Unity Descends From Above

The Great Stupa of Sanchi
Original: 3rd Century BC
Embellished over the passing centuries.


Borobudur Stupa

and yes, it amuses me to use Christian dating for Buddhist Monuments.

Max Ernst
The Blessed Virgin Chastising the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses
1926

• Gottfried takes on White Guilt, Gates and more [via keith418]
   
• The 12 most annoying types of Facebookers [via girlyunderwear]
   
• The coming rift between American Jewry & Zionism [via keith418]
   
• I Just chortled when I saw this question:
  Imagine that while watching a squirrel run along a power line, you see it touch a second wire and explode. Which would be closest to your reaction?
   
• Sweden refuses to cave in to Isreali demands. "There are calls from some quarters in Israel that we in some way or another should take an official position to distance ourselves from this article or even to intervene to prevent such an article being published," Bildt wrote on Thursday.
  
  "But our country does not work that way - and neither should it."
   
• One of the Thelemic Criticisms of Christianity is its unbridled compassion, the urge to "Love Thy Neighbor" even when they are undeserving of that love or if that love is ultimately undermining one's ability to seek or do one's will. keith418 provided these two articles which illustrate that the Bible calls for a stricter implementation than the OTO is currently willing to do. What place does Thelema hold if it is more corrupted with pity and compassion than Christianity? Can we bring about the promises of Thelema if we becoming more Christian than the Christians?
   
• Totalitarian Kitsch.
   
• Whether Crowley's personal behavior was bad is somewhat irrelevant to me," he says. “What's important is that he was amazingly prescient. He knew what was going on. And as a musician I'm actually happy that occultism is nothing without practice. I do magical tricks with music because I practice a lot. You get music to the point that it appears to be magic, even though there ain't no magic. The only magic in the universe is the magic that we create ourselves." [via keith418] Crowley's grandson releases fifth album 
   
• Amusing. Whites tend to facebook while blacks & hispanics tend to MySpace (no word on where the asians are hanging out). Obviously, this is the fault of those cruel whites who refuse to allow the blacks & hispanics to associate with white people. I mean why would blacks and hispanics choose to associate with other blacks and hispanics...
  
  Solving the problem of "virtual segregation" [via keith418]
   
• Purging English of potentially offensive phrases. It reminds me of when someone accused me of being antisemitic because I used the word kype & they thought it was derived from Kike. 
   
• Somewhat entertaining rant by the War Nerd called "Why I Hate WWII"
   
• What do they really expect? When the promises made to them are broken, it becomes obvious that the "liberal democratic process" is a lie. If they had wanted the Balkan's to remain in the leftist bracket, they shouldn't have removed democratically elected leaders, pursued an uneven prosecution of suspected "war criminals," nor broke the agreement for the end of hostilities by giving Kosovo to Albanian terrorists. An article on the supposed rise of fascism in the Balkans.
   
• I actually saw a Van with a PA system exhorting people to vote for the Happy Realization Party.
  
  

• NEETs (Not in Employment, Edutation or Training) die off -- nearly 17%. Should we thank providence for Natural Selection?
• Related is this comic from little gamers which succinctly explains the realistic difficulties in establishing universal health care.
  
• Ignoranus : A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.
  Oyster , n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
  Other great words. Thanks to keith418
  
• Devotional statues as used on Battlestar Galactica [via keith418]  
• For my Archeology Friends: Cahokia, an ancient city under the American heartland  [via keith418]
• It appears that their is a gene in our "Junk" DNA that, if it were active, would prevent HIV's ability to infect our cells.
  
• There was an interview with Anne Akiko Meyers on 89.9 AllClassical.Org. I believe I shall buy a couple of her CD's.
• Watched Mishima's Yûkoku: The Rite of Love and Death. (Wiki) I liked it, though I am aware that many are not drawn to silent films or the Noh stage [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noh]. The essential story (told in 30 min) deals with a man torn between the duty of following his emporer's orders and his duty toward his friends who staged a coup which has now been rejected by the emporer. He was not in the coup because he was married and in love so they left him at home. Now torn, he resolves to avoid dishonor by killing himself. His wife, due to her love for her husband resolves to follow him into death. Their last night is filled with passion. He commits seppeku, she drives her dagger into her brain through the flesh under her chin. Touching. Some stills are in my album.

• Todays word of the day is Sokushinbutsu -- becoming enlightened through self mummification.
• When I think of how my son lost a library book, I sometimes wish that librarians still had this law on the books:
  “Whoever willfully detains any book or other property belonging to any Public Educational Institutition, shall be punished by a fine of not less than one or more than twenty five dollars or by inprisonment in jail not exceeding six months.”
• We have seen or know this guy... XKCD
• The woman selling magazine subscriptions told me I waqs hot & offered me a blowjob for $20. Does that count as a double solicitation?
  
• August 9th was my Second Son's 12th Birthday.
  
• This was great. Plutherus pointed me to Robotman who has been having some problems in the My Little Pony Forums.

• Tesla Motor Cars finally turned a profit
• I've also been seeing these cute little SmartForTwo cars running around.
• More on England's immigration problems. My favorite line: "Wanting a better deal for her child doesn't make her anti-immigrant. But if we can't find a better answer to her despair then she soon will be." Trevor Phillips warns of immigration 'cold war'

Someday, I hope her website will be functional.

She is one of the few reasons I still log onto MySpace.

What have I been doing. Lot's of stuff. Between Guénon & Paperwork I did some refreshing on poetic forms.

In Western Poetry, I find three things to be of importance when crafting good poetry: meter, allusion and alliteration. (good poetry == poetry I enjoy reading.)

Most people are familiar with the iambic meter, as it was used a lot with Shakespeare. However, there are several others which can be utilized to avoid boredom. To illustrate the meters, I use a period (.) to indicate the unaccented syllable & a slash (/) to indicate an accented syllable. The pentameter or hexameter (etc) indicate how many occurrences of the foot occurs in the line The foot is the set of syllables defined by the meter. I also try to place an example in parenthesis after the foot.

The fun thing about allusion is that it is only understood by those with prior knowledge of the covert reference. Using the correct allusion can help you select the audience for your poetry. Alluding to Ford Mustangs and Wifebeaters will target a different demographic than alluding to Homer (& I don't mean from the Simpson's). 

Finally, one of my favorite techniques is alliteration, strictly the use of a repetitive initial sound, however it is often used to indicate repetitions within words (e.g. hour, power, flower all share an assonance, and tick, chock and muck, all share the consonance of the 'ck' sound). As an example of verse, here is William Langland's "The Vision Concerning Piers Plowman" which I have taken the liberty of "translating" by using modern English spellings.

A fair field full of folk, found I there between,
Of all manner of men, the mean and the rich.
Working and wandering as the world asketh.

This was brought to you by the Eliminate Bad Poet(ry) Foundation.

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did looking it up.

Aleister Crowley Statue
$250.00
Occultist, poet, chess player, mountain climber, sexual deviant…..all these things Crowley has been called, yet his influence on occultism is still felt today.

He stands 12 inches tall atop a round base engraved with a unicursal hexagram, emblem once adopted for magical use by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn over 100 years ago.
He is garbed in his atypical three piece suit, holding a pipe like the English Gentleman he was. Fans of Crowley will note the expression on his face is reminiscent of the legendary “Great Beast 666” portrait that resonates today as the most recognizable image of Crowley himself.

This tribute statue will figure prominently in your collection of Crowley ephemera or on your altar. Who knows what you'll conjure up with this amazing statue!

Get it here