Taking a break

I will be posting little or nothing for a week or two.

Sam Harris can be an idiot sometimes, but there are limits!

Vox Day posted this quote from Sam Harris the other day without providing a link.

Whether or not there is any truth to [peck] harm is irrelevant. There are numerous studies that prove the power of psychosomatic thinking. This is why we must censor anti[peck] information at all costs: because people who "believe" they've taken poison will suffer ill-effects as if they actually took poison.

Sam Hariss, 7 September 2022

This immediately set off my BS detector. Say what you will about Sam Harris, he is an educated, literate person, and there is approximately zero chance that he would hyphenate ill-effects or use quotation marks for emphasis. Also, people who support censoring information never say they want to censor information in those words; some euphemism would be used for censor, and the object of the censorship would be misinformation, disinformation, or at the very least controversial claims. Finally, the argument itself -- trivially easy to discredit by replacing peck with smoking -- is just a bit too retarded even for a Nu-Atheist.

And, surprise, surprise, Googling the supposed quote turns up pretty much nothing. I haven't been able to find Vox's source. A September 12 post on /sci/ has the same quote but credits it only to "Sam Harris, September 2022" without mentioning the exact date, so Vox must have gotten that detail from somewhere else.

This September 12 Reddit thread asks "Did Sam [Harris] actually tweet this?" and receives the reply that he did not, but the original post has been deleted, so I can't see the exact content of the alleged tweet. Checking Harris's Twitter, I find that he tweeted nothing at all between September 5 and September 12.

I did find this supposed Twitter screencap on iFunny. It has the September 7 date, but it can't be Vox's source because the quote itself is slightly different -- and slightly more believable, since it lacks two of the red flags I noted ("believe" and ill-effects).

This is sus on other grounds -- what self-respecting anti-Semite doesn't know and use the correct plural of goy? -- but is it still possible that Harris really tweeted this and later deleted it?

No. Because it's 310 characters. Twitter's limit is 280. Either someone went to the trouble of making a fake Twitter screenshot out of a real Sam Harris quote -- there's no telling what "goys" will do! -- or Vox has been had.

Snail on shingles

 Yesterday, September 11, I did some remote-viewing practice using the app RV Tournament. I was given the coordinates 6156-4124, and these were my notes.

I was then given two possible target images to choose from, and I chose the correct one with perfect confidence.

I consider this a pretty good hit. The snail in the target image isn't actually on a shingled roof, but it is on a dark surface, slanting in the direction I indicated in my sketch. (Surprisingly, this was a "practice round," with immediate feedback, which I'm usually bad at. I've done 102 practice rounds and guessed only 47 of them right -- 0.8 SDs worse than would be expected by chance. For "tournament rounds," with delayed feedback, I've done 34 and guessed 24 right -- 2.4 SDs better than expected by chance. That's a whopping 3.2-SD difference between the two types of round!)

The next day, I posted my dream, "The coypu assembles a new zodiac," in which a coypu (nutria) calls one animal after another to "come and join the general dance." Otto left a comment quoting the Mock Turtle's Song from Alice in Wonderland. Note some of the words that show up in the first stanza:

"Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail,
"There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail.
See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!
They are waiting on the shingle -- will you come and join the dance?
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance?

I know the Mock Turtle is referring to pebbles on the seashore, not to roofing shingles, but it still seems like quite a coincidence. "Turtles" -- again, with a different meaning -- have also been in the sync stream recently.

The coypu assembles a new zodiac

I dreamed that a coypu -- the semi-aquatic South American rodent pictured above -- was assembling a new zodiac, a new circle of 12 animals to which to assign portions of the sky. He did this by singing a song with one stanza for each of the animals that was being called to join the zodiac. I don't think the specific lyrics were clearly defined in the dream, but each stanza was four lines of tetrameter. The first three lines named and described the animal being called, and the fourth line was always "Now come and join the general dance!"

Although both very large and very small species were included, each of the new zodiac animals was roughly the same size, and much smaller than the coypu. They seemed to be miniature creatures, not fully material. They seemed slightly translucent and "fetal-looking," and they glowed slightly from within. The way they walked, with slow, exaggerated steps, made me think of them as "coltish."

The first animal called was, I believe, a black and yellow newt. When the coypu sang, "Now come and join the general dance," the newt came out and began prancing slowly in a circle around the coypu. When the second animal -- a giraffe, but no bigger than the newt -- was called, it held the newt's tail in its mouth and went along after it. One by one, more animals were called, each holding in its mouth the tail of the one before it. When the twelfth animal had joined the general dance, the newt took its tail, completing the circle.

That was the concept, anyway, although I don't think I actually saw the whole process in detail or heard every stanza of the song, and I don't think all the individual animals were clearly defined. Besides the newt and the giraffe, I remember seeing a water monitor, a goat, an eland, and an obscure mythological creature called a yale. That's only half the zodiac, but it's all I can remember. I also remember thinking it was good the coypu didn't call a chipmunk, because this sort of dance wouldn't be safe for it.

You be trippin

I don't know why this cracked me up so much, but it did.

The green man standing next to The Sleeping Bag With No Name represents the anon himself. No idea why he colored himself green, but aliens are stereotyped as "little green men."

Just before seeing the Sleeping Bag post, I had read A Shropshire Lad, A. E. Housman's 1896 book of poems. The fourth poem in the book, called "Reveille," begins, "Wake: the silver dusk returning" -- which I initially misread as "Wake: the silver disk returning," as if it were about a UFO. The poem's concluding stanza also caught my eye:

Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;

Breath's a ware that will not keep.

Up, lad: when the journey's over

There'll be time enough to sleep.

In my previous post, "Life Is Romantic, The Travail of Passion, and the Sorrowful Mysteries," I had mentioned the rite in Leviticus 14, where a bird is killed in a clay vessel ("clay lies still") and a live bird dipped in its blood and set free ("blood's a rover").

Life Is Romantic, The Travail of Passion, and the Sorrowful Mysteries

While on the road this afternoon, I fell to thinking about the term Romantic Christian -- designating the approach to Christianity advocated by Bruce Charlton, William Wildblood, Francis Berger, and myself -- and about how it is somewhat suboptimal because it is not a single word and because it cannot be abbreviated without confusion (since RC, in a religious context, normally means Roman Catholic). While my mind was thus occupied, I saw this printed on the back of the T-shirt of the motorcyclist in front of me:

I took this as synchronistic confirmation that Romantic is after all the best term to be using. The T-shirts equation of Romanticism with life also struck me as appropriate, since a big part of the Romantic Christian approach is a focus on Heaven as eternal life (rather than eternal rest, absorption into God, etc.) and on God as the living God, existing in time. An emphasis on life is also typical of the Gospel and First Epistle of John.

Later in the day, as is my habit on Fridays, I prayed the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, which are (translating): the Prayer in the Garden, the Scourging, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying of the Cross, and the Crucifixion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ. My meditations on the Rosary are highly visual in nature, the verbal part of my brain being preoccupied with the prayers themselves, and my mental image of the Prayer in the Garden is heavily influenced by the Yeats poem The Travail of Passion (which alludes to all five of the Sorrowful Mysteries).

When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;

When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;

Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way

Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,

The hyssop-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kidron stream:

We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,

That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,

Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.

Today my meditations were also colored by the T-shirt synchronicity: "Life is Romantic: Romantic Crown." Jesus' crown, plaited of thorny plants, was a crown of life, in contrast to the inorganic gold and jewels worn by worldly kings. "Why do ye adorn yourselves with that which hath no life?" (Morm. 8:39).

While imagining Jesus praying among "the flowers by Kidron stream . . . Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream," I suddenly realized the relationship of roses and lilies to one of the strange features of the T-shirt inscription: the use of an upside-down W in place of an M. My recent experience with a red dove had led me back to my 2018 post "The Rider-Waite Magician." In that post, I connect the red dove flying upward on the Magician card with the white dove flying downward on the Ace of Cups -- and I note that the Ace of Cups is marked with a W which is actually an upside-down M, confirming that it is an inversion of the Magician. I see now that the birds themselves have the form of a stylized W and M.

As detailed in the 2018 post, the red dove represents the Pillar of Severity and prayers ascending to heaven, and the white dove represents the Pillar of Mercy and blessings descending to earth. The red dove flying to heaven made me think of the Mosaic rite for cleansing lepers (Leviticus 14), which involves killing a bird in a clay vessel over running water (cf. the white dove over a vessel with running water on the Ace of Cups), dipping a living bird in its blood, and then releasing this bloody bird in an open field (cf. the Magician's red dove, surrounded by what Waite calls flos campi et lilium convallium, "flowers of the field and lilies of the valley").

Blood crying to heaven is a familiar biblical expression, and Jesus bled (or sweat as if her were bleeding) as he prayed in the garden. By "coincidence," just before seeing the "Life Is Romantic" T-shirt, I had read this in Éliphas Lévi's Histoire de la magie:

Paracelsus knew the mysteries of blood; he knew why the priests of Baal made incisions with knives in their flesh, and then brought down fire from heaven; . . . he knew how spilt blood cries for vengeance or mercy and fills the air with angels or demons.

He goes on to relate an anecdote from Jean-Baptiste Tavernier about certain Asian magicians who caused a small piece of wood to grow up into a flowering mango tree in the space of half an hour, by cutting themselves and rubbing the wood with their blood.

The Magician card alludes to Gethsemane via the red dove of prayer flying upward, surrounded by garden flowers. The Ace of Cups shows the content of Jesus' prayer in the garden -- "if thou be willing, remove this cup from me" -- and the white dove descending alludes to Heaven's response: "and there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him."

The Yeats poem begins with an open door: "When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide." This reminds me of a recent dream:

I was exploring an old abandoned building and found in it a very large wooden rosary. Each bead was the size of a golf ball and had a single word engraved on it. I believe the words were those of the Lord’s Prayer. I found that the cross on the rosary was also a key which fit the lock of one of the doors in the old building. I left the rosary hanging from the keyhole, but an old priest came and told me not to, saying a key has no purpose if you just leave it in the keyhole.

After the dream, I counted the words in the Latin Pater Noster and found that there are exactly 50, corresponding perfectly to the five decades of the Rosary.

And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write; These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth; I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name (Rev. 3:7-8).

Incidentally, Abraham von Franckenberg's illustration of Guillaume Postel's interpretation of the "key of David" would later influence Lévi significantly, particularly in his idea of writing the word ROTA/TARO around the rim of a wheel.

For 20 bucks, or for the evulz?

In the comments, my post about the world's most racist toothpaste has turned into a discussion of the martyrdom of St. George of Minneapolis. Debbie pointed out the bogus nature of the "crime" for which he was under arrest: buying some cigarettes and then refusing to return them when the shopkeeper belatedly decided he had paid with a counterfeit $20 bill.

Responding to a comment by ben, and to the general suggestion that the whole incident may have been scripted for some dark purpose, I wrote:

For maximum evulz, they had to get someone sympathetic enough to become a "hero" but obviously-bad enough that those lionizing him would be knowingly celebrating evil. GF, who had done some seriously bad things (such as threatening to kill a baby during a home invasion) but in this particular case was under arrest for some bogus petty non-crime, fit the bill.

This was a reference to the TV Tropes term "For the Evulz," -- referring to villains who have no motive beyond being evil for evil's sake -- and for some reason immediately after posting it, I randomly decided to run a Google image search on evulz. The second result was a "motivational poster" style meme featuring Heath Ledger as the Joker from The Dark Knight. (The archetypal knight, solidified in that role by Edmund Spenser, is St. George.) I clicked on it, and one of the "related images" caught my eye.

"Twenty bucks." "But you'll kill me." It's from a 2008 Batman comic book, so well pre-Floyd. My finding it immediately after posting about GF and the $20 bill was the result of a completely random whim.