Category Archives: READING MATTER

Books I read & recommend

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MATERIAL TECHNOLOGY vs SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE

August 25, 2026 LRS

“Material technology, without spiritual knowledge, is leading us to a global catastrophe on Earth. Technology should ASSIST in the spiritual development and not be used (as it is used now) to confine and enslave people within a monetary system and materialistic world, which are both temporary anyway.

The danger does NOT lie in the death of the physical body, as millions believe: the danger exists in the WAY in which one LIVES. There is nothing in the Universe to be afraid of, except our own ignorance and its consequences. We live on Earth to develop our consciousness, awareness and understanding of the specific aspects of laws of Nature and the Universe. What we think we “know” on Earth is just a tiny drop in the Ocean of Knowledge.” — © Dr Tom J. Chalko 1997

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Dr. Tom Chalko holds Masters degree in engineering and a Ph.D. in physics (laser holography). His professional interests span from lasers and vibration engineering to physics of consciousness and meditation.

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CHOOSE A HOLODECK PROGRAM

August 25, 2026 LRS

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Someday the “Holodeck” from Star Trek may become a reality simulation “toy” on Earth. Microsoft and other tech companies are already working on creating virtual reality devices for use in the home. The idea of “virtual reality” has been a part of science fiction and film since the 1930s : “Pygmalion’s Spectacles” by Stanley G. Weinbaum describes a goggle-based virtual reality system with holographic recording of fictional experiences including smell and touch.

Theoretically, since our universe is fundamentally composed of “thought energy” it is conceivable that we are already living inside a holographic universe, driven by computer technology developed by “aliens” over a period of billions of years. On Earth, we have had electricity for only about 100 years, and computers for only a few decades. What technology might be possible millions of years from now? Socially and technologically the human race are virtual barbarians. Yet, anything we can imagine can become a reality.

If you could choose any “virtual reality program” from a Holodeck menu, which would you choose?

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CATHOLIC CAT CURSE CATASTROPHE

Image August 24, 2026 LRS

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

The decree that “cats are evil” by the catholic church created the conditions that lead up to THE BLACK DEATH by associating the common house cat with Satan. The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe’s population, reducing the world’s population from about 450 million to between 350 and 375 million around 1400.

Remember that the plague was spread by fleas that lived on rats. A viscous cycle kept the disease going. Infected fleas would bite a rat, and the rodent would become infected. Then other fleas biting the infected rat would become infected themselves. Once the host rat died of the plague, any fleas living on it would find themselves homeless and would go in search of a new host. Unfortunately, this often took the form of a human. When the sick infected fleas bit the human in order to feed, the human would become infected. So why didn’t the Europeans just keep plenty of cats around to kill the rats and thereby reduce the incidence of the plague? They had cats at the time. They were originally brought to Europe by the Romans, who had discovered the felines in Egypt. Keeping pet cats as mousers had become popular in Europe by the time of the first plague.

The black plague, also known as the Black Death, is a disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. It enters the body through the skin and travels via the lymph system. The bacteria live in the digestive tracts of fleas. The fleas, of course, live off blood from a host, and when the fleas swallow the blood, it becomes infected with the bacteria. As the bacteria multiply inside the flea, an intestinal blockage forms, starving the parasite because nutrients cannot be absorbed. The flea vomits in an effort to clear the blockage, and since the flea is starving, it feeds voraciously. When the infected flea vomits the diseased blood into a bite site on a host animal or human, the host becomes infected with black plague.

The disease was once devastating, and the resulting death was horrible. There were actually three forms of the black plague – the bubonic form, the pneumonic form, and the septicemic form. Victims of the bubonic plague suffered painful swollen lymph nodes in the neck and the underarms, called buboes. They were also wracked with high fever, vomiting, pounding headaches, and gangrene. Some were so weak that they barely had the energy to swallow.

The pneumonic form was even more punishing. As the body tried to fight off the disease, large amounts of phlegm were produced. The victims had to constantly cough up sputum in an effort to breathe, and more than ninety-five percent of the time, the patient drowned in his own body fluids. The pneumonic form of the plague didn’t need rats or fleas to spread – it was an airborne bacterium spread by the coughs of infected individuals.

Septicemic black plague was a form of blood poisoning and had a mortality rate of one hundred percent. With this type of plague, the individual suffered from high fever and purple blotches on the skin. Fortunately, this deadliest form was also the rarest.

From the middle of the 1300s until the 1700s, the black plague terrorized much of Europe and parts of Asia. Most historians believe the plague was first brought to Europe on ships from Asia. The most likely culprit was the black rats that often foraged among the ships’ holds for food scraps. These were smaller relatives of the brown rats.

The initial outbreak of the plague in fourteenth-century Europe was the most virulent. In fact, much of the populations of England and France were decimated. In some parts of England the death toll was 50%. Some parts of France suffered an astounding loss of ninety percent of their populations.

Many modern readers assume that there was only one outbreak of the black plague, but there were actually several. In fact, it raged through Europe about once every generation until the beginning of the eighteenth century. One of the last major outbreaks occurred in England with the Great Plague of London, which took place in 1665-1666.

SOURCE: https://owlcation.com/humanities/Cats-and-the-Black-Plague

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100 MILLION SPECIES

August 24, 2026 LRS

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Mankind is only one SPECIES of life on Earth. According the leading “scientific authorities”: ...the “estimated total number of species on Earth is 6.5 million species found on land, and 2.2 million (about 25 percent of the total) dwelling in the ocean depths. However, a study, published by PLoS Biology, says a staggering 86% of all species on land and 91% of those in the seas have yet to be discovered, described and cataloged.”

If we do the math, we learn that 8.7 million is roughly 80% – 90% of ONE HUNDRED MILLION species on this planet. That’s a LOT of life! How many even MORE bizarre life forms are as yet undiscovered? And how many more might there be living throughout the rest of our own galaxy? (I won’t mention the whole universe….).

Many more imagined creatures are described in science fiction stories on other planets and galaxies. But, very few of these fictional “monstrosities” are as strange and bizarre at the real creatures that inhabit the microcosm on our own planet. Here are pictures of a few common insects viewed with the aid of an electron microscope. It is a challenge to imagine creatures more bizarre than these!

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CLEMENS VONNEGUT: THE REINCARNATED WRITER

August 23, 2026 LRS

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) died in 1910. It seems very likely and plausible (if you know about reincarnation) that he was reincarnated as Kurt Vonnegut in 1922. The resemblance between the two writers is uncanny in their events of their respective lives, there physical appearance, personal philosophies, writing and styles and by the fact that they were both prodigious, life-long smokers. The resemblance and affinity between Clemens / Vonnegut was not lost on Kurt Vonnegut as you will discover the in following lecture.

Kurt Vonnegut delivered the annual Clemens Lecture at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, An edited version of which we present here:

On Twain, Lincoln, Imperialist Wars and the Weather by Kurt Vonnegut

“Shock and awe.

What are the Conservatives doing with all the money and power that used to belong to all of us? They are telling us to be absolutely terrified, and to run around in circles like chickens with their heads cut off. But they will save us.

They are making us take off our shoes at airports. Can anybody here think of a more hilarious practical joke than that one? Smile, America. You’re on Candid Camera.

And they have turned loose a myriad of our high tech weapons, each one costing more than a hundred high schools, on a Third World country, in order to shock and awe human beings like us, like Adam and Eve, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

The other day I asked the former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton what he thought of our great victory over Iraq, and he said, ‘Mohammed Ali versus Mr. Rogers.’ What are Conservatives? They are people who will move Heaven and Earth, if they have to, who will ruin a company or a country or a planet, to prove to us and themselves that they are superior to everybody else, except for their pals.

They take good care of their pals, keep them out of jail – and so on. Conservatives are crazy as bedbugs. They are bullies.

Shock and awe.

Class war? You bet.

They have proved their superiority to admirers of Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain and Jesus of Nazareth by, with an able assist from television, making inconsequential our protests against their war.

What has happened to us? We have suffered a technological calamity.

Television is now our form of government.

On what grounds did we protest their war? I could name many, but I need name only one, which is common sense.

Be that as it may, construction of the Mark Twain Museum will sooner or later be resumed. And I, the son and grandson of Indiana architects, seize this opportunity to suggest a feature which I hope will be included in the completed structure, words to be chiseled into the capstone over the main entrance.

Here is what I think would be fun to put up there, and Mark Twain loved fun more than anything. I have tinkered with something famous he said, which is:

‘Be good and you will be lonesome.’ That is from ‘Following the Equator.’OK? So envision what a majestic front entrance the Mark Twain Museum will have someday. And imagine that these words have been chiseled into the noble capstone and painted gold:

BE GOOD AND YOU WILL BE LONESOME MOST PLACES,

BUT NOT HERE, NOT HERE.

One of the most humiliated and heartbroken pieces Twain ever wrote was about the slaughter of one hundred Moro men, women and children by our soldiers during our liberation of the people of the Philippines after the Spanish American War. Our brave commander was Leonard Wood, who now has a fort named after him. Fort Leonard Wood.

What did Abraham Lincoln have to say about such American Imperialist wars? Those are wars which, on one noble pretext or another, actually aim to increase the natural resources and pools of tame labor available to the richest Americans who have the best political connections.

And it is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln in a speech about something or somebody else. He always steals the show. I am about to quote him.

Lincoln was only a Congressman when he said in 1848 what I am about to echo. He was heartbroken and humiliated by our war on Mexico, which had never attacked us.

We were making California our own, and a lot of other people and properties, and doing it as though butchering Mexican soldiers who were only defending their homeland against invaders weren’t murder.

What other stuff besides California? Well, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.

The person Congressman Lincoln had in mind when he said what he said was James Polk, our President at the time. Abraham Lincoln said of Polk, his President, our armed forces’ Commander and Chief:

Trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood – that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy, he plunged into war.’

Holy smokes! I almost said, ‘Holy shit!’ And I thought I was a writer!

Do you know we actually captured Mexico City during the Mexican War?

Why isn’t that a national holiday? And why isn’t the face of James Polk up on Mount Rushmore, along with Ronald Reagan’s?

What made Mexico so evil back in the 1840’s, well before our Civil War, is that slavery was illegal there. Remember the Alamo?

My great grandfather’s name was Clemens Vonnegut. Small world, small world.

This piquant coincidence is not a fabrication.

Clemens Vonnegut called himself a ‘Freethinker,’ an antique word for Humanist. He was a hardware merchant in Indianapolis.

So, 120 years ago, say, there was one man who was both Clemens and Vonnegut. I would have liked being such a person a lot. I only wish I could have been such a person tonight.

I claim no blood relationship with Samuel Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri. ‘Clemens,’ as a first name, is, I believe, like the name ‘Clementine,’ derived from the adjective ‘clement.’ To be clement is to be lenient and compassionate, or, in the case of weather, perfectly heavenly.”