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October 14th; Thursday. A rather nifty 40-page report from the 1630s: 'A most certaine and true relation of a strange monster or serpent found in the left ventricle of the heart of John Pennant, Gentleman, of the age of 21 yeares'. Via the Public Domain Review.

October 13th; Wednesday. US Senator pointing out that compulsory vaccination doesn't match with pharmaceuticals being granted immunity from prosecution.
October 12th; Tuesday. Vaccinated 28-year-old woman MP collapses in Austrian Parliament during a speech in which she was apparently advocating vaccinating children against covid-19. Meanwhile Japanese nationalists celebrate Otoya Yamaguchi Day, to mark a 17-year-old killing Japan's Socialist Party leader in 1960. "Right wing" in the Wikipedia article is wrong of course - nationalists sat on the left of the French National Assembly in 1789, not the right. Yet more internecine left-wing violence, nationalist against socialist, relabelled by liars on the left as not their work.

October 11th; Monday. Fabulously dated-looking mid-60s pervert shocker movie with Bond-style theme tune, 'Who Killed Teddy Bear?' Perhaps worth seeing - even the poster is unmistakeably of its time.
October 10th; Sunday. A weblog discusses globalist pressure to impose unnecessary vaccine passes as conditions for normal life (going into shops, catching trains, entering museums, gyms, cafes).

October 9th; Saturday. Rather good short history article from 7 years ago about the heyday of high-speed mail coaches in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
October 8th; Friday. The French version of the intended world identity card.

October 7th; Thursday. Some elegant, or at least austere, ceramic art: (a) / (b) / (c).
October 6th; Wednesday. A consciously liberal Twitter account, of someone appalled by covid-19 authoritarianism: James Melville.

October 5th; Tuesday. A couple of days ago, several Facebook-related apps and related bits of the internet went down or slowed down. Speculation immediately started that this was the next aspiring world-government power grab after the imminent failure of the climate-warming and covid-19 gambits. After dusk Victoria drops by. She, Robin, & I natter into the small hours, putting the world to rights.
October 4th; Monday. From a couple of months ago, a speech by a politician in the Dutch Parliament setting out the globalist passport project that motivated the dishonestly hyped covid-19 scare.

October 3rd; Sunday. Wake up on Jessica Filmmaker's cream-coloured sofa. Last night she threw a party and we watched two films on her big screen television. Both movies were really about innocence. Pee Wee's Big Adventure (1985), which I'd never seen, is really a film about adults behaving like six-year-olds. Pee Wee is true naif, blithely in love with his fancy bicycle and utterly devastated when it is stolen from him. He goes on a big mission across the United States to find and reunite with his beloved velocipede. Various other characters, such as the girl at the bicycle shop hopelessly and secretly in love with him, are also small children inside the bodies of adults. Some remarkable moments. Spinster (2019) is a very low-key dry comedy about a woman in her 30s being nagged into getting married.
October 2nd; Saturday. Our contributor Tyler Durden discusses India's use of ivermectin, which turns out (what a surprise) to be effective against covid-19 after all.

October 1st; Friday. An old 1980s New Scientist interview with David Bohm.
September 30th; Thursday. Two recent posts from Our Man in Bucharest: Houellebecq on French civil war; Wuhan research lab & covid-19 linked after all. Duh.

September 29th; Wednesday. On which topic, a list of interesting books worth looking at if they decide to print them properly on paper.
September 28th; Tuesday. It seems there's an author (Ralph Ellis) who claims in a number of books that several characters in Ancient Egyptian history are renamed people from the Jewish Old Testament. One book, for example, says that Queen Cleopatra was grandmother to Jesus of Nazareth. What fun!

September 27th; Monday. This online document from the British government says that between 2021 Feb 1 and 2021 Aug 2 the newest variant of covid-19, the so-called "delta variant", killed 741 vaccinated people but only killed 253 unvaccinated people (bottom two rows of table on page 18).
September 26th; Sunday. French tennis player says sharp pains make him regret covid-19 vaccine. "I cannot train, I cannot play."

September 25th; Saturday. Argy bargy begins on Serb/Kosovo border. Might be part of the Sleepy Joe dividend. Annette says the German idiom is that, when the cat is away, the mice dance on the table.
September 24th; Friday. Interview with an Indian businessman on woke corporatism.

September 23rd; Thursday. Arctic ice cover now 25% bigger at its lowest annual point than the lowest point last year - of course hardly reported by the media.
September 22nd; Wednesday. A short article summarises why France's government is so angry about the recent Australian/British/US submarine decision. Plus more on the empty Russian-collusion claims, the attempted impeachment putsch against Trump the week he took office in 2016. Meanwhile, singer Nicki Minaj realises that Twitter banning her for questioning the covid-19 vaccines goes beyond health policy.

September 21st; Tuesday. A Daily Telegraph article about dangerous-sounding work Wuhan bat/coronavirus researchers applied for 14m USD to carry out in 2018. Worth reading carefully.
September 20th; Monday. Three interesting articles:
(1) A timeline of finance/banking motives to pump up the covid-19 emergency;
(2) A discussion of the character of one of the main vote hackers behind November 2020's election fraud;
(3) The Tablet reviews how China steered global overreaction to covid-19.

September 19th; Sunday. Another International Talk Like a Pirate Day slips by the gunnel, me hearties. Why do I keep missing this important festival?
September 18th; Saturday. I finish 'The Big Four', the 1970s reprint of a 1920s Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot mystery I bought yesterday. (Here's some slightly older cover art.) I don't recall reading this as a child, and I think I can see why. My mother had an austere taste for detective novels about character & intuition, and she disliked Hercule Poirot. Even more she detested his predecessors, Christie's short-lived Bright Young Thing detective duo Tommy & Tuppence - I recall reading one during the holiday in the fixed caravan in Anglesey when I was 8 and it rained every day. Mother was muttering in the background, as I read that book, about how appallingly characterised the Tommy & Tuppence flappers were, how dated and twee they were, etc. I suppose she was very much a child of the 1930s, hugely irritated by the 1920s.
Neither intuition nor character drives the 'The Big Four' plot. Indeed, it's hardly a plot and it isn't really a detective story. It's in fact Christie - in 1927 - having a go at muscling in on the then hugely popular Fu Manchu franchise of wily Oriental villains with long fingernails and silken robes controlling vast, shadowy networks of international crime. The name 'The Big Four' sounds hilarious now, and puts some of us in mind of the four major accountancy firms Arthur Anderson, KPMG, Price Waterhouse Coopers, and Deloitte, Ernst & Young (albeit so recently a Big Five and a Big Six). Poirot must use his usual "little grey cells" to deduce his way to the heart of the mystery. Yet neither he nor Christie (hardly out of her first decade of writing detective books, the decade that also invented the crossword puzzle - another passion of my mother's) had yet settled on the suburban milieu of Miss Marple. This book has poison gas and locked cellars and sinister Limehouse streets that Holmes & Watson (not to mention Bulldog Drummond or Richard Hannay) would have recognised. Some of the puzzle steps or plot twists are smart if a bit unconvincing to newer, more cynical readers. Except - one of the funnier effects of events since 2000 is that we now realise that the crassest of popular thriller tropes were a better guide to what was really going on the 20th century than the official histories. It's only just emerging now that Ian Fleming's Bond villains on tropical islands and the supernatural shenanigans of Dennis Wheatley novels gave a truer picture than the Cold War narrative. Then along came 2020 with an elaborate global disease scare playing to a script of Chinese-infiltrated media outlets and UN bodies to show us that the Fu Manchu books were, however luridly, describing a real danger, not a fantasy bogeyman. Nothing is too laughable or hackneyed to be true, it seems, and our smug bourgeois complacency wasn't so clever after all.

September 17th; Friday. Today picked up this book, 'The Struggle for a Human Future', by Jeremy Naydler, and read it later in the evening. On the way there, I also bought a second-hand paperback that has been staring at me from a nearby bookshop display window for a couple of weeks, an old Agatha Christie. That shop's "covid" opening hours are three hours on three days, that is 10 to 1, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose. The Christie cover portrays a sinister Chinese-looking chess piece with serpent coils in the background, in one of the 1970s or late 60s Fontana reprints I saw a lot of when my mother was encouraging me to read through Christie's detective novels.
Oddly, the Naydler book which had arrived for me at a bookshop across town, which I also pick up today, also has serpent coils in the cover design, a William Blake image. This is a curious book in which the philosopher of religion and gardener with a special interest in Rudolf Steiner compiles five of his articles about the computerisation of our world and our lives. There is an article about 5G, for example, the ongoing project to bathe almost every corner of the globe in various frequencies to ensure internet ubiquity. Another essay or chapter discusses light as it's regarded within the post-17th-century reductionist materialist research programme, and contrasts it with sacred views of visible light, and Rudolf Steiner's ideas about the meaning of light in particular. Naydler suggests that computers are damaging how people view the act of thinking, and are getting us into the habit of not experiencing the world directly. They are also making us, as in Heidegger's prophetic warning, view nature in an instrumentalist way, instead of our older attitude of reverence & mystery. This 2020 book gets me curious to read Naydler's 2018 book 'In the Shadow of the Machine', about the "prehistory of computing".
September 16th; Thursday. What a dismal intro it seems now: Van der Valk. My memory made it better, though I recall being puzzled as a small boy by a detective series in which Amsterdam police officers lived their lives entirely in English. The TV nostalgia sites call it 'gritty', and I can remember there were lots of storylines about corruption & local politics. I wonder how Dutch people felt about a British crime show offshoring bent-copper dramas to mainland Holland?

September 15th; Wednesday. More details emerge of US funding of coronavirus research in Wuhan.
September 14th; Tuesday. Another claim from a doctor (a tropical pathologist) that covid-19-vaccinated people are the ones who are dangerous to others.

September 13th; Monday. A plausible motive for the curious new push to - quite unnecessarily - vaccinate children.
Enjoyed several thoughtful articles in the copy of 'European Conservative' that I got given at last week's debate where Jeff Sessions spoke here in the Castle District. The magazine is much better than I expected, as were the darling little savoury pogacsas (mini-scones) on plates at the event.
September 12th; Sunday. Last night, visible to one side from Robin's balcony, crowds holding candles were slowly walking up Andrassy avenue towards Heroes' Square. This was while choirs sang. This morning I wake late to find Robin in the room adjoining the balcony, the room full of art ingredients, listening to more church music, more choirs singing uplifting hymns outside on the street. Another Catholic friend told me a few days ago quite mildly that Francis "did something very bad" in his youth that caused another priest to serve some time in prison. He said it as if perhaps it had been a valuable chance for the future pope to learn humility and repentance.
One of our contributors, none other than Tyler Durden, writes about Mr Fauci's involvement in the coronavirus scandal, lying when he called Senator Rand Paul a liar. Meanwhile, the British Heart Foundation describes how the spike protein in the covid-19 virus & vaccines causes changes to cells in heart tissue and elsewhere, migrating through the blood stream.

September 11th; Saturday. Barely 30 yards from Robin's front door, much of Andrassy avenue is shut down with parked police vans, newly mounted overhead display screens, lines of chemical loos, metal crowd fences, and long white ribbons marked 'Rendorseg - Police' in blue. This is all for tomorrow's visit by Francis the GloboPope, as a waitress outside the downstairs bar explained with sneering contempt, in reply to my query, two days ago. A Catholic friend told me a few months back that the Jesuits swore on their foundation never to let one of their own become pope (perhaps explaining why there has been no Jesuit pope until now).
Our Man in Bucharest judiciously celebrates Taliban victory.
September 10th; Friday. A good Salisbury Review article about history teaching. Not one of mine, I hasten to add.

September 9th; Thursday. Are white feminists evil? A nice Unherd piece. Small birthday party in the science cave for Tam, with Annette, Dag, Alja, and her sweet but jittery dog. Interesting how the pale shirt with pink and light blue checks, on being in the bucket of dilute bleach I put it in some hours a few weeks ago, stubbornly keeps the off-yellow background hue that makes it look not-quite-washed, but lost much of the dye meaning the checks fade in and out of white. In places the blue lines have gone altogether yet the white's failed to become clean-looking. You'd think that after a century and a half of bleaching and dyeing chemistry they might have worked this stuff out by now.
September 8th; Wednesday. A picture of Venetians larking around on the ice during the 1709 winter, a winter cold enough for the lagoon to freeze solid.
I visit Annette in the science cave for my first colloidal silver consultation.

September 7th; Tuesday. This morning woke out of a vivid success dream where I was, with some companions, in a large rambling building, part country house, part luxury hotel in some old city. One suite of rooms was haunted and filled with disturbing magical power, which was not so much frightening as thrilling. To get there I got into a lift which went vertically some floors and then horizontally down corridors and through rooms and walls very quickly, rather like a cable car. Then vertically some more - these "sideways lifts" feature in my dreams every few years, I notice. The suite of rooms was in some kind of tower overlooking from high windows a forest in winter, and I found myself triumphant, empowered, raised to more than health - "better than well" as the Americans say - as I clicked into rest-refreshed wakefulness. Later in the day, finished reading a copy of 'Ideas of the Great Philosophers', published half a century ago oddly enough by Barnes & Noble, a chain of American bookshops. I suppose booksellers branching into publishing was quite common once. The book uses a nice approach. Instead of touring in order through philosophers and centuries, or looking at specific debates, it does both. Each chapter is a topic (such as free will versus determinism), and the chapter starts with ancient thinkers, briskly touring through the Greeks, Late Antiquity, the Mediaevals, Renaissance thinkers, Early Modern, German Enlightenment and up to the late-19th/early-20th century figures (Russell and/or Pragmatists like Dewey in most chapters). Rather refreshingly for this reader, I don't recall seeing Wittgenstein, nor any of the Existentialists mentioned even once. The trick of making each philosopher italic on first mention in each chapter is very helpful, and some thinkers who tend to get left out of historical overviews, such as Herbart, Schleiermacher, or Anaxagoras, are here. Herbert Spencer gets quite a lot of mentions, and it's nice to see philosophers like Hobbes mentioned in non-political debates, not just in his classic discussion of the state. There's a proper effort to separate out Fichte and Schelling. This is an excellent book, but there are some strange slip-ups. A couple of thinkers, such as William of Champeaux and Roscelin, get italicised, full-status mentions in the body of the text, but are missing from the detailed biographical notes at the back, which include almost everyone else.
September 6th; Monday. A dog who apparently has learned to press buttons each with a word on is, her owners think, possibly becoming self-aware. Confusingly named 'Bunny', this affable hound is starting to press sequences of buttons like "dog / what / dog / is?" Not quite enough to convince me, but certainly interesting.

September 5th; Sunday. Read 'Perspectiva: A Nuremburg Renaissance Casket for the Marquesses of Lothian', which is a lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue, lusher than most books, that Robin got at some art show or auction house. The web has a lot of excerpted images of this casket, and other treasure boxes made by its maker, known simply as The Master of Perspective, who had a workshop in Nuremburg during the 1560s. The period of the German wunderkammer or cabinet of wonders was, it seems, exemplified by boxes to house valuables, themselves richly worked and decorated, sometimes containing jewellery, sometimes scientific wonders such as geological/biological/fossil curiosities. Pre-figuring Baconian science - the line was blurred between collecting natural oddities and displaying decorative wealth. Containing wonders and each cabinet itself sometimes constituting a wonder. The boxes made by the workshop in Nuremburg appear to have had a very distinctive style, surfaces in and out decorated by inlaid marquetry, mother-of-pearl and so on, almost invariably displaying what we might call wireframe polyhedra shown in perspective (hence the master's name) along with scenes from well-known classical stories such as Phyllis humiliating Aristotle, an episode Nietzsche & Lou Salome might have been referring to in their famous cart-pulling photograph.
September 4th; Saturday. This site opposes "covid passports" being pushed (clearly planned in advance) as de facto ID cards.

September 3rd; Friday. Up late, chatting with Robin. This Leo Strauss book looks like something worth reading as soon as I can. Strauss plausibly argues philosophers have always written in an 'esoteric' code, partly disguising their message so as not to challenge political & moral assumptions of their time head on.
September 2nd; Thursday. 'The crypto revolution is failing'.

September 1st; Wednesday. 'Afghanistan is where ideologies go to die'.

Recent weblog entries continued:

Who can translate the next 300 words into Korean or Hindi? Contact us and there will be revelry.

Languages dying out each week - who cares?