I think I found a book formerly owned by Donald Trump!

Found these during some random flipping-through at a used bookstore. These are the best marginal annotations, probably, ever. Everyone says so.

The only thing that makes me skeptical is that they're all in lowercase.

Gilgamesh was an elven king

I woke up with a few lines of verse in my head, all I could remember from a dream:

Gilgamesh was an elven king.

Of him the harpers sadly sing.

The sun and moon of heart's desire --

Oh, Troy town's down, tall Troy's on fire!

After jotting that down, while I was trying to remember more of the dream, a few more lines, in a different meter, came to me. I'm not at all confident that these were from the dream -- in fact I'm rather sure they were not -- but they came to mind as I was trying to call back the dream, suggesting that there is some connection:

O Smith, declared th' earth-shaking god:

Should Mars the debt refuse,

Thou hast my word that I will pay

To thee thy lawful dues.

None of this material is original. The quatrain from the dream takes, with minimal modification, two lines from a poem in The Lord of the Rings and two from "Troy Town" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The main change is the replacement of Tolkien's Gil-galad with the much less "elven" name Gilgamesh.

The second quatrain is taken nearly verbatim from Sir Charles Du Cane's 1880 translation of the Odyssey. The lines are from Book VIII, and the context is that Poseidon is trying to convince Hephaestus to release Ares from the golden chains with which he bound him after catching him in bed with Aphrodite. (In Du Cane's original text, the god is addressed as Vulcan, not Smith, but the lines are immediately followed by "Him answered then the smith renowned . . . .") The larger context of the Odyssey is, of course, that Troy town's down.

Torn from that context, though, Du Cane's lines suggest another reading: If Smith is not avenged by war, he will be avenged by natural disaster.

⁂

Shortly after writing down the two quatrains, I checked William Wright's blog and read his latest post, "Coriantumr and Donald Trump, the light-minded highness," in which he proposes that Trump is the reincarnation of the Book of Mormon figure Coriantumr. Unlike some of the other reincarnations William has proposed, this one immediately clicked with me at an intuitive level and made more sense the more I thought about it. I'm calling it a bull's-eye.

Then my mind jumped from Coriantumr back to Gilgamesh. Here's how Coriantumr's name is first introduced in the Book of Mormon:

And it came to pass in the days of Mosiah, there was a large stone brought unto him with engravings on it; and he did interpret the engravings by the gift and power of God. And they gave an account of one Coriantumr, and the slain of his people. And Coriantumr was discovered by the people of Zarahemla; and he dwelt with them for the space of nine moons (Omni 1:20-21).

Since Coriantumr was the only survivor of the carnage recounted on the stone, he must have engraved it himself. This reminds me of the famous ending of Gilgamesh, after the hero goes on an epic quest for immortality and utterly fails:

He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labor, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story.

Coriantumr was the last of the Jaredites, who spoke a lost language no one else could understand. That's why his engravings on the stone had to be translated "by the gift and power of God" rather than by ordinary means. Similarly, in the They Might Be Giants song "The Mesopotamians," Gilgamesh and friends say:

And they wouldn't understand a word we say

So we'll scratch it all down into the clay

Half believing there will sometime come a day

Someone gives a damn

Maybe when the concrete has crumbled to sand

The "secret combination" theme from the Coriantumr story also appears in that song:

In Mesopotamia

(But no one's ever seen us)

The kingdom where we secretly reign

(And no one's ever heard of our band)

The land where we invisibly rule

⁂

My dream, and William Wright's post, were both on February 22, and it's still February 22 now in the US. While I was in the act of writing this post, which quotes a little-read translation of the Odyssey, Zenith of the Alpha posted a new video saying:

The strongest Synchronicities I've ever experienced connected with THE ODYSSEY and the date 2/2/22. Now, 2 years later I see ODYSSEUS is news on 2/22.

Another horse-racing omen

In my August 2, 2022, post "Mr. Q 2310 and the Heavenly Trump omen," I mentioned a race in which a horse called Heavenly Trump, went from last place (out of five horses) to winning the race in just 18 seconds.

😳😳😳😳 pic.twitter.com/1QCjLu9EnC

— George Allan Bryant (@Bryant_HRD) June 24, 2022

Today I saw news that in a recent 12-horse race, a horse named Ridin With Biden finished dead last.

This happens just as ben has started bringing up the number 2310 (and 1320) again in the comments.

Not that "omens" mean anything at this point -- it's more than two years too late for that -- but I found it amusing.

Once in a red moon?

Election Day in the US coincides this year with a total lunar eclipse, being hyped in the press as a "Blood Moon."

Donald Trump's birth on June 14, 1946, also coincided with a total lunar eclipse.

There were only 19 total lunar eclipses in the years between those two dates, so it's not something that happens all that often.

The moon being "turned into blood" is an apocalyptic sign in the Bible (Joel 2:31, Acts 2:20, Rev. 6:12).

I didn't see the eclipse, but on the night of November 8, approximately ten minutes before midnight here in Taiwan, I happened to step outside and look at the sky at just the right moment to see a brilliant green fireball streak across the sky and burn out. Like the meteor I saw this March, it traced a corkscrew path, but its overall direction was downward. My immediate thought -- probably influenced by the 369 tissues I recently saw, which featured the Chinese characters 綠電, literally "green lightning" -- was "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven" (Luke 10:18). It felt like a portent, but of what?

Since we're doing knocking syncs . . .

This was discovered on 8kun; I got it from Anonymous Conservative.

In the photo the FBI released of "classified documents" seized in the Trump raid, a framed Time magazine cover is visible on the right.

The cover is from the March 4, 2019, issue of Time. It says "Knock, Knock . . ." and shows Biden, Harris, and various other Democrats peeping in the window of the Oval Office.

The blurb is about how "there's no front runner in sight" for the 2020 Democratic primary. Quite a lucky guess, putting Slow Joe front and center, with Harris right next to him.

On that same date, March 4, 2019, there was a Q drop suggesting that it might be beneficial to allow your enemy to open the front door.

I have no particular opinion about Q or about what's behind the raid, but I thought the tie-in with my own sync stream was noteworthy. One hopes this is not a sign that the sync fairies are about to get political again.

After seeing the above dots connected, I searched qanon.pub for "knock" just to see what would turn up. One of the four hits included this: "What they do not anticipate is POTUS declas[sifying] it all due to optics . . . to paint [it as a] political attack" -- oddly relevant to the recent FBI raid, where Trump's defense is that there were standing orders to declassify anything he removed from the White House.

"This is literally evil knocking" is a nice link to the Time cover, too.

Again, no real opinion on this, in the absence of any reliable source of information. I just note connections.

Try, try, try

In yesterday's post, "Many sparrows, again, and various other sync links," I noted how Debbie's comment about the etymology and meanings of knock made me think of the expression "Don't knock it till you've tried it," and how a version of "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" I had recently listened to had included instrumentals taken from the P!nk song "Try," featuring the refrain, "You've gotta get up and try, try, try."

That post also dealt in passing with Jesus' childhood (the legend of his bringing clay sparrows to life). I've also been working on a post (not very long, but constantly delayed by sync interruptions) about forgiveness and how Heaven will be populated by former sinners. These two thoughts made me ask the question of whether Jesus had always been "perfect," even as a child, and whether my reluctance even to ask such a question was a sign that on some level I was uncomfortable with the idea that anyone could ever become divine who had not always been so.

This, in turn, made me think of a Mormon children's song I had learned about Jesus as a child, which contained the lines, "He never got vexed if the game went wrong / and he always spoke the truth." The fanciful idea of those lines being chosen as someone's epitaph (perhaps that of J. W. Dunne, whose otherworldly visitants described life as a "game") crossed my mind, which served to keep the song in my mind long enough to remember that the chorus is:

So, little children
Let’s you and I
Try to be like him
Try, try, try

That triple-try is a clear sync with the P!nk song. Then I remembered that on July 31 I had had a sync involving a T-shirt that said "TRY YOUR BEST," with different parts of that text being successively covered and revealed to form different messages. At the end of the post about that, "U R best," I had quoted the First Epistle of Peter: "Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you" (4:12). This message, that a "fiery trial" is only to be expected, and perhaps inevitable, syncs with the P!nk song as well: "Where there is desire, there is gonna be a flame / Where there is a flame, someone's bound to get burned" -- in other words, don't think it strange if you "get burned," as though some strange thing happened to you. Keep it in perspective: "Just because it burns doesn't mean you're gonna die."

⁂

Another song that came to mind in this context was "Can't Run But" by Paul Simon. It doesn't actually use the word try, but the idea of trying one's best despite limitations is implied in the refrain:

I can't run but
I can walk much faster than this
Can't run but
I can't run but
I can walk much faster than this
Can't run but

Then I noticed the relevance of this verse:

I had a dream about us
In the bottles and the bones of the night
I felt a pain in my shoulder blade
Like a pencil point? A love bite?
A couple was rubbing against us
Rubbing and doing that new dance
The man was wearing a jacket and jeans
The woman was laughing in advance

This syncs with "My dream on the eve of September 11, 2001" -- a long-forgotten dream that was suddenly brought back to my attention last night by inexplicable means.

There was a sharp report, and I felt the bullet bite into my back, just to the left of my spine. . . . The bullet entered my heart, and a dark, warm, paralyzing feeling swept over me. I felt myself lose consciousness, lose identity, and everything was black and silent and timeless. The last thing I heard before I disappeared was my friends' laughter.

The bullet entered my heart through my back, just to the left of my spine -- pretty anatomically close to "a pain in my shoulder blade" -- and of course "pencil point" means lead, which means a bullet. And after the bullet, laughter.

⁂

Today I checked the Babylon Bee after several days of not doing so, and one of the stories was "Kim Kardashian Breaks Up With Pete Davidson After She Finally Gets Around To Watching SNL." The photo showed Davidson wearing a jacket and T-shirt; it didn't show his legwear, but the casual nature of his get-up makes jeans a strong possibility. This passage from the article syncs with "The woman was laughing in advance."

"Of course, everyone assumes I dated him because he's so funny," said a rueful Ms. Kardashian. "What it takes everyone a while to realize is that Pete has just perfected the smile and half-giggle of someone who just cracked a hysterical inside joke. You end up laughing because you want to be in on the joke, or think you must have missed something, and your brain somehow starts to believe Pete is actually hilarious. But if you just listen to the words coming out of his mouth, nothing remotely funny ever happens."

⁂

Going back the idea of pencil-as-bullet, it made me think of the They Might Be Giants song "Pencil Rain," in which that is used as an extended metaphor. The song begins: "The possible dream / Finale of seem" -- two lines alluding respectively to Man of La Mancha and a Wallace Stevens poem.

Relevant to my recent FBI dream, the news is all about the totally normal FBI raid on Donald Trump's private residence, the purpose of which was to "find" that he had misappropriated classified documents, making it illegal for him to run for president again and putting an end to "the possible dream" that the God-Emperor will rise again. How did that Wallace Stevens poem go?

Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. How is a line from a 1954 poem so precisely apropos to the current political situation in the U.S.?

Related to the classified-document allegations is the bizarre claim that Trump flushed so many torn-up documents down the toilet that the toilet clogged, allowing  NYT White House correspondent Maggie Haberman to photograph them. Trump's response to this?

He declared the story 'categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book.'

He also referred to Haberman as 'Maggot' as a play on her name Maggie.

The Poetry Foundation website says that "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream" is an allusion to Hamlet.

Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.

Mr. Q 2310, and the Heavenly Trump omen

Today I was on the road at a time when I would not normally have been; I had just come home and then had to go back out because I had forgotten something. While I was out, my eyes were drawn to a license plate that said MRQ 2310.

It was "Mr. Q" that first got my attention. There's been a lot of talk about "Mr. Owl" on this blog recently, particularly as a reference to Michael the Archangel. On July 29 (also, coincidentally, the day known as "Ghost Door Opens" on the Chinese calendar), I received an email from a woman using a pseudonym that begins with the letter Q, in which she said, "There is no real 'Mr. Q[...]' at this time, so with some of the things I've been reading about guardian angels, I'm beginning to wonder if Michael himself might be my guardian, or at least have an eye out for me."

So apparently Mr. Q is yet another name for Michael. In "More Mr. Owl," I noted that the Mr. Owl title does not identify Michael with the owl but with the owl's male counterpart, the hawk. In "If 6 turned out to be 9," I connected the owl with 6 and the hawk with 9. Note that a lowercase 'q' looks like 9, and that the Japanese word for "nine" is kyu -- a pun used, for example, in the title of Haruki Murakami's book 1Q84.

So what about the rest of the license plate? Well, it's my initials, for starters: 23 = W, and 10 = J. I thought there must be more to it than that, though (these things are always overdetermined), so I thought, "Well, what are its factors? It looks like it's divisible by 77, which is the S:E:G: value of Christ . . ." and, still on my motorcycle, I started doing the math in my head. Sure enough, 2310 is 77 times 30. At that moment, I passed a 7-Eleven convenience store, and I thought, "And 77 is 7 times 11, and -- holy shit!"

Why have I associated the owl with the number 6? Because of a restaurant called Six Owl Door, and accompanying syncs featuring six owls, an owl and six doors, etc. On July 28, Ben left a comment in which he linked to a photo of three doors marked with numbers.

The doors are numbered 11, 7, and 15 -- the product of which is 1155. If 1155 means three doors, then six doors would be twice 1155, which is, yes, 2310.

⁂

In other news, here's what's going on in the world of horse racing:

LSP in Grand Prairie, Texas, hosted a horse race for three-year-olds and up, and for most of the maiden race a four-year-old gelding named Moro Flyboy had a clear lead ahead of the rest of the competition, including a horse named “Heavenly Trump.”

As Flyboy, led by apprentice jockey Simon Camacho-Benitez, approached the final stretch of the race, the horse began to veer toward the track’s inside rail.

After flying too close to the sun, Moro Flyboy made contact with the rail and bucked Camacho-Benitez yards from the finish line, which gave way for Heavenly Trump to step up and steal the race (not like that).

The indisputable, Balaam-inspired act of God propelled Heavenly Trump to victory. Camacho-Benitez and Flyboy were reportedly unscathed after the incident.

From the accompanying video, it appears that Heavenly Trump is a white or light-gray horse, ridden by a jockey with a yellow cap.

"Heavenly Trump" is presumably a reference to the biblical "last trump" which calls the dead to rise from their graves, as illustrated on the 20th trump of the Tarot. The article, though, is obviously playing on the similarity of the name to that of Trump, the politician. Well, I made that connection long ago.

I also connected Trump with "The other Trump trump," the Sun. This card, which is associated with Gemini and Flag Day (Trump's sign and birthday), shows a yellow-haired child riding a white or light-gray horse next to a wall. Notice that when Moro Flyboy hits the "wall," bucking the jockey, the article refers to it as "flying too close to the sun."

Moro Flyboy -- Heavenly Trump's rival -- is connected in the article with the biblical story of Balaam, whose mount "thrust herself unto the wall, and crushed Balaam's foot against the wall." Balaam wasn't riding a horse, though, but a donkey -- symbol of the Democratic Party. I suppose this all syncs with Biden's foot fractures shortly after the election, and his recent fall from his bicycle.

The Return of the Great Witch-king

Today the Fake President mockingly dubbed his predecessor "the great MAGA king."

Trump immediately embraced the title and shared a meme taking it in a disturbingly Tolkienian direction.

Why "disturbingly"? Because maga is Latin for "witch." The Return of the King features a "maga-king" character, and he ain't one of the good guys!

Maybe lay off a little on the #DarkMAGA meme magic, guys.

Oh, and here's a little screencap for one of my readers. You know who you are.

Note added: It's an appropriate date for a 555 sync.

Some sort of incoherent synchronicity going on

On April 22, I received an email about the fact that the conservative blogger and birdemic enthusiast Rod Dreher had  just gotten a tattoo -- of a cross, on his forearm.

Two days later, on April 24, someone I know, a non-religious person who has no tattoos, told me that she had decided to get a tattoo -- of a cross on her forearm. She has never heard of Dreher and was certainly not influenced by him. Weird coincidence.

Today, April 26, I was thinking about the idea of a cross tattoo as a fashion statement with no religious meaning, and it made me think of this:

That's a juxtaposition of two clippings from the October 2, 2001, issue of the Columbus Dispatch; an example of the "subliminal comics" art form I was into at the time (as discussed here). I remembered that I had posted about that particular subliminal comic before, so I tried to find it by searching my own blog for the word knick-knack -- but all that came up was my 2019 post "Missile man."

When I was a very young child, I labored under the misapprehension that "this old man" -- you know, the fellow who had a knick-knack paddywhack with which he played knick-knack on, among other things, my thumb -- was actually called "missile man." 

That in turn led me to reread my old post about Methuselah and the Genesis 4-5 genealogies.

After that, I heard the news that Elon Musk had bought Twitter, which made me wonder if Trump was back on the platform yet, so I went to Twitter and searched for the name Trump. I don't know why the very first result that came up was a tweet from nine days before, but it was.

Trump didn’t win the election.
Dr. Fauci didn’t create Covid.
Biden isn’t to blame for the price of gas, the supply chain or inflation.
There’s no caravan coming for your wives.
No one is teaching your kids CRT or grooming them to be gay or transgender.

These are lies.

The end.

— Jo 🌻 (@JoJoFromJerz) April 16, 2022

I found this mildly amusing because of the unintentional ambiguity. "These are lies" could be read as meaning that the above statements (i.e., the statement that Trump didn't win the election, that Biden isn't to blame for inflation, etc.) are lies. I clicked to see the replies, wondering if anyone else had noticed the same thing -- and for some unaccountable reason, one of the replies was this:

Nick, knack paddy wacked...... pic.twitter.com/a3392oUT8K

— Kye Frankie (@FrankieKye) April 16, 2022

I don't know what I was expecting to see, but I certainly wasn't expecting a knick-knack paddywhack!

28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds

In my January 4, 2021 post “Dark ambiguity,” I noted mainstream propaganda’s efforts to associate Trump with the word dark. Today AC linked to a long Newsweek article about #DarkMAGA memes, commenting that the attempt to make #DarkMAGA happen was obviously a continuation of this same campaign.

I’ve written about the dark/d’Arc link many times, so I was intrigued to see the word arc in the Newsweek piece; it quoted an Expert with the obviously fake name Tim Squirrell saying that the #DarkMAGA concept was a “sort of anime arc.” This especially jumped out at me because someone had recently emailed me a picture of a 2006 Japanese video game with what might be described as a “sort of anime Arc” on the cover.

This made me wonder if anyone had ever tried to make “Dark” an official Trump nickname by calling him Donald John “Dark” Trump (which would of course contain a hidden Jeanne d’Arc). I did a Google search for “donald john dark” — not bothering to add the surname — and it brought up a Reddit thread in which someone had written “In the film ‘Donnie Darko’ the boy’s name is Donald John DARK-O” — but the thread was about Trump and how his presidency had been foreshadowed by “predictive programming” in movies and such. The OP was a link to this YouTube video from October 2020.

The video tries to link Donnie Darko to Trump, showing the scene where a big anthropomorphic rabbit says the world will end in “28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds.” The sum of those four numbers is 88, it informs us, which is the English gematria value of the name Trump! Really scraping the bottom of the coincidence barrel if you ask me. Then it shows photos of Trump at an Easter event next to someone in an Easter Bunny suit. When I saw that, my reaction was that it was meaningless because I had recently seen a very similar photo with Biden, meaning that probably every president poses with the Easter Bunny for Easter.

Now the spooky part. Right after watching that video, I searched Twitter for #DarkMAGA just to see what would come up. One of the first results was a link to an upcoming livestream that was going to discuss a long list of current-events topics, including “media warns of #DarkMAGA.” The stream wasn’t live yet, but for some reason I clicked the link anyway. That channel’s most recent YouTube video, posted just minutes before I watched it, was this:

Is that weird or what?

Possibly relevant: I recently posted about the appropriateness of the recent Chinese years of the Rat, Ox, and Tiger — and Bruce Charlton left a comment asking what my prediction was for next year — the Year of the Rabbit.

Dark Maga, Dark Magus

Possible sync development here.

Sunday, March 27: I post "The New Orleans Saint"; the sync fairies are yet again drawing my attention to Joan of Arc.

Monday, March 28: I become aware of the #DarkMAGA meme.

Tuesday, March 29: John Dee pings my radar and I start reading a biography of him. Hours later, I get sync feedback.

Dark = d'Arc. I've posted on this before.

Maga (feminine of magus) means "witch" -- which is what Joan's enemies accused her of being.

According to Wikipedia, John Dee's surname comes from the Welsh word for "black." In other words, his name was John Dark. Dee is commonly referred to as a "magus."

No idea where this is going, but I'm keeping my eyes open.

Three red lines

I was on the highway today, en route to Kaohsiung (a city I hardly ever have occasion to visit), and passed a van for a pet care company. What caught my eye, since I’d just been posting about winged animals going to heaven, was the cartoon pictures with which it was decorated: a French bulldog and a cat, each equipped with a pair of wings and a halo. That means they’re dead! I thought. Not the most reassuring message to would-be customers!

This recognition of “angel” as graphic shorthand for “dead” made me think yet again about my apparently failed prediction that Trump would win in 2020, based on the 20th Tarot trump, which clearly identifies Trump (name, birthday, hair color) — but as an angel. I thought of how I had later asked “Who is Joe Biden?” and drawn in answer this same 20th trump, which really confused me. (Looking that post up now to get the link, I see it was published exactly one year ago today!) In that post, I had referred to Biden and Trump as  Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, respectively, and I thought about that for a moment.

It was in the middle of this train of thought that I saw this billboard and snapped a quick photo.

“Sun Trump” — a sort of transliteration of the company’s Chinese name, 三川 (pronounced San Chuan; in Taiwan, Trump’s name is usually rendered 川普, Chuanpu).

What first caught my attention wasn’t the name Trump, though, but the first Chinese character: three horizontal red lines, something I have posted quite a bit about (starting here). These three lines were used on several Jay-Z record covers from 2009, and in Biden’s 2020 campaign logos. Then the “Trump” character is just this same Biden symbol rotated 90 degrees, meaning that the differences between those two presidents are immaterial. Behind Donald Duck’s supposed rivalry with Mickey lies the fact that he, too, is the property of Disney, aka Devil Mouse. Oh, and 2020 was the Year of the Mouse.

“Sun Trump” also refers to the Sun trump of the Tarot, numbered 19. This is the number of the birdemic — the area in which Biden is most obviously Trump 2.0 — and I have posted before about how the Sun trump relates both to the birdemic and to Trump.

Joe and Crow

Did you know that joe is a word in Dutch?

Back in 2020, Joe and Bye were closely associated.

At the time, this bumper sticker meant that "Don" was not the stickee's president and needed to be ousted by "Byedon." Now, the most natural reading is, "Biden: Not my president," respelled so as to suggest Bye! (Joe!), and the -don ending is as likely to make one think of Brandon as of Trump, who has never really gone by Don anyway.

In other onomastic news, Trump has a new, not-very-catchy nickname for Mitch McConnell (etymologically a "Big Bad Wolf" name, incidentally).

As Margaret Hatmann says in the Intelligencer article, this is a big step down from Crooked Hillary, Lyin' Ted, and Sleepy Joe, and it flies in the face of the universally accepted fact that McConnell resembles a turtle, not a crow. Why the need for a corvid nickname, even one that doesn't really fit? It fits with my own nickname for Biden, Slow Joe Crow. Merrick Garland is part of the same pattern: the ancient Greek word for "wreath, garland" is κορώνη (the source of the Latin corona). The ancient Greek word for "crow"? Also κορώνη.

"Old crow" in Chinese is 老鴉 (lǎoyā) -- which is pronounced exactly the same as 老鴨 (lǎoyā), literally "old duck," but also the Chinese name for Donald Duck -- 唐老鴨 (Táng Lǎoyā), literally "Don Old Duck," the 唐 (Táng) character being the same one used to transliterate the first syllable of the name Donald. Thus is the Donald himself connected with the idea of an "old crow."

St. Christopher, Deseret, and -- bear with me, it's all connected

I was visiting in-laws yesterday and happened to notice a children's toy they had in their house: a stuffed bear that looked exactly like Winnie-the-Pooh -- the Disney version, yellow with a red T-shirt -- but written on the T-shirt were the English words Mischievous Dog. This kind of "mutant knockoff" product is common enough in Taiwan, but this one caught my attention and seemed significant somehow. I thought I should take a photo but in the end decided not to, so sorry, no illustration. 

I tried to think what possible significance Winnie-the-Mischievous-Dog could have, but all that came to mind was that in my October 25 post "Bear with Biden" I had mentioned Winnie-the-Pooh in connection with Xi Jinping, Bernie Sanders (Bernie means "bear," and Pooh lived "under the name of Sanders"), and Robin Hood ("he belongs to Christopher Robin, and his name is simply Hood written upside down").

⁂

In my November 4 post "Doves of Tarshish," I note that both Jonah and Columbus mean "dove," and that both Jonah and Columbus are associated with the Tartessos, Spain. In the post, I wrote out the full name Christopher Columbus because his Christian name seemed important, too, but I couldn't put my finger on why. I thought of the legend of St. Christopher, who was supposed to be a giant with the head of a dog, but it didn't seem to have any relevance to Columbus or to Jonah.

⁂

Last night I checked my YouTube subscriptions, which I hadn't done in a few weeks, and found a new (November 3) video from Jonathan Pageau called "Finding the Giant Dog-Headed St. Christopher in the Bible." I immediately recognized this as possibly relevant both to the "Doves of Tarshish" sync and to the "Mischievous Dog" toy. I had previously highlighted the second half of the name Christopher Robin in connection with Pooh, and this was a possible link to the first. And could the biblical connection possibly have anything to do with Jonah? I watched the whole video.

Pageau begins with a brief summary of the St. Christopher legend -- a giant monster or dog-headed man who carries people (and ultimately Christ himself) across a river -- and says that in the Bible we often find monsters and animals associated with crossing water. The first example he gives is that of Noah -- who, escaping a world of giants, crosses the floodwaters in a boat full of animals. The Noah story is also the first mention of the dove (jonah) in the Bible; and while Pageau never actually mentions Jonah, he clearly fits the pattern as well, being swallowed by a monstrous animal while crossing the water.

After the biblical examples, Pageau relates the story of St. Christopher in more detail and emphasizes the role of trickery: After tricking the king of Canaan and the devil, St. Christopher is himself tricked by Christ. What a mischievous dog!

At the end of the video, Pageau promotes a graphic novel he and his brother are writing, which is based on the legend of St. Christopher and has the palindromic title God's Dog. This made me think of my December 2020 post "God and dog at the Panama Canal" -- the Panama Canal being a place where people cross from one body of water to another.

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Pageau's characterization of Noah as someone who crossed the waters in a boat full of animals made me think of a similar story from the Book of Mormon: the Jaredites. At the Tower of Babel, when everyone's language is confounded, Jared and his family have their original (the original) language preserved by the Lord. They leave Babylon and sail across the sea in "barges" (actually fully enclosed submersible vessels) full of animals. Jonah imagery is also clearly present: "For behold, ye shall be as a whale in the midst of the sea; for the mountain waves shall dash upon you. Nevertheless, I will bring you up again out of the depths of the sea" (Ether 2:24)

Of the animals the Jaredites bring with them, one in particular is singled out for emphasis: "And they did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees" (Ether 2:3). What a weird and evocative image -- swarms of honeybees crossing the ocean as if in "a whale in the midst of the sea"! (Bees in the belly of the beast is also a link to Samson.)

The bees the Jaredites carried with them are surely an exceedingly minor plot point in the Book of Mormon, but the word deseret has taken on a life of its own and been embraced as a symbol of Mormonism. What is now the state of Utah was called Deseret when it was a quasi-independent Mormon theocracy, and the flag of Utah still prominently features a beehive. On Twitter, the hashtag #DezNat (for Desert Nation) identifies one as what passes today for a Mormon "hardliner." A phonetic "Deseret alphabet" was developed under the direction of Brigham Young, and the name is still used for such things as Deseret Industries (Mormon thrift stores) and the Deseret News. (Since deseret in the Book of Mormon refers specifically to honeybees from Babylon, I guess Deseret News has the same name as the Babylon Bee!)

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Bees and honey are stereotypically associated with the bear. In "Bern, baby, bern!" (a follow-up post to "Bear with Biden"), I noted that the name Beowulf means "bear." Well, it actually means "bee wolf," but this is usually assumed to be a superstitious euphemism for the bear, along the lines of the Russian medved ("honey eater"). The dog and the wolf are the same species, and the bear -- also a member of Caniformia -- was apparently seen as a sort of super-wolf. Back in 2018, I postulated, citing beowulf and medved as evidence, that the "Big Bad Wolf" of fairy tale fame was originally a bear. (Unlike wolves, bears huff and puff, can climb onto a roof, and could more plausibly swallow a human being whole than could the much smaller wolf.) I suppose I can now add "Mischievous Dog" to this list of canine bear-euphemisms. St. Christopher, a gigantic dog-faced man whose name means "Christ-bear-er," would also seem to have ursine resonances.

This Halloween, I made a very cryptic patriotic statement by wearing what could be called a maga hat.

My maga hat is black, but capitalized MAGA hats are red. This got me thinking about red hats and how the Big Bad Wolf (i.e. bear, i.e. Biden) is the antagonist of someone named after a red hat. But, no, it gets more specific than that: I have identified the Sun card of the Tarot with Donald Trump, but I have also said that the baby on that card who is riding a horse and carrying a red flag represents Robin Hood. Little. Red. Riding. Hood.

Little Red Riding Hood is swallowed by a bear but, like Jonah, comes out again alive -- Resurgens in arc(t)a incubatus. Somewhere in the Origin, Darwin reports seeing a bear swimming around with its mouth open catching insects in the water, and speculates that this could have been the first step in the evolution of the whale. Jonah's ork, Noah's ark, Riding Hood's arktos. Jonah, as I have said, is Hebrew for "dove"; the Hebrew for "bear" is dov.

I now support the LGBTQ movement.

Y'all knew this was coming, ever since I embraced the rainbow flag.

LGB = Let's Go Brandon

T? Q? Hmm . . . whatever could those two letters represent?

How long wilt thou mourn for Saul?

Shortly after writing my last post, "Course correction," I opened up the app I have been using to listen to the Bible read aloud. It picked up where I had left off -- I had just finished 1 Samuel 15 -- and so the first thing I heard was this:

And the Lord said unto Samuel, How long wilt thou mourn for Saul, seeing I have rejected him from reigning over Israel? (1 Sam. 16:1)

"Mourn" is metaphorical, since Saul was not actually dead at the time. In (synchronistic, not textual) context, I took the passage as confirmation of my recent decision to disengage from politics -- specifically, to stop speculating about Donald Trump. Soon after Trump's emergence as a political figure, you see, I had connected him with Saul. I think the idea came to me when I saw him in one of those debates with a zillion other contenders for the Republican nomination back in 2016, and the extreme way in which he stood out from the crowd made me think, "from his shoulders and upward he was higher than any of the people" (1 Sam. 9:2).

In those days, a relative and I used to play the "reincarnation game" of half-serious speculation about the past-life "lineages" of public figures. Searching my email for "Saul," I find that I wrote this on May 6, 2016:

I know you've already got some of these people in a lineage ending with a magazine publisher, but these days I can't help thinking: King Saul > Henry VIII > George S. Patton > Donald Trump. What do you think?

Rereading that just now, I couldn't remember how George S. Patton had fit in, so I ran a web search and was reminded just how much Old Blood and Guts resembled Trump in terms of physiognomy. Clicking on the most Trumpesque image-search result took me to a page called "On this day in 1945: General George Patton dies in Germany." (Note: Trump was born in 1946.) The page begins thus:

"It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived." - General George S. Patton Jr.

On December 8, 1945, General Patton's chief of staff, Major General Hobart Gay, invited him on a hunting trip near Speyer, Germany, to lift his spirits. Observing derelict cars along the side of the road, Patton said, "How awful war is. Think of the waste." Moments later, his vehicle collided with an American army truck at low speed.

The very first words: "It is foolish and wrong to mourn." How long wilt thou mourn for Saul? And then, "How awful war is. Think of the waste." Disengage.

Last time I tried to disengage from "anything topical, political, or evil," the sync fairies weren't having any of it, so this synchronistic expression of approval is encouraging -- even if, in typically mischievous fashion, they had to communicate it in the form of a Trump sync! 

Trump is not on our side

Frank Berger has recently posted on how he misjudged Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán as a potential good guy. Frank writes:

Poor discernment and judgement happens. I have discerned poorly many times in the past (I thought Orbán might be a force for good; I admired Jordan Peterson's stance against the trans agenda; etc.) and will likely do so many more times in the future. The key is repentance. Acknowledge your error in judgement, forgive yourself, and ask Christ to forgive you.

This reminds me that my last word on Trump on this blog has been "I stand with President Trump" and that I probably need to revisit and clarify that -- especially since I keep predicting that he will be reinstated, and predicting someone's victory is so often confused with endorsing that person. So here, for the record, is my current assessment of the President.

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The good

• No new wars: Huge achievement. Best, maybe, ever.
• Only moderately antiracist: While still antiracist, he has condemned the most extreme expressions of that Satanic ideology, such as BLM and CRT.
• Rejects climate alarmism: Openly calls it a "hoax," though he's occasionally hedged on that. Says he supports clean air, clean water, etc. (real environmentalism) while rejecting the carbon dioxide panic.
• Controlled the border: He didn't actually build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, but he did a decent job of securing the border -- especially in contrast to what we're seeing now under Fake President Biden.
• Won the election: And thus should be president whether you like him or not.

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The bad

• Not a Christian: Not that most politicans are.
• Totally endorses the sexual revolution: Completely on board with the whole LPGABBQ thing.
• Antiracist: More moderately than most politicians, but still antiracist.
• Facilitated the birdemic: America fell to the global coup of 2020, and Trump did nothing to stop it. He pushed for the pecks and still pushes for them even now, his only complaint being that he's not being given enough credit for them. Absolutely no excuse for this. Epic fail.
• Flubbed Jan. 6: Invited his supporters into what was pretty obviously a setup. Didn't pardon any of them.
• Didn't drain the swamp: In fairness, this might actually be impossible.
• Part of the swamp: Strong Gadianton ties -- most notably Roy Cohn; also Jeffrey "Terrific Guy" Epstein.

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The verdict

He's obviously better than whoever or whatever is behind Fake President Biden, but that's a pretty low bar. Ultimately, he's not on our side. I admit it'll make me happy when he's back in power, but it certainly won't mean all our problems are solved. Any enthusiasm must be ruthlessly kept in perspective.

A prediction

Later this summer, if it starts looking like Trump is going to be reinstated, the strategy of last resort -- the "nuclear option" -- will be to admit that the pecks are harmful, and to blame Trump.

Six degrees of Jeffrey Epstein

This investigative series by Whitney Webb, author of the upcoming book One Nation Under Blackmail, is highly recommended. It's a bit of a long read, but I found it to be quite eye-opening.

1. Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case (July 18, 2019)
2. Government by Blackmail: Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era (July 25, 2019)
3. Mega Group, Maxwells and Mossad: The Spy Story at the Heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal (August 7, 2019)
4. From “Spook Air” to the “Lolita Express”: The Genesis and Evolution of the Jeffrey Epstein-Bill Clinton Relationship (August 23, 2019)
5. The Cover-Up Continues: The Truth About Bill Gates, Microsoft, and Jeffrey Epstein (May 25, 2021)

It was surprising to see the extent to which Reagan, the Bushes, the Clintons, and Trump -- the Republican establishment, the Democratic establishment, and a supposed outsider -- are all part of the same interlinked network. Also surprising was the conspicuous absence of any direct links to Obama or Biden, but I suppose they just haven't come to light yet.

Hey, Suzy, where you been today?

After a break of several months, the synchronicity fairies are suddenly back into politics again. I do apologize.

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In "The Trumpiest trump," my recent post at The Magician's Table, I revisited the Judgment card of the Tarot as a prediction of Trump's winning the 2020 election and discussed how John Opsopaus has connected that trump with the number 45 -- a number that Trump, the 45th president, has recently begun to emphasize in his branding.

In the post I mentioned that "trump occurs only twice in the King James Bible (1 Cor. 15:52 and 1 Thes. 4:16), and both instances refer to the scene depicted on the card." This reminded me that I had also found the string biden in the Bible, in 2 Chronicles 25:29.

Thou sayest, Lo, thou hast smitten the Edomites; and thine heart lifteth thee up to boast: abide now at home; why shouldest thou meddle to thine hurt, that thou shouldest fall, even thou, and Judah with thee?

At the time, my interpretation was that "Edom means 'red' in Hebrew, so the Edomites are the Republican." Today, though, a more specific meaning of Edom struck me: Edom = aleph daleth mem = 1 + 4 + 40 = 45. "Lo, thou hast smitten the 45-ites!"

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Today, YouTube Music autoplay served up a Weezer song I had never heard before, "The End Of The Game" (2019).

It didn't do much for me musically, at least on the first listen, but the music video got my attention because of its many very specific references to the 1989 Philippe Mora film Communion, starring Christopher Walken as Whitley Strieber, with a score composed by Eric Clapton (who, incidentally, was recently in the news for anti-peck statements). (I still can't entirely believe that such a movie really exists! It sounds too much like something I would dream up in a fantasy!) Anyway, it held my interest long enough to make me look up the lyrics. They begin like this:

Hey, Suzy, where you been today?
I'm looking for you every way
No sign of you when I wake up
I'm on an island with no sun

I feel like I've known you my whole life
You got me crying like when Aslan died
Now you're gone

For the significance of "Suzy," see my January 13 post "Wake up, little Susie." For Trump as Aslan, see my January 11 post "Hush my darling, be still my darling, the lion's on the phone." For Trump as the Sun, see my November 9, 2020, post "The other Trump trump."

Aslan, of course, represents Jesus Christ and as such comes back to life after being killed -- so "crying like when Aslan died" implies crying over a disaster that is soon to be reversed in a eucatastrophe.

The "island with no sun" also makes me think of the solar eclipse in the Tintin book Prisoners of the Sun -- a scan of which was emailed to me this year on (by complete coincidence!) the precise anniversary (and even the same day of the week) of its original publication. See "St. George, stake for the sun, and inevitable 'miracles.'"

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Although I should definitely know better by now than to discuss specific future dates, let me just say for the record that various lines of synchronistic "evidence" are currently pointing at Sunday, August 1.