This post addresses the much-touted and utterly misguided argument that ideas are ultimate and matter far more than people who express the ideas.

The argument comes in many shapes and flavors. Still, they all convey the same assumption—truth does not need people to be true. Ideas and truth exist independently ...

On the A page of Animalia, an Ace of Hearts is near a picture of a running man whom I interpreted as a reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Today I realized that the actor’s initials, AS, coincide with the French word from which our word ace derives. The Ace of Hearts, for example, is As de cœur. This made me ...

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everything is prayer, except work, which is penance

i have God as my witness, judge, jury and executioner. a devil's advocate.

die as if your life depended on it

granted, it was before my time, but politics used to be good bad theater. now ...

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My book By No Means Equal was published a few months ago and the advent of a new government in the UK brings its message to the fore because this government is motivated, theoretically, at least, by the principle of equality. To a degree, this principle drives all Western liberal democracies but ...

It's an interesting question as to whether it is worth having the mass of average stuff (not to mention bad stuff) in the arts - or whether we only really-need the really-good stuff?

Of course, it may be argued that the really-good stuff could not be produced without the average (and bad) stuff - because people need ...

My last post linked Emmett Brown, from the Back to the Future movies, with the brown emmets, or ants, on the A page of Animalia:

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As the syncs drew my attention to the word brown, I remembered that its curious etymology had come up on this blog before, in the October 2021 post "Bern, baby, bern!" ...

Most people seem to regard ultimate questions, metaphysics or "the cosmic perspective" as irrelevant frills (for people with too little to do, too much time on their hands) at best - but more likely as delusional nonsense, and something that ought to be avoided.

The subject certainly is avoided (except to warn ...

About five years ago, I documented the following observations on the subject of wisdom and old age:

That people inevitably grow wiser as they age is a cliché and a misconception. More often than not, my life experience has revealed the opposite to be the case. Most people I know from the older generations ...

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"Big Jack" Charlton and "wor kid" (i.e. my little brother) Bobby - 1966 Soccer World Cup winners feted in their home town of Ashington

This is a marvellous half-hour 1971 "fly on the wall" TV documentary about the 1966 England football world cup winner Jackie Charlton, visiting his childhood home ...

I'm not sure if it came from a forgotten dream or what, but I woke up this morning with a strange image in my mind: I was sitting at a card table, and opposite me was a yak, standing on the floor on all fours, with its head over the table. I had a small tumbler in front of me, and the yak had a shallow bowl, and we ...

For me, much of the mass media output is ruined and made intolerable because populated entirely by dislikeable characters.

Indeed "dislikeable" is putting it mildly! Most media dramatis personae (whether in TV, movies, songs, plays or novels) are people I regard as actively loathsome individuals!

I used to theorize ...

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Does anyone vaguely recall those remote, almost legendary, days of 2020-22? The birdemic and the peck campaign...

(And in the midst of it all, the lying, resentment, and spite of the "MLB" antiracism debacle of later summer 2020, and its permanent sequelae in law and regulations and social ...

Yesterday I started reading the Old Testament. This morning I picked up where I had left off, with Genesis 8. Thus it was that today, July 17, I read this verse:

And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat (Gen. 8:4).

About a week ago, I described how a pair of nesting swallows had clandestinely made themselves at home in my workshop. Well, the nest now contains four eggs.

So far so good. I just have to ensure my cat doesn't find a creative way to access the nest.

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I dreamed that I was in a cabin in a rural area, and a black bear cub wandered into the front room. I was a bit afraid of it but figured it could be mollified by feeding it. My wife said that was a bad idea, but I insisted. Looking around the cabin, I found a tray of tofu and congealed duck blood and fed it to the ...

Summer has been and continues to be home renovation time for me. That's what happens when you buy an old house in rural Hungary. Long-time readers of this blog will recall some of my previous renovation adventures like the henhouse, greenhouse, workshop, and block fence.

Well, this year I have tackled a tool shed, ...

When I was a late teenager and young adult; I envisaged being "a writer"; by which I meant some kind of creative writer - if not as a living, as a significant side-line to my job.

Aside from a few comedy sketches for performance in revues, and scientific articles for journals (which were collaborative) I did not ...

My job involves revising manuscripts (I know, I know), entailing that I spend much time at the computer reading documents and articles for which I have zero interest. Thoroughly reading texts one finds inherently uninteresting requires epic levels of concentration. Oddly enough, I have found that playing background ...

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it is what it is. not what it was.

for me, Jesus was the missing piece. and it was Joseph Smith who turned the puzzle around so i could finally see what it depicted.

how tragic to be a product of one's time, when the time is one of mass ...

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There's nothing like being wise after the event but no astrologer will be surprised by the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, given the planetary patterns of the time. Below is the chart of President Trump with the transits of the day added. The important thing to note is the Mars/Uranus conjunction in 26 Taurus ...

Continuing from my last post, "Visions as irruptions of dreaming consciousness into waking life":

In Joseph Smith's account of the visit of Moroni, I think we can see a distinction between the visitation of the angel, which was an actual experience, and a vision which occurred during that visitation. Here is how the ...

I have been very un-impressed by what I know of the "results" of group prayer, or meditation - especially when groups are arranged to pray "for" something or another.

Such things seem recurrently popular - among Christians, and also in the New Age and occult world. Those involved in group prayer/meditation/ ritual ...

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There is an apocryphal story hereabouts (recalled from memory) about Wittgenstein when he was working as a laboratory assistant in the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne during the second world war (lodging in the Jesmond house - illustrated above - that is currently, ...

There's a theory -- I'm not sure who deserves credit for it -- that dreaming goes on all the time, but that it is imperceptible when we are awake because it is drowned out by the much "brighter" and "louder" stimuli of waking consciousness -- much as the stars are always there but only become visible when there is no ...

There’s this line of thinking, mostly among secular alt-right, anti-woke, dissident type bloggers, that believes that going along to get along with the System publicly is acceptable as long such plain public submission is balanced out by private objection or anonymous/pseudonymous public dissent.

The ...

I dreamed that representatives of a secretive organization were going around to elementary schools and interviewing the “gifted and talented” kids, trying to identify individuals of possible interest to their group.

Part of the interview involved playing brief clips of various national anthems and noting in ...

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Although apparently designed in the 60s; at the time when I was in my teens during the 1970s the Trimphone still seemed the height of Space Age sophistication.

My best friend's family had one; and when I was visiting I got great satisfaction from its electronic trill (with volume control!), its ...

Following up on a post of mine from a few days ago; William James Tychonievich challenged the coherence of my statement that I believe in the reality of many supernatural/ paranormal/ occult phenomena - while disbelieving nearly all specific reports of such phenomena.

How - he asked - could I believe in the reality ...

Today I was once again trying to go to archive.org, but autocomplete sent me to archive.4plebs.org/x/random/ instead. The random post it served up was this:

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