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Thursday, 28 November 2024

An Unholy Vision, from Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt

A painting by Gwabryel, based on H. P. Lovecraft's story The Call of Cthulhu. It shows a man with arms outstretched worshipping a very tall, black figure. To his left and right, victims are suspended upside down from gallows, and in front of the dark figure are several other, perhaps tormented figures.
“Some want to turn the clock back, harkening back to some golden age of nostalgia, when women, children, the lower class, parishioners, and people of other races and creeds knew their place; not back to the 1950s, but further back: to Dickensian times and to (corporate) feudal fiefdom. They want to wind the clock back to a time before the hard-won battles for civil rights, social reforms, and worker representation. A time long, long before the ‘woke virus’, ‘illegal immigrants’, and gender identity, when life was more conservative and white lives mattered; though with a new, fundamentalist, Christian nationalist (or Islamist, or ultra-Zionist, or even atheist) and isolationist twist. And some will go to any lengths – and I do mean any desperate, violent, draconian lengths – to bring this vile and unholy vision about.”

~ H.M. Forester, Preface to Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt.

Story of resistance only, WITHOUT additional study materials.

Availability ...

Friday, 22 November 2024

Bloggers: A pox on Googlebot

Technical stuff

For a while now, GoogleBot, via the Google Search Console, has been crawling and indexing sites "mobile first": that is, they crawl a web page as if they were a smartphone user. Only much later, if at all, do they come back and carry out a "desktop" crawl.

The issue for users of Blogger / Blogspot is that these sites detect the simulated mobile device and redirect GoogleBot, adding "?m=1" onto the end of the URL (web address).

Googleplex HQ with logo blurred-out.

Wednesday, 20 November 2024

Societal Collapse by Design: MAGA’s Big Plan

Creating distrust, division, confusion, and chaos, leading to massive societal dysfunction and collapse, is not a bug in the MAGA plan due to incompetence in personnel picks and policy: it’s a very deliberate design feature, and it will have dire global consequences.

And for accelerationists, evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Christian nationalists, it’s all a part of the big plan for the End Times.

Tariffs are imposed and tax cuts are extended yet again to the wealthy; markets crash, the dollar plummets; the US defaults on the national debt; the rich make a healthy profit on the downward spiral, from bitcoin and from bailouts; the natives become restless, and for “reasons of national security”, the authorities declare martial law. And “before you can say Jack Robinson”, it's fait accompli.

Added to which, we can only hope and pray that things don't escalate into nuclear war with Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, and peacefully protest any such emerging crises, or we'll really be shafted.

~ H.M. Forester.

If this resonates with you, you may like “An Unholy Vision, from Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt” (a story of Resistance), with links to the eBook.

Destruction, a painting from the series, The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole (1801–1848). See blog post text for a full description by the artist.

Saturday, 9 November 2024

The Esoteric Meaning of Noah, the Ark, and the Flood: Maurice Nicoll

“There is the literal level of understanding sacred writings and there is also the psychological level of understanding them.” ... “The esoteric or inner—that is, the psychological—meaning is quite different. Esoteric teaching is always about [Humanity's] inner evolution. It is about Man's higher development and his relation to what is higher than he is.” ...

Le déluge or The Flood, a painting by Léon Comerre (1850–1916), showing a whole heap of forlorn-looking naked men, women and animals on rocks, with stormy water all around and washing over some of them.

The legend of the stone soup

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, and in a land not a million miles from here, there were two hungry dervishes, who are seekers, people of the 'poor'. 

One evening in their travels, they came across a small village and decided to stay for the night. There was an inn there, just by the side of the village green. But because they had no money, the two dervishes could not afford to stay there. Sometimes the pair would take out their musical instruments and play and entertain the inhabitants with jokes and news, in exchange for a few coppers for food and lodgings. But not tonight, for it had been a long haul up into the foothills of the mountains that day, and they were both too dog-tired to play, or even raise a smile. 

So it was that the two dervishes set their scant belongings down by the side of the village green, right in front of the inn. While one of them set about stacking up the sticks of wood he had scavenged along the way, the other arranged the stones which he'd collected in his travels, into a small circle around the wood. 

A large cooking pot, propped-up between two rocks over a camp fire.