Category: The Urantia Book

Open The Pod Bay Doors Please Hal…


…I want to step out for the weekend.

“About the time of the attainment of the maximum of mass, the gravity control of the gaseous content commenced to weaken, and there ensued the stage of gas escapement, the gas streaming forth as two gigantic and distinct arms, which took origin on opposite sides of the mother mass. The rapid revolutions of this enormous central core soon imparted a spiral appearance to these two projecting gas streams. The cooling and subsequent condensation of portions of these protruding arms eventually produced their knotted appearance. These denser portions were vast systems and subsystems of physical matter whirling through space in the midst of the gaseous cloud of the nebula while being held securely within the gravity grasp of the mother wheel.”
—The Urantia Book

PRACTICALLY ALL OF THE STARRY REALMS visible to the naked eye on Urantia belong to the seventh section of the grand universe, the superuniverse of Orvonton.  The vast Milky Way starry system represents the central nucleus of Orvonton, being largely beyond the borders of your local universe. This great aggregation of suns, dark islands of space, double stars, globular clusters, star clouds, spiral and other nebulae, together with myriads of individual planets, forms a watch-like, elongated-circular grouping of about one seventh of the inhabited evolutionary universes.

From the astronomical position of Urantia, as you look through the cross section of near-by systems to the great Milky Way, you observe that the spheres of Orvonton are traveling in a vast elongated plane, the breadth being far greater than the thickness and the length far greater than the breadth.  Observation of the so-called Milky Way discloses the comparative increase in Orvonton stellar density when the heavens are viewed in one direction, while on either side the density diminishes; the number of stars and other spheres decreases away from the chief plane of our material superuniverse.  When the angle of observation is propitious, gazing through the main body of this realm of maximum density, you are looking toward the residential universe and the center of all things.

Of the ten major divisions of Orvonton, eight have been roughly identified by Urantian astronomers.  The other two are difficult of separate recognition because you are obliged to view these phenomena from the inside.  If you could look upon the superuniverse of Orvonton from a position far-distant in space, you would immediately recognize the ten major sectors of the seventh galaxy.

The rotational center of your minor sector is situated far away in the enormous and dense star cloud of Sagittarius, around which your local universe and its associated creations all move, and from opposite sides of the vast Sagittarius subgalactic system you may observe two great streams of star clouds emerging in stupendous stellar coils.*

The nucleus of the physical system to which your sun and its associated planets belong is the center of the onetime Andronover nebula. This former spiral nebula was slightly distorted by the gravity disruptions associated with the events which were attendant upon the birth of your solar system, and which were occasioned by the near approach of a large neighboring nebula. This near collision changed Andronover into a somewhat globular aggregation but did not wholly destroy the two-way procession of the suns and their associated physical groups. Your solar system now occupies a fairly central position in one of the arms of this distorted spiral, situated about halfway from the center out towards the edge of the star stream.

The Sagittarius sector and all other sectors and divisions of Orvonton are in rotation around Uversa, and some of the confusion of Urantian star observers arises out of the illusions and relative distortions produced by the following multiple revolutionary movements:

1. The revolution of Urantia around its sun.
2. The circuit of your solar system about the nucleus of the former Andronover nebula.
3 The rotation of the Andronover stellar family and the associated clusters about the composite rotation-gravity center of the star cloud of Nebadon.
4 The swing of the local star cloud of Nebadon and its associated creations around the Sagittarius center of their minor sector.
5. The rotation of the one hundred minor sectors, including Sagittarius, about their major sector.
6. The whirl of the ten major sectors, the so-called star drifts, about the Uversa headquarters of Orvonton.
7. The movement of Orvonton and six associated superuniverses around
Paradise and Havona, the counterclockwise processional of the superuniverse
space level.

These multiple motions are of several orders: The space paths of your planet and your solar system are genetic, inherent in origin. The absolute counterclockwise motion of Orvonton is also genetic, inherent in the architectural plans of the master universe. But the intervening motions are of composite origin, being derived in part from the constitutive segmentation of matter-energy into the superuniverses and in part produced by the intelligent and purposeful action of the Paradise force organizers.

The local universes are in closer proximity as they approach Havona; the circuits are greater in number, and there is increased superimposition, layer upon layer. But farther out from the eternal center there are fewer and fewer systems, layers, circuits, and universes.

Paradise force organizers are nebulae originators; they are able to initiate about their space presence the tremendous cyclones of force which, when once started, can never be stopped or limited until the all-pervading forces are mobilized for the eventual appearance of the ultimatonic units of universe matter. Thus are brought into being the spiral and other nebulae, the mother wheels of the direct-origin suns and their varied systems. In outer space there may be seen ten different forms of nebulae, phases of primary universe evolution, and these vast energy wheels had the same origin as did those in the seven superuniverses.

Not all spiral nebulae are engaged in sun making. Some have retained control of many of their segregated stellar offspring, and their spiral appearance is occasioned by the fact that their suns pass out of the nebular arm in close formation but return by diverse routes, thus making it easy to observe them at one point but more difficult to see them when widely scattered on their different returning routes farther out and away from the arm of the nebula. There are not many sun-forming nebulae active in Orvonton at the present time, though Andromeda, which is outside the inhabited superuniverse, is very active. This far-distant nebula is visible to the naked eye, and when you view it, pause to consider that the light you behold left those distant suns almost one million years ago. The Milky Way galaxy is composed of vast numbers of former spiral and other nebulae, and many still retain their original configuration. But as the result of internal catastrophes and external attraction, many have suffered such distortion and rearrangement as to cause these enormous aggregations to appear as gigantic luminous masses of blazing suns, like the Magellanic Cloud. The globular type of star clusters predominates near the outer margins of Orvonton.

The vast star clouds of Orvonton should be regarded as individual aggregations of matter comparable to the separate nebulae observable in the space regions external to the Milky Way galaxy. Many of the so-called star clouds of space, however, consist of gaseous material only. The energy potential of these stellar gas clouds is unbelievably enormous, and some of it is taken up by near-by suns and redispatched in space as solar emanations.

500,000,000,000 years ago the first Andronover sun was born. This blazing streak broke away from the mother gravity grasp and tore out into space on an independent adventure in the cosmos of creation. Its orbit was determined by its path of escape. Such young suns quickly become spherical and start out on their long and eventful careers as the stars of space. Excepting terminal nebular nucleuses, the vast majority of Orvonton suns have had an analogous birth. These escaping suns pass through varied periods of evolution and subsequent universe service.

—The Urantia Book

Seriously;  you’ve got to read it to believe it.  Read it while you can.

*  About the time of the attainment of the maximum of mass, the gravity control of the gaseous content commenced to weaken, and there ensued the stage of gas escapement, the gas streaming forth as two gigantic and distinct arms, which took origin on opposite sides of the mother mass. The rapid revolutions of this enormous central core soon imparted a spiral appearance to these two projecting gas streams. The cooling and subsequent condensation of portions of these protruding arms eventually produced their knotted appearance. These denser portions were vast systems and subsystems of physical matter whirling through space in the midst of the gaseous cloud of the nebula while being held securel within the gravity grasp of the mother wheel.  — The Urantia Book

The Apostle Matthew Levi

MATTHEW LEVI  •  Terry Kruger Jesus the Son of God was a man among men, and the men closest to him were twelve diverse, unique personalities of that day.  The Bible and apocrypha contain scant few historical insights concerning these men;  until the appearance of The Urantia Book in 1955, almost nothing was known about their personal natures, not excepting …

The Apostle Simon Zelotes: Simon The Zealot

Simon Zelotes was a fiery agitator— and also a man who spoke much without thinking. . .

Romney’s Parallel Universe Machine (Update)

For the man who has everything (except the presidency) , this handy device takes less energy than an Etch-a-Sketch to alter reality

The fallout from Mitt Romney‘s lies about President Obama shipping U.S. jobs to China continued yesterday as General Motors spokesman Greg Martin told The Detroit Free Press:

“We’ve clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days. No amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country.”

Huffpo describes  it thus:

Mitt Romney’s round of highly dubious television and radio ads suggesting that Chrysler and GM are shipping American jobs to China has managed to offend both car companies….

The day before, meanwhile, Chrysler Group LLC CEO Sergio Marchionne penned a letter to the Detroit News insisting that there was no validity to the idea that the company was shipping Jeep production overseas. Instead, he noted, the company was looking to open new factories in China to meet increasing demand there.

Used to be that when a political campaign got caught with its pants down, it would mumble an apology or at least have the good sense to STFU.  Not this generation of Rethugs. Instead, they double down, drop their undies and moon  the world.:

The Romney campaign has showed no willingness to back off the suggestion that American Jeep workers may end up losing their jobs. In fact, the campaign has released a radio ad in Ohio to complement the one it has on television there that repeats the insinuation.

Which of course is entirely consistent with their adoption of the Big Lie strategy that Goebbels found so effective. What really makes it work though is constant repetition, made possible by Citizens United and the unlimited amounts money provided by plutocrat billionaires like the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson who think so much of themselves that they’re intent in re-making the US in their own distorted image.

At the close of Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked:

“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”

  “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

What we are witnessing this election is no less than a battle for the very soul of the country.  We are right at that tipping point Franklin referred to.  Will we continue to be an admittedly flawed  representative government, where the democratic principle of one person, one vote prevails, and the belief that free speech is not measured in personal and corporate wealth?  Or will be become just another oligarchy run by greedy and power-hungry billionaires who have more in common with Ayn Rand than the Founders, who promised “to promote the general welfare” at home and maintain “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” abroad.

The prospect of four more years of The Black Man in The White House is enough to send the Rethugs over the edge, despite record corporate profits and huge increases in the personal wealth of the top 1%.

The Koch Brothers spent $25 million between 2005-2008 alone, fighting every attempt to regulate climate-changing green house gases, the byproduct of their energy extraction companies.  The results are super-storms like Sandy that just killed some 74 people (and counting), traumatized millions more, and wreaked $50 billion (and counting) in property damage.

And now they’re on the cusp of getting one of their own into, arguably, the most powerful office in the world.  A say-anything politician and his Darwinian running mate that want to privatize FEMA disaster relief by further cutting the social safety net to pay for it.  How’s that for Bizarro World logic?

Somehow I think that when these traitors to the planet are called to account for their crimes they will have so deluded themselves about their assumed natural superiority and moral rightness that they will find no contrition in their hearts, and thus no need for mercy from the real Powers That Be.

 But when mercy is exhausted, when the “memory” thereof testifies to its depletion, then does justice prevail and righteousness decree. For mercy is not to be thrust upon those who despise it; mercy is not a gift to be trampled under foot by the persistent rebels of time.

—The Urantia Book

I want to be around for that.  Meanwhile, a little justice and righteousness would be a good thing right now.

[Image found here.]

UPDATE: (11/1 @ 1:25 pm) Exxon and Shell just announced they made $16 billion in profits during the last quarter alone.

And here’s a reminder of what a dick Romney is on the issue of climate change.

 

Cognitive Dissonance & The Unskewed Polls

Limbaugh just before his head explodes in a fit of cognitive dissonance 

“Never get high on your own supply.” —Notorious Big.

When the polls started turning up for Obama and the down ticket  Dems after the DNC convention, the GOPers dismissed it as a “sugar high.”  Some high octane sugar, that.  Obama now leads in all nine swing states, each outside the margin of error. Worse for Team Romney, the internals showed a double digit drop in the number of people saying the country is on the wrong track.  Obama’s favorability ratings have now risen to the crucial 50% level.  Romney’s pick of Paul “Voucherize Medicare” Ryan to be his Veep has hurt him in the crucial senior demographic.  And Obama now leads on the question of who is the better candidate to improve the economy, formerly Romney’s greatest strength.  While the post-convention bounce could have been explained away as a short term effect, the political impact of the leaked 47% vid has unmistakably bent the arc of the campaign towards Obama and the Dems,  leaving the Rethugs flailing around for a new narrative spin.

Enter one Dean Chambers, an obscure right wing blogger who claims to have scientifically “unskewed” the polls by eliminating a presumed oversampling of the number of Democratic respondents. Presto change-o —  Romney actually enjoys a substantial lead. (For an analysis of why Chambers’ methodology sucks,  see this article from TPM, featuring a critique from the former champion of GOP leaning pollsters, Scott Rassmussen himself.) Citing what is rapidly becoming known as the “Poll Truthers” movement, ThinkProgress  reports that:

Rush Limbaugh also outlined the pollster conspiracy on his radio show: “They’re all Democrats. They’re all liberals. They just have different jobs. The polls are the replacement refs. They see certain things. They don’t see other things. They don’t call certain things, and other things go by. In this case, what they’re trying to do is exactly what they’ve done in your case: frustrate you, make you pull your hair out, say, what the hell’s happening to the country? They want you thinking the country’s lost. They want you thinking your side’s lost. They want you thinking it’s over for what you believe. And that makes you stay home and not vote. That’s what they’re hoping.”

Limbaugh, while doing his best to rally his troops, is thus planting the seeds of a post-election narrative that blames the liberal media and their co-conspirators in the pollster business. Jason Linkins and Elyse Siegel over at HuffPo write that there is a longer term goal, with a clever Catch-22 hook:

So you should look at “Unskewed Polls” as less of a strategic effort to get Romney elected, and more of a long-game effort to mount a war against pollsters once the election is over.  (They will magically have a case, no matter which way the election turns out:  if Obama wins, pollsters are in the tank;  if Romney wins, pollsters are terrible and wrong about everything.)

I would offer a third possibility:  that the Rethugs  are seeding a post-election rationale to be employed after they steal the election:  “See, there was polling precedent that showed Romney was winning all along.”  I’m not ready to abandon that possibility just yet, given their track record in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.  (See, e.g., former DNC communications spokeswoman and current MSNBC political analyst Karen Finney‘s repeated warnings about same.)  But for now I am more intrigued by Billmon‘s analysis over at the Big Orange titled, “Skewed polls and the paranoid style” (the latter phrase being an homage to Douglas Hoffsteader‘s 1964 classic essay, “The Paranoid Style”).

The most striking feature of the current right-wing obsession with “skewed polls” is that it combines two of modern conservatism’s most pronounced tendencies:  A complete rejection of empirical reality, and a deep conviction that said reality is in fact a conspiratorial plot by the enemies of America (a.k.a. the liberals) to poison public opinion— to win through deception what they cannot achieve openly.  Memories of the right’s insistence that all was going well with the bloody occupation of Iraq are hard to avoid— likewise the manufactured “debate” over the causes and consequences of global climate change, the imaginary role of ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act in the subprime mortgage meltdown, and just about every other instance in which conservative ideology has had to come face to face with the cold, hard facts of life.  In each case, the knee-jerk conservative response to inconvenient (and unfriendly) truths has been to mimic Adam Savage’s line from Mythbusters:  “I reject your reality and substitute my own.”  Except Adam was being ironic.  They are not.

The “complete rejection of empirical” reality and substituting a different one was, of course, enshrined in the political universe when a Bushian political operative, widely believed to be Karl Rove, told author Ron Suskind:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.  And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously, as you will— we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”[2]

Writer and blogger Julian Sanchez describes this cognitive mindset as “epistemic closure”:

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal?  Well, they disagree with the conservative media!)  This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile. Think of the complete panic China’s rulers feel about any breaks in their Internet firewall:  The more successfully external sources of information have been excluded to date, the more unpredictable the effects of a breach become.  Internal criticism is then especially problematic, because it threatens the hermetic seal.  It’s not just that any particular criticism might have to be taken seriously coming from a fellow conservative.  Rather, it’s that anything that breaks down the tacit equivalence between “critic of conservatives and “wicked liberal smear artist” undermines the effectiveness of the entire information filter.  If disagreement is not in itself evidence of malign intent or moral degeneracy, people start feeling an obligation to engage it sincerely— maybe even when it comes from the New York Times.  And there is nothing more potentially fatal to the momentum of an insurgency fueled by anger than a conversation.  A more intellectually secure conservatism would welcome this, because it wouldn’t need to define itself primarily in terms of its rejection of an alien enemy.

h/t Chris Hayes.

Billmon again:

There simply is no getting around the fact that the mentality of the modern grassroots conservative movement is in almost all particulars the spitting image of a 20th century totalitarian political party— an “epistemically closed” loop of self-reference and self-delusion.  In other words:  a cult.  The upshot is that one of America’s two main political parties has managed to turn itself into the proverbial insane asylum run by the inmates. . .  But for most sane (or at least semi-sane) people, there comes a point where you realize you’ve lost the thread and have to back up a bit— and maybe enter rehab.  But epistemic cults have no such corrective mechanisms.  They never go in reverse, never question their own assumptions, and most of all never ever admit error.  Their belief systems are too fragile.  Break the gestalt, even in one place, and the entire edifice may come crashing down.  Which may explain why totalitarian cults that actually achieve unchallenged state power usually end up astonishing the world not just with their barbarity, but with the sheer zaniness of their thinking.  They can’t stop themselves from taking their obsessions to the ultimate extreme.

Or as The Urantia Book might put it:

But life will become a burden of existence unless you learn how to fail gracefully.  There is an art in defeat which noble souls always acquire;  you must know how to lose cheerfully;  you must be fearless of disappointment.  Never hesitate to admit failure. Make no attempt to hide failure under deceptive smiles and beaming optimism. It sounds well always to claim success, but the end results are appalling.  Such a technique leads directly to the creation of a world of unreality and to the inevitable crash of ultimate disillusionment.

 

The State Of Ayn Rand

The body politic is organismal and functions best as a whole. This collective intelligence represenst a state of “we.” When an individual cell rebels from the “we state” and enters the “me state,” we call that the Ayn Rand state, aka cancer.