Okay; I must admit, I find this spooky
Offline ...I've been listening to an acquaintance tell me all about Nostradamus's predictions (feel free to get your chortles out) - and, I must confess, at least one account I do find particularly eerie (if the information is accurate):
Allegedly, Nostradamus predicted that there would be a German man, born near the Rhine and the Austrian mountains, who would start a war that the entirety of europe would be caught-up in, that he would attack Poland and that his name would be Hister.
I assume there's someone here (...no, Luminon - not you) who might be familiar with this prophecy? I know Nostradum is a bit of a pet od Michael Shermer's, but I tried Googling for any insight he might've had and wound-up empty-handed. Is the information accurate (that is, is this what Nostradamus wrote down?)? If it is... well, I must say, I find that a little disturbing.
"Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full."
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
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It sounds made up by someone particularly ignorant of history.
Hitler, after all, was not German.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Well, exactly; he was born in Austria (in an inn, if memory serves); and this, allegedly, is what Nostradamus wrote down.
I wouldn't find it spooky if the parallels I was given weren't so precise.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
You could try asking David Mabus?
Um.
Who's David Mabus?
(Now I feel sheepish. No pun intended)
The thing you've got to be careful with is that a large number of the Nostradamus memes circulating the internet are made up and have no other purpose but to ensnare the gullible (the one about the 9/11 terrorist attacks was allegedly predicted by Nostradamus in the mid 1600s, odd considering he died in 1566).
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Hey; whose yous callin' guillible, bub?
j/k
Point taken. I suppose the first thing to do is figure-out what, exactly, was actually written down (if anything) by the big N hisself regarding this prediction.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
Have a peek at The Skeptic's Dictionary entry for Nostradamus.
'Hister' refers to the Danube River. It's the Latin name.
On a slightly related note I'd like to point out the the new double cd from Judas Priest is about the life of Nostradamus and the thing rocks.
Lets all just assume that every nutcase in history who claimed to be an oracle and that there WAS a third man on the grassy knoll and that little green men have analy probed us. Lets just assume for a sec, for argument's sake.
This being up in the sky sure has a funny way with efficiancy and clarity, assuming. If this claimed being(incert name here) came into my board room(if I were Trump) what do you think I would say to him?
Nostradumbass is nothing but a product of effective marketing like any other myth. It is why suckers tune into Larry King to watch con Silvia Brown market her snake oil.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
If people want to know who really killed JFK, they could add up all the letters in all the posts on this site and mesure their frequency an "RRS code", devide it by pie, then eat some pie, and then rub their tummies and pat their heads at the same time. If it doesn't make sense, it will if you follow my instructions(or see what you want to see, even if it is bullshit).
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
The best that I can dig up on that is Ray Mabus, who among other things was Clinton's ambassador to Saudi Arabia. That and the name Mabus does appear in one of the quatrains.
Now I don't see the connections but according to wikipedia, Poor Ray Mabus has been declared to be the anti-christ by some of the nostrildamnit followers.
In any case, there are better things to waste time on.
For example, my horoscope for today talks about the past few days having been taxing, taking some time to rest and spending time with friends. And holy crap but today is christmas eve and if I was not sick at home with a stomach bug, I would be at work at the company christmas party.
Somehow it seems like much less of a stretch to make sense of my horoscope than to connect anything from Nostradamus to anything at all. I did find out one interesting thing in googling the guy. Apparently, during his life, he did popularize the act of regular bathing as a method to avoid contracting plague. I think he may just have been on to something with that one.
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Pie? Pie good, want pie now...
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Pie is Borg, you will be assimilated and charged with JFK's assasination. And while serving a life sentance you will be put in charge of inventing the Transporter and translating for Klingon prisoners who conspired with you to kill JFK. OR, you can make boots for the poor out of the skin of Loc Ness who was reported by the Weakly(very weak, yea I spelled it right!) World Crap FAUX NEWS!, as captured by the ghost of Jaque Custo(sp).
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
This is pie:
http://www.weebls-stuff.com/wab/pie/
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David Mabus is a nut job who periodically spams the boards with pages and pages of shit about Nostradamus. I'm sure he has had at least five or six IPs banned. The kid's persistent, if nothing else.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Ah, I see (said the blind man).
I took the question literally and dug up another Mabus guy who is tragically connected to Nostrildamnit. Does that make me a literalist atheist?
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I think it just makes you contextually challenged.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
If I had to worship any orical(or parody thereof) It would be that of Dave Shapel and "Nigrodamus".
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
Here are the verses cited at armageddononline.com, supposedly in reference to Hitler.
Out of the deepest part of the west of Europe,
From poor people a young child shall be born,
Who with his tongue shall seduce many people,
His fame shall increase in the Eastern Kingdom.
Okay, so Hitler was born in Austria. That is to say, Central Europe, almost Eastern Europe. Not the deepest part of the west of Europe, so that doesn't match. Furthermore, in Nostradamus' time, the reference to an "Eastern Kingdom" is hardly a clear one. I suppose it could be the Ottoman Empire, or Russia, or maybe even China. It doesn't seem like it could mean Germany (the only place where Hitler could ever have been said to have had "fame"
because Nostradamus refers directly to Germany in a later verse, and makes no attempt to connect the two.
He shall come to tyrannize the land.
He shall raise up a hatred that had long been dormant.
The child of Germany observes no law.
Cries, and tears, fire, blood, and battle.
This is a little bit better than the first selection, though the "hatred that had long been dormant" is arguable. The Nazi Party was anti-semitic in its inception, so you can't completely blame Hitler for stirring up a resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe.
A captain of Germany shall come to yield himself by false hope,
So that his revolt shall cause great bloodshed.
Well, Hitler was never a captain, anyway.
Beasts wild with hunger will cross the rivers
The greater part of the battlefield will be against Hister.
As stated before, Hister is the Danube. And the greater part of the battlefield was not "against Hister" in any case. In WW2, the Allied forces entered Germany primarily through Belgium and France. They didn't need to cross the Danube, but the Rhine and the Elbe.
Near the Rhine from the Austrian mountains
Will be born a great man of the people, come too late.
A man who will defend Poland and Hungary
And whose fate will never be certain.
Okay, so once again, Hitler was born in Austria in a town called Branau am Inn, which is on the Inn River, itself a tributary of the Danube, not the Rhine. Even if we give Nostradamus "near the Rhine", why couldn't he get the exact river correct? Hitler wasn't born near the Inn river[/i], he was born on the Inn River. Seems like a real visionary could have called it a little closer. A "great man of the people, come too late"--too late for what?, one asks. The German people are more wealthy and successful now than they were at any time in history, and that's in spite of the destruction Hitler brought upon Germany. I suppose you could say that Hitler defended Poland after he conquered it and slaughtered its people, but I don't know of any historian who'd give you much more than that. As for Hungary, Hitler set up a puppet government there and got lots and lots of the locals killed and set the stage for Hungary being a puppet yet again under the Soviets.
"The whole conception of God is a conception derived from ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men."
--Bertrand Russell
Well, the Western Allies never had to cross the Danube, but most of the fighting against the Nazis was done by the Red Army and they most certainly did have to cross the Danube, although again, not much of the battlefield was "against the Danube". Most of the fighting against Nazi Germany took place in Russia itself, in France and in North Africa and Italy.
And of course, Hitler was not exactly a "great man of the people, come too late", nor did he defend Poland and Hungary. The former was crushed under the Nazi jackboot and the latter was supportive of Hitler until he began to lose, whereupon it was taken by Skorzeny under Hitler's orders in 1944 in preparation for the most massive deportations to Auschwitz.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Oh.
See, none of that watches what I was actually told (...Well, some of it sort-of does, but the context has been twisted around).
I should've known better.
Thanks for spelling that out, DDA.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
Oh great, now there's a banner ad for Nostradamus 2012 on top of this:
Hindsight is 20/20, foresight is 2012!
Eden had a 25% murder rate and incest was rampant.
Oh, hey, how about that. It's apparently going to be a 2-hour long programme on History channel (boo) and will feature Michael Shermer & Penn and Teller (yay).
Imma watch that.
EDIT: Ahem. Pardon:
Dr. Michael Shermer.
I keep forgetting that he has a PhD. Dude is just way too chill about it.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
No cable here. I will have to watch it on a Chinese web site an hour later. I don't want to expose us to copyright crap but any additional details that help with the searches would be appreciated.
Kev, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of “How We Believe”.
When his mother was diagnosed with brain cancer (and the doctors gave him the buisness on the matter), he did wave his doctoral dick around a bit. I have the book with me but the bit that is relevant is
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Let's not all forget, either, that the idea of "German" didn't exist until the mid-1800s. The idea of an all-Europe war, however, got a fair amount of attention during the 1500s, so it makes sense that the prediction is in there. There's actually more evidence that points to him being specific about people living during his time that he didn't particularly like. Public figures, that is. Mention of "two brothers", for instance, may find itself appearing in 9/11 madness, but is more likely to refer to actual brothers during Nostradamus's lifetime. Even if you consider that he wrote in the so-called "Green Language" (of astrologers), the predictions still don't end up anything but cleverly-worded statements that could be interpreted a thousand different ways. Try predicting world history by Shakespeare, and you could probably do pretty well, too.
Nostradamus is unfortunately too vague for us to make sense of his assertions until after they happen. Curious, considering they have that in common with any run-of-the-mill vague prediction.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
The idea of German nationality did, but the state didn't. The Romans first identified a group of Celts from Central Europe as "Germanii", likely coming from their word for "seed". Later on, one of Charlemagne's grandsons was called Louis the German as he ruled over the east Franks and the Bavarians when the first iteration of the HRE split. People throughout the region self-identified as "German", even though there was no single individual named King of the Germans until Wilhelm Hohenzollern made himself Kaiser in the 19th century. Admittedly, the idea of the state of Germany didn't catch on until Hegel and Schelling started presuming that the "Volk" had a special kind of racial purity.
"The whole conception of God is a conception derived from ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men."
--Bertrand Russell
Sorry - my point was that the word had a completely different meaning, in the same sense that "Asia" has a different meaning to us than it did to the Romans. At the time of Nostradamus, we have the quatrain:
Which is translated fairly easily into English nonsense:
Ferocious beasts cross rivers from hunger
Most of the [region?] will be against Hister
In a cage of iron the great [one] carries, dragging
When the German child will see [R in?].
Or something to that effect. Not sure what the "R in" is. There may be an online translation that's better, but I doubt any of it will be particularly enlightening. The idea that all that nonsense points toward the 20th century is weak at best.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
...His mother was diagnosed with brain cancer and died?
That's pretty sucky.
Man. I don't know anything about most of our modern popularizers of science.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
It's perfectly likely that it was coincidence.
I will write:
In the time of the War of The Gulf there will be a dark skinned man named Huusain. (Made up, of course.) He will terrorize the people he owns and spread disease across the land.
If Nostrodamus wrote something like that it would sound eerily similar. But what I am getting at is that you can easily associate similar things, in fact, we're made to do that. When glossed over, it appears real, though in reality it is just coincidence. Sorry if I repeated what someone else said, I just posted.
Evolution cannot be debated. 'Tis real.
Well, of course it sucks. Such is the way that the world really is. However, thanks to our modern understanding of science, he was able to have a couple more years with her than he would have if we were still living in the middle ages.
Interestingly, a promising area of research is in the behavior of tumors and how they develop. With a better understanding of those factors, it may be possible to find new treatments that can be targeted specifically at different types of tumors, as opposed to the more generic and devastating treatments that we have today.
The specific type of tumor that she had is one that can easily be knocked out with chemotherapy. However, the damage appears to be widespread and the tumors may be producing a hormone like substance that suppresses new tumors from developing. So every successful treatment leads eventually to new tumors developing.
If those factors can be isolated, then in the future, we may be able to develop new drugs that are able to target the damaged tissue and prevent a recurrence. As sad as each individual death is, with a commitment to science, they may lead the way to preventing future deaths.
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