Monday, June 30, 2025

Edgar Cayce: The Most Documented Psychic in History


This documentary tells the basic story of the life of Edgar Cayce, best known as the most documented psychic in American, and probably all, history.  He lived from 1877 to 1945.  

In his 20's, Edgar Cayce learned to put himself into a trance-like state, where other people would ask him questions, and he would tap into some other levels of information, including something he called the Akashic Record.  Over 14,000 of these readings, as they were called, were documented by a stenographer, and then transcribed and organized.  The material covered was mostly health readings, to diagnose and find treatments for illnesses and injuries for thousands of different people.  But he also gave "life readings," which dove into the history of individual people.  It was those readings that spoke of past lives, reincarnation, ancient Egypt, the "lost" civilization of Atlantis, and many other topics.  

Edgar was a devout Christian throughout his whole life.  At age 13, he decided to read the Bible, the whole thing, start to finish.  During the rest of his life, he read the entire Bible once for every year of his life, 67 times in total.  He taught Sunday school from his teen years on.  He worked several different jobs, but spent many years working as a photographer with his own small shop.  He moved a few times around the eastern U.S., and at one point tried to use his abilities to strike it rich in the oil boom in Texas.  He married a woman named Gertrude, they had two boys, and eventually settled in Virginia Beach, Virginia, led by suggestions in his psychic readings.  

With the help of some investors from Wall street, he opened a small hospital in Virginia Beach, where people could be treated by doctors and nurses, using the treatments suggested in his health readings.  Thousands of people, including Edgar himself, and his oldest son, Hugh Lynn Casey, were helped by Edgar's health readings, through serious ailments and injuries.  When Edgar woke up from his readings, he had no idea what information had come through him, which is why a stenographer (a woman writing in shorthand, taking detailed notes) was necessary, to accurately compile the information received.    

Edgar's readings predicted the stock crash of 1929, earlier that year.  He predicted in the early 1900's that some day doctors would be able to take a single drop of blood and diagnose what's wrong with a patient.  He predicted that the obscure Jewish sect, the Essenes, would become more prominent in the future.  Many years later, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in Israel, which shed light on the Essenes.  He also predicted things that didn't happen, like the Earth's poles shifting in the 20th century.  But he said that the future is not predestined, it can change, depending on what we do in the present.  

Near the end of his life, in the 1940's during World War II, Edgar Cayce did as many as 8 readings a day.  The readings took a lot out of him, and he pushed himself to physical exhaustion, while trying to help as many people as he could.  Edgar Cayce died in 1945, months before World War II ended, at age 67.  

Below are talks given by different scholars of Edgar Cayce's readings, on a few different subjects.  There are dozens more talks on many different subjects that came through the 14,000+ psychic readings of Cayce.  This post is just a little introduction into the life of this regular man who could tap, somehow, into extraordinary pools of information and knowledge.  

If you find him interesting, you can research more about him on your own.  You can also join the A.R.E., the non-profit Association for Research and Enlightenment, which Cayce started late in his life, and which continues on today.  The link to their website is below.  There are also several books, most published in the mid 20th century, on different subjects, based on information in his many readings.  

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Half a million page views and over 1050 posts...


This blog just crossed the 500,000 page view threshold.  Cool.

As I said in the post a couple of days ago, I don't know where the big chunks of page views are coming from.  This has been happening over the last 1 1/2 to two years, maybe.  This blog has 1,062 posts, but there are a few I started and never finished, so the real number is 1,050 to 1,055 published posts, just on this blog.  This blog has about 200,000 or so "normal" page views, which is damn good for a weird, niche blog.  Then it has around 300,000 page views that have come in big chunks, thousands in a day, from around the world.  Bots?  AI searches?  People using VPN's to check it out?  Something else?  I don't know.  

On all the blogs I've done since my first, really lame, taxi blog in 2007, I've written somewhere over 2,800 blog posts, most pretty meaty, at least 400-500 words, sometimes more than 1,000 words.  Those assorted blogs have pulled in over 800,000 total page views.  For all intents and purposes, I've made almost no money off of all of that writing.  I have a handful of people that support me on Patreon, about $65 a month total, for a year and a half or so.  A number of people have given me small amounts here and there, mostly because I've been homeless much of the time I've been blogging.  I really do appreciate that support, and I thank all of you who have read my posts, and helped me out.  

I have sold well over 100 Sharpie Scribble Style drawings, many of them to readers of this blog, over the last ten years.  But that income isn't directly from the blog itself.  I've written all these posts because I enjoy doing them, and because I wasn't able to find "a real job" for many years, after working as a taxi driver.  So I had a lot of time on my hands.  

I'm building up my Substack site, which is designed to actually earn money as a writer, and I'm working to earn a decent income from that, at some point.  I will shamelessly ask all of you for your support on Substack (probably about $7 a month or so) when I can get a bank account, and the other things needed to get the paid subscriptions working.  

Thanks again for checking out my blog!  Again, I don't know where these big groups of views are coming from, but the counter hit half a million.  I'll keep adding a post now and then here, as I write mostly on Substack.  So check out my Substack for longer, in depth posts on a bunch of different subjects. 


Click on "No thanks" on the first page, to see the latest posts.  If you subscribe for free, it just means each post will come directly into your email.  I appreciate all subscribers, and when the paid subscription option happens, there will still be lots of stuff to view for free, but some posts and series will be for subscribers only.  

Right when I noticed the number of views, we had a little earthquake, a 2.7, right under this part of The Valley.  It felt like someone picked up the library a couple inches and dropped it.  I'll take that as a thumbs up from the Earth on hitting a big blog milestone.  Thanks again... enough babbling... onward!

Steve Emig
The White Bear
June 24, 2025 

Saturday, June 21, 2025

I honestly don't know what's going on with the page views on this blog... as it creeps towards 500,000


 AI?  Bots?  Thousands of people finding this blog while using VPN's?  I don't know.  Steve Emig: The White Bear blog has about 200,000 "normal" page views, and now nearly 300,000 in huge chunks from all over.  I spend most of my time and effort on my Substack now, and just put up blog posts here once in a while.  If anyone knows what's going, let me know.  






Friday, June 20, 2025

People living in commercial buildings and alternative scenarios to save money or create dream homes


When it comes to alternative living spaces, there's one that goes way back.  Ever wonder just exactly what it was like down in Oscar's trash can on Sesame Street?  Of course you did.  It turns out Elmo got a quick peak at it once.  

As a grubby little kid who didn't care much about cleanliness, I definitely could relate to Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street a bit.  When the drama was high in my house, there seemed times when living in a trash can like Oscar might be a good idea.  I'm only half joking.  Alternative housing, when you live in a tense household, was appealing as a kid.  I couldn't wait to grow up, make money, and have my own place to live.  OK, things didn't play out quite like I expected.  As a result, I have lived in a wide range of "non-normal" living situations, as well as several cool apartments and houses, in my adult life.

It was the late 1970's TV detective, Dan Tanna, who really turned me on to the idea of living in a commercial building.  In the TV private detective show, Vegas (See 20:06, 30:38, 38:14). Tanna lived in a warehouse/industrial building in Las Vegas, and drove a classic, red, 1957 Ford Thunderbird into his living room.  When I was 12 or 13 years old, that seemed like the coolest bachelor pad ever.  Tanna, being a TV detective, was always surrounded by beautiful women, which added to the idea.  My dad, a serious car guy in his younger years, owned a red, 1955 Ford T-bird, and two 1957 T-Birds, which was another reason Dan Tanna seemed super cool to me, as a kid.    

A few years later, and about 1,500 miles west, in Boise, I got into BMX bike racing and freestyle while I was in high school.  A year after I graduated high school, in 1985, my family moved to San Jose, California.  With no money for college, and with BMX freestyle being the driving force in my life then, I started publishing a BMX freestyle zine, financed by my low wage job at Pizza Hut.  Old School BMXers remember that the BMX movie Rad came out in 1986.  The whole plot of Rad seemed pretty hokey to me, but it was cool that BMX made it onto movie screens.  

Another bicycle movie came out about the same time, the Kevin Bacon movie Quicksilver It was about a stock broker who loses big, goes broke, and becomes a bicycle messenger in San Francisco.  Personally, I liked Quicksilver better than Rad.  In that movie, Jack and his girlfriend lived in a big, industrial loft turned into an apartment.  Again, that just seemed like a really cool place to live.  I thought, "if I lived there, I could freestyle in my living room."  It wasn't like I suddenly started dreaming of living in an industrial building, it was just something that seemed cool, and the idea stuck in the back of my head.  

Years later, as I lived in a bunch of different places with BMXers, and backyard ramps became a thing, the idea grew.  In addition, I was living cheap all through the 1990's.  During that era, I was working odd jobs, reading dozens of books, and just trying to work through my shyness and personal issues.  Then, after an injury in 1999, I wound up living in a taxi, and in a whole lot of unusual places, in the early 2000's, and beyond.  In high school, I had expected to live a pretty typical life.  But BMX took me off in another direction, and I'm glad it did.  Over my adult years, I've lived in two houses with 10 or more roommates at a time, in an office, in RV's, in an indie art gallery, in an industrial building, in my personal car and several taxis, and a whole bunch of different homeless scenarios, ranging from shelters, to a tent in the woods for several months.  It definitely wasn't the plan, but I became very experienced at cheap and "alternative" living situations.  

Now it's 2025, and nearly everybody, at every income level, is complaining about how high rent and mortgage payments are.  And they are right.  Mortgage and rent affordability is worse than it has been for most of your lives.  For a while now, I've been writing a series on my Substack site about the tens of thousands of vacant and abandoned buildings in the United States.  I call this issue the "Simulpocalypse."  You can check my Substack posts, to learn more about that idea.  At this point, after many years in and out of homelessness, I just want to find a decent place to live and work.  But that old idea has grown.  Getting an industrial or warehouse building large enough to create a live/work/art studio place, one big enough to put a mini ramp inside, sounds really, really cool.  It will probably never happen, but the dream is still there.  

In any case, housing affordability is a huge issue for millions of people now, not just me.  At the same time, there are more and more warehouses, industrial buildings, stores of different sizes, and now entire office buildings, becoming vacant.  One possible option to save money on housing, or to build a dream house scenario, is to look to these vacant and abandoned commercial buildings, sitting empty around the country.  

It turns out YouTubers seem to be leading the charge with this idea.  I think we're heading into a long, pretty gnarly, recession. I think people finding cool ways to live in vacant urban and commercial buildings will grow into a decent sized trend.  It's not the only option to save money on housing, but it's one interesting option that's out there today.  As traditional homes and apartments have become more and more expensive, a huge number of commercial buildings have become vacant, even totally abandoned.  Many are much cheaper to lease than apartments in the same area.  Sure, you're not supposed to live in commercial buildings.  But building owners need tenants, and some may let a decent tenant live in the building, and not sweat it, so they have some rent coming in.  

So here are a bunch of different people who are, or have lived in, commercial buildings, in one way or another.  Check out the ones that sound interesting.  






OK, enough of the crazy places, here are some much more down to Earth homes in commercial buildings and other alternative living spaces.  





This real estate investor "became homeless," and lived in his office to save money, after the real estate market crashed, during the Great Recession.  He credits the time spent living in the office with helping him to get his business going strong again.  









I do most of my writing on Substack these days, a platform designed specifically for writers.  Check it out:











Friday, June 13, 2025

Inflection Point Weekend- June 13th-June 15th, 2025

Generation X was grew up under the threat of a potential, worldwide, nuclear Holocaust at any time.  A holocaust that never happened.  Not yet, anyhow.  What can I say, it made us a bit jaded.

Generation X, of which I'm one of the older members, was the last generation to be raised in the Industrial Age, when the factories of America were still thriving.  By the time we hit our teens, and the first Millennials were being born, the factories were closing down, and we were visibly in the long transition into the emerging Information Age.  

By the time the Millennials started hitting their teen years, the internet came along, and democratized communication around the world, in a way that had never happened before in human history.  At that time, the earliest Gen Z kids were being born.  Gen Z was born into a fully digital world, with Web 2.0 in full effect from childhood, and social media and smartphones coming along in their childhood years.  Through all these last few decades, the pace of social and technological change has been steadily increasing.  The power brokers of the Industrial Age world have been desperately clinging to what power they could, while the paradigm shifted around them.  

There come times when the slow grind of change builds up pressure, and a major, sudden shift happens.  An earthquake in society, you might say.  A major inflection point.  

The pace of changes becomes social inflection points when a great deal of change happens in the mentality of large numbers of people.  Or changes in mentality that have already happened make themselves known.  It looks like this weekend, June 13th through June 15th, 2025, will be one of those major inflection points in human society in the United States, and perhaps around the world.  Pay attention kids, we are all living history this weekend, however things play out.  I'm simply calling attention to the importance this weekend will play in society overall.  And somehow, it all starts with a Friday the 13th.  Crazy.  


Here are a few songs to set the mood for what looks to be a pretty crazy weekend, one way or the other.  















Blogger's Note- Monday, June 16th, 2025- It turns out that all those AR-15's owned by 2nd Amendment activists have been completely useless in preventing the drive toward authoritarianism in the United States of America.*  The push by the American Right away from a constitutional democratic republic, and towards an authoritarian state, continues.  Guns are useless in a war of ideas and culture.  The NRA is MIA in the fight to preserve democracy.  But we all knew that already.  

Here are some new reports from today (6/16/2025):


Democracy Now- "No Kings" report- Monday morning, June 16th, 2025 - The pro-democracy majority in the United States of America now has a face.






And on the lighter side, here's a parody music video: 


Was this weekend, June 13th-June 15th, 2025 an actual inflection point in the United States, or society as a whole?  Time will tell if democracy or authoritarianism wins in the U.S., and elsewhere...


* Just for the record, I am 100% for legal gun ownership.  If you own guns, you need to be a responsible gun owner.  









 

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Rumble in Richmond 2025


Here's the Dig BMX edit of the Rumble in Richmond BMX day O' fun, put on by Steve Crandall and posse.  If you like BMX, and you ever get the chance to go to one of Steve Crandall's events, do it.  It's as simple as that.  Check out RAD Share, and help them out if you can.  Bikes to kids who need them.  

Just for the record, I was not at the Rumble in Richmond.  But I lived there a while back in 2018-2019.  I went to the DIY World Championships event in October of 2018, and it was epic, even as an old guy with no bike.  That's why I recommend checking out any event Steve Crandall puts on.

Saturday, June 7, 2025

The "Lost Cities" of the Amazon


Have you ever heard about the "Legend of El Dorado," the city in South America that was made entirely of gold?  The very first European explorers in the Amazon in the 1500's reported huge cities.  When more explorers made it into the Amazon area about 100 years later, those cities couldn't be found.  Over centuries, a legend was born that there was a Lost city, built entirely of gold, somewhere in the Amazon basin.

An explorer in the early 1900's, named Percy Fawcett, became obsessed with a lost city in the Amazon he called "Z."  A few months ago, I read the book, The Lost City of Z, about Fawcett.  On his 8th expedition into the Amazon, looking for the lost city of Z, Fawcett disappeared, in 1925.  Dozens of other explorers later went into the Amazon, looking for both Fawcett, and "Z," and disappeared themselves.  Fawcett never found the Lost city of Z, but he did report finding earthen mounds, and ancient pottery in places.  In reality, he actually did find parts of the "Lost Cities of the Amazon," but they weren't built with stone, with huge temples, like the cities of the Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas.  Fawcett didn't recognize the earthen mounds and bits of pottery as remains of the cities he was looking for.  

But now, partly because of the massive deforestation for cattle ranching, and LIDAR scans showing huge, shaped, earthen mounds under the jungle cover still remaining, there is a lot of evidence that large villages and cities once existed there.  More and more signs of these societies are being found on a regular basis.  

If you're interested in the lost cities of the Amazon, the 7 minute video above gives a good overview of what has been found.  There are many more videos that go into more depth on the subject, as well as interviews and talks with Graham Hancock, who has written a book on this subject.  

I'm doing most of my writing on a platform called Substack now, check it out:



There are no paid links in this post.



Friday, June 6, 2025

Top Ten Reasons The White Bear Sucks


Op cord short shorts for guys.  Izod ankle socks, yeah, they actually had the little fucking alligators on them.  Nike Pegasus running shoes because I sucked at running cross country before I sucked at BMX.  The Vuarnets are cool, I found them in a field.  This is me as manager of the tiny Boise Fun Spot amusement park, balancing on my Skyway T/A, in the summer of 1985.  Yep, a lame freestyler (one of three in Boise then), running racing frame pads while doing balance tricks.  Let's face it, it was all downhill after this photo was taken.  Photo by Vaughn K., my co-worker at the Fun Spot.  

Top Ten Reasons The White Bear Sucks

(One) He looks gay as fuck in that photo from Boise in 1985 (above), he must be a fag.  (Actually I'm just a lame straight guy who's been fat, ugly, broke, and had bad teeth for the last 20-25 years, so it's not like women have been beating down my door or anything).  

(Two) He had terrible, shaky camera work in this video, although the ending is cool.  "Somebody fire that cameraman right now."  Heh, heh, heh...

(Three)  He spent way too much time writing about trying to do bunnyhop tailwhips in his blog, and never, EVER, pulled one.  Bill Nitschke invented that trick, let him enjoy the props for being the first guy to land it.  

(Four) He's a loser... anybody who can manage to be homeless for 17 or 18 years must be smoking crack or meth or something.  How could anyone not get a job for 17 years?  (Actually no alcohol, no drugs, I even kicked my Diet Coke habit a couple of years ago.  I do have a serious 7-11 pepperoni pizza habit though, after my years driving a taxi, and then being unable to find any job in NC for ten years, I actually have no work history to even put on a resume' at this point).  Either I manage to get a little, one man publishing/content creating business going, or I'll do the work for free.  Time will tell which way it ultimately works out.   

(Five) He hasn't been able to jump anything at Sheep Hills since about 1992, when The Bowl was still a thing.  And he had the audacity to write a "History of Sheep Hills" post on his Substack.  What the fuck is a Substack, anyhow?  

(Six) He writes like he's still a BMX guy, but he hasn't ridden a bike since like 1995 or something.  (Actually I rode nearly every day from June of 1982 until August of 2003.  The last trick I learned was nollie 180's on a speed bump, in a parking lot in Garden Grove, across the freeway from the Van's Skatepark and The Block of Orange.  I started gaining weight working as a taxi driver in late 2003, got really fat, and haven't ridden hardly at all since, that's true).  

(Seven) He's fat, ugly, and he smells bad.  I know you're homeless, but damn dude, jump in the ocean once in a while or something.

(Eight) He wrote FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales blog and totally pissed off everyone at Wizard Publications.  (Yep, I wrote that blog in 2008-2009 (over 100 posts).  Then I wrote the original Freestyle BMX Tales blog from 2009-2012 (over 500 posts).  I deleted both of those blogs completely from the internet in the fall of 2012).  

(Nine) He actually admits that he used to work in a porn store.  He must be a perv.  I bet he has sex with goats, aardvarks, and transgender pygmies or something.  (Sorry to disappoint everyone, but a little free lesbian porn when I get a motel room keeps me away from the goats, pygmies, and such.  I do find aardvarks cute, though, but in a purely platonic way).  

(Ten) The guy made like three low-budget BMX videos, waaaaay back when, and they all sucked.  And he acts like he's some big Hollywood producer or something.  What an arrogant prick!  Here's the Steve Emig: The White Bear's Film Festival.  You can decide how much they all suck.  Feel free to go off on Facebook to make it official.  

(Bonus) The guy is 58-years-old, and he still calls himself "The White Bear," a nickname from 1992.  Who the fuck does that?  He writes blog posts making fun of himself, in the third person.  Who does that?  Besides, the guy is so damn sarcastic that I can never tell if he's kidding or he's serious.  What a fucking kook!  He's a fucking NEVER WAS sell out.  And he draws pictures of other people's photos and calls it "art."  What a loser.

Blogger's note- June 9- 2025- Everything on the list above is a reference to things that have been said to my face, said about me in social media comments, or said behind my back that I heard about later.  My life has been really weird for about 25 years now, and I've been plugging through a whole lot of bullshit, sometimes my own, but also a lot that came at me from outside sources.  It's a crazy world, shit happens.  I'm still plugging away at trying to create pretty cool stuff, to the extent I'm able, every single day.  I will continue to do that, as long as I can.  In this post, I just decided to address a bit of the mud that's been slung at me, in my usual, sarcastic way.  


When not writing self-deprecating posts while Old School BMX events are happening elsewhere, I do most of my writing on Substack these days.  It's an online platform designed specifically for writers.  To find more reasons to hate me, click the link below:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack