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)).

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

The Hong Kong situation is a nightmare. This tweet gets it right:

Very worrisome. No one should be under any illusions about what Beijing may do if it believes there is a budding color revolution in HK SAR

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) September 28, 2014

Soap Jackal is putting together a Cameralism reading list, so far (that I’ve seen) it includes:
(1) Mercantilism Re-Imagined (essay collection)
(2) The Cameralists: The Pioneers of German Social Polity (Albion W Small)
(3)Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Murray N. Rothbard)

Neoreaction @ 8chan, and 8chan @ the Encyclopedia Dramatica. (XS is still reeling from the sudden intelligence is explosion the seems to have taken place in the reactopunk net.) The fact it all seem to have followed upon a black op. makes the situation especially exquisite. Predictable response: More beatings necessary. (Free Northener is on it. NIO urges moderation. Anarcho-Papist tries to stay out, fails.)

An incredible hoard of high-minded sensualism (3D cellular automata, Prime number, visualization, Strange attractors, and more …).

Crab weaponry.

Some numerate crime-think contributions, on mathematics and political correctness, the demographic death of liberal Jews, 23andMe data, and twins.

This is what Golden Dawn stands for (ethno-socialism).

Whatever happened to libertarianism?

Hard not to notice that three-quarters of NRx seems to have sunk into a blog coma, when it hasn’t actually died. Are blogs already an obsolescing medium?

On those hard times coming. Amerika lays it out clearly:

… dependents of the world, they will cut you out. You are not necessary. You serve no role and contribute nothing. At some point, whether for pure financial reasons or to preserve themselves, the others will cut you out. You will descend into third world poverty and the rest will will take their money and prosper elsewhere. The “benefits for no riots” scam will have come to an end.

Neoreaction in the DRC. (Added.)

The emergence of this objectively pro-Hamas and pro-war Left is an historically significant event. It breaks with both the self-understanding and public image of a Left that carried a banner of anti-fascism. It rests on a double standard of critique, a critical one applied to the extreme Right in the West and another, apologetic standard applied to similarly based rightist Islamist movements.

So the left intelligentsia is prone to extreme hypocrisy, anti-semitism, crypto-fascism, opportunism, and the unrestrained politics of ressentiment? Is this supposed to be news of some kind? Political controversy is to be measured against some yardstick of fundamental decency, that is now, peculiarly, being betrayed? Who or what is supporting that yardstick, exactly? If we subtract any such ‘yardstick’ entirely from our considerations, haven’t we thereby, for the first time, begun to approach the topic realistically?

(2) As noted before, I’m a terrible reader of Scott Alexander. There’s always a point, early on, in any of his posts, where my concentration is wrecked by the buzzing question: how is this any kind of problem? So I’m reliant on better followers of his lithe reasoning to explain to me how this post can make any sort of sense except through the expectation that life should be fair. The attractiveness of that dream (or delusion?) is easy to grasp. What is difficult (for me) to understand is how an acute intelligence can fail to realize, intuitively, that thinking begins at exactly the point such indulgent fantasy terminates.

It’s quite clear that Scott knows obnoxious PUA sociobiology is basically correct. How else to read this?

If you’re smart, don’t drink much, stay out of fights, display a friendly personality, and have no criminal history – then you are the population most at risk of being miserable and alone. “At risk” doesn’t mean “for sure”, any more than every single smoker gets lung cancer and every single nonsmoker lives to a ripe old age – but your odds get worse. In other words, everything that “nice guys” complain of is pretty darned accurate. But that shouldn’t be too hard to guess …

How could the aspiration to any kind of ‘social justice’ in this context (or in fact any other) conceivably be anything but a fantastic falsification of the world as it deeply (or pre-conventionally) exists? To acknowledge this reality is to admit that our ideas of ‘justice’ mean nothing. One might as well “complain” about gravity or the second law of thermodynamics.

(3) Perhaps Nothing isn’t in any way real, suggests Leon Horsten. Zero, unlike any other small Natural, would have no irreducible designation. It would function only as shorthand, abbreviating a concatenation of plenary operations. Linguistic applications of “nothingness” would be dissolved by analogy.

According to the scientific picture of the world, absences do not seem to be fundamental building blocks of either the concrete (physical) world or of the abstract (mathematical) realm.

So Nothing can be ‘scientifically’ annihilated — that will surely dispel its irritation. (Or not.)

***

Of the world’s various contests, there have to be some which do not draw Outside in unreservedly to the nihilistic side of the battlefield. If I turn to this possibility with sufficient dedication, perhaps I will think of some.

ADDED: Nice guys finish last. (Linked in Jim’s comments, this classic.)

Even without any content yet it … says something.

ADDED: … and another brand new blog start-up, with a highly-intriguing title (and a taste for experimental T-shirt design).

Winter Is Coming
333

Envisaging a dark camo background, which would match both of these intersecting sign-lines. Fusional pop-culture crypsis is the way forward. Everywhere, yet unseen.

(It would take the fake-archaism “Winter ’tis Coming” or ominous Teutonism “Winter Ist Coming” to get the numbers to work out perfectly.)

To immediately understand a number of things (simultaneously) type in the Law of Thelema:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

This tool, and more especially the method — or specific gematria — it incarnates, is the consummation of rigorous Anglophone Occult Tradition. While its value is almost certainly lost on the moderns, it is once again freely available to be used.

It is now an Open Secret.

ADDED: DARK ENLIGHTENMENT = 333. (This needs to be here for reference.)

(Ibdhjad)
Aj, Baa, Caf, Dia, Et, Fam, God, Hagg, Ink, Jaeo, Kul, Los, Moan, Neom, Ohmga, Padbbha, Qush, Rakht, Sigol, Tactt, Umneo, Vfisz, Wumno, Xikkth, Yodtta, Ziltth.

Recognizing the Anglossic alphabetical names is far too rudimentary to count as a solution. The question is: What is the embedded numerical regularity?

The best way to demonstrate understanding, without revealing the key, is to submit alternative (but consistent) versions of any three consecutive signs.

Note: While Qabbalistic adepts get no credit for correct answers, well-crafted terms from any source will be appreciated. Furthermore, Outside in accepts no responsibility for any hazardous or harmful xenocosmic occurrences resulting from calculations associated with this quiz.

Qabbalism is the science of spookiness, which makes it a natural companion on any expedition into horror. There is, in addition, an intrinsic reactionary slant to its ultra-traditionalism and attachment to the principle of hierarchical revelation. Its concrete history provides an unsurpassable example of spontaneous auto-catalysis (from discrepant conventions of arithmetical notation). This post, however, is restricted to a very preliminary discussion of its most basic intellectual presupposition, as if it had been developed out of an implicit philosophy (which it was not). It will be coaxed into making sense, against the grain of its essential inclination.

Within the Abrahamic tradition, the Word of God anticipates creation. Insofar as scripture faithfully records this Word, the holy writings correspond to a level of reality more fundamental than nature, and one that the ‘book of nature’ references, as the key to its final meaning. The unfolding of creation in time follows a narrative plotted in eternity, in which history and divine providence are necessarily identical. There can be no true accidents, or coincidences.

The Book of Creation is legible, and intelligible. It can be read, and it tells a story. The noisy squabbles between religious orthodoxy and natural science that have erupted in modern times threaten to drown out the deeper continuities of presumption, which frame the rancorous contention between ‘belief’ and ‘disbelief’ as an intimate domestic dispute. This is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the declaration attributed to Francis Bacon: “My only earthly wish is… to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds… [nature will be] bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets.” There is no doubt that nature can speak, and has a story to tell.

Resisting any temptation to take sides in this family argument, we refer neutrally to Gnon (“nature or nature’s God”), ignoring all dialectics, and departing in another direction. The distinction to be drawn does not differentiate between belief and unbelief, but rather discriminates between exoteric and esoteric religion.

Any system of belief (and complementary unbelief) that appeals to universal endorsement is necessarily exoteric in orientation. Like the witch-finders, or Francis Bacon, it declares war upon the secret, in the name of a public cult, whose central convictions are dispensed commonly. The Pope is the Pope, and Einstein is Einstein, because the access to truth that elevates them above other men is — in its innermost nature — the equal possession of all. The pinnacle of understanding is attained through a public formula. This is democracy in its deepest, creedal sense.

Esoteric religion accepts all of this, about exoteric religion. It confirms the solidarity between doctrinal authorities and the beliefs of the masses, whilst exempting itself, privately, from the public cult. Its discreet attention is directed away from the exoteric mask of Gnon, into — or out towards — the OOon (or Occult Order of nature).

The OOon need not be kept a secret. It is secret by its intrinsic, inviolable nature. A very primitive qabbalistic excursion should suffice to illustrate this.

Assume, entirely hypothetically, that supernatural intelligence or obscure complexities in the topological structure of time had sedimented abysmal depths of significance into the superficial occurrences of the world. The ‘Book of Creation’ is then legible at (very) many different levels, with every random or inconsequential detail of relatively exoteric features providing material for systems of information further ‘down’. The deeper one excavates into the ‘meaningless chaos’ of the exoteric communicative substrate, the more uncluttered one’s access to the signals of utter Outsideness. Since ‘one’ is, to its quick, a signaletic product, this cryptographic enterprise is irreducibly a voyage, transmutation, and disillusionment.

The most thoroughly documented example is the esoteric reading of the Hebrew Bible, which need only be remarked upon here in its most general characteristics. Because the Hebrew alphabet serves as both a phonetic system and as a set of numerals, each written word in the language has a precise numerical value. It is at once at exoteric word, and an esoteric number. Nothing prevents an ordinary language user from deliberately coding (numerically) as they write, or even as they speak. The key to numerical decryption is not a secret, but rather a commonly understood cultural resource, utilized by every numerate individual. Nevertheless, the linguistic and arithmetical aspects are in fact quite strictly separated,  because thinking in words and numbers simultaneously is hard, because maintaining sustained parallel intelligibility in both is close to impossible, because the attempt to do so is (exoterically) senseless, and because practicality dominates. The esoteric realm is not forbidden, but simply unneeded.

That the Hebrew Bible has not been deliberately crafted as an intricate numerical-cryptographic composition by human authors is therefore an empirical or contingent fact that can be accepted with extreme confidence. Its esoteric channel might of course, as common sense has to insist, be empty of anything but noise, but it is no less certainly clear. Whatever comes through it, that is anything other than nothing, can only come from Outside. It is the real difference between exoteric and the esoteric levels that makes the OOon thinkable at all. Only that which the exoteric does not touch, is available for the esoteric to communicate through, and to have assembled itself from. Qabbalism has to be seldom, in order to occur. For that reason, it cannot seek to persuade the masses of anything, unless its own senselessness. In an age of triumphant exoteria, this is not an easy thing to understand (thank Gnon).