Literally indistinguishable from satire

I was watching old Onion videos from back when they still had it -- classics like "Tired of Traffic? New DOT Report Urges Drivers: 'Honk'" and "Report: Most College Men Admit to Regularly Getting Stoked" -- and the algorithm cued up one I hadn't seen before, "Can men get pregnant?" I thought, "Heh, yesterday's satire is today's reality." Then I thought, "This actress is phenomenal. Have I seen her in anything before?" And then, almost a minute in, I finally realized that I was no longer watching old Onion videos and that this was actually something on C-SPAN from eight days ago. I guess I should feel stupid for taking so long to catch on. Anyway, someone should definitely feel stupid.

Fire, Ice, and blue Good girls

The Babylon Bee has been off its game for a few years now, but I still check it occasionally. They recently ran a story with the headline "Pentecostal Church Doesn't Notice Riot Is Occurring" and this illustration:

The first thing to catch my eye was of course this sign:

The intended meaning is, "Terminate the employment of those tasked with enforcing immigration law," but there's obviously also some intentional "fire and ice" wordplay.

Then I noticed this other sign:

Renee Good, written in blue. The late Ms. Good is apparently being promoted as the new George Floyd for an astroturfed Traitor Lives Matter movement. So, a woman named Good, known mainly for supporting criminals, with her name written in blue? This naturally made me think of Manson girl Sandra Good, known as "Blue" and closely associated with Lynette Fromme, known as "Red."

Fromme/Red (left) and Good/Blue (right)

Although her name links her to Sandra Good, Renee Good had much more of a Lynette Fromme physiognomy, particularly the eyes.

Skimming the Wikipedia article on Sandra Good, I read that "Good is portrayed by Kansas Bowling in Quentin Tarantino's 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." I clicked the link for Kansas Bowling just because it was a funny name. There I read that "Bowling's longtime boyfriend is musician Don Devore." I clicked that link, too, because Devo was recently in the sync stream. One of the musical genres in which Mr. Devore performs is "shoegaze."

I know it's a pretty roundabout link, but I found that word, shoegaze, funnily appropriate, since recent syncs have associated red-and-blue spectacles or eyes with red-and-blue shoes.

Red and blue eyes, Egyptian edition

In Egyptian symbolism, the right wedjat-eye is associated with the Sun and the left wedjat-eye with the Moon. This fits with the two-eye symbolism of recent posts.

The above illustration follows the Pyramid Texts in making one eye white and the other black. I thought I'd seen wedjat-eye amulets that were more colorful than that, though, and a quick Web search yielded exactly the colors I'd been hoping for:

The main pattern here has been red right eye and blue left eye, but this isn't the first time the blue has been combined with green.

The proximate inspiration for the present post was a photo of pop singer Katy Perry holding a blue left wedjat-eye in front of her own left eye:

This was from a January 20 /pol/ thread with an endless series of photos of various celebrities who "flaunt their allegiance with pride" by making occult signs. The image in the original post was the all-seeing eye in a triangle.

I hadn't bookmarked the thread, and when I tried to search it out on 4plebs just now I at first misremembered it being on /x/ rather than /pol/. Searching the /x/ archive for one eye sign, most of the top results (e.g. this one) were "Fire Kasina General" threads promising a "DMT experience without DMT." I'd never noticed any such threads on /x/ before, but on January 19 someone going by Speaks-With-Crows left this comment on "An anomalous bit of remote viewing":

"Precognition"

I've come to the same conclusion. Now, if you want to exponentially increase your magic powers, practice fire kasina ( flame gazing). Stare into a candle flame for 8-10 hours daily over the course of 21 days. Around the 5th day you'll enter extraordinary states & the visions arising will appear to be hyper realistic and tangible, as if you have actually physically entered a different place. Sometimes you'll see scenes from the past as if you are actually present. I can't stress enough how profound it all is.

I've heard it compared to the psychedelic experience like this: on psychedelics you are scuba diving, with fire kasina you have become a fish.

You do run a real risk of being driven mad so if you decide to give it a go please do be careful.

Good vibes to you and yours!

Staring into a candle flame for eight to ten hours every day for 21 days sounds absolutely insane. The /x/ threads, in contrast, have recommendations ranging from 30 seconds to two hours -- so I guess Speaks-With-Crows is taking the Terence McKenna philosophy of "when in doubt, double the dose" to the next level!

Running into fire kasina again while searching for that Katy Perry photo was a bit of a sync, especially given that my interest in that photo had to do with syncs in which one eye is "ice" and the other "fire."

I went back to that /pol/ thread, which has lots of images of celebs covering one eye. Besides Katy Perry covering her left eye with something blue, I found five photos of celebs covering their right eye with something red. I found zero counterexamples (something blue over the right eye, or something red over the left). I'm sure counterexamples exist, but that particular thread is 100% consistent with the established pattern.

Content warning: Hollywood

Manson even has colored contacts to make him look like a beautiful cat with homophobia.

Macron channels both Uncle Ted and Scott Crane

My last post, "Squaring the circle, and more red and blue eyes," begins with a photo of a 1996 newspaper clipping reporting on the Unabomber, which includes this sketch of him wearing his iconic aviator sunglasses:

Before seeing that post, Debbie had left a comment on "More Urim and Thummim syncs" noting that Emmanuel Macron had just been in the news for wearing blue aviator sunglasses at Davos. I thought this was a fairly minor sync -- blue sunglasses as a link to red-and-blue specs -- but the coincidence of my posting the Unabomber picture (even though it had no real relevance to the post) strengthened it somewhat. Debbie had linked to a YouTube video, but rather than watch it I just did a news search for macron sunglasses davos. The first result was a very recent BBC article (apparently posted around noon today Taiwan time):

Still not an amazing sync, though, since his sunglasses are just blue, when the ongoing sync theme is about glasses with one red lens and one blue one.

Then I read the article:

The French leader wore a striking pair of blue reflective aviator sunglasses indoors while addressing world leaders at the World Economic Forum.

While Macron did not explain the reason for the accessory during his speech, French reports have attributed it to an ongoing medical condition.

Last week, he appeared at a military event in southern France with a red eye and at one point donned a similar pair of sunglasses.

While addressing troops, he downplayed his condition and said it was "totally benign" and "completely insignificant", adding: "Please pardon the unsightly appearance of my eye."

Macron even joked about it, calling it "l'oeil du tigre" or the "eye of the tiger", in a reference to rock band Survivor's song used in the 1982 boxing movie Rocky III.

He was wearing blue glasses because of "a red eye"? Now you've got my attention. Which eye, though? To fit the sync theme, it should be the right eye. Sure enough, a photo from the Daily Mail confirms this:

And that image ties right in with another image I included in the same post that had the Unabomber:

Macron is of course French. The above image comes from the cover of Poker d'Âmes, a French translation of a Tim Powers novel, which is one of the only French-language books I own. (I think I have a few volumes of Rimbaud and Baudelaire in the original.)

Squaring the circle, and more red and blue eyes

Last night, after posting "More Urim and Thummim syncs," I went into my study and saw on one of my desks a small stack of books which I had bought secondhand last month and hadn't gotten around to shelving yet. I had a sudden hunch that one of those books would contain an illustration relevant to imagery of the red-and-blue spectacles. Since only one of the books had any illustrations at all, I naturally went for that one: The Secret Language of Birthdays (1994) by Gary Goldschneider and Joost Elffers. I had bought this book not for its own sake but because of one of the bookmarks that came with it: a clipping from the April 5, 1996, Times of London introducing the public to Uncle Ted:

When I bought the book, I of course checked what it had to say about my own birthday, but it really didn't fit me very well at all -- it described some sort of social climber, when in fact I have never had the slightest scintilla of interest in social status or leadership and find the whole subject profoundly boring (truth be told, I'm a bit more of the "loner fits Unabomber profile" type) -- so I just put it on the desk and didn't look at it again until last night.

In the book, each day of the year has a two-page entry that begins with a picture and a title. The Ides of March, for example, is "the Day of the Heights," illustrated with a ladder.

Last night, pursuing my hunch, I decided to flip through the book a bit and check the birthdays of people I know. The third or fourth date I checked was March 8:

My hunch had been that I would find something relevant to the red-and-blue spectacles. My last post dealt at some length with connections between the two lenses of the spectacles and the Masonic square (red right lens) and compass (blue left lens). The March 8 illustration is a "square and compass" in a somewhat different sense: It shows a compass being used to draw not a circle but a square. The perspective makes the square appear as a rhombus, like the suit of Diamonds -- and so, although the picture is black-and-white, the notional color of the square is red.

While looking through the book, I discovered that near the beginning, before all the birthdays, it had brief articles on each of the 36 decans of the zodiac. I have some passing familiarity with astrology but have never really learned anything about decans. I read about my own decan (Pisces III) and thought the description fit me much better than the one for March 15 did.

This morning, I went into the study again to take photos for inclusion in this post. This time I noticed the red-and-blue specs imagery that I had missed last night even though it had been hiding in plain sight. The Secret Language of Birthdays, being large and bulky, was at the bottom of my little stack of books. At the top of the stack was a small paperback: Poker d'Âmes, the French translation of Last Call by Tim Powers. I posted the cover of this novel in "The water is blue, and the birds are awake," but until this morning I didn't notice how the cover art links to the specs:

That's Scott Crane, the main character. He is portrayed with a blue left eye and a red right eye. My last post, which begins with two examples of similar imagery, ends with Dean Radin's book Real Magic. In the context of the "secret language of birthdays," it is surely worth noting that Dean Radin was born in New York City on February 29, 1952. Tim Powers was born in Buffalo, New York, on February 29, 1952. Dean Radin's book is called Real Magic. According to one commentator, Tim "Powers has a little sub-genre of his own: his books are about magic intruding into the real world."

This afternoon, I checked the comments on this blog and found that there were several new ones, mostly from Bill. The most recent, though, was from Debbie:

William,

I googled Dean Radin and noted his birthdate Feb 29.

Him and I ( Feb 19 ) are both first decan Pisces.

Check out the decans. You are a 3rd decan Pisces.

Check out the article ( link below )

[. . .]

Does this sound like you???

Last night, I read a description of people born in the third decan of Pisces, having never read anything about decans before. This morning, before reading Debbie's comment, I noted that Dean Radin and Tim Powers were born on the same day.

Bill had posted a series of long comments on the symbolism of the Urim and Thummim. Although his method is obviously unorthodox -- reading the Hebrew words as Elvish and tying them in with various movies -- the conclusion he arrives at is remarkably similar to the consensus of normie biblical scholars: that the two stones represent light and darkness, respectively. This gets combined with the Mormon view of the Urim and Thummim as a pair of spectacles.

Bill associates Urim and Thummim with David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel, from Spinal Tap. This is based on the scene where Derek Smalls calls them "fire and ice" -- a scene in which Smalls also compares his bandmates to Shelley and Byron. This made me think of these lines from a minor but well-known poem of Byron's:

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that's best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes

One etymological meaning of aspect is "seeing, looking at," so the third and fourth lines fit with the idea of the Urim and Thummim as a pair of spectacles with one "dark" lens and one "bright" one.

Bill's comments also mentioned the movie The Quick and the Dead (1995). He notes that one of the characters is called Cort, and he connects that with the word court and thus judgment.  I've been rereading the Book of Mormon, and last night I finished all but the last three chapters. Today I finished those last three. The closing words of the book are ". . . the Eternal Judge of both quick and dead. Amen."

Note added: Here's Morpheus with the red and blue pills reflected in the appropriate lenses of his sunglasses, as mentioned by Bill in a comment:

Some time ago, I downloaded a photo of someone holding a plastic bag with a single blue jelly bean in it, which he had been given as a "vaccination treat." Someone had posted it on 4chan with a comment along the lines of "It's even blue. They're mocking us." I was going to add it here but can't seem to find it. While combing through meme folders, though, I did find this somewhat related image:

More Urim and Thummim syncs

My January 14 post "Red and blue spectacles" featured two similar images, one from a YouTube review of the 2011 movie The Ides of March, and the other from the 2004 movie National Treasure.

This morning (January 20), the preschool asked if I could read to the kids a story of my choice. Since (as mentioned in "The water is blue, and the birds are awake") I recently bought a set of mint-condition used Dr. Seuss books, I chose one of those: I Can Read with My Eyes Shut! (1978). That book has come up here before and even lent its name to a post or two (e.g. last September's "Reading with my eyes shut"), but I hadn't thought of it in connection with the specs until this morning, when I opened it up to the first page and found this:

Although my focus was on red-and-blue specs, Nicolas Cage in that National Treasure still actually has three lens colors: red on the left side of image (Cage's right), blue on the right, and green ("pickle color") slightly down and to the right of the blue -- corresponding broadly with the relative location of the colored words in the Seuss book.

The illustration shows the Cat wearing glasses of only one color -- but he's not just wearing them; he's holding them in front of his eyes with his hands, with some of the fingers of his left hand raised, very much like Nicolas Cage in the movie still.

The very next page in the Seuss book shows the Cat wearing glasses with differently colored lenses -- not red and blue, but still a significant sync in context.

On both pages, the emphasis is on how the Cat's specs give him the ability to read in various ways. That is also the function of the "ocular device" in National Treasure:

The Ocular Device was found with the Masonic Square and compass in a brick at Independence Hall by Ben Gates. The glasses were built by Benjamin Franklin to read the map from the back of the Declaration of Independence. It leads the group to New York.

"The glasses were built . . . to read." The square and compass reference also got my attention. From the beginning, I associated the red-and-blue specs with the "interpreter" spectacles used by Joseph Smith, which he later dubbed the Urim and Thummim. In "Fire and ice, first syncs, 1491, and the Urim and Thummim," I linked back to a 2013 post of mine associating the Urim and Thummim with the Mormon version of the Masonic square and compass.

This connection would be reinforced 11 years later, when I read Don Bradley's (highly recommended) book The Lost 116 Pages. Bradley writes:

The interpreters, as described by [Joseph's mother] Lucy Mack Smith in earlier chapters, were translation "keys" of triangular shape -- "three cornered diamonds." And we have learned from Joseph's father that these interpreters lay on the top plates of the book, which was engraved with symbols, minimally including compass and square.

Over this place with the compass and square symbols were laid the two transparent triangles described by Joseph's mother -- the interpreters. The placement of the triangular interpreters over the depictions of compass and square is fitting -- perhaps literally -- and suggests another layer to the compass and square symbolism of the relics. Triangular interpreters could potentially be placed over the compass and square engravings so as to align perfectly with them, one interpreter aligned with the compass, the other with the square.

Bradley includes this illustration of what the interpreters may have looked like:

From the orientation Bradley chose for the square and compass in this illustration, it is obvious that he, too, was thinking of the Mormon temple garment, with a compass in V orientation on the left breast and a square in L orientation on the right. My 2013 post, "Lux et Veritas: A hypothesis," proposed that the L and V stand for that phrase, which is a Latin translation of Urim and Thummim.

(Note: In Hebrew, Urim begins with aleph, the first letter of the alphabet; and Thummim begins with tav, the last. Since Hebrew is read from right to left, this is consistent with Urim being the right lens and Thummim the left.)

Bradley also proposes that the specs (which Lucy Mack Smith's description suggests were hinged) could have been folded up, creating a hexagram:

My recent post connected the red and blue lenses not only with the Urim and Thummim but with "fire and ice." In alchemical symbolism, a triangle with its point up (like Bradley's "square" lens for the right eye) symbolizes Fire, and a triangle with its point down (like the "compass" lens for the left eye) represents Water -- an element which, in the Aristotelian analysis (see "Suits as elemental qualities rather than elements"), is primarily Cold and only secondarily Wet. The hexagram is widely understood to be a combination of the Fire and Water triangles.

When I opened the Don Bradley book to get those images and that quote, I found something else that I'd forgotten about:

Depending on the orientation of the lenses, the use of the interpreters could also evoke the symbol of the all-seeing eye. With an equilateral-triangle lens oriented with its base at the bottom during the interpreters' use, the user's eye would be framed in a triangle in precisely the way the symbol of the all-seeing eye is most often depicted.

That got my attention because it reminded me of one of the books I am currently reading, Real Magic by Dean Radin. This is what the cover looks like:

It's an eye. The left half (on our right) is blue, the color associated with water. The right half is yellow -- not red, but still a "fiery" color -- and is inside a Fire triangle, forming the symbol of the all-seeing eye. There even appears to be a subtle nod to the Masonic square and compass: Only one letter of the title is inside the triangle, and that letter is G.

This post began with a reference to two movies, one of which was National Treasure. This is the logo for the National Treasure franchise:

The other movie mentioned was The Ides of March. Maybe this is a bit too clever, but I think I see a nod to that title on Radin's cover, too. The subtitle consists of three lines of text, each of which is bisected by the line separating the all-seeing eye from the human eye. Looking at the right half of the text, the first line begins with M; the second, with IDE; and the third, with OF. Is it too much of a stretch to say that suggests "M[arch], Ide[s] of"?

Meta-glitch in the matrix: Neo sees the cat again AGAIN

This afternoon I was browsing /pol/ and found a thread, posted today (January 18, 2026) claiming (falsely), "Prime minister of Quebec FRANCOIS LEGAULT shot dead in his home!" Apparently it wasn't the first such claim, given some of the responses:

Again? Sacre bleu!

but this also happened yesterday, he seems unlucky

There is currently a glitch like Pam Bondi. Deja vu.

That last response I've quoted was accompanied by a gif of the scene from The Matrix where Neo sees the same black cat repeat the same behavior twice (the original "glitch in the matrix"), leading him to say, "Whoa. Déjà vu."

Hours later, I clicked for a random /x/ thread -- randomly selected from an enormous pool of threads going back to 2013 -- and got one from August 28, 2024, "Nobody general /NG/ Rebuke the devils."

The original post in this 2024 thread is accompanied by a gif of the scene from The Matrix where Neo sees the same black cat repeat the same behavior twice (the original "glitch in the matrix"), leading him to say, "Whoa. Déjà vu."

Running into essentially the same gif twice would have been a sync no matter the content, but it was actually a gif about seeing the same thing twice!

⁂

In the 2024 thread, one poster writes that "Jews killed Christ," and someone responds with, "Jesus was literally Jewish," to which the former replies, "Jesus Christ spoke Aramaic and Greek. Hebrew is a Canaanite language" -- apparently implying that Jesus was not Jewish because he spoke Aramaic.

The sync here is that just before viewing the thread I had replied to a comment on "The Spirit of the Lord upon the hill, and the question of Aramaic influence in Deutero-Isaiah," and had written about Jews speaking Aramaic:

But you are certainly right that some Jews in Isaiah's time knew Aramaic. In fact the very text Dr. Bokovoy cites, 2 Kings 18, has Jews in Jerusalem saying "Speak, I pray thee, to thy servants in the Syrian language [i.e. Aramaic]; for we understand it" (2 Kgs. 18:26).