Bruce G. Charlton's Blog, page 13

Church faith, or church superstition

If once a person becomes convinced that a church (i.e. his church) is ultimately not an institution but also a divine entity; then there is a faith in the church which, in principle, cannot be refuted by any possible experience or action.

With faith; the divine nature of a church is irrefutable. 

And if such a faith is lacking, then there can be nothing that could happen that would ever prove a church to be divine. 

In other words; the judgment is contained in the assumptions.

Yet the above two faith-focused alternatives do not exhaust the possibilities; because a church may instead be, or become, the object of superstition.

Superstition is an interesting and seldom remarked phenomenon, because it does not make sense either to real spirituality or to materialism - yet it is almost universal. 

A person can be, and innumerable people actually are, highly superstitious, yet in their theoretical understanding of the nature of the world, they reject any possible explanation for having their superstitions.

Superstition survives and thrives in this "age of science", just as it did in the preceding "age of faith" - but although powerful superstition is also... uncomfortable. 

So we can be confident that superstition is not the same phenomenon as religion, nor necessarily a part of religion; also that it is a spontaneous and innate aspect of being human. These by the fact that superstition as a phenomenon has been nigh-universally rejected: it was (sometimes) rejected as evil by religion -- and currently is (usually) now rejected as non-valid by mainstream leftist-materialism.  

Superstition is therefore disreputable, furtive, and we sense that it probably "does us no good" even as we feel it personally necessary to yield to its insistent claims. 

The sceptical materialist explains superstition as a phenomenon of psychology; indeed psychopathology - an irrational symptom of some dysfunctional mental condition. 

Yet this does not coherently explain why this aspect of psychology survives (and thrives) without the oxygen of societal approval, and in face of ridicule; when so much of human instinct (eg in the sexual realm) has been inverted. 

Superstition is instead perhaps best understood by a follower of Jesus Christ as part of a constellation of extremely durable ideas to do with luck and propitiation. 

Luck and propitiation are, in turn, bound up with implicit assumptions concerning the incomprehensibility and hostility of supernatural and divine entities. 

There ideas have seemingly been integral to past religions - for instance, Roman religion and superstition were so integrated as to be inextricable. 

Superstition is still very much a part of religion as-is in 2025 and The West - in particular, I would say, in terms of people's attitudes to their church. 

There is no strong faith in churches, as was evident by church behaviour in 2020 and the birdemic; but as is evident in almost everything almost all of the time.      

Instead we have superstition about churches. 

The difference between faith and superstition is the difference between positive and negative. 

Faith is positive, superstition negative. 

Faith is expressed by a trust analogous to the young child's trust in his loving parents in a good family. This trust is something like the opposite of superstition. 

The faith of a Christian is an analogous trust in God; because God loves us personally. 

Conversely, superstition is rooted in mistrust; and the need for propitiation. 

The implicit assumptions of superstition is that the world is alive and purposive - which is why materialists cannot explain it - and the world is partly incomprehensible in its motives (hence the attention to "luck"), and partly hostile. 

Superstition focuses on the negative harm that may be done to us, if we anger or offend those entities who have power over us. 

We can't really understand these entities, therefore we sometimes must do things that make no sense to us - yet we fear not to do them, lest this cause offence...

Why must we grovel, kneel, prostrate, avoid eye contact? Who knows? But best to do it, to be on the safe, side, to avoid offence. 

Why must we perform superstitious rituals? Same reason. We don't believe in the validity of these rituals, but we do fear not-to-do them. 

Why must we make ritual obeisance to church authority, why refrain from acknowledging personal discernment, why refuse publicly to acknowledge that we have taken ultimate responsibility for our fundamental convictions? 

Therefore superstition is a double-negation; it seeks to avoid the harm that may result from antagonizing the world, and its entities. 

People neither believe-in nor act-upon positive faith in a church and the goodness of God the creator - yet we double-negatively fear to deny the claims of the church, and its ultimate and eternal authority over us.

(After all; somebody might notice, might be listening - and then who knows what may happen?...) 

It seems to me that the continuing power of churches over Men's minds, especially among Christians, is of this superstitious nature - which is why churches have survived the extreme loss of faith occurring both in church-rulers (priesthoods, ministers leadership) and among church laity/ members. 

Church Christians do not positively and faithfully trust their churches in any strong and durable or primarily-motivating way. 

And churches have almost ceased to be a force for good in the spiritual realm; but instead net-support the agenda of totalitarian evil. 

Yet Church Christians fear to antagonize their churches (even mentally); in a way closely analogous to that by which people fear to go against irrational and meaningless superstitions. 

Church adherence by superstition is thus, like other superstitions, not a product of theory or understanding; but something people do despite their theories, and because of their lack of understanding.

One who faithfully believed and trusted in a creator God who loved us each as His individual children; such an one would have no truck with his own felt-needs to propitiate the divine. 

However motivationally or psychologically powerful, such a desire would be recognized as a sin - because it misrepresents the nature of God and divine creation. 

Superstition is strong and superstition is wrong - but this is no paradox, and quite normal in our lives and this world 

 

A Christian should know and acknowledge that superstition is an evil; even though he cannot stop feeling it, and even when cannot stop yielding to it. 

And even when it applies to his church. 

Superstition should lead to repentance, not to the attempt to justify its necessity.   

Such is the nature of sin and of human beings in this world: we just-are "sinners", and cannot cease from sinning - but we can always repent. 

Therefore, like other superstitions; Church Christianity as-is in 2025, is primarily a consequence of lack of faith in the personal and loving goodness of God the creator.

And the spiritual harm of church superstition is sustained by the refusal to repent.        

Note: The above is a harsh teaching, but I believe that it is true. The only way out and up from where we now are, is first to return to unexamined or denied root assumptions; then to acknowledge and evaluate these assumptions - and that is what I am trying to stimulate here. In other words; far too many Christians actually are assuming that God is incomprehensible and unloving - when the reality is very simply that God the Creator is our Father who loves us as His children, and God's motives are understandable as those of ideal parents are confidently known by their offspring. A child ought not to regard genuinely loving parents in a superstitious manner, and to assume that fear is appropriate and propitiation is necessary is a sad and self-harming misunderstanding - that actually denigrates love. All I am suggesting is that Christians take seriously, and put first, the teachings and example of Jesus concerning his Father - especially as it is revealed in the IV Gospel. This teaching on God as an actual and loving parent of us as His children is what is literal, sure and certain about Christianity, above all else. And all else, all other claims of church, theology, philosophy, doctrine, church history etc.; needs to be judged by this. 

Time Loops and other temporal paradoxes don't Really exist. Charles Williams's novel Many Dimensions (1931)

I am currently reading Charles Williams's 1931 novel, in which there is a very early discussion of the possibility of a "time loop". 

In his biography of Charles Williams, Grevel Lindop suggests that this novel contains the first discussion of temporal paradoxes in any fiction, since the subject was first broached by HG Wells in The Time Machine (1895).

The stimulus for Williams's discussion seems to have been the 1927 non-fiction volume An Experiment with Time, by JW Dunne.  

But I regard the whole notion of temporal paradox as unreal; an artefact of distinctively modern scientific-abstract modellings of "time", as if it were a separable thing.

Read the whole thing at my Notion Club Papers blog.

An area of genuine supremacy of Girl Geniuses - spiritualist mediums and psychics of the past two centuries

Genius is much commoner in men than women. 

Indeed, in Charles Murray's historical survey of Human Accomplishment; English literature was the only one of the subjects surveyed in which women made a strong showing. 

And, even there, women did not feature among the very highest literary geniuses such as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. 

But there is one neglected but culturally highly significant area in which it seems as if women geniuses have been supreme, in terms of ability and influence; and that is as spiritualist mediums and psychics. 

1. The Fox Sisters, who from 1848 were the origin of Spiritualism, which became a global phenomenon for a century, and still persists (there is a spiritualist church within ten minutes walk of where I write).  

2. Madam HP Blavatsky - the founder of Theosophy; whose international influence is so vast as to be difficult to calculate and of extraordinary breadth. For instance; much of Rudolf Steiner's vast oeuvre derives from Theosophy; and it was the Theosophical Society in London that converted a secular-minded Gandhi to Hinduism. 

3. Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science, which grew very fast and went all around the world in a couple of generations to become extremely widespread at its peak - and, although much diminished, it still continues. (There is a Christian Science Reading Room about a mile from here.) 

4. Ellen G White was the prophetess whose insights underpinned the Seventh Day Adventist church - global in reach and apparently still growing, especially in the third world.  

5. Dion Fortune - who was the leading Christian magical occultist of the twentieth century. Her teaching and Fraternity of the Inner Light gave rise to multiple other major magicians and magical societies. Nowadays DF's influence appears to be growing in New Age and Neo-Pagan media.  

These five women (to which some others could be added) constitute a pretty formidable tally in a short space of time.

And the contributions of these women was apparently of a fundamental and foundational (rather than derivative) nature. 

This also fits with the oft-noticed fact (across several religions and churches) that women are intrinsically more often naturally psychic and mediumistic; and can also (like Dion Fortune, who was not naturally a medium) become psychic by effort and training. 

It is no coincidence that the (currently) best known, most beloved, English Christian mystic is Lady Julian of Norwich. 

Although genius is always rare, and in most cultures for most of the time (including our own, now) essentially absent; there are, indeed, solid psychological reasons (e.g. innate personality and intelligence) why genius is overall much more often to be found in men.   

Despite which, over the past half century, it has become a rather dodgy academic-journalistic pastime to manufacture and fake women-"geniuses" in science and the arts (and culture more generally). 

This has been attempted even in several fields in which there are zero women of the first, or even second, rank (such as mathematics, and the composition of classical music). 

Meanwhile, there has been this area in which women really do excel; but which has been ignored!

...Albeit for fairly obvious reasons; in that their activities seem fake, mad, or wicked both to the outgoing Christian traditionalists and the incoming Leftist materialists. 

Nonetheless, if evaluated by the normal standards of our culture; these womens' achievements clearly emerge as both socially significant and distinctively creative - and can then be recognized as products of genius.

  

God works primarily with individual persons, and always has done - thus God merely "makes-the-best-of" man-made groupings such as civilizations, nations, religions, churches...

It suddenly seems obvious that God has always worked primarily with and by individual persons; and that the historical necessity by which Men came to regard divine providence and plans in terms of tribes and nations and churches was partly a spiritual fact and partly a psychological constraint. 

In other words, Men of the past experienced the world and themselves, spontaneously (often unconsciously), as part of a group consciousness. 

And reality was experienced (psychologically) as oneself being primarily a group-member, whose primary role in life was to serve the group. 

In sum: the group came first, individuality was dependent on the group. 

"Individuality" was hard for such people even to conceptualize; but insofar as it was conceptualized, individuality was spiritually regarded as a sin, and psychologically as a menace to society. 

But Man's consciousness has changed since ancient times, and so has his psychology. 

Now that the spiritual group mind has substantially dwindled and weakened to a level of insufficiency; and now that Man's psychology is substantially autonomous and spontaneously alienated - these have ceased to motivate people strongly. 

It has at last become clear that God always was working primarily with individual persons; but this fact was obscured by the earlier more "pooled" nature of consciousness, and the innate needs of psychology. 

All that stuff about God working through tribes, races, nations, civilizations - and via the primacy of churches and other institutions - we (from our individuality) can now recognize to be merely God making-the-best-of whatever and various human groupings by which men used spontaneously to identify themselves themselves. 

We now (like it or not) realize that God must either primarily be working through groups with individuals as subordinate and in-service-to group interests... Or else God relates primarily to individual persons, with groups secondary*.

(*There is an exception for groups rooted in mutual personal love, such as some families, marriages, and deep friendships. It seems God is directly concerned by such - when they are real; for the obvious reason that love is the basis of divine creation. Any individual incapable of love or excluding of love, is beyond God's reach. Thus, in summary, God works on that aspect of individual beings which is loving of other individual beings.)  

This means that we now are called upon to drop many habits of thinking about God, providence, destiny and the like. 

We need to stop thinking of God's will in terms of civilizations, nations, religions, churches, tribes...

Instead; we are asked to recognize that these institutions are man-made and man-sustained - and God simply makes the best of them. 

The future of our souls, and of the world, depends first and foremost on God's relationship with each and every being (including human beings). 

We should regard our relationship with God in terms of this inter-individual reality, and what helps this relationship - and not psychologically-erect a mandatory groupish barrier or buffer-zone between our-selves and the divine. 

And the rest of it (civilizations, nations, religions, churches, tribes...) is - ultimately - a distraction and a self-deception. 

Group-primacy is - here-and-now - a perspective capable of leading us towards evil affiliations; but not towards Goodness.

 

Spiritual Systems, such as churches, used to be net-helpful, but now block spiritual contact

We live in a world of systems - of interlinked formal institutions, organizations, corporations etc - so this is a fact of life... "inevitable", at least at present. 

But these modern systems - or indeed the overall System - is scientistic, physicalist, materialist in its assumptions; and leaves-out the reality of the spirit at the level of our thinking. 

Systems thinking just-is mundane in its nature; and mundane thinking has no space for God or Jesus Christ (except falsely, as supposed means to materialist and this-worldly ends). 

This means that what would have been regarded in the past as spiritual, supernatural, divine knowledge and experiences; are nowadays excluded. The world of spirit is not noticed, or it is explained-away as the product of immaturity, stupidity, gullibility, manipulations and lying, or mental illness. 

In the past it was accepted that religion meant a church; and church meant a system by which the spiritual was achieved. The church was very complex; and consisted of approved knowledge - facts and interpretations; and narrative, symbolism, and rituals etc... 

Each Christian got from his church a strategy for life - almost a blueprint... What to do and what to expect from doing it. 

There was a plan, methods, and procedures: a causality of do this, and that will be the result. 

A church was a Spiritual System. 

But Men changed, human consciousness changed, and the world changed. 

From the later 1700s in England and Germany, people began to notice: Church Systems had ceased to lead to the spirit - the cause and effect of do-this and get-that was broken.

And this experience, or insight, or reality; spread throughout the West, and the world. 

And, from this point, the System of a church would overall and normally serve to block spiritual contact and experiences, instead of helping them. 

Because the churches maintained all or most of their canonical information, procedures and interpretations - but these had lost their positive and beneficial effect of leading to the spirit. 

Leaving (increasingly) empty forms and structures and actions - that were nonetheless asserted to be essential. 

Instead of providing a plan-of-action leading to the spirit; the churches (inevitably, by their nature as social institutions) retained a pre-determined, objectified, materialist framework - into-which all possible individual spiritual experience must be "slotted". 

And having been slotted-into the already-existing church System, spiritual experience was thereby linked with the other social systems (politics, law, economics, science etc) - which total-system explained it away as not-really-real (perhaps with the church-added spin of being due to some sin such as spiritual pride, disobedience etc).

By their very existence as social institutions and therefore, necessarily, part of The System (aka globalist, leftist, totalitarianism) - the Christian churches went from (often) doing net-spiritual-good, to constituting a barrier, perhaps a blockage, to the individual Christians ability directly to experience spiritual reality.

So long as Modern men remain primarily committed to System, God cannot get at us.

Because whatever God does to contact or guide us; we can - and usually will - explain it away.  

And the churches are complicit in this reality-distortion. 

Of course, the churches often assert that outside their walls lies chaos at best, and unopposed demonic control as most likely. 

Yet all of these are within the walls of the churches, and often dominant; operating at the level of what makes any church an institution in the world as it now is. 

The churches are on average and predominantly this-worldly in orientation, and mundane in discourse.

The spirit is allowed only if confined to predetermined slots in a dysfunctional (because no longer spiritual) System.  

Christians must therefore (and I think the "must" is justified) have faith that God can and will operate outwith churches and by a direct and personal relationship with each Christian.

So long as God is honestly sought...

And have faith that Jesus Christ's gift of resurrected eternal Heavenly life is available to every person who genuinely desires and actively-seeks it - (ultimately) regardless of human institutions, and of the circumstances of mortal life on earth.  

We should have faith (confirmable by personal spiritual knowledge) that God the Creator, our loving Father, will have set up the world so that salvation is available and possible always and everywhere, and for everybody. 

The deep archetypes of King Arthur and the knights, Robin Hood, and Merlin

What follows is either a deep archetypal insight, or more likely just my headcanon, concerning some subjects I have spent an inordinate amount of time reading and thinking-about. 

While I love the Big Picture; I have always had some reservations about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table - perhaps because of their deployment by the Plantagenet and Tudor aristocracy in a self-justifying, self-aggrandizing, sort of way. 

I mean, when all is said and done, Arthur is a king, and they're all knights!

And the stories are often (at least superficially) about fighting on horseback, ransoms, castles, hunting, courtly love, points of honour - and other such nasty or ridiculous (and typically Norman) stuff. 

To complement this as any kind of myth for England and the English; it is necessary to give primacy to Robin Hood and his Merry Men. 

These represent to me something like the Yeomanry and Craftsmen of the English and "Welsh" (Saxons and Celts). Certainly there was, for many generations, a kind of obsession - an insatiable hunger - among ordinary English people for songs and tales of Robin Hood. 

This archetype is, however, rather poisoned by the gentrification of making Robin an Earl, and having the story rotate around his supposed loyalty and obedience to his feudal monarch King Richard I ("Lionheart") - who was a a pretty typical absentee Francophile militaristic Norman oppressor. 

I see Robin and Co.'s "outlawry" as - negatively - a protest against the Norman Yoke and especially the vile Forest Laws imposed on the Anglo Saxons; but positively as a kind of restoration of the freedom and animism of a hunter-gatherer life. 

The other great archetypal character is Merlin the wizard - whose greatest resonance is as a kind of shaman-priest, and a link between the pagan and Christian. 

I suppose Merlin to have spent most of his time in the forest, nearby the Merry Men - In my mind replacing Friar Tuck in the role of spiritual teacher, advisor, seer, and magician. 

But, linking the worlds of Arthur and Robin; Merlin might reasonably have been supposed to spend some time in the court; including the crucial task of arranging the birth of Arthur from suitable hereditary stock - on the basis that, since we apparently must have a King and Knights, these might as well be Good ones. 

Western politicos, military and mass media have now talked-up deliberate gamma-ray-emitting environmental contamination into An OK Thing to do

Beginning with the Fire Nation conflict, and now in the Middle East, it has become An OK Thing for Western Forces deliberately to try and contaminate the environment with gamma/ alpha/ beta-emitting substances. 

There have already (seemingly) been Western-forces launching multiple and sustained missile (and other military) attacks on (what is supposed to be) Europe's largest electricity-generating power station that uses gamma-ray-emitting materials. 

(Compare this with the Green "outrage" over the 1986 power station accident in the same part of the world.) 

There was also reported the massive usage of artillery mucky missiles - which inevitably polluted the very nation that the West was using as a proxy against the FN (as would the power station attacks have done, if they succeeded). 

There were and are evidenced claims of Western proxies (with Western help) developing mucky mines; devices explicitly-designed to cause lasting mutation-inducing pollution over a wide area.    

And just now there are triumphant claims of having destroyed research and development facilities in Zoroastria; which, if true, would inevitably mean extreme and lasting environmental damage from spread of these substances. 

My point is not so much about what has actually been done (which is unclear); but how this discourse has normalized the idea of deliberately causing, strategic, lasting and dangerous contamination and pollution -- and of a kind that has for, the previous 80 years, been regarded as the ultimate environmental horror that humanity ought to avoid.  

We have already reached a point where people do Not Even Notice that this is the intent and consequence of multiple and repeated (and planned) - West-initiated - actions. 

The nature-harming implications apparently do not even occur to the mass of Concerned (self-identified Responsible) people who affect passionate environmentalism, pseudo-worship of Gaia, who support Green parties and policies... 

This kind of stuff is beyond ridicule: a Bizarro Inverted World where people are terrified-of, and try to eliminate "Carbon" (Trade Mark: The Gas of Life); yet cool and approving about spreading gamma/ alpha/beta-emitters across and into our planet, on a whim; from military expediency - indeed, simply because it make A Good Headline. 

NOTE: All the above is hard to explain on the basis of politics based on a primary desire for money and power. But it is easily understandable on the basis that Western geopoliticsis dominated by those who serve the agenda of Sorathic demons - in other words; those who seek maximal destruction of divine creation as their ultimate goal.  

Pride/ Wishful Thinking - versus futility and shirked responsibility

There are always defaults in (what pretends to be) "reasoning" - and defaults are assumptions, not necessities.

Currently, the default assumption is that individual human beings are accidents of causality and randomness, products of physical processes and biology, motivated by evolved instinct... 

And, as a product of more fundamental causes and accidents, each human being therefore has no genuine significance - everybody is inessential; and to believe otherwise is a delusion of pride or sheer wishful thinking. 

Modern Man's default and underlying assumption is: "I don't matter to the universe, or to the world."

And insofar as modern humans matter to anyone, it is framed in terms of providing material, or maybe psychological, "help" to "others"... which, if thought about consecutively, means no more than that we are supposed to help each other to... help-each-other.

Against such a background; anyone who asserts (or even believes privately) that he has a significant cosmic role to play - a destiny in terms of is regarded as stupid or dangerous; maybe a childish daydreamer, insane with arrogant pride, or a would-be manipulator and dominator of others.  

And of course any of these might be true. 

But there are very serious - indeed lethal - adverse consequences from an affected humility or conviction of insignificance. 

For a start, there is no basis for taking responsibility for anything - and this fundamental evasion, this refusal to be responsible for one's existence, life, behaviour - is mainstream and encouraged.  

And if we have no spiritual or cosmic role, not even potentially; then life is reduced to mere hedonism - seeking pleasure and gratification, avoiding suffering and misery. 

Also; disposing of ourselves (preferably without suffering) whenever it is convenient, or expedient.

No reason why we should not dispose of ourselves in order to avoid the risk of future suffering... 

(This is what is entailed by regarding "quality of life" as the justification for staying alive.) 

But - if we have no ultimate (cosmic, spiritual, eternal) significance, even potentially, as individuals - then we are just cogs in a machine, bits of a computer program... so there is no solid reason why others should not dispose of us, whenever it suits them. 

In the past, it seems that people justified themselves, saw reason for existence, not individually but in terms of their loyal membership of a family, clan, tribe... later of a nation.

That's gone. 

Now; it's either justification for each individual person, or no justification at all. 

Clear, simple, difficult. 

And if it is to be justification for each individual person, there can be no shirking of individual responsibility. 

We are each, therefore, of cosmic significance; each life is important to creation; and each person just-is responsible for his own life.

Tat's the proper default. 

We cannot hide behind service to some "group-good" - because we don't really believe it, so we don't really act upon it. 

It's a fake excuse. 

  

Trying to ignore evil in an evil-dominated world...

I keep circling back to the basic insight that negations do not suffice; so that the common strategy of trying to ignore something like geopolitical evil turns-out to be an assimilation to exactly that evil. 

On the one hand, mass media (eg "news") addiction, is a besetting sin of our times and place: the media is intrinsically evil in motivation and net effect. 

If we are to choose salvation and learn spiritually from this mortal life; then we each must know this evil, and must not surrender to it. 

But! 

Cutting-off from the mass media (as well as being literally impossible for most people) is not a virtue - it does not even tend to goodness; because negation does not lead us to positive good. 

And positive goodness is what we must have. 

If we attempt to cut-off our awareness, try to Empty our minds, try Not to have our thoughts occupied with the totalitarian agenda...  all this does not accomplish anything good, because thinking does not stop, minds will not stay empty... 

Unless we acknowledge and discern the presence and activities of purposive evil in our world - such minds will passively be filled by the pervasiveness of evil motivations throughout all the social institutions.

In a world that is - as now - administered and managed by evil-affiliated persons, any form of passivity, negation, attempted-ignoring, or the like; will fail to discern evil, fail to dissociate from evil, fail spiritually to oppose evil by active goodness. 

However differently things were in the past and in other places; for Men in 2025 in our society it is only a conscious and positive spiritual affiliation to the hopes of God and divine creation that suffices to benefit ourselves and the world. 

This, naturally, entails an inner detachment from the ideology and propaganda that pervades (and is the ultimate purpose of) mass media and the Western social institutions - yet it also entails our own active, aware, positive and personal choice to reject the plans and schemes of the servants of evil, whenever they impinge upon us... 

Which impingement is frequent and unavoidable.

The main thing is not, therefore, to try (and fail) to avoid the endless unavoidable impingements, not to enter the infinite and overwhelming vortex of double-negation - hoping to reject evil after evil after evil, without end...

But instead consciously to recognize evil-motives and actions in our orbit of thinking...

And - whenever this happens - recurrently to confirm our desire to align with God's eternal agenda, and confirm our intention to follow Jesus to resurrected eternal Heavenly life. 

**

Note: Back in January when DT replaced the previous puppet-Prez, done with the essential support of CHOAM and its agents; I made a precise prediction of upcoming direct Western military action in the Middle East before April, rationalized by a fake pennant event. This prediction was wrong. My prediction was about three months too early, and I underestimated both the scale of action; and I failed to recognize that the nature of evil in The West would have reached such a point that large scale direct intervention could happen without bothering about false pennants - and indeed without any plausible excuse or attempt to explain its "rationale". Yet here we are. To me, this confirms the acceleration of that decisive shift away from the Ahrimanic evil which is rational pursuit of global totalitarianism (i.e. wars intended to gain relative power and wealth). A decisive shift away from this, and instead into a spitefully-motivated and intentionally destructive evil of the Sorathic kind. (NB: Mutually destructive war - war intended not to "win" but to damage both sides, indeed all sides, i.e. to damage the world, humanity, and divine creation.) So this war is primarily spiritual, and to oppose it requires a spiritual act of conscious recognition and choice. And such discernment is A Must; not something that can be avoided by negations such as trying and pretending not to know, or attempting not to think about such things. Or pretending that what we personally think makes no difference... when in truth what we personally think, makes the only potentially positive difference. 

DuckTales introductory song

I used to watch the Disney TV programme DuckTales when the kids were small. 

I never thought much of it, except for enjoying the Stax-Atlantic influenced introductory theme song; with its incomprehensible words, but marvellous brass section interjections. 

I later found a superb parody performed by the impressionist Hunter Davis; whose version of Ian McKellen reciting the lyrics of DuckTales is little short of genius in its phrasing and comedic timing.