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Ripheus23

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  1. Quote

    Research using virtual reality finds that humans, in spite of living in a three-dimensional world, can, without special practice, make spatial judgments about line segments, embedded in four-dimensional space, based on their length (one dimensional) and the angle (two dimensional) between them.[12] The researchers noted that "the participants in our study had minimal practice in these tasks, and it remains an open question whether it is possible to obtain more sustainable, definitive, and richer 4D representations with increased perceptual experience in 4D virtual environments".[12] In another study,[13] the ability of humans to orient themselves in 2D, 3D and 4D mazes has been tested. Each maze consisted of four path segments of random length and connected with orthogonal random bends, but without branches or loops (i.e. actually labyrinths). The graphical interface was based on John McIntosh's free 4D Maze game.[14] The participating persons had to navigate through the path and finally estimate the linear direction back to the starting point. The researchers found that some of the participants were able to mentally integrate their path after some practice in 4D (the lower-dimensional cases were for comparison and for the participants to learn the method).

    That's from the Wikipedia article about four-dimensional spaces in general. It makes me wonder if my notion of a sort of "purpose" in the universe, consisting in the transformation of our physical perception into a geometrically (not---quite---mystically) higher-dimensional form, is possible, at least in the sense that concrete understanding of 4D-space would help with deontic logic, say.

    Now, actually, I haven't mentioned it fully yet, but there's a cognitive argument for a 5-dimensional limit on our physics theories, sort of. Namely, we can use dimensional analogies to "intuitively" compute 4-dimensional structures, e.g. as by saying that the net of the tesseract is a layout of cubes just as the net of the cube is a layout of squares. We also have faithful rotational analogies (the gem-like imagery on Wikipedia, for example), stereographic projections, etc. We have some of these for 5D-space, but they are intuitively weaker, depending more on abstract than tangible geometrical analogies. So, 5D-space is the "cognitive limit" of analogical intuition, so (on Kant's scheme, say), it is the limit of what we can acquire empirical evidence of (for the time being!).

    1. The Preface to This Resistance
    2. The Axioms of Paradise
    3. Reason's Trinities
    4. A Tower of Fire Defy
    5. In the Days of Ascension
    6. Seven Fallen
    7. Of Their Dominion
    8. Will Always Be
    9. Alas! the Broken
    10. Herald the End
    11. Ask Why This Should Be
    12. For the Sake of Three Things
    13. Nothing Instead
    14. The Darkness Not
    15. To Heaven to Go
    16. To Take a Stand
    17. Wherefore Apollyon et Ripheus...

    [Hypothetical list of titles for the series. OTOH I'm not sure I've come up with 17 books' worth of material, even in principle. I.e. the demiplane of Apollyon is book 1, 2 through 4 are the Precentor trilogy, 5 through 7 are the Septatheon trilogy, 8 through 10 are the Keyscape trilogy, 10 and 11 are the evil schoolteacher duology, the Dirge-shadow known as the Void of Threnody storyline is somewhere in the next set [IDK if I've mentioned the Dirge-shadows yet here?], as well as the conclusion to Bassilfastion's quest and the buildup to the awakening of Apollyon (that latter is at the end of 16).]

    "For the Sake of Three Things": the unholy trinity of the final offenses. Three interlocking (perichoretic) sins, whose personification is the so-called Form of Evil.

    "The evil of corruption is negating the essence of goodness in something; the evil of destruction is negating the existence of goodness as something." "But it is possible to think of destroying the properties that make something good without replacing them with other properties that would be evil; the evil is all in the destruction of the good properties, not their replacement or lack thereof. So would not Apollyon be the actual Form of Evil?"

    1. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      *11 and 12 are the evil schoolteacher duology

  2. [Abstract for an essay I will try to work on for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.]

    A Transcendental Argument for the Ability-to-do-otherwise

     

    As books like the Choose Your Own Adventure series highlight, the usual concept of free will is the ability to do otherwise at a given time, even given the same background conditions at that time [c.f. Austin]. Besides common intuition, though, what reason can be given for believing in such an ability, both as a conceptual precondition for willing, and for the actual existence of this will? The will, as a fundamental subjective function [ac], should be amenable as such to a transcendental argument on its behalf. Just such an argument will be delineated in this essay.

    1. Show previous comments  2 more
    2. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      Transcendental inferences can be critiqued or defended as circular or recursive: if an interlocutor does not accept the "explained" (transexplained!) premises themselves, then the explanatory axioms will fail to convince on the same level. Now so far, the notion of explanation has been referred to in a self-explanatory way. However, given the role of the relevant kind of argument in stopping epistemic regression, another characterization is possible: if an argument is a sequence of inferences, and if inferences hold between sentential forms, a transcendental inference can be defined as a piece of erotetic logic. That is, some questions (erotetic functions), concerning the forms of kinds of knowledge, entail or imply some assertions (assertoric functions). A transcendental inference is from a question to an answer. Since the fundamental premise in this argument would be a question, it does not admit of circularity as far as its inferential value goes. Asking the question at all commits the interlocutor to accepting the given answer.

      To illustrate: consider the problem of ethical rationality in general. This is often parsed as, "Why should I do the right thing?" Setting aside the ethical force attendant upon the word "should," I would suggest that the substantial answer to the question is that asking "why" of activity in the first place commits the interlocutor to acting on reasons "why." There is, in other words, no reason to ask, "Why do x?" unless one intends to do x just in case one knows why. The very question, "Why do x?" contains the motive of ethical activity in general.* [*Axiomatically and recursively, the variable "do x" can be taken for the activity of asking "why" in itself, so that the function becomes, "Why ask 'why'?" And it is exactly this question that entails the assertoric function, "Because there is no reason to ask why unless one intends to do what there is a reason "why," to do, in the first place." Asking the question commits the interlocutor to the ethical outlook transcendentally.]

    3. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      An illustration of the erotetic transinference, here, would be Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic knowledge. To put the distinction in mathematical parlance, an analytic truth is one resulting from an epistemic function taking itself as an input; synthetic knowledge is knowledge from epistemic functions that take self-distinct inputs (the function being synthesized with external information-values). But an epistemic function is erotetic: answers to questions that can be known by assigning the semantic value of the constants to the variables are known by analysis as such, and answers to questions that can be known only by assignment of external semantic constants to the variables are known by synthesizing the information-value of the question with external such values.*

      *[This description immediately applies only to so-called "wh"-term questions (also known as "open questions") [add citation]. However, "yes/no"-questions can be converted into "wh"-term ones. Take, for instance, "Is Sarah in South Africa?" being recast as, "Where is Sarah?" "Yes," to the first question can be known by analysis or synthesis if and only if, "South Africa," could be known by analysis or synthesis of the information-value of "Sarah" in the "wh"-term case.]

    4. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      [The existence of free will is a matter of transcendental argument owing to the unity of the erotetic and prescriptive functions of the mind. Although questions are not absolutely reducible to epistemic prescriptions, the epistemic-imperative model of erotetic logic does testify to the fundamental relationship between the two classes of mental object [ac]. Empirically, all languages are recognized to express sentential syntax in erotetic, prescriptive, and assertoric forms [ac] [phrase in terms of illocutionary force?].

      Accordingly, the principle ought-implies-can is the keystone of our modal knowledge in concreto. That is, noncontradictory description is possible description simpliciter, but to know what in particular is possible requires more than bare conceivability or imaginability, and it is the deontic transit that gives us this. In other words, ought-implies-can is the principle of specific knowledge par excellence. But if this is so, physical determinism is unnecessary as a belief because the opposite belief is in fact necessary.

      ... What mathematics describe the action of the will? On the face of it, probabilities---and the difference between the chancy and the random [ac]---apply to this question. However, from the Kantian vantage, the existence of free will pertains to the antinomian problem of reason, which depends on the limits of infinite representative synthesis. Now, in Cantor's paradise, the antinomian sequences can all be collapsed into the problem of the absolutely infinite aleph-number ("omega"). Free will, mathematically, therefore must be expressed in the form of the aleph-numbers and their pure order.]

  3. Metafinity as the foundation of mathematics

    Let the finite and the infinite be relative or absolute. By absolute is meant a universal relation: x is absolutely y if in all relevant relations, x is y. For example, if x is to the left of all y, x would be absolutely leftwards (though this is not really possible, let us suppose). Accordingly, we have an order of four metafinite predicates: absolutely finite, relatively finite, relatively infinite, and absolutely infinite.

              Next, allow that there are two fundamental numerical questions: “Which one?” and, “How many?” A number is either an answer to some form of these questions, or eventually derives from such answers. Let us refer to numbers as answers to the first question by the term ordinals, the second cardinals. Numbers as answers, in some way, to both questions will be denoted surdinals (with reference, as will be explained far below, to the concept of surreal numbers). Numbers as answers to neither question, used purely to differentiate between some x and y, will be indexicals. Thence, to use the number 1 as a name for someone, and the number 3 as a name for someone else, is to use these numbers indexically; they are not subject to arithmetic as such, which is to be considered an ordering of numbers in themselves. So while we might add 1 and 3 when these are used as ordinal, cardinal, or surdinal numbers, we would never add them when using them indexically. —The four positive metafinite predicates are then generally correlated with four basic uses of numbers.

              Our axiom system is a set of axioms and their schemas used in mathematical proofs. The most commonly used such system is Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice, which has up to nine basic extralogical principles, some of which can perhaps be reduced to others or waived altogether. Now the attempt to provide a foundation for mathematics, using the concept of metafinity, involves the question (roughly enough put), “Assuming that there is some set of axioms and axiom schemas, why is the number of basic principles what it is?” So if ZFC set theory is true, the question is, “Why are there (as many as) nine such principles?” And according to the theory of metafinity, there would not be nine, but only four, generally correlated with the pairings of metafinite predicates and the numerical erotetic dyad. Indeed, this theory is telling us that we know how many axioms and axiom schemas to look for, without directly knowing as such what the system is.

              Let a logically irreducible number be a number occurring in the logical principles of the system. For example, if 0 and 1 are mapped to FALSE and TRUE,[1] then it is unnecessary to derive either number from the other using extralogical principles. Rather than by transconstructing 1 as the simplest successor of 0, for example, we have it immediately, here. Moreover, if this is true, then the classical set-theoretic definition of the ordinal 1 is false: being the simplest successor of 0 characterizes 1, but does not define it. 1 is not actually reducible to the set containing the empty set, or any such thing.

              If there are four axioms or schemas, here, what are they to be expressed as? Axiomatic structures are assertoric: the basic case is subjects and predicates, which in mathematics comes to numbers and operations thereon. At least one axiom will give us some numbers to work with, and at least one axiom will give us operators for them. Now in the metafinite context, we immediately know that we have numbers for all the metafinite predicates, so the classical axiom of infinity is encoded into the context. This gives us our basic case of a relatively infinite number, here  as an ordinal (and surdinal) and  as a cardinal. Arithmetical intuition, and set-theoretic transconstruction, vitiate the idea of a well-ordered sequence of operators, so that our second axiom will be one that gives us the hyperoperation sequence as such.[2] This sequence will be represented under the heading of the axiom of transcension.

              The existence of relevantly basic cases of the other metafinite numbers will generally be referred to under the heading of the axiom of transcardinality. This has it that there are relations among the metafinite predicates such that, starting from the transfinite cardinals, we can go on to situate the absolutely and relatively finite numbers fairly exactly. Until actual examples of what this situation means are provided, of course, this remark is not even quite programmatic but might appear rather mystical (at best).

              Lastly, the axiom of transfinality collates all the relations of finality that appear in the mathematics of the numbers and their sets referred to here, and adds to them, in light of the metafinite context in total: therefore, in quintessential relation to the absolute infinite. Expressing the concept of an absolutely infinite number in a consistent way is the challenge to be met in this case, as the standard vectors of approach give rise to simple contradictions. By way of a very preliminary remark, the axiom of transfinality involves an extreme reimagining of the principle of foundation in set theory. In other words, though a naively infinite and descending sequence of sets is not to be presented, some infinite descending numerical sequence will be. As far as already-established mathematical systems go, a clear example of an analogy with what we will be looking for is the surreal sequence . But a transfinal sequence is meant to be advergent under absolute infinity, which is an absolutely strong relation to enter into, and so we will have cause to analyze phrases that appear in the literature such as “a set that might as well be as large as the universe V of sets” as well as the equation VV = V (and its cognates, e.g. “”).

              Think of the axioms, then, as introduction rules for types of glyphs. The axiom of infinity introduces the aleph glyphset in general; the axiom of transcension introduces the ascending arrow glyphset; the axiom of transcardinality introduces glyphs for juxtaposing the relatively infinite with the absolutely and relatively finite numbers; and the axiom of transfinality gives us notation for the idea of advergence under the absolute infinite. Logical conjunctions of two or more axioms or schema then yield further analogous or derivative glyphsets. The infinitary context also allows us to apply the axiomatic propositions in an infinitary way. There are therefore 23 such adjunctions of the axioms and their schemes to consider, which gives us much to work with, as will be seen.

     

    [1] For technical reasons, the logical system in use here will actually map FALSE to -1. Though in assertoric space, for a sentence to lack truth is for it to be contrary to the true, in simpler predicative space this is not so (that is, absence and opposition are different kinds of difference). Accordingly, though, -1 is also logically irreducible in the metafinite theory of mathematical foundations; it is not to be irrecursively defined, though it may be expressed, as the additive inverse of 1.

    [2] To try to consolidate and simplify matters as much as possible, I will be using a variant of Knuth arrow notation for this sequence throughout the text. As will be seen, if the aleph numbers can be assigned a minimum of two indices—a base and a compounding index—then it will be an elegant symmetry for the same assignment to hold of the transcension operator. That this symmetry obtains in fact will be illustrated by the overall system of notation as it is developed

  4. Accidental Cosmere-creepypasta leftovers from a post-edit attempt

    Also known as "whether Sanderson left a meta-clu        .

         , s of realityp  ny, so to speak, seeming normal and becoming mur     remember if this was a specific sub-scene or more a collage ofdescthe linesli s       being the creepy shadow-version of the stark base, just as the subtle tyranny is the creepy version   

    ,ry time (that means my mind can't be broken of this belief :P): there wilny-arcs incallandor-f Lik,the ther ar      .                                            Bear in mind, then, that this theory entails that Dominion was never evil, regardless of whether the Skaze are now (so to speak), or whatever. He might've been in danger of becoming an evil like that but who knows, maybe any of them can, in principle. Anyway...

    So, assuming that Odium is equal to                  ,e-tortBraize-tortur Braize-tortureBraize-torture-v Braize-torture-victorture-vict                  (                           (         e. In fact, whenever Odium ts a magic system base b pa ,  .     tormencti      whate

     

           (             ""     (   a   

  5. The Lay of Vyrian

    Wherefore the preface to this resistance

    is true,

    the Axioms of Paradise

    and reason's trinities

    a tower of fire defy;

    and in the Days of Ascension,

    seven fallen are denied.

    Of their dominion

    "was" an end.

    Will always be until the end.

    But alas! the broken come

    To seal all light in the dimension of sin,

    Or else to herald the end of all that there is;

    and why ask why this should be?

    If all is denied for the sake of three things?

    But if darkness is nothing instead,

    how would the darkness not come to an end?

    To heaven to go,

    to take a stand,

    to sing the song of silence,

    to pass the Test:

    "Wherefore Apollyon et Ripheus*"...

     

    *[pronounced "Rif-ae-es" to rhyme with "Test"]

    _____________________________________

    "Although Armirex used the power of the Form of Evil to silence Apollyon at the terminus of the Last War, the Artificer later came to believe he had sinned in doing so [to use Evil's Form at all], and so sought to atone for his sin by awakening Apollyon at the end of time..."

    1. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      800px-Munsell_1943_color_solid_cylindric

      This is a (the?) Munsell color solid and will probably be used as the design for a kind of entity in the story.

    2. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      The Form of Fear was a demimetric being formed around the same time as the Form of Adventure. It was believed to be a shadow of the Form of Evil in some way. It died on the Ramparts of Minos when the minotaur number stampeded from the Labyrinth into Cantor's house: the dangerous number crushed the Form in its path. The ability of the Form of Fear to be destroyed later served as an element in Armirex's equation.

      _____________________________________________

      The Four Adventurers: a party of four adventurers who entered Cantor's house to investigate the outcome of the minotaur number's imprisonment there. Their experience of time differentiated from that of the economies, scores of thousands of years passing outside while for the Adventurers only days or weeks wore on. At mysterious intervals, the timelines would progress at an equivalent rate and an unscrambled signal could be sent from the house to the economies. It is for this reason that the deaths of the Four are a matter of public record, as their last moments came to the economies in a signal sent when the Form of Evil ripped the part of Cantor's house in which they were located, off the overall demiplane, and smashed that part of the house into a detached chunk of another demiplane (during the First Ecomachy).

    3. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      "The minotaur number had some extensions, including the zero-minotaur and minotaur-zero functions, and the Ramparts of Minos, an exotic staircase."

      exotic staircases. Sequences of aleph-glyphs, in semiotic transpace, that do not proceed in only one direction out from the central glyph of an aleph-number, or which diverge for abstract reasons from the normal members of the set of Cantor's staircases. [A major subject of research in so-called staircase theory.]

  6. Ԙ: The Final Power, Part 2

    The Shield defends Ripheus with a surety as of wild gold, and as true, for he alone holds it in valor. But this valor is only enough to preserve this one man as he ascends the last staircases of destruction's transfinity. Everyone else not here in the City falls and rises in the self-desecrating magma of the apocalypse, gasping for words of horror at each rise and fall of the crystal Forms of Evil and Nothingness.

    Armirex stands alone at the base of the four towers, watching skyward in despair and hope.

    Some of the others reach out, try to cross over to...

    Like calliopes of massacre, the shifting stairwells up which Ripheus goes trespass upon themselves darkly. Again and again the Shield saves him from being smashed apart by their cataclysm of murder. Sinstone breaks in torrents, rocking the ascent to the parapet that runs parallel to Apollyon's ray of fire and light.

    ... as they live and die they live up...

    Ripheus makes it to the parapet. He looks through an aperture onto the artificial plateau, bearing first witness to the ramparts of destruction's flame. Within which he intends to stand...

    ... to interpose himself between goodness and the Form of Evil...

    ... they live up, up, upward into the City...

    ... he braces the Shield for his entrance onto the parapet, slanting it as he passes the boundary of the Destroyer's radiant wake. Blocking the passage of that radiance, the Shield yet blocks only a small halo therefrom: enough for Ripheus to survive and endure through this end.

    Already, however, he is driven back by the weight of the light pouring forth unto him. This is the fire of the Final Power enmeshed with the ferocity of Apollyon. Those words, "Nothing can be done to stop the one who comes to end that which does not exist," Ripheus thinks back to.

    Hammered by the might of desolation, the Shield forms a wake of its own in the ray. As incandescence surges around him, Ripheus feels the stone on which he stands melting. Step by step, Apollyon raptures him towards the parapet's edge, and he sees the melting of the stone as a slow river carrying him along with the rapture.

    ... assembling at the base of the fourfold tower...

    --And a flicker of Apollyon's power sails off, rams into the Shield directly. Gripping the Shield's handle, Ripheus flies off the parapet, down towards portals opening from the physical plane that reveal friends and enemies and others come to fight or not. Ripheus warps the Shield like a kite and after harrowed sailing amidst the sapphire period of the light he manages to hit ground at a safe velocity and angle.

    The rest of the ensemble having arrived, one of them--[add name later]--runs up to the man of Troy. Talking to him while looking at the gem of Evil, she asks, "What is happening?"

    Hanging his head, Ripheus explains the situation: and the gem explodes again: and again the nova of the seraph hydra floods the streets of the City.

    1. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      *Wherefore Ripheus makes it to the parapet.

    2. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      *carrying him along with the rapture.

      Wherefore does he resist? What is there not to resist? Defiance can be defeated, though.

    3. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      *intoxicated magma of the apocalypse,

  7. Could the USAF be an "inherently criminal organization"?

    I will admit, my initial reaction to the "Storm Area 51" meme included a peculiar ambivalence. I had become accustomed to thinking of America's nuclear/"national-security" administrations as the major criminal organizations in the government due to e.g. Bomb Power by Gary Wills. So if I was going to think of a particular branch of the military as contaminated by those criminal forces, at this point I would have pointed at the US Navy on the grounds that (a) the Trident submarines are the most demonic weapons the US has (as far as I know) and (b) I live about 45 minutes from the town where the major Trident base is located (the Poulsbo/Bangor area, near the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton)---so the image of the Trident submarines is called to my mind on a regular basis as such. (Unfortunately, also, my dad was a nuclear submariner back in the 80s and one of my two main managers at work is also a former nuclear submariner.)

    Now this is actually a little peculiar, otherwise, since my obsession with the Vietnam War USED to prompt me to fixate on the USAF as especially symbolic of what is worst about the US military government. In fact, I had a theory that because the separation of the USAF from the US Army was mediated in part by America's role in the corruption of the Geneva Conventions (the pre-70s exclusion of air-war regulations therein), and because the USAF had so meticulously carried out the holocaust of Vietnam, then by the Nuremberg standards there seemed to be grounds for believing that the USAF is an inherently criminal organization, one where even just joining is a crime, then.

    Now, we don't know what kind of higher-end physics weapons-system development is actually going on at Area 51. It could be reverse-engineering of alien technology, I suppose, although until there is a strong working model of FTL (besides the Alcubierre hypothesis, say) I will remain exactly skeptical of the idea. But we know that they are working on higher-end physics-based weapons of some kind there, because that's just what the government does, after all. And since it is a sin to try to use the powers of creation to create these means of destruction as such, we know that some of the people at Area 51 are sinning, and indeed it appears that people there who are exposed to dangerous materials are treated badly (I remember hearing about this years ago, though the details escape me), for example.

    It's also worth noting that the Dugway Proving Ground, another (international law-wise) criminal setup (because they work on chemical and biological weapons there), is not terribly far from the Area 51 region. Apparently DPG is administered by the Army, though, but anyway the point is there's a little constellation of darkness in this area of the US, so...

    ... it would not be unfitting...

  8. The Number of the Dead

    [Intended plot: a Soviet officer who witnesses both German and Russian atrocities during the war is later sent to administer an isolated gulag site, where he eventually meets a prolific executioner and discovers the Lovecraftian outcome of Stalin's immense terror. The title is a reference to the wide range of estimates for victims of Stalin-era cruelty and injustice, the explanation for a true high number being that the enormous number of corpses, after littering the frozen landscape for years, were disposed of by being incinerated during Soviet nuclear testing---the testing itself actually meant in part to fight a Cthulhu-like monster that had been rearranging the corpses in eerie geometrical patterns.]

  9. Officer Arendt and the Transcendental Purifier*

    *I believe Derrida's "transcendental signifier" phrase is later than 1930s Germany in origins, so inasmuch as this title is a play on that, it is so at a stretch.

    _______________________________

    Scene outlines:

    Edith Arendt is a Jewish police officer in Nazi Germany assigned to a case involving a serial killer the locals in Berlin (the city scene of the crimes) have nicknamed "the Transcendental Purifier."

    ["Don't call him that again. That's just a name some stupid students got to using because they took classes in which their teachers told them about stories like that in the American press."]

    She reviews the case with morbid colleagues before being summoned to investigate a new crime scene in which the murder weapon is harder to find than in previous incidents. Prior to this, all had been killed by metal crosses or menorahs used to bludgeon or stab the person to death. All have been people identified as "upstanding" Aryan-minded citizens so the initial theory is that it's a Jew killing Nazis. However, one of the victims was a Jew herself, so the off-color colleagues make a joke question out of it: "Maybe he didn't think she was Jewish." "Of course he knew she was Jewish! He hit her in the head with one of their storming candleholders!" Now, the victim is a Muslim, though. One of the colleagues says something like, "Aren't Muslims just sand Jews?" To which the other replies, "No, they're not," and they mock-argue, as a set-up to ask Edith whether she knows if Muslims and Jews are the same. But she's focused on the bookshelf.

    She finds a section where there are three copies of the Quran. Two are simple but the third is larger and heavier and more ornate. She checks it and it's covered in blood.

    Later, she comes up with a theory that the killer is following a regular foot-route and the department tests her theory, which gets them down the road from where the actual next killing takes place. And that is in a super-rare Eastern Orthodox church in a Russian area of Berlin, where the victim has been killed by a cross, a menorah, and a Quran.

    So, the killer is escalating. Frustrated, Edith thinks of her two possible overarching rivers of evidence: the unsub's motive, and his signature. For some reason he's using religious icons as murder weapons. Unsure, she goes to the nearest university, where she hears students talking about "the Transcendental Purifier." She talks to them about it, and they say they didn't coin the phrase to refer to a Jew purifying Germany, but a fanatical German purifying his own ranks, so to speak. She realizes the killer is targeting people who he deems to be insufficiently German or Aryan, and the next morning she rushes into her superior's office to explain what she's found out after a sleepless night of archival examination. She says she's identified the culprit as probably Immanuel Mendelssohn, an early inmate in the Nazi concentration camp system, sent there for unusual political deviance, a for-the-time excessive zeal for Nazi ethnic ideology, and contributing in a peculiarly ghastly way to the purge of the SA. The superior gets an odd glint in his eyes, as if he recognizes who Edith is talking about even before she says the name. Anyway, they track him down and arrest him, and ready him for trial.

    At one point the interrogators ask him why he did what he did. They mention his name, which can be traced back to targeted ancestry but at a far enough hereditary remove not to compromise him at all. Anyway, Immanuel says he wanted to do it for a while and figured that with the way things have been going in Germany, he figured he could get away with it. He argues for a "Roman conspiracy," not by Catholics but literal bloodlines-Romans, and says that this is just as dangerous as (or even moreso) the "Jewish conspiracy." He complains about Judaism and Christianity and Islam as all different species of the same general virus of almsgiving that weakens German mettle.

    "Now that's an interesting idea that I'd never considered before," the interrogator laughs. "Never mind that Rome doesn't exist anymore.

    "Or I'll concede the point. Rome is a perfect example of what we mean by the decay of a people. Cultivated from the survivors of the holocaust of Troy... and brought to ruin by mongrels---Germans hadn't evolved much, back then, among others... and martyrs. Mongrels and martyrs! But, we've improved.

    "Enough of my dialectical catechism, however."

    Edith cringes and worries a lot as she routinely runs into colleagues and superiors and other higher-ups in other subsystems of the regime, who laugh at odd intervals and give her coy smiles here and there. Eventually, the serial killer is sent to another concentration camp. Edith is startled by her superior and another government agent on a similar level, who accost her for getting an upstanding Aryan citizen in trouble, basically. They say that she's proven that even a supposedly actually good Jew, is really a traitor in waiting. But this is (on the surface) just very morbid mockery. After a few rounds of this, they laugh and cajole her, telling her that they have an assignment for her, in Poland.

    In the camp, the Transcendental Purifier is one day interviewed by some of those creepily-laughing Nazis. They tell him about a health measure the government intends to put into effect after the impending war. They say they've come to share his point of view in various ways. In their heads, of course, they think, We can't seriously punish him for doing exactly what we're going to be doing in a few years. They say that given his history and, technically, his name, they can't give him a job in the public police, or the SS so much, or the secret police, or the military. They judge him unfit for those kinds of duties. So they smile at him and say, "But we do need you to drive some trains for us."

    [In movie-form: then the camera shows a portfolio with a map, on the table in front of the killer. As it zooms in, the audience sees that it is a map of a train route to Auschwitz. Unsettling loud music starts to chime in before the final zoom-in and cut-out to the credits.]

    1. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      Or pilot/captain the trains, IDK the lingo.

  10. ... Gravitational pressure "squeezes" the quark-gluon plasma, and the quarks, which have been flowing through the seething array of gluon flux tubes, are "squeezed" out. The matter surrounding the quagma sphere is therefore hit with a pure quark wave. Simultaneously, the gluons are compacted enough to fuse and form a "short-lived" gluon star that will eventually, if it absorbs enough matter, go supernova and leave behind a black hole...

    ... In some cases, a squark/gluino analog of an atomic-molecular star collides with another dark-matter star at the same point in space as where two baryonic stars are colliding. Though the two regular stars do not interact with the dark-matter stars, their gravitons and gravitinos do. Accordingly, not only do the collisions and accompanying novae generate two separate black holes, but these black holes involve the fusion of gravitons and gravitinos at their core, which creates a small shell of gravitational fusion energy around the absolute core. In other words, the tetra-star collapse compounds the gravitational turbulence that already arises in the case of a regular black hole and generates a supermassive black hole (with an epochal intide (inwave) that draws matter towards the black hole, from the neighboring star systems, over a vast enough space that the SBH quickly absorbs more and more stellar masses within a "short" (let's say 1,000-year period)). [The inwave manages to suck a massive number of neutrinos/sneutrinos into itself, which adds up to a sizable amount of the mass constituency of the initial hole.]

    1. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      RETRACTION: I now think that the gluons would get squeezed out of the quark manifold, because the quarks would form a superfoam, and the thermal pressure surrounding the foam manifold would squeeze it like a sponge. So a quark star, albeit small and short-lived, would form at the center of the thermal manifold.

    2. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      DOUBLE RETRACTION: Now I'm not sure, maybe the case would alternate depending on the ratio of quarks to gluons (i.e. a quark store forms if there are more quarks, a gluon star if there are more gluons---although how many would be released in the initial quagma foam state IDK).

  11. … Kant’s theory of ethics is nowadays regularly placed under the heading of the “deontological” school, with R. M. Hare arguing for a utilitarian variant and Allen Wood an explicitly “teleological” account. Deontology is put on a par with consequentialism and aretaic approaches. By contrast, Kant’s tabulation of ethical theories depends on his conception of the mind.

                    Although Kant writes in the language of “faculty psychology,” he does not maintain that we use these different faculties separately over time, or more precisely that if we do so, we fall into various kinds of error. Even when, as is natural, we exercise each mental ability simultaneously, it is possible for us to order sensibility over the understanding, for example, or reason over sensibility. It is this divergence that gives rise to the fivefold table of moral theory given in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.

                    Living well before the time of Ayn Rand, Kant was not called to account for egoism as a possible ethical stance. He addresses hedonism, sentimentalism, perfectionism, and theological voluntarism as alternatives to his autonomian doctrine. Before explaining those five options, though, I would say that per the logic used to organize those, egoism would count as a moral theory in which the fundamental moral principle is given from sensibility. Thus it lacks in the absolute universality that we would otherwise ascribe to moral principles in themselves. Egoism is the moral outlook arising from the priority of sensibility insofar as we attend, without further “adieu,” to the unity of apperception, the “I think,” with which all given sensation becomes merely self-referential, hence egoistic—ethically solipsistic—as a normative representation.

                    It is the understanding as the faculty of rules that most ethical analysts appeal to, when trying to formulate what Kant would loftily declaim to be the “supreme principle” of morality. Since there are four types of categories of understanding in general, appeals to the understanding result in four types of moral principles. The first, which requires a morally qualified extensive magnitude, defaults to either a single independent quality as the material for ethical theory (hedonistic utilitarianism) or to a single irreducible concept of the good, to be summed up using the arithmetic of extension as such. The point is that, as Kant has it of the axioms of intuition in a theoretical sense, the parts (the units of deontic value) precede the whole (the determination of an action as right or wrong, good or evil).

                    Next, moral theorists might interpret the ultimate imperative in terms of an intensive magnitude. I will leave it to the audience to clarify how the positions of thinkers like H. A. Prichard or W. D. Ross exemplify this position (though I will say that with Ross, for instance, the relation obtains due to the convergence of the ceteris paribus clauses surrounding a given moral question and its possible answers).

                    Thomas Aquinas, with Aristotle before him, probably falls into the third kind of camp. Indeed, “natural law” ethics, grounded in purposive essences, is nothing else but the deontic conception of the analogies of experience, which give us the conditions of physical substance and causality themselves. Fourthly and lastly, using the postulates of modal association to define the right and the good gives us the necessarily righteous good of God, either as the eternal fulfillment or the almighty author of all other laws of righteous good.

                    Kant’s belief, on the other hand, is that moral imperatives derive from reason, which is not the same as the understanding. Though there are rationalistic elements in all moral theories (as all theories involve the activity of reason), it is only Kant’s kind of theory in which reason in itself, as the erotetic faculty, determines morality. That is, the ability to ask questions, which is perforce the ability to ask moral questions, and to order this inquiry transcendentally, itself contains the possibility of answers to those questions. Pure reason, and the practices it inspires, is therefore autonomous, deriving its supreme order neither from the ocean of empirical perceptions nor the lightning of conceptual understanding.

  12. "... outwitting the wicked,

    One sin of theirs

    And one grace of mine

    At a time..."

    1. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      [Although, the fixation on sin, even for the sake of fighting it, was questionable!]

  13. "Excuse, me, sir, but do you---I mean, does the library--have The Black Hole?"

    That's what he thought she'd said, but she had shaken her head when she saw him looking through an index of books. "No, the book isn't The Black Hole but the book is a black hole."

    For a moment, he believed that she might've been talking about those peculiar circular books from Charshajest, or the Moebius script---many original replicas proudly housed in this building, no less. But her accent hinted at Atashy or Screlk, not Flerence. Not that I know much about any of those places. Still, he'd never heard anyone refer to any such thing as a black hole. "I'm sorry, ma'am, but I do believe that it is not possible to write on a black hole, much less to store one for public reading. If you would kindly clarify..."

    "It's in time," she rushed in, "not space. Well, you can see parts of it in space. In the words. They're squiggles, you see. Strings. Wasn't it Taustargine who said that the shape of reading is the shape of time?"

    The custodian of the great cathedral-library of his land would have interjected with an answer, knowing as he did a little about antescholastic theology, including the anti-Helagian writings of Taustargine: an insightful, if prejudiced, figure in the historical regime. The custodian might have voiced other thoughts. But as he collected his breath to say something, the interloper simply continued.

    "So," she exhaled sharply, "there is a book that can draw all those strings towards itself sharply. It bends time the way mass bends space. We know that now, you know. They've proved it. So, the book absorbs meaning like a black hole absorbs matter. It absorbs the power of that meaning."

    Nodding, the custodian replied as soon as he could, however. "What about Zhawking radiation?" He didn't really get what the point of the "black hole" description was. Time? Space? He studied lists, not facts. Really! However, the interloper smiled slightly and spoke again.

    "No matter, that. The music of semiosis is not the same... it can be in perfect harmony."

    "Is there, though, actually such a book?" Here, the custodian thought he'd caught her in the web of her own metaphors. For it all came down to there possibly being a book in his library that united other books to itself with the strength of absolute gravity. Aside from the God-lore, I suppose. But that hadn't ever really been codified in a single text. Some people in some places at some times argued that it had---the B'kol Semanticists and the Terfryltyth Syntacticists the most ardent kinds of those debaters---and so maybe, for those people, their holy books were black holes. In their minds, into which all their thoughts were thrown.

    But now the interloper said, "Yes."

    The custodian studied her eyes for a glint of a second as he imagined to guess at her proposal. What kind of books has this person read? If she was from Atashy or Screlk---or maybe Ejaes---she was within a few hundred miles' distance from many trade routes involving paper and ink goods, and other great libraries and university reserves. Even a national literary estate, the Hall of the Labyrinth-book, in the north of Ejaes. But more readers and more reading choices meant more titles to hypothetically sift through. The custodian had seconds in which to make his judgment. If the interloper was quoting or paraphrasing the report of a book about time having black holes in it (the book about the phenomenon therefore embodying its own report), then she was probably---I'm not sure exactly how probably, to be fair---referring to the esoteric works of the Kanz-Frafka clique in Nrague, the capital of Czelchliand. Or the Xolopon Society, in Flerence after all... Or something else, even more absurd or weird, to be sure.

    He'd neglected his intuition on letting the interloper into the library four hours earlier. That had signaled to him that there was something weirdly dangerous about her, that she or her intention's shadow meant possible violence for someone, somewhere---even if was only herself, ultimately. But the name of the book she gave to him when he failed to guess it was of a work so innocuous, in his eyes, that his worry flashed away totally. Again his intuition jolted him as he'd handed the text to the visitor, and again he refused to look it in the eye at all. Now he just smiled; he was going to be allowed to stand guard at his desk in silence again: no one else there for the day had asked him so many questions as this one odd patron had.

    The odd one didn't look at her book when she took it. She just let it dangle in her hand while she signed a receipt of withdrawal, then slowly left the realm of bookshelves, off through the intersection of the cathedral transepts, after which point her departure proved invisible to the custodian. Whether she ran in delight then or not, he knew not, though he had a split second to think on that question when, a week later, the universe came to an end.

    THE END

  14. "The souls of the lepidoptera finalitas contain prophecies. Think of them like flying fortune cakes..." "Be gentle! Heed the lepidoptera..."

    And they said:

    "Hither! Purple whispers creep! The noose is loose! Kitten and a kaboose!"

    "There are 9.23 grams of marmalade dried to the base of Mrs. Losensky's blue ceramic bucket..."

    "I woke up one morning to find that my nose had detached itself from my face and been transformed into a hideous, lavender-scented aardvark..."

    "Apollyon likes bloody omelets..."

    "There seem to be a few problems with the argument: it is too long and only quotes The Minstrel of Lettuce..."

    "The quotient of a positive shirt and a negative shirt is a set of four-legged pants..."

    "Good grief, it looks like I missed the coronation of my skeleton's last remarks..."

    "What a mighty! I! What!"

    "My nephews never believed that I used the abacus for firewood to power my mitten-crinkling machine..."

    "Tsk. As if YOU had ever shaken hands with the Form of Handshakes..."

  15. [A tropey-sounding story, haha!]

    Long ago, when the Morning-god, Ramn Surdur, tried to destroy the world, He was bound into the Shadow of Heaven by the power of the Firelights. For thousands of years, in the City Under Heaven alone, these lights burned to uphold the Shadow. But a crisis of war arose that threatened our protection with extinction, whereafter the Firelights ignited themselves anew elsewhere, to strengthen their purpose to the last. So it was that the City Under Heaven lost splendor and influence, until this very day...

    [Deviant element: the doctrine of the antagonist, here, revolves around a quasi-stigmatic image of the Atonement. I.e. there is a supreme evil, the actual nature of, or precursor to, the Morning-god, but this was not originally some primordial malice as such, but instead the theory was that the Atonement wrought by the ancient Savior required the Savior to suffer the bridge-analogies of the final offenses themselves, to wit rapetorture, and murder, at the hands of at least one individual person. So, the deviant element is that to save the world by suffering in its place, the ancient Savior had to be tortured and murdered, but also raped, and the one who raped the Savior was transformed by this action into Ramn Surdur or its predecessor/source/lord... How to integrate the Christian theme here with the prologion-theme of the Shadow-binding, IDK yet. I don't even have any actual characters haha!]

    1. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      [Why/how are the bridge-analogies keyed to the final offenses? If my theory is right, like so:

      Rape-murder :: romantic injustice

      Torture-murder: recursive disgrace

      Rape-torture: transcendental delusion

      Therefore the most evil mystical action-types correspond to the most evil physical ones, in pairs. This is not necessary to prove that rape, torture, and murder are wrong; but it might be needed to prove that these are wrong in a way that theft is not, for instance (much capitalist propaganda regarding the merits of 'property' notwithstanding).]

      [Why, though: rape is clearly unjust in relation to romantic affairs; and Apollyon makes use of rape to fuel the process of universal desolation in murder, so... But recursive disgrace, as the superficial concept of Hell/eternal damnation, rests more on torture as such than rape at all [we don't think that Apollyon, or God the Father, molests those in Hell, do we?], and transcendental delusion, as requiring the dissolution of the mind, is reflected in the living trauma of rape/torture survival.]

    2. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      OK, new formula:

      The divine nature exists in at least two forms in this reality, relative to the concept of creation simpliciter versus creation as destruction-of-destruction. The Morning-god is the creator as the second, and the bridge-analogies of the final offenses are destruction-like forms (inclusive of pure murder as such).

      It's possible there might be a third divine form, creation-of-destruction/destruction-of-creation (reducible to each other via moral logic), but IDK what its name/title would be (the Day-god, maybe, haha!). And this might be the being who assaulted the ancient savior (who I no longer have as raped: rather, that might be the problem, that the Shadow of the Morning-god's seal is keyed only to two of the bridge-analogies, which allows the Day-god to issue forth more of its dark work in the time of the story).

  16. http://dc.medill.northwestern.edu/blog/2018/02/09/exactly-low-yield-nuclear-weapon/#sthash.I1biKEhs.dpbs

    So, it occurred to me, a while after hearing the president of the US (where I live) propose his idea of developing low-yield nuclear weapons systems or whatever, that my special knowledge of the Vietnam War and high-yield nuclear weapons test reports indicates what this proposal would amount to. So, according to Nick Turse's book about the Vietnam War, in 1969 alone the US military placed an order for 379,000,000 incendiary grenades (white phosphorous in particular, IIRC).

    I don't know what that means (was the order to be filled in the same year? over the next few years? in general?). I do know that the US military used an immense amount of firepower during this specific war. Like 17,000,000 tons of explosive force, 370,000+ tons of napalm, compared to a little over 2,000,000 as were used by every major faction during the Second World War, including only 200,000 tons (~150,000 conventional, ~10,000 napalm, ~33,000 nuclear, I think...) on Japan's cities.

    Which, you know, well, I won't make a gallows-humor remark but I will tell you that the USSBS (Strategic Bombing Survey) claimed it would only take 500 tons of bombs to devastate the average city. If low-yield nuclear weapons can range from 1,000 tons to even 10,000 tons, of TNT-equivalent explosive force (along with their other destructive energetic effects), and if the US was able to make a single high-yield weapon equivalent to 25,000,000 tons of TNT (in the past, this is true), then the military could easily end up making tens of thousands of "low-yield nuclear weapons" that still if unleashed in large numbers on specific targets could mimic explosions on an order of magnitude of 100,000 (maybe hundreds of thousands) tons of TNT. And keep in mind, this is just assuming that we're using 25,000,000 as the benchmark. It's not like the US didn't make tens of millions of tons of TNT-equivalents' worth more overall. In fact it might even be many tens or hundreds of millions (I don't remember the numbers I saw cited when I did the research but it was in those kinds of ranges). So for all I know, the US military could place an order for, IDK, 200,000 to 300,000 "low-yield" nuclear weapons on the 1,000-tons-of-TNT scale, which would be equal to 200,000,000/300,000,000 tons of TNT-equivalence. So if you fired 10,000 of these at a city, which would leave you with a great majority of these weapons regardless, you could simulate the detonation of a single 100,000 tons TNT-equivalent explosive, which would be like five or six times greater than the explosion set off in Hiroshima.

    And the thing of it is... well... If the US put in an order for 379,000,000 grenades, in one year, during the Vietnam War---not normal grenades but incendiary ones--alongside all else it was manufacturing in terms of weaponry then... I feel like it would be easy for them to make at least something like 800,000 to 1,000,000 of these things (hell, do you really think 2,000,000 to 3,000,000, for that matter, would be totally unattainable?). Equip them to the Trident submarines somehow (I feel this wouldn't be incredibly impossible of an engineering problem to solve) and voila, "the most versatile nuclear arsenal/system on Earth," perhaps (I don't mean to say that someone has vouched for that phrase's usage yet, but that it sounds like a description the government would use to congratulate itself about what it had done).

    1. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      P.S.: And that's all assuming that the use of these things doesn't trigger a conventional nuclear exchange. (Ironically, the least of the problems originally faced by the Avengers in the movies [the weaponization idea from S.H.I.E.L.D. for the tesseract] seems to be the greatest of the problems in the real world [weaponizing the most powerful energy source in this general way...].)

    2. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      EDIT: 10,000 of the 1KT would = 10,000,000, not 100,000. IDK why I wrote the number I did in the above.

  17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitary_logic

    Very interesting topic as it lines up with my notion of infinite transcension/transfinality sequences...

  18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectified_5-cell

    So, in the next stage of dimensionalization after 3-space appears, the tetrons and the octons are composed in the 5-cells and the rectified 5-cells that are tessellated together in 4-space. If the 5-cell has 5 particle types associated with it, and if the rectified 5-cell has 10, then there are 15 particles of tessellation (tessellons?) in 4-space. Now the theory as it stands becomes geometrically degenerate at the next stage of dimensionalization unless the information is hosotopically curved. Besides, then, rectilinear-spherical duality, we have a basis for the spheration of space in gravity, but then the graviton is an intrinsically 5-dimensional (spacewise) quantum field (it is the spheration arising from the hosotopic action at that stage). [Moreover, the sphere-helix of the tetrahedral chain mediates gravitational action, under the assumption that the tetrahelix naturally arises in action and satisfies the required principle of correspondence, here. So perhaps it is not necessary to limit gravity to 5-space, as such.]

    1. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      Otherwise, though, we just have one graviton type acting at each stage, invoked under different conditions. Since the 5-cell can decompose into tetrahelical manifolds, it can subsume that form of spheration into its action. But so anyway, there are 14 particle types at the 3-space stage (Higgs, graviton, 12 vectrons/gluons), then 17 (hyper-Higgs, hyper-graviton, 15 hyper-vectrons/gluons). If dimensionalization proceeded apace, then there would be 43 particle types (6 for the 5-simplices, 15 for the rectified 5-simplices, and 20 for the birectified 5-simplices, and then the other 2). So {5, 14, 17, 43}... an interesting pattern to consider, as it would then enable a prediction of which stage of dimensionalization the universe was at, based on which of the numbers on this list the universe was set towards...

  19. A Novel Eschatology

    Let us suppose (we are going to make a good number of extreme suppositions) that, long ago, humankind had developed a civilization that, while not as powerful as ours is, nevertheless was much more powerful than even Rome or elder China, say. While it is unlikely that they manufactured nuclear weapons in the modern sense, there is a small amount of evidence that radioactive materials might have been used in an “elevated” form (e.g. in Mohenjo Daro) at various remote points in antiquity and before. At some point, wars relating to these and other materials consumed this ancient civilization to naught, leaving us the remarkable structures of Macchu Picchu, the Giza pyramids, Stonehenge, and so on, as a testament to the might of what was then lost.

                Among the survivors of those days were the precursors to the Israelites. There is some evidence that YHWH, among those (hypothetical) survivors, began His “life” as a god of metal. But inasmuch as the Hebrew scriptures “translate” the tetragrammaton as a code for the divine self-assertion, “I am that I am,” we might suppose that “YHWH” is ultimately no more a simple proper name than it is just a descriptive term. Suffice it to say that the proto-Israelite metallurgical YHWH was not really the One God YHWH of the Hebrew scriptures.

                Now the Book of Daniel (and the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, implicitly citing the Danielite text) says that the human enemy of the Messiah (now known variously as the Antichrist or the Beast from the sea), in the “last days,” will set himself up as a god in himself, as the embodiment of a heretofore unknown, unrecognized “god of fortresses” placated by offerings of precious metals and other such treasures. The Gospel of Matthew notes that representatives of the false eschatological religion will perform signs and wonders so as to deceive “even the elect, were this possible.” This religion, therefore, must appear very similar in form and content to Judaism and Christianity. The easiest sum of this and the rest of the above is: the antichurch will present itself as worshiping YHWH, but this will be the forsaken god of metal from the end of an older human world, not the Father of the Son, Jesus Christ.

                Why would an evil lord of metals be the image of ultimate darkness as such? Uranium is not emerald ooze or ore, but a typical metal in regular appearance. By means of its power, humankind has formed a “god of fortresses” (to contain and uphold the dire weaponry) that has subverted the political integrity of every people, nation, tribe, and tongue: all are beholden, directly or not, to the forbearance of the “great powers,” such that the threat of nuclear holocaust holds all humanity hostage to itself—trapped in the “fortresses” of the great lands. The discoverers and inventors of the threat sometimes saw themselves as having achieved divine stature, as unleashing a deity of death and destruction (“I have become Death, destroyer of worlds,” as Oppenheimer said).

                America on some (fundamental) level has always imagined itself to be the truest example of the New Rome, not only the inheritor but the transcendental successor to the apex predator of human antiquity. We can see how far America has carried out its antichristian foundations in this, that when the US state made of itself an ideological soldiery (in the holocaust of Vietnam), the prerequisite explanatory appeal was to a clearly Beastly system:

    The conquered people are not [always] forced at gunpoint to change their ways, but “all participation in public life, whether political, cultural or economic, is conditioned on acceptance of the new faith.” (Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft, chapter 12)

                Rarely do we find such an explicit (if unintended?) evocation of the “prerogative” of the Antichrist, his False Prophet, and the image of the Beast thereof: “It forced all the people, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to be given a stamped image on their right hands [their deeds] or their foreheads [their beliefs], so that no one could buy or sell except one who had the stamped image of the Beast’s name or the number that stood for its name” (Revelation 13:16-17).

    Fire from heaven

    Although YHWH in the “Old Testament” is depicted as having entire cities destroyed by fire from heaven, Christ mysteriously enough claims that it will go better for Sodom and Gomorrah, at the final judgment, than it will for several other cities (Matthew 10:15). According to some copies of the Gospel of Luke, Christ actually goes so far as to ask His disciples once, “Do you know what kind of Spirit it is that we serve? For the Son of Man came not to destroy life but to save it” (Luke 9:56), and this in reply to a request by the disciples for celestial incandescence to be visited upon some unfaithful village in Samaria. Now there is apparently little to no archaeological evidence for the story of the ancient Israelites under Moses and Joshua going about physically slaughtering entire peoples in the land of Canaan, and it fits with the typological method of scriptural interpretation to suppose that those genocidal legends are allegorical for the ideological efficiency of monotheism versus polytheism: as Jewish philosophers (prophets, as per the definition of Maimonides) testified to the intellectual and emotional superiority of faith in One God instead of many, pagan regions variously converted en masse to monotheism of various forms (exclusivistic Ra-worship in Egypt for a time, say, or Zoroastrianism in Persia, being seeds or samples of such foreign processes).

                Accordingly, the False Prophet, however, will as his preeminent “sign” of power unleash “fire from heaven” on behalf of the Beast and the Beast’s image. Now there is one nation, above all others, who has indeed unleashed “fire from heaven” at many times and in many places: America, first and foremost in Japan, also to some degree in France and Germany (and a few other countries, during the Second World War, I believe), then massively in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. (Granted, other nations have inflicted the same or similar flames on this or that land, but no other to the degree or extent that the US military has.) It is in America that the falsest forms of Christianity have taken pride of place in much government decision-making, public or covert (by this I mean that even notions like “Christian Identity,” a racist formulation that is brother to Nazism, are on the minds of at least some of our leaders, here or there, now or then). It is America that has the unique potential to betray the reconstituted Israel—the means, the motive, and the opportunity, even.

                Who is like the Beast, therefore? I think it is easy enough to see who is so in our day, at least.

    1. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      Civilian death tolls per nation (resulting from major air wars) (these numbers are my own opinions after 10+ years of statistical research and analysis)

      Non-American (all during WW2)

      Germany vs. USSR: 500,000

      UK vs. Germany: 400,000

      Japan vs. China: 350,000

       

      American

      Japan: 500,000 (but possibly 900,000, as per the USSBS)

      North Korea: 750,000 (but possibly 1,500,000, per one of Curtis LeMay's claims about overall North Korean deaths)

      South Korea: 250,000 (but possibly 500,000)

      North Vietnam: 100,000 (but possibly 200,000 or more, per the official postwar Vietnamese government and my own analysis)

      Laos: 300,000

      Cambodia: 300,000 (but possibly 600,000 or more, as per various other estimates)

      N. Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos considered as a unit: approximately 1,000,000

      South Vietnam: at least 1,000,000, possibly 1,500,000 or more [note: South Vietnam was not only subject to the largest tonnage of bombing ordnance simpliciter, out of any nation in known history, but also to an inconceivable near-400,000 tons of napalm, to be contrasted with c. 10,000 as used on Japan during WW2, say]

      Total: approximately 3,500,000 to 4,500,000 [likeliest range; can be reinforced by considering sums for smaller campaigns]

    2. Ripheus23
  20. The Forge: magic system involving being magically tied to a specific structure called the Forge, which contains artifacts, the Instruments of the Forge, that can be invoked at a distance by people who are Forge-tied. These are usually large vaults of things like hammers, glowing rings, some swords, etc. Depending on how many people channel an object at once, it can start to resonate more and more violently inside its vault in the Forge, until arcane glyphs/runes manifest around it and close off its channel. [The rings are known to glow reliably even when being drawn on by hundreds of thousands of people per ring at a time; and there are millions of these rings in the vaults.] Forgeswords have some kind of fearsome or inauspicious powers, though IDK what yet. I don't want them to be Shardblade-analogs, to be sure :P

    Anyway, the Messiah of Despite was sealed by the Messiah of Daylight ages ago, by allowing the Servant-avatar to perpetrate two of the incarnations of the Final Sins upon his person. It was ages later when the Princess-goddess, Lavaliere Arestroissa, opened the vaults and the Anvilheart of the Forge to the masses of her and all other lands. When the Messiah of Despite arises again, it is to use the flaw in the seal to fulfill the "prophecy of free will": when the Creatrix was destroyed by the Despite-god during the foundations of the world, She imparted a possibility into the flux of history: that at unknown intervals, the forces of the Final Sins would have the power to end creation entire, and it would always be for the people of the world at those times, in those days, to defy evil unto salvation.

  21. ... This was a clever argument, arguably(!) one of the most clever the demons ever came up with. On a knife's edge did they balance the possible damnation of entire worlds...

    It was said, then, that right was what was done according to nature, and that wrong was to do what was unnatural. But in this event right and wrong would not be pure opposites, besides which all wrong would exist inside of all possible right, here, which amounts to the apotheosis of desolation, one might dread... However, the more important point down the line was to deviate from the axiom of opposition. The entire process was, so to say, half a red herring: the primary external victims would suffer greatly as a result, but not because hurting them was in and of itself more interesting to the demons than was hurting anyone else. It just so happened that these ones suffered from a special weakness which, if the demons exploited it, allowed them to open some of the doors to the apocalypse.

    So anyway, because what these people do does not cancel out something already-existent action or state of good and right as such, but is merely different from such an external state, it is not contrary to goodness and so is neutral if nothing else. Because this must be so, the control narrative has to be constructed by which to deviate these people from the truth nevertheless.

    You start out from a statistical weakness, the question of romantic luck, for them. You see, you have to think that there's much less chance for them to find one person to have a special love for, that is the greatest of all they can feel, here, i.e. it is statistically harder, just so, for them to achieve their romantic ideals. You prey on this [if you are a demon, as it were], because you know this is their weakness: they don't participate in the competitive scheme that you do, they look at other guys and think not so much, "How can I win one over on him?" but, just so to admit this, "I wonder if there's any way I could hook up with him?" Or whatever, haha.

    Anyway, this is their first weakness, here...

    ... [...] ...

    ... So the demons set it up where these people would be tempted to forbidden sadness on one hand, or promiscuous dissolution, elsewise. Convinced, thence, that romantic ideality is a moral illusion, an impossible gambit, an unacceptable promise, a gilden ticket to the heart of damnation even: you must convince these people that they are guilty, in every necessary way, in order for them to accept being sacrificed to the Destroyer's altar at last.

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