my recent renewed infatuation with music led to calling the series diminished discords (also i liked the name of the last one, Wee Wisdom, the repetition of the W, so i wanted something with the same format; the other option was bizarre babbling, dodged a bullet there, uh). and now i think the name is causing me to ...

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The crew of a Handley Page Halifax heavy bomber - some Sergeant's stripes evident

The extremely high casualties in RAF Bomber Command, throughout the Second World War - with roughly half of crews killed, more than 50,000 men* - was mostly among Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs)

All RAF aircrew ...

People are apparently unable to grasp the very simple fact that the "subfertility*" of all the populations of all the developed nations is a strategic choice of biological extinction.

The peoples of the modern world are willing their own annihilation.

Of course, the averaged population choice in favour of death is ...

The tempest sync theme reminded me of a hymn that confused me as a child:

Master, the tempest is raging!The billows are tossing high!The sky is o'ershadow'd with blackness,No shelter or help is nigh;Carest thou not that we perish?How canst thou lie asleep,When each moment so madly is threat'ning,A grave in the angry ...

I just read J. M. Smith's recent series at the Orthosphere on apocalyptic literature: "Servants of the Saints of the Most High," "Apocalypse is Neither Cryptic History Nor Cryptic News," and "Myth is Cathartic and Not Cryptic."

The second post in the series discusses the meaning of the biblical phrase "son of man," ...

I was listening to a recording of the Book of Isaiah while doing some routine paperwork for my school. At the very moment that I wrote Ariel -- the English name of one of my students -- Isaiah said:

Woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the city where David dwelt! (Isa. 29:1)

That's all so far, but these minor syncs are often a ...

With the Cherubim re-entering the sync stream, I was reflecting on the strange way certain themes or symbols are connected. The Cherubim have been identified with the Gryphon, which has been identified with the griffon vulture Odessa Grigorievna, who is linked to the Garuda, which is linked to the monstrous avian ...

The fourth couplet of "With?" is:

Ninbad the Nailer -- there he stoodAnd did the only thing he could.

I wrote this with Martin Luther in mind -- the "nailer" who nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, and who famously said, "Here I stand. I can do no other."

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In "Up ...

Escapism is a good, and perhaps spiritually-necessary, basis for Life.

The desire to escape, the evaluation that escape from this actual-Life is needed, is an aspect of any person of depth and wisdom...

Which implies that not to be an escapist is to be a shallow, dishonest fool (and there are plenty of these!). ...

In "Glorians and such," I quoted as an example of a Glorian "witnessing an ant transporting a magenta blossom across the desert floor." In the next post, "Animals dipped in food," one of the titular animals was a blackbird "in the bush with pink blossoms." One of the definitions of pink is "magenta, the color evoked ...

In "Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest," I report suddenly wanting an omelette and then finding a reference to that food in The King in Yellow. Wondering whether omelettes might have been mentioned earlier in that book, planting the idea in my head, I did a word search. There is one earlier instance:

"That's a ...

My last post, "Minor syncs: Omelette and Mormon tempest," dealt with two seemingly unrelated syncs: one about omelettes, and one about the word tempests in the Book of Mormon and a Mormon writer named Tempest. But perhaps they are related after all, via Walt Whitman. Though the review, linked on A&L Daily, which ...

There have always been wars so the end times prediction of wars and rumours of wars should not seem especially relevant now, and yet it does. Perhaps because wars usually have some kind of sense to them, territorial, tribal, monetary and the like. But recent wars seem to be without any sense at all and simply war for ...

This morning, while far from home, I suddenly wanted an omelette -- that specific dish, which is not at all common here in Taiwan. I tried to think of any restaurants in the area that might have such fare on their menu, but in the end I gave up and got something else instead. While waiting for my food, I decided to ...

Tolkien depicted the nature of evil with a depth and power only possible to a good Man. But what is the extremity of evil as depicted in The Lord of the Rings?

Which sentences would you nominate?

My candidate is quoted over at The Notion Club Papers blog.

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From The Two Towers "Shelob's Lair" (slightly edited):

‘We’ll see, we’ll see,’ Gollum said often to himself, when the evil

mood was on him, as he walked the dangerous road from

Emyn Muil to Morgul Vale, ‘we’ll see.

'It may well be, O yes,

it may well be that when Shelob throws ...

As I was reading The Words of Them Which Have Slumbered this morning, I unexpectedly came across a footnote referencing -- incongruously in this book set in a distant Tolkienian past -- a rock song that had been in Daymon's head when he wrote a certain part of it:

The song? "When You're Gone," by The Cranberries, a ...

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To my eye, drawing lines between the five brightest stars; Auriga (the charioteer) is a great pentangle in the night sky; and one that includes Capella (meaning "chapel") - which one of the brightest stars, and one that is usually high overhead.

Because I have "a thing" about ...

I have begun to think so.

It is impossible to be sure, because the whole world of communication is full of lies and fakes; as well as sheer ignorance and honest error.

But the attempts to maintain some kind of civilization outside of the West - which is long-since committed to suicide - are apparently unravelling ...

because the worst person to tell you about a book is the author (and in this case it’s even worse because the author is me), here’s what other people have said about Sketches of Alice.

(do not read too much into the fact that they are all writers, please).

anyway, it might pique your interest, or ...

This is the standard reading of Nephi's list of what is included in the Plates of Brass (1 Ne. 5:11-13):

And he beheld that they did contain:

(1) the five books of Moses [Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy], which gave an account [in Genesis] of the creation of the world, and also of Adam and Eve, who ...

As a complement to William Wildblood's reflections on the potential value for Christians in what might be termed pagan-ism; Laeth makes an interesting point about the possibility of a future pagan religion in The West (edited):

Jupiter stopped answering the Romans, and Jesus stopped answering the Christians. This ...

In a geopolitical world where treachery and gratuitous murder are openly and officially celebrated; it's become pretty easy to appear "good" - merely by defending The System, and its continued functionality.

When contrasted with a mainstream moral system increasingly based-upon paranoid resentment and Schadenfreude - ...

A few passages in the Book of Mormon appear to contain errors immediately followed by corrections. This is probably the most obvious instance:

. . . and thus we see that they buried their weapons of peace, or they buried the weapons of war, for peace (Alma 24:19).

Since "weapons of peace" doesn't make any sense, the ...

In my reading of Rudolf Steiner I came across a fourfold division of Beings into what he called "bodies" but which might better be understood as "levels".

Ego - Astral - Etheric - Physical*

The first and last are easy to grasp - Ego is me-my real-self which is eternal; and Physical is the mortal material body. ...

Today I read in Words of Them Which Have Slumbered an alternate account of Fëanor's creation of the Silmarils. In this telling, the three gems begin as "light-seedlings" taken from the Trees of Valinor, but later "to seeds again returned they, who once as light were never so housed," and thus the Silmarils are not ...

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no man is an island, but a couple can build a boat.

(how you read the above says a lot about you, doesn’t it)

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the only real war now is about preventing what is yet to be created.

some people say this has always been the case, but i don’t think that’s true. there were forward thinking eras, ...

William Wildblood's latest post analyses and expresses well something I have felt for as long as I have been a Christian.

Edited excerpt:

Paganism died out for a reason. It was superseded by the advent of Christ who really did make all things new.

And yet some things were lost in the process, in particular a real ...