Flexible graphite arms, purple rubber, and remote viewing

On the afternoon of August 13, the same student who randomly mentioned owls serving as alarm clocks in colonial America asked if she could tell me about a dream she had had about a month ago.

In the dream, she was visited by small purple aliens "from a Blue Planet, but not like Earth because they actually classify Earth as a Green Planet," and they took her on board one of their "flying laboratories" to show her how new aliens were created. "They wanted me to see it because they were really proud of how the whole process works. I didn’t mind, because these aliens are always quite respectful. I'm a bit frightened of them, but only a bit."

There were two big machines in the lab. One made the body parts, and the other assembled them. "First you make the arms, and you have to put, uh, this into the machine" -- and she held up a case of refill lead for a mechanical pencil.

"Lead?" I said.

"No, this. It's not actually lead."

"It's actually graphite."

"Yes, graphite. And the machine uses that to make the arms. When they come out, they're not attached to anything, and they're kind of wiggling and wobbling all over."

"Really? But pencil lead isn't very wiggly."

"I know, but that's how the machine makes it. Their arms are really quite wiggly. They're strong, but they don't actually have any bones."

She went on to explain how the rest of the body -- the torso and the head (this kind of alien levitates and doesn't have legs) -- is made by putting different material into the same machine. The material for the rest of the body is purple rubber. Finally, the arms, torso, and head are put in the second machine, and a complete alien comes out.

"When the alien came out, they told me not to touch it, because it was still very -- you know, it breaks easily, like glass."

"Fragile."

"Yes, the new baby aliens are extremely fragile, and they're transparent. They aren't purple yet. You have to wait a bit until it's safe to touch them -- well, you still can't really touch them. You have to wear special gloves like this." She sketched a glove with webbed fingers and drew small circles all over it.

"What are those circles?"

"They're like what an octopus has on its tentacles, they use those gloves to move the babies when they're still fragile -- they didn't let me do it -- and they put them in, I guess it's called a flying nursery, where they stay until they're purple."

"Who takes care of them? I guess they don't have moms and dads if they come out of a machine."

"No, they don't, but there are adult aliens that take care of them. They showed me a bit of the flying nursery, too. They had this thing they were really proud of : an oven, and they would put the babies in the oven."

"They put the babies in an oven? Why did they do that?"

"Well, I guess it's not really an oven. I just called it that because when they opened it I could feel that it was quite warm inside. What it does, is it makes them grow up faster. Well, not grow, because the babies aren't smaller than the adults, but they become adults faster. You can put transparent babies in there, and when they come out they're a bit purple -- not completely, but they've started to become purple. And normally that would take weeks. They've really sped up the process."

"Why do you think they wanted to show you all this stuff."

"They were just proud of it, and when you've done something you're proud of, you want to share it with other people and help them understand it a bit."

⁂

Shortly after hearing about this dream, I tried to visit Synlogos, but autocomplete unexpectedly took me instead to SynchroMiss -- a blog I visited months ago when I was methodically going through a list of links to 2009-era sync blogs. The most recent post, "SATuRN STRANger TRANSgender," included this:

Just after I had expressed incredulity that something made of graphite could be "wiggly," I run across this reference to an "incredibly stretchy" material made from graphene.

The reference to pencil lead really being graphite, and in the context of "arms," also syncs with this comment of mine about pencil points, bullets, and "Graffites."

Even the "purple rubber" from which the rest of the alien is made is a sync.

On August 6, I started using the RV Tournament app to practice remote viewing. They give you target coordinates and let you sketch and write notes on the screen. Then they show you two photos, and you guess which was the target image and state your level of confidence. The next day, the correct answer is revealed, and your cumulative score is adjusted based on whether you were right or wrong and how confident you were.

For my first attempt, I decided to keep it simple by trying to get only the predominant colors of the target image, ignoring everything else. The color I got was purple, but then, despite my intention of focusing only on color, I got a spontaneous mental image of a torus, or doughnut shape, and scribbled that down, too.

Neither of the target images was purple, but one of them featured tori, and I correctly chose that one with 90% confidence.

So I saw purple torus when the target image was actually some rubber tori. Later my student would report her dream in which aliens were made of purple rubber.

So far I'm doing okay in RV Tournament, although the number of trials is still too low to draw any real conclusions.

The chances of getting at least 5 out of 6 right by dumb luck are 7/64, or about 11% -- nothing particularly remarkable. And my mental images are extremely crude -- usually enough to choose Image A over Image B, but not enough to describe the target image itself in any real detail.

Honey-tongued Canadian politician swallows a bee live on camera

I don't really have anything to say about this at this point, but it has the feel of an omen, or the first half of a synchronicity, or something like that, so I'm posting it here for future reference.

A bit of minor synchronicity already: I happened to post this just after posting birth and death statistics from the Taiwan government. The bee-swallowing incident made me think of "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly," and I remembered that I had referenced that rhyme once before on this blog. Looking it up, I found "She swallowed the cat to catch the bird," a post in which I also posted death statistics from the Taiwan government. The post is dated August 14, 2021 -- almost exactly one year ago today.

Sorry about that, sync fairies. I guess I was supposed to post this tomorrow.

More data on Taiwan's demographic decline (and possible birdemic/peck link)

Taiwan's Department of Household Registration provides monthly statistics going back to January 2013, including the total number of births and deaths per month. I consider these raw numbers to be reasonably reliable

Since January 2021, there have been more deaths than births every single month -- for 19 months and counting. -- and the gap is rapidly widening. Does this have anything to do with the birdemic or the peck? Let's zoom in on the 2020-2022 period.

Taiwan started pecking in March 2021, and half the population was pecked by September. The birdemic itself didn't start in earnest until May 2022, with only a negligible number of "cases" and birdemic-attributed deaths before that; by the time the birdemic started, about 85% of the population was already pecked.

Insofar as there has been a recent drop in births, over and above the gradual downward trend that has been going on for at least a decade, it appears to have started in January 2021, before either pecks or birdemic. As discussed in my earlier post, "Reports of the 'depopulation of Taiwan' may have been somewhat exaggerated," Igor Chudov has made much of the fact that the June 2022 birthrate was 23% lower than the June 2021 birthrate, calling this an astronomically unlikely "26-sigma event," but as you can see, fluctuation of that magnitude is actually quite normal. (Chudov's "26-sigma" label came from the insane assumption that the standard deviation for births-per-month would be proportional to that of births-per-year.)

June 2022 is nine months after half the population had been pecked, which I think is too early to see any peck-induced decline in fertility. Older people were pecked first, so I assume the number of women of childbearing age who had been pecked by September 2021 must have been much lower than 50% -- how much lower I can't be sure. If the pecks have drastically impacted fertility, as suggested by anecdotal evidence, that likely won't be statistically obvious until around the end of the year. The period between now and February is especially important, because after February (9 months after the start of the birdemic in Taiwan) it will (in theory anyway!) be hard to disentangle the effects of the peck from those of the birdemic itself.

As for the recent uptick in deaths, that golden window of unambiguity has already passed, and the data is inconclusive. Any post-peck-pre-birdemic increase in mortality is too slight to separate from the overall background trend of gradually increasing death rates (presumably due to the fact that the population is aging). The relatively high death rate since May 2022 (if it is in fact the beginning of a trend, not just random noise) could in theory be due to the birdemic, the pecks, or any combination of the two.

I'll probably follow these numbers for the rest of the year just out of idle curiosity -- but that's really all it is. Can we really expect any new data to change anyone's mind about the birdemic or the pecks this late in the game?

They have a fight, Triangle wins, Triangle Man

A monster made of hundreds of tiny triangles

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.

My dream on the eve of September 11, 2001

This is really weird, and I'm still not exactly sure how it happened, but last night I was trying to type a web address into my browser, and some combination of typing errors and an autocomplete function with a really long memory caused the browser to bring up a Wayback Machine archive of something I had published on a long-defunct GeoCities website on September 12, 2001. I still have no idea how that happened. I have no memory of ever visiting the archive of that site, or if I have it can't have been at all recently, and my browsing history backs me up on that: no record of ever having visited it before last night, and yet somehow the autocomplete function on that same browser served it up.

This obviously indicates the hand of the sync fairies, or of other unseen agencies, so I'm posting it here.

This, unmodified, is what I wrote in my personal journal the day after the attack. As you can tell by reading it, I wasn't planning on posting it on the Internet -- but, for some reason, I now feel like I ought to.

9:30 a.m. Wednesday 12 September 2001

I've been working on my alife insects -- I can't call them ants now, since they're all able to reproduce -- and yesterday morning I was putting some finishing touches on the program when Dad came in the door in a great hurry and told me the news: Hijacked airliners had been crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It took a second to register. At first it was just another news item, just another terrorist attack. Dad's breathlessness over it all helped me realize (academically, anyway) just what a monumental event had just occurred. "It's not going to be the same America after this," he kept saying. He may be right. I don't know. Who can say at this point just what the fallout will be?

Everything was canceled. João came home early because LCC was closed for the day. Institute was canceled. Mom and Dad's meetings were canceled. Everything stood still. The ambient attitude was that to go about one's daily activities after what had just happened would be in very poor taste. Everyone should stop everything, watch the news, and spend the day thinking about the disaster. I didn't. I went about my day. I didn't feel a need to dwell on the incident -- but that evening, when I went on the Internet, my attitude began to change. Every site I went to had some acknowledgment of the disaster. Every blog had an entry -- or several entries -- about it. Arts and Letters Daily had "Jesus Wept" written in place of their usual "Veritas odit moras" motto. Even Google had an attack-related addition to its bare-bones page. Jorn Barger (of Robot Wisdom), pro-Palestinian in his opinions, had a link to pictures of the attack, with the linktext "If you want peace, work for justice." After reading all that, I felt that my blog, too, should acknowledge the disaster -- unless I wanted to look completely heartless. But I had nothing to say about it. I linked to the BBC story, using the date as the linktext and making no commentary. Then I deleted the post, thinking it artificial. That was the idea behind my new blogging style, right? I'm not linking or writing out of a sense of duty -- I'm linking when there's something to link, writing when there's something to write. A link to news about the attack would be pointless: who hasn't read it already? So now my blog doesn't acknowledge the attack at all, and probably won't -- unless I end up writing an article with some substance, which I most likely won't. Why should I let a terrorist leave footprints in my blog?

I feel no sadness, no anger, no hatred -- only a sense of unreality and occasionally a black, empty feeling. It still doesn't feel real. The pictures don't look real; they look like something from a movie. The stories seem to be straight out of a novel. The feeling of emptiness was with me on and off all day yesterday. It was with me from the time I woke up -- before I knew anything about the disaster. It was a new kind of feeling, and as I tried to clothe it in words all my ridiculous brain could come up with was a cheesy line from Star Wars: "I feel a great disturbance in the force...."

Part of me wants to call it precognition or some such, but I think it more likely that the dark feeling was a leftover from the disturbing dreams I had had that night. I dreamed I was shot. An unshaven, black-haired man was putting a new magazine in his machine gun, and we were laughing at him -- laughing because he was a bad shot, and could never get us. The people who were with me -- my friends -- told me to lay down on the ground and demand to be shot, and I did. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I threw myself on the ground and said, "Just shoot me! Now!" And he did -- that's not what was supposed to happen. There was a sharp report, and I felt the bullet bite into my back, just to the left of my spine. My thoughts were running at a frantic pace: "He just shot me! Am I going to die? Am I ready? Of course I am going to die... and of course I am ready... it's over... it's finally over...." 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.

This syncs to some extent with the recent dream I recounted in "Many sparrows, again, and various other sync links." In that dream, an FBI agent I had known as a child came to my house, and I thought, "That's Mr. Graff from the FBI. I'd better go with him," and got in the backseat of his car -- effectively "arresting myself" instead of being arrested by force. Reacting to an FBI visit that way is somewhat akin to reacting to a gunman by lying on the ground and demanding to be shot.

The link that really got my attention, though, was that in the 2001 dream "we were laughing at him -- laughing because he was a bad shot, and could never get us." The reason I posted my recent FBI dream was that a sync related to clay sparrows had made me think of clay pigeons, which made me think of skeet shooting -- the one form of shooting at which the otherwise omnicompetent, Chuck Norris-like Mr. Graff was a spectacularly bad shot.

BÖC is actually pretty good

I only knew them for "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" and had kind of assumed they were one-hit wonders. Actually, they've done quite a lot of stuff that's good -- and synchronistically relevant.

About Godzilla:

About spontaneous human combustion:

About how just because it burns doesn't mean you're gonna die: