One insight from Berdyaev that I have found particularly clarifying when it comes to the problem of what it means to be oneself, to be true to oneself is the distinction between individualism and personality.

To simplify Berdyaev’s often overly complicated and circular line of thinking, I will reduce his ...

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Peter Jackson claims that this image is of Folco Boffin - Personally, I doubt it...

The unsolved mystery of Folco Boffin is described over at my Notion Club Papers blog.

Was his fate too sinister to be mentioned, or did Tolkien "nod"?

A brief update on the sneaky pair of swallows that built a nest in my workshop. Four ravenous chicks have emerged from the four eggs in the nest.

The adult pair fly in and out of the workshop the entire day to feed their young. I hear the chicks gently cheeping every time I step into the building to retrieve a tool. ...

The demolition of the old pig barn is in full swing. I wouldn't say destroying parts of the old building was all that easy, but it was -- as Bruce Charlton often notes -- much easier than creating the new building will be.

​Cleaning up the destruction is another challenging factor, and that's exactly where I ...

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This is one of the funniest TV advert sequences I've seen - seven shorts, each about thirty seconds; made in Egypt for Panda brand cheese.

What makes them, is the comic timing; and the panda himself.

Enjoy.

My recent post “Trump’s pierced ear” led me back to my 2020 post “Here come the twenties,” in which I proposed as a theme song for the present decade a song by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, from an album with an ear on the cover:

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I began that post with an epigraph from the Book of Daniel, ...

I have a good deal of sympathy for serious seekers who wish to explore spiritual traditions of the past because they see these as unaffected by the plagues of modernity to which all religions which have made it into the 21st century have succumbed. Christ is universal and his person and teaching encompass and ...

Selected from the current iteration of Laeth's "blog": Trees and Triads

the ease with which those of above average intelligence are manipulated into unfounded and dumbfounded optimism is a confirmation of my pessimism. and there isn't even pleasure, or pride, or fun in being right when the ruse is so obvious.

any ...

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i'm a young man whispering at a blue sky

not even the most rabid trans activist despises the human form as much as a traditional theologian

i'm in over my head over heels

presently, i'm a futurist nostalgic for the past.

i did not stake any ...

Last night, I randomly thought of an old Rocky and Bullwinkle episode about the Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam and decided to watch it on YouTube.

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I had auto-generated captions on, which, oddly, corrected the pun “Ruby Yacht” to Rubaiyat but couldn’t deal with the poet’s name. Here’s a ...

A pen friend told me that as he was talking with a family member about the Ear Incident, the Golden Earring song “Twilight Zone” was playing on the radio. He later looked the song up and discovered that it’s from an album with this cover art:

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That’s an actual photograph of a bullet ripping ...

I think there is too often a self-gratifying conflation at work when individuals are (implicitly) bragging about their "lifestyle hacks" that are (after all is said and done) ultimately rooted in the same value system as the mainstream leftist ideology; in other words, hedonic utilitarianism.

The conflation occurs ...

In his July 21 post "Twister, 'The Extreme', and Shine On," William Wright mentions a couple of Book of Mormon passages which he interprets as being about "Beings living on 'Mountains' with beautiful feet publishing Good Tidings." This language comes from Isaiah (52:7), and the priests of King Noah had used it against ...

The smug-to-the-point-of-self-blinded idiocy of the dissident "right" was on display in spades last week, with respect to the global computer shut-down.

We, especially in The West, live in the most interconnected and outsourced society the world has ever known By Far.

What happens to The System therefore happens ...

It has been statistically normal for so many generations that the mass of people have some kind of principled, ethical devotion to an abstraction - that the extreme strangeness of it gets unnoticed.

An early form was Marxism/ Communism, which asked people to devote their lives - even sacrifice their lives - to the ...

For reasons I’ll never understand, I have never bookmarked my blog on my computer. When I want to visit my site, I usually connect through a link featured on another Romantic Christian blog or use a search engine.

The other day, I accessed my blog through Duckduckgo, and I saw the following presumably ...

My somewhat unconventional evaluation of Mozart's Don Giovanni is that it does not really work as a whole; and its quality ranges from the superb to the distinctly sub par.

To focus on the best; I suggest listening to the "Madamina" or "Catalogue" aria sung by Leporello, servant to Don Giovanni; in which he numbers ...

Christianity, properly grasped (and I personally fail in this all-too-often) is pure choice.

There is no compulsion; because we can affiliate with God only voluntarily; as love must always be voluntary (else it is not love).

So there is no compulsion to join with God in His creation - only the natural consequences ...

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Even Spock was limited to Tri-Dimensional Chess...

Recent and forthcoming events in relation to the US "President" elections, have once again filled the mass media and blogosphere with complex, labile, incoherent "4-Dimensional Chess" explanations of what is really going-on...

We know that the ...

I don't give a crap about the upcoming fake election, but I remain somewhat interested in how the "standing prophecies" in the Tarot deck will hold up. The deck was right about the 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections but wrong about 2020 (and the 2022 midterm, if you want to count that). If the ...

When a reader left a comment here shortly after the Ear Affair saying, “Have you heard what just happened to Trump?” I searched for trump on Google News and couldn’t find anything special. Not one of the results on the first page was about the alleged shooting. I ended up finding about it several hours later via ...

Big news!

Let's all recommit to the demonic system by getting really optimistic about the prospects of it turning around and being good again like it was in the good old days that none of us seem to personally remember.

​The Age of Dishonesty.

That’s what I would name our current era if anyone asked me to name it. Dishonesty because the lies that saturate this time and place are as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.

We have reached the point where people will candidly defend lying by calmly outlining why dishonesty is ...

Tinbad the Tailor killed some fliesWhich in the telling grew in size.

When I wrote that couplet in “With?” I had nothing deeper in mind than the story of the Brave Little Tailor, who bragged about killing seven flies at one blow but was misunderstood by his hearers, who assumed he was claiming to have killed ...

My wife is on some kind of weird diet recently which requires her to eat lots of hard-boiled egg whites every day but no yolks, so she always leaves the yolks for me. Often as I'm about to leave the house, she'll say, "Wait! Eat all the egg yolks before you go so I can wash the dish." Today it occurred to me that this ...

There does not seem to be any reliable correlation between the degree of talent, flair, specialness exhibited when young; and ultimate achievement.

Of course there sometimes is. My namesake (but not related) Bobby Charlton was perhaps England's greatest footballer of all time; and his talent was evident from a very ...

It seems that, when he first arrived in Middle earth and was more youthful in appearance; Gandalf had no beard!

My reasoning is presented over at The Notion Club Papers blog.