http://www.tom-holland.org/books/in-the-shadow-of-the-sword/
Advance Warning of Possible Bombshell Detonation, see above.
This book apparently completely overturns the historical asssumption that Islam and the Koran had a clear cut and well documented birth. Apparently according to this book, nothing was actually written down till 200 years after the event, and the Islamics have doctored it continually ever since then. The definitive version of the Koran apparently dates only from a 1924 Cairo edition! Salman Rushdie and the Danish cartoonists don't come close to the impact this may have.
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Plenty of good cheer this week, married off my eldest daughter to a fine scotsman, dog bit my sporran mistaking it for a badger, it probably once was a badger, otherwise a splendid day. The anti-rain spell worked despite an averse forecast, we had a brief flurry of snow to accompany the sunshine, white wedding in May! I returned to find that my mandrakes have sprouted from seed as had the canarian dragon tree, this may take 300 years to mature but the project to repopulate southwest england with mandrakes may only take a decade or two.
I notice that my seminal earlier blog on Designer Religion has now achieved 1,000 reads. Perhaps this calls for a franchise operation.
http://www.specularium.org/index.php?option=com_blog&view=comments&pid=38&Itemid=137
The Dark Matter absence seems to be causing some serious head scratching amongst our cosmologists, and the chances of the Higgs existing seems to receede with every passing spin of the LHC. The standard models of cosmology and particle physics look set for drastic revision, hooray.
There remains some danger that the Euro and the EU may survive though. We must have the courage to accept the short term consequences of their collapse and welcome destruction, for otherwise europe will condemn itself to a Synarchist Totalitarianism run by an unelected oligarchy of faceless bureaucrats that we have no power to deselect, and who will expand their regulatory powers beyond all apparent sense and reason until they have achieved their actual goal of Arbitary Power. SCREW THE EU.
Saturday 26th May marks Apophenia's Birthday, prepare rituals, lay in plenty of chocolate.
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http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/340170/title/Dark_matter_search_turns_up_empty
Ahem, yes well I did predict that some time ago and wrote it up in The Apophenion and The Octavo.
Half-crazed wizards can take speculative risks denied to career scientists.
See the VHC paper on this site. Vo = (Gm/r - rA)^1/2 sorts the galactic rotation just fine with a small adjustment to orbital velocity due to the Anderson decelleration.
BTW the universe has never expanded and no big bang occured either, we inhabit a vorticitating hypersphere of a universe, finite and unbounded in both space and time. Don't expect the Higgs boson to appear either, Mass = Spacetime Curvature, not a gauge field effect.
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St George's day will probably pass more or less unnoticed as usual, since our phyrric victory in WW2 and our loss of empire and superpower status we haven't really done patriotism with any enthusiasm.
Our Illiberal Dimocrats want a fully elected House of Lords, the hereditary principle seems indefensible as does the automatic inclusion of the bishops of what has become a marginal religion. The other parties want to retain the right to appoint lords to the 'upper' house to preserve their influence there.
I have a far more radical idea. If democracy works through a system of checks and balances then what we actually need is a non-democratic check on democracy itself. The monarchy no longer really provides this. Thus we should have a RANDOMLY SELECTED upper house. A few hundred people picked at random off the electoral rolls with absolute power of veto over parliament. After all we trust this principle in our courts of law, twelve citizens at random for the jury, to moderate the power of the judiciary.
Such an upper house would contain a representative selection of all age and income groups and sexes by virtue of its randomness.
Let us hope that Francois Hollande wins in France. His policies display the usual economic illiteracy of socialism but they do have the virtue that they will hasten the breakup of the single currency and hopefully the entire cursed European Union.
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With the Esotericon now moving at a fair pace towards its final shape, and the accompanying Portals of Chaos Deck half done, we have finally accepted the challenge of fully entering the Mythos of the Elder Gods using the tools and perspectives of Ritual Chaos Magic in the hope of recovering a proper Necronomicon for its final chapter. An instrument for recovering dangerous knowledge from the depths of the entire panpsychic universe.
We note with some amusement that the first spell in our first book, Liber Null , actually read I wish to obtain the Necronomicon , given as a lighthearted example of how to use the Austin Spare sigil making technique, as the whole Necronomicon idea seemed a bit fanciful at the time, now however, a quarter of a century down the line it seems that the spell may have actually done something, so, 'conjure long' as they say.
After 40 years of slaving over a hot pentacle we hope to have enough sanity points to carry this venture through, the lore clues seem to develop with our investigations, see below: -
Lovecraft's original handrawn form of the Elder Sign may possibly indicate a bind rune of:
Algiz, a somewhat mysterious rune variously interpreted over history as Elk, Elk-God (Horned God?) Protection, or Life.
Ansuz, The Aesir (Gods) but both reversed and mirror imaged, somehow oddly appropriate.
Laguz, Lake or Ocean, reversed.
Derleth's description of the Elder Sign as 'a distorted five pointed star' may actually prove strangely compatible with this in a sense, for if we represent the Lovecraft sign with 10 lines then it becomes topologicaly foldable into both a pentagram inscribed within a pentagon, and also into the more or less topologicaly isomorphic figure of the pentachoron which constitutes the first regular 4 dimensional hypersolid. (Imagine it in 3 dimensions as a tetrahedron with 4 additional edges meeting at a fifth point in its centre, a strangely distorted five pointed star indeed when viewed in only 2 or 3 dimensions.)
Thus we can perhaps regard the Lovecraft Elder Sign as an unfolded pentagram-pentagon and/or an unfolded pentachoron. In the aether a folded antenna usually works about the same as a flat one.
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Just how the Shia in particular react to all this remains to be seen.