“An illogical yet divinely guided step…”

Sales of Tarot Cards are up! Oh no, witchcraft, satanism, and atheism, oh my! And worst of all, anti-Trump!

Breaking Israel News that warned that “sales of tarot cards have risen sharply in the last year as self-proclaimed witches claim that divination and dark-magic are effective in opposing President Trump.”

In that, um, article, Tarot cards are referred to as an ancient evil. That couldn’t really be further from the truth. Tarot cards are quite old, yes, but they started out as playing cards for specific card games, which are still played in parts of the world. The whole using them as divination tools and such didn’t come into fashion until the late 18th century and 19th century, which is not all that long ago. What I find to be funny is that tarot playing cards all have trump cards. I have no doubt that if lunatic christians and Jews found out about this, they would make a most hysterical hay out of it.

Right Wing Watch has a full article up about all this, I’m just going to quote this particular part of it:

The Breaking Israel News article also quotes Rabbi Pinchas Winston “an end-of-days expert and prolific author.”

“Anytime people act illogically and don’t notice it, it is a sign that Divine hands are setting the stage,” Rabbi Winston said, explaining that this was all part of a “Messianic endgame.”

“According to Jewish sources, the end-of-days will see an enormous polarization of good and evil,” Rabbi Winston said. “This is so that when we stand before God and he asks us ‘why didn’t you choose good?’, no one can say they couldn’t see the difference, that good and evil were not obvious. No one can say that they were kind of good. The end-of days is all or nothing, with the ramifications clearly spelled out.”

Winston explained that this process of clear good versus clear evil was clearly true in how American politics has played out in recent years.

“Obama was the first step of this polarization but he was able to hide most of the polarization and dress it up as social justice,” Winton said. “He could hide the evil he promoted, make it sound like good. So people who supported him could support evil but give the excuse that it was reasonably presented as good. To accomplish that, they need to be masters of disguise, to hide the truth even from themselves. They need to embrace Hollywood. They need for it to be all about appearances and subjective reality because the truth is too painful.”

“Trump is one step further,” Rabbi Winston said. “There is no hiding. You either love him or hate him, and he doesn’t know how to hide the truth in pretty words. Good and evil are laid out for everyone to see.”

Personally, I think good and evil are pretty easy to tell apart, especially these days. I agree with Rabbi Winston that it is most important for people to stand up against evil, which means standing against the Tiny Tyrant and all the destruction he is wreaking all over the damn place. It’s a pity so many believers of Abrahamaic religions are noisily standing on the side of evil, and protecting evil people.

Good people don’t go out of their way to destroy the environment even further when the damage already done is displacing so many people and dire weather events are happening all over the place. Good people don’t encourage Nazis, let alone refer to them as “fine people”. Good people believe in social justice, wanting basic human rights and equality applied to all people; good people don’t characterise social justice as evil. Good people don’t build concentration camps, rip people apart, and place children in fucking cages. And on and on and on the list goes.

If your fucking god hates people because of skin colour or country of origin, and hates social justice, then your god is one evil fucker, and you should be walking away, into the light and the right. Time to question that god of yours, and decide whether or not you can manage to be a truly good and moral person. No gods are needed for that.

RWW has the full story.

Slow Times Ahead (Admin).

Modern Meaningless Hieroglyphics, © C. Ford, all rights reserved.

Modern Meaningless Hieroglyphics, © C. Ford, all rights reserved.

A bit of fatigue is setting in from radiation, so I’m going to kill the alarm clock for the next several days, and sleep until I’m done, so things will most likely be starting late on Affinity for the next little while. Voyager and Charly of course, will continue to post whenever they feel like it – I’m just going to join in with them for a bit, and say the ‘hell with discipline’ for now. :D

Jack’s Walk

Smoke tree

©voyager, all rights reserved

We haven’t had much rain lately and the lawns are suffering and turning brown. I think that’s a good thing because it means it’s easy on Jack’s feet. It’s the moist, green grass that makes his big, webbed feet itch so now he’s free to spend some time checking out his own nieghbourhood. Telephone poles and trees are of particular interest, but so are hostas, car tires, kid’s toys, flower planters and garden hoses. I swear a 3 block walk took us longer than a 3 km trail, including the car ride there and back. It’s Jack’s walk, though, so I let him take as much time as he wants. I figure it takes me a while to deal with e-mail, so it must take just as long to deal with p-mail.

Word Wednesday.

Prick

Noun.

1: a mark or shallow hole made by a pointed instrument.

2a: a pointed instrument or weapon b: a sharp projecting organ or part.

3: an instance of pricking or the sensation of being pricked: as a: a nagging or sharp feeling of remorse, regret, or sorrow b: a slight sharply localized discomfort <the prick of a needle>.

4: usually vulgar: penis.

5: usually vulgar: a spiteful or contemptible man often having some authority.

[Origin: Middle English prikke, from Old English prica; akin to Middle Dutch pric prick.]

(before 12th Century).

“Stone shook his head. “Rapid’s not going to be the Wild West for too much longer, girls.” I could tell Madame was included in that “girls,” and it put my back up. She had years and miles on Dyer Stone, and brains to boot. But he had a prick, and inherited money, and a prick. I guess that gave him the right to lord it over her. – Karen Memory, Elizabeth Bear.

Making a Rondel Dagger – Part 12 – Rondel

For second attempt I have decided that the tools that are at my disposal are not sufficient to do what I want to do. So I have made a tool.

I took a piece of wood from my late cherry tree that had about the right diameter and I rounded one end with an axe and a rasp to desired shape – a cylinder with the outer diameter just slightly smaller than the actual dagger handle has. I have put it in a bucket of water so it does not burn too quickly and I proceeded with the forging.

First I made the same shallow bowl shape that I have done previously, but when making it deeper I did not use the ball peen hammer anymore, instead I have inserted the prepared cherry tree block and whacked it with 1 kg forging hammer (also courtesy of my late uncle).

It has worked rather well. Not as well as a metal die would of course, but reasonably well. After only a few whacks I got a shape with which I was content.

That was not the end of the usefulness of this highly sophimasticated tool. After drilling the hole for the tang and rounding the edges on belt sander I nailed the bowl on the cherry wood for polishing.

To avoid too excessive material removal I did not do it on belt sander this time, but I have used my angle grinder with lamellar soft abrasive wheels. It has worked very well and in mere minutes I had sufficiently polished surface. Some pitting remained, but I have decided against removing it completely to avoid one of the mistakes from previous day (making the steel too thin in places).

Now for the grooves. I could not forge them hot, because for that I would need a special die. I could make one of course, but that would be extremely time-consuming and my anvil cannot hold dies yet. I had to hammer them into cold steel and from previous day I knew that I need support and space for the bend at the same time.

So I took a rasp again and I filed grooves in the end of the very useful cherry log. They are intentionally asymmetrical, because that is the look I was aiming for.

On thus prepared support I have fixed the bowl, this time not with a nail, but with a fairly long and thick screw.

A lot of banging has followed, first with masonry chisel to mark the groove, then with the smith’s hammer and old file used as a flat surface, and with small cross peen hammer. The steel was a lot tougher than I thought it will be so the cherry wood collapsed a bit. The result is that some grooves are better looking than others and some are nearly symmetrical, but that is actually correct as far as the 3D model from the game goes – the grooves there are notably different and one even looks like botched. And whilst I am not aiming for exact replica, I am aiming for the general look of the thing.

The rondel has circa 50 mm in diameter and is circa 10 mm tall. Grinding that out of solid block of steel would take an inordinate amount of time, eat a lot of abrasives and definitively weigh way too much. So I think this is mission accomplished.

Next time I will be doing something like this I will most definitively do a better job at it, but I do not think this is all that bad and I will use it. Now it will be polished and buffed together with the bolster and the guard as long as it takes for all three components to have the same look to them. That will probably take a few evenings. However I will not remove all pitting from the rondel, because I fear that it might destroy it.

And then comes the assembly. I literally cannot wait…