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October 2026

October 02, 2026

Chess Grifters, Chinese Rooms, and AI

LLM AI systems do not "understand" anything. So don't be a sucker. As Harry the...

May 2023

May 29, 2023

People Are Like Firewood

The only way to precisely engineer a wood fire is to pelletize the wood, to...

October 2021

October 27, 2021

The Serenity of Shikata Ga Nai

You can't solve the halting problem, you can't make someone love you, and you can't...

May 2021

May 21, 2021

Energy In The Art Of Magic

Our "energy" is an experiential, psycho-socio-emotional phenomenon. It's not measured in kilowatt-hours or Newton-meters.

February 2020

February 09, 2020

We All Get To Do Everything, Because We’re All Everyone

I seldom remember my dreams, but sometimes they are humdingers. From this one came a...

October 2019

October 09, 2019

Magic Doesn’t Care About Metaphysics

Imagine that we could hop in our TARDIS and jump back to the Golden Age...

May 2019

May 16, 2019

Reason, Rhetoric, and Identarianism

What is special about propositions is that they are true or false no matter who...

October 2018

October 15, 2018

Manifest The King, Honor The Ancestors

The sort of King we are speaking of here truly "reigns but does not rule";...

August 2018

August 10, 2018

Eight Points About Consciousness

We have no good definition of what "consciousness" is. If we're invoking science, whatever "consciousness"...

July 2018

July 18, 2018

Pagans Are Wild

Who's going to find what we need? The wild ones. The experimenters. The spiritual mad...

April 2018

April 14, 2018

The Wounded Healer

But we must be wary of thinking that more suffering enables more healing, that in...

April 22, 2017

What Science Is And Isn’t

So let us join with Uncle Walt in saying "Hurrah for positive science!" But let...

February 2017

February 02, 2017

Groundhog Day and Ikuru

So he does three things: he works to improve himself. He comes to love the...

January 2017

January 27, 2017

Welcome To Tiny Train World

That's part of Tiny Train World: every story is subject to change, with past versions...

January 08, 2017

“This Present Moment Sucks” (A Song – Week 1 of “52 Makeup”)

And that sounded pretty good when you meditated But when you're blissing out, you never...

November 2016

November 17, 2016

Luke Cage and the Hero’s Journey

And when I watched Cage what I found was more than a tale of a...

August 2016

August 13, 2016

Paradoxes in the Path

So there are some logical reasons why you might get contradictory instructions. But there are...

February 2016

February 20, 2016

Am I Going Nuts?

But I can never be sure. This routine bit of business becomes a topic of...

December 2015

December 06, 2015

In Praise of the Circular Argument

On the other hand -- and here I freely admit that I am stepping out...

October 2015

October 30, 2015

Spirituality, Creativity, and Vitality

And so our friend is living what Thoreau called a life of quiet desperation. Do...

September 2015

September 14, 2015

When I Die

Now perhaps it's jumping the gun to assume anyone will give a damn, that they...

September 05, 2015

Otalp’s Cave

The ideas that he loved, the roundness of the geometer's circle, the inarguable perfection of...

September 01, 2015

Are People Any Damn Good?

But over-engineering the garden ruins the fruit, give us those cardboard supermarket genetically-engineered tomatoes instead...

August 2015

August 28, 2015

We Live For Beauty

Why do we live?

August 20, 2015

Neopaganism: Looking Forward or Looking Back?

I've always held with the old saw that says we should all be concerned about...

August 11, 2015

Why I Am Still a Zen Pagan Taoist Atheist Discordian

I look back at this after fifteen years, and it’s not terrible. I’ve come to...

August 07, 2015

Enchantment and objectivity

There can be plenty of enchantment in the objective world-view. There is a form of...

July 2015

July 18, 2015

You Don’t Make the Grass Grow By Pulling On It

Zen teacher and punk rocker Brad Warner recently posted a piece titled "Don't Try to...