Racial healing from the Duck:

in revenge for #BlackBrunchNYC some uncool white people just flash mobbed a black barbecue joint and forcibly pulled up everyone's pants

— Duck Enlightenment (@jokeocracy) January 5, 2015

(Best way to keep up with the Sith these days is to read the Washington Post.)

This surely deserves immortalization:

A reactionary is someone who, encountering a fence with no obvious purpose, electrifies it.

— Steven Kaas (@stevenkaas) August 26, 2010

(Open thread.)

Still link-deprived, so here’s a puzzle (strictly optional):
(1) Every Roman Numeral has an Alphanomic value (corresponding to contemporary alphanumeric position, or to alphabetical position +9).
(2) Are there any consistent Roman-Alphanomic numbers?
(3) The Roman-Alphanomic difference can be conceived as a disequilibrium, and the puzzle is an attempt to restore a zero-divergence through a syntactically well-constructed Roman number. Key, to this method: I (+17), V (+26), X (+23), L (-29), C (-88). Values above C are surely unusable: D (-487), M (-978).
(4) My preliminary conclusion, based on a weakly formalized application of the method above, is that there is no correct solution. The only candidate I could find is the badly constructed CLXVIIII (= 169), which — of course — syntactically collapses to CLXIX (= 117 in alphanomics).
(5) This is a specimen being collected for my qabbalistic quagmires compilation.

ADDED: On an even more incidental note (at this stage), the Time Spiral Press site is a malnourished formless mess at this stage, but it’s finally on a track to become something.

ADDED: So the solution is X-Civ (XCIV, 94, multiple interpretations available, among which various lurid options). You can’t make this stuff up.

ADDED: More productive work. (No idea how I missed CXXIX (it’s a thing of simple beauty)).

Walter Russell Mead picks up on a highly-significant political pattern:

What liberals are struggling to come to grips with today is the enormous gap between the dominant ideas and discourse in the liberal worlds of journalism, the foundations, and the academy on the one hand, and the wider realities of American life on the other. Within the magic circle, liberal ideas have never been more firmly entrenched and less contested. Increasingly, liberals live in a world in which certain ideas are becoming ever more axiomatic and unquestioned even if, outside the walls, those same ideas often seem outlandish.

Modern American liberalism does its best to suppress dissent and critique (except from the left) at the institutions and milieus that it controls. Dissent is not only misguided; it is morally wrong. Bad thoughts create bad actions, and so the heretics must be silenced or expelled. “Hurtful” speech is not allowed, and so the eccentricities of conventional liberal piety pile up into ever more improbable, ever more unsustainable forms.

This exquisite Scott Alexander sentence probably bends my rules in various directions (but January is going to be a tangled (or dynamically unstable) month in any case):

It seems neither uncommon nor unexpected that if you charge a group with eliminating an evil that’s really hard to eliminate, they usually end up mildly tweaking the evil into a form that benefits them, then devoting most of their energy to punishing people who complain.

(The whole — long — post is a masterpiece of Scott Alexanderness. Read it alongside Ligotti, and the cross-echoes are notable. Extreme liberals are horroristic maniacs who haven’t yet given up for good.)

Ideo-thedish categorization done right:

Red tribe Blue tribe Grey tribe Color-out-of-space tribe

— Deity Of Religion (@DeityOfReligion) January 1, 2015

The protagonist of Thomas Ligotti’s My Work is Not Yet Done dreams of revenge, possessed by “constantly recycled scenarios in which Domino had his day”:

And that day was soaked in bathtubs of blood, a day of judgment overseen by a never-setting sun that burned madly red against a black sky.

(Soon.)

This one earns its ‘moron’ status strictly at the point of consumption. At the point of delivery it is by no means unintelligent, and is in fact strategically adept (if crude). Its cynicism approaches the sublime. (By “they” is meant the “us” of NRx.)

@DurrutiOvercloc @YakovPettersson Yeah, they seem to have been the most successful at rebranding fascism for libertarians.

— William Gillies (@williamrgillies) December 31, 2014

The only way this doesn’t consolidate massively in 2015 is for NRx to fall off a cliff.

Horroristic practice: to seize the collapse of the world as the opportunity for an encounter with the Outside. Is this NRx? In all probability, no more than symbiotically. The occasion for tactical alignment, however, is considerable.

There are twin tracks into the gathering darkness, but horrorism is by far the more capable of feeding itself. (The chronic NRx call for ‘action’ is a symptom of malnourishment.)

While schematic qabbalism is the most rigorous science to which the transcendental intellect can aspire, symbolic qabbalism — even that in the subtlest Neo-Lemurian vein — merits the very deepest distrust. Nevertheless, in this interim period of near-complete exile from Cyberspace, there has been plenty of opportunity for exploratory calculations. For what little it is worth, 2015 radiates a peculiarly distinctive signal, suggesting an emphasis upon the deep state, maritime civilization, and mathematical zero, with a dominant oceanic affect. This is not an agenda set to provoke obvious resistance at Outside in.

(Tomorrow is likely to be socio-technically challenging, but I’m hoping to sleaze back towards functionality from the start of the new year.)