Blogger's stats are getting more and more bizarre. Here's their list of my top referrers in the past week:

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It's possible that I'm actually getting "traffic" -- presumably from fake-intelligence systems based there -- from Brazil, Vietnam, Singapore, and Hong Kong. It's not possible that anyone is ...

A Chinese chap, whose post I used to see in the college pigeon-holes, that was called Ivan Ho.

A friend of a friend from Yorkshire, whose name was Annette Curtin.

Even decades later; these can provoke an inner chuckle.

Rather than being a part of the fake-"Alternative" economy; and defending it on the untrue basis that it is genuinely Alternative; it is spiritually better to have a job explicitly in service to evil totalitarianism, and to know that is what you are doing. And to repent the necessity.

The idea that there is any ...

I talk a good deal on this blog about purpose, and how important it is - yet purpose is an abstraction, hence not really real, but just a symbol for reality.

(The reality is the personal desires of living Beings.)

For most theologically-minded people, the abstract nature of purpose is important; because ...

My according the Fourth Gospel primary authority is indeed a matter of my personal preference, since even before I was a Christian it always seemed that it was the most beautiful book of the Bible.

But is it just that - merely personal?

No - there is something more to it than taste, and something that may be ...

I've been discussing Michael Jackson with an email correspondent, and the other day his title made me think of another "King of Pop" -- Bob Black, maker of Bob's Black Banana Pop. This was a fictional character and product, developed mostly by one of my brothers in childhood, with considerable input from other ...

A few observations...

Lack of Christianity is killing people, and the world.

In that sense any kind of Christianity - of desiring salvation by Jesus Christ - is better than nothing.

I believe that the decision concerning salvation comes after death of the body. Which is just as well; because it means that the ...

My 2019 post "Fire and ice" tells the story, insofar as I could remember it, of the first synchronicity ever to get my attention. It involved coming across the same four lines from Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" twice within the space of an hour -- once in a sermon on chastity and once in a popular science book. ...

I'm a bit obsessed with this business of "understanding" as a pre-requisite!

As a spontaneous "philosopher"; I am naturally an argumentative person, who has striven for the past couple of decades to suppress this trait because it was (mostly) a pointless waste of my life... More exactly, it was pointless in terms of ...

Lots of (very belated) media-chat at present about the strategically engineered conditions for within-nations Civil War/ Genocide in Western countries; alongside the ongoing Western escalation towards all-out inter-national World War.

It is very late in the day to be noticing this, and it is probably many, many ...

if you create your own prison, you have to make your own escape.

no drywall

to punch

wet blood

i never worked at anything i've written. that's just the truth. whenever it becomes work, or i notice it is, i stop and only go back to it when it's no longer work. the idea of it being work is as absurd to me as the ...

Possible future expectations need to be confident in order to be effective in shaping present life.

At least, "confident" to the degree that we can be sure of anything in this mortal life of change and uncertainty.

When I was a medical student I was confident of becoming a doctor; therefore that expectation shaped ...

I woke up with this old song in my head. No idea where it came from. I associate it with my old Scoutmaster (“Mr. Graff from the FBI”) and haven’t heard or thought of it since my Scouting days.

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Back then I had long hair and a beard. Today my hair is cut just as short as his.

Yesterday at around 4:00 p.m. I was teaching English vocabulary to some junior high students when this example sentence from the vocabulary textbook caught my eye:

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"Robert came to see me on a snowy evening." Obviously whoever wrote this sentence was inspired by Robert Frost's famous poem "Stopping ...

Back in the middle noughties I was a New Agey atheist; keen on modernity, globalization, economic growth, democracy - a sort of libertarian; and saw many applications of evolutionary theory to human life... that kind of person.

(See, for instance, this - written at the time; which tried to provide a coherent ...

Any motivation to interact with the System’s newest and latest top-down-endorsed and implemented (re: enforced) technological innovation that will change everything--so you had better get-with-the-program-or-get-left-behind--is inherently misguided on its own;

however, the specific motivation to engage with AI ...

Opening my blog dashboard, I saw the name of my most recent post, "Dyed white," and for some reason spontaneously misread the first word as if it were not the English past participle of dye but rather a transliteration of the Russian дед ("grandpa"), with the ye pronounced as in yes. My main association with that ...

Metaphysical Dissonance is what we experience when our superficial and everyday motivations are contradicted by our metaphysical convictions.

In other words; when our everyday, on-the-surface specific attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours; are contradicted by our basic understanding of the nature of reality. ...

Leftism collapses the vertical to the horizontal. That's it. That is its great error or sin as you might well call it since it deforms reality. This is why it can only really infect human consciousness in a time of materialism, and why when it contaminates spirituality, you get a false spirituality that reduces the ...

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For all you Hawkbit fans, I have an important update...

I took a slight diversion to walk through the 30-40 acre urban field (Little Moor) that forms the densest Hawkbit concentration hereabouts; when I discovered that most of the bright yellow flowers I reported just a fortnight ago; have turned ...

We posit one God because we need to explain the cohesion of reality - why things hang-together and don't fly apart; why there are values; why there is is structure, coordination, predictability etc.

We posit many gods because we need to explain free-will/ agency, evil, love, creativity, the possibility of change and ...

I recently spent a few days in Eger, a smallish city in northern Hungary, known for its wines and surviving the Turkish seige of 1552. While there, I attended a mass in honor of Saint Stephen of Hungary (August 20 is a national holiday in his honor). The Archishop of Eger presided over the mass, held at the Cathedral ...

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Booly end is at the top, clappy at the bottom

From my childhood (by oral transmission, with no spelling); a Northumbrian dialect ("Pitmatic") term for the ends of a slice of traditionally-shaped bread is booly - i.e. because round like a ball (or bool); and clappy - because flattened as if ...

It has been... interesting to observe how the word disinterested, which means impartial; has become co-opted as a synonym of uninterested - which means not having one's mind, feelings or motivation engaged by a thing.

Properly speaking, a good judge in a court of law ought to be disinterested, but not uninterested. ...

On the road this morning, I passed a real estate agency which had a picture like this prominently displayed. (I didn't take a photo; this is a similar image I found online.)

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The agency is called Pacific Realtor. The Chinese word for "ocean," which is part of the name Pacific (太平洋), sounds ...

By my understanding; it was once (almost) inevitable that Christianity would be conflated with "Church" (although exactly which Church, was very soon a matter of deadly dispute).

Whether or not such conflation of Christianity and Church was once inevitable, so that it was natural, spontaneous, and necessary for a ...

I woke up this morning with the phrase "Joseph the Smith" in my mind. This seemed to be analogous to the title of James E. Talmage's book Jesus the Christ, a Mormon classic, the insertion of the definite article serving to emphasize that Christ is not Jesus' last name but rather a title descriptive of his role and ...

Once he heard that the chevalier was closing, he had to call her. It was only fitting and fair that they meet there one last time, to say goodbye to it, and to their young selves, and to whatever it was they had together, and which he knew he would never have again with anyone else. It was a summer fling, that was one ...

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A spirit; naturally seen by the shaman, invisible to Westerners...

Consider, as a thought experiment, a situation that happened for many Western anthropologists who were observing native tribes in various parts of the world.

A tribal "shaman"/ medicine man/ spirit healer would perform some kind ...