Robert Bast

Piñata – Global Mystery


 [Source: http://www.craftychica.com/site/2012/10/i-made-more-sugar-skull-pinatas/]

I actually came across this watching a TV cooking show. I’m surprised that I have not read of this previously, and I suspect that the original sources are suspect.

Still, if you look at Wikipedia, the Piñata concept was global in ancient times:

Spain
Denmark
India
Japan
Philippines
China

It seems reasonably clear that the Piñata originated in China, and spread to Spain. The Spanish introduced the game to Central America, but apparently the Aztec and Maya already had something similar:

The Mayan tradition was similar to the modern piñata tradition, including blindfolding the participant hitting the piñata. The Aztec tradition commemorated the birthday of Huitzilopochtli. Priests would place a clay pot decorated with colorful feathers. When broken with a stick or club, the treasures inside would fall to the feet of the idol as an offering.

The source of this is an article by Wendy Devlin from 2007:

At the beginning of the 16th century the Spanish missionaries to North America used the piñata to attract converts to their ceremonies. However indigenous peoples already had a similar tradition. To celebrate the birthday of the Aztec god of war, Huitzilopochtli, priests placed a clay pot on a pole in the temple at year’s end. Colorful feathers adorned the richly decorated pot, filled with tiny treasures.. When broken with a stick or club, the treasures fell to the feet of the god’s image as an offering. The Mayans, great lovers of sport played a game where the player’s eyes were covered while hitting a clay pot suspended by string. The missionaries ingeniously transformed these games for religious instruction. They covered the traditional pot with colored paper, giving it an extraordinary, perhaps fearful appearance.

http://www.mexconnect.com/articles/459-history-of-the-pi%C3%B1ata

The article cites no sources, and the other online Wikipedia references seem to be dead-ends.

Either this is a great piece of evidence for pre-Columbus contact, or simply a case of Meso-American people adopting a ritual and the history books getting a little bit muddled about it.

Does anyone know of serious research on this?

The Tower of Babel

Have you ever wondered how pyramids exist all around the world, but their differences are enough to doubt a common origin? Perhaps this Biblical quote is an attempt to answer that very same question – allowing for some distortion over time?

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.”

And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”

And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

So the LORD dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth. And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth. Genesis 11

The one true universal language is mathematics, because it is pure. Regardless of how it might be described, it always breaks down to a pure form. And pyramids are mathematical by nature (you could argue that the form forces math to be used, but just look at the Great Pyramid and the Pyramid of the Sun – their math strongly suggests a common origin…).

So, if the Bible means mathematics when it says language, and the Tower of Babel was a pyramid, and the language of all the Earth is pyramids… The Lord confused them by making them different enough to make it hard to prove they had a common origin.

Until now I just figured global pyramids had regional differences just like modern houses do – even on the same street. Expressions of individuality within a local cultural context.

But what if the differences where deliberate? Were rebel missionaries building a legal defence, because they defied orders by convincing locals to build pyramids?

Or were the differences natural, because the missionaries / mysterious elders had to incorporate local ideas and customs when convincing locals to build such massive structures?

Regardless, it seems (to me) that the above Biblical passage is an attempt to explain the different looks of pyramids globally. And if that is the case, such questions were being asked in antiquity.

[Meanwhile I am still working on the similarities between the Tower of Babel and Noah’s Ark – there’s a small chance they were the one and the same…]

Little Red Riding Hood / Pyramids and Flood Myths

If you study ancient mysteries deeply, you always end up asking a particular question: were ancient cultures communicating with each other, or are the similarities just a combination of human nature and coincidence?

>>> pyramids everywhere
>>> flood myths everywhere

One way of tackling this question is via evolutionary biology, and in this instance the study involved the story of Little Red Riding Hood, which existed in varying forms in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and East Asia:

Those data allowed Tehrani to use phylogenetic analysis, a statistical technique used to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships between species. He started with 58 versions of the tale—all in English translation—from 33 different cultures around the world. Then, just as an evolutionary biologist compares physical traits between organisms to measure their similarity, he scored the differences between the stories using 72 plot points, such as who played the villain, what trick the villain used, and how the story ends. The output of the analysis is a family tree showing the most likely relationships.

[images: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0078871]

the folktale seems to have emerged almost 2000 years ago somewhere between Europe and the Middle East

I can only presume that similar studies of flood myths and pyramids don’t exist – not because the research hasn’t been done – but because no discernible pattern has been discovered. One possible reason for this is the negating of global cultural communications that are outside of what orthodox science accepts.

Orange Moon / Chance of MegaQuake

The sun will be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood before the great and dreadful day of the LORD comes.
Joel 2:31

If you were following my work pre-2012 you might have seen my research connecting lunar eclipses with major earthquakes. Basically the odds of a 7.5+ quake doubles in the days surrounding a lunar eclipse.

That does not mean a big quake will certainly happen, it is still a 1-in-33 (each day) chance compared to a 1-in-74 chance on normal days.

What it does suggest to me is that a 10+ megaquake (that many experts say is impossible) would be more likely near an eclipse. In simplistic terms, there’s a tug-of-gravitational-war between the Sun, Earth and Moon, with us smack in the middle.

This particular eclipse (Tuesday morning USA time) is known as a blood moon, although SpaceWeather.com says it will be orange:

The color of Earth’s shadow, and thus the color of the eclipsed Moon, depends substantially on the amount of volcanic ash and other aerosols floating in the stratosphere. According to atmospheric sciences professor Richard Keen of the University of Colorado, the stratosphere is clear. This means the eclipse will be not “blood red,” but rather bright orange.

See for yourself. The event will be visible from Australia, New Zealand, and all of the Americas: visibility map. It’s so bright, even observers in light-polluted cities will have no trouble enjoying the show. Got clouds? No problem. The event will be broadcast live on the web by the Coca-Cola Science Center at Columbus State University in Georgia.

You may have noticed there has been quite a bit of 6.0+ earthquake activity in the last week – Chile, Nicaragua, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands – so hopefully there’s nothing left in the tank.

You Are Not (on average) Prepared!

I was pleased to see that some surveys have been conducted to assess the preparedness of American citizens, and I would expect similar results from Europe / Canada / Australasia.

53% do not have a minimum three-day supply of nonperishable food and water at home
44% don’t have first-aid kits
42% do not know the phone numbers of all of their immediate family members
40% could not come up with $2,000 if an unexpected need arose
49% of all Americans live in a home that currently gets direct monetary benefits from the federal government

[Source: Intellihub]

So, on average, the average person is completely unprepared.

It is all due to a recent phenomena – reliance on others. Partly due to prosperity, partly because of government social programs. We figure if water and food run out at home, we can buy some more. We feel that if we get in strife, the government will help us (which doesn’t scale well…). We rely on hospitals and we rely on our cell phone to remember the phone numbers of family members.

Self-reliance needs to improve, a lot.

Tumuli of Turkey

It isn’t much of a stretch to call man-made mounds pyramids. They are tombs (whether actual or pretend) of a massive scale that have not been replicated in modern times. Sure, they aren’t pyramidal in shape, but why would they be? Even today we tend to create buildings in different shapes and styles, even when they serve the same purpose.

The pyramids of China are earthen mounds in pyramidal shapes. Silbury Hill in England is an earthen mound that is conical, and 40m high.

Less well known are the tumuli of Turkey:

The site is called “Bin Tepeler” (a thousand mounds in Turkish) and it is in the northwest of Salihli district of Manisa province. Bin Tepeler is a Lydian necropolis that dates back to 7th and 6th centuries BC. These mounds are called, “the pyramids of Anatolia,” as a giant specimen among them is 355 metres in diameter, 1115 metres in perimeter and 69 metres high. According to Herodotus, this giant tumulus belongs to the famous Lydian King Alyattes II who ruled between 619–560 BC. [Source – Wikipedia]

Marble burial chamber within! And it isn’t the only mound in the district…

Not to forget the unique Mt Nemrut, Kâhta – a natural mountain (2150 metres above sea level), with a 50 metre artificial mound built on top. If pyramids are meant to represent mountains, the builders of this one have gone a step further by placing it on top of a real mountain. [http://survive2012.com/middle-east-pyramids/]

Cell Phone Spying for $200K

Stingray Cell Phone Interception

The Stingray is smaller than a suitcase, costs about $400,000, and its function is pretty straight forward. Basically, it tricks all nearby cell phone traffic into sending data to the Stingray as if it were a cell tower. It then downloads all that data to a computer program that translates it for whoever is operating the Stingray. All the traffic is then passed to the nearest cell tower, with no one the wiser.

Source: http://cloakers.org/stingray-cell-tower/

(Massive) Megaliths Discovered in Siberia

Mysterious stones on Mountain Shoriya (Kemerov region, Russia) have puzzled both scientists and ordinary men. The wall of rectangular stones piled up on top of each other is already being called the “Russian Stonehenge”. According to one of the stories, they were found back in ancient times.

Though it aroused the interest of researchers in 1991, it was not explored then due to lack of financing. The research was just resumed in autumn 2013.

Visit the source pages for full-size images:

http://englishrussia.com/2014/03/06/huge-mysterious-megaliths/
https://www.academia.edu/6200990/Super_Megaliths_in_Gornaya_Shoria_Southern_Siberia

I’m sure it would be easier to form an opinion if you were there in person. From the photos, there are some that have me thinking it is a natural structure:

But when you get up close, it looks like block-stacking beyond anything else found so far in the world:

Chikungunya: Nasty Virus Soon To Land in the USA

Story via The Daily Beast

Chikungunya Mosquito

This isn’t an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario. And it has barely made the news. But with the potential of millions of Americans suffering painfully, I fully expect the situation to be dealt with – without any fanfare or lack of funding.

Unlike TEOTWAWKI scenarios, this will be fixed because of the certainty of it happening, and authorities being accountable. As likelihood diminishes, responses diminish exponentially. That seems to be human nature.

Anyway, please be aware of this threat, and be thankful that it will/should be promptly dealt with!

A bit of history:

The United States once was a pit of malaria-toting mosquitoes from the South all the way up to Philadelphia and beyond. Indeed, malaria figured heavily in the Revolutionary War and may have helped defeat the Redcoats. The National Malaria Eradication Program mounted in Atlanta after World War II used DDT to vanquish the mosquito and made America malaria-free.

How a new variety of mosquitoes are now arriving in the USA:

It turns out that millions of bald tires are moved from rich countries to poor countries and retreads sent back from the poor to the rich. Millions, seriously—check this out. Used, hubcap-free tires are well known to sequester standing water—a perfect breeding ground for the next generation of mosquitos.

Why Americans should be fearful – the suffering is great, and with zero immunity basically everyone in its path will get ill:

Chikungunya, which causes fever and severe aches, has been a big deal in public health circles for a decade or so since an explosive outbreak of the viral infection occurred on the Reunion Islands in the southwestern part of the Indian Ocean. Once introduced there, 266,000 of the island’s 770,000 people developed the clinical disease. And after the epidemic burnt out in Reunion, it moved to India, where 1.25 million cases were seen in short order. Then Italy. Then more islands in the Indian Ocean.

The solution:

…it is inevitable that Chikungunya will move through the rest of Caribbean and find its way to Florida, Texas and the rest of the muggy South unless an intense mosquito eradication is undertaken. Such a program will be expensive, require thoughtful planning and coordination between states both red and blue, involve harsh pesticides and a re-consideration of the necessity of an international tire resale business. Control also will need faster more widely available diagnostic tests, smoother healthcare delivery, and exploration into new vaccines. In other words, unless we as a country become contorted in a fashion not seen since the great 20th century public health triumphs against diseases such as polio, we soon may be contorted by Chikungunya.

NASA Data: 2012 Solar Superstorm Really Happened

I have long speculated that one of the two possible purposes of the ancient Mayan Long Count calendar was the prediction of a massive solar storm.

(the other was the return of a long period comet)

Basically, by noting the occurrences of auroras at low latitudes, future solar superstorms may have been predicted. This is complicated by the Sun rotating, meaning most superstorms would miss us. Even so, the discovery of a pattern could be discovered just from the auroras – it just means that most of the predictions would fail to be proven until now.

Like many things associated with the 2012 meme, this is a big if. However, it is conceivable that a destructive solar storm was predicted by the Maya for 2012. And it actually happened!

We haven’t had the technology for spotting solar storms not aimed at us for long. But the first one we have been aware of since the Carrington Event happened to be in the year 2012. It was bad enough to wipe out electricity grids globally:

Earth dodged a huge magnetic bullet from the sun on July 23, 2012.

According to University of California, Berkeley, and Chinese researchers, a rapid succession of coronal mass ejections — the most intense eruptions on the sun — sent a pulse of magnetized plasma barreling into space and through Earth’s orbit. Had the eruption come nine days earlier, it would have hit Earth, potentially wreaking havoc with the electrical grid, disabling satellites and GPS, and disrupting our increasingly electronic lives.

…”The authors believe this extreme event was due to the interaction of two CMEs separated by only 10 to 15 minutes,” said Joe Gurman, the project scientist for STEREO at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The STEREO spacecraft were launched in 2006. There is no statistically relevant way of interpreting the timing of the two Carrington-level storms so far observed. But a layman could see it this way:

After 6 years, one such event was observed
The last event that struck earth was roughly 150 years ago
That equals 25 events every 150 years, with one aimed at us

I don’t know how wide these storms are. But it feels like we will suffer a direct hit before too long. The Carrington Event was not a one-off. They happen on a regular basis, and in due course we will be in the firing line.

Prepare.