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It's Father's Day, and everybody's wounded

Since Oppenheimer's in the news now, allow me to present my theory that he is the kabbalistic referent of the Leonard Cohen song "First We Take Manhattan":

"They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within" - losing all of his positions and security clearance for mild nonviolent communism

"First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin" - his plan was always to finish the Manhattan Project, then use the bomb to defeat the Nazis

"Guided by a signal from the heavens" - Oppenheimer's early work was in astrophysics, focused on x-rays, cosmic rays, and other signals received from space

"Guided by this birthmark on my skin" - Oppenheimer also published in biophysics

"Guided by the beauty of our weapons" - Left as an exercise for the reader

"I'd really like to live beside you, baby / I love your body and your spirit and your clothes". At this point, the song is interrupted by a female voice singing these words. I puzzled over the meaning for ages, but now it makes total sense - the kabbalistic wires got crossed, and that's a reference to Barbie!

#the Trinity test was the day before Father's Day 1945

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You probably knew that Calculus class is etymologically related to calculus, the medical term for kidney stone, through Latin calculus “small stone” (the math link comes from the small stones used in an abacus).

But did you know that Literature class is etymologically related to diphtheria?

Ancient Greek diphthera meant “leather”, and was also metonymically used for writing (eg on leather parchment). As it travelled west, the sounds changed and it became Latin littera, which gave us the modern “letter” and “literature” (also “ledger”).

(does English “leather” also come from diphthera? my sources say no, but I refuse to believe them)

In the 19th century, some French doctor who knew ancient Greek discovered diphtheria and named it after the Greek word for leather, because it involved a “leathery membrane” over the throat.

Unrelatedly, in some Greek dialects diphthera doesn’t have the h’s and just ends up as diptera. Biologists will recognize this as a class of flying insects (including flies and mosquitos) - here it comes from di (two) + pter (wing, you might recognize this from “pterodactyl” and “helicopter”). Diptera fly and diptera literature are two unrelated words that happen to sound alike; in ancient Greece, which wrote its literature on scrolls, there wouldn’t have even been any kabbalistic link. But now:

Books have two wings!

The moral of the story is: if you can’t figure out the kabbalistic link between two similar-sounding concepts, just wait a few millennia.

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Fun Facts About the EU Flag

The EU flag depicts twelve golden stars in a circle on a blue field.

Before it was the flag of the EU, this was the flag of the Council of Europe, which designed it based on ideas submitted to a contest and tweaked by a committee of the Council.

The original contest-winning design had fifteen stars, representing the fifteen member states of the Council of Europe. Before adopting it, the committee decided to change the number of stars to twelve.

There had never been twelve of anything in the Council of Europe - it had ten founding members, with Greece joining the following year and then Iceland, Turkey and West Germany all signing up the year after that.

The committee's official explanation for their choice was that the number twelve is a "symbol of perfection and entirety".

Nobody knows what the heck that means.

Some people have suggested that the ring of twelve stars on blue was inspired by religious art, like this statue of the Virgin Mary in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg:

The same year that the Council of Europe adopted the twelve-star flag, an enormous new stained-glass window was installed in the same Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg which made this connection explicit (it's known as the "Window of Europe"):

The crown of twelve stars is not just a decoration; it has a very specific religious meaning. In the Book of Revelation, a woman appears "clothed in the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars". Traditionally known as the "Woman of the Apocalypse", she is the counterpart figure to the Whore of Babylon, and is responsible for bearing the child whose enmity with a demonic dragon leads to a "war in Heaven" at the end of days.

In Catholic tradition, the Woman of the Apocalypse is identified with the Virgin Mary.

At its founding, the European Union adopted the twelve-star flag unchanged.

The EU technically has three separate presidents - the heads of the European Parliament, the European Commission, and the European Council respectively.

The President of the European Parliament has diplomatic primacy, and is listed first in every treaty affecting the three presidents.

The other two presidents work exclusively in Brussels, where almost every EU institution is headquartered.

The European Parliament, however, by law must carry out at least half of its proceedings in the city of Strasbourg, France.

This is the center of the Hemicycle where the Parliament meets in Strasbourg:

The person in the very center, who's lined up directly under the EU flag, is the President of the European Parliament.

This building is just a short stroll up the river from the Cathedral of Strasbourg.

The last female President of the European Parliament, Nicole Fontaine, was also the last one to hail from France.

This is her:

Most Parliament Presidents don't dress all in yellow for their official portrait, or pose in front of the EU flag.

Fontaine was President of the European Parliament when the Euro was first introduced, at the turn of the Millennium.

The Eurozone Crisis of the 2010s culminated in a series of deadly riots in the ancient city of Athens.

That crisis demonstrated the necessity of integrating Europe fiscally as well monetarily - making it effectively one polity under a united sovereign.

Luckily, nothing like that has ever been prophesied, and there's no other evidence that we're currently living in the end times.

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(source)

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anabolism: building something up catabolism: breaking something down canabolism: breaking someone down and eating them to build yourself up capitalism: breaking natural resources down to build society up catapultism: shooting projectiles up to break walls down

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A classic table of accidental lexical gaps in English, from Language Log.

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RIP Quintus Valerius Soranus (140 - 82 BC), Roman poet and scholar. Angry at Rome’s moral decline and increasing chokehold on the rest of Italy, he hatched a plot to bring it down. According to legend, there is a secret true name of Rome that must never be revealed, a name which gave its posessors spiritual power over the city. Soranus learned the name, stood in the center of the Forum, and shouted it at the top of his lungs where all the citizens and clients and slaves of Rome could hear it.

They crucified him, of course, and damage control efforts were successful enough that the name remains unknown to this day.

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A neuroscience paper mentioned that neurons ramify. I had never heard this term before. It comes from Latin ramus, meaning branch. To ramify is to branch out. Ramifications are branches that spring out of an action.

Before important events and transitions, the Bible tells us to sacrifice a ram. Kabbalistically, this is equivalent to a ramus, a branch. To commit to an action is to select one world-branch of many, to sacrifice possibilities. God asked Abraham to seal the covenant by sacrificing a ram because symbolically to serve God is to destroy all your paths but one, to commit to a single branch in possibility-space and prune all the others. Guilt sacrifices are sealed with a ram because to repent of sin is to close off those world-branches where you do it again.

Sacrificing a ewe is also acceptable in many of these cases, I assume because it is a form of self-sacrifice.

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This of course made me wonder if there's a link between all these female deities like Eostre and estrogen.

Answer: no. Estrogen comes from estrus, the scientific name for females being "in heat". Estrus comes from oistrus, Greek for a kind of biting gadfly, possibly from some kind of story where being bitten by a fly sends you into a rage, and so any kind of rage or passion is metaphorically a fly-bite (compare our modern term "gadfly" for a radical who riles people up). The fly's name comes from an Indo-European root meaning "passion" or "anger". Its closest living relative is English "irate".

Ishtar and Astarte are closely related Semitic goddesses; Eostre is an unrelated English goddess. Ishtar and Astarte were goddesses of the planet Venus, and their names might come just come from the word "star" (weird, since they were Semitic goddesses, but Wiktionary thinks it might be an Indo-European loan). Eostre was a goddess of dawn or spring, and her name is related to Eos, the Greek dawn goddess, and "east", which I guess is just the direction the dawn comes from, okay, never made that connection before.

If you want to link Ishtar to a spring holiday, your best bet is Purim; there's a plausible (but unproven) theory that Esther was named for Ishtar, based on a practice of Jews living among pagans sometimes taking pagan names.

The Real Truth About Easter

Easter is not named after ISHTAR or EOSTRE. Actually it’s derived from easterOGEN and originated as a celebration of FEMINISM marked by the symbolic exchange of DRAGON eggs. In fact the easter symbolism of fluffy baby chickens is where we get the colloquialism of calling women CHICKS. Chickens and rabbits of course being common feed for medium to large REPTILES, these and shiny metal wrappers are the modern remnants of the SACRIFICES of poultry, game, and treasure made to the actual FEMINISM DRAGONS in the distant past, to petition them for BLESSINGS, represented by the DRAGONS’ precious EGGS. The symbolic eggs are made of chocolate because chocolate is a TRADITIONAL HERBAL REMEDY used by WITCHES to ease Female Problems, and pretty much the biggest problem females have is PATRIARCHY. So next time you give someone an easterOGEN egg remember you’re really wishing them EMPOWERMENT and EQUALITY. Good for you.

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“And all who taste of it will have eternal life”.

#haha get it laplante because it's the Tree

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Left: heavily zoomed-out rendering of the infamous 2b2t "no rules" Minecraft server, a virtual world set up to be as unpleasant, violent, and offensive as possible for its participants.

Right: the Kalachakra Mandala, Buddhist depiction of the true nature of the cosmos.

#life is suffering

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Seen on Twitter:

Donald Trump’s campaign site asks supporters to donate $45 in exchange for a red MAGA cap. 45 is the gematria value of MAGA (mem + aleph + gimel + aleph). Trump is the 45th US president. None of this is a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.

Also, there are 22 trumps in the Tarot and 22 Trumps in Donald Trump’s family (self, parents, siblings, children, grandchildren), you can find a preliminary mapping between them here.

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(full thread here)