This is a reprint of a column originally appearing on in the web periodical EveryJoe on 11 November 2014, edited and revised. The Windrose of Political Heresy The traditional Left-to-Right and…

The old testament makes no sense For a few years now, I've been interested in trying to understand the old testament. (ie, the Hebrew Bible) This is a post for another time, but I had no church…

I need to open this one up to the readership. From a reader… QUAERITUR: Thank you for all the instructions, rants, and articles. Out here in the trenches, it is becoming untenable. My health…

Residual energy captures past events, replaying them as sights, sounds, or feelings in specific places, like echoes from history without any conscious presence.

Afternoon, Tokyo. A big red car called Rubicon crosses my path. What exactly did you win and die for, Julius Caesar? A nightmare in which a lesser woman wins a grander prize. Wait, I was awake when…

lingthusiasm:Talk, talked. Walk, walked. Go…went?In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the many ways that languages are irregular in their…

In his memoir Palace Gate, WWII and Vietnam pilot Richard Brown reveals a gut-wrenching truth about post-war Vietnam: When he returned a decade after the war, the corrupt monarchy hadn’t been…

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." This was written by a human. "The era was one beneficial to many people, but substantially detrimental to others." This was written by…

Redemptionis Sacramentum, the 2004 Instruction from the Congregation for Divine Worship (in happier times)… [92.] Although each of the faithful always has the right to receive Holy Communion on…

The Demon in Democracy, as Marxism and Liberal Democracy Merge. Posted by Ed Folsom, August 23, 2026. Why did Eastern Europe’s communist apparatchiks transition so smoothly into the West’s liberal…

Yesterday, our Deacon Fellowship at University Baptist Church focused on evangelism. Specifically, our Senior Pastor, Dr. Will Rushing, provided some specific training that he entitled “The Pursuit,”…

I had Dex research and help me with this... ...so I can properly sing along with Doug here . [ At the 24 Divisadero stop in front of the Bernal Beast shop in Bernal Heights... ]

Devarim / Deuteronomy 22:6 If you chance upon a bird’s nest whilst on the road, in any tree or on the ground, with chicks or eggs, and the mother sitting over the chicks or on the eggs, do not take…

Sacrament Meeting | Aug 23, 2026 | Estimated 17–18 minutes Core thought: Christlike knowledge begins in humility, sees people mercifully, and proves itself in love. I last had the opportunity to…

I just watched Orson Welles’ 1952 short ghost movie Return to Glennascaul (silly but gorgeous) and was struck by the phrase “keep in” used of a fire: the narrator meets a couple of…

I had this idea (unoriginal idea, to be fair) to make up my own words. The whole "all words are made up" thing is KINDA 1 true. Of course a language's words, rules, and conventions are not only…

When I was a boy, I was certain the world around me was simply a collection of lifeless particles. Clearly, only a moron could believe in a magic man living in the sky. He must be a character from…

In November 1967 Italo Calvino gave a lecture called Cybernetics and Ghosts where he talked about writing machines and the future of literature: ...will we have a machine capable of replacing the…

In many ways, despite their background against mass carnage on enormous scales the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted something entirely new. The earlier fire bombing of Tokyo had…

I’ve been alerted to The Speakers of Indo-European and Their World (ed. Sergio Neri and Michiel de Vaan; open access) twice today — by David Marjanović in this comment and by Matthew…

” I Enjoyed It Immensely” Says Former Governor Osborn After Bear Choking – 1921 With the passage of time there are news stories that do not age well. Contemporary attitudes towards…

Contempo American culture loves winners and hates losers, but there is honor and nobility in fighting for lost causes, when you know that failure is certain, inevitable.

A year ago I read Libraries of the Mind by William Marx, and some of it is still very much on my mind ever since. Particularly what William Marx called ‘dark matter’ literature, which…

Henry Assaulted a Priest. Then He Raised the Alarm — on Himself. F. W. Maitland, Select Pleas in Manorial and Other Seignorial Courts , p. 167. The entry concerning Henry Smith and Sir Robert the…

F.F. Bruce (1910-1990), The Books and the Parchments , 4th ed. (Basingstoke: Pickering & Inglis, 1984), p. 27 (footnote omitted): The inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram of Gebal, for…

The Library of Congress has crowdsourced more than a million transcriptions. A half-finished 1917 telegram at the National Book Festival shows why AI can accelerate archival work without replacing…

In an essay published on Medium, in reaction to a New York Times guest essay about Gay vs. Queer, James Dale said: "We don’t win by figuring out who to leave outside. We only win we when we stand as…

We see variations of this question: What happens when robots can do anything physical better than humans and AI can do anything cognitive better than any humans? What will be left for us? The answer…

I've been watching through the documentary series The World at War lately, and figured it was worth talking about here. For those who don't know, it was aired in the early 70s, and is generally…

There was a period in the history of the Kingdom of Lombardy when they had no king. Two kings in a row had been murdered—the first by his wife, the second by a young slave he had mistreated—and a…

Here’s a recording in a mystery language. Do you know, or can you guess, the language?

August 23, 2026 By Kristin Berkey-Abbott Matthew 16:13-20 When I teach first year students in Composition classes, the first writing assignment is for them to write about themselves. What could be…

Shebna thinks himself fittingly commemorated in marble - in reality he is but a lump of gooey dough to be flicked out of the kitchen window into the savannah. How different our perception of self can…

Two Men. A Floor. Absolutely No Explanation. Two men. A floor. Absolutely no explanation. There are two men sitting underneath an illuminated architectural scene in the Hours of Jeanne d’Évreux .…

The earliest known clearly identifiable figures of the dragon and phoenix combination in northern China have been discovered in a tomb at the Zhaizita Stone City site in Ordos City, Inner Mongolia.…

Roshan: Wikipen [[Suicide is Absolution]] is the idea that if someone kills themselves then their crimes are forgiven. It is a historically common position adopted by various societies. Some of these…

​A very good video. While this topic has been covered at nauseam in other media this video does a very good job of presenting it in a clear concise manner. I was really surprised by the AI imagery.…

This blog should be subtitled “and now I understand sexually explicit lamps”. On Thursday night (20th August 2026), I travelled to my university laden with equipment and high hopes. I left laden with…

In 1950, the poet J.V. Cunningham translated from the French a work by the seventeenth-century Jansenist Pierre Nicole, “An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in Which From Settled Principles is…

Ab dem Augenblick, als ich begriff, dass Bücher im Grunde eine Technologie sind, mit deren Hilfe Menschen ihre Ideen in die Zukunft schicken können, war die Sache für mich klar...

"Row" as in noisy argument rhymes with cow; I thought it rhymed with crow. Row as in rowdy, as in rouse. I found out while watching a TV show. And how it made me want to compose rhyming rhythmic…

Poems by Andrea Skevington and Margaret Mackinnon on Pharaoh’s daughter and infant Moses, along with comments on reaching across ethnic lines in dark times. The post An Act of Kinship with One of a…

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power”

Éthique à l’usage de mon fils Personal Rating: 9/10 - I read this book while I was in grade 9. It profoundly changed my perspective on life and started to spark my interest in different areas of…

Let strong physicalist supervenience (SPS) be the view that necessarily all truths supervene on first-order truth about the spatiotemporal arrangement of physical stuff. Here is a plausible thesis:…

I feel towards Paul Washer that particular kind of affection reserved for those godly men who, despite their weakness and frailty, were used mightily by God to preach Christ’s glorious strength,…

A look at Zelda, a look at the Mahabharata, a look at myself, and the realisation thereafter.

The imperial system of measurement is often criticised, but it has some units that for every-day life are actually really good. This post is a defence of those units.

«Aren’t you very much afraid?» «Wouldn’t do me any good, would it?» The Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood in «The Company of Wolves» In [...]

A week can acquire a shape without our noticing it. One conversation raises a question, another exposes something we had overlooked, and by the end of the week several things that seemed unrelated…