Every Duckstack is perfect, of course, but the latest is extra super-duper-perfect. Maybe even pluperfect. We're talking Anglin's-Duke-of-Earl-posts levels of perfect. I've read a lot of material by and about Nietzsche, but none of it is even in the same league as the Duckstack's "The Nietzschean Dialectic." Possibly ...

In May of 2024 I published on this blog a short series of excerpts from Coleridge's Table Talk which is a collection of his conversations with friends round the dinner table recorded for posterity. One of them ran like this."Most women have no character at all," said Pope, and meant it for satire. Shakespeare, who ...

it’s good to know the reasons why we do the things we do, but when it comes to creation, and the impulse behind it, inspecting it too much and too closely kills the magic. or at least it does for me. if i’m in the middle of it and i start thinking about the process, it’s gone.

there are plenty of ...

It has become pretty obvious that the class of which I am a member - the "upper middle class", the people who work in professional and managerial jobs; nowadays, mostly as bureaucrats, of one sort of another - are the most corrupted of people in The West,

I mean the most corrupted - that is the most ...

Last night, some links led me back to my 2024 post "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask," which recounts two seemingly unrelated dreams. In the context of my February 13 post "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen," though, they did seem to be related. In that more recent ...

This evening I stopped reading Words of Them Which Have Slumbered near the end of a section, having flipped forward a few pages to check. The next section, which I have yet to read, is called "Every Hill of Valinor."

Just now, on a random whim, I used a website to select a truly random verse from the King James ...

The biggest frauds of recent decades have all involved Big Money overcoming common sense.

Enough Big Money and, it is clear, people will believe what they know to be impossible - indeed they are positively eager and zealous to believe what they know to be impossible.

A clear and uncontroversial example is the ...

In the old days, a King would grant a favoured vassal a legal monopoly on the provision of some sort of goods or services; but nowadays the rulers inject invisible subsidies - at the early stages, and for many years, to ensure the success of those corporations that they wish to establish as a part of the totalitarian ...

The Saruman Syndrome happens when the lust to be "a winner", or the horror of being "a loser" - causes people to switch sides from Good to Evil, themselves to join with the side of evil - as soon as they become convinced that the side of evil is going to prevail.

Saruman drew himself up then and began to ...

My recent post "Half under the sea" began with this image, an adaptation of an existing meme:

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Commenter NLR determined that the background image in the meme was originally a 2016 photo by Kate Ferguson of a salt flat in a Bolivian desert, as viewed from a rocky outcropping.

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To ...

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Vincent Van Gogh, Olive Trees (1889)

The 2 Zenos text (as quoted in Jacob 5) has significant parallels to three different biblical texts: Isaiah 5, Luke 13, and Romans 11. In this post I will lay out the parallels and attempt to discern the direction of the influence.

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A. Isaiah 5 and 2 ...

By "instrumental" I mean "making use of" - so that having an instrumental attitude to somebody means "making use of him".

By "the dead" I mean those who have mortally died, biologically died.

By "spiritual contact" with the dead - I refer to the fact that we (naturally and spontaneously) have spiritual contact with ...

These two posts appeared in close proximity on Synlogos:

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Barnhardt's post is self-explanatory: The "pizza" code word used by the Scum On Top may derive from pizda, which occurs in virtually all Slavic languages as what Ann politely calls a "vulgarism for the female genitalia."

In the Didactic ...

Despite everything, some self-professed Christians continue to publicly laud the merits of AI, claiming it will make people smarter, more efficient, creative, and wealthy, provided it is utilized effectively with good underlying motivations.

Ridiculous hype and exaggerated claims aside, AI has revealed itself as the ...

One of the major difficulties that Christians now have* is in trying to explain clearly, simply, concisely: who Jesus was, what Jesus did - and, in particular, why Jesus was indispensable.

(i.e. "Indispensable" to those who want what Jesus offers.)

Jesus might be conceptualized in two main ways: either as someone ...

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My 14-year-old son recently began reading Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a novel I was very fond of when I was his age. If memory serves me well, Bradbury’s tale of book-burning firemen served as the gateway to what became a mini-obsession with dystopian fiction during my ...

The idea that what we think, believe, do; ought-to-be derived from some external authority - which is, in practice, always some institution/ organization/ corporation... some formal group of people - is something that we recognize in others, but seldom acknowledge in ourselves.

I had a friend who had recently become ...

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Even Silly Wizard could not look stylish when posed in the family front room with seventies decor

Continuing today's musical theme with a very different thing: here are the ex-Silly Wizard brothers Phil (accordion) and Johnny (fiddle) playing various reels - reels being a fast folk dance in 4/4 ...

The first part of Nephi's high mountain vision deals with the conception, birth, baptism, ministry, end execution of Jesus Christ -- the resurrection is, strangely, omitted -- and presents no real problems. It is consistent with the stories we have in the New Testament. After Christ's execution on the cross, though, ...

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isn’t it sweet that substack allows us to create meaning, or is it only “meaning”..

the magic of analogue

attitudes about death

entropy

these three posts by Bruce are all great and provoked a lot of thinking. the first one might seem unrelated, but is not completely so in my ...

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King of the Road, written and performed by Roger Miller, 1965

Trailer for sale or rent Rooms to let, 50 cents No phone, no pool, no pets. I ain't got no cigarettes Ah, but two hours of pushing broom Buys a eight by 12 four-bit room. I'm a man of means, by no means King of the road

Third boxcar, ...

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I dreamt that I was with my wife and some of our friends. I was playing a music video from the Sugarcubes album More More More! (which does not exist in the waking world), and we were singing along with what lyrics we knew. Instead of Einar Örn, Björk's co-vocalist was a woman, whom I did not ...

The attempt to live on Earth as though you were already in Heaven inevitably leads to disaster, and communities that try to do this always collapse. No exceptions. They may have good intentions but they are naive and lack wisdom.

The world of man is innately corrupt. It is a fallen world marked by sin, ignorance, ...

Why is entropy inevitable, unavoidable in this mortal incarnate life?

The answer is because, in this transitional phase between a purely-spirit pre-mortal life, and resurrected eternal incarnated life in Heaven; our bodies are made from the substance of other Beings.

Because ultimately there are only Beings. ...

The mainstream and official modern view about death is that it is the complete annihilation of the person, after which nothing of that person remains.

That is one prevalent error about death - it is the error of materialistic atheism.

The other prevalent error is spiritual.

It acknowledges that biological death ...

In "Public urination, and unlawful possession of a cured vehicle" (December 2025) I proposed that a "cured vehicle" might be something like this:

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Today I saw on Synlogos a review of some recent film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which (naturally) made me think of that Heathcliff comic where ...

i think we can discount what Jesus said at least in a few occasions, especially when he was clearly being provocative, trying to shake people out of complacency. this is the case in many instances. for example the often debated marriage answer. it’s obvious to me from the context and the inferred tone that ...

My post "A feast for the god of war" made me think of the fact that in childhood I was the president of two "societies": the War Society and the Wonderful Mountain Apes Society. The latter (which was a cliff-climbing group) got me wondering whether there might be any real mountain called Wonderful Mountain, and that ...

I dreamt that I was at some sort of breakfast buffet, possibly at a college dining hall. There were very few dishes to choose from.

I commented to a woman standing near me, "They've got all kinds of things here: eggs and egg sandwiches."

"Well, we were just talking about wanting to eat more raw food," she said. I ...

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Similar to, but not the same as, my radio circa 1972

There was a magic to analogue technology, that is objectively absent from the digital. As an obvious example (that many discovered from themselves after many years of denial): an analogue-recorded vinyl LP record captures that which is recorded ...