How do US presidents end their speeches? (with a 3-6-9 postscript)

I just read "Weird Things About King Charles' Coronation" by Naomi Wolf, who argues that the coronation was rendered "uncanny" by slight but noticeable departures from established tradition. I'm not British, didn't watch the coronation, and have no opinion on this, but something else she said jumped out at me:

When we as Americans see the Stars and Stripes saluted - and we know that it is the same salute that goes back most of our nation’s history - we are comforted. When the US President ends his every major speech with the phrase "and God Bless the United States of America", that repetition is not only reassuring, it creates an invocation for our national life extending from deep into the past, giving us promise for the future. All of this is a form of positive magic.

[. . .]

I have noticed that icons, symbols and texts that are culturally central to Western countries, and that are central to the Judeo-Christian tradition especially, are being slightly rearranged, slightly soiled, slightly garbled these days everywhere (just as President Biden keeps systematically not concluding his speeches with: "And God bless the United States of America").

"God bless the United States of America"? Did she do that on purpose, to see if anyone would prove her point by noticing it? The traditional way to end a presidential speech is "God bless you, and God bless America," and Wolf's paraphrase is just the sort of "slightly garbled" modification she decries.

That was my immediate reaction, anyway, but I figured I'd better confirm it. I checked the transcripts of every State of the Union address in the last 100 years, and here's what I found.

First, ending the speech with any form of "God bless . . ." is a relatively recent custom, introduced by Ronald Reagan. Of the 60 pre-Reagan addresses I looked at, 95% end with no such formula. The three exceptions are from Truman ("May God bless our country and our cause," 1953), Kennedy ("may God watch over the United States of America," 1962), and Ford ("God bless you," 1977). Since Reagan's first State of the Union in 1982, though, every single address (with the one exception of Clinton in 1999) has ended with some form of "God bless . . . ."

From Reagan to the present, here is what presidents have blessed at the close of their State of the Union addresses:

Here's how they have referred to their country in these statements:

As for specific, word-for-word formulas, these are the only ones that have been used more than once or twice:

• God bless you, and God bless America. (used 8 times, by Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Trump)
• God bless America. (used 4 times, by Clinton, Bush II, and Trump)
• God bless you. (used 4 times, only by Reagan)
• God bless you, and God bless the United States of America. (used 3 times, only by Obama)
• God bless you all, and may God protect our troops. (used 3 times, only by Biden)
  

So I feel a bit vindicated. Although the formula is neither as old nor as invariable as I had expected, the form I remembered is in fact the most canonical, used twice as frequently as any other. The difference between my own understanding and Wolf's probably has to do with the fact that I left the United States in 2004 and haven't watched a full State of the Union address since then, whereas Wolf presumably listened to Obama's addresses, with their (anomalous) preference for "the United States of America."

Anyway, Wolf's overall point stands: Biden is the only recent president to consistently end his speeches without invoking God's blessing on the country. It's also strange that Biden, not any of the wartime presidents who preceded him, should be the one to introduce "our troops" into the formula.

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Reading Naomi Wolf -- a person whose existence hadn't crossed my mind in years -- made me think of the time she was interviewed by Ali G and managed to come off as cool and likable, something of which feminists seem no longer to be capable. (Then I found out that, after the show, she denounced Ali G as a racist and tried to have the episode pulled! She did manage to be cool and likable while she was actually on camera, which is something anyway.)

This little exchange caught my attention:

Wolf: But let me tell you, honestly, how would you feel if you had to sell sex, your sex?

Ali G: What, if people paid me money for sex?

Wolf: No, honestly! I mean --

Ali G: Wicked! I would be there every day, I would [unintelligible] 24 hours a day, seven days a week, three six nine!

Booyakasha! She walked right into that one. Notice, though, how he uses "three six nine," apparently with a meaning similar to "twenty-four seven." Debbie has brought up 3-6-9 several times in the comments, in connection with Shirley Ellis's "Clapping Song" and a statement by Nikola Tesla, but this is the first time I've ever heard it used in a slang sense. (In the Ellis song, I'd always assumed it had no real meaning but was analogous to "Two four six eight, who do we appreciate.") Has anyone ever heard it used this way before?

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.

Un brandon de guerre civile

Not photoshopped; these are the optics they went with

I look at it this way: Either (a) our guys have infiltrated his team and are having him give speeches like this, or (b) his guys are so jaw-droppingly incompetent they they're having him give speeches like this. Either way, it seems like a hopeful sign.

Still waiting on that spontaneous human combustion, by the way -- unless, metaphorically, this is it.

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."

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

NPH 421 and spontaneous human combustion

On July 28, 2022, I was stopped at a red light when I noticed the text on the back of the T-shirt of the motorcyclist in front of me. It was written in the style of an eye chart, and it said: "Stay with me boy. See the world through the eyes of Mickey. Don't stop looking." I assume this was some sort of mutant Disney knockoff, but in the current synchronistic context I figured "Mickey" (a nickname for Michael) was more likely to be a hawk-eyed archangel than a mouse. Anyway, I took it as an injunction to keep my eyes and mind open.

At the next light, my eyes were drawn as if by magnetism to a license plate that read NPH 421. That means Nephi, of course, an important name in the Book of Mormon, so my first thought was that the numbers were giving chapter and verse. There are four books of Nephi, and none of them has 42 chapters, so I looked up 4:21 in each of the first three books of Nephi. Fourth Nephi is very short and isn't divided into chapters, so I checked 4 Ne. 21. Of the four verses I checked, only one of them struck me as in any way noteworthy:

He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh (2 Ne. 4:21).

I thought that was an odd turn of phrase. In the Bible, the "consuming of flesh" is always associated with burnt offerings, destruction by fire, and horrible plagues. The verse from Nephi made me think of Paul's equally strange statement that "though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing" (1 Cor. 13:3). Paul's other examples of things that are worthless without charity include prophesying, having great faith, feeding the poor, and the like; how did "giving my body to be burned" make it onto that list of good works? How is that even a good work at all? I thought it might be a reference to submitting to fiery martyrdom of the type pioneered by Nero and taken up centuries later by the Inquisition, but 1 Corinthians was written before Nero's accession to the throne, and I don't think "being burned" would have been an understandable reference to martyrdom at that time.

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Then I had the thought that 421 was a year, not a scripture reference. AD 421 is, after all, the very last date in the Book of Mormon chronology, the year in which Moroni, the last surviving Nephite (NPH), finished the book -- an abridgment of the Plates of Nephi, with additions by Mormon and Moroni -- and buried it in the earth.

Then I remembered that in my July 2021 post "In the sync stream" had prominently featured Moroni (both the Nephite and the city in the Comoros) and even mentioned that the "golden plates are supposed to have been buried by Moroni in the Hill Cumorah." 

In the opening paragraph of that post, I had written that "when I think Moby-Dick, I think 'The Whiteness of the Whale' and I think 'Loomings.'" Then at the end of the post, I noted seeing the number 142 and feeling it was significant, not knowing why until eventually I "realized that 1 and 42 are the numbers of the two Moby-Dick chapters I mention in the first paragraph."

But I had actually begun the post by mentioning first "The Whiteness of the Whale" (Chapter 42) and then "Loomings" (Chapter 1) -- not 142, but 421. Then in the same post I had gone on to mention, for reasons entirely unrelated to Moby-Dick, Moroni's burying the golden plates -- which is supposed to have occurred in AD 421. Not until now, a year later, did I make the connection.

Moroni, the last survivor of his people, passed on their history to future generations. This is precisely the role played in Moby-Dick by Ishmael, the sole survivor of the wreck of the Pequod. The epilogue begins with an epigram from the Book of Job: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

One of the comments on my "In the sync stream" post began: "Interesting. The license plate post was also good."

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So satisfying was that interpretation of NPH 421 -- the last Nephite in the year 421 -- that I dismissed my earlier attempts at chapter-and-verse interpretations as barking up the wrong tree. Then I noticed my July 30 post "And then the message said, 'End of message," which ends with what I admit is a completely unrelated reference to spontaneous human combustion.

Spontaneous human combustion -- doesn't that very obviously sync with "He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh" (2 Ne. 4:21)? Also it's a little known fact that the name Nephi is not original to the Book of Mormon but appears in one of the apocryphal books of the Bible -- as the name not of a person but of a flammable liquid (2 Macc. 1:36). Nephi is the King James rendering; most modern translations have naphtha.

Why does my July 30 post have the title it has? I was posting about how I had just finished reading a book called The Messengers, so "end of message" seemed appropriate. The precise wording, though, is from one of Joe Biden's teleprompter gaffes.

In my December 2020 post "American politician spontaneously combusts!" I describe my absurd but persistent premonition about the spontaneous combustion of Joe Biden (without mentioning Biden by name). Later, in September 2021, I had a dream in which reference was repeatedly made to "Joe Biden, the Human Torch"; days later, Biden suddenly acquired the nickname Brandon, which is French for "firebrand."

My 2020 post quoted an excerpt from Unsong in which George W. Bush bursts into flames after someone hacks his teleprompter and makes him utter a magic word that has that effect. One of the comments to that post said:

After reading the George Bush excerpt, I think 'spontaneous human combustion' might be a metaphor for a politician 'melting down' during a public appearance. Justly or unjustly, Biden is particularly singled out among politicians as someone who relies on a teleprompter to keep on track.

Then, yesterday, without consciously making the connection at all, I published a post with a Biden teleprompter gaffe as a title, and although it is primarily a post about Mike Clelland's book on owls, I included a reference to Unsong and then one to spontaneous human combustion.

If the Cabinet were full of Mormons

Not counting the VP, there are 24 members of the Cabinet of the United States. Mormons account for about 2% of the US population. Now imagine if a president gave a quarter of all Cabinet-level positions -- including three of the four highest-ranking -- to Mormons. Imagine if we had, I don't know, let's say

• a Mormon Secretary of State
• a Mormon Secretary of the Treasury
• a Mormon Attorney General
• a Mormon Secretary of Homeland Security
• a Mormon Director of National Intelligence
• a Mormon Chief of Staff

Wouldn't that be extremely noteworthy? I think everyone would be asking what was going on, why so many Mormons. Many would want assurances that the administration wouldn't be unduly influenced by the agenda of this tiny religious minority. Even Mormons and Mormon sympathizers would be wondering what was up and might even find the situation embarrassing, especially if the president himself was a Satanist. Yes, I think everyone across the board would agree that this was something very much out of the ordinary and would want an explanation.

Of course it could never really happen -- they're only 2% of the population! -- but it's fun to imagine.

Piracy on the high seas, and Cologne Cathedral

I had two fragmentary dreams about a week ago which have persisted in memory longer than is customary and which have an air of meaningfulness about them. I record them here in case that meaning ever becomes apparent.

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In the first dream, I am with my brother Joseph in a very large bookstore where everything is free. He takes this for granted and says bookstores have always been like that. I have vague memories of patronizing bookstores in the past and shelling out 20 bucks or more per item, but I don't say anything. We go our separate ways to browse, and when our paths cross again he is carrying an armload of dozens of large hardcovers, all of which appear to be about piracy on the high seas. Piracy on the High Seas is actually the title of one of them; I don't see any of the other titles but gather that they are all works of non-fiction dealing with the Golden Age of Piracy. He is also carrying two rolled-up American flags on short, spear-like poles, and I understand that these are also from the bookstore and are considered pirate-related items. I comment, "This is a whole new direction for you, Joseph."

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In the second dream, I am doing some long-distance hiking in a mountainous area. I come to the edge of a cliff, and there below me, its spires just level with my head, is what looks like an enormous Gothic cathedral. For some reason I decide it's probably Cologne Cathedral (although checking pictures now on the Internet, I see that it actually bears a closer resemblance to Canterbury), so when I see a man inside the cathedral, close enough to talk to through a window, I ask him if I'm anywhere near Cologne. I try to ask this in German, but it keeps coming out in Chinese, so in the end I just give up and speak English. Fortunately, he understands. In answer, he causes a map to appear in my head, showing where I am and where Cologne is -- but the map looks like Canada, not Germany. Cologne is around where Edmonton would be on a Canadian map, and my current location is far to the northwest, around where (I think in the dream) Yellowknife should be, though waking I would correct this to Whitehorse. I thank the man for his help, get an azimuth, and start walking to Cologne.

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Regarding possible meanings, the juxtaposition in the first dream of American flags and the name Joseph made me think of the Fake President and his recent remarks about his piratical efforts.

I’m also sending to Congress a comprehensive package of -- that will enhance our underlying effort to accommodate the Fire Nation oligarchs and make sure we take their -- take their ill-begotten gains. Ha, we’re gonna accommodate them!  We’re gonna seize their yachts, their luxury homes, and other ill-begotten gains of Poutine’s kleptoc- -- yeah -- kleptocracy and klep- -- the guys who are the kleptocracies.  Heh heh heh.  But these are bad guys!

Most of the commentary on this has focused on the Fake President's ignorance of the meaning of accommodate and inability to pronounce kleptocracy, but I think the content is much more disturbing than the delivery. This is pretty literally piracy on the high seas. Not only is he talking about robbing random businessmen (who for some reason are called "oligarchs" if they're from the Fire Nation) of their private property; he specifically mentions seizing sailing ships by force. As of 2022, the Stars and Stripes is a pirate flag. A whole new direction!

Another possibility is that the dream is actually about the other kind of piracy. A "bookstore where everything is free" sounds pretty much like the Internet, and helping oneself to free content is sometimes considered "piracy."

About the Cologne Cathedral dream I have no ideas at all. We'll see if any syncs turn up later. One possible connection between the two dreams: It turns out that the cathedral in Edmonton is called St. Joseph's.

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Update: I'm not the only wrongthinker to have made the piracy connection.

He even has Biden say, "We pirates, bitch . . . See yall on the high seas . . ."

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.

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.

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.

The Bident

From Raphael's Council of the Gods

A correspondent recently emailed me about the upcoming Pluto Return -- the return of Pluto, for the first time, to the precise zodiacal position it occupied on July 4, 1776 -- and I mentioned in reply that I had previously associated Biden with Pluto because his name resembles bident, the two-pronged spear traditionally associated with Pluto.

On December 18, I received two emails in reply. The first asked me to send links to the blog posts where I had mentioned the Biden-Bident-Pluto connection, and the second pointed out an additional Biden-Bident link that I had not previously been aware of.

I've been researching about Pluto and the Bident and found this interesting connection from Wiki: "In Roman agriculture, the bidens (genitive bidentis) was a double-bladed drag hoe." . . . I don't know if you've read this or not on social media / urban slang, but Biden and Harris are often referred to as JOE AND THE HOE. Harris being the Hoe because of allegations that Harris 'slept' her way up to her positions in politics, especially with her alleged relationship with Willie Brown.

The next day (today, December 19), I searched my own blog for the word bident so that I could send the requested links. I emphasize the dates because it turns out that the only two posts that contain that word were posted last year on December 18 ("Saturn-Pluto conjunction to end on January 8?") and December 19 ("The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown)").

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Thinking about the Bident again today, I realized that there is another prominent person whose name is associated with a two-pronged fork: David Hume.

And doesn't the name Hume strongly suggest Pluto? To exhume a body is to remove it from the grave, so by implication hume is the common grave of mankind, Sheol or Hades. Hume's name was originally spelled Home, but that is appropriate as well. "Man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets" (Ecclesiastes 12:5). Or, as They Might Be Giants put is, "We long to swim for home, but our only home is bone."

Exhume actually derives from humus, "earth," whence also humanus, "earthling." Thus the etymology of human parallels that of Adam, from adamah, "earth."

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In my "Green Manalishi" post of exactly a year ago, I associate the two-prong crown of the Manalishi with the two-prong bident of Pluto. (The song was supposedly inspired by a drug-induced dream of being barked at by a long-dead green dog that represented money. Pluto represents both money and death, and he has a dog.)

The two-prong crown made me think of the "two-horned man" of the Quran, recently mentioned both by myself and by Chris Knowles, as described in my post "Ye Cannot Serve God and Ammon?" The title of that post alludes to Knowles's theory that Mammon (money) derives from Ammon -- but money is more an attribute of Pluto than of Jupiter.

The two-horned man is Alexander the Great, portrayed with horns because he was supposed to be the son of Zeus Ammon -- a combination of Zeus with the Egyptian god Amun, who was sometimes given a ram's head or four rams' heads. This four-headed "Ram of Mendes," later considered to be a form of Amun, was called Banebdjedet. The Wikipedia article on this god begins thus:

Banebdjedet (Banebdjed) was an ancient Egyptian ram god with a cult centre at Mendes. Khnum was the equivalent god in Upper Egypt.

And who is Khnum? Well, it turns out he is none other than the Green Manalishi with the two-prong crown.

That's right, Khnum (the god of the Nile, later assimilated to Zeus Ammon as Jupiter Nilus) is specifically a green god with two horns.

The second of the demonic beasts of the Apocalypse -- the one that comes from the earth rather than the sea and would thus be associated with Pluto rather than Neptune -- also wears the two-prong crown.

And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men (Rev. 13:11-13).

The horns of this beast are specifically those of a sheep, but the beast's true nature is that of a dragon. Compare this two Khnum, who has the horns of a ram but is green -- a reptilian, not a mammalian, color.

The association of the apocalyptic Manalishi with supernaturally produced fire is also interesting, given the inexplicable but persistent way in which the sync fairies keep connecting Joe Biden with the idea of spontaneous human combustion.

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").

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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.

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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’d like to dedicate this song to my friend Brandon

Brandon's number

"Let's go, Brandon!" -- originally supposed to be a cheer for NASCAR driver Brandon Brown -- is now code for a vulgar execration beginning with the letter F.

Brandon Brown's number is 68.

Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet, and so the number 17 is synonymous with the letter Q.

Brandon Brown's number is thus equal to 4Q.

And 4Q is code for a vulgar execration beginning with the letter F.

Thy firmness makes my circle just, and makes me end where I began.

Bern, baby, bern!

I can't believe I failed to connect this:

with this:

I mean, "The right has their racist frog," so the left needs a bear -- followed by a pun on the noun and verb senses of bear. How did I not immediately make the connection?

In the same movie, Kermit says, "C'mon, bear, burn rubber!" The combination of a bear, burning, and going fast in a car syncs with "Let's Go" Brandon Brown. (C'mon is roughly synonymous with "Let's go," and is a known Bidenism.)

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the English words bear and brown come from "a Proto-Indo-European root meaning 'bright; brown' (the sense connection might involve polished wooden objects)." I find this a very curious connection, since brown is one of the least bright of colors; of all the basic color terms in English, only black and gray are less often qualified as "bright" than brown is. Brown is not alone in this, though. The very least bright color of all, black, comes from the Old English blac "bright, shining, glittering, pale" and is related to French blanc, "white"; the OED speculates "the connecting notions being, perhaps, 'fire' (bright) and 'burned' (dark)." Perhaps this is also the connecting notion for brown; it certainly seems more plausible than the "bright as wood" idea.

By a very strange coincidence, the bear is also etymologically connected to the idea of burning in Chinese, a language completely unrelated to English. The Old Chinese character for "bear" was 能, and the term for a blazing or raging fire was 熊熊 -- made from the character for "bear" by adding a component meaning "flame." Later, the characer 能 began to be used for a completely different word (meaning "can, ability") and so 熊 (originally referring to a blazing fire) was pressed into service as the character for "bear."

Even more curiously, dictionaries say that 能 (originally "bear," the animal) was also used in the past to mean "to bear, to withstand" and "bearing, attitude" -- exhibiting some of the same polysemy as the English word bear.

There's something mysterious about bears. Beowulf's name means "bear"; so does King Arthur's. There are two constellations called Bears even though their most salient feature is their long tails. (The constellation-inspired myths about how the bear lost his long tail don't address the question of why the ancients would have called the long-tailed shape they saw in the stars a "bear" in the first place.) The universal and enduring popularity of the teddy bear also calls for some explanation, I think -- and no, some anecdote about an American politician ages ago isn't enough to explain why the idea took off and became so popular all over the world.

Bear with Biden

You may recall that back in 2020 there was a campaign on 4chan to trick Biden supporters into adopting Pedobear as a mascot, using the slogan #BearWithBiden.

In a comment to my recent post "Brandon the Crow - Russell Crowe - Russell Brand," Debbie (Ra1119bee) wrote, in part:

BR is the Bear ( BR of course after omitting the EA ( Vowels )

BR ( the Bear ) as in : BERN ( Switzerland and Germany )

The Bears ( who are Alchemists ) are pulling the strings...

Now I must say I don't quite follow this train of thought -- I'm not entirely sure where "BR" came from (Russell Brand's initials backwards? first two letters of Brand?), nor am I sure how we get from bears to alchemists -- but I know this commenter, she's about as in tune with the sync fairies as anyone I know, and her mention of BERN (in caps) turned out to be helpful.

In my October 22, 2020 post "Jay-Z in 2009 presages Biden and 2020," I noted that the three red horizontal lines that replace the E in the Biden 2020 campaign logo also appear on the covers of several Jay-Z (another corvid name!) records from 2009, including this one:

I found this one particularly funny because, while Jay-Z intended it to be read “A Star Is Born,” the Biden campaign would later use three red lines to represent E — making the Jay-Z cover read “A Star Is Bern.” In my original post, I took this as a reference to Biden’s rival Bernie Sanders, but now I see that Bern = bear = Biden. In fact, flip the two central letters and you get B^IdEN.

I've mentioned before that the three horizontal lines used in Biden's campaign logo also resemble the Greek letter Xi. Xi is also the leader of China, and the nickname Xiden has been used to imply that Biden is a pawn of that country. Xi is of course also closely associated with "bear" imagery.

Pooh also confirms my original association of "A Star Is BERN" with Bernie (from Bernhard, "brave as a bear") Sanders, since "Winnie-the-Pooh lived in a forest all by himself under the name of Sanders."

Incidentally, Pooh also ties in with Robin Hood, since he belongs to Christopher Robin, and his name is simply Hood written upside down. I note that my original Robin Hood post begins with a reference to "Samson tying firebrands to the tails of foxes." The firebrand -- French brandon -- has recently reappeared in the sync stream, and it was the fox that originally led me to connect "A Star Is Born," and Biden, with Xi. After noting that FOX could represent the number 666, I wrote, "the Greek-numeral equivalent of FOX is ϜΞΧ," and realized that Jay-Z had made this same O-to-Xi substitution.

Now that the bear connection has been made explicit, a possible interpretation of the three red lines suggests itself.

And behold another beast, a second, like to a bear, and it raised up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it: and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh (Daniel 7:5).

This bear is the second in a series of four beasts, and an angel later explains to Daniel that "these great beasts, which are four, are four kings, which shall arise out of the earth." The first beast was a lion, which has already been identified as a symbol of Trump. After the lion, a bear. As I note in my post "One beast becomes four, and four become one" (like that title, Debbie?), the lion, the bear, and the other two beasts are later combined into a single Great Beast of the Apocalypse.

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Now a few odds and ends.

First, Jay-Z is also known as Hova or Hove -- from the blasphemous nickname Jay-Hova, with the Jay removed. This parallels the case of Sonja Horah, where the Ja- is separated from the rest of the Tetragrammaton.

Second, my recent post "The birdemic in Asterix and the Chariot Race" discusses the French comic-book series Asterix. I've never really read much Asterix; I heard someone mention the birdemic connection and decided to look up the details. Just yesterday, though, I was reading The Sacred Heart and the Legend of the Holy Grail by René Guénon, and I found this: "The Round Table was destined to receive the Grail when one of the Knights should have succeeded in winning it and bringing it from Britain to Armorica." This caught my eye because of the similarity of Armorica to America, so I looked up the former name online and read, "The home village of the fictional comic-book hero Asterix was located in Armorica during the Roman Republic."

Asterix and his friend Obelix obviously take their names from the typographic symbols asterisk (*) and obelisk (†, also called dagger). "A Star Is" is very similar to "Asterisk." This is reinforced by the word born which follows, since "the asterisk and the dagger, when placed beside years, indicate year of birth and year of death respectively. This usage is particularly common in German." (Debbie had highlighted Germany and Switzerland in her original BERN comment.)

Brandon the Crow

One year ago tomorrow, I first identified Slow Joe Biden with Slow Joe Crow and then, a day later, with a bluegrass album called The Crow. Earlier this month, the name Brandon came to be inextricably linked with Slow Joe.

Today, this 4chan thread (linking it to the recent shooting by Alec Baldwin) reminded me of the existence of this movie:

Brandon Lee was of course Bruce Lee's son, and his full name was Brandon Bruce Lee. The Brandon whose name has become attached to Slow Joe is NASCAR driver Brandon L. Brown. I haven't been able to track down his middle name -- could it be Lee? At any rate, the two names are highly similar: Brandon B. L. and Brandon L. B.

Here's a bit from the screenplay for The Crow. "Eric" is the Brandon Lee character.

Here come Lead SWAT and his Merry MEN.

MOVING ANGLE - WITH ERIC - ADJACENT ROOFTOP

Eric runs for it.  Half a story higher.  He hits the wall and skitters up, gripping tiny cracks in the brickwork.

ANGLE - RESUMING MEN ON FRONT SHOWTIME FIRE ESCAPE.

Lead SWAT hesitates -- because of what he sees.

LEAD SWAT

Holy shit, it's spiderman.

He tries to pull a bead and fires too late.

LEAD SWAT (CONT'D)

What're you boy scouts staring at!

Let's go!  Let's go!  Let's go!

To be fair, just about every movie ever made probably includes the phrase "Let's go!" somewhere in the script -- but I was intrigued by the strange stage direction (or whatever it's called in movies) inexplicably referring to a SWAT team with the Robin Hood term "Merry Men." I have previously connected Robin Hood both with Slow Joe (middle name Robinette, two sons named Hunter and Bow) and with the Crow (Russell Crowe played Robin Hood).

Danny, Marvin, Brandon: Let’s go!

S. K. Orr recently posted a link to a particularly inspired Tucker Carlson monologue, under the heading "I, Too, Want To Encourage Brandon To Go." This rephrasing of the "Let's go, Brandon!" slogan made me think of the Dr. Seuss classic Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now? -- and of the time-honored tradition of replacing the title character with the president of the United States.

"Marvin" put in an appearance in my recent Gene Hackman dream, in which Hackman plays a father interacting with his son in a series of short video clips. At first the son is called "Danny," and the Hackman character is angry (expressing that anger by means of minced oaths like "Gosh darn it!"); later, the son becomes "Marvin," and Hackman's tone changes to one of kind reassurance.

In my original post on the dream, I asked "Why Gene Hackman?" and offered some speculations, but I did not consider the two names of his "son."

When I hear the name Danny, the first association I make is with the song "Danny Boy," which begins thus:

O Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling

From glen to glen and down the mountainside

The summer's gone and all the roses falling

'Tis you, 'tis you must go, and I must bide

So Danny and Marvin have this in common, that they must go. (After which "Danny Boy" stops just one consonant short of name-checking Slow Joe!)

In my 2009 post "The old savanna calling," I discuss "Danny Boy" (as modified by the Beatles) in connection with 9/11 prophecies. I link it both to the lion and to the 18th Tarot trump, the Moon. In the Seuss book, Marvin's last name is Mooney, and "by lion's tail" is suggested as one of the many ways in which he may "go." This even makes it onto the cover of some editions.

The "Let's go, Brandon!" phenomenon began on October 2, 2021. In the "Ripple" Tarot spread, October 2021 is represented by a modified version of the Moon card. Where the traditional Tarot card features two dogs, or a dog and a wolf, the "Ripple" version replaces them with (Chinese-style) lions.

As for the name Brandon itself, it apparently derives from a Celtic root meaning "crow, raven" (Slow Joe Crow). There is also the etymologically unrelated French word brandon, meaning a flaming torch, or a twist of straw or paper used to start a fire. This ties in with my "spontaneous human combustion" premonition, and with a dream in which Slow Joe is called "the Human Torch." There's also this interesting figurative meaning:

Personne, chose ou événement qui provoque des conflits, des querelles. Brandon de discorde, brandon de guerre, de guerre civile. Jeter le brandon de la discorde parmi les citoyens. Cet écrit est un brandon de guerre civile.

(In case your French is even worse than mine, a brandon can be a person or thing that provokes conflict, and the bolded phrase means "a brandon of civil war.")

Finally, I note that "Let's go, Brandon!" has become a way to curse without cursing, a way of implying a particular vulgar word without actually saying it. This ties in with the "Gosh darn it!" minced oaths of my Hackman dream.