Note: I’ve posted this elsewhere but am posting it here for the sake of continuity. Second note to Fold PR: Since this blog was in my email links to you, I am sure you can now appreciate that I am who I said I was.

Final note: if you are an author, check out my author webring: Behold!

Fold Sounds Possibly Cool

Fold is a card that claims to support lightning rewards. I was interested to try that out to see how it worked. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get that far, and I wonder if Fold should exist as a crypto card at all–here is my email exchange most recent occurs last so scrolling down you are moving “back in time” and anything without a name is me:

Eh no biggie. It simply means to me that your service has some fairly large bugs (possibly spiders?) in the system considering I could verify my identity with eBay in the 90s. But of course I think we both know that isn’t the actual issue here. It’s really about underwriters and lawsuits which should be an interesting mix with your purported crypto support. I’ll delete your app and let others know of my experience here.

Mar 7, 2023, 5:46 PM EST

Hey,

Our team has reviewed your application and discovered some discrepancies. As a result, we cannot establish your identity.

I understand how frustrating this can be, especially if this decision was made in error. Still, due to the limitations of identity verification, we won’t be able to open an account for you at this time.

Thank you for understanding.

Best Regards,

Risk Team

Mar 7, 2023, 1:53 PM EST

I’ll wait until 10 pm tonight CST. If it isn’t done by then I will just delete the app. I’m all for security and I understand false positives but my time is valuable and there are other accounts I could apply to who hypothetically might not “false positive” my info. Like flying on an airline I am going to tend to favor the one that hassles me the least. Thanks for alerting me however.

Foster Evans (Fold)

Mar 7, 2023, 12:52 PM EST

Hello,

To maintain a high level of security for our members, we must periodically update certain criteria in our systems with regard to user accounts. However, this can sometimes create false positives that require a manual review by our risk team. Unfortunately, it looks like your information must be manually reviewed before it can be approved.

We are working on completing this process as quickly as possible, and we appreciate your continued patience as we enhance our security measures for our cardholders. Due to the current number of outstanding reviews, response times may be longer than usual. We ask that you do not submit multiple tickets, or replies, as doing so may cause further delays in gaining access to your account.

Best,
Fold

Jeniza Ferrer (Fold)

Mar 7, 2023, 11:54 AM EST

Hello,

I apreciate your response. Your concern is very important to us. This issue will require additional assistance from our Escalation Team. I am going to forward your request to them, and someone from their team will respond as soon as possible.

Due to the current number of outstanding requests, response times may be longer than usual. We ask that you do not submit multiple tickets, or replies, as doing so may cause further delays in getting a response.

We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Best,
Jeniza

Mar 7, 2023, 10:15 AM EST

After restart cannot process submission continues. If there isn’t a way to solve this today then it is apparent having a fold card isn’t on my path and I will delete the app.

On Tue, 07 Mar 2023 15:07:10 GMT

Sure. Here is the error as of today. Will restart and advise further. I will include yesterdays error as well.

Mar 7, 2023, 10:07 AM EST

Sure. Here is the error as of today. Will restart and advise further. I will include yesterdays error as well.

Jeniza Ferrer (Fold)

Mar 7, 2023, 9:11 AM EST

Hey,

Thank you for reaching out, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

First, I would suggest force closing and relaunching the app. You may need to reboot your phone if that does not work.

Next, I would check the app store to make sure there is not an available update. If so, please download it and try again.

Lastly, if all else fails, try uninstalling, then reinstalling the app.

Please let me know if the above steps do not resolve the issue, and can you send a screenshot of the error that you are having for us to investigate further?

Best,
Jeniza

Mar 6, 2023, 11:00 PM EST

Placing my address and social security in fold card app results in Error and to Contact support to get fold card.

This sounds like the song and dance Stripe gave me which you can read about over at my blog here: Stripe Blog Post.

So, somehow the crypto of Fold is being used in an identity “risk assessing way” which sounds to me like a possible “poisoning of the well” for the sats earned by Fold since it seems to me this is going beyond typical KYC. I figured I’d alert the community to the potential problem since Crypto probably doesn’t need any additional “Bankmen-Fried” incidents.

Printing, A Perilous Adventure

As you have probably noticed, I have had several posts concerning the nature of my new book How To Do Nothing Well. I am writing these posts partly for people that are trying to publish so that a “pipeline” of what works and what does not in the modern post “everything is deplatforming everyone” era. My latest go around concerns thebookpatch.com. Here is what their site looks like as of yesterday:

As you can see, this is not exactly ideal, particularly as they also owe me money from some orders placed. One customer had gotten an email that morning that said her order was being shipped. So, whatever happened must have happened rather unexpectedly and in a hurry. I hope that everyone who ordered my book from thebookpatch received a copy. Part of the reason I selected them was because they had been around since 2009 and were more unlikely to suddenly disappear. Of course, they still suddenly disappeared, so time is no great indicator of market longevity.

Their Facebook page (or is that meta?) is also missing or else blocked by Facebook now, but as of yesterday this is what it looked like:

Quite a mysterious disappearance with a lot of very irate authors. I tend to be more patient and I sent them an email yesterday when I noticed the site was nonfunctional and as of today I still do not have any answers and that goes under “unacceptable” in my book of “business communication when you owe people money”. So, why they suddenly went away is currently unknown, however, I did find something interesting concerning the proprietor of thebookpatch. This one deserves some quoting.

The Guy Who Founded The Bookpatch…

Born in 1949 in Canada, Victor Ostrovsky moved to Israel with his family at age five. His inclination for the arts was apparent from a very early age. The well known Israeli painter, Gilady, lived on the same street and often set up his easel outdoors to paint. Victor would watch, spellbound, on his way to and from school as Gilady created beautiful /images on the blank canvas. Eventually, the artist presented Victor with his box of oil paints and took the time to guide him into a world where expressions come through /images and color, handing the child a gift that would soon become a passion.

Victor entered the military at the age of eighteen and became the youngest officer in the Israeli Defense Force. Victor rose to the rank of a lieutenant commander in the Israeli Navy and served as head of the weapon testing program when he was recruited by Israel’s elite intelligence agency, the Mossad. After two and a half years of training in the Mossad, victor became a katsa (case officer.) after serving in the field and becoming aware of the activities of elements within the agency that had more to do with self-preservation than the good of the country he left the service. After five years of trying to inform the powers to be with little success, he wrote an exposé “By Way Of Deception” that shook the agency’s foundations and is said to have brought about change. Victor has written two more books since A nonfiction “The Other Side Of Deception” and fictional spy novel “Lion Of Judah.”

Today, Victor’s insight and knowledge of the intelligence community facilitates his writing of fictional novels and screenplays and serves as a basis for his enigmatic and cryptic paintings. His canvases offer tantalizing /images, evoking a mystical and other-worldly reaction from viewers. Hats, gloves, scarves, and umbrellas hide his mysterious figures’ identities, provoking and teasing our imaginations with visual portrayals of adventure and intrigue. The activities of his figures and the titles of the work reflect the enterprise and language of the international intelligence community, bringing several layers of meaning to his paintings while creating stories for the viewer.

source: https://villagegallery.com/gallery/victor-ostrovsky/

Mr. Ostrovsky was/is the owner of thebookpatch, and suddenly it makes sense as to why an ex-Mossad whistleblower might want a way to write a book that does not go through the channels of Amazon and the like. Amazon, as I noted in another post, has become far too “motherly” in the sense that it wants to “help you file your taxes” and “adjust your margins” and a bunch of other stuff while taking large percentages of your sales. It is almost like Amazon is a kind of “rain forest” that “makes money” by selling logging rights except replace rain forest with authors and logging rights with rape.

At the very least, if anyone has a motive for a swift disappearance, I’d say Mr. Ostrovsky has one. The inner-workings of any intelligence agency organization are convoluted at best. I suppose that is why they call them “spies”. They definitely, as per Edward Snowden, do not like anyone blowing any whistles since by their nature they operate in the shadows.

Publishing Without An Agency…

Frustratingly, as an author, however, I did not do a “Deep dig” on Thebookpatch thinking to myself “Gee, I wonder what intrigue and misadventure might lie here!” No, instead, I simply wanted a reliable publisher for print on demand services. I had recourse to this because Amazon was far too “controlling” in all the wrong ways, and we know that it certainly isn’t on the payroll of any intelligence agency, right? Right. I’d like to publish my damn book without having to consider every black budget in the “known world” and whether they might “get offended” by my “meditation book designed to give someone a closer relationship with spirit.” Instead, as an author, I am sandwiched between “CIA” and “Ex-Mossad” somewhere in the “self-help” print on demand section.

Too Many Clowns

The bottom line is, there are too many clowns masquerading as legitimate services with far too much power and money at their disposal. My book is first and foremost a “church book” and rolls together three world religions. It does not say they all “go the same place” but it does show that they do indeed go somewhere and that somewhere is most assuredly not an intelligence agency unless you mean the intelligence agency of YHVH. However, we will remember that even the “spies for Israel” to gain the land had some serious problems in that only two came back reliable and loyal to that source. Everyone else got a long slog of 40 years through a desert.

I Was Able Though…

I was able, however, to find a workaround to offer the for print version of the book up on my site. I’m not going to get into its inner workings right now, other than to say it is a company that offers a “bridge” to Wordpress. So, it actually looks better like this anyway, in my opinion. More “my brand” as opposed to “thebookpatch-now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t” brand.

Which Brings Me To This Morning’s Shower Thoughts

Speaking of bridges, a rather novel idea I had occurred to me as I was grabbing a shower was that typically, we are only AS assertive as we are willing to burn bridges. In other words, there are some people who are attaching dynamite to the bridge before we even get on it just waiting with a button in their hand to blow the thing when we are convinced by them to get on it. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is that most people don’t stand up for themselves because they are afraid of a burned bridge. Of course, if a burned bridge is what results, then should you really be around a person that forces that scenario to start with? I’d say no, and I’d say whatever thebookpatch is doing, it surely looks like internet scorched Earth.

The Perfect Book Writing Flow

I am somewhere between a programmer and a writer. That means I can program, but it isn’t my first goal in life. I can write, and that is closer to my goal in life, and so where I need to, I can program. I do not program for the joy of it, though. Never have. When I program it is strictly for a result or functionality I did not have before. So, when I go to publish something, I like a flow that gives me maximum ability to publish to different formats–pdf, html, epub, whatever. When XML first made its appearance, I remembered thinking “YES, FINALLY.” Ah, that was naive. (XML is great for everything I mentioned, it just happens to REALLY SUCK to write at any complexity)

Enter Latex

Latex is awesome for typesetting. The only problem with Latex, though, is that it is mostly made for a more “scienecy” type of writing. Equations, tables, charts, graphs all the things that bored you in textbooks Latex is good at. With some beating, one can coerce Latex to print other things fairly well like books. With some pandoc magic, you can even get it to convert to different formats with varying degrees of success. Then, the idea may strike you, why not write in something like markdown then convert it with pandoc to whatever else like latex? Some people do just that, but I have found that the results are too variable for my writing style. I don’t especially want to have to write specific Latex formatting guides either. All of that is very time-consuming and most often needed for whatever I am currently doing but not for things on down the road. Latex suffers from having many different kinds of interpreters and packages do not always place nice between successive incarnations of Latex.

Enter Quarto

Quarto, however, is a kind of synthesis between Latex and markdown with structured yaml thrown in for good measure. If you have built a static website with a static web builder, then you won’t have much trouble with Quarto. Quarto smoothly outputs different formats such as pdf or a website or many other variations.

The Problem With Quarto

Quarto would almost be a perfect tool except for the fact that it has certain stylistic assumptions about your book. For instance, if you have a dedication before your introduction, Quarto does not have a built-in facility to deal with this. Instead, it has a specially labeled section called “before-body.tex” where you can place formatted latex. This, however, can cause issues with your pdf generation later on down the road since certain things might duplicate. If you need a preface before the body, for instance, Quarto is not going to care for that since it all ready has ideas about where your preface should go. The same thing is true with an abstract and the “before body“ element does not carry into constructing a website. Therefore, if you want an abstract in your website, you are going to have to make Quarto do some calisthenics it would prefer not to do. (it looks like in hindsight you can also have a before body for the html too although I’m not sure how that works or does not work with .tex files)

A Glossary

During the writing of my book, after some feedback from my wife, I thought it might be nice to have a glossary as per some of her suggestions. Quarto does not support this at the moment, and so I went to support to see if anyone else had had a similar hankering. Imagine my glee in finding this information in the repo with the first issue being mentioned all the way back in August of 2022. Since there had been no update on the milestones, I figured I’d better ask as my book, which was in no small way about the End of Days, was nearing completion. I want to make sure I give you the pictorial version of the reply I got here, so you have an insight into the type of support you might receive if you happen to also want to use Quarto:

Oh no, he just didn’t!! He gave me the ole “My time as a programmer is more important than your time as a user/author and if there is a change you will see it here schtick,” after no discernible info had been contributed since last year. At the time I checked this repo for this article, I did notice that there were exactly 666 issues outstanding, and that just today, in fact, the milestones had been changed from 1.3 to 1.4 for the glossary! I can’t make it up, man. Dude has important things to do as a programmer, and if you just happen to be writing a book about the End of Days, you will JUST HAVE TO WAIT BUDDY! 2025, according to one American General, is gonna be an interesting year. Don’t ask cscheid about any programming for a glossary if that breaks out though! It distracts his mystical Quarto programming flow and he does NOT have time for that! (I will follow up with him about the glossary then if all of our countries are not some composite of nuclear obsidian) He will probably be on milestone 1.6 by then for sure.

All that being said, cscheid is just one member of the Quarto team, and it is highly possible not everyone is an arrogant jerk that is developing Quarto. Being someone who fields the issues of users is not always a fun job either, and so I don’t fault him for that. I do fault him for not following up on my email where I tried to explain myself a little further. He simply wanted to make me look like I was some energetic, enthusiastic cheerleader who was overzealous in public. I may be a lot of things, but enthusiastic cheerleader ain’t one of um. Next time, try updating the news more regularly and maybe users won’t ask you annoying questions.

Having Said All of THAT

I did mostly enjoy using Quarto, and I decided to release the free version of my book using their scaffolding. It was a smooth publishing flow and I could see how academics that don’t know much about web hosting would really enjoy this aspect of Quarto. I simply enjoyed not re-writing or modifying the content to try to achieve some static website semblance that did not violate the basic aesthetic flow of the book or chop up the words in some undesirable way. The pdf output was also pretty easy to engender, although for the title page I had to assemble that AFTER I ran Quarto to produce the entire pdf and use “pdfarranger“ to include a “cover”. There are some Quarto templates out there that say they do this, but I found them to be more trouble than just re-arranging the pdf in this fashion.

So Go Buy the Book

So now you know “How It Was Made.” Go buy the book!

New Edition of My Book

The last time I did a new edition of HTDNW3 (How To Do Nothing Well 3), I had just finished unsuccessfully trying to warn everyone of an impending judgment tied to the medical systems and food supplies and basic collapse of society. Hence, I was at a campground consistent with the plan, re-editing my First Edition in prep for the Second Edition and suddenly COVID broke out in earnest and paralyzed everything. I was not especially surprised to see any of this, since my message of “We should probably all be repenting and living differently” was falling on deaf ears. Covid was a really stupid answer to a very simple lack of giving a shit by people who had heard what I had to say.

I had also written various world leaders before this time telling them of the same basic issue. I bet you can guess how many replies I got back? So, now that I have written the THIRD Edition, I feel a little like the frontman of a “retard parade”. Yeah, I don’t care that it isn’t politically correct. Humanity is being “retarded” which means, in the original version of the word, “growth that is slowed down or arrested”. That is EXACTLY what humanity is doing–and what it is being–on an average day.

So Now the Third Edition

Now I have moved on to the Third Edition, which is more complete. Lest anyone says that I am doing spiritual stuff for money alone, (I’ve heard it before, mostly from people doing spiritual stuff for money alone) I have also put up a version of the book for free on the web. Eventually, as the digital cogs turn, the paper version should appear on all of your favorite terrible booksellers. I say “terrible” because I set the paperback price to 27 dollars which, after every digital store gets done taking their cut, leaves me with about 8 bucks per book for my “original meditation” that I so “graciously allowed” these places to print. (Really, it is about market penetration and signal spread) Edit: Those terrible companies wanted me to change the margin instead of just printing what Latex has all ready made perfectly formatted. Therefore, the book is available for print on demand through the Bookpatch. The digital distribution I am keeping on my end, and you can get the pdf version via crypto or Cashapp since I absolutely hate Stripe and refuse to use them as you can see elsewhere on my site. (Nevermind that I started the Church with their crowdfunding platform that apparently later became “too dangerous” for Stripe’s board of imbeciles) The book is being sold ultimately for the Church itself, since it outlines via the Dead Sea scrolls a disciplined meditation designed to allow a person to have a deeper relationship with Spirit.

Take My Money, I Want Your Book

Great! You are my kind of person. You can march yourself right over here and avail yourself of purchasing options which also includes the web-based free version if you are really cheap and/or poor or are the indecisive sort who wants information but does not want to support the source of it.

But You Don’t Sound Like a Meditation Guy…

I am EXACTLY what a “meditation guy” sounds like. If you tuned into spirits right now, you would find the majority of them are none-too-pleased. Most of them are miffed because humanity simply refuses to pay attention to what it knows it SHOULD be doing. You notice that I used the word “spirits” and not simply “Jesus”. The Holy Spirit is composed of “much more” than just the Christian expectation of the manifestation of spirit. Again, this amounts to trying to assert “control” over matters that God has set into motion. If YHVH decides, on a given day, to turn whatever He so pleases into a Living Being, He can do it. Not everything that He might do this to looks like “Christian Aryan Jesus”. Maybe it looks more Native American. Perhaps it looks Middle Eastern. Perhaps it is African American. Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps. The point to be made is nobody really knows what to expect until they meditate and see what they have waiting for them. Whether it is of Heaven or of Hell, it seems to me that either way, nobody is going to learn much about themselves or anyone else unless they first open up their eyes.

This Is the Part Where

This is the part where I am supposed to say how “Great” it was to write the Third Edition. It was “great”, but was a little like writing while riding a shark inside a tornado surrounded by flying snakes and scorpions. The book was written IN SPITE OF all of these distractions and outright machinations. The best I can say about it is directly to all those who interfered with its writing in the immortal words of Calvin Coolidge in reference to when someone bet him they could get him to say more than three words. His reply? “You Lose!”.

Combine that with some Willy Wonka, “Good Day to you Sir!” and that is really the best summary I can provide.

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time, I was a psychology Major at Murray State University, which has now been relegated to “long ago”. I had a professor by the name of Alisha Ritter who was the resident PHD over introduction to research. Lecturing wise, Dr. Ritter was very polished. When it came to the epistemology of the basics, though, we had some disagreements. Though Dr. Ritter was right from an academic standpoint, she was wrong in a philosophical sense. Since I was on a path that would eventually include what was, in psychology parlance, considered a pseudo-science, the collision was perhaps inevitable. Everybody “knew” that astrology was a sham, and boy, if you did not, you were gonna be in for a tough time. Nevermind that Jung basically used astrology. Nobody talked about him. Freud was quoted in passing. It was really all about Skinner, Skinner, Skinner.

My Research

My research for this intro class concerned Piaget and something called a “conservation task” which in six seconds or less, involves a child being able to understand that liquid placed in a glass of differing sizes does not lead to the vessel of larger size containing more liquid. I made a quiz that tested on two questions a very complicated version of this that dealt with jelly beans in jars. The piece behind the theory Piaget propounded was that all adults could understand the “conservation task” and that there really was not much in the model beyond this stage. My quiz which had a lot of noise showed that this was not so, and there was a lot of other research to indicate the same. As you can see, I indicated these results in about 30 seconds like the above, but later learned that our presentation had a time component built-in to the grading which made people go on and on with graphs and theories that were quite honestly boring and unnecessary. I therefore had to fill time for something requiring no more than 30 seconds to realize and understand.

Dr. Ritter’s Research

Dr. Ritter’s Research is here. As can be seen, there is a lot of information on optics and testing. Visual perception, test validity, and so on. Here is an example abstract:

Although every effort is made to make performance tests comparable, implementing the same test or test battery on a different computer in a different program language can produce only approximately identical tests because of differences in hardware and software. Therefore, comparability of the tests is an empirical as opposed to theoretical issue. The present paper examined a battery of six performance tests implemented on two computers, a NEC laptop programmed in N82-BASIC, and a COMPAQ laptop programmed in TurboC. The asymptotic performance levels differed somewhat, as did the rate of approach to asymptote in some cases. More important, after correction for reliability attenuation, the cross-correlations between the two different implementations of the same test approached unity, which supports the conclusion that what was measured after the tests had stabilized was identical for the two different hardware and software configurations. Furthermore, comparison of intercorrelations among tests on the different computers showed no significant differences, which suggests that the factorial structure is the same.

Wow! That sounds fancy! In laymen’s terms, it means if you make a test in two different computer languages, the measured performance on the tests by the subjects is only somewhat the same but that whatever it is the thing measured is the same if you use a very fancy statistical technique for “reliability attenuation”. This reliability attenuation of course assumes that something can be reliable when you measure it (Whatever that is). So what we have learned is we measured something, whatever it is, which, when we use a fancy version of statistics, we are told that this something is the same thing and that whatever this nebulous thing is, changing computer languages and software and hardware makes people perform differently. (Isn’t this just variability?) Remember, Dr. Ritter is a PHD and gets paid lots of money for this research and to teach intro to research. Therefore, as someone who is not a University PHD in psychology and does not get paid large sums of cash and only got a C in her research methods class on his presentation, what I am about to say about a pseudo science which everyone knows is false is probably rubbish at best, and silly and supernatural at worst. Here goes: In astrology, when you have constellations in two different languages or cultures, the results are only approximately the same. However, if you throw out the differences and go with the Hebrew Mazzaroth as the “master template” the results are Unity. Here is the step beyond the above: what was measured by method of constellations were, on some level, units of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Here is what’s more, performance on the tests conducted by Dr. Ritter above, are what we might, to borrow terminology from Ken Wilber, metrics of expected performance of apperception of the holons defined as performant by the constraints of the computer systems and human comprehension. The only thing measurable here potentially is “Signal” which we might also term “compliance”. Confused? Let me make it easy.

The Glyph of Pluto

Everyone knows this is the Glyph of Pluto right? Lord of the Underworld. Has a boat and a guy who boats. Responsible for keys and agriculture. Further research on the glyph indicates that he has two prongs because of his “bident” which is a sacrificial implement. One problem, that’s all Greek, and why does he have a little circle which looks like a head? Neptune, which is defined as a trident has no little circle as a head. Furthermore, it looks like he has his arms up around a head and a little cross for a body. This sounds like something else. What does it sound like? Well, I am glad you asked. It sounds like Moses.

Why Moses?

Moses held up his arms during the time that Israel was in a battle.

Moses said to Joshua, “Choose some of our men and go out to fight the Amalekites. Tomorrow I will stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hands.”
So Joshua fought the Amalekites as Moses had ordered, and Moses, Aaron and Hur went to the top of the hill.
As long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning, but whenever he lowered his hands, the Amalekites were winning.
When Moses’ hands grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up–one on one side, one on the other–so that his hands remained steady till sunset.
So Joshua overcame the Amalekite army with the sword.
Then the LORD said to Moses, “Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it, because I will completely blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.”
Moses built an altar and called it The LORD is my Banner.
He said, “For hands were lifted up to the throne of the LORD. The LORD will be at war against the Amalekites from generation to generation.”

All of these pieces of mythology sound like the glyph of Pluto. Power, battle, Moses’s face had been transformed before. Prior to all this Moses lived in Egypt the land of Alchemy or science of transformations. So it seems like someone might have MEANT to make the glyph of Pluto be a “bident” but instead they wound up accidentally pulling in a different archetype and wrapping it up in pagan influences.

“But wait,” I hear you cry out. “Moses was after all the giant stuff, so like, isn’t Pluto totally the first thing since it is probably some weirdo Greek giant worship?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I cooly reply and sip on my Capri sun. “The giants were not supposed to be here in the first place, as they had disobeyed YHVH as fallen angels.”

Therefore, the keeper of the archetype of Pluto, is, in any regard, Moses. Any other version was “stolen” and stolen power always gets someone in trouble since ultimately the thievery is against the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

What Makes Moses Different

As badass as Moses is, (can you even call Moses a badass?) he has to have help to wield the power he is holding. He gets tired. He needs to sit down, and a couple of guys need to come in and help him hold up his arms. Despite the fact Moses is holding immense power, he still needs help. If Israel had just said, “Well, Moses talks to God face to face, so I think he’s got this,” the conclusion is “Bad things would have happened that day”.

Back To My Psychology Professor

If you relate to the different astrology systems as different computer programming and hardware, then you can see that the results of what I am here outlining are exactly the same as the computer analog except the difference is that whereas the scientific explanation cannot go beyond and say what it is in fact measuring–the above certainly can. Since the only thing that can be measured in terms of performance is the expectation of what constitutes performance then the only thing that can be measured is what “good performance is”. This is signal defined by consensus. Since comprehension is first a God-given ability, then the conclusion is that whatever is measured will be some mirror of this gift although the definition might be far from what is since the methodology being used in science is “blind” to any source. This makes people do weird things such as make many charts and graphs with long presentations to explain something that should be fairly simple when fully grasped. Something like, “Hey, did you know if I make the same test and use two different computer languages and different computers I get different results from people in a surprising kind of way?” becomes all that you see in the abstract. The reply to why this is so is simple with the methods I indicate above: Those results are explainable in terms of the signaling apparatus that you are using. Computers are different brands and are made differently, and all these factors contribute to how a consciousness parses a given reality at a given moment. Different languages also introduce subtle differences in programs, just as they do where words and definitions are concerned.

How I Solved My Psychology Woes

I decided, not long after all my experiences in psychology, that I would instead go into Internet Technology as I needed something that could be said to categorically either function or not. Ironically, it was a more objective field than psychology and the subjectivism about what made a good psychologist in an academic sense was driving me crazy, also somewhat ironically. In a network, the signal is understood in that the network either provides required information, or lacks it. Though there was still room for opinions about what consisted of things like “Security” the basics were there. I was a much happier person doing this, although it was more like learning a trade. I just was not cut out for making long papers with many graphs describing things better understood through the lens of zen. It was not my dharma. The dharma of the blind/woman with a stick making long presentations though, was, without a doubt, far more laden with grants, riches, and honors. Of course, doing all that would have been equivalent to giving Pluto all the credit.

What Is the Mazzaroth?

In keeping with my blog and “the year of the internet as the way it was with some crypto thrown in due to evil payment processors”, I am going toss in some links to other useful sites in addition to webrings. (these will appear at the top of the page) For you youngins out there, back in the beforetime of the internet, the search engines could find a given page, but were very bad at finding related material. Your best bet was to use the search engine to stumble into a given webpage, and then examine the links on that site to find other interesting items. The advantage of this method was that you were guaranteed a human being had read the material and probably interacted with the other human beings to which the material linked in some meaningful way. This allowed human beings to do what human beings do best–that is determine and interpret context for other human beings–and robots do what robots do best–which is mindlessly indexing seemingly thousands of unrelated stacks of information produced by human beings. At no point did robots index pages made by robots to sell marketing and ads. That was some Blade Runner crap, which was watched as Dystopian Fiction for amusement and cautionary tales. However, I digress. I’m here to focus on the Mazzaroth today, not the web of old–or AM I? (That’s a not very subtle segue) What’s that you say? Why, I am glad you asked, intrepid scholar! It is the night sky as interpreted by Hebrew people.

The Night Sky

The Night Sky, in no small way, forms the psychic culture of a collective people. The constellations have stories shared by the collective consciousness, and this in turn links to understandings of divinity and in the monotheistic culture of Hebrew people, YHVH. Modern Christians have lost this understanding because they have tried to “saw off” the Hebrew parts in favor of a Pauline doctrine that “does away with” Torah in an Old Testament variety. Since there is no way to understand the night sky and that “Signs” are posted there by YHVH, they can only view the Mazzaroth as being a subset of witchcraft or fortune-telling which is ironic since by doing that they are casting themselves as only understanding Hebrew culture as witches and fortune-tellers. To be sure, Hebrew culture contains witches and fortune-tellers, but what makes the culture specific in the Torah is that those things are forbidden and punished. Hence, the only way to view the night sky and interpret what it has to say without getting into trouble is to neither be a witch nor a fortune-teller. The word used that I think fits best is an old one which is “seer”, although that word later got updated to “prophet”. The Night Sky was the very first “internet” with related “pages” and “links” and had its own “usenet/bulletin board”. The study of this sky linked to other matters like letters and numbers and together formed an entire understanding of the culture.

My Study of the Mazzaroth

My own study of the Mazzaroth is not as deep as I would have preferred for it to be. Most often when I wear my astrologer hat, I have to jump through other cultures’ views on the heavens, and so I have to be able to translate “between” systems. If you have ever seen the movie inception where there is a dream in a dream in a dream, it is a little like that. The Mazzaroth, however, is the “master template” since it comes from the one True God. Why do I say that? I say that mostly because I have had long enough to study to know it. That is not to say that other views of the heavens are “not correct”. It is to say if someone wants to understand those other views there is only one view by which they will completely comprehend the nature of them.

Where One Scholar Leaves Off

Fortunately, although my own studies have often been interrupted or else necessarily linked to some other part of wandering Israel, there does exist a site that does a good job of explaining the Mazzaroth and its connections. Over at Robert William’s site there is a great foundation in Mazzaroth study. The constellations he has are linked to the letters, which in turn are linked to tribes. Mr. William’s site also gets into the complementary signs and how they link to prophecy. So, for instance, in a common astrology chart the sign of Leo is linked to the sign of Aquarius in that they are opposite signs. However, the sun has the “shadow” of the sign opposite it. So in the system outlined on Mr. William’s page, Deli is linked to Aryeh which are Leo and Aquarius respectively. If you look at the letters he has associated with the signs, you will notice some other connections that relate to Bible stories. You might, for instance, say that the letter for Aryeh looks a little like a sperm or a seed, and that the letter for Deli looks a little like a whale. Therefore, you might conclude that the “righteous seed of Jonah” will make a people who “repent” as a collective. “Aquarius”. You might also conclude that the use of the “fertile powers of the sun in the wrong way” might be something that has to be repented for should the “Sign of Jonah” appear in the sky. (An eclipse) In addition to all this, he has a beautiful poster (which I hope to be able to purchase) with all this information contained on it for a very reasonable price. Here is an image of it:

The Power of Interpretation

The power of interpretation changes radically when you have the ability to see what the “grand design” of any given tribe is supposed to be doing. You can then begin to figure out in other mythologies of the night sky what people are going to do relative to that movement. Therefore, in the above, we might say that Judah (leo) and Joseph(aquarius) are supposed to be heading the virgin that appeared after the solar eclipse such that sexual desire is used appropriately or “fruit-fullness” is put into proper perspective. How then do pagans see fruitfulness? Well, they might try to do some “not Torah authorized sexual ritual” that will produce health issues for them, for instance. In Polynesian cultures if the land was not yielding they would find a virgin sacrifice to throw into the volcano as an appeasement. Therefore, a burned offering was made. None of that is legal in the sense of Torah, of course, which is why those traditions are “pagan”. Human sacrifice post the Messiah is off the table. There is no “bigger” appeasement to be made or offered.

So, Go Buy His Poster!

Go support Mr. Williams and his research and buy his poster! Also, if you are interested in natal interpretation in the manner I have outlined above, well, I am not hard to find. (or maybe I am if you are trying to find me with robots) It will not be a cheap session, though, since I will likely have to interpret three natal charts at once–the psychological or tropical–the vedic or sidereal–and finally the Mazzaroth and how it links. If, on the other hand, you are pagan, well, that chart is cheaper in the sense that I do not have to interpret the chart AS MUCH, but the cost to you personally in your life rises so really, I suppose it balances out.

Akashic Records and Blockchains

If serendipity could be defined as the ability to find increasingly weird shit with relative ease, then I would say I am quite serendipitous. Shortly after writing my previous post, I stumbled onto a well-written blog by a fellow who I assume is named Luke Smith. If that’s not his name, he really missed out on being named that from a marketing/domain standpoint. (the domain is lukesmith.xyz). In his article he does two things I want to bring up here since I previously made a post about a similar theme.

From his article:

In the late 1800’s, there emerged a group of spiritualists and scammers called Theosophists, principally followers of the eccentric Helena Blavatsky.

This New Age religion was a mishmash of perennialism and invented secret eastern teachings (which Blavatsky claimed to have learned in a fabricated part of her life in Tibet), with significant parallels with other universalist sects like Freemasonry. It was one of the many spiritual vultures preying on the spiritually empty as the power of Christendom waned.

The Akashic Records were their idea of a cosmic repository of all reality, past, present and future. They contain every event of the universe from all past and all future. Theosophist psychics tried to “tap into” these records to attain universal and specific knowledge.

This information is correct to the extent that it describes the concept of the Akashic records. I would not be prepared to say that Blavatsky was a parasite/vulture, but I would be prepared to say that she definitely mired herself into some occult practices that did not turn out well, and that’s putting it lightly. The Freemasons mostly were re-utilizing the knowledge found most likely under the Temple mount in Israel in dubious ways and so were, ironically, using the “actual records” of how to build a temple from the library of Jerusalem. In both cases, there is an attempted utilization of knowledge, which in both scenarios seems to bring about more trouble than it solves.

The Akashic Records, though, are more complex than being simply a repository. Rather, a better way to think of them is like a hologram that records all the deeds of a thing in real time and can be played back from a first person perspective in total immersion. This becomes an important part of the definition for the next part of his article that I am going to quote:

…blockchains, as they come to maturity, are functioning as Akashic Records of our own invention.

Bitcoin’s blockchain is a necessarily public ledger of all past transactions, the origin of their funds, the wallets they interact with and more. People often erroneously think that the “crypto” in cryptocurrency means that information about it is somehow “cryptic” or hidden, but this is just ignorance.

Bitcoin is substantially worse for privacy than even the most corporate credit cards, since even then credit cards don’t broadcast your transactions publicly on the internet as bitcoin must do for all submitted transactions.

As time has gone on and projects such has Ethereum have developed, blockchain technology is employing these public ledgers for an ever wide range of tasks: decentralized computing, contracting and much more…

If blockchains continue developing as they are, they will gradually record and make publicly available every transaction, action and for that matter—idle word of every human. There are projects and coins for every segment of digital life, including storing and accessing files, watching videos, interacting with the internet of things and more. A combination of greed, stupidity and neophilia are leading us to disaster world that might not be able to be undone.

Here the definition is separated from the function. One could say, for instance, that the World Wide Web is serving the same function as blockchains and that blockchains are, if anything at the moment, the re-imagining of that space with the hope of eliminating the middlemen corporations that polluted the first/second version of the web.

So, I think Mr. Smith misses the most important threat of the blockchain for the purposes of religious alarm–it is not so much that it can function as an Akashic record–but rather that it can serve as something that provides a digital identity.

Identity

The identity proves to be key from the standpoint of the Bible because there are passages where the Messiah will turn people away and say “I never knew you.” This is a matter of identity which is what Peter did by denying he was a disciple and most often the disciple who appears in chains is Peter. (blockchain anyone?) Indeed, we all ready have experienced a situation where all of our deeds are on the web in the electronic sense which was part of what the Snowden revelations were disclosing–the extent to which that data is being used to try to persuade and control the population at large. So if anything, the blockchain could be used to exert an influence that causes people to deny the Messiah and therefore God which, eventually, can lead to a change in identity as a believer or as someone who was “saved” from the system that is doomed to destruction. Combine this with the idea of some manner of Musk-esque brain neural interface, and one can see why the blockchain could become a real problem. The original internet did not concern itself with the concept of money AS SUCH. It was more a vast library of weirdness. This next version though, intends to make sure commerce is woven into the fabric of its being. On the one hand, this could allow unparalleled freedom economically since it eliminates banks. On the other hand, anything digital can be controlled if someone wants to exert enough processing power.

The Rest of the Article

The rest of the post is spot on:

Transhumanists, as their name suggests, ultimately believe in what they might glowingly describe as humans “transcending their biology and psychology” or other cloudy terms. In reality, these people are pining for the death of humanity, or as some absurdly put it, “human civilization surviving [sic] in human-created AI.”
This is actually the best case scenario of ‘transhumanism.’ If you think this comic is weird, wait until there are Matrix-style warehouses of pod-people hooked up to auto-masturbators. Acutally, you’ll realize in some senses, they’re already here.

They imagine husks of biological humanity, perfectly climate-controlled by vaccines, “augmentations,” and directly-injected stimulation and entertainment, embedded in a casket of metal for their entire lives. They imagine human-created robots, then totally de-tethered from their creators, exploring the universe and installing robot colonies on distant planets. In some perverted way, they call this genocidal conquest of humanity humanity itself, or humanity “improved.”

Yes, this is the goal for certain in one way or another. All of the discussion about “gender politics” and the like is part of that agenda. The Nephilm/giants did not have gender in a normal sense, since they were angels that fell to Earth. Because they did not belong here, they had grotesque bodies and when they bred, it caused the acting mother most often to die in labor. Because they did not come from here, they developed all manner of appetites and desires that were unnatural, and wound up becoming tyrant kings/queens that usually ate people or enslaved them or both.

All of these devices above are trying to “knock the soul out of” humanity, so these forces can run slip-shod over top of it and convert it to worshiping some image of humanity that is false. Mostly, it is using fear to try to bring this into play. Covid vaccines, for instance, hardly had anything to do with science and had much more to do with providing people a sense of perceived safety up until they started dropping dead of heart attacks. I suppose killing people does, at some point, stop a pandemic. However, people can just inject themselves with bleach and accomplish that end probably just as effectively.

A final concluding point from his article is worthy also of mentioning:

The reason that people like Richard Stallman continue ending up sounding prophetic about the dangerous of proprietary software is because they are serious enough to realize that programming is the closest mankind has ever come to wizardry and dark arts. With such supreme power and with such a lack of oversight (either by writing closed-source code or otherwise), even the most noble programmer can be easily seduced into flexing their Will-to-Power to do the absurd.

Not quite, but I am picking up what Mr. Smith is putting down. Stallman, it will be remembered, was in tight with MIT and trying to figure out if something might be wrong with pedophilia. So, Mr. Smith has the cart before the horse. Stallman was a programmer of some renown because he was all ready playing with people who were doing much darker things than programming could conjure. He was allowed to play with computers and develop technology to inspire other would-be magicians on down the road but of course he did have a moral awakening that maybe schtupping children is a “bad idea”. It is worth remembering also that the computer revolution really took off because of the Los Alamos scientists and countless cryptographers during World War II proved that computation could do impressive things–like cook your adversaries like a bowl of soup in a microwave–or break and reveal their confidential plans to destroy your country. Alarmingly, Stallman also happened to be a brilliant programmer. Sometimes intellectual giftedness comes with deeply benighted morality.

Wrapping Up

If one wants to blow the alarm on technology like the blockchain, one needs to understand the threat it presents, and how it is different than the web before. There is a one-off line Mr. Smith tosses into the mix concerning transhumanism:

This is the Gnostic Heresy reborn, but worse than original Gnostics, who at least believed in the structure beyond matter, and who consistently denigrated matter compared to it. These new Gnostics believe in creating this realm of ideas, but destroying and mutilating the human mind and body that they believe to be the very metric of value of this new realm. In a literal sense, they want to destroy nature, mankind and the universe as they know it.

No, no, it is not. Most Gnostic heresies end in the death of the Gnostics at the hands of some other institution that most often rhymes with the phrase “Catholic Church”. Those Gnostics most often die because they conclude this world is evil, and it is hard to argue against them. When Satan shows up to kill them, their attitude is usually “Thank goodness!” Satanic Gnostics, on the other hand, are more what Mr. Smith means and there is a drastic difference. Knowledge can come from the Messiah, or it can come from Satan. This is why one must be “wise as serpents and as gentle as doves.” The technology people are not especially wise, and definitely not gentle as doves. They are, however, very cunning as a general rule and are “increasing knowledge” just as it was foretold would happen before the “end of days”. That doesn’t mean, however, that I approve of them or wanna hang out with them and swap bitcoins or something. We are on different teams in important regards and anyone who is against that team ought to damn well be on mine.

New Technologies

Some time ago I implemented Coil on this site. If you have not heard of Coil, and odds are you have not, you will understand why I am not using it on the site now. The idea behind it, however, was good. Monetizing content creators or independent authors is what it is supposed to do, but requires a “buy-in” of five dollars monthly. Since I have had months where five dollars was the difference between making rent or missing it, and because there was not wide adoption of Coil, I stopped using it. Lightning, however, is a blockchain that does not require a “buy-in” and allows a set amount to “flow out to” websites a person wants to support at a given rate using website plugin crypto wallets like Alby. Since no one hardly used the previous donate link in a traditional sense to help support content that appears on this blog, I got rid of it. I added a webring link instead in a homage to “old school” blogging, where one kept track of others who wrote by belonging to groups where the notices of new posts and comments were “tight”. Both of these measures are in strong support of “The Independent Web”.

IndieAuth Blogs

Also, this blog has a lot more capability than I have previously utilized, because I am somewhat “less social” than most technology users are. I got rid of Facebook some time ago and never really enjoyed it or Myspace that much with which to start. Twitter was a non-starter for me at inception, since I prefer longer communications that require a person to focus.

I strongly feel and believe that authors and users should own their own information. Meta-data harvesting and selling ought to be a criminal enterprise. So, this blog has features that allow it to participate in the “indieweb” which means that it can act as something like a hub for any communication I decide to allow it to. A big part of that participation is called a “webmention” which is analogous to the “pingbacks” of yesteryear. Mostly, they notify you when someone has linked to your post, and they allow you to display whatever was linked on your page. So, if someone webmentions you in a Twitter post, suddenly you will receive a notification about it on the appropriate post. In academia this is a little like “citing the source” and is desirable when someone is quoting something you have said. That way, you can go on Twitter or wherever it was said, and have a “flame war” where nobody agrees and everybody leaves sad and upset. Yes, I jest, but remember, this IS the internet everybody made!

Geek Technical Stuff

In order to enable webmentions, I had to do some digging about as my site is statically generated. This great post over at Fundor 333’s helped me out although it left off the important part about including the partial in the webcontent thusly: {{ partial "webmentions.html" . }} I am not really sure if that small period is always required, but I know it was for my specific template in a file called single.html located in a _default folder. It is important to remember to copy this file and mirror it outside the theme file within a Hugo directory structure since anything outside of the theme that mimics its form will override the default. Also, the webmentions.min.js file had to go in the public directory for the sake of Gitlab. That took a little while to figure out.

Alby, on the other hand, was as simple as adding a header tag and enabling it. So that wasn’t too bad.

Technology Prophecy Stuff

Implementing all of this made me have to question what technology I think others are likely to use and how it might work with this little blog. Everything is always such a frothing sea of change in technology that it feels a little like going to Vegas and playing the slots. The goal, of course, is to be able to receive some kind of money for content that is all ready developed and that others believe is good enough to read. This enables future content to be generated on a “I can develop content and also make enough pocket change to continue to do so”. If that isn’t doable then at least being a part of some kind of community of people who are fighting for that future ought to provide some kind of emotional payoff. After all, altruism usually at least gives you that “warm, fuzzy, feeling” right?

In thinking about the technology and how I am never sure it is moving us toward a “better world” I was reminded of the Hopi Prophecy but especially of a couple of lines that talk about how an individual will be able to tell the end is near:

“This is the Fourth Sign: The land will be crossed by snakes of iron. (Railroad Tracks)

“This is the Fifth Sign: The land shall be crisscrossed by a giant spider’s web. (Electric power and telephone lines)

source: https://wolfruck.com/the-nine-signs-of-white-feather-hopi-prophecy/

Helpful parenthetical to the contrary, the second clue could easily be referring to the internet as opposed to electric power and telephone lines alone. It is, after all, called a “web”.

Any of the above technologies can and all ready have been used to make the life of human beings worse. Bitcoin may seem great because it is not regulated, but if it did in fact become regulated, it could be something used as a Mark of the Beast in a way paper money never could. The same thing is true of the internet. It has been seen as a fun little playground of information for some time, but it also has been in the middle of election frauds and domestic surveillance. A technological savior in a moment is, at another moment, a cruel, tyrannical despot.

So I guess you could say, I am beyond the “I’m so excited for this technology and hopeful” and more at the “How are we also going to mess this up” stage of technology. However, I think it wise to prepare for things going better than one anticipates in addition to not being surprised at the worst case scenario. If there has been anything being in tech and humanity and around Prophetic utterances has taught me, it must be that people are mostly a bi-polar, suicidal lot that think that there is ultimately no consequence for their actions until it is far, far too late. By the point everyone is appropriately sorry, there is all ready enough trauma to keep therapists in luxury cars and boats for years. Of course, that assumes that whatever happens leaves some therapists around. The kind of trauma we appear to be moving toward is the kind that leaves a psychic, collective scar in the soul memory for eons. But hey, at least we had “digital money” and “Webrings” right?

Dogs

For much of my life, I had a dog or dogs. Only recently, within the past ten years or so, have I been dog free. Having dogs, I think, requires one to have certain guarantees in life. You need a yard with a fence. You need potential dog sitters. You need the right kinds of food. You also are going to require a lot of vet trips. My life does not meet these parameters at this point, and so therefore I do not have a dog. I only mention this so that when I start speaking about Sirius, the “Dog Star” momentarily, everyone will know it is not because JB hates dogs or something.

Sirius

The Bible tells believers to “come out of Egypt”. This phrase originally meant the actual country of Egypt, but subsequently it means the mentality and spirituality of Egypt since it is and was a place of spiritual bondage. In the lineages traced in the Bible, we find that Mitzraim, or Egypt, is a son of Ham, and we all know what happened with Ham and Noah–he “saw” his father’s nakedness while his father was inebriated. This caused Noah to curse him from that day forward. Therefore, we can understand Egypt as a place that culminated and concentrated this curse such that Pharaoh and Egypt were torn apart by God. So, it is imperative that if we do not wish to share in some nasty Egyptian curse that we “come out of it” as much as possible. Indeed, this is so whether one believes or does not believe. If not, ask yourself the question if you are not in Egypt why you should not get up and move there today!

The Star Sirius, in Egypt, was a “Big deal”. As a matter of fact, it was such a big deal, everybody wanted to know when it was going to rise helical–that is before the sun–because this signaled that the Nile was about to flood. If you lived in a lower region, you better haul your Egyptian ass elsewhere with haste!

But that was the only reason Egypt tracked this star.

Sirius Association (or, This is Why so Serious)

Other cultures regarded Sirius and Egypt saw it with many of these associations in addition. Traditionally, the Egyptian view of the Dog Star were the “Dog Days of Summer” but a little research shows us there is more:

SEIRIOS (Sirius) was the god or goddess of the Dog-Star, the brightest star of the constellation Canis Major. The pre-dawn rising of the star in the path of the sun was believed to be the source of the scorching heat and droughts of midsummer.

Seirios appears in many guises in myth. He or she was variously described as Maira (Maera) daughter of the Titan Atlas, Maira the dog of the hero Ikarios (Icarius), Lailaps (Laelaps) the hound of Orion, and Kyon Khryseos the golden-hound of Zeus. It may also have been associated with Orthros (“Morning Twilight”) the hound of Geryon, giant of the west. The star was no doubt also connected with the dog-loving goddess Hekate who was the daughter of Perses “the Destroyer” and Asteria “the Starry One.”

ALTERNATE NAMES
Greek Name

Αστηρ Κυον
Transliteration

Astêr Kyon
Latin Spelling

Aster Cyon
Translation

The Dog Star
CLASSICAL LITERATURE QUOTES
THE DOG-STAR SIRIUS APPEASED BY ARISTAEUS

Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2. 518 ff (trans. Rieu) (Greek epic C3rd B.C.) :
“Seirios (Sirius) was scorching the Minoan Islands from the sky, and the people could find no permanent cure for the trouble till Hekatos (Hecatus) [Apollon] put it in their heads to send for Aristaios (Aristaeus). So, as his father’s [Apollon’s] command, Aristaios assembled the Parrhasian tribe, who are descendants of Lykaon (Lycaon), left Phthia, and settled in Keos (Ceos). He raised a great altar to Zeus Ikmaios (the Rain-God) and made ritual offerings in the hills to the Dog-star and to Zeus Kronides himself. In response, Zeus gave his orders–and the Etesiai (Etesian Winds) refresh the earth for forty days. The priests of Keos still make yearly sacrifice before the rising of the Kyon (Dog).”

Callimachus, Aetia Fragment 3. 1 (from Oxyrhynchus Papyri 7) (trans. Trypanis) (Greek poet C3rd B.C.) :
“The [Kean (Cean)] priests of Zeus Aristaios Ikmaios (Aristaeus Icmaeus, the Lord of Moisture) : priests whose business it is upon the mountain-tops to assuage stern Maira (Maera) [Seirios (Sirius)] when she rises.”

Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 4. 81. 1 (trans. Oldfather) (Greek historian C1st B.C.) :
“A plague [i.e. a pestilence arising in a time of drought] prevailed throughout Greece the sacrifice he offered there was on behalf of all the Greeks. And since the sacrifice was made at the time of the rising of the star Seirios (Sirius), which is the period when the Etesian winds customarily blow, the pestilential diseases, we are told, came to an end. Now the man who ponders upon this event may reasonably marvel at the strange turn which fortune took; for the same man [Aristaios (Aristaeus)] who saw his son [Aktaion (Actaeon)] done to death by the dogs likewise put an end to the influence of the star which, of all the stars of heaven, bears the same name [i.e. Seirios (Sirius) was known as the dog-star] and is thought to bring destruction upon mankind, and by so doing was responsible for saving the lives of the rest.”

SEIRIOS (Sirius) was the god or goddess of the Dog-Star, the brightest star of the constellation Canis Major. The pre-dawn rising of the star in the path of the sun was believed to be the source of the scorching heat and droughts of midsummer.

Seirios appears in many guises in myth. He or she was variously described as Maira (Maera) daughter of the Titan Atlas, Maira the dog of the hero Ikarios (Icarius), Lailaps (Laelaps) the hound of Orion, and Kyon Khryseos the golden-hound of Zeus. It may also have been associated with Orthros (“Morning Twilight”) the hound of Geryon, giant of the west. The star was no doubt also connected with the dog-loving goddess Hekate who was the daughter of Perses “the Destroyer” and Asteria “the Starry One.”

The Dog Star
CLASSICAL LITERATURE QUOTES
THE DOG-STAR SIRIUS APPEASED BY ARISTAEUS

Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2. 518 ff (trans. Rieu) (Greek epic C3rd B.C.) :
“Seirios (Sirius) was scorching the Minoan Islands from the sky, and the people could find no permanent cure for the trouble till Hekatos (Hecatus) [Apollon] put it in their heads to send for Aristaios (Aristaeus). So, as his father’s [Apollon’s] command, Aristaios assembled the Parrhasian tribe, who are descendants of Lykaon (Lycaon), left Phthia, and settled in Keos (Ceos). He raised a great altar to Zeus Ikmaios (the Rain-God) and made ritual offerings in the hills to the Dog-star and to Zeus Kronides himself. In response, Zeus gave his orders–and the Etesiai (Etesian Winds) refresh the earth for forty days. The priests of Keos still make yearly sacrifice before the rising of the Kyon (Dog).”

Callimachus, Aetia Fragment 3. 1 (from Oxyrhynchus Papyri 7) (trans. Trypanis) (Greek poet C3rd B.C.) :
“The [Kean (Cean)] priests of Zeus Aristaios Ikmaios (Aristaeus Icmaeus, the Lord of Moisture) : priests whose business it is upon the mountain-tops to assuage stern Maira (Maera) [Seirios (Sirius)] when she rises.”

Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 4. 81. 1 (trans. Oldfather) (Greek historian C1st B.C.) :
“A plague [i.e. a pestilence arising in a time of drought] prevailed throughout Greece the sacrifice he offered there was on behalf of all the Greeks. And since the sacrifice was made at the time of the rising of the star Seirios (Sirius), which is the period when the Etesian winds customarily blow, the pestilential diseases, we are told, came to an end. Now the man who ponders upon this event may reasonably marvel at the strange turn which fortune took; for the same man [Aristaios (Aristaeus)] who saw his son [Aktaion (Actaeon)] done to death by the dogs likewise put an end to the influence of the star which, of all the stars of heaven, bears the same name [i.e. Seirios (Sirius) was known as the dog-star] and is thought to bring destruction upon mankind, and by so doing was responsible for saving the lives of the rest.”

Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 4 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
“Icarus [of Attika (Attica)] received the wine from Father Liber [Dionysos] . . . when he showed it to the shepherds . . . some of them, became stupefied, and sprawling here and there, as if half-dead, kept uttering unseemly things. The others, thinking poison had been given the shepherds by Icarus . . . killed him, and threw him into a well, or, as others say, buried him near a certain tree. However, when those who had fallen asleep, woke up, saying that hey had never rested better, and kept asking for Icarus in order to reward him, his murderers, stirred by conscience, at once took to flight and came to the island of the Ceans. Received there as guests, they established homes for themselves . . . But when Erigone, the daughter of Icarus, moved by longing for her father, saw he did not return and was on the point of going out to hunt for him, the dog of Icarus, Maera by name, returned to her, howling as if lamenting the death of its master . . . [and] taking hold of her dress with its teeth, led her to the body. As soon as the girl saw it, abandoning hope, and overcome with loneliness and poverty, with many tearful lamentations she brought death on herself by hanging from the very tree beneath which her father was buried. And the dog made atonement for her death by its own life. Some say that it cast itself into the well, Anigrus by name. For this reason they repeat the story that no one afterward drank from that well. Jupiter [Zeus], pitying their misfortune, represented their forms among the stars . . . The dog, however, from its own name and likeness, they have called Canicula. It is called Procyon by the Greeks, because it rises before the greater Dog. Others say these were pictured among the stars by Father Liber [Dionysos].

[The constellation] Canicula rising with its heat, scorched the land of the Ceans, and robbed their fields of produce, and caused the inhabitants, since they had welcomed the bandits to be plagued by sickness, and to pay the penalty to Icarus with suffering. Their king, Aristaeus, son of Apollo and Cyrene, and father of Actaeon, asked his father by what means he could free the state from affliction. The god bade them expiate the death of Icarus with many victims, and asked from Jove that when Canicula rises he should send wind for forty days to temper thee heat of Canicula. This command Arsitaeus carried out, and obtained from Jove [Zeus] the favour that the Etesian winds should blow.”

Nonnus, Dionysiaca 13. 253 ff (trans. Rouse) (Greek epic C5th A.D.) :
“He [Aristaios (Aristaeus)] had not yet migrated to the island formerly called Meropis [Kos (Cos)] : he had not yet brought there the lifebreathing wind of Zeus the Defender [the Etesian Winds], and checked the fiery vapour of the parched season; he had not stood steelclad to receive the glare of Seirios (Sirius), and all night long repelled and clamed the star’s fiery heat–and even now the winds cool him with light puffs, as he lances his hot parching fire through the air from glowing throat.”Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 4 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
“Icarus [of Attika (Attica)] received the wine from Father Liber [Dionysos] . . . when he showed it to the shepherds . . . some of them, became stupefied, and sprawling here and there, as if half-dead, kept uttering unseemly things. The others, thinking poison had been given the shepherds by Icarus . . . killed him, and threw him into a well, or, as others say, buried him near a certain tree. However, when those who had fallen asleep, woke up, saying that hey had never rested better, and kept asking for Icarus in order to reward him, his murderers, stirred by conscience, at once took to flight and came to the island of the Ceans. Received there as guests, they established homes for themselves . . . But when Erigone, the daughter of Icarus, moved by longing for her father, saw he did not return and was on the point of going out to hunt for him, the dog of Icarus, Maera by name, returned to her, howling as if lamenting the death of its master . . . [and] taking hold of her dress with its teeth, led her to the body. As soon as the girl saw it, abandoning hope, and overcome with loneliness and poverty, with many tearful lamentations she brought death on herself by hanging from the very tree beneath which her father was buried. And the dog made atonement for her death by its own life. Some say that it cast itself into the well, Anigrus by name. For this reason they repeat the story that no one afterward drank from that well. Jupiter [Zeus], pitying their misfortune, represented their forms among the stars . . . The dog, however, from its own name and likeness, they have called Canicula. It is called Procyon by the Greeks, because it rises before the greater Dog. Others say these were pictured among the stars by Father Liber [Dionysos].

[The constellation] Canicula rising with its heat, scorched the land of the Ceans, and robbed their fields of produce, and caused the inhabitants, since they had welcomed the bandits to be plagued by sickness, and to pay the penalty to Icarus with suffering. Their king, Aristaeus, son of Apollo and Cyrene, and father of Actaeon, asked his father by what means he could free the state from affliction. The god bade them expiate the death of Icarus with many victims, and asked from Jove that when Canicula rises he should send wind for forty days to temper thee heat of Canicula. This command Arsitaeus carried out, and obtained from Jove [Zeus] the favour that the Etesian winds should blow.”

Nonnus, Dionysiaca 13. 253 ff (trans. Rouse) (Greek epic C5th A.D.) :
“He [Aristaios (Aristaeus)] had not yet migrated to the island formerly called Meropis [Kos (Cos)] : he had not yet brought there the lifebreathing wind of Zeus the Defender [the Etesian Winds], and checked the fiery vapour of the parched season; he had not stood steelclad to receive the glare of Seirios (Sirius), and all night long repelled and clamed the star’s fiery heat–and even now the winds cool him with light puffs, as he lances his hot parching fire through the air from glowing throat.”

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20220903001207/https://www.theoi.com/Titan/AsterSeirios.html

Hot Dog!

That was a lot of reading, was it not? There was a whole lotta Zeus, and fevers, and death, and water and…oh yeah, that’s all a bunch of pagan witchcraft stuff. The implication of that, of course, is that on some level Egypt liked pestilence and witchcraft stuff, right up until the tables were turned on them and they did not. Biblically speaking, we hear a little about dogs licking up the blood of Jezebel. So, the conditionals essentially hold. We know that Zeus was considered to be the “abomination that brings desolation” or at least the worship of him through swine, and we even get to see the Angel of the Pit in there make some recommendations! I mean, what could go wrong with any of that?

Sirius and Royalty and Other Annoying Assertions

Many astrology books like to put Sirius up as being a star of kings or something probably equating the money that it ties to from previous associations with medicine and the flooding of the Nile. This is categorically a mistake. If you want to deal with a Royal Star tied to gold, you would been looking at the constellation of Leo with a star like Regulus or another star in Leo that is modernly referred to as “alpha”. What you would not pick is some weird witchcraft/plague star unless of course you wanted a lot of people to die to make you money. I mean, that’s a pretty awesome 401-k inspiration, having everyone basically tie themselves to a death angel and think they are royal because of it and then have them die AFTER buying your book or whatever, but I would say that it is also quite likely evil if not malevolent to do that. You want to feel special? Here! Take this gold star of cursedom!

Greek Thought

However much of the issue derives from a Greek confusion. Remember, Greece was, for a long time, pagan. Therefore the Greeks got especially good at paganism and being clever and tricky. Maybe this is why the term “Grecko-Roman” is often not all that far removed from “Egyptian.”

Back To Dogs, Though

It has been my observation that a lot of folks who own dogs are actually, in a very strange way, paying homage to the Dog Star as though they are somewhat “worshiping” their pets. Of course, we can see from the above this eventually ends very badly for the pets, but it seems as though people do not stop doing whatever they were doing after this happens. They just move on to another dog. Combine this with elements of technology like satellite radio called Sirius, and you can really begin to see who is under the influence of what. If a person will gladly dish out money for their dogs and an usually named satellite radio subscription, odds are there is something else going on that is not simply a love of satellite radio or dogs. Worst case scenario, they are devotees of Hecate which is about the same as saying they worship Satan.

Sirius Ain’t Gold

The bottom line is that Sirius is not Gold or Golden and if it is, pretty soon whatever it is will be dead and probably burning in Hell. That, to me, seems sort of like the opposite of Gold unless it is Pyrite. Of course, I think that is called Fool’s Gold for a reason…

Awake During A Bake?

Several weeks ago, I woke up in the middle of the night because I had gotten too hot. Usually, this involves a throwing off of covers and going back to sleep, but I had done that several times all ready, and so I had an additional problem of being annoyed as well as being hot. I decided to get up instead, even though it was around 2:00 am. I was of course, browsing the internet in a semi-groggy state when I happened across one of those “think carefully about this” calculation sort of problems. This also, somewhat annoyed me, since I was trying to get my brain to go to sleep and not think about some problem that would not necessarily allow for a deeper sleep state. What was the problem? Well, allow me to present it here:

Billy The Whizz, a 19th century cowboy, carries an 1847 Colt single action 6 shooter revolver. So proficient is he with this weapon that when he fires all 6 shots in a row, the time between the first bullet and the last is 60 seconds. How long would it take him to fire 3 shots?

In my sleepy state, I knew the question was not an obvious answer and I vaguely remembered something about how degrees of freedom in statistics as a concept overlapped this one. If you haven’t taken time to think about it yourself, you ought to do it for a few moments before you go on. I’ll just wait here.

Did you think about it? Good. Let me just go ahead and hit you with the answer that was supplied that my groggy mind also found rather annoying. The answer, as provided by the puzzle, is 12 seconds. The part that my groggy brain got quite irritated by was there was a little disclaimer saying that no matter how much you might want it to be, the interval between shots was 12 seconds, not 10. Something about this that I could not immediately say with a clearly defined “Why” nagged at the back of my brain. So, I decided “To hell with this not sleeping thing and this damn problem,” and went back to bed. My brain, though, was going to churn on this matter for the night. Its equilibrium had been disturbed.

Sleepy Thoughts

Somewhere in the middle of the night, I had the vague thought that most of this problem concerned how one defined an interval. The answer provided gave a clear visual which I will reproduce here:

Image Credits - http://puzzles.nigelcoldwell.co.uk/sixtythree.htm

As can be seen, it all makes perfect mathematical sense. So what was my brain putting up a fuss about? Well, the problem proceeds on the basis of giving one an interval by definition in the problem. It tells you to consider the first and last bullets and the space between them. However, we are accustomed to dealing with time as being a rate. Therefore, I tell you that a bullet is fired say, once every ten seconds. That means, then, that our little picture above has ten seconds that exists OUTSIDE that first bullet and ENDS when the last shot is fired which is the sixth bullet. So, a rate is a “rational”–by definition–mathematical construct. An interval does not tell us when something begins in time. It only tells us how long it lasted. Therefore, when the first shot is fired, the first bullet is at “zero” because the rate is measured from that moment forward. We tend not to think very much in quality-from-our-senses derived intervals. We travel, for instance in miles per hour. If I give you a number of miles, and a unit of time, you determine the rate of speed at which I traveled per unit of time. If I tell you I covered X number of miles in an hour and that I was traveling at a constant speed, you can figure that out as well. If I tell you my first mile began at 5:33 and my last began at 7:00 and the distance was 500 kilometers or something, you might look at me a little strangely. Certainly you can express distance in this manner, but something about it feels not quite right–like you are measuring a coastline with a ruler.

So Why The Annoyance?

So having dealt with that problem and then basically being able to articulate that the interval changes depending on whether one has defined a ratio, I felt some better. To put it more clearly, the perception of the time of the interval is different and therefore when it starts is different in time depending solely upon whether one gives a rate or whether one gives the “first instance of a thing occurring”. Note the second definition is caught up specifically in perception. I have to “See” the first shot, or “hear” the first shot. At that moment, zero is defined. In a rate, my units start at the zero rate of the beginning of the ratio. 10 miles per hour means at time 0, I haven’t gone anywhere yet and at 60 minutes I have gone 10 miles. The happening of the thing is moving along with the occurrence of motion. The zeros match. In the bullet example, something has all ready happened, and that moment is defined as zero. Too little, too late–especially if you happen to be on the receiving end of the bullet being fired. Something about that feels “wrong” to define as a zero. It’s like saying, “The moment that I fell off the building and hit the ground is the beginning of the interval of a lot of pain.” The truth is, that interval started well before that–when you tripped off the steps or when you did not sleep well the night before due to being hot and having puzzles like these thrust before your eyes. A ratio is more “predictive” and a quality-sensory-based-interval is more descriptive after-the-fact or more akin to something being a priori or a posteriori respectively. Put differently, a ratio of normal speed/time is a bit like a Prophet, and the description of the interval traveled is a bit like a dead man. The second kind of reasoning is handy academically, but is useless for purposes of predicting when that first bullet is going to fly. Because mathematics is “Bad” at distinguishing this kind of knowledge from one another, it has a kind of “I knew it all along” that comes along with it. However, it cannot tell you when the bullet is fired. It might not be able to tell you when the journey will start with the car either, but it can tell you where it will be at some point in the future given a starting point. That, is useful information since one can “plan” with that information. The shooting begins when you hear it, though, is not especially useful information for the purposes of planning. At that point, everything is reactive should you happen not to be dead, and otherwise the interval of anything doesn’t matter to you if you have left this mortal coil. (12 seconds between shots probably won’t be in your calculations either from the experience of a firefight)

So Really…

So really, the problem is that the question is asking a life and death question where the first occurrence of something makes the rest of the question potentially useless, since if you are dead, it is irrelevant. It “feels smart”, but it really isn’t all that useful, since you can “feel smart all you like” and still be stone dead. Hence, the description of YOUR EXPERIENCE of the question is potentially the first bullet flies at time zero, and the rest of the rate collapses for you since you are no longer around to “measure” anything else beyond that first occurrence.