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When we realised that we would not be able to buy a property in India we had to reassess our situation. While living at the Shilton Hotel we had become friendly with several fellow long-term residents. One was a German called Max who worked at the Goethe Institute in Bangalore. He had an Indian wife who took a great ...

Yesterday I published -- in "Lions, dandy and otherwise, and a ladybird -- plus, I eat a lot of bees" -- this meme with a dandelion and what I at first thought was a tulip. Later I discovered that it's called "The Virgin Rose vs. the Chad Dandelion."

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After discovering the name of the meme, I ...

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I review this interesting and enjoyable volume over at my Notion Club Papers blog.

Diana Pavlac Glyer (edited). The Major and the Missionary: The letters of Warren Hamilton Lewis and Blanch Biggs. Rabbit Room Press: Nashville, TN, USA. 2023. pp: xxxiii, 309.

Anyone who becomes interested by The Inklings, that legendary Oxford group of CS Lewis's friends - which functioned as a writers club to hear ...

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What's not to love about South African fast bowler Gerald Coetzee; currently playing for the Gujarat Titans in the Indian Premier League?

Uncomplicated in operation; but no doubt affected by the living-torment that it is to be a fast bowler - always injured, often out of action, always having ...

Found this today on a /pol/ humor thread:

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I think the "virgin" flower on the left is meant to be a tulip. It's got dicot leaves, but obviously these MS Paint drawings aren't meant to be botanically correct. The "chad" flower on the right is definitely a dandelion, and has no problem busting ...

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Many Christians insist that conventional/traditional metaphysical assumptions—and only conventional/traditional metaphysical assumptions—are founded upon the bedrock of rationality, logic, and common sense.

Such Christians assert that the assumptions they hold, assumptions ...

Honesty and repentance are among the most significant things Christianity asks of us.

The above comes from a video recently suggested to me through private correspondence. I will skip the actual subject matter of that video and focus instead on the thought expressed above, which has kept me ruminating for three or ...

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That's Literally my Bête Noire.

(I forget, now, why I decided to call him Literally.)

Vanity is one of the things which are perhaps most difficult for a noble man to understand: he will be tempted to deny it, where another kind of man thinks he sees it self-evidently. The problem for him is to represent to his mind beings who seek to arouse a good opinion of themselves which they themselves do not ...

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I don’t like the term “clown world.”

I use it here to draw attention to a predominant theme in the rightist/alt-right blogosphere—that some politics, geopolitics, economics, law, and all the rest of it fall under the category of clown world.

​In contrast, ...

Debbie has pointed out that at around the same time I was posting about orange Oscar, this guy was winning the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Miami:

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Piastri, according to a name website, "means plate or sheet in Italian, historically referring to a flat piece of metal or a tile." Metal plates -- "leaves ...

There's been some recent discussion in the part of the online world I inhabit on AI and its usefulness or otherwise. I haven't much to add to the wise words of William James Tychonievich, Frank Berger and Bruce Charlton, but I would reinforce all that they say. As far as I am concerned, AI might have some value for ...

In private correspondence I came-up with the term AI-dolatry which William James Tychonievich has seized upon and elaborated thus:

Idolatry is exactly what it is: taking something we ourselves have made -- human-created software mindlessly plagiarizing and imitating human-created content -- and treating it as some ...

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eternal life is worth dying for

about the blackout: i have no power (pun!) over it, so i don't waste energy (pun!) thinking about it

the book writes itself with my blood for ink

you cannot ride the liger

i'm into mind altering essences

i don't want AI powered, i want human weakened

to air is human, to ...

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That's Bruce's coinage, from an email, though likely one that's been independently invented by others as well. I thought it was precisely apropos and replied:Idolatry is exactly what it is: taking something we ourselves have made -- human-created software mindlessly plagiarizing and imitating ...

I dreamt that I was with a group of five or six White people in their seventies. We were all staying in a luxury hotel in Italy somewhere. One of the old men said, "This is the life! Traveling the world and eating turkey pasta!" This "turkey pasta" was in fact Chiayi turkey rice, a Taiwanese dish which we had indeed ...

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"I've found a synchronicity!"

The Celestine Prophecy, by James Redfield, was a self published book of the early 1990s, that went on to become a major best seller; and contributed to the sense of millennial anticipation among "New Age" spiritual seekers.

On the one hand, the book was much read ...

Smart-stupid people believe that education -- particularly the trendy, expedient, this-worldly sort -- offers a surefire cure for stupidity.

They know they can mask their stupidity by saying the right words, mimicking praised patterns, echoing embraced platitudes, rearranging congealed forms, and imitating accepted ...

I've had that question in the back of my mind since "The Blue-Green Abelard" came up. On of the main links between Abelard and me, besides the pterodactyl thing, is that each of us wrote a fairly lengthy work called Yes and No. His was a collection of mutually contradictory quotes from church authorities; mine was a ...

My brother Luther, who teaches computing at the University of Illinois, explains "How to be as 'smart' as an AI." Like the Molière character who was astonished to realize that he'd been speaking prose all his life without realizing it, some people may make the surprising discovery that a lot of their thinking has ...

An excellent comment from NLR expresses a valid insight concerning current "AI":

It feels weird reading machine produced writing (and I try to avoid it) because I know it's just words strung together with no understanding.

I'd rather read a well-written article by a human. Old search engines were good at finding ...

A couple of micro-dreams during a brief catnap:

In the first, I had taken a photo of something -- a T-shirt maybe, or a bag -- that had lots of little pictures and words printed on it. Using the photo software on my phone, I zoomed in on part of the photo where there was a picture of a ladybird beetle and under it ...

​AI is not artificial intelligence; it is anti-intelligence. More precisely, anti-spiritual intelligence.

Considered exclusively within the realm of pure mental intelligence—though such a thing does not and cannot exist without spirit because all intelligence stems from a foundation of spirit—it ...

About a week ago, as documented in "Roman literature and the Cow Tools dancers," I dreamt that

I was trying to play some music on my phone. I think what I wanted was "Hit That" by the Offspring, but I tapped something wrong and got a Taylor Swift music video.

Last night, due to the influence of that dream, I played ...

If it is acknowledged (or believed) that top-down evil - purposive evil originating global, multinational, and national institutional level ("The Establishment") - is a real and significant phenomenon - then various implications follow.

But it is clear that not many people, including not many Christians, really ...

the following are fragments from a conversation i’m having with my friend Jack (who i hope to convince to have a blog, at the very least). through this exchange, i was able to clarify some things for myself, or express them better than i did before. so i thought it was worth sharing.

as my interlocutor put it: ...

This is today's mental jukebox tune:

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It wasn't released until 2/22/22, six years after I read Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, but I strongly associate it with the the "far-traveling" episode in that book -- which I last posted about on 3/22/23 ("Sync: Ne(m)o and Morpheus"). And today is the equally ...

People talk as if there is "the" story of Jesus Christ - as told in "The Gospels"; but there isn't really one story but two stories; unless you make certain prior assumptions.

These prior assumptions are either

1. That all the Gospels are all telling the same story...

2. Or that Matthew, Mark, and Luke ("Luke" ...

Yesterday I posted "Gross Gaur," about a dream in which a very large man, with every bit of his face and body concealed, walked into my school and said, "My name is Gross Gaur."

It's a bit strange to announce your name when you're in disguise, but there is precedent for it in the Book of Mormon:

And it came to pass ...