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Manfred von Richthofen - the Red Baron - was the top scoring ace in World War I, with 80 confirmed kills; a number that seems likely to be essentially valid.

The greatness of the Red Baron was always contested (or, at least, ambivalent) in the British air force - Royal Flying Corps/ Royal Air ...

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Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford - a lovely place to visit on a sunny day

As happens recurrently, there is a resurgence of the argument that the bloke from Stratford upon Avon could not have written the plays attributed to William Shakespeare.

This will never cease; because details of WS's ...

Very occasionally -- but only occasionally since the demise of Denis Dutton -- I check in with Arts & Letters Daily for old times' sake. (Back in the late nineties, when the Internet was young, it and Robot Wisdom were my only regular online reads.) This morning, scrolling through the links there, I clicked on one ...

A recent piece in the Bee shows a dolphin with a swastika on it and the ungrammatical graffiti “DIE NAZI.” (How many Nazis? Singular! Der Nazi! Now write it out a hundred times, and if it’s not done by sunrise, I’ll cut your balls off.)

I was writing about the Nazi-dolphin connection way back in 2021.

In the /pol/ thread about pterosaurs I referenced in "Quetzalcoatlus and man," there was an image prominently featuring a bird with a wingspan of 6.4 meters, a number that jumped out at me as significant though I wasn't immediately sure why.

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After a second, I made the connection. The thread was ...

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Everybody rightly makes fun of the pseudo-Christian preachers of a "prosperity gospel", when their message becomes too crude, short-termist and monetary - e.g. those US televangelists who state that if you contribute to their church, you will get a better paid jobs, or suchlike.

But the ...

I have harped-on about the problem of regarding God's omniscience as necessary and definitive, and what malign effects this assumption has for Christians.

I was thinking more on this matter, when it struck me with forcible conviction that omniscience is part of an assumption that reality is ultimately "static" - by ...

God is personal, and human beings are persons too - and ultimately reality is a matter of relations between persons, or more exactly Beings (alive, conscious, purposive etc).

Life in 2025 is pushing us towards either a clear recognition of this reality, or else a collapse into nihilism, then despair.

Inwardly to ...

In yesterday's "Patrick, Pennywise, and 27," I linked to Galahad Eridanus's November 2024 post "Modulation and Idolatry," and the link text was "an old one," meaning an old post of his, in contrast to a newer post I had just mentioned. As indicated by the title of my own post, I was interested in his discussion of "a ...

While I assume that God is Dyadic (a Heavenly Father and Mother) - this is something I have not really grasped, not does it correspond much with daily experience.

Partly this may be because we Christians are intended to relate primarily to Jesus, rather than the primary creator; but partly it is because I tend to ...

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i'm easily amused. i think the muses like me.

a wise man is a whys man

my cynicism is as sincere as my romanticism or my mysticism. it's just that i don't only have a heart, i also have a mind, and a dick. i'll leave it up to others to map out which comes from which

the ends justify the memes

aesthetic means ...

This morning, I found a /pol/ thread with this picture:

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Later, preparing for my afternoon English classes, I needed some exercises to help my students practice making comparisons with as. I went through my files and found some suitable material I had created back in 2020. The very first exercise, ...

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"Bolshy Boudica", a British heroine, as depicted by TV Horrible Histories

The story of Boudicca's revolt against the Roman occupiers in AD 61 is well known; and it is usually explained as having been caused by Queen Boudicca having been whipped and her daughters raped by agents of Nero.

But ...

Now and again I like to put out a reminder of a couple of books not mentioned in the sidebar on the right for lack of room and also because they are compilations of blog posts rather than original books. One is of posts from this blog up to about 2020 while the other derives from Bruce Charlton's Albion Awakening ...

There is an absolute and ineradicable stupidity at the heart of The System: the bureaucracy that controls our totalitarian society.

This is something that I observed first-hand in the year and a half I worked in the National Health Service administration. What is characteristic of the stupidity is a conviction that ...

When I think back across my conversion from (almost) lifelong atheism to Christianity, it seems clear that the biggest barrier was that God the creator is a person.

Even in my youth I was prepared, even keen, to adopt abstract deistic principles, and assumptions about the directional or cohesive structure of ...

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My life seems to have been plagued by Hartleys; which I blame upon that archetypal Hartley: Hartley Hare - who I tentatively presume to have been a transdimensional and temporally omnipresent being; capable of exerting influence of many kinds, by many means.

Such were my thoughts when I saw ...

This Saint Patrick’s Day, I read a post by Bruce that mentioned “King’s Bollege, Bambridge,” which I assumed was a reference to the Monty Python sketch where the man can pronounce K but not C and mentions “Keble Bollege, Oxford.” Actually, there’s another version (linked by Bruce, though I didn’t ...

A problem we have - a real problem! - is that "doing good" does not mean that good is done.

Of course, in practice, this was usually only a loose-ish connection. But overall it made sense to talk in terms of virtuous or moral actions, of beautiful artistic products and performances, of truths (from science, ...

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I recently attended choral evensong at King's Bollege Bambridge - which is perhaps the most famous choir, and choral venue, in the world; thanks to its many decades of BBC world broadcasting on Christmas Eve.

They certainly lived up to their reputation, with a beautiful sound and extraordinary ...

From Laeth's latest batch of aphorisms:

the only bridge the Lord ever built was Adam. but really he was more of a ladder. though of course a ladder is a vertical bridge, and a bridge a horizontal ladder. i do wonder if trolls also live behind ladders.

Laeth reads here, so not all the parallels with things posted ...

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matter is swollen spirit, spirit is condensed matter

battling is half the knowing

my aphorisms are only those that, before the last thing that supposedly happened, every well-born person considered sane and normal

meaning comes from thinking

i should have been a gravedigger. now it's too late, except to dig ...

Yesterday, someone posted on /x/ about vulture bees, claiming they were a Mandela (a.k.a. Mandrill) Effect phenomenon:

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One of the replies, mocking the assumption that anything you hadn't heard of must never have existed in your timeline, sarcastically claimed that the 1999 movie Mystery Men had ...

A lot of self-identified Christians believe that it is right and "Christian" to give institutions and powerful persons "the benefit of the doubt" when they claim good motivations. Or even when they espouse bad intentions.

This is assumed to be good in principle or at least harmless.

Not so, because when an ...

When I was in India in the 1980s I met a group of Tibetan refugees who had come to the hill station where I lived to to sell some of their wares which mostly consisted of woollen items for which there wasn't much call in the south of India, even up in the hills. But they also had some pictures of Tibetan deities ...

About four years ago, I picked up secondhand a few of the first published Biggles books (by WE Johns), which triggered a serious revival of interest in WWI, then WWII, military aircraft.

Since then, I have read many scores of memoirs and histories; and watched movies and documentaries by the dozens.

Going back to ...

In a comment on "Drill, baby, drill!" Bill writes, referring to my posts about the poem by Christina Rossetti:

The last, and it looks like only, time you've mentioned goblins on your blog was in connection with the Goblin Market.

When I read that, I knew that wasn't true. (Bill, it turns out, had searched for the ...

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They're taking environmental protection just as seriously as they were taking public health a few years ago:

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The earliest recorded ("Pre-Socratic) ancient Greek philosophers were metaphysicians who seem to have been focused on explaining change and changelessness - which was the most fundamental, and/or how the two were related and interacted*.

Since change is so obvious, why did they feel a need to impute or explain ...

Theory is always and necessarily a simplified model of reality. Extremely simplified - because everything in the universe is left-out, except what is specifically included in the theory.

If you think about it, this must be the case - the vastness and unboundedness of life (which is not really divided ...

Just before waking, in the early hours of March 10, I had two brief dreams. The second, recounted in "Britbong dolphin (600, 300)," turned out to have multiple links to the Dolphin Drilling company and the Byford Dolphin disaster of 1983, dubbed "the worst diving accident in history."

The first, which I didn't both ...