This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.
First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.
Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their follow-up comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here, and have extended that ban to LLM-generated content of all kinds.
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Before we go on, a heads up concerning a speaking gig in October that some of you may find interesting. The event is the Sages & Scholars Conference, and its theme is “What Does It Mean to Be Human in the Age of Exponential Technologies?” It’ll be in South Pasadena, CA, and I’ll be one of the headline speakers. Other details:
Tickets on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sages-scholars-conference-tickets-1986778963362
Flyer: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bNRqrDtq-A3w8qjSPBRL-egseCIxWXn9/view?usp=sharing
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With that said, have at it!
Congratulations Mr. Greer on being invited to such a conference. Since your belief is that industrial-scale technologies of any sort are not sustainable in the future, I suspect your point of view will be a notable contrast to many of the other attendees.
I am curious how you would respond to the “population decline = human extinction” hysterics.
Hello everybody!
In my latest post I explore the economics of how to “Rise Above By Sinking Below”
https://justinpatrickmoore.substack.com/p/to-rise-above-by-sinking-below
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/to-rise-above-by-sinking-below
Also, for anyone who has enjoyed the various “Dada not Data” images I’ve shared, a reader of mine made some graphics that enabled me to turn them into stickers and other things, which you cand find here if you are so inclined:
https://www.redbubble.com/people/justinmoore42/shop
Also included are things like the “Turning Off is Tuning In” motto and a new “Dada Architect” design.
On MM I shared a passage in Stephen Harrod Buhner’s Ensouling Language: On the Art of Nonfiction and the Writer’s Life, which I have bought as a gift for my (adult) son. Here’s the passage:
Or we are walking along in the woods, our thoughts a million miles away, and suddenly we come upon a great tree or magnificent stone outcropping and we are caught up in something that has nothing to do with our human world. We suddenly feel something coming into us from what we have encountered, something that is not of the human world. We are pulled out of ourselves into a world that is a great deal more ancient than human civilization. We discover that trees have been doing something more for the past 700 million years than simply pining away for our emergence. We feel the touch of life, of a particular kind of nonhuman awareness upon us.
This is in the first third of a book about how to write nonfiction like it is an art instead of the boring textbook and owners’ manual style. It really does read like an occult book, except without any of the usual occult jargon, so I am going to put my personal recommendation here (as promised). He talks about how to work your way into the flow-state (I’d call it a light trance, and my PhD-candidate-in-neuroscience son also calls it a “meditative state”) and how to revise with not just your ear, but with what we would call our astral senses, eventually perhaps engaging the mental sheath. A couple more little quotes:
“A writer piles up meaning behind the word like water behind a dam.”
“Words are the containers for the invisible meaning.”
This is my second reading of it, and this time I am making all kinds of notes, and leaving those little “Postit” marking flags all around the three free edges of pages with bits I want to return to.
Katrina (formerly dfr1973)
I suppose that this question to the host and the commentariat is probably a better fit to last weeks post, but since this is open, I will put ‘er out here.
How does one calibrate the slope of the decline and how does that calibration inform the decisions concerning technology and lifestyle?
I am myself an eeyore. But I am trying to change. The technologies that are available to us now aren’t going to disappear. The internet is going to be here for a long time, probably longer than anyone reading this will be alive. Yet the tendency here is to act as though it is going away completely and we will be left without.
The same goes for other technologies and resources. No one reading this will see the death of oil or the total absense of airplanes.
I am thinking that this might be a bit of semantic nit-picking, but while our gracious host coined the great neologism “Collapse now and avoid the rush” (which by the way, is a great way to get folks going in a conversation over a joint and a couple of beers), I am not at all certain that taking it literally is all that useful.
Granted, there is a decline ahead. in a way, the crapification (relatively polite term) is a way to deal with the decline. we are going to have less food (the shrinkage in sizes for products and inflation) and the commensurate decline in product quality due to using less energy and materials.
I agree that “less” is in the future for most everyone. I am just hoping that there won’t be a collapse. I am to old to start again.
Hi John,
I am currently writing an alternative fictional novel about an alternative Europe where Germany wins WW2.
Its in 1964, Hitler is long dead (1953) and Speer is Chancellor and de facto leader.
My thesis is the occupation of the East is ruining the Reich fiscally and the regime is starting to desperately need detente with America in particular.
It needs credit, trade and the ability of Reich elites to transfer their wealth abroad.
Do you agree with this overall thesis? The central challenge facing a Speer leadership is how to deal with the demands of the US to answer what happened to the millions of Jews who were murdered during the war. Jewish American groups would be demanding it.
My conclusion is that Speer would have eventually had to blame the SS as a semi rogue organisation and hang the main ring leaders of the Holocaust with the backing of the German military who hated the SS.
I am looking up books on the OPEC oil embargo the 70s financial crisis in general. As a library worker, I can find stuff like this, but if anyone has any recommendations, I’m ears.
So far, I have found these:
Pivotal Decade :How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein.
“Judith Stein argues that in order to understand our current economic crisis we need to look back to the 1970s and the end of the age of the factory–the era of postwar liberalism, created by the New Deal, whose practices, high wages, and regulated capital produced both robust economic growth and greater income equality. When high oil prices and economic competition from Japan and Germany battered the American economy, new policies–both international and domestic–became necessary. But war was waged against inflation, rather than against unemployment, and the government promoted a balanced budget instead of growth. This, says Stein, marked the beginning of the age of finance and subsequent deregulation, free trade, low taxation, and weak unions that has fostered inequality and now the worst recession in eighty years. Drawing on extensive archival research and covering the economic, intellectual, political, and labor history of the decade, Stein provides a wealth of information on the 1970s. She also shows that to restore prosperity today, America needs a new model: more factories and fewer financial houses.”
& Panic at the pump :the energy crisis and the transformation of American politics in the 1970s by Meg Jacobs.
“Meg Jacobs shows how a succession of crises beginning with the 1973 Arab oil embargo prompted American politicians to seek energy independence, and how their failure to do so shaped the world we live in.”
I found this essay too:
In the name of austerity : middle-class consumption and the OPEC oil embargo of 1973-1974 / Natasha Zaretsky collected in the anthology, The world the sixties made :politics and culture in recent America /|cedited by Van Gosse and Richard Moser.
All this is probably enough for what I have in mind, but if anyone has suggestions, again, thank you…
@KM Gunn Art: I have read most of Buhner’s book. I liked it too, but as a writer, I’ve learned to not read too deeply other peoples writing guides. I really like what he said about “pulling golden threads” -and his appendix on what to do after the first book and going forward with the nuts & bolts of what to expect with publishers has been helpful.
the sages and scholars conference looks interesting and valuable. will it be possible to obtain copies of presentations afterwards for those of us who cannot attend?
A question for JMG the writer–
you’ve spoken before about how important it is to develop a daily writing habit, and to separate writing and revising. Those things ring true for me, but what do you do on those days that you’re off your game, under the weather, and almost certainly not going to write anything of worth? Aside from taking the day off, which seems sub-optimal if one is building a habit, I could see ‘dumping’ the day’s words on unsalable work like extra journaling or self-insert fanfiction or what-have-you that you never intend to show anyone, or just accepting that yeah, quality will be down and there’ll be more need to revise the output from the bad day. There are probably many other options, so I’m curious if you can share what you do. Assuming you have ‘bad days’ like that, at any rate.
Also, when you say “write every day” do you mean everyday everyday or do you keep something druidically akin to a sabbath where you take regular breaks? Aside from the sabbaticals you used to take from blogging, that is.
JMG,
I have become somewhat involved with my local city and state government over the last two years. Not to the point of trying to get on committees and such but from the level or writing letters to elected officials and attending public meetings either in public or watching via televised video of meetings. One of the small benefits of modern internet video technologies is that you can now watch your local city council meetings and work sessions in there entirety from the comfort of your laptop.
Last night a situation came up where the weekly county board of commissioner meeting had to be moved from the purpose built meeting auditorium to an an ordinary multi-purpose conference room elsewhere in the same building, because the HVAC serving the auditorium part of the building was malfunctioning and the elected officials deemed it uncomfortably warm. The meeting took place at 6:00 in the evening and the temperature was no more than 80 here with typical PNW low summer humidity and light breeze. The room has no opening windows and doors to the outdoors can not be left open for security and control reasons.
This building was constructed in 1990 for its purpose. According to public officials the special part that will be needed to fix the HVAC system that serves the auditorium will take 7 weeks to manufacture from scratch. The conference room the are using is inadequate because much of the public can not fit it it and must be housed in an additional room to watch on tv.
So this encapsulates many of the trends we are seeing and will see as stair step collapse progresses. Lack of money for proper maintenance and to secure a stock of spare parts causes disruption to public services. Lack of local skills and resources to come up with temporary fixes to the system. Lack of flexibility in operating conditions on the ground to work around the slightly warm room, such as temporary Cooler Unit, Security screen on doors so they can be opened etc. Physical entitlement of public officials, staff and some citizens that an ordinary room at 80 degrees with low humidity is no longer acceptable to conduct business.
This building is very. near where I grew up. When I was in high school I did not know anyone with air conditioning in their home, or in school, or in most public buildings. The only place one would have encountered air conditioning at that time was a movie theatre, a grocery store and a hospital.
No one involved seemed to take notice or see this as a harbinger of times to come.
Oh, yeah, for books about the writers life and the path of becoming one, I recommend Martin Eden by Jack London. I’m reading that write now. I also thoroughly enjoyed Rudy Rucker’s autobiography, Nested Scrolls… it was his story of course, but very actionable to me. & I am also reading a short autobio by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor… “How I Came to Be A Writer” -just finished her YA series “The York Trilogy” (good!) and saw this in her list of books, and decided to read it. I find these stories often better than the how-to’s which can sometimes trip me up (as Delany’s book On Writing did to me in my twenties.)
Thank you, JMG, for this space. I’m starting a group read and discussion of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, happening through this fall. Ecosophians and esotericists are especially welcome!
For a half-century this book has confounded the best minds in American Letters and left them dazed and stammering. They can’t make sense of its esoteric themes, occult images, or its satire of the sacralization of technology. It’s going to take some genuine weirdoes, the Vanguard of the Enweirdening, to uncover the riches of the book!
For example, I, armed with only my copy of Davidson’s ‘A Dictionary of Angels,’ was able to demonstrate several names and images in the book derive from Enochian literature. I posted to the main Pynchon listserv this spring and got feedback suggesting it was an original insight.
More: An authority in Pynchon scholarship cleverly worked out that the first part of the book spans nine days in December 1944. But no one has published the fact that that’s the period needed for a novena prayer cycle. In a novena, the tenth day is the feast day of the saint to whom one is praying; in Gravity’s Rainbow, the tenth day falls on the feast of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist, author of the Gospel and the Book of Revelation. I think Gravity’s Rainbow has an initiatory structure, and that the Johannine tradition may be part of it.
True, there’s been the odd article about Pynchon’s use of Tarot or Kabbalah or the Gnostics or Jung, but no one has explored the idea that the book may be an esoteric work in its own right. Let’s have a look together: Esotericgravitysrainbow.dreamwidth.org
“Those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity.” (Pt. 3, ep. 30)
Don’t know if you read it but Musa al-Gharbi wrote “We Have Never Been Woke”, where he indicts the professional/managerial/class, who he describes as “symbolic capitalists”, who you castigated years ago for their betrayal of the American working-class
You were prescient
Hi JMC and readers,
Am I the only one who would like an updated take from JMG on the geopolitical situation as we creep along the descent? Lots of moving parts the last few years as old alliances break down and new ones form.
And a quick thanks to everyone here (especially to JMG) for the weekly dose of sanity.
No question (at least as of now 😉 ), but some offers for everybody:
1. I’m going to perform a Master attunement for the Modern Order of Essenes on Sunday, September 20th. It’s open to everybody who has done the required work and wants to be attuned (or re-attuned!) as an MOE Master. Details here: https://thehiddenthings.com/moe-master-attunement-2026-09-20
2. Since there has been some recent interest in spiritual healing and especially in the MOE: I’ve put up a (free) online course for the Modern Order of Essenes on my site. It’s essentially the same material as JMG posted here on Dreamwidth and as in the pdf files hosted by the Octagon Society ( https://octagonsociety.org/archives/modern-order-of-essenes ), plus some commentary of mine, some additional themes for meditation and reflection, etc, all structured in bi-weekly units. The course is now fully posted, but stays open and available (including the comment sections for questions), and you can start at any time:
https://thehiddenthings.com/topics/moe-course
3. And finally, I perform a formal blessing each week in which I bless all the people who have signed up for it. If you’d like to be blessed in any given week, the signup is open all week for the then upcoming Wednesday and can be found here:
https://thehiddenthings.com/categories/weekly-blessings
I wish all of you a wonderful Wednesday,
Milkyway
PS: The name of a garage band, maybe? “The Wonderful Wednesdays”… 😀
I have some thoughts and questions after reading Jung’s Aion and being almost done with his Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Okay so the thought is that I understood these two works of Jung way better than Psychology of Alchemy, Mysterium Coniunctionis, and Symbols of Transformation. I don’t know if I’m more intelligent now (read the latter ones awhile ago) or if these are legitimately easier books? The one thing I didn’t understand in the most recent round of reading was his essay on the Trickster. All I really got out of that is that the trickster is an archetypal memory of when humans were unconscious. I don’t get how unconsciousness maps to a deceiving/trickster archetype. I remember about one sentence of actual explanation on that. He talked about evolutions of the trickster but I don’t think he really explained that either.
JMG, I am wondering if it’s possible for you to briefly explain the trickster archetype from Jung’s perspective or your own perspective, if you prefer. Or feel free to tell me to flock off and read it again.
Hey JMG (and commentariat),
As the subject of dental care recently came up, I’ve got a situation of my own concerning that subject. I am not asking for medical advice. I recognise that (to the best of my knowledge) none of you are medical professionals and if I choose to act on anything you say, it’s my own fault if something goes wrong.
My lower wisdom teeth are more or less horizontal. They’re both beginning to break out. My orthodontist and dentist, needless to say, agree that I should get them removed before they damage the teeth next to them.
Obviously, dental medicine is set up to extract as much money as possible. On the other hand, “the teeth will push into the other teeth and damage them” sounds perfectly obvious even to a layman such as myself. On the gripping hand, I have no particular desire to be put under and have somebody cut around in my mouth. Any thoughts on the matter?
—David P.
I have a question, when it comes to your practice with occultism what exactly is the goal of your practice?
Also Dolly Parton died. I was sad to find that out, she was a big part of my childhood and a good person. May she have a fortunate and good rebirth. Namo Amituofo. 🙏
Before I go on… late last night I heard about the loss of Dolly Parton. It saddens me.
I’ve heard it said that she was special to a variety of people and I see it. Everything I ever heard about her was good.
Dolly Parton. Great to have her while we did. Shame that time is over. Bless her soul.
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So last week there was a post from one Johnny who touched briefly on how certain musical tastes might still be satisfied in a deindustrial future even though it was electronics that gave rise to that music.
It made me think, and of course I was already, that tools for making electronic dance music aren’t the only thing that’s on the way out, my beloved electric guitar is as well. I’ll play acoustic of course if I’m still around and I can, but oh! What a loss that will be!
I wondered if anyone had an interest in doing a music project where all of us involved play something that’s on the way out like that. While we still have time. Not something that’s tied to whatever genre we individually come from, but meeting each other in between so we can make our swan song… before that’s it, done.
I did this little jam to an ambient electronic song. I thought that music in particular was great to play to because it doesn’t seem to have chords, but the variation comes from changes in timbre instead, like a lot of rave music.
This video isn’t super polished and I’m not sure how much attention I even want at this juncture. The video is unlisted and maybe it doesn’t need to be really widely shared beyond Ecosophia at this time. It’s just to say, “I picture it kind of like this.”
My video: https://youtu.be/a2_0VXnqu7k?si=8E_VrP3ew71oPNgF
The video I played to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHqTmgpBzBQ
The video I played to is three hours long but the five minutes I used is at the start of it.
Chuaquin: Any onanism in my video is strictly the guitar kind, hahahahha!
Something I’ve been musing about for a bit: young people now on the whole have as much trouble using computers as old people, and this may be part of what’s driving the return to older technologies.
I think the issue is not so much that computers are complex, but that they’ve become inconsistently complex: the apps and interfaces that most people use most have been simplified to the point of fundamentally misrepresenting how the device actually works, so when you do need to do something more advanced than browse the web or use a social media app, many people have no working knowledge of the system and only a very loose grasp of its metaphors, like files and folders.
Thirty years ago there was a significant learning curve when you first tried to use a computer, but you soon got used to how things worked and for the most part — there have always been badly designed UI’s of course — the rest of the system worked in the same way.
Hello JMG and commenters:
I’m glad we’ve arrived to the current Open Post. I’ve been thinking what I was going to write now…I think the Ceuta events are very important, beyond current jingoism here, for the EU and maybe global future, but…I need to think better about it, and try to write it in an understable English (ahem).
So I’ve prefered to clarify a topic I wrote a few posts ago, and I think I didn’t explain it very well.
Some JMG posts ago, I wrote about nasty and dirty woke double standards about xenophobic/racist attitudes. On the short form, I pointed wokesters love to blame white/European people for all their infamous sins against non white people…but they justify revenge against Europeans (especially the origin of every evil: straight white men) by non Europeans, including reverse xenophobical/racist hatred against them.
I proposed some ugly examples about non white people commiting imperialism and atrocities against another human beings. So a classical example came to my mind: the embarrassing Japanese imperialism during first half of the XXth century.
Someone (maybe Clay Dennis?) answered me that Japanese imperialism was fueled by British colonial elites according their own agenda, so my ominous picture about Japanese imperialism was wrong. I won’t deny it but…I think I was partly wrong and he was, too.
After I scratched my head, a bit puzzled, I remembered that, according the most serious History scholars, historical events have several causes, not an only one.
So I’m sorry if I was uncautious to point only a cause for the bloody Japanese imperialism. I can say I’m not naïve to not know British imperialism was the boss until more or less WWII. However, this influence didn’t preven Japanese elites to have their own agenda, mehink. The two causes don’ have to be opposites, but complementary…
There are some another motives for Japanese imperialism. For example, Japanese victory against Russia in 1905 made believe Tokyo elites they could win against every Western (white) country. Big mistake: In 1905, Russia was a poorly industrialized country…You know what happened in Japan in the 1945 summer (ahem). Another nasty fact: in spite of their shallow “westernization” during Meiji era, Japanese elites supported their Emperor was a living god (cough cough). Do the math…
Another dirty motive was that Japanese elites admired, within all European powers, Germany over another countries, maybe because they were afraid of British and French democracy (cough). This Germanic favoritism explains, at least partly, how the Asian Japanese were allies shoulder to shoulder with European fascisms during WWII (ahem). A very bizarre situation…
I’m not making up anbody new when I’m writing about Japanese inferiority complex more than a century ago. For example, Natsume Soseki (a good Japanese novelist) wrote about it, and I think He knew well their time society…
It’s a wry irony how Japan managed to avoid European colonialism and imperialism…becoming another (non European) imperialist power itself…
By the way, I remember a legendary old “South Park” episode, titled “Chimpokomon”; in it, there was a lot of fun parody about Japanese inferiority complex in front of white people, especially Americans. It isn’t another silly provocation. Well, their authors also mocked American (and western) superiority complex against Asians, so I think that rough humor wasn’t really racist…I’m sorry about people like John who don’t like videos (the rest, you can find it in Youtube). A slight spoiler: some pary of the story was about penises (ahem).
And…next time, I’ll write about Ceuta mess…
Hi JMG and commentariat,
Are you familiar with Jean Gebser’s work, and in particular his book The Ever-Present Origin? It was written in 1949 and it builds on Nietzsche and also Spengler’s work in the Decline of the West. Specifically, he constructs a model that humans have mutated through four stages of different structures of consciousness, the archaic, magic, mythic and mental, each of which develops through an efficient phase into a deficient phase. He argues that the Decline of the West is diagnosing the terminal deficient phase of the mental structure of consciousness. Each subsequent structure introduces an additional level of dimensionality. For example, the archaic structure is 0-dimensional, it just exists; the magic structure is based on a one-dimensional unity; the mythical structure becomes conscious of two-dimensional polarity related to myth, the yin-yang, and cosmic cycles of time; the mental structure develops consciousness of perspective and intentional directionality in 3-dimensional space. He argues we are on the cusp of mutating into a 5th structure, which he terms the integral structure of consciousness.
Anyway, it is a fascinating work. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it if you’ve read it, and if not I think you would really enjoy it. It calls to my mind your discussions of the tamanous as a potential mascot for post-Faustian culture.
In the spirit of one of this blog’s themes, to wit – that the main proper alternative to “control” is “participation”, I would like to share a post on this topic that touched me this week.
Eileen McKusick has been experimenting with using tuning forks to help people find internal coherence, and thereby, healing, for many years.
In this post she widens her frame to consider what are the implications of coherence in nature and in society.
Beginning like this:
“The idea is simple:
“Sometimes order doesn’t have to be imposed. Sometimes, when the conditions are right, order arises on its own.
“A flock of birds turns in the sky without anyone calling the turn. A school of fish changes direction as though it were one animal. Cells that begin as nearly identical somehow sort themselves into skin and liver and bone and brain. A wound closes. An ecosystem rebalances. Musicians listening deeply to one another suddenly lock into a groove that none of them could have produced alone.
“In every one of these cases, there is no central commander directing the parts. Something else is happening: the parts are sensing each other, responding to each other, and out of countless local interactions, a larger coherent pattern emerges.”
She never quite uses the word “participation” but stresses that the it is the relational “sensing” and “listening” to one another carried out by the “parts” that lends pattern to the whole.
https://emckusick.substack.com/p/emergent-coherence
‘exponential technology’…. uhm; but ‘what it means to be human’ seems like a very important question for the times!
I ask the following after watching some footage of a vigil or something for the Arday character – it looked like people were existing in a parallel universe – rational thougt out the window and low grade emoting that made him (and by extension them?) victim and what looked like it could be development of a psychotic mass formation.
Have you ever read anything where occult philosophers etc address the idea that humans as a group could effectively have a psychotic break and ‘devolve’?
i.e. in things I’ve read there seems to be an idea that movement towards the absolute is baked in the cake (ultimately); but has anyone in occult philosophy considered that collective human stupidity could result in the equivalent of a society jumping off a cliff and make the journey longer… potentially much longer?
Asking for a friend…
Justin @6 – I am very much enjoying his prose, as well as his take on “the writer’s life” and why he went that path. I also love his assertation that nonfiction can and should be art – which is also what caught my son’s attention when I asked if he had either read it, or would like a copy. I still have my clin chem textbook, which we used to call “the cure for insomnia!” I don’t know about you, but I have read far too many nonfiction books that I managed to finish despite plodding, clunky prose. The fact our host writes readable and engaging nonfiction is one of the reasons we are fans.
We need more readable and engaging nonfiction in our world., and I am firmly planting a flag on this here hill with my recommendation.
🙂
David P, for what its worth, I had a “complicated” set of wisdom teeth (4 of them) extracted on the advice of my dentist. Obviously, I don’t know what would have happened if they had been left in, but I have no complaints more than 15 years later. I guess what I’ll say is that just because dentistry is set up to maximize profits, doesn’t mean that all dental services are a scam. In my case I was partially sedated with a pill in addition to being locally numbed – I don’t remember what drug they used but based on my (limited) recollection it was probably some sort of benzodiazepine.
I do recommend the drugs, as I recall feeling my dentist crush the tooth (they drill it out most of the way, then break it to separate the roots) and not being particularly bothered. I don’t think I’d feel that way sober! Healing was quick, and I didn’t have the (apparently) revolting experience of giant blood clots breaking into my mouth that some people have with extractions. Of course, I’m not a dentist, this is just my recollection of my experiences with a procedure recommended by a dentist.
When reading of your upcoming appearance at the Sages & Scholars Conference I immediately wondered if you were taking a cross country train trip to appear there in person. Or will you be Zooming?
I keep sensing the magnitude of the vibeshift symbolized by last winter’s Saturn Neptune conjunction at zero Aries. “We stand at the hinge between two great ages of the world” as you put it. Truly a turning point of monumental proportions I feel every day in my bones. Granted, my natal chart has Neptune exactly on my ascendant and Saturn in the first house so I’m naturally inclined to be tuned in to it but I’m curious if others are feeling it too?
As always, thanks for all you do and for hosting another Open Post.
KM Gunn # 3:
I think the book paragraph you depict seems cool. Thank you!
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Degringolade # 4:
After reading your comment, I’ve scratched my head (again) and after I’ve thought I can’t answer you properly. However, I can tell you my opinion about your statement about internet. I bet internet will last maybe until next century, but I doubt it will be opened to everybody much more years…I think John would explain my idea better than I can do it.
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Fritter… # 11:
I’ve read a reference in your comment about John (the Evangelist). I think there are some interesting data about him: it’s said he was the only one Evangelist who met personally Jesus, he wrote the Apocalypse book (in addition of his gospel), and I think his gospel was to some extent, different from the another ones (indeed, more mystical).
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David P # 16:
I can tell you that “state funded” odonthology services are poor in my country (in spite of our apparent -and declining- welfare state). So most of odonthological acts must be paid to private dentists (ahem). Thid is my country situation.
An anonymous surgeon said a time ago, that dentists were fake surgeons and doctors who took profit on others pains (si non é vero, é ben trovato).
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Seeking # 17:
Well, I knew Dolly Parton had died. She wasn’t my favorite singer, due to my personal and “national” preferences, but I can say she was a good singer in her music style. So I mourn her death.
By the way, in spite usual hipsters here and everywhere despising country music, I can point it’s a working class origin music (in the US), so I don’t despise it (though I’m not a fan of it, neither).
if new money is created by taking out loans and the most common cause of taking out a loan is to buy a house than it is convenient that people in a family should all have separate homes rather than to stay together
so that means it is not as cultural/political as people seem to believe like sure it amplifies it but again no one really has raised this point
@Fritter_mywig,
To better understand Pynchon you should check the following list of close friends, teachers and influences on him from his days at Cornell. They might give you a clue as to where his esoteric references came from:
Richard Farina, Kirkpatrick Sale , MF Beal, David Sheltzine and arguably Vladimir Nabokov and Kurt Vonnegut.
I found this interesting article on LewRockwell.com:
Why China Works and India Does Not
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/08/jayant-bhandari/why-china-works-and-india-does-not/
It is an interesting look at how China is trying to adapt the “best” of Faustian culture and avoid its pitfalls, while India seems unable to do so because of endemic corruption.
David P: I’m 55 years old and I’ve never had dental work. All of my wisdom teeth have grown in; one of them is horzontal. It makes a space that bugs me when it traps food, but otherwise causes me no problems. There is no crowding, pushing against the adjacent tooth, or anything else. It has a flattish top surface at about the height of the adjacent molar.
Without gainsaying you about the wisdom of taking internet advice, I just wanted to relate that this is my experience. I do not know if that would be the typical experience of wisdom teeth if people left them alone as I have, or if you are indeed faced with a real problem. I wish I did.
Sounds good KM Gunn Art… I like Buhner too. I think he is an excellent writer. (The first book I remember reading by him was on sacred beers… then later his other herbal stuff.) I was just sharing my own reservations about books on writing in general. With one nonfic book to my name and numerous essays, I do hope to keep improving as a nonfiction writer, even though fiction has always been the dream. Glad to have some short stories published & under my belt too… but our host is right also about it easier to break into nonfiction. I hope Buhner’s book really helps your son, & I’m wishing him success in the vocation.
Buhner seemed to be what some might call an ovate or others, on the plant path. He definitely knew some esoteric stuff and applied it.
Gunstone, it should be entertaining. As for the idiotic equation of population decline with human extinction, I’ll point out first of all that this is like seeing the temperature start to sink back to normal after a scorching summer and insisting that this proves an ice age is about to kill us all, and then discuss the fact that population contraction is a normal experience in civilizations in decline, such as ours.
Justin, thanks for this.
KMGunn, thank you for this! I’ll definitely have a look at Buhner’s book when time permits.
Degringolade, the thing I like to point out is that collapse is fractal. There are megacollapses, mesocollapses, microcollapses, nanocollapses, and picocollapses, all jumbled together in the same timeline. There are already countries in the global south that were once relatively stable, and have now disintegrated into civil strife and raw survival. There will be more of those with every passing decade. There are American cities that have done a small-scale version of the same thing. There are also declines with shallower slopes. All of it’s happening together. Depending on where you are and how old you are, you may well manage to limit your experience to a few slow mesocollapses and a lot of micro-, nano-, and picocollapses — but it’s not the death of oil or the end of the internet we each have to worry about. It’s the point at which petroleum products, internet service, etc. are no longer available to us — and before that, the various little collapses at which these and many other things shed benefits and add costs.
Forecasting, that seems like one plausible timeline. I assume you’ve read Robert Harris’s Fatherland, which has the attendees of the Wannsee Conference being quietly murdered to improve German relations with the United States? It’s not the same as your version, but shows that the concept is reasonable.
Justin, excellent! Understand the disastrous choices made in the wake of that energy crisis and you get most of what landed us where we are today.
Michael, I believe everything will be available on video.
Tyler, one of the most important lessons a writer can learn is that it’s always a mistake to try to judge the quality of your writing while you’re writing. It’s happened quite often that the writing I did on a day when nothing seemed to come out right turned out, in retrospect, to be some of my best prose. It’s happened even more often that, when I went over the day’s work later, I could see easily enough how to improve it. So I just write, and sort things out later. As for every day, I don’t usually write when I’m at speaking gigs, because I generally don’t have the time. When I’m home, though, I do write every single day, for as many hours as I can spare.
Clay, thanks for the data point. Yeah, that sounds about right.
Fritter, fascinating! It’s on my list of books to pick up and read one of these days.
Camelotkidd, I have indeed, and it’s a brilliant and trenchant essay.
LoonChaser, I’ll consider it for a post sometime later this autumn.
Milkyway, thanks for this as always.
Luke, it’s been a long time since I last read that essay and I’m far from sure I understood it at the time! I’m planning on another deep dive into Jung later this year, so will put that at the head of the list.
David, I’ve had good experiences with extractions, for what it’s worth. It’s when they try to put something into the mouth that problems occur. The Niven-Pournelle reference got a chuckle from me, btw.
Pure Land, in occultism as I understand it, there are a sequence of goals, which can be accomplished in a single life with enough hard work. The first is to enter into a constructive relationship with the higher self. The second is to make that relationship conscious. The third is, through the medium of the higher self, to become aligned with the spiritual powers above the higher self. The fourth is to become a vehicle for energies of blessing and healing descending from those higher powers, and radiate them in the ordinary world. The fifth and final is, through the process just described, to dissolve the last of what old texts call “material inclination” — the state of consciousness that holds the soul bound to the wheel of incarnations — and go on to the less restrictive and more creative realms of being in levels less dense than physical matter.
I was sorry to hear about Parton’s passing, and I also just heard that Tim Curry has just passed away — it probably won’t surprise you to hear that The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a fixture of my teen years.
Slithy, hmm! That’s fascinating.
Raen, I am indeed, and in fact I wrote a blog post about it:
https://ecosophia.net/against-enchantment-3-jean-gebser/
I disagree with his analysis, but at least he’s more interesting than Ken Wilber, who borrowed so much from him.
Scotlyn, good heavens. I haven’t seen anybody discussing that since the early 1980s. There used to be quite a bit of talk about that, under labels such as “coevolution,” but it got dropped like a hot rock with the coming of the Reagan counterrevolution. Good to see it getting some attention again.
Earthworm, I don’t know that anyone’s discussed mass psychotic breaks as such, but occult philosophy makes ample room for that. It’s not humanity as a whole that evolves toward the absolute, but each individual human soul — and there’s always the possibility of making catastrophic mistakes and facing a much rougher road as a result. The Lemurian deviation and the submission of late Atlantean culture to the Lords of the Dark Face are good examples. As for the Arday phenomenon, there may be a mass psychotic break going on, but it’s not hard to understand. Academic fraud is pandemic in today’s universities — that’s the ugly not-so-little secret behind the “replication crisis” that gets so much discussion these days — and the fact that Arday was caught out plagiarizing and lying has got to be sending cold terror through tens of thousands of academics who are doing the same thing with less panache.
Jim, I’ll be traveling — haven’t worked out the details yet, but I’ll also be giving a talk to a Masonic lodge and visiting some occult schools and temples in the LA area.
Arnav, if I understand the point you’re making, yes, it has been raised, though not as commonly as it might be.
Michael, interesting. Thanks for this.
TO: Chaquin #26 et al.
I think that we agree to a certain extent. I just think we phrase things differently.
The internet in it’s current incarnation is a blob of bandwidth trying to do everything to everyone. That part certainly can’t last. But the “pipes” that carry the bandwidth aren’t going to be going away anytime soon, but someone will need to pay for them.
IMHO email will transmogrify into a system more akin to the postal service than to the current hodgepodge. You will pay to have a message delivered. I actually hope this will happen, because then junkmail type messages will diminish.
Videos and social media will also need to be paid for.
At the end of the day, the bill always come and someone will have to pay the piper. There is a whole lotta “free ride” going on right now.
What will need to change is the finances, the infrastructure is there, the fiber isn’t vanishing.
Do you know of any good books that cover American occultism from about 1890-1930?
TO: JMG 33 et al
Agreed, my only petty comment is
“but it’s not the death of oil or the end of the internet we each have to worry about. It’s the point at which petroleum products, internet service, etc. are no longer available to us”.
I would agree wholeheartedly if the caveat “at a price I can afford” is added.
I think that I could always manage to send someone an e-mail for $1.75 each. But is sure as heck would cut out my socally inept forwarding memes to piss off my buddies. And I am certain that this forum would have to start charging admission (which I would gladly pay) if the financing of the system became somewhat rational.
Be well all, things are a changing and be careful out there.
This is the single worst MAiD (euthanasia) case I have come across in Canada so far with regard to consent: https://alexschadenberg.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-last-ten-days-of-brigittte-gg.html
The family has lodged complaints with everyone they can over it.
Seriously, if you’re in Canada, keep an eye on elderly parents or ill family members to make sure they aren’t being bullied or forced into it. And be doubly careful if you are elderly and sick yourself.
I just read more news about a measles outbreak, and noticed that a fairly large fraction of the patients are apparently vaccinated. This raises a somewhat odd question that, to the best of my knowledge is not being asked by anyone who has the knowledge and resources to figure it out: is it possible that a major factor in the measles outbreak is that the disease has evolved to get around the vaccine induced immunity?
Since I’ve also seen evidence measles is also somewhat destructive of the exact type of immune response that vaccines provide, this could be a major game changer: if it is infecting vaccinated people, and wiping out vaccine-based immunity, this would dramatically increase the disease burden we as a society face; and this could mark the start of a major decline in public health.
Does anyone know if anyone has started looking into this possibility?
Hi JMG!
I recently read your article “The Death of God”, and was quite moved by it. It explained something I had felt (or rather, hadn’t felt!) all my life, having been on the periphery of Christianity growing up, but not enough to have an actual belief in its god.
I was wondering what you think about Christians nowadays who feel the presence of Jesus or feel the power of prayer, or get some other kind of response out of their religious practice. I experience prayer as something that has a potency beyond who it’s directed to, and I’ve felt it work when I just prayed to “God” or “The Universe” or “Love” or something general, because I didn’t know who to address. I’m assuming the response I felt came from the life force you call the One Life in The Way of the Golden Section, or maybe a part of it that is more closely related to me in some way…anyway, I wonder if sometimes that’s what’s happening for some Christians. I also have felt Jesus in my field, or someone who felt like the embodiment of the virtue behind the question, “What would Jesus do?” Until the last few years, I had taken on the modern idea of gods and goddesses and saints as sort of collective fields that are created because of human belief, and I always assumed that that explained my experience of Jesus. That no longer feels like a good explanation, because I feel other gods and goddesses as such real and independent beings (which is why your writings on religion are so compelling to me, and why Druidry is similarly so compelling – the gods and goddesses feel so vibrant and responsive!). So now I’m curious, if the Christian god is dead, for Christians that still feel a divine response, who is responding? I’m thinking especially of my grandmother, who prayed five times a day and was in such a state of grace, generosity, and love, when she died at the age of 99, that many people in her life were genuinely convinced that she was an angel. From my perspective, her religious practices and her community were the two biggest factors helping her get to that state. Are there benevolent beings that stand in place of a dead god, for earnest and loving souls? Can human worship resurrect old gods? I’m also curious in that regard if new life breathed into a practice of worship can breathe new life into gods – is that how the old Pagan gods have new movements around them nowadays?
I know that’s a lot of questions packed into one, and I suspect that none of them have clear cut answers, but I’m curious what you think about all this.
If you don’t mind a second (hopefully short) question, I was wondering if you have any recommendations for places to buy iron phosphate or magnesium phosphate for making cell salts. I can find the other minerals in fairly small quantities, but those two seem to be harder to buy short of larger industrial amounts. The cheapest I could find iron phosphate, for example, was a little over $100. In the long run, especially if I can find a friend or two to go in on it with me, it could still be worth it, but I thought I’d see if you had knowledge any good sources!
Thank you so much!
I posted this comment at the end of the last thread, but it may interest others to put it out there, so:
One more thing…
“We could very easily end up fifty years or so from now with a fully bifurcated society, where a minority of technocrats and affluent flunkies live in walled communities patrolled by robot guards, getting access to impressively advanced technologies at the cost of having their actions and their thoughts watched 24/7 by implanted brain chips or the like, while the majority have walked away from so hellish a lifestyle and taken up something much closer to Sarah Chrisman’s Victorian habits.”
It strikes me that James C. Scott’s “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia” is a history of this precise topic of (voluntary) bifurcation. The work examines a lengthy, 2000-year long, or so, history of the relationship between southeast Asia’s “civilised” valleys and its “backward” (or “free” depending on your point of view) hills.
Even though the narrative of “civilisation” is always that the “backward” hill people are “primitive” and simply have not cottoned on to the benefits of civilisation yet, (ie that the road from the hills to the valleys can only run one way) the hills always represented a form of freedom from the detriments of civilisation that was always available for the denizens of the civilised valleys to run away to. In other words, this road goes two ways, and there were always people who voluntarily travelled that road one way or another, depending on what they valued more – centralised controls and comforts, or hilltop freedom and relative material deprivation.
David P.
The Navy removed my wisdom teeth. The bottom ones needed to come out, one of them did damage the next tooth forward and all my other teeth ended up shoved forward causing other troubles. I’m not so sure the upper ones needed to come out as they came in straight.
The dentist did it without a general anesthesia, but I did get to experience mainlined Valium. Wee! The percodan afterwards only made sleepy, no fun at all. A few days later I was loading stores on the boat when a clot came out. It’s just as disgusting as you heard.
The worst advice my parents ever gave me was about dental care. They honestly thought it was normal to need dentures by 50. The fluoride-free water in that part of the state didn’t help.
(First attempt to post this resulted in a hard crash. If it actually got through please delete this one)
Degringolade @ 4, I think what we see now will continue, the increasing reservation of advanced technology, not to mention access to food and health care, to ever smaller groups of favored people.
Forecasting Intelligence @ 5, in your novel, how do you view the USSR? Will it still exist as a communist one party state? Does the USSR have the same satellites it had during the Cold War?
I would imagine the main task of your Speer govt. in foreign affairs would be the management of relations with Russia (or the USSR).
” Jewish American groups would be demanding it.”
Disagree. While it’s your book and your exploration, for my money the Reich would moderate, slowly becoming essentially the modern EU, but with different flash points. Yes, the East might drain them, But why? The East has the most resources, it’s exclusively the West draining the EU presently, that’s why they use the whole Soviet East as an extended colony to fill harmful social expectations in France and England. The borders might be, maybe North/South, eg, unable to take Greece and Italy, those being stand-ins for Slovakia and Romania, Although Serbia might be equal in both worlds. Maybe Finland or a breakaway Norway bothers them from the North.
There would be no Jewish groups in the US or elsewhere because they owe their existence to the end of WWII. Jews were 50-50, considered suspicious or even actively disliked in 1940. WIthout the huge media reform push from 1950 and going on tirelessly for 50 years, they would never have this peculiar level of influence. I mean, compare with JFK being not allowed as a mere Catholic.
Each would be a very major change to your exploration. However, these other things might be very much more interesting. For example, in WWI we were not going in because first, we Americans could profoundly care less which king lost or what they did, and second, which side would we pick? Half our money in Wall St was on England, and Half on Germany, as per our underlying migration.
It was barely pulled off that the London faction of Wall St won over and installed President Wilson, air-dropping him into office. And that in contrast, Germany played more fair. WWII was very nearly the same, where America literally couldn’t care, and FDR’s only promise to get narrowly into office was no closing banks, no war, both of which he immediately did. That is to say, over the dead bodies of the American electorate, but now all forgotten to history. So given the two, and the normalcy of any late Reich, America would not have repressed all German immigration and pride, and be far more “German” both internally and after 30 years of trading/interacting with “Pan-Germany”, Europe. So we would see the war as something in the unfortunate past, like Vietnam and US today.
This are important thoughts, but what is far better, *more interesting* to a reading audience. I say this as a writer. We hear the very same thing over and over, while growing up on 50s-80s Issac Asimov Magazines, they were never afraid to tip the sacred cows and actually try the new. If I ever hear another “Nazi Bad” statement, I’m going to scream. I know. I’ve just heard it that too many times, with too little understanding of who they really were.
I found your 20 August post on the fall of the Cult of Progress interesting, and I notice a cluster of related themes around that subject here. Maybe a collective conversation on the fall, how to step out of the way and where those steps will lead next would reduce some of the anxiety I notice among the commentariat…?
Also – I really like JPM’s take on Dada. Might you and the commentariat be interested in an Art Conspiracy?
And – Maybe we could discuss something like, “Where were you when Progress fell for you?”
Many thanks!
@ Fritter: I read GR three times, beginning back in the 70’s, with my now well-worn 1st edition 6th printing HC. (I guess I’m a glutton for punishment.) I used to lurk on the old Pynchon-list, about three decades ago, when there were some really good writers commenting there. Particularly one who went by the handle “Steelhead.” He’s fairly well known, but you may not like his politics. (I checked out your link to the upcoming read. It might be interesting to watch.) My own opinion was that Pynchon was doing like Melville sometimes did: offering portentous hints that suggested he knew more than he actually did know. I’ll coin the term “burlesque esoterism” to describe this. But that’s just my opinion. I often recommend “Mason & Dixon” as being “the last Pynchon novel I actually enjoyed.” There’s a fair amount of “burlesque esoterism” in M&D, which might be a hint to what’s in GR. For example, in M&D there’s a chapter about a tavern in the Pennsylvania wilderness called “The Rabbi of Prague,” IIRC. You might check that out. In fact, it occurs to me that the tavern chapters in M&D are comparable to the “gams” chapters in Moby-Dick. (The “gams” chapters in M-D are all titled, “The Pequod Meets the ______.”) There are six or seven of them. Maybe somebody would like to do a book making that comparison. Finally, I have a book titled “The Gnostic Pynchon.” I bought it many years ago and every now and then, seeing it in a bookcase and being intrigued by the title, I pick it up and make another attempt at reading it. Each time I put it back down disappointed, and the next time I see it sitting there, gathering dust, I think “I didn’t know I still had that book.”
Hi John,
Your thoughts please on Social Darwinism?
I’ve read that it is enjoying a Renaissance and is being promoted by people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. I find some truth in it that all people are not created equal. Some people are smarter, some work harder, some are stronger, some are more emotionally resilient. It is that way after all in the natural world – survival of the fittest
Yet Social Darwinism flies against the teachings of all religions. Elon Musk has said “Empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western Civilization”. Yet does anyone really want to live in a society without empathy?
@earthworm (#23):
AS for your last paragraph, there seems to be some medical literature on what is now being called ‘mass sociogenic illness,” which I think comes down to a medicalized version of what you’re asking about, though in groups less large than the total of humanity. The articles I bookmarked, all from the early 2000s, came to my attention when I was looking into the effectiveness of nocebos and placebos, but I haven’t followed them up.
Looking at the title of the conference and some of the other speakers’ topics, I have to wonder how your name ended up in the hat to begin with.
I wish I could be there with a bag of popcorn to watch what happens when the audience and organizers realize that key parts of your talk are that the only thing exponential about modern technologies is their energy requirements, that AI is a temporary problem because industrial civilization is a temporary phenomenon, and that their best bet going forward is to make friends with people who wear overalls to work.
Hey JMG
I thought I would begin this Open Post by sharing my latest article, a short musing about how we can tell the difference between self-improvement that is caused by voluntary, conscious adherence to some “program”, and improvement that is just a involuntary and unconscious consequence of aging.
https://jlmc12.substack.com/p/can-you-distinguish-the-effects-of
I tried to comment on a post here last week and it was eaten by the server. It gave me a message about proving I was human and a capcha. I filled in the capcha, submitted the comment, and poof! Vaporized.
In other news, I am starting two different paw paw groves this year. 4 trees I grew from seed and 13 saplings from a local guy who actually knows what he is doing. Wish me luck!
@William (#35):
A fairly good, somewhat shallow introduction is Mitch Horowitz’s Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation. He followed it up with One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life (2014). A deeper dive into the subject will involve a fairly large number of books more tightly focussed on one part or another of that history.
Thank you. I’m almost embarrassed to admit it but I don’t even know who or what Niven-Pournelle is—the reference, such as it was, was entirely unintentional.
—David P.
Milkyway #14:
May I suggest Wonderful Wendesday Weirdos?
Slithy Toves #19:
If I may, a datapoint from a young person: I don’t know many fellow Zoomers who have as much trouble using computers as the generation of my parents, nevermind genuinely old people, but I will freely admit that my circle of friends heavily leans towards either Computer Science (like myself) or an “inofficial” interest in computing.
However, a decent chunk of said circle dislkes dealing with computers for just that reason. Things are too complex and opaque. It’s funny you should mention web browing as something that works because just an hour ago, I needed to figure out whether an event location has a coat check but the FAQ items wouldn’t expand. Why? I disabled both my ad blocker and Firefox’s built-in tracking protection. I tried two more browsers on my desktop and Firefox on my smartphone. Nothing works. Is the website just broken or is it disagreeing with something specific to me and my browsers?
Justin #25, Chuaquin #27, Cynthia Christie #31:
Thanks y’all, I appreciate your perspectives.
—David P.
I am fascinated by your concept of a future “corvin” civilization created by descendants of modern crows 100 million years from now.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-05/the-next-ten-billion-years/
I am curious as to how you picture the background of this reality. Is it a “Planet of the Avians” where a large amount of the dinosaurs (wink, wink) have grown to relatively significant sizes again (think moas, elephant birds, terror birds, or demon ducks) while the remaining mammals are mostly small again.
I wonder what role the “Mediterranean Mountains” play in corvin development.
@ForecastingIntelligence
“Hi John,
I am currently writing an alternative fictional novel about an alternative Europe where Germany wins WW2.
Its in 1964, Hitler is long dead (1953) and Speer is Chancellor and de facto leader.
My thesis is the occupation of the East is ruining the Reich fiscally and the regime is starting to desperately need detente with America in particular.
It needs credit, trade and the ability of Reich elites to transfer their wealth abroad.
Do you agree with this overall thesis? The central challenge facing a Speer leadership is how to deal with the demands of the US to answer what happened to the millions of Jews who were murdered during the war. Jewish American groups would be demanding it.
My conclusion is that Speer would have eventually had to blame the SS as a semi rogue organisation and hang the main ring leaders of the Holocaust with the backing of the German military who hated the SS.”
Perhaps the best example of an alternate reality where the Third Reich lasts longer is “The Anglo-American Nazi War” originally written by CalBear on alternate history.com:
https://www.amazon.ca/Festung-Europa-Jon-Kacer/dp/1976423236
https://www.alternatehistory.com/wiki/doku.php?id=timelines:anglo-american_-_nazi_war
A key thing to keep in mind about the Reich, the Jews were only the No. 1 group the Nazis wanted to eliminate. To use a great passage from the Anglo-American Nazi War:
“The goal of Nazi Germany in beginning the European Phase of the Second World War was to achieve, it claimed, living space and to unite all the German peoples into a single nation again. Both of these claims were, even at the time, viewed with more than some skepticism outside of the Reich’s borders. While there were legitimate issues involving the treatment of minorities in various European states (including German speakers in a number of nations), the extreme measures taken by Nazi Party officials, as early as 1933, indicate that the desire was far darker than that stated publicly. Reading of Hitler’s own published works make clear that a primary driver of the author, and later of his associates was an overt racism of both remarkable virulence and wide scope. While the Nazi Party had established even before gaining power via the Ballot Box that it was anti-Semitic this was far from unusual in 1930’s Europe where such prejudices were wide spread and surprisingly accepted across much of society. What were very different were the additional hatreds that were part of the Nazi manifesto, with groups ranging from Slavs to Asians to Roma (Gypsies) along with homosexuals, Communists, intellectuals, the handicapped, and followers of several religions all being marked as “different” and hence dangerous to the “Volk” (German for people, it was commonly used in place of citizen or residents in the Reich). These beliefs were to produce remarkable results during the acquisition phase of the Reich’s attacks across the European continent and in the following years.”
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/the-anglo-american-nazi-war.140356/page-3
In particular, I recommend you look up the fate the Nazis had in mind for the Slavic populations under their control, especially if you want some real nightmares!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/oz6cz9/generalplan_ost_in_numbers_source_in_comments/
Hello Mr Greer and the commentariat!
I’ve really enjoyed the recent Ecosophian articles on the energy depletion and decline – the main articles as well as the excellent comments. The awareness of what is happening is inevitably percolating to the mainstream, and here is a link to a sober article on the topic, hosted on a site that while not quite New York Times is not fringe either:
https://unherd.com/2026/08/the-death-of-middle-class-luxuries/
Interestingly, few of the comments below flat-out deny the reality that the article is describing – that mass air travel is inexorably on the way out. Still, quite a few believe that if only we threw out the foreigners/wokesters, things would go back to their glorious mid-90s state. I guess wishful thinking and scapegoating are as inevitable as the cyclical rise and fall of civilisations.
Now, there were a lot of useful ideas on Ecosophia on how to best weather the decline. They mostly include relocating to a promising geographic area, establishing strong local communities and acquiring practical skills relying on sustainable technologies. As good as these strategies are, obviously they are not for everyone. I myself am something of a drifter without strong connections to persons or places, with no home I would insulate, and no talent or affinity for complex manual work (I do work with my hands, but as an unskilled labourer, and do not feel compelled to progress in that direction). All of this has consequences and I will accept them as they come. I would also like to say that I feel blessed to have been able to follow my curiosity, learn about many disparate fields and live in several different cultures. All of this would not be possible in a different historic moment. With that said, what can I do to adapt as well as possible to the long descent? I hope that there will be space for some meditations on the fate of misfits and wanderers in the ongoing series on the civilisational cycles 😉
On a different topic, I saw an announcement for your life force workbook, which is supposed to be released in early September. I have long been interested in life force, both the history of the idea and the practical applications (I am studying qigong). Your articles on this topic have been illuminating, so I am intrigued to learn more about your take on this. However, the book is advertised as the third in a series, and I don’t have the two previous installments. Also, there is some incompatibility between qigong and Western-style energy work. With that in mind, would the book be suitable for me?
Many thanks!
Hi,
Agree John. I also see Speer eventually withdrawing from large parts of the East by the late 1960s.
As for Soviet Russia, I think Stalin survives and does around 1950 or so. However he is unpopular and privately blamed by many for the catastrophe of losing much of Soviet Russia.
I see a Berla/Malenkov duo running things. They will loosen the communist economic system but maintain a highly miltarised and Russified command state.
Soviet Russia becomes more powerful after the 1960s after Siberian oil is discovered and parts of Eastern Europe are recaptured after Germany withdraws to more defensive lines.
What I’m not sure is whether Speer and his successors can get away long term with their white lie that the Holocaust was essentially an excessive action by an out of control wartime SS state within a state.
Or more profoundly even if documentary evidence leaks out to the rest of the world by angry SS veterans and dissident whether anyone will care.
All the camps would be destroyed, archives shredded and over time witnesses die. Hardly any Jews would be alive in Reich controlled Europe. What are your thoughts John?
@Sama Lindara,
my assumption is that Christians who experience God’s presence in prayer, and have prayers answered, are actually being answered by God because he’s very much alive and well.
But then I’m a Christian who has experienced this multiple times, and you may consider me biased.
KM Gunn Art,
in antiquity, it was completely accepted that nonfiction needed and allowed as much stylistic sophistication as fiction. In fact, for several centuries it was considered elegant to write manuals of rather dry subjects in verse, especially in hexameter – Virgil’s Georgics on agriculture is the most famous one, but there are many others on astronomy, meteorology and more.
Not saying we should go back to writing such manuals in verse – I love Virgil, but was unable to finish the Georgics because I found it too dull!
Nevertheless, sometimes it is good to aim high. The first words of one of Plato’s dialogues were renowned and discussed for their rhythm, more than for their content!
William, it’s a very mixed bag still waiting for a really good study. Joscelyn Godwin’s The Theosophical Enlightenment is excellent, but covers America only in passing; Catherine Albanese’s A Republic of Mind and Spirit focuses on the US but includes occultism only as part of a much broader trend. Mitch Horowitz has a couple of books on the specific subject but I found them shallow and tendentious.
Degringolade, and that’s also a sliding scale — “a price I can afford all the time” gives way gradually to “a price I can afford when I really need to” and eventually to “a price I can’t afford at all.” Yes, times are a-changing!
Pygmycory, since the whole point of the MAID scheme is to harvest organs for the very lucrative transplant trade, expect many more examples of that. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Canada ends up doing as China does, and treats its prison population as raw material for more transplants. Gotta keep the well-to-do alive!
William, I don’t know. Anyone else?
Sama, that’s a fascinating question. What I know is that there are a lot of people who left Christianity because they prayed for years and got “sorry, nobody’s home” for an answer — but then there are other people who apparently do get someone on the other end of the line. Why that should be — well, I don’t know. As for the cell salt minerals, at least one of my commenters sourced some back a couple of years, but I’m not sure where. Anybody?
Scotlyn, it’s an excellent point, and it’s quite possible that we’ll see some such arrangement in the deindustrial future.
Rhydlyd, by all means have at it, then!
Peter, people who believe in Social Darwinism have never read Darwin. Of course they’re hardly alone in that — the vast majority of people who babble about Darwin, pro or con, have never taken the few hours needed to read The Origin of Species and think about what it says, and so are spouting nonsense. Social Darwinism is utter nonsense, as anyone can find out by examining the biographies of people raised in very wealthy families, but it’s perennially popular among nouveau-riche circles because it allows them to pretend that what raised them to their current position of absurd wealth was something other than the combination of dumb luck, favoritism, and blatant cheating that’s typically the real story.
Slithy, it’s going to be entertaining, that’s for certain. I suspect I’ll mostly talk about technological bifurcation, because that’ll be less traumatic for the poor dears than the broader picture.
J.L.Mc12, thanks for this.
Kimberly, thanks for the heads up; I’ll check with my tech guy. I’m looking forward to trying pawpaws for the first time in my life this year — one of the two local farmers markets has announced that they’ll be in stock tomorrow. Luck!
David, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle were science fiction authors; “on the gripping hand” is a Motie turn of phrase, from the Niven-Pournelle novel The Mote in God’s Eye.
Gunstone (aka Aidan), I have no idea. Since I created that purely as one element in a thought experiment, I took it just far enough to make the point I wanted to make, and left it at that. Nor, as you may recall, do I find such things especially interesting. I wonder if you’ve seen a certain comedy routine where William Shatner gets pestered by a Star Trek fan until he loses his cool and starts yelling at the guy…
Soko, I’m sorry to say that scapegoating and xenophobia are very common in eras of economic contraction, and of course those happen on all sides — you have locals insisting that the immigrants ought to be thrown out, immigrants insisting that they have the right to whatever they can grab, and so on down a long and dreary road. It can get very ugly — I don’t remember the details, but the citizens of the Byzantine Empire engaged in at least one mass slaughter of the barbarians in their midst. As for what you can do, why, that depends on fine details of your situation about which I know nothing. I’ll try to paint some broad strokes later on. The Life Force Workbook isn’t primarily a manual of practice — like the other two workbooks in the Golden Section Fellowship series, it’s meant to give students a good general overview of occult teachings on a given subject and some basic practical experience in a few applications. It will give you a good idea of how Western occultists understand what you’re doing in your qigong practice, if that matters.
Forecasting, it’s your novel, you can take it any direction you want!
If one has been keeping up with the events in Gary, Indiana where there is still 30,000 houses without power after two weeks. One has to look at the below billboard and just chuckle at the double meaning it presents. Everything about it is perfect in a morbid dark humour kind of way.
https://www.reddit.com/r/agedlikemilk/comments/1vummaa/palantirs_americas_future_ad_in_gary_in_c_early/
JMG: “It’s not humanity as a whole that evolves toward the absolute, but each individual human soul”
Nice to know but there is a certain dismay at watching what seems to be a slow motion train wreck.
A term that came up with the footage was ‘mass formation regression’, a term I am not familiar with; so many syndromes, so little time!
“and the fact that Arday was caught out plagiarizing and lying has got to be sending cold terror through tens of thousands of academics who are doing the same thing with less panache.”
We thought we heard thunder earlier, but it could have been the sound of 10,000 sphincters tightening.
@ Robert Mathiesen #47
‘mass sociogenic illness’ is a new one to me, thank you.
I wasn’t thinking about the total of humanity so much as a more localised thing.
The Sufi story ‘When the Waters were Changed’ from Idries Shah’s Tales of the Dervishes came to mind, not so much for similarity of story, but of being in the position of finding oneself as a stranger in a strange land.
I may have posted this before. I don’t know how much is remembered from some article or documentary and how much is from a dream.
A guy in Africa (or anywhere poor) with a car is obligated to give rides to neighbors. They don’t pay for gas and some steal his gas. When he gets a new side hustle he decides he doesn’t need the car anymore. He attaches heavy stuff to the rear and drives the car until the transmission fails. He leaves the car on the dirt road and walks home.
I recommend JLMc12’s https://jlmc12.substack.com/p/can-you-distinguish-the-effects-of as food for thought for those following the Yeats book club
Hi JMG,
First, I wanted to say thank you for the ongoing series revisiting the energy crisis. I haven’t had time to comment much but have been enjoying the discussion. Good stuff!
Second, from the department of What Catabolic Collapse looks like: I have been following the “abandonment” of Hartman, Colorado after it became clear that the cost to repair the municipal water system was hopelessly out of reach. All of the municipal officials resigned, dissolving the government. The community is in limbo, and it isn’t clear what will happen now that they are a ward of the county. So, it isn’t a ghost town, but there is no “town” any more in a legal sense. The whole thing strikes me as pathetic rather than dramatic. T.S. Elliot had it right: not with a bang but a whimper. He left out the part about the boil water order from the county, but that’s okay.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/01/hartman-colorado-town-abandoned
@Forecasting Intelligence (#57 and earlier comments on your novel):
What you should (IMHO) keep in mind while writing it is that–before Pearl Harbor–a huge fraction of the US wanted to enter World War 2 on the side of Hitler!
My father had been a mechanical engineer working on the Norden Bombsite project during those years. In 1960 he talked about them with me at considerable length. He particularly wanted me to know that, of all the engineers and military men with whom he interacted during those years, about on-third wanted the US to remain neutral, and that the remaining two-thirds were more or less evenly divided between those who wanted the US to enter the war on Germany’s side and those who wanted the US to enter it on England’s side. Germany was hugely admired in those days for the quality of its science, its engineering, its industrial development, its schools, and its over-all culture. Had the Japanese never attacked the US at Pearl Harbor, he though it quite likely that the US would have entered WW2 on the side of the Nazis.
He took the time to tell me these things, he said, because after the War was over and people had become more aware of that the Nazis had done, those who had formerly been pro-German were inclined to bury that part of their past; and he doubted whether any history course I might take in college would ever acknowledge how wide-spread pro-German (and pro-Nazi) sentiment had formerly been in America. (And he did know about Operation Paperclip, which was largely effectuated by the pro-German third of our Military-Industrial-Intelligence complex.)
I should add that he was Danish-American: all four of his grandparents had been born and raised in Denmark, and they had bitter memories of how Germany had overrun Denmark during the two Schleswig-Holstein wars launched by Bismark. His family had long had no use for Germany because of that; and my father was very proud of what occupied Denmark had been able to do to resist the Nazis who had overrun it once again during World War 2.
So when you write your novel, you might want to take into account how very wide-spread pro-Nazi sentiment was in America, back in the days before Pearl Harbor, and how close our country had come to entering the war on the side of the Nazis.
Cal Newport’s recent podcast ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLMLzpdgWgo ) has an interesting short discussion of the effects of social media on people’s ability to do certain things. He proposes a set of three measures (Key Point Indicators (KPI) in his terminology) for assessing where you are at. I have noted them below (with some clarifications – in the podcast he goes on to discuss how you could work on improving these indicators):
KPI #1 Reading Endurance
Test: What is the max number of minutes you can comfortably remain focused on conceptual (i.e. dealing with conceptual thought, expounding theories, etc, not just history or the like) non-fiction reading without context switching?
Brain rotted: 5 min
Distractible: 15 min
Pre-2012 Average: 30 min
Impressive: 75 min
Cognitive weapon: 1 book a day
KPI #2 Contemplation Control
Test: Attempt to make progress on a personal or professional problem, working only in your head, while walking. Keep redirecting your attention back to the problem if your mind wanders. Keep going until you can no longer make reasonable progress. (i.e. discursive meditation)
Brain rotted: < 1 min
Distractible: 1-3 min
Pre-2012 Average: 10 min
Impressive: 30 min
Cognitive weapon: 6-8 hours
KPI #3 Written Persuasiveness
Test: Write an argument for a contested stance you believe in.
Brain rotted: Disorganised; appeal to emotions; relies on ad hominem attacks
Distractible: Reasonable list of arguments in favour of your stance (i.e. bullet points)
Pre-2012 Average: Prose arguments for your stance and against the opposing view (not against a caricature of that view)
Impressive: A powerful argument from first principles
Cognitive weapon: An argument that forever changes the world
JMG, while organ harvesting may become more of an issue soon, until recently I don’t believe it was legal to harvest organs from MAiD patients, most of whom are old and very sick and aren’t really a great source for healthy organs. I think the bigger issue so far is trying to keep the healthcare system afloat because no one wants to pay the full cost and things are falling apart behind the scenes, and the government and medical system aren’t willing to admit the scale of the problem. So instead of refusing astronomically-expensive medications that only questionably work we get doctors and nurses pushing patients to agree to be killed if they get too expensive. Though to be fair, there seems to be quite a lot of expensive medications and procedures being refused these days too…
What gets me about the example I showed you is the fact that her family weren’t able to protect her, despite power of attorney and both the woman’s stated religious opposition (earlier when she was more compos-mentis) and the power of attorney grandaughter being unable to stop it. I had assumed it would be less of a threat to those with strong family involvement like that – that they’d target those without close family who might complain. But most people are still not dying this way. I wonder why they targeted her so hard.
It looks now like the only full defense is being compos mentis yourself and actively stating no, combined with being able to leave the care home or hospital.
I wonder how bad this is going to get. We just passed 100,000 euthanasia deaths as of this summer, starting from 2016.
I’m not sure how often you have been to LA, but if you have time, there are a few stops that might be interesting. Most people see the stars on the sidewalk and call it a trip. They miss the best stuff. The Museum of Jurassic Technology is pretty cool. The PRS library is something else! Besant Lodge has lately taken to showing silent black and white films once a month. They’ve shown Faust and The Sheik. (The lodge used to be a screening room for very early directors working on edits). Perhaps most interesting, shortly before you arrive the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will have just opened. This should be something spectacular, once the crowds clear out. Lucas is known for collecting art primarily from illustrators and commercial artists, who are focused on the human form and storytelling. He is of course shunned by the fine art world for this. (I hope he’s been able to build his collection for a steal…) The Getty Museum has a world class collection of illuminated manuscripts on display in the basement. The Huntington Library has a Gutenberg bible on display, halls filled with great art, and the best Chinese, Japanese, and succulent gardens. The Magic Castle is a spectacular experience. Some of the best close up magic in the world. Hard to get into. Being in Pasadena, you’ll be right next to the Devils Gate. IYKYK. If you want a good hike, Deukmejian park is not far from Pasadena, and gorgeous. One of the best coast live oak trees in LA lives here, and not very far in. Gold Bug is a real cool shop in pasadena. If you enjoy whiskey, The Blind Donkey (also in Pasadena) can’t be beat. Kopan Ramen in Burbank has some of the best tonkatsu ramen this side of the pacific. There are a few Guisados Tacos around; they turn tacos into an art form. Also, don’t forget to get a bacon wrapped street dog. It’s been about a thousand degrees in Southern California this summer, so you’ll either be dodging firestorms or the getting the early innings of el nino at that time. Sounds like it’s going to be a doozy this year. Hope you have fun.
William @38
Measles does stress the immune system, with increased rate of (other) infections for a year or more after the measles infection.. The immune damage is far less than with HIV (and probably Covid, still under study). The measles virus historically has not mutated much at all, unlike the rapid and extensive changes seen in colds, flu and Covid viruses. With so many outbreaks, prevalent chronic disease and changing climate, the risk for mutation could rise. In my state, the last outbreak, of 154 cases, only involved unvaccinated or those whose vaccine status was unclear. Many adults do not know if they were vaccinated, got both doses, or had the measles. Two dose vaccination, or measles infection, give something like 97% immunity for life, at least during the long period when measles was rare and states followed the infections.. This could change, but it is unlikely to be a drastic change in the basic character of the virus, which is relatively stable..
Infection risk is higher for the immunocompromised, including the substantial percent of the population with long Covid and/or other immune disorders. Some doctors recommend a booster for high risk patients. When presenting data, states tend to accept the remembered history, and may lump the “unsure” people in with one or the other group, blurring accuracy.. I have seen internet reports of a high percent of infections in vaccinated (like 30%), yet when dug into details, found very small numbers and no mention of full vs partial, vs uncertain vaccinations.
“Peter, people who believe in Social Darwinism have never read Darwin. Of course they’re hardly alone in that — the vast majority of people who babble about Darwin, pro or con, have never taken the few hours needed to read The Origin of Species and think about what it says, and so are spouting nonsense. Social Darwinism is utter nonsense, as anyone can find out by examining the biographies of people raised in very wealthy families, but it’s perennially popular among nouveau-riche circles because it allows them to pretend that what raised them to their current position of absurd wealth was something other than the combination of dumb luck, favoritism, and blatant cheating that’s typically the real story.”
It often seems to be the case in mass movements that the original “men of words” often have large parts of their message ignored by the “fanatics” who come afterwards. As Eric Hoffer noted in “The True Believer”,
“Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/770689-jesus-was-not-a-christian-nor-was-marx-a-marxist
Marx for example made a jaw-dropping quote (in hindsight considering what many revolutionaries who came to power in his name did) that the bourgeoisie had accomplished more in a couple generations than the Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic Cathedrals combined!
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10858238-the-bourgeoisie-has-torn-away-from-the-family-its-sentimental
Justin Patrick Moore 2
{I have had one heck of a rotten day dealing with credit card companies and credit bureaus, so, frankly, it is a wonder I haven’t collapsed or gone stark-raving bat-sh_t crazy. Before my head explodes, I need something to eat and take a nap. Moving on… }
> to keep their foothold on the rung above so that they have an easier time kicking down at the people on the rung below
Brilliantly put. I have the distinct feeling these words are utterly and completely correct. These words are, indeed, what we are enduring, and we will continue to endure; and it is not going to get better.
> Adobo
I remember when Adobo first started. In the 1980s, Jethro and I bought their early laser printers. Then many of their early softwares.
Fast forward to the late 1990s and early 2000s: I was a dedicated Adobo enthusiast. During these years, I bet we forked over to Adobo at least $5,000. But does Adobo care about that now? Not one twit. They have forgotten me and others like me. As you cite, Adobo is now on a subscription basis which, I agree, sucks. However, they went too far,— they tried my patience, —for too long. I finally broke and have abandoned Adobo. I switched to Serif Designer, Photo, and Publisher, now Canva. And to a number of other softwares that do similar things as Adobo software but at affordable prices.
To this day, Adobo charges a premium for Illustratanator.
For greedy reasons and blindness, Adobo has not gotten the memo that they are too expensive, all around, and have been, for a long, long time. They keep their expenses up while charging outrageously high prices to “end users.” Adobo has dug its own grave. I don’t care if they go bankrupt,— they deserve it. All they have cared about since 2010 is executives’ salaries of a zillion dollars, and high dividend bucks.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Fascinating, thank you for answering my question. I can now see the similarities between Vajrayana and Occultism 🙏
Two great icons have died. May their next rebirth be fortuitous 🙏
@earthworm #23: maybe try Charles Mackay: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Hi JMG and Commentariat,
I enjoy reading the datapoints of others, so thought I’d share a couple from my past two weeks:
Our hair guy told me and husband last week, at our regular appointment, that he is opening his own salon not far away. He’s unwilling to continue to fork over half his pay to the corporation that owns the business he’s worked for these past many years, and who can blame him? We’ll gladly follow him. Same price, plus $3.00. Still a bargain for us, and a bargain (hopefully) for him.
A couple days later, a young herbalist at a family-run health food shop told us that she, too, will open her own business nearby. The family that owns the health food shop is retiring, so good bye paycheck. I visited this young woman’s new shop last night, and was delighted to realize both she and our hair guy will be working in the same strip mall warren of smallish offices. It’s a pleasant setting once inside the nothing special main building. There are easily a dozen or more private offices doing business there. As an aside, a 30-something friend of the herbalist commented that of the many people she encounters, among the younger ones there is a definite chasm forming between the “yay robots” and “anti-robot” people. What you’ve said about society splitting along these lines is happening right now out here in a mid-sized city in flyover country.
OtterGirl
Thank you to whoever recommended the movie “Flirting with Disaster” (1996), which incorporates themes that have been discussed here. The timing is ripe, one might say.
Forecasting Intelligence (no. 5), I suppose comparison with Phlip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” and Thomas Harris’s “Fatherland” are inevitable. Are you attempting to create a plausible althist scenario in which (for example) Germany somehow won the war, or will it be more of a fantasy (like Dick did) where the reader just accepts that all this has somehow occurred? Modern Turkey offers a real-world example in which a Hitlerian character won his war, and is now enshrined as the father of his country, over the protests of US ethnic minorities.
I’ve been contemplating writing a book on a topic that interests me greatly, but about which I cannot count myself an expert. I can certainly do research (as in, read previous literature on the topic) and think my own thoughts to put my own spin on it, but I seem to have picked up somewhere the sense that says an author on a topic ought to be an expert in it. Right? Isn’t that kind of what we expect of the books we read?
Or is this just one of those things we get socialized to think and if I wait until I’m confident in my “expert” status, I’ll likely be dead – and I should just work on it anyway?
I guess I just answered that myself (because why not work on it anyway?), but would love to hear your thoughts.
Michael Gray, not least because one of the things that’s preventing a restoration of power is that locals keep on shooting at the power crews. Wave of the future? You bet.
Earthworm, thank you. That comment about sphincters had me laughing hard. Yes, I know that slow motion train wrecks are hard to watch — but we’ve been in one of those since the days when I played with toy trucks. I’ve gotten used to it; I recommend that others try the same thing, as there’s a lot more where the last fifty years came from.
Lunchbox, hmm! I don’t know the source, but it seems very plausible.
Samurai_47, thank you — that’s a sign I’ve been waiting to see for quite some time now. Hang onto the grip bar — wheeeee!
KAN, thanks for this. I’m going to preen my ego a little, because the “impressive” level on the first two is easy for me; others will have to judge how well I do on the third.
Pygmycory, if they’d been open about harvesting organs from the beginning, the laws probably wouldn’t have gotten passed. Now that it’s established, as you’ve noted, organ harvesting has become legal, and the money will be rolling in. I seriously wonder if the woman who was murdered had some unusual tissue type that a rich person needing a transplant could use.
LA, I haven’t been there for many years, but most of my time is spoken for. I’ll be visiting PRS, of course, and also the BOTA headquarters on Figueroa Boulevard to take in a Sunday service, but other than that it’ll be lodge meetings and the conference. Maybe some other time.
Gunstone, Hoffer is as always square on target. Jung once said, “Thank God I’m not a Jungian!”
Seeking, the similarities are profound enough that Manly P. Hall, one of the great figures in 20th century American occultism, was also an initiate of Shingon Buddhism, one of the two Japanese Vajrayana sects. He used each tradition to illuminate the other.
OtterGirl, this is excellent news — it shows that the barriers to new business formation may be shrinking. Huzzah!
Temporary, write the book. The working definition of “expert” is “someone who’s published a book about something.”
William,
I believe it’s not secret that the measles vaccine does not confer lifelong immunity – that it is, in fact, temporary for nearly everyone who gets it, unlike those who naturally get measles who are granted lifetime immunity.
It’s not that measles has changed, it’s that the population has changed from heavily naturally immune (excepting mostly the young) to heavily temporarily immune (which is a mix of some with immunity some without). And thus, measles spreads.
Re: New Podcast: Reading for the Renaissance Man
I hope this doesn’t fly too close to the “no sales pitches” sun, so I’ll understand if it doesn’t go through, but am attempting to post as there’s no money involved.
I’ve launched a new podcast, Reading for the Renaissance Man as a companion to my blog Rhetoric for the Renaissance Man. In the podcast (also available as video on youtube, for those who prefer that), I’ll be reading works from the Western canon with some amount of commentary. The idea is to provide a more accessible way to finally “get to” those books that have been on your list forever, but you just can’t seem to find the time to sit down and read (but maybe can find the time to listen to while you drive, work out, do chores, or work).
I’ve decided to start with Thucydides’s The Peloponnesian War, and so this first “real” episode is a brief (~20 minutes) introduction to Thucydides, his time, and why we still care about his chronicle of what happened in his time and place over 2400 years ago. One of the main reasons I started here is that my description above also applies to me: despite majoring in Classics in college, I’ve still never read the whole thing, and would like to remedy that. If you’d care to join me on the journey, links below (it’s also available through about half a dozen podcasting indices, including Apple and Spotify, and searching for “Reading for the Renaissance Man” ought to find it, if you prefer that).
Audio: https://www.podbean.com/player-v2/?i=qtf4y-1b44cc9-pb&from=pb6admin&share=1&download=1&rtl=0&fonts=Arial&skin=1&font-color=auto&logo_link=episode_page&btn-skin=7
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F1Q32iM-bY
Blog: https://rhetoricfortherenaissanceman.com/2026/08/26/reading-for-the-renaissance-man-episode-1-introduction-to-thucydides/
If you do happen to check it out, I’d love to hear any and all feedback, and I hope you’ll find it valuable.
Cheers,
Jeff
JMG (no. 33) ” I’m planning on another deep dive into Jung later this year…”
One post or a whole series? (More the better.) As long as you’re taking requests, at some point you mooted doing a series on Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra.” I would love to see that. Also, more installments on modern Western esoteric history, like your posts on Steiner and Blavatsky.
“… in occultism as I understand it, there are a sequence of goals…”
Is this sequence your own devising, or did it come from some source I’m not aware of? It tracks fairly well onto either Tibetan Buddhism or Henry Corbin’s writings.
Forecasting Intelligence (no. 57), another real-world parallel would be with modern China and its overseas dissidents, e.g. exile Tibetans. By now the whole world is probably aware of various Chinese outrages, but support is limited by considerations of Realpolitik.
“is it possible that a major factor in the measles outbreak is that the disease has evolved to get around the vaccine induced immunity?”
It’s certainly possible for the measles to mutate around the vaccine. After all the flu does it all the time. If it does it will spread really fast. Whether it has or not I can’t say. How many people really have it is unknown, not every sick person will report to the doctor. Antibiotics don’t work on viruses so there is nothing the doctors can do any way.
I’ve heard that claim that measles “resets” the immune system. It never did that to me. Your immune system will know it’s in a fight though. My fever ran 103 for three days. My brother ran even hotter and mom fed him aspirin to bring it down some. No one worried about Reye’s syndrome back then.
On the Nazi thing, there is another consideration. The reason that US opinion matters more than, say, Brazil’s, is that the USA presides over a global trading empire that includes Europe and much of Pacific Asia. If Germany won WW2, this wouldn’t be true.
If I may be so bold, lest I forget, for those who like video:
I would like to recommend the TV series:
PBS/Masterpiece Theatre >
Big slimy ribber >
Primo Viddeo:
Bookish (TV Series)
brilliant British crime drama
actor Mark Gatiss
actress Polly Walker
actor Connor Finch
set in 1946 London, England
First series/year > three two-parts (6 episodes total).
Second series/year > has been renewed.
Christmas special > December 2026, two-parts, pending.
I cannot speak more highly of this TV show. “Brilliant” is too tame. How about “ingenious” or “first-rate”?
The first four episodes are set in a bookshop. The fifth and sixth episodes gravitate to a bar but, still, home-base is the bookshop.
This is a TV show to go out of one’s way to watch.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Wishing Tim Curry a pleasurable transition into the strange journey ahead.
Lets do the time warp again!
@ Northwind Grandma: I hope you are doing as well as you can be in this brief time since Jethro left for the next leg of his journey.
I appreciate you reading my piece and quoting it… yeah, I guess it was seversl things combined in the boiler and I spat all that out.
A good friend of mine and his wife publish an annual book for their rural Synagogue and micro softie is making it, cough, hard, for them to use the Publisher program. I guess thats how the techillonaire class gets off.
Another graphic designer friend got locked out of Adobo a few days ago… I use Gimp for my detournement and graphics needs. It works just fine.
Again thanks for reading. It does mean a lot in the ADHD addled attention economy!
Peace to you and hope the bureaucratic end of things goes smooth for you.
“That comment about sphincters had me laughing hard.”
We’re only ten miles from Oxford so I may have underestimated the number. The Grift must flow.
“I’ve gotten used to it; I recommend that others try the same thing, as there’s a lot more where the last fifty years came from.”
An interesting aside in practice – a definite shift to ‘observing’ rather than ‘participating’; we’re not sure what is going on, but ‘Keep a distance Mordred’ is working for us just now!
JMg and Pygmy Corry
Without getting into a debate over the ethics of MAID, I very much doubt it is an organ harvesting scheme. For that one would want young healthy donors ( though I hate to use that word as it implies consent) The vast majority of MAID deaths involve people who are old and/or diseased. There would also have to be surgical and refrigeration facilities right at hand.
I know that executed Chinese prisoners organs were harvested this way, and have heard horror stories about gangs in some parts of the world actually hunting people for organs.
Chuaquin
Britain very likely encouraged Japanese militarism at one stage as a counter to Russian power, but Japan has always had a strong imperialist,classist, militarist and racist orientation. It was only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that they started to turn it abroad though.. It was certainly encouraged by their defeat of Russia in 1906 and their gaining former German possessions after WWI.
Stephen
Chuaquin
Just checked: Japan made Korea a protectorate in 1905 and annexed it in 1910
Stephen
David P.- I had the same horizontal wisdom teeth. I also had no insurance so I didn’t do anything about it. By the time I was in my forties it started being a problem; first pain in the adjacent molars, then eventually pain in all the lower teeth. I finally managed to find both dental insurance and a dentist who was honest enough to explain that it wasn’t the molars but the funky wisdom teeth that were causing the pain, and who would give me a referral to an oral surgeon. Removing messed-up lower wisdom teeth isn’t a normal extraction; it’s a real surgery with general anasthesia and prescription painkillers afterwards. I’m glad I had them out; the constant lower jaw pain is gone, and my lower teeth gradually shifted and straightened out once the pressure was removed. However, recovering from that surgery at my age wasn’t fun, and I wish I could have taken care of it earlier.
JMG
I’ve been trying to really solidify my theory on the Templars and the baptism of fire ritual and I keep finding overlap with the Christ myth theory, namely that the Templars might have discovered an earlier version of the Gnostic myth in which Jesus was a heavenly man of light, crucified in the heavens by the archons. My theory is that the myth was originally based on a drastic midrashic rewriting of Genesis 1:1-2:3 or the seven days of creation. However because this myth was developed in Alexandria Egypt, that number was extended to eight, with the eighth day being the resurrection/redemption of the fallen world/aeon. Rather than telling the story of a human Adam and Eve and a literal seven/eight day period the authors assumed that the story of Adam and Eve in the garden was an allegory for the Godhead with Adam representing the Unknowable Father, Eve representing Sophia/the Holy Spirit, and the days representing aeons/ages of creation, etc. The basic summary of the narrative (censoring the more intense parts) seems to go like this:
There is a single divine principle, which is the initial division of the Godhead, a trinity of Father, Mother and Son, the primordial waters fall below, Pistis Sophia (a lower version of the Mother) descends to them. Pistis Sophia is joined by Jesus/Christ (a lower version of the Son), they create the angels in the heavens above. Pistis Sophia descends to the material aeon and shapes materiel aeon, based on the heavens above. She then creates angels to govern the material aeon. However, the angel of Saturn (who later becomes Yaldabaoth/the Demiurge) believes that he is the only god. Pistis Sophia rebukes him. This angel then creates a serpent of light and sends it to the abyss. The serpent cries out that he is a spirit of light forgotten in the abyss. Pistis Sophia descends to him in order to rescue him. With her guard the archon of Saturn “defiles” her, which allows him to steal her light/power and corrupt her with his darkness. The rest of the archons then take turns “defiling” her until her spirit is broken. The “defiling” of Pistis Sophia creates various demons of different shapes (likely in the shape of fish and birds?) who inhabit the realm of the abyss. The archons stop the creation of life in order to hoard the light within the cosmos for themselves, keeping it trapped in a dead material cosmos.
The archon of Saturn now has the power of a God and begins a tyrannical rule over the cosmos. Jesus calls the twelve archangels/aeons of the Zodiac to him and gives them his power. Jesus wears a disguise of “soulish” flesh and descends the heavens, hovers over the cosmos, challenges the archons, and the archons crucify him. The blood of Jesus pours onto the earth and gives it life. When the archons see men on earth, they realize that they’ve been tricked. They create lesser archons in their image, who implant the “false spirit” into early humans by means of “defiling” them, so that they would fall into their vices. The archons cut the body of Jesus into seven pieces, but argue over one of the pieces (all evidence I’ve found seems to point to his phallus, but I do not know the original reason as to why) and draw lots to see who keeps it.
The archons rest, being tired from their work. The spirit of Jesus appears to Pistis Sophia. She escapes the abyss and is challenged by the archons and demons who try too keep her trapped, but she defeats them by knowing their names, which makes them powerless and one by one she takes back the light they stole and reassembles the body of Jesus. Pistis Sophia returns to heaven with the body of Jesus, the archons try one last time to stop her, but she breathes out another angel who binds the archons and throws them into the abyss. The body of Jesus is then placed in a pool of water and the spirit of Jesus descends into it. Pistis Sophia also descends into water and the water bursts into flames. Out of the fire come countless angels (the holy guardian angels). Jesus arises from the water as body of pure spirit and sits on a throne. He then assigns seven archangels to reside over the planets now that the archons have been thrown out. With the heavens and Earth made whole the angels cheer and the archons seemingly continue their schemes in the abyss with the demons.
This is a brief summary of my current working reconstruction of what the hypothetical proto-gnostic myth might have looked like which more closely resembles what the Gnostic myth of Simon Magus looked like, as well as the gnostic myth found in the Pistis Sophia in which the archons defile the Divine Wisdom after the creation of the universe as opposed to creating a fallen world. Interestingly in the Gospel commentary section of the Pistis Sophia the baptism of fire ritual and its meaning is explained multiple times.
As an occultist with knowledge on myths, and how they are used in ritual can you tell me if my current outline makes sense as a myth/encoded instruction for a ritual(s) and if any of this symbolism fits with any Arthurian, Freemasonry, Golden Dawn, etc. symbolism that you have come across?
Ha, I like that! I’m looking forward to leveling up, then. I’ll keep you posted 🙂
Re: Measles.. Please accept my correction, with my prior comment based on older literature.. Recent study has shown slow loss of immunity in current populations, with enduring immunity for decades, despite declining antibody levels. There is less confidence in lifetime immunity, which was previously suggested in near-elimination settings (where late-life infections were rare).. Immunity decline is (vaguely) estimated around 0.039/year, and the process is more complex than previously thought. Further study is underway.
.
.https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(24)00181-6/fulltext (2024, Lancet)
“Early signs of waning-linked transmissions have been observed through outbreaks in other near-elimination settings (Europe8 and Japan9)…..Epidemiological reports have highlighted that symptoms in vaccinated cases are milder (less likely to develop conjunctivitis, fever, or coryza), thereby increasing the risk of under-reporting.9,25… “
Thanks for the feedback on my Pynchon program. Chauquin (27), Clay (29), I will check your ideas! Can’t wait for you to read and review the book, JMG!
Phutatorious (45). I appreciate your thoughts. I’ll check “Steelhead” in the listserv archives. (Funny “coincidence”—my favorite Moby Dick chapter is about “Steelkilt”…) Your point about “burlesque esotericism” is well taken and, yes, it can feel shallow. But the layer of esoteric Christianity that’s very much hidden is worth deeper exploration, I think. I’ve looked at Eddins’ book, “The Gnostic Pynchon” and also found it very hard going; I gather he’s following Hans Jonas’ Gnostic interpretation, that some dismiss as a “proto-existentialism.” A very different idea of Gnosticism than we get at Ecosophia!
One more ponderable about Pynchon: He was finishing GR while living in LA (“the throbbing heart of American occultism” –JMG). Who knows what influences he was under?
@Sama Lindera #39 As a Christian one of the things that irritates me about my God or god (respecting you polytheists) is “the Spirit blows where it wishes” and “the paths of God are past finding out” answered prayers, dreams, visions, miracle healings, tangible knowings of the Spirit in your body, clear communications and words, angels in action, coming back from being pronounced dead, seeing Jesus and having him speak to you, the gift of tongues,strengthening and comforting, guidance, peace, joy and so on have all happened in varying degrees and types to me and people I know well over the decades. Yet I also know this isn’t the experience of many. As it says “my ways are not your ways”.
Hi John Michael,
Have to laugh about the organ harvesting matter, a little whisper suggests to me that it would possibly be a very careless idea to have the knowledge of one’s DNA floating around in the public realm, just sayin’. 😉 I could imagine a sci-fi story where a person is tracked down by an organ hunter – working on commission. Nobody wants to wake up in an ice bath with a previously unnoticed surgical scar. Too many fictional stories fixate on murder as the worst thing that can ever happen, when surviving could well exceed the seriousness of that drama.
Hey, the Hartman thing is fascinating. Oh well, perhaps the locals can now get off the couch and sort something out for themselves. I provide my own limited water supply infrastructure and it’s not the end of the world – they however may not be well adapted to thinking and acting in such terms – that’s what I’d describe as being ‘woke’ (from consumption slumber that is). Reminds me of Mr Kunstler’s fine fictional series: The World Made by Hand. 🙂
Man, this open post is going places. Arday, did he do it, or didn’t he do it – is still a very relevant question despite the facts on the ground. It’s been my observation that the organisation which fails to look at it’s own systems, process and actions, is probably on the road to failure. And I won’t mention that impromptu test in a different, but similar place of learning a while back which uncovered that 32 of the 36 students allegedly cheated by using the software that we’re not allowed to mention in this post. If memory serves me correctly, few of the students were apologetic and chose to re-sit the assignment – and what does that suggest? Far out.
Sorry to hear about Tim Curry, and some folks are larger than life, but it takes extraordinary skill to play both Dr Frankenfurter and the super scary Pennywise the clown. Despite being a musical, the Rocky Horror show was alright, I saw a live version of it at The Melbourne Town Hall. And I could recount a naughty story from that show where a heckler a got proper what for-ing from the most clever Red Symons, but might save that for another forum! 🙂 Not quite family friendly, although if you made an exception?
Cheers
Chris
“Gunstone, Hoffer is as always square on target. Jung once said, “Thank God I’m not a Jungian!””
John Cleese once said of religious fundamentalists and their relationship to the prophets/gurus they allegedly follow,
“..I think that the central problem of any religion is that the founders of religion are always extraordinarily intelligent people and what you notice as you get older is that extraordinarily intelligent people are not literal-minded and the great problem with religion is when what’s been said by the founder of the religion which was supposed to be taken metaphorically is taken literally and that’s where you get complete nonsense being made of what the founder of the religion said and indeed, people claiming, more or less, that the founder of the religion said the opposite of what they believe, except they haven’t realized that”
Nietzsche himself, in spite of having a famous loathing of Christianity, later in his life came to believe that Jesus himself was a relatively harmless and even interesting figure and that most of the flaws of Christianity (as Nietzsche perceived them) came from Christ’s most prominent proselytizer, Saint Paul. Nietzsche opined that had Christ’s actual message been transmitted, it would be more inward looking like Buddhism and would have become the all-consuming, guilt mongering “slave morality ” that Nietzsche later described Christianity as.
Nietzsche also had something of a shift in heart regarding Socrates. He disliked him early on but later came to blame Socrates’ main messenger Plato.
@Sama Lindera And myself and the people I knew who had those varied experiences of the Christian god in action were ordinary people mostly of some variety of evangelical Protestantism and it’s still happening as the Spirit wills and blows.
@KMGunn RE : Bruhner.
I have yet to read anything by Bruhner I have disliked. You are right though, he does speak very much in occult language decoded and that has its charms. I have yet to go through his final book ‘Becoming Vegetalista’, but I suspect as he was writing it practically on his death bed, it will wrap up his works wonderfully.
@Degringolade Re : Collapse.
I said it many times here, if we follow the usual path, it will merely look like a rising tide of poverty.
@ David Re : Wisdom Teeth.
I had all mine removed about 20 years ago via the public Dental system here, so it cost me nothing at all. It seemed to go just fine and did help with the crowding.
It was under a general anaesthetic which was a fun experience but not so keen to go through again. But recent studies have shed some fascinating light on how anything alive emits a visible light that vanishes on death. They have tried to recreate it by heating up dead creatures and plants but with no luck.
Not mentioned in that article is that this also happens when anaesthetics are used. You are still materially alive but now something it missing. Aesthetics is possibly a chemically induce temporary death?
https://www.sciencealert.com/we-emit-a-visible-light-that-vanishes-when-we-die-surprising-study-says
@JMG “Not least because one of the things that’s preventing a restoration of power is that locals keep on shooting at the power crews.”
I have also heard a theory that it could be excuse they are using as they do not have the resources to repair said issues. That is plausible, but with these sort of things, it get complicated very fast.
@David and JMG
So a fun story about Jerry Pournelle. He used to also do a lot of technology writing for Byte magazine in his “Computing at Chaos Manor” column.
In 1984 he was given the task of reviewing the very first Macintosh. He said it was a decent idea but didn’t have enough memory to do anything and as such it is merely toy. Steve Job’s got a hold of this review calling it a toy and was absolutely livid! Jerry was banned for life from any future Apple events or early product reviews. Jerry liked the 2nd revision of the Mac because it had enough memory to actually do something a normal person would want to do. Regardless Apple never relinquished this until his death in 2017. Goes to show you just how brittle people in power can be.
Hi all, the beauty is my planned novel is in the 1960s and whether the Speer settlement lasts is one for the readers to ponder after thry finish the novel.
I have no intention of providing an answer. My initial instincts was no but I now think I based that on my own moral and liberal influences and biases.
As one commentator commented a substantial minority of Americans admired Nazi Germany something I’m well aware off.
JMG, have you heard of the distinction between symbolic orientation from the polar axis vs symbolic orientation from the Sun? Any thoughts on that? Apparently it’s discussed in Symbols of Sacred Science by Rene Guenon. I find this idea incredibly fascinating and am very eager to finish my current book so I can read Guenon’s. I heard of it from Mario Garza’s Symbolic Studies podcast. His symbolic knowledge is pretty impressive except it’s all audio, which I have a harder time remembering as opposed to books. He was on Ike Baker’s podcast who I believe you were on a panel with.
Jeff, thanks for this.
Ambrose, to begin with, just me reading my collection of his books. What posts will come out of that is another matter. The sequence comes from certain initiatory teachings I’ve received.
Earthworm, yep. That’s always a good idea when things start flying thick and fast.
Stephen, maybe so, but I’ll remain wary. It wasn’t that long ago that the organ harvesting rings were being dismissed as urban legends and conspiracy theories.
Anon, you could certainly make a ritual out of that, but it doesn’t fit well with any of the ritual systems I know. All the Gnostic systems I know of assume that the archons are still in charge of the created world.
TemporaryReality, delighted to hear it.
Chris, I’m sorry that Philip K. Dick didn’t write that story — it would have done very well indeed.
Gunstone, maybe we can get Cleese to write a gospel. It would be more interesting than most.
Luke, you might have a look at Joscelyn Godwin’s book Arktos, which also discusses this. There are many different possible structures of symbolic orientation, but those are certainly two of them.
” I don’t believe it was legal to harvest organs from MAiD patients, most of whom are old and very sick and aren’t really a great source for healthy organs.”
That’s true enough. Here is what to watch;
“On February 29, 2024, legislation to extend the temporary exclusion of eligibility for MAID in circumstances where a person’s sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness received royal assent and immediately came into effect. The eligibility date for persons suffering solely from a mental illness is now March 17, 2027. ”
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/ad-am/bk-di.html#s1_1
That’s a dangerous road to take. Given the pressure the government and the sickness prolongation industry were willing to put on kids to transition the pressure on those diagnosed as mentally ill to self-terminate and donate will be intense. Those will be healthy organs. They won’t need the organ-leggers Larry Niven wrote about.
Note this quote about the extension from the link;;
“This extension will provide more time for provinces and territories to prepare their health care systems, including the development of regulations, guidance and additional resources to assess and provide MAID in situations where a person’s sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness. ”
They have NOT explicitly ruled it out permanently, they just need time to get everyone used to the idea.
Justin Patrick Moore 6
> OPEC oil embargo 1973 financial crisis
I remember those weeks. I was there. I was 21, and living in Torrance, Los Angeles County, California, USA, then. I owned and drove, luckily, at the time, a❣️VW Beetle,❣️which got 37 miles per gallon (59 kilometers per gallon). I remember all-the-cars, including myself, sitting in gasoline-station lines, that were blocks’ long (like 1/4-mile), cogitating about all the gas-guzzling cars there (which got 8 miles per gallon; 13 kilometers per gallon). I vowed to NEVER, EVER own a gas-guzzler, and haven’t. I “learned my lesson” (I got off easy that first time), while hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people didn’t learn one little itty-bitty thing from the experience,— still haven’t learned a thing from subsequent similar experiences, and probably never will learn a thing from past, current, or future petroleum/gasoline shortages (but I shan’t brag). That “used” Beetle was my very first car, and I absolutely loved it; it got me through thick and thin.
That VW Bug REALLY helped me out big-time. In Los Angeles, no less. I breezed through those 1973 weeks effortlessly. Whee…
Thank you, Volkswagen, a LOT❣️And bring back the Beetle,— we ’needs it bad.’
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
JMG,
Can you name a few other different symbolic orientations? I’m really interested now because I only became conscious of the concept “symbolic orientation” recently.
David P. 16
> wisdom teeth
I gather you want unbiased, clear opinions…
As a 73-year old, I had all my wisdom teeth extracted around age 21,— they were about to cause major oral problems.
It was well worth “the investment” to get the wisdom teeth the heck out of there.
I have not missed them.
Good riddance.
There is no bloomin’ reason for anyone to encumber themselves with wisdom teeth.
It makes no sense to have wisdom teeth cost more than to permanently remove them.
One’s mouth (and the rest of your body) will thank you for removin’ ’em.
I have no idea why wisdom teeth exist. What they are good for? If anything, wisdom teeth harm.
Just my 2¢.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
When I’ve been to PRS, I feel like I could reasonably expect to see Indiana Jones walk around a corner, after locating some esoteric book containing the required knowledge to fight the nazis. Such a cool space.
BOTA is in an interesting part of town, Highland Park. This used to be one of the early streetcar suburbs of LA, and when it was at it’s most functional, it was probably one of the high points of civilization. Must have been amazing to be there then. You can still see some of the old buildings here and there, and the street layout echoes what it used to be, but it’s largely been absorbed by the deathstar like sprawl of LA. It’s just down the hill from Los Feliz, one of the spookier parts of LA. A couple blocks walk from BOTA is an old depression era bowling alley (highland park bowl), with a restored and exposed pinsetter which is something to see. As rube goldberg as it gets. Apparently doctors gave out prescriptions for liquor here during prohibition.
I hear you on the full schedule. Being that lodge meetings are on the docket, you may consider inquiring about the Scottish Rite temple on Wilshire. You might get some fun stories that most people aren’t privy to. It’s enormous, designed for thousands, and it has a 70 foot tall Millard Sheets mosaic on the wall outside. Sheets filled dozens of SoCal bank entrance walls with beautiful mosaics depicting LA history, and many have been preserved. They are a very unique part of LA. The temple must be the one of the largest mosaics he made, I’d guess. I’ve always wondered what it was like inside.
One last recommendation, if you find time opens up at all. Altadena is directly adjacent to Pasadena. In most states, Altadena would have been one of the larger cities. In LA it is an appendage. Currently, it is the closest thing I’ve ever seen that compares to the bombing of Dresden. Empty lots from one horizon to the other; the remains of homes scraped from the foundations after the fire. Passing through, the scale of what burned down is hard to convey. Even to people who live in LA but haven’t seen it in person. To my mind it is an object lesson in catabolic collapse.
“and the fact that Arday was caught out plagiarizing and lying has got to be sending cold terror through tens of thousands of academics who are doing the same thing with less panache.”
I suspect that much of the reaction from academics is a bit indirect and more fundamental. The flagrant nature of Arday’s cheating and the clear Sergeant Schultz style “I know nothing” by the institutional leaders provide some serious ammunition to parts of the elite that would like to take academic down a peg or two or ten. That threatens not only other cheaters but even those who don’t.
Chuaquin (#297 from last week)
The Seminoles were not a pre-Columbian tribe. They formed in response to European invasions and included native Americans from damaged or dissolved tribes, escaped Africans, and I believe even some Whites who were on the outs with the colonial authorities. Their way of life was chosen for the specific purpose of surviving the invasions. So in a sense, they are more comparable to Maroon communities of escaped slaves than to empires like the Aztecs and Incas.
I think it was easier for outside invaders to conquer empires such as the Aztecs and Incas, which were themselves conquest empires. The invaders just had to insert themselves at the height of the hierarchy, as was done in any number of conquests within Europe (the Normans in England being somewhat of an exception). Even in North America, natives such as the Haudenosaunee, who had a more complex structure that distributed power more broadly, lasted far longer and played a larger role in their area than the more powerful hierarchical conquest empires to their south.
Many domesticated animals also have social structures with one or more alphas and humans could domesticate them by taking over the alpha role. Cats seem to be an exception to this. 🙂
Hi all — I’m hoping someone can help me make sense of several unusual events in my life. Earlier this summer, while driving to the gym at about 50 mph during one of my sporadic visits, I noticed a strikingly beautiful evening sky. The clouds seemed to glow with an inner luminosity, full of beauty and possibility. I remember thinking it felt like a deeply magical moment, yet at the same time I sensed a real danger. Within seconds, a large object slammed into the driver’s side door with a sharp bang. At first, I thought it had hit the window. Then I saw what looked like a large crow crumpled on the pavement behind me. When I arrived at my destination, I noticed a blood spot on the driver’s side door about the size of a dinner plate. I have had similar feelings of magical moments and subsequent awareness of forthcoming events – nothing profound but still striking.
My second question concerns images I sometimes see while fully awake with my eyes closed. The image is clear and steady: a rectangular box containing a stream of letters that moves like ticker tape. The characters are usually English letters, though they sometimes resemble ancient Greek letters or mathematical symbols. The characters appear random; no words or mathematical formulas even though I was trying to discern a pattern. Again, the imagery is as real as any normal vision. At times I can voluntary create the imagery and at other times it occurs spontaneously. This has been going on for many years. Anyone have had similar experiences or thoughts about what thisis about?
I’d appreciate any insight from others who have had similar experiences or thoughts about what might be happening. Thanks.
JMG,
Been a bit depressed about being right about Japan lately. Having a Japanese wife and speaking the language fluently and having lived there during my twenties, Japan was always my backup plan. I mentioned on this blog before that I was considering moving back but felt trepidation given Japan’s historical treatment of foreigners and the xenophobia lurking just below the surface.
And now it’s above the surface. As the yen has massively dropped against the dollar in the last few years (from 100 to 160 yen to the dollar), as their pre-COVID deflationary environment turned into an inflationary one, and as their population collapse has surpassed even the worse predictions from a decade ago (literally), Japan is back to blaming foreigners.
Visa fees of all sorts were jacked up by up to 2000 percent depending on the type of visa, people are being rejected for permanent residence for having a single late tax payment (by even one day) on their record or for running a stop sign, and they put in a new requirement saying foreigners must make more than the average Japanese person (average, not median) to obtain permanent residency.
On top of that, they changed their business management visa to require small businessman to have at least one Japanese full time employee (no big deal) plus having the equivalent of about 200k USD sitting in the bank at all times (big deal for small businesses like restaurants ). The net effect is many foreigners will be forced to sell their businesses to Japanese locals for cheap as they are forced to leave the country.
Japanese social media is loaded with stories of foreigners behaving badly, often in minor ways like pictures of foreigners failing to correctly separate their recyclables (complicated in Japan), and the public opinion has turned from we need foreigners to supplement our labor force to foreigners are making Japan an unsafe society.
So, I feel like I dodged a bullet. This blog helped me dodge this bullet. As you pointed out earlier in the comments of this post, scapegoating is a common feature of economic contraction, and Japanese respond by scapegoating foreigners as one group. But it makes me sad because I love the place and considered it “the home I chose” rather than the one I was born into. But that love is unrequited and my effort was misplaced.
For those that are still looking around for a religeon that is just right for you, have you considered the Church of Gnome? Definitely “Not a cult!” and Gnome Blessings!
https://www.churchofgnome.org/
To tie this into last weeks post, there is a growing association of Gnomes with the new Luddite movement.
The Gnomes Are Taking Over New York City – https://www.theblueandwhite.org/post/the-gnomes-are-taking-over-new-york-city
Hartman, Colorado
I checked on the map and it is in far eastern Colorado (near the Kansas state line) just as I would have expected. Population 56.
Even back in the 1990s, the state of Colorado had a Depopulation Department. Even while the Front Range (the north-south strip just east of the Rockies) and the hip ski towns have rapidly increased in population, the non-scenic flat dry eastern end of the state has long been emptying of people. This is similar to the depopulation of marginal agricultural areas in New England by the early 1800s. (For example, the family of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism.)
That part of Colorado is what people think of when they think of Kansas. In the best of times, it was barely viable. It probably should have been left to run cattle, not converted to grain crops. With the continued increase in the minimum size farm required to be viable and with the interstate highway and Walmart’s draining the life out of the small commercial centers, it is nothing new for these small towns to fade away.
A parable I created decades ago.
Namibia on the SW coast of Africa is a place in the world where elephants swim and bath in the ocean. Two gnats one day were blown out to sea. One landed on an elephant, the other on a whale. The wind reversed and they were blown back to land and they excitedly shared their experience. Both said something similar – “I met the ultimate being out in the ocean, it was wet, gray, it moved, it was alive and it breathed!” They then proceeded to argue as to which was greater.
Now as a Christian I feel I have encountered the great Yah Whale in the ocean of reality, but after reading JMG’s book, A World Full of Gods and his arguments, I have to temper my insistence and now only say politely, “Yes, It’s alive, wet and wild and breathes out the Spirit”
@BeardTree #95
If I might comment on “God” vs. “god”… as a polytheist I always prefer “god” when referring to polytheist deities but often use “God” when referring to Abraham’s divine patron. The issue isn’t respect, it’s grammar: “god” is noun referring to any member of category of beings, “God” is a proper noun for one of those in particular.
I try to do this consistently: so Thor is a god, not “a God;” Jesus’s father is a god and is also called God; the God and Goddess of Wicca (note these are proper nouns) are gods, not “Gods;” depending on the tradition, various Hindu gods are considered Ishvara aka Supreme Lord; and Siddhartha Gautama was a buddha and is also the Buddha; etc.
On the other hand I don’t capitalize “he” or “his” when referring to God, because that is a show of respect over and above what’s required by English grammar. I note that most copies of the Bible (another proper noun, heh) that I’ve owned don’t do this either, so I feel I’m on strong footing here.
You have written that we alternate sexes from one life to another and that trans folks may be folks whose life in one sex is cut of prematurely, so there is carryover. In your case, you died in your 40s as a woman, so you came back as a Jane-girl (good word creation) but not trans.
But what happens in the life after being trans? Let’s say someone is born male then transitions to female. Do they come back the next time as male because they finished this life as female? Or does this life still count as a male one, so they come back next time as female?
If it matters, we are talking about folks like me who did the complete transition with surgery and hormones.
@ David P. #16, @Brenda #90 re extraction of wisdom teeth:
I had 3 of my (sideways) impacted wisdom teeth taken out in my 20’s, and one in my late 30’s. I did the first three teeth one at a time, on visits 6 months apart. The oral surgeon who extracted these was a wizard, and they came out quickly and easily– ‘crick-crick’, under local anesthesia.
The fourth tooth I had out in my late 30’s and that oral surgeon (a different one) had to take it out one piece at a time, with lots of buzzing and drilling and pulling involved. Again under local anesthetic which did its job well.
This oral surgeon told me afterwards that wisdom teeth are much easier to extract when you are in your 20’s and younger, than when you are in your 30’s and older.
So my recommendations are:
1) get them out as young as you can, they come out easier.
2) consider doing one side of your mouth at a time, letting that heal, then the other. This lets you chew your food on the other side of your mouth and it helps avoid getting food in the incisions.
3) Now that we have the Web, check around on Yelp to find the most highly spoken of oral surgeons in your area. A skilled extractor makes all the difference.
Howdy JMG and Commentariat,
Long time reader since The Archdruid Report, first time commenter. I want to thank everyone for their thoughts, book/essay/blog/podcast recommendations and the interesting discussions, questions and comments on every post.
Over the last 15+ years I’ve happily made lifestyle changes that align with the ideas on this site (like most of the readers probably have) because they made sense to me right away, they were not too difficult to implement in my situation and they usually improved my life. e.g. Things like composting, walking/biking, repairing items, cooking homemade meals, loaning out my tools and books to others, connecting with nature more etc. I always got behind the idea that I can’t expect others to change their actions if I am not willing to first make the changes myself.
I’ve recently had more free time to reflect on these last 15+ years and the frustration that I keep on feeling is that over this time frame, basically none of my family, friends or co-workers have been interested or willing to make even the smallest change in the direction of less consumption (most have gone full throttle in the opposite direction). I’ve tried to lead by example and have never preached, screeched or demanded anyone to make a change. When it’s relevant to a conversation, I will occasionally bring up a way that myself and others have made a change in our lives that is not only better for the environment but can often save money and provide a life improvement. I’ve kept my expectations low for having any influence on the people in my life in regards to consumerism and the environment but I truly thought that I would be able to witness a few changes here and there that I could enjoy with them.
I am having trouble accepting that the people in my life truly prefer to fully embrace the consumer lifestyle (along with LLM’s now) and do not really care about the health of the environment if it means they would need to make any lifestyle changes themselves.
I’m sure others have had similar experiences, so I guess my question is what are some ways for me to deal with this reality I find myself in? Is it really just acceptance? Do I need to try harder to see things from the perspective of the people in my life? Drive a mile in their new car?
Maybe I felt motivated to post today for the first time because I have not reached out and conversed with enough people who appreciate and engage with the ideas discussed on this site.
This community is what makes the internet valuable and it is one of the few sites left that I regularly visit. Thanks!
Dear JMG,
I just submitted my first post and it had paragraphs when I wrote it in the text box but the preview is showing it as a huge wall of text while it awaits your moderation.
Not sure if I need to do something different when I post? Maybe it displays correctly when it officially gets posted?
I was using the Firefox browser but could submit it again through a different browser if that was possibly the issue.
Thanks, Derek
@Michael Martin; You might be interested in this Substack essay on the same subject:
https://davidoks.blog/p/why-china-got-rich-and-india-didnt
The gist of it is that, almost immediately after coming to power, the CCP took a sledgehammer to every source of authority in traditional Chinese society. The hereditary landlord class, religion, and even arranged marriage and the authority of husbands over wives were mercilessly crushed. Combined with basic mass education, adequate nutrition and health services, these autocratically imposed changes produced an essentially modern workforce, individualistic enough to travel for work, meritocratic enough to believe that hard work would bear fruit, disciplined and healthy enough to be reliable.
India was a relatively peaceful democracy from the time it achieved independence. That meant the traditionalists weren’t slaughtered as they were in China, so the ancient social structure was brought forward into the modern era with all but its worst abuses intact. Social identity (below the very thin top layer of high-achieving internationally-minded families) is still based entirely on gender, caste, family reputation and other circumstances beyond the individual’s control, and extended families still control access to resources, so mobility and meritocracy have no chance to take root.
@dZanni; there absolutely were Jewish communities in the US before WWII. Every time the Tsar or some part of Austria-Hungary would have a pogrom, there would be a wave of Jewish immigrants. The music Eastern European Jews brought with them, known as klezmer, had a well-documented influence on the jazz of the 1920s.
@JMG and @Kimberly Steele; Based on personal experience I want to strongly recommend against fermenting pawpaws. Yes, their juice will develop alcohol, but it’ll be the worst tasting booze you ever had. This is one fruit where fresh is best.
I had the pleasure of an indie film crew making a short documentary about my experimental post industrial farm- this work was heavily inspired by the green wizard movement over a decade ago, but I took it in my own unique direction.
https://youtu.be/apdB2H-y8c4?si=moISEVp7k3OdKXtn
David#16
Remove It as soon as possible.
Chuaquin #20
Japanese dislike the opresive/invasive contact with western powers( they considere Westerners like barbarians ) And their history is a sucesión of different responses.
1) In the XVI Century, they finished their long period of civilian wars wih the victory of Tokugawa (TV series Shogun), and they were contacted by Portuguese Misionaries who converted some thousands of Japanese to christinanism, though their understanding of this religión, was absolutely heretic. The lack of patience of the missioners lead them to plot a cup d’etat against the Shogun for the conquest of Japan by Spain. Probably because the Spanishs wanted to conquer China and Japan was a previous step.
But they failed and provoked the response of the Shogun, consisting in:
a) Extermination of all christians.
b) Closening of all international relations of Japan.
This were the features of Edo epoch ( movie: The silence)
The Edo Epoch finished when in 1870 the Usanians threatened the Shogun with the invasion of Japan taking advantage of their modern weapons superiority, and the Shogun capitulated and allowed the intrance of Usanians and another Westerners. All these colonists hoped that japanese surrended to them and , in few years, Japan would be converted in a colony more (poster child: Diego García island’s natives) But things didn’t hapened in this way, because the Japanese are a very very special People.
Do you want to know more ?
pamouna #74
Charles Mackay – thank you for that – I thought there was a copy on the shelves here but it eludes me – I did find a book which I have yet to read: The Crowd in Peace and War by Martin Conway from 1915
Just looking randomly, the old style of writing is wonderful:
“At other times man adopts the attitude of complete detachment from his fellows, like Thoreau at Walden, or a Theban hermit in his cave. The crowd then is nothing to him. His aim is to be self sufficing – to think his own thoughts, go his own ways, provide for his own needs, and perhaps save his own soul.
“He no longer resembles a sheep in a flock or a wolf in a pack, but remains aloof, like some lonely condor circling in the blue, with even the high Andes far beneath him, and his nearest fellow, visible only to vision as keen as his, likewise isolated miles away in the depths of the air.”
Except didn’t Thoreau go to his mother’s for dinner? I forget. No matter…
Randomly opening another page I found:
“Not till all the people have good manners are they describable as wholly civilised. The North and West Europeans and the English speaking folk of North America have not, as a mass,had experience of high civilisation and do not know what the word really means. The French are more civilised than the English and the Spaniards than the French. All of us are on the up grade, but we have a long road to travel before any of us can come to be a people of gentlemen, as the Indian people actually are.”
David P (#16): I’m not sure where you’re based (the US?) but you could do worse than look into medical tourism. There are more than a few countries in ‘the Global South’ where excellent treatment from English-speaking dentists for very reasonable fees, such that (so I hear) the cost of flights, accommodation, treatment and a short vacation come in lower than out-of-pocket treatment in the US (and perhaps even the UK).
I’ve heard of Bangkok, Bali and places in India, while a USian commenter on Naked Capitalism a short while back reported a great experience in Mexico. YMMV and do your own research, of course. I personally had a good experience of dental treatment in Bali, fwiw.
Dear JMG,
I’m months behind on Magic Monday and came across this thread on May 3:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/367364.html?thread=60123908#cmt60123908
You mentioned the Piscean religions (Christianity, Islam, etc) as being sex-hating, but here’s my question: why then are they so obsessed with convincing women to have lots of children? It’s one thing if that’s what the woman wants: my astrologer thinks I lived a past life like that. But in this life I didn’t want kids and being raised in the deep red south…that was unthinkable. Thanks for your time.
@ William #38
Re recent outbreaks of measles and the usual “interpretive” media coverage narrating modern beliefs that these outbreaks only occur among the unvaccinated, and only occur because of the unvaccinated.
I would like to share with you a standard paper on the topic of measles vaccine that was published in the proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, in November of 1974.
https://sci-hub.box/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003591577406701114
It’s author is Dr A J Beale, of “The Wellcome Research Laboratories” in Kent.
It is a run of the mill scientific and industry treatment of the topic of measles, and of measles vaccination, hinting at the potential development of new products which “may” solve the problems introduced by the old products, and arguing in the conclusion in favour of increasing measles vaccine coverage higher than the 50-60% coverage statistic of that time.
Nevertheless it does a decent job of listing both pros and cons of measles vaccination, and in the course of the paper you can find out that the following facts were already known and readily discussed in the literature in 1974:
1. Clinically manifest infections of natural measles confers long lasting and solid immunity against second athttps://sci-hub.box/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003591577406701114tacks. (p 8, paragraph 3)
2. In a follow up of the research subject from the “MRC” trial (for the Schwarz vaccine strain), 968 children contracted measles, representing 3% of those who had received the living vaccine strain, and 5% of those who had received the “killed-living schedule” (ie a killed vaccine strain followed by a living vaccine strain). (p 10, paragraph 1)
3. in general “a proportion of vaccinated children do get the disease, and outbreaks occur in highly immunized communities which suggest that reinfection and spread by vaccinated children may occur. (p 10, paragraph 1)
4. Several potential causes for vaccine failure (wrong age, wrong timing, bad manufacturing practice and etc) are considered, but the author recognises that there is a residual and inevitable remnant of “true vaccine failures because in all studies antibody responses to vaccine have been less than 100%.” (p 10, paragraph 1).
5. Known long term consequences of concern included encephalitis, subacute scherosing panencephalitis and multiple sclerosis (ie long term neurological sequela). (p 11 paragraph 3)
6. “In the USA, out of 59 cases of encephalitis of uncertain etiology, 45 were in the time interval 6-15 days after vaccination.” (This statistic is preceded by “some cause for concern”, but followed by “there is little proof of an etiological association”).
There are dozens of papers from the 1970’s which make reference to measles outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations, and which discuss vaccine failure – ie the failure of the vaccine to prevent any vaccinated child from contracting measles or from spreading it.
Somehow, 50 years later, none of these facts have entered into the story that we all *know*, which is that vaccination is 100% effective, and the only possible cause of any outbreak, is the persistence of unvaccinated people.
JMG, can you give a recommendation for solid, reliable traditional guides on how to bind and command demons such that only the desired outcomes are achieved, with no unanticipated or unwished-for side effects?
Note that I’m not asking for summoning or banishing etc. That’s because I have zero wish or intention of any actual interactions with such entities. I’m coming at this from an interest in the linguistics and the mental frameworks and thought processes involved: of anticipating the potential downside outcomes and shutting them down.
Does that make sense? Anyway, any pointers much appreciated.
@ TemporaryReality #77
“I seem to have picked up somewhere the sense that says an author on a topic ought to be an expert in it. Right? Isn’t that kind of what we expect of the books we read?”
It strikes me that the “stock-in-trade” of an expert is what they already know. Thus an expert is no longer “teachable” or interested in discovering anything new. (This, to me, is precisely why the “expert” is the opposite of a “scientist” – at least in the old school definition of what a scientist is).
If you remain a student, an aficionado, and cultivate a simple, direct interest in *whatever*, then you will remain both curious and teachable, and therefore capable of finding out about stuff that experts don’t already know. 😉
Hurray!
@ TemporaryReality #79
What she said… 🙂
(Also I might have saved myself a lengthy comment, but anyhoo). 🙂
Ah, I see. I was under the impression that that’s just how you continue counting the hands. Read it somewhere and never thought about it until today.
—David P.
Siliconguy #41, Brenda #90, and Michael Gray #99:
Thanks y’all.
—David P.
Fritter @ 94: In case you (or anyone) are interested, “The Rabbi of Prague” is found in Chapter 50 of “Mason & Dixon.” Gollum and Popeye both appear. Talk about burlesque! “The Town-Ho’s Story” is one of my favorite chapters in “Moby-Dick” too. I especially like Melville’s description of the Great Lakes: “… out of sight of land, however inland….”
David P, as I recall the worst part of having my wisdom teeth out was afterwards when one of the stitches unraveled. No bleeding or clotting at all, but the loose end drove me nuts for a day until I could trim it short (I’m the sort who can’t concentrate on anything if there’s say a raspberry seed in my teeth). I had three wisdom teeth, two of them impacted, and a fairly small mouth, so out they came. I had Tylenol-3 afterwards, which was adequate I guess; I’ve had multiple surgeries, oral and otherwise, since then and the drugs today are way better than 35 years ago.
I don’t know your situation, but in general I feel that if you have health insurance now, it’s best to take care of anything that might mess you up in the future, before the insurance vanishes. I learned that the hard way with a seriously outdated eyeglass prescription–I’m very grateful for the excellent vision coverage at my current job!
Cynthia C. # 18:
I have no problem with guitar “onanism”, if guitarists play well their “onanistic” instrument, ha ha!
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Scotlyn # 22:
I think McKusick shows some good examples of an spontaneous order, but I’m afraid the musicians playing good music without any boss is right…only to some extent. Beyond camera orchestras, big symphonic orchestras need a director due to a good reason: it’s impossible in those musical groups to make agree so much musicians without an upper coordinator, boss or whatever term we like to use.
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Dolly Parton and country music:
Until some years ago, I thought (like a heck of compatriots here), that country music was for jingoistic American (far) right people. Luckiky, I learned I was wrong due to my arrogant European bias against US culture. Today, although I don’t like especially that music style, I admit country was born from working class white Americans, and they’ve got (and another people too) their right to enjoy it. If hip hop (another music genre from humble origins) deserves respect, so it’s listened by Blacks and non Blacks alike, why not Country too?(unless you’re a “reverse” racist).
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Wisdom teeth:
OMG! I don’t have access to online English dictionaries this week, so I’ve been thinking what the heck were those teeth in some previous comments. Eventually, I’ve grasped they may be the same as we say in Spanish “muelas del juicio”(“juicio” can be translated as “wisdom” in a loose sense, and “muelas” are bigger teeth for chewing food). By the way, I’m lucky to “enjoy” my 4 wisdom teeth since my youth without any problem. My mouth is very big!(in a real and metaphorical sense alike!)
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Michael M. # 30:
China works as a country (or it seems to work), for now. But past and present good performance doesn’t allow any sure nor safe future success. China is ruled by a smart elite now, but everybody can be sometimes wrong. In an only one party regime, there’s a tendence to justify and not criticize its leaders (free speech doesn’t exist), so mistakes not understood by elites go and go on. Do the math. What would happen in the long term?
I don’t have a serious opinion about India real problems, but I can see Indian MSM and online users seem to enjoy free speech to speak badly about govt and bureaycracy, at least to some extent. Is India a more corrupt country than China or it only seems it? Finally, it seems Chinese govt campaigns against corruption are partly subterfuges for prosecuting inner dissidents (ahem).
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JMG # 33:
If collapse is fractal (according your answer to Degringolade), of course it’s believabke different collapse levels can happen at the same time. After 2024 floods in Valencia and recent events in Ceuta, I think Spain govt is collapsing in slow motion. At the same time, I feel the EU suffers a bigger collapse, only disguised by “our” hatred against evily evil Putin. We’ll see what pace would be those different level collapses I’ve thought as near examples for me.
****************
I’ve just known Tim Curry has died, well I mourn it. I watched “The Rock Horror Picture Show” during the ‘90s and I was very puzzled (for good) by that countercultural movie (in the good side of counterculture, I mean).
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Degringolade # 34:
I understand your view, which isn’t very far of my own view about internet future. I hadn’t thought seriously email could survive even in the long term like a paid service, like old school postal services (thanks for your idea).
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(To be continued)
Chuaquin,
“Korean is a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.”
These words were spoken by Jacob Meckel, a Prussian military advisor to Japan in the 1880s, and this phrase became something that Japanese elites invoked repeatedly while calling for an invasion and colonization of the Korean peninsula.
Essentially, the idea was that a weak Korea invited other foreign powers to take it over from which they could easily launch an invasion of Japan. Therefore, Japan should take over Korea first and make it as strong as possible to resist invasion.
And that explains the contradiction in Japanese imperialism. Was it brutal? Yes. Did they try to stamp out and crush Korean identity? Yes. But they also built up the country’s educational system, physical infrastructure, and bureaucracy in a generalized way as opposed to the Europeans who only built up such systems as to facilitate economic exploitation. This is a major reason why both Taiwan and Korea did so well economically after WW2 compared to the Asian places colonized by Europeans.
Because all things humans do are rooted in ideas, no matter how contradictory. Here’s some of the ideas behind the Japanese invasion and colonization.
Korea is a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.
If a foreign power takes it over, Japan will be invaded next.
Korea is weak, so a foreign power is likely to take it over.
Japan must take over Korea first.
Then, Japan must make Korea strong.
We will build up Korea like we built up Japan.
We will stamp out Korean weakness.
Korea is weak because they are Korean.
We will replace Korean identity with Japanese identity.
All Korean identity must be stamped out and suppressed.
There were also ideas about Koreans and Japanese having a shared ancestry and they needed to be reincorporated back into the fold similar to how Putin talks about Ukraine today. If I were born into a wealthy family, I would have got a PhD on Japan from the 1852 to 1952, so that period of Japanese history is my favorite to discuss.
People here might like my friend Ron Orovitz’s article “An Antibellum Prescription.”
https://ronorovitz412783.substack.com/p/an-antibellum-prescription
Ron is an old friend of mine who first got me on the radio back in my Art Damage days when he was running that program on WAIF. He wrote this piece in response to the Hinternet (subslack publication) query “How might current and emerging technologies best be mobilized to secure perpetual peace?”
Being a digital skeptic and analog sort, along with deep thinker he came up with a very interesting essay in response. He proposes to alter Ammendment XVI following this argument:
“in as much as the press is for the most part privately owned by profit-incentivized business entities, and even when operating through not-for-profit organizations, often reliant on wealthy individual and corporate donors, it is subject to the vested interests subsidizing it and may be shaped in ways that are not in the best interest of the public at large. As exceptions to this prevailing tendency however, Substack and other subscriber-funded press outlets – in so far as the less affluent contribute a greater share – demonstrate that knowledge more attendant to the public interest can be gained and distributed.15 What we would do to even better serve the public interest is to take the private subscriber-financed model and make it public – through the Internal Revenue Service and a slight adjustment to the Income Tax. The IRS and Amendment XVI! – the bogeyman and infamy respectively of every Libertarian and strict Constitutionalist? They may rather find it satisfactory that this proposal creates a free market of not-for-profits and a more direct input of the people towards the funding of public agency.
The way it can be done is quite simple: rearrange the 1040 tax form such that the line indicating contributions to not-for-profit organizations comes after the line indicating tax owed, then subtract; if the amount donated equals or exceeds the tax owed, then nothing is paid to the federal government. The recipients of the tax-payer channeled revenue range from charities to educational and arts institutions to environmental groups and so on, the proviso to each being that it performs some sort of governmental function, i.e. what might otherwise be apportioned by fiscal acts of a legislature, state or federal, save to those institutions which deal directly with the enforcement and prosecution of laws passed by the respective legislative bodies, and to those institutions charged with the defense of the sovereignty of the people. The people as such and not their representatives may then more directly determine what organizations are better suited to address the public interest in a given field of service. This cuts out the middlemen, those potentially corrupt, compromisable, ignorant, or just plain stupid politicians who all too often deviate from the public interest. They are legislators primarily and so shall they stick to the core charge of making the laws that their constituents deem necessary.”
I’d like to get opinions as to when Western Civilization peaked. It can be thought of as a rolling peak as various measures peaked and declined such as: social cohesion, optimism, relative power vs other civilizations, innovation, net energy, income, life expectancy and health. Some say as early as 1890 to 1914 before the outbreak of the war. My tendency has been to think it was in the 1960s but maybe that’s US centric. What are your thoughts?
Pygmycory # 37:
It seems MAID in Canada is a bad idea badly inplemented (to say it softly). Euthanasia is also legal here, with some limits. Unfortunately, some “Progressives”(?) have been pushing to wide “free consent” to very dubious cases (cough). For example, recently a disabled young woman was euthanized in a public hospital. She had serious mental disorders before being disabled. Thanks to our woke govt and euthanasia activists, public health services pretended her will and intellect was right to ask for be legally killed (cough).
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Peter # 46:
A little dirty secret about Social Darwinism (now supported by Mr. Musk): In its most extreme branch, it was cheerleaded by Fascists/Nazis. So this time, what could be wrong with this revival?
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(To be continued)
Greetings all
JMG wrote: “submission of late Atlantean culture to the Lords of the Dark Face”
Dear God, that sounds dreadful! Never heard of that. Can we have a quick resume?
Regards and Thanks
So, I’ve been thinking about this belief I’ve been evincing about how there’s a spirit playing music with me through the app I built. I decided that like all claims made by humans about the unknowable, it is balderdash. The app does what it does because it can’t do otherwise. As the silly [person] who coded it, I should know that. No ghost musicians or otherworldly spirits of any kind are involved.
I formed that comforting delusion for a reason I quite understand. Oh well. Be that as it may, the thing I wished to believe is not true.
@jmg — synchronicity!
I was chatting with my son and he said “it’s like the slow zone”. I was like “what’s that”?
He brought out a book called “A fire upon the deep”. Reading it now. I can’t believe I never ran into this before as it came out in 1992. Someone mentioned the author last week (Vernor Vinge).
Big picture though, this is the solution — we just need to move the Earth out of the slow zone into the beyond and all our problems will be solved!!!! We can plan to shift the earth and and reap the rewards!
(just kidding).
PS — all 4 chickens still alive — 3 still give eggs — 1 is “retired” and enjoying hunting ticks and bugs.
Jerry
JMG
I should should probably clarify since my reconstruction is convoluted. From what I can tell, the earliest proto-gnostics understood the lower aeons to be an inverted mirror of the aeons above with the material plane representing the middle focal point. So in this sense it is still a dualistic system. Each of the planets/stars/zodiac have a positive and negative power associated with it. Based on what’s preserved in texts like the Secret Book of John and On the Origin of the World, I think the way the proto-gnostics understood that, in order to defeat a demon/archon, you had to know their name and/or the name of the angelic power to counter them. This is why in some texts, Sophia has an angel bind Yaldabaoth and throw him into the abyss.
What seems to have happened is that there were originally two hebdomads (seven heavens), one good, one evil. Each with an eighth above/below it, Sophia and the seven archangels for the good and the archons with the serpent below. Likely sometime after the Kitos War in 120 AD wiped out the Jewish population in Alexandria, the original meaning was lost. Because the names of the archons/archangels were likely kept secret, later Gnostic Christians had to fill in the blanks, this leads to the Ophite diagram preserved in Celsus/Origen where there are two sets of evil hebdomads. These two hebdomads are then later simplified to one evil hebdomad. The highest of the upper hebdomad, the lion faced Michael (or likely evil twin called Ariael), and the lowest of the lower hebdomad, the serpent Samael, are fused together for simplicity becoming the lion faced-serpent bodied, Yaldabaoth. This shifts the material plane from the center to the bottom (which is unsurprising given that this was during the era when Rome was heavily in decline).
JMG, a couple magic Mondays ago, I mused that the rising obsession with demon worship has the flavor of popular delusions like flat earth and Tartaria which I see as signs of rising collective madness.
I don’t think that this came up in that post, but the way corporate elites seem to think about AI gives me similar vibes.
Anyway, you said that with regard to mass delusions etc., you think the worst is yet to come.
Could you elaborate a bit on that?
It rings true to me, and I have a similar impression, but would very much like to hear what you think.
@Stephen,
many MAiD deaths happen in hospitals or other medical facitilies, and are planned ahead of time. Therefore, surgical facilities etc are more likely to be available than with natural deaths.
Most people, such as the lady in the article are indeed old and very ill when receiving MAiD, but some people taking MAiD are young, and don’t actually have a huge amount physically wrong with them. This is pretty rare, but is increasingly happening. And one healthy-ish young donor can be harvested for multiple things.
The Liberals are pushing really hard to extend MAiD to mental health issues alone. Access to healthy organs might actually explain why they’re pushing so hard when most Canadians and the opposition oppose it for mental health alone. I suspect that a desire to have fewer mentally ill/drug addicted homeless people for the government to deal with also plays a major role, though, and my default assumption is they want to save money and hassle by killing people rather than treating them or letting them run wild.
Personally I tend to think that reducing pressure on a health care system that is wobbling by killing the ones who need lots of health care is a bigger reason for the MAiD push than organ donation, especially so far. Having people in hospital corridors because there are no beds, or dying in the emergency room before they are seen by a doctor, or while waiting for Cancer treatment that isn’t available before its too late looks bad and makes the public mad at you. Canada has publically funded healthcare, and its’ the government’s fault if the system is not functioning and people get very angry at the government.
If the government can persuade a significant number of people needing substantial medical resources to agree to be killed instead of treated, they can free up beds, reduce wait times etc without hiring more doctors or spending money on medical equipment. Given that over 16,000 people a year and rising are now dying by MAiD and they’re still trying to increase uptake, I think this is a MAJOR factor.
Canada’s health care system was getting stretched before the pandemic and it is a lot worse now than it was then and shows no signs of going back.
Late to the party for this month’s open post. Congrats on the conference appearance. Hope the trip is good.
For anyone with advice, recommendations on publishing a 12,000-word western-supernatural novelette? I know it’s an odd length in an odd genre, so I’m considering self-publishing, but I want to try a few more outlets first. BCS and Clarkesworld both gave me quick “no’s,” but that makes sense. The joys of trying to become a debut writer.
@Slithy_Toves: People definitely are losing computer skills. My wife is a teacher, and many of her students have no idea how to save documents or move files because they’ve never had to. She’s been fighting to get a digital literacy class going for some time, because a not insignificant part of her class involves teaching kids basic computer skills.
I don’t think this necessarily contributes to the use of older tech, though. I think more is aesthetics and vibes – I started picking up vinyl mostly because I really like the way it sounds and getting to watch the disk spin. I still stream a lot, but there’s something nice about relaxing to a spinning record as opposed to a stream or a FLAC download.
@William #38,
A couple years back we had an outbreak at a publicly-funded daycare where every single kid should have been vaccinated. Every. Single. One. How’s that for 97% immunity? You can’t blame it on our aging population when it’s kids in a daycare, either.
Talking with an old public health nurse and later with a young fellow studying the field, we ended up with three hypotheses: One, that measles has slowly mutated enough to get past the immunity and nobody wants to talk about it– no data available;
two, that most of the kids there were faking the vax pass, which is frankly unbelievable;
three, that the way we’re administering the vaccines does NOT provide the immunity it used to.
Of the three, I have no way of determining which is true, but we’re not just doing MMR shots in Ontario anymore. At one year of age, kids get the MMR with pneumococcal conjugate and meningococcal conjugate– five in one go! Obviously if 3 mixed together works fine, adding another two thingies shouldn’t hurt, right? At the second MMR shot at age 4, they mix in a chicken pox vaccine. How well studied do you think that change was? Well, when I asked nobody threw papers at me saying “no, it’s fine, look at these statistics”– they just shifted their feet uncomfortably. So I’m guessing not too well. I can’t believe that if the outbreak was due to parents falsely reporting their kids as vaccinated we wouldn’t have made the national or even global news, but there was never a peep afterwards. Not much news about the outbreak at all, come to think of it.
Someone less trusting of traditional vaccines than I suggested that this is actually normal, that the shots never really worked as advertised, and that its just social media nowadays letting us hear of such things. I’m not sure if I fully believe that, since the grapevine was always a thing, but I’m willing to entertain that hypothesis more than “oh, they’re all just antivaxers who faked their papers.”
@Milkyway #14, David P. #53 et al re: generational computer literacy–
From what I’ve seen it depends entirely on what you were first exposed to, and when. That can track generationally, but it doesn’t have to, and the standard generational labels don’t really work with North American tech trends. For example, the oldest Zoomers might have grown up with a PC running Windows 98/XP/Vista– depending on how wealthy his or her family was and how invested they were on the upgrade treadmill– while a youngest member of the cohort might have gotten a their grubby infant hands on an iPad. On the other hand, perhaps that youngest Zoomer grew up in a household with a techie parent who kept their Commodore 64 and they grew up PEEKing and POKE-ing at BASIC code like some Xilennials did.
Statistically speaking, I did notice the trend towards less computer literacy when the iPad generation started coming around. Kids used to take to anything with a screen like a duck to water– now a good number of the young ones are confused by a keyboard and mouse and have to be educated that not all screens are touchscreens. There are some bigtime outliers to any such trend, though.
The water problems in Hartmann, Colorado make me think of something similar that happened here in Ontario recently, in the township of Fauquier-Strickland. Similar story: the town went belly-up bankrupt because they needed to replace the water treatment plant. As befitting the country of “Peace, Order and Good Government” in Fauquier-Strickland, they did get the water fixed, but budget overruns on that project killed the town. Well, bankrupted it, anyway. Unlike in Colorado higher levels of government came in with a bailout to keep municipal services (including clean water) running until the town can get their shale in order.
https://www.timminstoday.com/local-news/year-in-review-fauquier-strickland-pushed-to-the-brink-by-financial-crisis-11661794
While the Province is expecting them to double property taxes so they can pay their bills, nobody is willing to run for mayor or council to enact such measures:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/fauquier-strickland-municipal-elections-9.7320017
Unlike in Colorado, there’s nothing betwixt the town and the province/state, and we’re talking about almost ten times the number of people, so it will be interesting to see how it goes. As far as I know, there’s no option to dissolve a municipality in Ontario.
It’s not the same, but it rhymes. Collapse is a local phenomenon!
Chuaquin: If “onanistic” instruments are a whole category, do they get a section in an orchestra, like the brass and the winds and so on? 😀
Do they get chafed if the conductor waves his baton too fast?
David P. # 53:
You’re welcome!
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Gunstone # 55:
Yes, Nazi plans for genocide against Jews was only Hitler first partial goal, Slavs genocide was another part of their plans, as soon as they would defeat Soviet Union. Some “useful” Slavs, like nationalist Ukrainians, were fooled to fight against Russian Commies. After their task would finished…Ahem. Indeed, some Conservative Polish patriots ended in Nazi camps in addition of leftists, Jews, Romani and another groups hated by Nazis.
However, Zionism was more successful in those first Victimism Olympics than Slavs (under nasty Communist regimes after 1945), so this dirty “secret” about Nazi genocide plans against Slavic people has been ignored until today in the WWII mainstream narrative.
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JMG # 60:
I agree with your answer to Peter about Social Darwinism. I can also point it’s dubious Hitler and quite of his minions (not very educated men), had read Darwin work, nor Nietzsche philosophy. So “Ubermensch” and “Untermensch” terms (which I hope I wrote them right) seem IMHO a made-up idea, very loose related with those two famous men, but maybe more related with XIX European high class biases (as work hypothesis).
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Robert M. # 66:
Speaking about Pearl Harbor, I’ve been told that some Japanese think (until today) that US government “allowed” Japanese aeronaval forces to attack P. Harbor., in spite of lack of true evidences about it. So I tend to believe it’s a conspiracy theory whose useful reason to go on is making old Japanese militarist govt less guilty of that first attack. I can say Pearl Harbor event was evidently the casus belli for the Pacific war, with or without American “provocation”.
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Stephen P. # 88:
I don’t know exactly how MAID in Canada works (or is commited); according previous comments I’ve read, it seems a very common and dirty medical behavior there. I’m very puzzled. Legal euthanasia here is less used, though a few controverted cases have been used by usual activists to wide the supposed willing consent of patients (ahem), blaming the opposite opinion as Fascist/Far Right Catholic (another cultural war). I haven’t heard anything about organs harvesting in Spain thanks to euthanasia. Finally, it’s interesting to remember that people euthanized without their true consent leads us toward the darkest times of WWII (it’s not a “progressive” measure).
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Japanese Meiji era imperialist tendences: No argument here, except I prefer to blame Japan elites under the emperor “umbrella”, for that disastrous strategy for Japan in the long term, than blaming common people. By the way, I recommend you a Taniguchi historical manga, titled “The Botchan era”, which depicts Japan society after 1905 victory against Russia, in addition to make a tribute to the novelist Natsume Soseki. It’s not a jingoist manga, but a honest view about last times of Meiji era. For example, Korea anexion is cheered by most people (under govt propaganda), in a nationalist frenzy, but there was a leftist minority who debated about new born Japan imperialism. Korean migrant in those times were despised by a lot of Japanese (ahem).
On the other hand, some European behaviors were racist against Japanese. For example, during those times, a British ship started to sink in the Indicus, so its captain ordered to save in the boats only Brit people. Poor Indians and Japanese who travelled in the ship drowned…but there wasn’t any indemnization for their families (cough).
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Fritter # 94:
You’re welcome!
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Gunstone # 97:
I tend to suspect Nietzsche tactic against Christianism was avoiding to attack directly Jesus (maybe he was afraid of being too radical and being prosecuted across all Europe), and prefering to blame the “bad guy”, Paul, for everything he disliked in Christian mainstream teachings. I think it isn’t a serious nor honest tactic, methink (nobody’s perfect). In your own comment, you’ve pointed Nietzsche did the same “modus operandi” against “evil” Plato for saving Socrates from his corrosive criticism (maybe he discovered Socrates wasn’t his enemy). Well: Maybe I’m biased: You know I’m a fringe Christian (but not especially Platonist).
Luke, alongside solar and polar orientations, you have the telluric orientation (spiritual power rises from within the earth), the lunar orientation, the oceanic orientation (spiritual power comes from across/within the ocean), and the montane orientation (spiritual power comes from within specific sacred mountains), just for starters. Then there are all the combined orientations — the material I work with, for example, uses a combined solar-telluric orientation, while solar-lunar orientations are also quite common, and in some folk traditions a montane-oceanic orientation (some powers dwell in the mountains, others come from across the sea) is common.
LA, thanks for this. I’ll note these down for future refeence.
Jessica, that may also be involved, of course — but there’s a fantastic amount of academic fraud these days, so it’s more likely to be both/and than either/or.
Observor, hmm! I’ve never had experiences like these. Anyone else?
Dennis, sorry to hear it, but I’m not surprised. I wonder if at some level the Japanese are aware that the industrial age is ending and they need to get back to a population they can support on nonindustrial farming.
Michael, maybe I’m just too cynical, but to me there’s something faintly creepy about the Church of Gnome website. It may not be a cult but it rubs me the wrong way. That said, do what keepeth thou from wilting shall be the loophole in the law, or what have you.
BeardTree, I don’t doubt your experience at all. I simply wonder why it’s apparently less common these days than it used to be.
Ariadne, first of all, the alternation of genders isn’t a rigid thing. In my experience (my memories and those of other people who’ve shared them with me), it’s common but not universal; there have been times, for example, when I’ve had two male or two female lives in a row. Second, the carryover seems to be a function of too little time between incarnations — with so many bodies alive these days, souls don’t have a lot of downtime between lives and so it’s more common for memories to slip through on some level, enough to make the current body feel unnatural and awkward. (This means that things will get better over the next century or so, as human population is peaking and depopulation is setting in hard.) Third, since surgical transition is a very new thing, nobody in the occult scene has any idea how it will affect reincarnation — that’s something we’ll all have to figure out over the next few centuries, as folks like you are reborn. I wonder myself if we’re going to see a lot more intersex people than before — the flood of hormone-mimic chemicals being dumped into the environment makes that more likely anyway, which is why I gave intersex people so significant a role in my deindustrial novel Star’s Reach. But we’ll have to see.
Janegirl, by the way, wasn’t my invention — it’s used in some parts of the US for the male equivalent of a tomboy.
Derek, that’s an experience all of us have. I know it’s dispiriting to discover that most people’s concern about the environment goes only as far as mouthing slogans and maybe doing a virtue signal or two, such as insisting on paper straws, but that’s simply the way things are. I’m reminded of what the small boy wrote when asked to used the word “horticulture” in a sentence: “You can lead a horticulture but you cannot make her think.” The hard lesson is the one the old Stoics taught: all we can control are our own judgments and our own voluntary actions, and accepting that is the way to serenity. Mind you, it may also mean that you come through the ongoing decline in better shape than the people around you, but I gather that’s not really your concern just now. (BTW, as you see, the line breaks came through just fine; there’s a glitch in the software that makes the preview look otherwise.)
Joan, thanks for the warning! I plan on simply buying a couple and eating them, for whatever that’s worth.
Shane, thanks for this — and delighted to hear it.
Cs2, it’s one of the oddities of human psychology that an aversion to sexual pleasure very often coexists with an obsession with reproduction. The Catholic church is a great example — a vast organization of (at least officially) celibate priests who spent many centuries denouncing sexual pleasure as inherently evil, while simultaneously demanding that laypeople have as many babies as possible. The flipside is also common — notice how much of modern feminism is obsessed with sexual pleasure but has a strong aversion to reproduction, tolerably often going as far as an actual hatred of children. No, it doesn’t make sense, but that’s generally true of human beings, isn’t it?
Bogatyr, nope. You might consult traditional manuals of exorcism; those and banishing rituals are the only modes of interaction with demons I’m willing to discuss.
David, hmm! Fascinating that it’s spread outside of SF circles that way.
Justin, thanks for this.
CRC, I don’t see the peak as a single point, but a sequence of events filling several decades. To my mind the peak began in 1914 and ended in 1973 with the first energy crisis. We’ve been in decline since then.
Karim, it’s something that got a lot of press in 20th century occult literature. Basically, the idea is that late in Atlantean history, a growing number of Atlanteans turned away from the worship of the ancient sea goddess who was their chief deity early on (misunderstood by Plato as the sea god Poseidon). The outer form of the new worship was a sun god, but the inner circle worshipped demonic entities, the Lords of the Dark Face, with a cult that eventually included human sacrifice. (The claim is that this is where Mesoamerica got that tradition; the Aztecs, as any collection of Mesoamerican mythology will tell you, claimed that their ancestors came from a vanished land called Aztlan, the Place of Reeds.) The result was a rising spiral of never-quite-open conflict between the Sea Temples and Sun Temples, in which the Sun Priests gradually seized more and more power in society while practicing evil magic more and more openly.
By then most of Atlantis was already underwater as a result of the first two inundations, which were some centuries apart; what remained was a pair of islands, Ruta and Daitya, and Ruta was a large volcanic island. The story has it that something the Sun Priests did — playing around with geothermal energy, maybe? — triggered the final catastrophe, which from the description sounds very much like a major caldera eruption that blew Ruta to smithereens and sent huge tsunamis crashing onto all the nearby islands and coasts where Atlanteans lived. The priestesses and priests of the Sea Temples had enough warning to sail away in time, and they ended up in various parts of the Atlantic littoral; look for cultures that use the cross inside a circle (Celtic cross, medicine wheel, Bakongo cosmogram) as a sacred symbol and that’s supposed to be a sign that survivors of the Sea Temples made it there. Make of that what you will.
Cynthia, just because it’s balderdash doesn’t mean it’s false!
Jerry, I managed to miss that one too. Glad to hear the chickens are still hard at work.
Anon, hmm. Interesting.
Eike, I don’t know what’s ahead; I’ve simply noticed that the signs of collective psychosis are becoming more common and strident as time goes on. The bizarre Lindsay Clancy business, where thousands of women are rallying to the cause of a woman who admits she murdered all three of her children, and constructing convoluted conspiracy theories to blame the murders on someone male, is just one example of many. The obsession with demon worship is of course another. How much worse will it get? I have no idea, but I admit I’m worried.
EchoEcho, one thing you’ll need to get used to, if you want to make it as a professional writer, is that you need to size your manuscripts to fit the available markets. 12,000 is too much for the short fiction market and too little for the book market, so you’re probably screwed — unless you can figure out, that is, how to boost the word count to at last 40,000 words, at which point you can look for book publishers.
dZanni @ 43, For heaven’s sake, do look up, for just a few examples, Louis Brandeis, Henry Morganthau (FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury) Henry Dexter White, (a Soviet asset to be sure, but not a very effective one), Albert Gallatin, Jefferson’s Secretary of the Treasury whose statue stands in front of the Treasury building to this day. That comment of yours wouldn’t have been a throw spaghetti at the wall thingie, now would it?
I also recall the Jewish goldsmith, Sol or Soloman, I am afraid the last name escapes me, who helped Washington finance the continental army. Sol was arrested by the British authorities in NYC, charged with spying, and sentenced to death. He escaped, and set up business again in Philadelphia, where he continued his activities in support of the continentals. A forgotten Founding Father who happened to be Jewish.
Jessica # 108:
I’ve read your comment correcting me, so I’ve scratched my head, and I’ve checked online my ideas about Seminoles. Well, I’m sorry. I was wrong when I depicted Cabeza de Vaca fighting against them in XVI century: an anachronism. Indeed, he didn’t name his native enemies in Florida (“indios”) as Seminoles, never. I was mistaking “Naufragios”-Shipwrecks-(written by Cabeza de Vaca himself) with wrong information which appeared in a recent novel written by a Spanish writer (badly informed), whom I don’t want to say his name here (ahem).
You’re also right depicting some former Black slaves (cimarrones or maroons) within Seminole people. Indeed, according some anthropologists, there was an “afro-native continuum” for centuries (there have been quite influences between Black and Native cultures around all Caribbean Sea and South America).
What is possible is Cabeza de Vaca fought (and lost) against some of the likely ancestors of some Seminoles. Thanks…
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Anselmo # 122:
Although I’m not an expert nor a hipster obssessed with Japan, I knew something about last centuries in Japan history. By the way, it’s a pity that Japan only counts in Universal History taught in high schools (at least it was taught to me in ‘90s), only since Meiji era (in Mutsuhito times), not much before the past century. I also think “Gaijin” can be translated as “foreigner” or “barbarian”, depending of its context…
Japanese as special people: Evidently, they live in another different culture, under a layer of shallow westernization, but I also think everybody share a common human condition under our cultural and racial “suits”. Of course, for example Jews can say about themselves they’re special (or being told by some goyim the same thing), and they’d be partly right, partly wrong.
OK, write more about Japan if you want.
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Dennis M…# 135:
I didn’t know that advice said to Japanese government by a Prussian (German) during Meiji times, but I’m not surprised, due to the well known Japanese elites fondness for everything that came from Germany…
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CRC # 137:
Maybe I’m biased by my own generation memories, but I tend to think the West peaked in social and politics and economics, somewhere between the ‘80s and the “happy” ‘90s.
After this century beginning, I think everything has slowly worsened year after year. But we’ve got smartphones! Huzzah!(ironically).
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Cynthia # 148:
Oops! I can tell you honestly: I had never thought about your two questions…I don’t know what to answer you now, so I need to think it better, ha ha…
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Recently, I’ve read a novel about Jesus life, written by a Spanish writer (Christian Gálvez), “He vencido al mundo”(I’ve beaten the world). There isn’t any English translation by now. It puzzled me he depicts another view about Judas-the traitor-, a less wicked man than mainstream Christianism (especially Catholicism) has shown of him. I can compare this view on Judas with Scorsese movie “The Last Temptation of Christ”, where Judas (played by Harvey Keitel) was an impulsive man with a nasty past, but not a bad guy in his deep thoughts and feelings. It seems this less evil, near good Judas, comes from the apocryphal and gnostic “Judas Gospel”. What do you think about this topic?
DZanni 43
> If I ever hear another “Nazi Bad” statement, I’m going to scream. I know. I’ve just heard it that too many times, with too little understanding of who they really were.
Exactly‼️
That is exactly how I feel. When I implied as much a few posts ago, this “one guy here” (who shall remain nameless) jumped all over me: how dare I support Nazis, was the jist. For 75-80 years, I feel, no-one has been allowed to so much as say the word “Nazi,’ much less explore what-ifs. For those who wish to continue to try to suppress the word “Nazi” and things that word MAY IMPLY, flock them. I have a right to MY beliefs; I don’t need anyone’s approval. I could say more, but shall desist.
Thank you, DZanni, for pushing the curtain aside. And for stating the issue much better than I could have.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
At this page is the full list of all of the non-faith-specific requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 8/28). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment at the prayer list site and/or below.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Trubujahs’s mother-in-law, Helen, who is currently recovering at home after gastrointestinal bleeding related to stage 4 pancreatic cancer, be filled with vitality and be healed of all cancer and any ailments relating to it; may she and her family find the strength and support they need throughout.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May Atmospheric River’s gall bladder full of gallstones heal and be filled with such vitality that her current stones diminish, her comfort increases, and her gall bladder remains free of new stones.
May Northwind Grandma’s husband Jeff, who passed away unexpectedly on July 22, be blessed and make a peaceful transition to his next destination; may he be healed of the “wound in his heart” that he held in life.
May Jeff’s cat Henry accept, twice a day, Northwind’s giving him his Flovent inhaler dose and pill, and let her take him to the veterinarian once a month for an injection.
May Anonymuz get the strength and resolve he needs in his endeavors for justice, and may truth and justice be served.
May Lukeszy’s father’s post-surgery swelling be healed.
May Helen in Oz be free of inflammation in her biceps and shoulder, and may she be successful in the slow process of regaining pain-free range of movement and increased muscle mass and strength therein.
May JC of Geauga County, Ohio, who is fighting cancer, be blessed and uplifted so that he may receive the healing he needs and recover as best as possible.
May 1Wanderers’s partner Cathy, who is still undergoing chemotherapy in preparation for a surgery, be given the physical and mental strength to fight it, and tolerate the treatment; may she enjoy a full and permanent recovery.
May Dustin, a relative of Brenainn, who still has some lingering issues in his ongoing recovery from a heart condition, be healed and strengthened.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis’s reconstructive surgery on his left ureter go well; may his right kidney heal; and may his empty nose syndrome abate.
May Brother Kornhoer be able to afford his son’s international surgery.
May a safe and happy home environment be enjoyed by Laurelmirror, her daughter, and her mother, as well as protection from evil influences. May their family situation be resolved in such a way that Laurelmirror’s mother will get a chance to recover physically and mentally from the stresses it has caused.
May Geoff G’s sister Lindsay, who suffered a stroke at the end of May, recover to the fullest extent possible, and be blessed and supported in her mental wellbeing throughout.
May Mathew Damon Gallowglass, who has been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, be treated successfully for his condition and make a full recovery.
May Lisa C be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from breast cancer.
May 6 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Bob W of Lake County, Ohio’s treatment for cancer go well so that he may heal and recover as quickly as possible.
May Larry Mulford, who has entered hospice after a year battling with pancreatic cancer, pass in the smoothest possible manner, and may his wife be enveloped in our love.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If Kevin, whose sister was suffering hallucinations, happens to be around: I’ve kept Cynthia on the list for more than a year now. Normally I take prayers down after 3 months automatically, but it seemed important. Kevin, if you happen to see this, please let me know if you’d still like prayers on Cynthia’s behalf.
Re measles –
This paper, from 1972 (less than ten years after the licencing of the first measles vaccine) does a complete seriological study during a measles outbreak in a highly vaccinated population.
https://sci-hub.box/10.1093/oxfordjournals.aje.a121391
From the abstract:
“A seroepidemiologic study of a measles epidemic in an elementary school in which 74.5% of the students had received measles virus vaccine from their private physicians was undertaken to determine if there was a loss of immunity in previously immunized children. Of the 94 cases of clinical measles, 54 had received vaccine by various regimens. The vaccine efficacy for all immunized children was 49.3%, but for children who received live vaccine after one year of age, the current recommendation, it was 83%. There was no significant difference in the clinical illness between the immunized and unimmunized, except for atypical measles in children who had received killed vaccine. Only one of the immunized children was shown to have measles antibodies present prior to the onset of illness.”
The following passage appears within the body of the paper:
“…children developed measles during this study who had received vaccine after one year of age, and all of the physicians from whom information was available had given MIG on a weight basis as recommended. Approximately 2 per cent of a vaccinated population will fail to develop antibodies without a specific reason (2) but the failure rate in this epidemic was much greater.”
The point I wish to make here is simply that the viewpoint you gain from reviewing old scientific papers (it’s quite complex and we’re still working out the details) is decidedly different from the one you gain from a reading of media reports. (it’s quite simple, get with the program! idiots!).
In the “AI gums up the works” department:
A BBC podcast featured a lawyer from a local council lamenting the use of AI in the complaints department. Apparently more and more councils are requiring all complaints to be submitted in writing. But there are many people who prefer not to put their complaints in writing for one reason or another.
Then came AI, and these people discovered they could get an AI to write their complaints for them, and they did. With the result that A) there were a lot more complaints; and B) the average complaint got much longer.
The lawyer cited for example a complaint that someone’s bin had not been emptied for a while. Typically, that might take two or three paragraphs to describe. But AIs tended to go to town, producing 15 to 20 pages of verbiage, citing case studies, municipal by-laws, and federal laws. Which, on analysis by a competent lawyer, turned out to be nonsense. Superficially convincing but in reality just “word salad” (the term the lawyer used).
Since most municipal complaint handlers were not trained lawyers, they were being snowed under in trying to decode the AI-generated junk and falling behind in serving the public.
An even more interesting passage appears in the body of the research paper linked in my last comment:
“Prospective studies have shown the persistence of measles antibody for at least eight years after both attenuated and further attenuated measles virus vaccines (2). However, there has been a marked decrease in antibody titers in populations without re-exposure to natural measles (15). This suggests that boostering of antibody titers by re-exposure to natural measles may be necessary to maintain vaccine-induced antibody titers.”
The suggestion that those immunised against measles by vaccination benefit from the “boostering” effect of re-exposure to NATURAL measles (ie this mechanism of re-exposure to natural infection is what prevents the immunisation effect from waning) is exactly congruent with the comment made by TemporaryReality at #79. How many people are able to avail of “re-exposure to natural measles” these days?
The whole population effects of mass vaccination campaigns may mean precisely that the erosion of opportunities for “re-exposure to natural infections” is what has now become endemic, with the result that we now have an ever growing pool of people of all ages who are susceptible to measles, regardless of their vaccination status.
I still have all my wisdom teeth. They came in straight, but they made my small v shaped jaws even more crowded, and my teeth are more crooked now. Makes them harder to floss and brush, and might have contributed to periodontal disease, though I’m not sure what’s causing that. Don’t smoke, don’t drink sugary drinks or fruit juice more than once a month or so, brush and floss religiously. Might be genetic – one of my parents has the same issue plus way worse teeth than I’ve ever had.
I’d like to write something about recent Ceuta “rampage” events, from my point of view.
First, I can tell you that here, near nobody believe current Spanish government version about recent national sovereignity and integrity by a lot of thousands of Moroccan civilians (an event planned by illegal migration “mafias”, cough cough). Most likely theory outside Madrid govt and its zealots in MSM and social media, is the event was a geopolitical hybrid war attack, disguised as migrants “spontaneous” act, activated from
Rabat govt. I guess Madrid govt is lying.
It’s very easy for Moroccan secret services to heat social media in Moricco against the hatred Spanish cities in their North. “Agents provocateurs”, paid haters and trolls, and of course bots, can upset civilians against North borders with Spain. Maybe some coordination by local intel members has helped to organize better that very well oiled “peaceful” attack.
I think (with a sad and wry smile), Rabat played this card in the worst moment for Spain. Current political tension and polarization has worsened an unlikely unity between all our political spectrum, so Ceuta events worsen even more our local context.
On the short form, after those events, I see two opposite narratives here, but the two are outdated and unable to fix current situation.
First one, Madrid govt is trapped by its own narrative: “Massive migration is always good (even illegal one), so if you disagree, you’re near Fascism”. This woke or naïve left story is counterfactual in front of migrants use by Moroccan regime, to show its desires for integrating Ceuta and Melilla towns in its kingdom. Moroccan rulers have been clever enough to guess how predictable is Madrid in its stereotyped narrative; for example, one of our govt favorite “sacred cows” are (non legal) migrants always depicted as innocent victims (ahem).
By the way, this spanish govt, like all previous democratic govts before it, is very afraid to upset Morocco rulers, so every govt here has agreed to bend its will under repeated Rabat blackmail pressures.
Second narrative, the patriotism
Spectacle showed by the right wing block parties, seems IMHO also fake and suicidal. Provoking xenophobia and jingoism within Spanish population (I bet there’ll be soon some parriotic demonstrations) won’t prevent Morocco from launching future hordes against Ceuta and Melilla. It’s impossible to stop them with police non lethal measures, but any direct military action made by a future right wing govt has some problems…Morocco has had always good relations with USA; our NATO membership protects Spain from evily evil Putin, but not against King Mohammed wishes. Indeed, famous article 5 of NATO treaty works only in Europe, not in Africa (ahem). Our army would fight alone against Morocco (if NATO bosses allowed that war). Right wing leaders must know this dirty data, but if they know them, they shut up. Of course, these right wing parties love NATO and American power, so do the math.
It’s very probable first measure a near future right wing govt would do in Madrid, maybe it would be to “hide” national flags to not offend Rabat feelings (ahem). And suffer more Moroccan blackmail…
Finally, an important part of Ceuta events consequences, beyond our usual small compost heap (named national politics), is a bigger compost heap (named EU politics). It’s sad Ceuta events influence in EU declining power and prestige, have been barely pointed in MSM here (our usual nstional blindness). It’s interesting, for example, that if/when Spain loses that two towns in North Africa, its shock wouldn’ go only against this country (maybe accelerating its pace toward becoming a failed state without any prestige), but also against Brussels prestige and power. A non-EU country getting former European territories (small but symbolical ones), could be and humiliation for Brussels too. It seems some nasty signs of times about ominous EU future have been seen after Ceuta events: for example, Brussels shy speech supporting Spain govt in a half hearted way, is contradicted by some EU members (Italy, Denmark and Finland), showing hard criticism against Spain for its alleged bad management of this crisis (real motive: ideological rivals against current Madrid govt). What kind of “Union” is this, when there’s an open and tensioned argument between different countries govts?
I’m afraid I mustn’t ask myself wether Ceuta and Melilla are going to be Moroccan towns soon or later or they won’t; but asking how and when they’ll give up their Spanish sovereignty.
@dZanni (#43):
Jews were not merely tolerated, but respected and valued, in some parts of the country almost from the time of its first settlements from Europe. It is simply not true that the USA has been a (Protestant) Christian country in principle from its very beginnings.
New York, ever since the days when it was still New Amsterdam, a Dutch Colony, always had a substantial Jewish presence, as did the Netherlands back in old Europe. And Rhode Island, founded by Roger Williams in 1636 specifically on the principle that no government had any right whatever to interfere in any way whatsoever with the religions or religious beliefs of its citizens, has had a significant Jewish presence from 1658 onward, that is, almost from the very founding of the colony.
There is a famous letter sent by George Washington in 1790 to Moses Seixas, warden of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, RI, defending the religious freedom of all Jewish citizens of the US in the following words:
“The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
That letter is still read aloud in public here in the state every year, as it has been for a very long time.
“For anyone with advice, recommendations on publishing a 12,000-word western-supernatural novelette? ”
Write several short stories, either related to your novelette or not, then bundle them all together?
JMG: Hey, you ruined my favourite word! That’s balderd–um, crap! 😉
Actually I got a much-needed chuckle out of that, thank you! 🙂
JMG
Eike‘s comment and your response reminded me of something that I’ve been noticing. I think we’re on the cusp of another Satanic panic. It started with the Epstein files and the democrats attempt to pin it on Trump with the “Epstein class” narrative. Multiple boomers I know bought that line up and now believe that there are satanic child abusers in every level of government. Then you have Candice Owens going on about how Israel killed Charlie Kirk and that seems to have thrown more gas onto the fire. Following the Lindsay Clancy trial I’ve seen several prominent commentators talking about the “astrology question” and several saying “this is why we had witch trials.”
Also while not as prominent I have noticed there is a growing trend of “occult to Christian” grift among women online looking to make easy cash. They talk about how occultists regularly summon demons and the other usual bits of sensational nonsense. And lastly there seems to be a relatively large number of (bipartisan) people online who seem to be ok with labeling anime and anything associated with it as exploitative to children which they call the “loli question.”
I’m guessing the major wave of new Christian converts over the last few years are about to try something extremely stupid.
Hello Mr Greer,
It will be great if you do write at some point about different ways to deal with the civilisational decline. There is much sensible material on the topic in these pages already, although I feel there is some scope for less sensible takes, if that makes any sense. One possible path mentioned as suitable for the less worldly was monasticism, and I was wondering if there were other (currently) unusual options worth considering. In John Gilbert’s take on tarot, a key step in spiritual development is to imagine the possibilities, so here’s hoping for some thoughts on that in a future post 🙂
Good to hear that the life force manual is not solely a practical one – I am unsure how much of it I would be able to apply because of potential conflicts due to my qigong training. My practices are hopelessly idiosyncratic and a Western occult take on what I am doing is certainly of great interest. Reading up on theory might even help me integrate better various methods I’ve picked up along the way.
Now if I may, I have a question on consequences of a certain Western occult practice, if any thoughts come up. I have been doing Jung-inspired dreamwork for a while, and recently powerful archetypes have begun showing up. As soon as this started happening, I had several people I haven’t heard from for a long time, sometimes decades, contacting me within a space of a few days. It seems to me that the dreamwork has somehow increased my visibility on a non-physical plane (as I am not familiar with any occult traditions, I don’t even have the vocabulary to describe properly what might be happening). Is this something to pay attention to? Potentially dangerous? Can it be put to good use?
Many thanks!
When did things peak? Here is one take (first chart) that it’s not all gloom and doom.
https://brucemehlman.substack.com/p/six-chart-sunday-inheritances
As for the list the different criteria did not peak all at once.
Social cohesion, Died in Vietnam.
Optimism, Died in the late Reagan years as right-sizing and re-enginnering took hold, then the export of the industrial base began. My personal Lost Decade started in 1995. I was able to recover, many others did not.
Relative power vs other civilizations, For the US, the early ’90s as the USSR fell but China hadn’t yet risen, oh and Japan’s economy blew up about then too.
Innovation, Depends on how you measure it. Hot running water and refrigeration are nearly a century old, Wikipedia (an encyclopedia in every pocket) is pretty new. Do you really think Augmented Idiocy will do something truly useful? How do you measure innovations? Papers published,? Patents granted? Both of those are flawed.
Net energy, Peaked with the North Sea, Prudhoe Bay and the first batch of off-shore wells in the Gulf.
Income, Peaked in the ’70s for the working class, that’s well documented.
Life expectancy and health, Going backwards now, though the CDC says otherwise. (Imagine that) You can find lots of disagreement though. The CDC also says Infant mortality is down but The NY Times and other articles say it’s up. If we were healthy the whole GLP-1 fad would not be popular.
An unhappy possibility is that life expectance in 2024 is looking up because the virus took out a respectable number of sickly people leaving the healthy to run up the numbers at least for awhile.
JMG,
The “horticulture” pun version of the proverb gave me a chuckle and is a good reminder to have.
Its been around 8 years since I read the Stoics and it’s apparent that I need to revisit them and reread the notes I took at the time. I have been on the “Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush” path and it looks like I could not fully accept that no one that I’ve been close with in my life has shown any interest in joining me for even just a few steps along the way.
But after a recent long distance move and getting some of these thoughts out in writing, I have a renewed sense of optimism that I can find the people in my new area that understand the “Myth of Progress” and are interested in taking actions together to make ourselves more resilient in the years to come no matter how the decline plays out.
I also want to thank you for keeping me from falling into the “Instant Collapse” doomer mindset over the years. I never was in the “Techno Utopia” camp because none of their ideas ever made logical sense to me but I have occasionally read a little too far into the secular “The End is Nigh” apocalypse scenarios.
Northwind Grandma (no. 153), I’m all for a nuanced perspective on the Nazis. But the internet is full of people who are attracted to them, in much the same spirit that a teenager might affect an allegiance to Satan, Among new converts to Orthodox Christianity, many if not most these days (the “Orthobros”) are attracted to it for what they see as its strident, uncompromising fundamentalism, and pair it with alt-Right political views that, yes, regularly incorporate racism and support for Hitler and/or the Confederacy. (Some of them have no idea that their new religion has Africans, Arabs, and native Alaskans in it.)
Anyway, if someone (Jung, say) joined the Nazis during the Hitler era, we shouldn’t rush to judgement–they were faced with difficult choices, and lived in very different times. But if somebody today flirts with Nazism, no such ambiguity applies–such people are attracted to it *because* it is evil, even cartoonishly so. The internet is full of Nazis of this sort (everybody’s a Nazi on the internet!) who post their shibboleths in comment sections like this one–sending out feelers, so to speak. Such people deserve to receive push-back, out of common human decency.
In fact, rebuking neo-Nazis is a kindness. Setting aside any moral arguments against Nazisn, being a neo-Nazi more or less guarantees being a loser. These people are more likely to see the inside of prison than the inside of a college. The paleo-Nazis would have regarded them with contempt, and considered them degenerates. (Alpha-Nazism vs. beta-Nazism?) Virtually any political alignment or spiritual path would represent an improvement over neo-Nazism.
On Canadian MAID, I’m surprised the clinics haven’t been bombed / participating doctors and nurses assassinated, like we see in the anti-abortion movement. A terrorist campaign like that might get a lot of quiet support. (Perhaps someone will suggest as much to Putin.)
Imagine that, one day soon, Trump goes on TV to denounce MAID, and declare an invasion of Canada in order to stop the mass-murder of innocent elderly / hang the politicians who voted for it.
I’m not as quite in tune with the vibrations of the universe as many here, but something has happened with Dolly Parton’s passing. I was never much of a country music fan, so her music wasn’t what has struck me. (Although “Best Little Wh0r3house in Texas” is a charming musical). I thought as a tribute I’d try to learn the bass line to “9 to 5,” but I got choked up and couldn’t do it. The whole world seems to be the same way, it’s as if something purely good has died.
Hi John Michael,
I must say that dark story would be right up that authors’ alley. Mr Dick had a very devoted fanbase and formed the basis of some startling movies, like Blade Runner, which was very good indeed. I’ve only sampled a few of his books because I didn’t really enjoy the ‘zone’ created mostly because very bad things and events were usually unfolding, whilst I also had troubles feeling empathy for the characters. By and large they were remarkably cold depictions of the human condition. Still, just my opinion there. Maybe I simply read the wrong books?
By the way, this teasing of us with loose talk of pawpaws is not quite the done thing ol’ chap! 😉 Go on, I’m curious were they North American, or South American pawpaws? I’ve tried obtaining one of your North American varieties which would grow and fruit very well here, but the cost was prohibitive. And it’s too cold here for the more southerly sub tropical variety (an entirely different species), for three have now succumbed to the winter cold, even in the greenhouse. Oh well. Worth the attempt.
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
On a more serious note, looks like private credit (i.e. non banking lenders) are having some err, troubles… ASIC warns of ‘first significant cracks’ in Australian private credit. ASIC is for those who don’t know, the down under corporate regulator, although I can’t say for sure exactly what it is that they do.
The sudden clamping down on redemptions was always going to spook the market. The thing is with all this stuff, most of what the cash is used for is illiquid. Why people don’t realise that, baffles me. Probably won’t end well… You know what I mean! 🙂
Cheers
Chris
@LA #69,
Thank you for your LA suggestions as I will be headed out that way soon, unfortunately before the Lucas Museum opens.
I looked up The Magic Castle and it is below a place that caught my eye earlier, Yamashiro Hollywood. It has an interesting history as a mansion, then the architecture concealed out of caution during WW2 and now it seems to be an upscale restaurant. They have some gardens there so it may be worth an expensive drink or two to take in the view and grounds.
Jeff #80,
I’ll definitely check out your podcast and blog.
JMG, a follow up question from ignorance. Is it possible to synthesize all the symbolic orientations? I could see an individual seeking to understand all the orientations via meditation. It might be harder (impossible?) to enact them all in ritual. Or maybe the individual would use distinct rituals for each orientation.
@David: re: wisdom teeth
I had mine extracted at 19. Undersized jaw, teeth kind of sideways, partially erupted and stuck that way. No idea if it was ultimately necessary or not, but it has not caused me any complications after 20 years so… (shrugs). Anyway, I had it done under a local (just Novocaine), they prescribed a stronger opiate painkiller I was supposed to take one pill before the surgery, and then at intervals after. I took the first one as directed and never took another… just a couple of acetaminophen. I have a fairly high pain tolerance and no problem with dentists. Awake for the whole procedure including having two of the teeth sawed in half to get them out: no problem. I am way more afraid of general anesthesia than of something hurting 😉 There were one or two points where the process was painful enough to notice through the anesthetic (but not unbearable) at which point I signaled the doc and they administered more anesthetic. Got all four done at once to get it over with and minimize costs. If I had to do it again, I’d do the same thing.
Justin #25: I had the right-side wisdom teeth out, one year, and the left side a year or so later. It’s nice to still be able to chew food, while the opposite side is healing. Also, I’ll take a shot of anesthetic near the work site, but after that wears off, I prefer to Transcend Dental Medication. 😉
Scotlyn (#40): re: not being governed. So, are you saying “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”?
Regarding wisdom teeth, I’ve kept all of mine well into my 60’s because there was no reason to take them out. Recently as they have needed more maintenance than they are worth, I have started getting them extracted. (Specifically, extraction cost me $200 each but the crowns they needed were several times that.) I haven’t missed them much, and the extractions were not particularly difficult. I would advise to do some critical thinking about yours and decide whether they are an asset or a liability. If your mouth doesn’t have room and/or they are coming in crooked, getting rid of them before they cause trouble is the best bet. “Horizontal” wisdom teeth will never be an asset. If you are currently in a position where the cost is covered do it sooner rather than later. There is nothing to fear-just do it.
Peter (#46) re: Social Darwinism. Adding on to what others have commented: Those who advocate it ASSUME that they can identify “fitness”, as if it’s something that can be cultivated according to some imagined standard. But Darwin’s theory asserts that EVERY existing organism is just as fit as any other, because they’ve all survived, while others have not. The leech is as fit as the eagle, the ant as fit as the elephant. And a cooperative society, where children can be nurtured in learning mathematics, science, and art together, could produce the atomic bomb, while a society brutally striving to assert the fitness of one individual over another could not.
Scotlyn, re #128
well, what a delightful way of putting that! Thank you.
Given that I’ve pretty much adhered to your last paragraph, of remaining “a student, an aficionado, and cultivate(ing) a simple, direct interest in *whatever*, then you will remain both curious and teachable, and therefore capable of finding out about stuff that experts don’t already know.” for my whole life, I appreciate that someone recognizes the merits of being slightly dilettante and motivated by opportunities to learn. Onward!
Also, re: your other posts on the measles. Does it matter that the measles vaccine formula was changed after most of those articles you cite were published (if I recall correctly, that is; I don’t have exact dates of that in my memory)? I mean, I already know where I stand on the issue, but the early version’s bad outcomes prompted a reformulation and so perhaps some of those critiques aren’t quite hitting the target, no?
@JMG & Karim #150 re: Atlantis Lore
Wow, still more evidence Tolkien was more familiar with occult material than he was willing to let on – the displacement of the wholesome original religion by an evil religion posing as good that eventually turned to human sacrifice, with a remnant of the good guys getting away and settling in the wilds to found a successor culture sounds a lot like Sauron in (the obviously Atlantis-inspired) Numenor.
Cheers,
Jeff
“An unhappy possibility is that life expectance in 2024 is looking up because the virus took out a respectable number of sickly people leaving the healthy to run up the numbers at least for awhile.”
As far as I know, the usual way to calculate life expectancy is to look at the survival rate for each age, then assume that that will remain the same forever.
So the life expectancy of a newborn in 2024 would assume the survival rate of newborns in 2023, then for 2025 would assume the survival rate of 1-year olds in 2023, then for 2026 would assume the survival rate of 2-year olds in 2023, then for 2027 would assume the survival rate of 3-year olds in 2023, etc.
This method of calculation is very noisy. In an unusual year, it assumes that that unusual year will continue forever. So this calculation exaggerates the life expectancy drop for 2020 and 2021 and also the rebound in the next few years. The life expectancy calculation for 2024 has this wind at its back. One would have to find a way to remove this exaggeration to find out what is actually happening to life expectancy.
For example, one could use a 10-year moving average for each age’s survival rate.
I would be fascinated to see such a life expectancy calculation further broken down by income level. Falling life expectancy creeping up the income scale over time would be a strong indicator of ongoing social decline.
@Scotty #173 re: My New Podcast
Thanks very much, I hope you enjoy!
Cheers,
Jeff
Ecoprayer, thanks for this as always.
Martin, now surprise me. Mind you, it won’t surprise me if the municipal complaint handlers are soon replaced by LLMs, so it’ll be one set of programs exchanging word salads with another set of programs!
Robert (if I may), bingo — there were synagogues founded in most of the thirteen colonies in colonial times. Wikipedia has a decent list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_synagogues_in_the_United_States
It’s also worth noting that three colonies — Pennsylvania and Maryland as well as Rhode Island — had religious liberty laws passed in the 1600s. It’s a common lie, but still a lie, that the US was exclusively Protestant from its foundation.
Cynthia, “balderdash” is a fine word. I have a great deal of appreciation for colorful words of opprobrium that aren’t profanities. Why, oh why, don’t we hear more people described as ratfinks, bootlickers, and ninnyhammers, and the ideas they spout as horsefeathers, hogwash, claptrap, and twaddle?
Anon, I know. I’ve been very concerned with that for quite a while now — not least because so many people in the occult scene are feeding the frenzy by publicly embracing devil worship. Morons!
Soko, oh, the one thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be unlikely. The obvious outcomes never actually get around to happening. As for your dreamwork question, I’ve never yet been able to make that work for me, so I’ll have to ask other members of the commentariat to comment.
Derek, I hope it works out for you!
Watchflinger, I think we’re seeing the birth of a folk saint.
Chris, Dick’s fiction isn’t easy reading by any means — it’s not just that you read the wrong books, I’m not sure there are any right ones! As for pawpaws, oh, they’re North American — these days I live in an area where they grow well. I got four modestly sized pawpaws, and will be trying them soon. As for private credit, thanks for the heads up — private credit firms have been in trouble here for most of a year now, and it’s a sign worth noticing that it’s spread down under as well.
Luke, you could, but it would be like trying to speak fifteen languages at once. The point of a symbolic orientation is that it structures your relationship to spiritual energies in a practical way that brings in the specific energy you focus your work on.
Jeff, bingo. When Tolkien wrote the first drafts of his Numenor story, the only place he could have gotten that version of the Atlantis legend was from Theosophical literature. It wasn’t in print anywhere else; it’s not in Plato, Donnelly, or any of the early secular Atlantologists.
@JMG “Maybe I’m just too cynical, but to me there’s something faintly creepy about the Church of Gnome website”
I suspect is probably from the fact that some things start as a joke and then becomes the real deal. It can also just be something like the Church of Bacon or Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it is atheists just unintentionally rebuilding the religious structures unaware of what they are doing.
@ long power outages, 2 weeks Gary Indiana
I think that everyone should be ready for such things. There are lots of scenarios that can take out electricity. 2 weeks is not even that long. I actually find it amazing that so many people have never had a very long outage, I remember when some big Hurricane hit the east coast, New York New jersey, was that Sandy ? I forget. I talked on the phone to an extended family member in New Jersey, she said prior to that Hurricane she had never in her life experienced a power outage longer than 2 hours.
Anyways, it takes along time to clear trees and restring line and check power lines in such a large area, 2,000 miles of lines to check. I bet it could be complicated by it still being populated, in some larger disasters, everyone has been evacuated and they are just kept out until the lines are restrung. So the area is empty and the workers can get to it, that does make it faster, they can block roadswith big trucks, layout wires and poles down the middle of them, break out the chainsaws and drop those trees….
I would realy recommend that everyone no matter what type of place you live in to give yourself a dry run of losing electricity. Go ahead and make sure you think it thru and have preps in place. But then, maybe on a weekend, turn it all off. If you can, turn off the breakers, otherwise just unplug or turn off absolutely everything that uses electricity. If you were wrong, you can just turn it all back on and rethink how you can get thru these things, and try again in a few weeks. But try and work thru it. I guess to not waste food, you can set up some rules about that, pretend the rest has gone bad after x amount of time or whatever. Otherwise dont cheat.
I do agree with how it feels when everything is dark and empty and feels unsafe. You are not going to get that feeling by just having your place “go dark” but use your imagination or read what others have said about it. It is very eerie.
A few comments have been talking about children not being able to use computers. Like this is some kind of natural thing to do. I think classrooms are expecting too much too soon, trying to have them use keyboards and computers while too young, their little hands….. Look, none of us the original generation who made them used them as children either. Did not set us back. Children need to learn other things, like using a pencil, thinking, reading, doing. And, why would a teacher think a child would know how to save work or do anything on a computer without being taught to do so ? And why should they have to do their work on them, when first learning to write or do math or such, that is another layer of complexity to learn at the same time. The appropriate time to learn to use a computer is when it is the right tool for what you need to do. For alot of people, this is simply word processing. And you dont need that until you are writing longer papers, just like when people would learn how to use a typewriter. We did not give 5 year olds type writers ! We should not expect our 5 or 8 year olds who we would have never had using a typewriter back then trying to type up their work on a computer. Once you are at the developmental level to need that tool, it is not hard to learn. I wouldnt let me kids use one until they were old enough to understand what one was ( and how stupid they realy are underneath it all)
@ Michael Gray # 99
Macintosh computer : We bought one of the first ones, and by memory I expect you are referring to RAM. While it did work just fine for the word processing my husband was using it for, there were instructions going round in an early days online forum on hardware hacking that area to increase RAM. I decided it didnt look too bad so took it to work on the weekend and opened it up and performed that rough surgery. And broke it and no thanks to Apple found where I broke an internal trace and fixed it. A few years later my area dug out and repurposed a mothballed piece of equipment from the bone yard. The Mac was not new technology of theirs, it was a repackaging of an offering that had bombed. The Apple Lisa. I had never seen one before that, but the Lisa could run all the Mac software as it was the same machine and it was out of the corporate boneyard, so free for our group to take and use. The Lisa was much larger, Mac was packaged to be portable, small footprint, had alot more hardware integration, must have, which made its electronics smaller and brought the cost down. The Mac was expensive, we bought our home one on terms, but the Lisa could never have been marketed for home use, much more expensive . The Lisa was marketed to companies to be used by secretaries I believe, hence the name Lisa or maybe also for use instead of having to send it off to a secretary. Graphic interface, mouse, it was the Mac before there was the Mac, easy for non-computer literate to use.
Re wisdom teeth extaction, (David P. and Justin comments),
I had wisdom teeth removed as a teenager (otherwise they would have impacted into my other teeth). I got the blood clot thing, called dry socket. Super painful in the middle of the night; my mother took me to the oral surgeon who fixed me up. It can be avoided by not using straws for drinks or smoking cigarettes. When I had this done in the 70s we weren’t told (or they didn’t know) that sucking on straws caused this and I know I used a straw.
Watchflinger: About Dolly, yes, that, exactly! That’s certainly how I feel.
A woman on youtube said this: that the thing about Dolly was that she was for all of us – for example, you could be a super flamboyant drag queen or a staid little church lady and Dolly was just as much for you as she was for anyone.
I always liked that song 9 to 5.
So, bass! Cool! What do you like to play? My favourite bass player is Geddy Lee, although I’ll always wonder what would have been if Cliff had lived.
Chris (#171)
I agree that Philip K. Dick’s characters are not often all that sympathetic and the worlds he portrays usually have a darkness running through them. He can be quite humorous though.
If you haven’t read the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, I would recommend it. It is the book that Blade Runner was loosely and inconsistently based on. (In fact, the term Blade Runner comes from an entirely different story by a different author.)
I think he is brilliant and prescient – the dark visions of his amphetamine-addicted mind are now coming to pass – but not everyone’s cup of tea. Due to intense financial pressure, he wrote a great deal and did not have the time to revise and edit and I must admit, it shows.
His last few books are in part thinly veiled autobiography and in part works that Dick himself probably did not consider fiction. I find them fascinating in a different way.
JMG: I like such words as well and I’m not sure I would have gotten reacquainted with them if I hadn’t shown up here. We don’t really use them in construction. In that world what doesn’t get a frack gets a shale, sometimes both, and often not just one. It’s sometimes satisfying in its way to fill your lungs and let a stream of words like that out, but it’s really not creative or interesting in the way that the non-profane ones are.
But, then we agree about what balderdash is? To say that something is balderdash is indeed to assert that the thing is false. I might have better said, “guesswork designed to remove mystery where mystery isn’t acceptable” for general application, or “pretending I’m not alone”, about my particular thing. You might disagree that the things I spoke of are false, but that is indeed what I said.
I won’t repeat the charge about anyone else’s beliefs just because I happen to like the word, and anyway the “guesswork designed…” phrase is more like the thing in most cases. But the thing I was saying about how the music that comes from my app is the result of a spirit rather than the normal operation of the computer is glazed balderdash with cream of codswallop soup and a tall glass of poppycock. It is false.
Casting some stink eye at that thing I said about my name too. A brain defect that makes me think I should be the opposite sex from the biological reality could easily create an experience like that too. I’m sure Occam would concur and he wouldn’t even need his famous tool. A butterknife would be sufficient.
@ Lathechuck #177
Lol!
For sure, freedom is another word for nothing [you are too afraid] to lose… 😉
Does that mean that civilisation is a condition of acquiring too many things you’d be afraid of losing?
Hmmm…. lot’s to think about. 🙂
@TemporarilyReality #180
Re the matter of the changes to the pharmaceutical product details for measles vaccines over the years, it does not seem to have reduced the number of scientific papers studying measles outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations.
I just ran a search on Google Scholar by “custom years” for the search string “measles outbreak highly vaccinated”.
1963-1973 – 675 results
1973-1983 – 1220 results
1983-1993 – 2500 results
1993-2003 – 7120 results
2003-2013 – 16000 results
2013-2023 – 17500 results
2023-2026 – 16300 results (I ran this last partial decade for good measure)
I have not dived into the later literature very deeply, because, to me, the most striking fact is the degree to which outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations began to attract notice almost as soon as there were highly vaccinated populations for them to break out in (and the equally strong degree to which this fact has remained absent from public discourse).
However, it seems that the above search term never dried up as a source of hits in the scientific literature. For whatever that is worth.
Hi JMG,
are you familiar with Graham Hancocks work/investigations about flooded civilizations and if so, what do you think about it?
Greetings
Frank
@JMG Yeah! A folk saint is a good way to think about Dolly. I guess Bob Ross and Mister Rogers have a bit of the same.
A few thoughts:
It wasn’t just white working class Americans who gave birth to Country music and the nations various folk genres. The banjo had its origins in Africa, and all of the country’s best musical genres have shown an intense hybridization from the meeting ground here where various cultures intersected to create new flowerings. Of course Country wouldn’t be what it is without also the delta blues. Hip hop wouldn’t also wouldn’t be what it is without the debt to German electronic musicians such as Kraftwerk who were a favorite of turntabilists. Or rappers sampling Karlheniz Stockhausen. Of course we have black country musicians and plenty of white rappers. There is even the genre of hick-hop. Southern good ole boys like their rap and plenty of urban blacks get into punk, metal, alternative rock. (Yeah, this is mostly aimed at you @Chuaquin… but since you live in Spain, I imagine you don’t really know what the culture is like here on the ground in America, where none of it is as cut and dry as the media and social medias would like anyone to believe.)
Re: Nazis
If its true that what you contemplate you imitate, it seems good reason to not give too much time to contemplating Nazis.
That said, this summer I did read Spencer Sunshine’s academic but very readable book: Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege. I thought of writing a book review on it, but I would hesitate to give too much more attention to Mason or Siege. One thing I was happy to learn: there aren’t really a ton of actual neo-nazis in America. Not that I thought there were, but its a very small group that seems to mostly be made up of, well, and this may sound harsh, various antisocial and misanthropic losers. But I don’t think I need to mince words too much when it comes to this particular strain of Nazi-Satanists and Charles Manson worshippers covered in the book. That particular mix of members of the Church of Satan, people who liked to go visit Charles Manson in jail or write him letters, and actual Neo-Nazis, or just belligerent sociopaths, made strange bedfellows known as the Abraxas Circle (also sharing interests in various aspects of gnosticism and the darker side of magic) made inroads together to get these neo-nazi ideas into further circulation -and some really sick ideas about lone wolf serial killers and the like. Dark stuff. They edged their way into various existing subcultures where various extremes were tolerated and were all working to further the “cause” though they had different agendas and aims. Some of it ended up bleeding into the racist and ethnic isolationist end of Asatru. All of them self-identified as fascists (and I don’t write that word just to fling a name.)
Some of these folks were even too far out for the Neo-Nazis but found common ground with various edge lords and people who “wallowed in extremes” to use Sunshine’s term. Yet groups like the Atomwaffen Division (AWD) read Mason’s Siege and mixed it with accelerationism. What could go wrong? And their are other sickos like the Order of Nine Angels, and strange splinter groups exploring these things.
With the current anti-Zionist frenzy already moving to a greater degree of intensity, its not hard to imagine it spinning out of control from being against certain foreign policies, to being totally against the Jewish religion and people.
I will be reading Nicholas Goodricke-Clarkes books next… but I needed to take a break, because these things do seep into your mind, and well, its good to have some Sunshine after all that darkness. For me, I like to remember Dion Fortune, and others who did work on the inner planes to defend against those doing occult work for the Axis powers.
I did enjoy Philip K. Dick’s alternate history “The Man in the High Castle,” so I think there is a place for alternate histories. Sometimes it seems to me though, that the writers of some military histories and some alternate histories have a Nazi fetish. I’m not accusing anyone here of that, just bringing it up as part of the conversation.
re: PKD characters (@Chris, et al). I get what you mean about bad things usually unfolding in his books. Everyones always getting divorced (Dick himself was married a bunch of different times) relationships are on the outs, etc. I guess I did have empathy for the characters. One of the things I like about his SF is that its very everyman. It’s usually some repairman or janitor or other kind of lowly worker who is at the center of his tales, unwittingly subject to some kind of cosmic revelation. But unlike the superheros or stories of special chosen ones, these things don’t usually make their life better, or they don’t become a typical hero. They have to fight their way to reality in a world that doesn’t give a shale. So, much more realistic, in my opinion. There is a certain melancholy in them, such as in the sad book “Flow My Tears the Policeman Said,” or “Scanner Darkly” but I’ve been familiar with that kind of melancholy too, and I like to root for the underdog just like he did.
This is in a way a continuation of the discussion about technological bifurcation from last week.
I came across an article called Power and towns in late Roman Britain and early Anglo-Saxon England. It is a bit older, published in 2000, but from my layman’s understanding there haven’t been too many archaeological discoveries in the meantime that would overturn the hypotheses.
The article argues in great detail (leavened by some very sarcastic footnotes) that all kinds of Roman towns and cities were abandoned very early, beginning even before 400 CE, i.e. long before Saxon settlement, and that there is not a single case of Anglo-Saxon settlements “taking over” an existing Romano-British town.
(What makes this more ironic is that Roman cities in Britain had been fortified generously in the 3rd and 4th centuries: solid walls were built around the entire existing settlements, while in Gaul, the new city walls often retracted to a very modest part of the former city. The author of this paper doesn’t go into why, but I read a different, more recent paper that shows that Britain, or at least British large-scale grain producers, became very prosperous in the 4th century CE by exporting grain to the soldiers on the Rhine frontier. That kind of money might have financed the generous building program in Britain (my speculation), but this deindustrialized economy based on the export of commodities broke down very suddenly when the imperial court moved away from the capital at Trier in 380 CE and the Rhine frontier broke down. The more modest city walls in Gaul could be defended more easily).
The author argues that Anglo-Saxon rulers had no use at all for the empty stone ruins and preferred to build sumptuous but less permanent rural halls. He suggests that the missionaries sent by Pope Gregory at the end of the 6th century CE came with an outdated mental model of Britain and therefore tried to build bishoprics in the old Roman provincial capitals. It took them several decades to adjust to the new reality, and then they started building centres of church administration in the countryside, often next to existing royal halls, but sometimes (as in Lindisfarne) at some distance, maybe on purpose.
This struck me as a very vivid image: huge (for the time), still mostly fortified, but internally ruined cities, overgrown with vegetation, but still containing stone basilicas, baths and a forum, and the only living souls in the entire city were a bishop with his household, basically camping in the middle of the ruins and pretending this was a capital city. In the meanwhile, wooden halls in the countryside, and the yeomen, nobles and kings couldn’t see any reason at all to enter, much less to live in the stone ruins. Technological bifurcation!
As the author argues, it took several centuries for the towns to actually come alive again, due to a combination of the persistence of the church, the growing importance of long-distance trade (the old cities, like London, often lay at the perfect locations for trade) and finally the attacks of the Vikings, which made the old stone fortifications valuable again.
Hey, I just realized something. If I’m saying, and I am, that no conception of the hereafter (etc) made by humans is more likely than the literally infinite possibilties that have not been conceived of or imagined, since that realm is not observable save for dubious claims to have seen ghosts and whatnot…
If that proposition is true, must it not then follow that no random possibility is more *absurd* than any other? Whether it’s been thought of by humans or not?
Is there even such a thing as “absurd” in this context? That kind of bothers me, because if there is no “absurd”, then how can there be “sensible” either? If nothing is absurd, then everything is.
This reminds me of something. Has someone gone down this rabbit hole before? (googles) Oh, apparently so, one Albert Camus, who a quick review suggests was a very sensible… Ha! Sensible! I just realized the absurdity of what I was about to say!
Guy knew what was what though. I can tell, because he seems to agree with me. 😉
The memes that showed up with that search are hilarious!!
I hope there really is a Flying Spaghetti Monster so it can say “am I a joke to you” to atheists when they show up. Hah! Does Pastafarianism have hell??
Since there seems to be a lot of interest in the paw paw, I’ll just drop a note that the small town of Paw Paw WV will be holding its Paw Paw Festival on Sep. 12 this year, which may be of interest for those who live in the MidAtlantic region. I attended a couple years ago and there were some informative lectures on the paw paw tree and fruit.
https://pawpawfestivalwv.com/
PS: The nearby Paw Paw Tunnel on the C&O canal is a great hike!
I had my wisdom teeth removed when I was near 30. At least one of them was impacted. Because of this, the alignment of my remaining teeth was affected.
(This comment is not really about my teeth, however. It is about one of my language pet peeves: using “impacted” for “affected.” I’m getting to be such a grouch!)
Chuaquin #160
The youtuber Rubén Gisbert claims that the Ceuta migrant agresion is framed in a pacto Sánchez/Trump for to give the Spanish territorial wáter surrrounding Ceuta to USA’s control, and that ithis is included in the preparatory steps for the war USA/China.
Dental surgery:
I’ve had periodontal surgery once. They recommended lying prone under a general anesthetic but I chose a local anesthetic, seated in the chair. In preparation they started wrapping everything in plastic. It was when they wrapped the overhead light in plastic that I panicked..
“OMG, how high is the blood going to spurt?” I wondered.
It went off okay. The light was wrapped in plastic because the periodontist’s hands were bloody and he needed to move the light from time to time. Things healed quickly. A dentist told me that the mouth is the part of the body that heals quickest.
Cynthia C.:
I’ve been thinking about onanism within classical orchestras, and well, rock guitarists solos and frantic pianists can be seen like true musical onanists. However, philarmonic orchestras need their musicians play together, so there aren’t true onanists…except when an instrument is played in the equivalent of a rock solo or a lonely pianist (Sorry, I don’t know the classical music word for this “solo” by only one instrument).
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Northwind G. # 153:
I think blaming someone labelling him/her as a Nazi/Fascist is named online, half kidding, half seriously, as the “reductio ad Hitlerum” fallacy. It’s a dirty and nasty trick, especially used by woke leftists today, to avoid debunking with sound reasons (fair play) their usual rivals (what laziness it shows…).
Sometimes I don’t like your comments, but you also can see I’ve never played the “reductio ad Hitlerum” in JMG blog.
There’s another despicable tendence since 1945, apparently opposite against the thoughtstopper I’ve depicted before: I’ve known too many online and offline people who seems too interested in Hitler and their friends, so I suspect they admire with shame those evil guys. Hanna Arendt (she was a Jew), pointed it’s a big mistake depicting Nazis and other genocidals as evily evil overhuman monsters, because some people can fool themselves to believe those mass murderers were great men. They weren’t it, not at all. Arendt reminds us in her essay about “Eichmann at Jerusalem”, that evilness is rude and vulgar, not cool (banality of evil men).
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Martin B. # 157:
Very good comment…Yes LLMs will save the world (ha, ha). In addition to your sad and funny alike comment, it seems China government and many Chinese companies are supporting their own LLMs frenzy even more than current American “idiot savants”. This blindness could be another near future problem for that regime, in addition of some another Chinese contradictions (Can you guess which ones?). Oh, LLMs everywhere: What could be wrong?
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Ambrose # 168:
I agree. Belief in imaginary greatness and “manhood” of bad guys is very wrong and dangerous, and this tendency can be seen easily in ill interest on Nazis even today. By the way, I can tell you Sven Hassel bad written novels are still sold and bought here. He often depicted Nazi soldiers in a too romantic way, if some people keep believing those fake stories deserve to be read, it means they admire shamefully those dubious “heroes”.
Even some Wehrmacht German vets despised Hassel cheap novels for his lies about WWII (bullshale), some decades ago…
By the way, I’ve just known General Mladic, a former Serbian military, has died today. He wasn’t a Nazi, but he helped and fueled some nasty events during the ‘90s. I bet some Serbs still admire him (cough).
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More about Dolly Parton:
I can tell you not everybody here has despised Dolly and country music as a whole, but some people see her as another pop culture global icon. For example, during ‘90s a stupid rock band here, named “Los Berzas”, had a song about a redneck man who had fallen in a platonic love with Dolly, well, he especially liked her breasts…It was a comical and ironic song, but also an honest tribute to this country music “goddess”, methink. Smart and lovely humor can be another kind of tribute for a celebrity…
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Jessica # 182:
I think life expectancy hard data can be “cooked” by governments and “scientists” to fit into the godlike Progress narrative…to some extent, for a while. Even when hard data are true, its interpretation can be biased according different political agendas (for example, squatting cases or women killed by their male partners in Spain or another countries: let’s draw a veil…).
JMG, you seem unusually prolific for an author. Is there a particular reason or trick to it, or do you just, well, write a lot?
@Patient Observor
Yes, I sometimes see streams of what look like letters when I have my eyes closed, usually as I’m drifting off to sleep or just waking up. Usually in more or less horizontal bands. Maybe Latin letters or other marks that look rather like letters. It hasn’t happened much recently, but some years back I saw them almost every day. After attempts to read the letters and discovering that they didn’t seem to form words, at least not that I could understand, I guess I ignored them and the phenomenon went away.
I have to admit, I wanted them to mean something, but if they do it’s eluded me. They may be hypnagogic. I also fairly often see simple symbols such as a 6- or 8-spoked wheel, a 5-pointed star, or occasionally a Christian cross. Or concentric shrinking circles of color, most often purple, or other colored patterns. These things still happen, often when I’m preparing to meditate. I think it’s my mind starting to relax and shift away from ordinary thought.
@David P., I’ll chime in on the wisdom teeth question. Mine were all impacted and removed when I was 12, decades ago. Surgery with anesthesia. Once I recovered, I had no trouble with my jaws or back teeth. I have quite a small jaw so I think it was necessary. I’m glad it was done. The dr. should show you the X-rays so you can see the state of your teeth.
In addition to my comment about Ceuta “invasion” by thousands of Moroccan civilians, some “flashes”:
– EU elites, always eager to order again and again more economical sanctions against evil Russians, have avoided carefully to punish Morocco economy after its hybrid war attack against Spain (thanks for nothing, Brussels).
-European goverrments which made unilateral destructive criticisms against Spain govt haven’t been seriously warned nor punished for their reckless lack of loyalty against another EU member, by Brussels (no comments).
-Madrid govt delayed for some weeks real and massive humanitarian aid toward Ceuta local govt. It seems a similar situation like after Valencia floods in 2024. I think this “lazy” behavior would mean a dangerous tendence toward govt passive inhibition, which in the long term, if it worsens, would lead Spain to become a failed state.
-It wouldn’t be difficult for current Madrid govt to challenge Morocco govt blackmail. On the short form, our Prime Minister should order Spanish Navy to perform manieuvres near Moroccan and Ceuta coasts. At the same time, ASAP Ceuta and Melilla borders should be militarized with soldiers enough and tanks and artillery, for sending a clear message to Rabat. (Crickets…).
-Our brave patriotic right wing opposition hasn’t made any constructive criticism to Madrid govt behavior, maybe waiting its fall tomorrow (ahem). See previous “flash”…
-Our far right party leader visited Ceuta recently, to show a jingoist speech (maybe thinking in next year elections in Spain). He “forgot” to mourn the death of 80 people drowned in the sea during Ceuta rampage, maybe for him they weren’t human beings (cough).
-Finally, in the dubious case Ceuta events weren’t led by Rabat secret services and they were “spontaneous”, Morocco has an army to prevent massive not wanted population riots in its own territory, so they allowed Ceuta invasion (Morocco govt is responsible at least for doing nothing innthis case).
JMG which is better from an esoteric perspective, burial or cremation? Please explain and thanks again for all your ideas and commentary
The headquarters of Procter & Gamble in downtown Cincinnati have long been known as the Dolly Parton towers. I don’t know if it was just known that way by little boys, when I first heard it or not, but…
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cincinnati-procter-and-gamble-headquarters.jpg
JMG,
A recent trend that has begun in Ernest in many places is for broke municipalities to add ” special fees” in to the citizens utility bills for things that have nothing to do with those utilities like funding streets or parks. That is because in many states property tax laws only allow a small increase in accessed value over time. This will of course accelerate greatly as a revenue scheme when accessed values begin dropping rapidly.
This will be very disturbing for efforts to reduce ones monetary footprint to collapse now and avoid the rush later. No matter how much one economizes in water or sewer use ( if you are hooked to a municipal system) your bill will keep going up due to skyrocketing special fees. In Oregon this is happening in both broke cities, Independence and rich cities, West Linn so nowhere is safe unless there are specific laws prohibiting it where you live.
You can only really avoid this if you are in a position to relocate and choose a place with a septic tank and well ( as opposed to city water) that are viable for the medium term. In other words a well that has good access to non-contaminated water and enough land to support a drain field that does not contaminate your well. Or you set up a composting situation so that your well can stay clean if a proper drainfield is not possible. Beware of areas with lots that are too small but each lot has wells and septic. These can frequently lead to cross contamination between the properties. When my wife was public works director in a small city the state environmental quality department forced the conversion of a whole neighborhood of one acre lots to city water and sewer at great expense because they were contaminating each others wells.
Or just economist so much in other places you can afford these new fees.
Michael, maybe, but I’m fine with the Church of the SubGenius, for example. The Church of Gnome’s sticky sweetness feels manipulative to me — but I know, as previously noted, that this may simply be too sharply honed a cynicism on my part.
Atmospheric, thanks for this — doing a no-power dry run is a very good idea. I’ve done it several times, which is why I have a chafing dish to cook with and plenty of good candles.
Cynthia, we may disagree about balderdash. I would define it as nonsense, gibberish, colorful handwaving…and one of the lessons few people learn these days is that a conclusion can be true even though the arguments leading to it are utterly specious. Consider the medieval belief that rocks love the earth and hate to be separated from it, so if you lift one up, it strains to be reunited with its beloved and, when you let go of it, it flings itself into her embrace. I don’t think most people would agree with that way of thinking about gravity — they might well call it balderdash! — but the fact remains that it leads to a true conclusion, i.e., that if you lift up a rock and let go of it, it’ll fall to the ground. You can take that considerably further. Here’s a syllogism I use in a forthcoming book:
Major premise: All hedgehogs wear bright green bikinis.
Minor premise: Most ice cream contains no Martians.
Conclusion: Therefore, water is wet.
You can spend a good fifteen minutes laying out everything that’s wrong with this syllogism, starting with the illicit negative and the undistributed major and minor premises, but the conclusion is still quite true!
Frank, Hancock’s an interesting cat. He’s very good at collecting evidence, and some of the evidence is first-rate stuff, but he’s fond of jumping to conclusions that don’t necessarily follow from the facts. (I’m thinking among many other things of his claim that Freemasonry came to Earth 15,000 years ago with refugees from the planet Mars.) Still, he’s worth reading, and I plan on doing a thorough read of all his relevant books as I begin work (finally!) on the revision of my book on Atlantis.
WatchFlinger, very much so. In a sensible Pagan society they would have been elevated to the status of minor deities, along with Elvis and JFK.
Justin, thanks for this. You’re quite right, by the way. Many years ago, when I ran a Hermetic quarterly journal, I used to get unsolicited copies of various other small magazines. Most of them were pretty harmless, but there were two neo-Nazi periodicals, one British and one American. The British one was your typical Old World reactionary stuff, polished, pretentious, snide, with a veneer of logic over a lot of crass nastiness. The American one was fascinating because under the crude saliva-flecked rage and the kneejerk hatreds you could sometimes see flickers of genuine self-knowledge. I recall one editorial in response to the WTO riots in Seattle, in which the editor was bemoaning the fact that the neo-Nazi movement couldn’t even dream of managing so efficient a protest — and he talked about how everyone in the US neo-Nazi scene was an antisocial, misanthropic loser who’d embraced Nazism as a way of putting a label on their awareness of their own failure.
I’ve also known a couple of Klansmen personally. Both of them saw themselves as total failures, not without reason, and put on the bedsheets because it allowed them to tell themselves that there really were people who were lower than they were. From such motives no succesful movement was ever born.
Aldarion, yep. Roman cities depended, as ours do, on long-distance trade connections. When the fall of the Western Empire shredded those, the cities became quarries for raw materials and nothing more; it’s worth remembering that the English word “dilapidated” literally means “having had stones taken out of it,” because that’s what was done to Roman buildings all over.
Cynthia, the only reason I take ghosts and reincarnation seriously is that I’ve seen and heard the one, and recalled memories via the other. If you haven’t had such experiences, why, it’s not as though having the “right” opinions about the afterlife matters two farts in a cat-5 hurricane, you know.
Cyclone, hmm! Well, I ate my first two pawpaws this morning with breakfast, and enjoyed them — rather like a banana that had a mango in the woodpile somewhere back in its family tree. I don’t know how easy it is to get to Paw Paw, WV, but I’ll look into it.
Jennifer, I write a lot. I have the advantage that I naturally think in spoken language, so I never have to try to find words for what I want to say — if I can think it, I can write it — and a few decades of occult practice have helped my ability to concentrate, but mostly I just write a lot. Oh, and I’m kind of antisocial, so I’m not always running out to do something with other people, which helps me write a lot.
Dusan, as long as you wait for at least three days after death, it doesn’t matter a bit. Once the etheric body has separated from it — that’s usually complete by the three-day mark — the body’s just organic matter, and can be cremated, buried, composted, or what have you. Myself, I’d rather be cremated and have my ashes scattered in a natural environment, but that’s purely an aesthetic matter.
Justin, ha! Okay, once P&G goes bust, we can start a fundraiser to buy the building as the Cathedral of St. Dolly Parton. 😉
Clay, and that’s going to be one of the major forces driving people to drop out of formal participation in society and take up the squatter lifestyle, from which the tribal societies of the deindustrial future will draw much of their ancestry. It may also lead to local revolts against elite groups and spendthrift officials, some of them political, others violent.
BTW, I just deleted a couple of angry posts about Nazism. That’s a subject that very often whips people up into a rage, and so I’m placing a moratorium on that subject for the rest of this open post: nothing about Nazis, Hitler, or any related topic will be put through. Maybe you can talk about Mussolini instead.
Chuaquin: Oh dear God, some people are just too good for this world. Buddy I was making a crude joke, not asking serious questions. Ha ha. Now I feel like I let out a loud fart in church. Please excuse my crudity. Eek!
I think that “solo” originally had the meaning of only one instrument, and that the meaning has become more relaxed since then so as to include people playing accompanied melodies. I guess there’s general agreement that the two things are similar enough for the same word to serve for both. I’m not sure I agree, but it is what it is.
JMG #60: I certainly understand the feeling of praying and getting a cosmic voicemail/answering machine. As for why some do get a response, I believe you said that there are a variety of entities answering to the name of “Jesus”, which would explain that. I also recall a discussion in which Christianity, the ultimate Piscean religion, is naturally fading due to the coming of the Age of Aquarius. Another reason may be the departure of the 6th plane souls, who have been trapped here since the beginning of the Bronze Age, whose spiritual plight is accurately described by the Axial faiths.
Anselmo #122: Let’s not forget about the Kakure Kirishitans, or Hidden Christians, who survived the persecution and carried on their religion underground. It seems to have become a strange mishmash of my native Catholicism with eastern influences — one documentary I watched showed elderly priests doing Communion with bowls of rice and sake (rice wine)! There’s also their Scripture, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth (Tenchi Hajimari no Koto), which likewise is an amalgamate of the Catholic Bible with Eastern culture. A rather fascinating history overall, which I first became aware of when it was referenced in the classic anime Samurai Champloo. They still exist today in dwindling numbers, known since the Meiji Restoration as Hanare Kirishitans (Separated Christians) who refuse to be reintegrated into the mainstream Church, sticking to their own mutated customs. Ironically, it was the ending of persecution and legalization of Christianity that spelled their gradual demise.
JMG #150, Jeff #181, JMG #184: Fascinating stuff, and much thanks to Karim for bringing out that history. I hadn’t realized that the “cross within circle” design came from the Atlantean Sea Temples! So that confirms that the seedbearers landed in Ireland, Africa, and North America, among other places. Yes, the legend of Numenor, or Akallabeth the Fallen (or Atalante in one of the Elvish languages, to make the connection even more blatant), is a fairly accurate retelling, as is the Zeal arc of Chrono Trigger. Both versions hit upon the major points of an advanced, ancient civilization, a turn towards corruption and evil entities, its downfall resulting in a tidal wave, and survivors seeding their knowledge while blending into existing societies. Chrono Trigger in particular depicts a few different islands, and the rest of the world locked in an ice age (the islands also floated in the sky, but we have to allow a bit of artistic liberty).
More than that, CT depicts Reptites, a prehistoric race of intelligent dinosaurids, and Mystics, intelligent magical beings who seem to be a stand-in for the Fae. As I’ve said, a surprising amount of occult lore lives on in pop culture, with CT as one of the best examples, but not the only one by any means.
methylethyl 175
> Got all four done at once to get it over with and minimize costs. If I had to do it again, I’d do the same thing.
But beforehand, buy soup cans (or make soup). I don’t remember much about specifics of having my wisdom teeth out; I don’t know if it was two + two, or all four at once. I remember it was an oral SURGEON who extracted them. According to my diet of those days, I would have subsisted on soup, yogurt, and instant oatmeal for a few days; early thereafter bean-and-cheese burritos. Nothing that required chewing, like no chunky soup.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Further to St. Dolly Parton:
The first icon of the new saint. The artist is Asterosperma aka Stacie E. Williams, who can be reached via her website.
I’ve recently been having some face-to-face experiences with figuration. I had a partial hole in my macula, so underwent retina surgery. It was a spectacular failure and now there’s a hole in the center of my vision (in one eye) about the size of a dime at a foot. But when I have both eyes open I apparently see normally – the vision from the good eye seamlessly fills in the hole. Even if I look only through the bad eye, my visual cortex does a heroic job of trying to fill in the hole with visual material surrounding it – this can lead to some interesting effects! But it does make plain just how much I’m interpreting and creating what appears to be “reality!”
It’s also made me much more aware of how much “I” am entangled in this flesh and blood. I’ve had this idea that at death “I” will just drift painlessly out of this body, but I now suspect the experience is going to be just as painful and traumatic as birth.
Anyway, this is a roundabout way of thanking you for all the discussions about philosophy, as well as the recommendation of Stoicism (which is helping me accept my reduced vision with relatively good grace).
@Frank (#194) & JMG (#211):th
I’ve read a bit of Hancock, and he’s definitely a cut above many of the other “hidden prehistory” authors.
I got into Hancock because he collaborated with my first occult teacher (outside of my own family), the late Clesson Hopkins Harvey (1925-2012). Harvey had grown up and gone to school in Katherine Tingley’s Theosophical colony at Point Loma, California. He read Old Egyptian and Classical Tibetan easily, edited a small magazine, The Blavatsky Theosophist (3 volumes, 1982-1990), ran a website on the Old Egyptian Pyramid Texts (pyramidtexts.com), and published a fine short book on meditation, The Short Path (1996).
@JMG (#216):
Many thanks for this!
Hi JMG,
I hope all is well with you and the new digs. My apologies for not commenting but I’m in the process of restoring a ’68 ford 3000 tractor and this has kept me busy for the past 4 months or so. Did you know that the logistics of repairing this thing using Amazon, Ebay or Atwoods is much better than a new one? It’s pretty impressive for a 60 year tractor but between the Chinese & Indian knockoffs, the salvage yards, and just plain generic parts from Atwoods or the local auto parts store, I can usually have parts in hand within an average of 3 days. I’m starting to think of this as an heirloom tractor for the grandkids since it could be converted to alcohol or other fuel as needed, not very specialized at all. Not to mention repaired almost indefinitely. I’m stock piling parts anyway though.
Anyway, on our long descent I know collect data points and thought I would pass this one along. I absolutely love this idea and had never heard of it, the repair cafe where mechanics to seamstresses gather to fix stuff. I hate disposable items, the ongoing crapificaction drives me crazy. However, this feels like something that could mitigate alot of problems in the future. Not to mention help would be apprentices find suitable master craftsmen to work for. Think farmers market but people bring their junk and leave with functioning items or some coin since if its not repairable, its useful as spares. More info at the link below, apparently its catching on.
Looking forward to the revised Atlantis book, one of my favorite topics when you write about it.
Cheers,
Bob
https://tomknighton.substack.com/p/a-promising-development
@Ambrose, I understand that the bombing campaign against abortions, when tried in Canada, is a lot of the reason that Canada went solidly pro-choice. It caused quite a backlash. So I don’t think that’s a viable tactic to deal with MAiD. I think the biggest problem with MAiD is that most people haven’t realized yet that the safeguards that were supposed to be in place either got removed in 2021, or are being ignored a meaningful amount of the time.
The question is what people will do with that information once it becomes non-ignorable. That’s a large part of why I keep bringing the subject up here: I’m hoping to make sure the Canadians on here know what’s happening.
Hi JMG,
I have noticed that you often get asked questions regarding the difficulty in working on a craft or praxis. I was listening to Paul Thomson, who started Spitfire Audio, and he mentioned that 99% of people give up on establishing a career in the field where they want to succeed. He said the 1% who stick it out are often successful.
I don’t think that one is always successful for sticking something out, but I do think he’s on to something very important.–and this relates to your idea of Will. And there is something magical about this, too. Sticking to your chosen craft requires that you overcome your self-imposed limitations; but the astral light also comes into play since you are working to open a new path.
What do you think of this? Have you found that people sticking to something for years will result in a positive outcome?
Hi JMG,
good grief, I didn’t know he’s making such outlandish claims! I also didn’t know about your book on Atlantis, and I’m rather interested…should I wait for the revision before I by it?
greetings
Frank
Hey JMG
I don’t know if I have asked you this previously or not, but what are your thoughts on J.G. Ballard and his works? I have been on a bit of a Ballard trip at the moment, currently I’m going through a collection of his interviews called “Extreme Metaphors”. It’s amazing how prescient he is about the future, modernity and humanity yet still remain an adherent to “progress” in his own odd way. I mentioned to JPM earlier that he is almost a kind of bizarro version of yourself, in the sense of having unique and interesting takes on the world and predicting quite a few trends that more fashionable people would not let themselves notice.
Justin @ 196:
With the current anti-Zionist frenzy already moving to a greater degree of intensity, its not hard to imagine it spinning out of control from being against certain foreign policies, to being totally against the Jewish religion and people.
I would not wish to see that happen, but I do take leave to point out that the more intransigent the person, government or movement, the more extreme is the backlash. I think many Americans who did support Israel–brave little nation fighting for its’ life, building civilization in the wilderness, etc. etc.–are feeling that they were conned and taken advantage of. Not a pleasant feeling, and not everyone is willing to say, oops, I messed up, won’t do that/believe that person again. OK, I already know that the ME was not and is not a wilderness, is and was the site of many highly advanced civilizations; I am talking about myths that were sold to a gullible public.
Hi John,
Would be very interested in your revised book on Atlantis. It is one the biggest mysteries of the ancient world and would love your very summary version of your revised theory.
On a very different subject, a spook I follow wrote on his blog the following:
https://topsecretumbra.substack.com/p/general-ratko-mladic-1942-2026?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=61287&post_id=213049402&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=1dcn5&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
“e controversial career of General Mladić offers troubling questions for Europeans, many of whom revile him as a monster. More than three decades after he secured the Republika Srpska in the face of Muslim attacks that were backed by NATO, it’s Europe itself which appears imperiled by radical Islam. Rising crime, terrorism, and even outright invasion by Muslim migrants as witnessed recently in Ceuta are causing many Europeans to wonder about their future, particularly in light of the dismal native demographics plaguing the whole continent. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently mocked Great Britain as an “Islamic republic,” a taunt which was denounced by European elites – but might it come true by the middle of this century? If so, France and many Western European countries are on the same demographic trajectory, while the willingness of Europe’s political class to stand up to radical Islam doesn’t seem to even chart. To be sure, there are right-wing parties on the rise in several European countries which promise to get tough with Muslim migrants whom they rightly associate with crime and violence.
However, it may already be too late to turn back some of these ominous trends through normal democratic politics. A gradual Islamic takeover of much of Europe through demographics and force, once dismissed as a paranoid far-right joke, isn’t the subject of laughter anymore. If conventional politics fails to rescue Europe from Islamization in the coming decades, the rougher yet proven methods of Ratko Mladić, which he employed to save his people, Bosnian Serbs, from the jihad in the 1990s, may well represent the continent’s only option to survive.”
I haven’t seem him write such a dark take on Europe until now.
I’ve been busy inventing a new kind of musical instrument I draw on every source for inspiration, and I remembered you, Mr Greer.
Specifically, I remembered “Electrically heated underwear for chickens”, and by extension the quad graph of utility and cost.
Eagerly, I applied this rationale to my invention. What if I cut a hole that you could put an effects pedal into? useful? sure. cheap? yeah. cut one hole. Great! incorporated for sure! What if I get some tiny led lights, drill a hole for a battery container, and have light up fret markers? cheap and easy. marvellous.
and so on.
And suddenly my simple prototype turned into something complex and unwieldy. An option for the finished product? yeah that might work. As a way to progress my idea? worse than useless.
Lessons learned?
Just because something is easy and has utility doesn’t mean you want it. And following any dogma uncritically leads to errors that critical appraisal catches.
Xcalibur/djs, I tend to think it’s specifically the change of astrological ages that’s doing it; as Jesus said (Matthew 28:20), “for behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” — in Greek, that last phrase is heos tes synteleias to aionos, “until the completion of the aeon.” Clearly, though, that’s a gradual process, as some people are still making contact with at least one of the entities called Christ. As for Atlantis, well, that’s the tradition as I got it from mimeographed lessons back in the day!
Roldy, condolences on the surgical flop, and I’m glad to hear you’re getting by well anyway. As for death, it really does depend on how you prepare for it. It’s worth mentioning that meditation helps make it much easier…
Robert, I can’t imagine why I didn’t download The Short Path earlier — I guessed, correctly, that you’d have it up on Archive.org. A friendly note to all other readers of this blog: you can get a capable and pleasantly idiosyncratic education in occult spirituality by using Archive’s “find everything this person has uploaded” function and going here:
https://archive.org/details/@oldprofessor
BobinOK, now that sounds like a very useful project indeed! Yes, I’ve started to hear about repair cafés out here on the east coast too — it strikes me as a brilliant idea.
Jon, bingo. The most common factor that distinguishes the successful person from the failure is raw perseverance. That’s not the only thing that comes into play, to be sure, but Edgar Guest’s once-famous poem is still far more often true than not:
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it!
Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that;
At least no one ever has done it;”
But he took off his coat and he took off his hat
And the first thing we knew he’d begun it.
With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quiddit,
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.
There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure,
There are thousands to point out to you one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing
That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.
Frank, I’d wait for the revised edition. I ignored far too many relevant facts in the earlier book, which is why I’ve never allowed it to be reprinted. The new version has the working title Before Atlantis: Secret Knowledge and the Lost History of Humanity, and it covers all four of the cycles of civilization that took place before the beginning of our history.
J.L.Mc12, I’ve tried several times to get into Ballard, and never enjoyed him. I’ll have to give him another try one of these days.
Forecasting, that’s what I’ve been saying for years now. Unless something changes drastically, given that western European elites are going out of their way to make exactly the same mistake that Vortigern did in post-Roman Britain, the consequences will be identical: the historic nations of western Europe will cease to exist within a century or so and will be replaced politically, culturally, and demographically by Islamic nations populated mostly by the descendants of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. It really is that simple. England, for example, will no longer exist in any legal, cultural, political, or demographic sense; its current territory will be occupied by the Islamic Republic of ‘Iinkiltira, or something along the same lines, and the descendants of its native population — those whose ancestors didn’t flee abroad — will be a persecuted religious and cultural minority, rather like the Copts in today’s Egypt. And the elites who are abetting this, out of an idiotic conviction that this will help keep them in power? Again, Vortigern’s a good model; they and their families will most likely be slaughtered by the newcomers, down to the last man, woman, and child.
Paul, it took me a moment to remember electrically heated underwear for chickens! Sounds like it’s time to start over with a simpler design…
About euthanizing mental health patients for their organs, I can only imagine what effects that might have on the recipients. Our society tends to think of the mind as correlated solely with the brain and the rest of the body as mere machinery. However, many organ transplant recipients, especially those who receive hearts, report changes in personality that correspond with the donors, sometimes specific things like musical tastes, food preferences, and even sexual orientations. This article is a good discussion of the phenomenon,
https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-mystery-of-transplanted-consciousness?
If significant numbers of the rich and powerful end up receiving organs from those with severe mental health issues, who knows how much crazier things will become?
Hi JMG,
you wrote
“BTW, I just deleted a couple of angry posts about Nazism. That’s a subject that very often whips people up into a rage, and so I’m placing a moratorium on that subject for the rest of this open post: nothing about Nazis, Hitler, or any related topic will be put through. Maybe you can talk about Mussolini instead.”
Thank you for that, there’s quite enough of that going on in my country just now.
Also thank you for taking the time to answer each polite question patiently and just as politely.
greetings
Frank
JMG (no. 216) Great is Dollyana of the Redneckians!
(no. 211) ” The Church of Gnome’s sticky sweetness feels manipulative to me…”
Worse than the Steinerians? They worship gnomes too, and use them in Waldorf schools.
“… the only reason I take…reincarnation seriously is that I’ve…recalled memories”
Dusan (no. 208) “which is better from an esoteric perspective, burial or cremation?”
There are other options. The Neptune Society organizes “burials” at sea (from an airplane), in order to avoid exorbitant funerary fees. Not to be confused with “sky burials” as practiced by Tibetans and Parsees! It is also possible to donate one’s body to science, or to that German artist who preserves and mounts them in interesting positions.
Then what made you conclude that what you were experiencing was recalled memories of a past life, as opposed to clairvoyant perception of the memories of somebody else from that past? They might even be fantasies in the Jungian / Corbinian sense. (I say this as someone who has dreamed of “my own previous death” in 1920.)
BTW I was born without any wisdom teeth buds at all, so I will never grow wisdom teeth. This must mean something!
(did my last post get scrambled? Sorry, I’m klutzy like that.)
Yes, trade is large part of the reason for cities to exist – but administration is another one. The thesis of the author of that article (S. T. Loseby) is that, even when long-distance trade and the control of the empire over Gaul collapsed, all of the Roman provincial capitals continued to exist (in at least token form) because some taxes were still collected there and because the administration of the Christian church substituted largely for the reduced civilian administration. In Britain, Christianity had barely begun to make inroads when Roman civilian and military control collapsed (between 380 and 410 CE), so the church wasn’t there to maintain the cities alive.
As far as I understand, for several centuries, Anglo-Saxons did not want to live in stone buildings, preferring wooden ones. That is what made me think of technological bifurcation. Dilapidation would not have been a thing during those early centuries, but only when people started to live in the old cities again, from the 9th century onwards.
Something occurred to me re the disenchantment/enchantment discussions concerning our time of decline.
I think re-enchantment – figuring out that the world around us, especially the land and living plants and animals, is not an It but a Thou, and re-establishing that relationship, is going to be a critical factor in surviving the coming changes as the techno world crumbles and falls apart. That doesn’t feel like fantasizing but like re-connecting to a level of life and intelligence we will need to navigate.
I’m not talking about a political agenda but an individual shift in consciousness, one that has to be personally done each for themself – not for a magic utopia but for life and death survival.
It is obvious that the distinctive cultural and social entities of Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the USA which in my youth felt permanent are fading and in years to come will be creatures of the past. The loss of civilizational confidence and the associated demographic death spiral will not be reversed IMO. There is a sad autumnal feeling when I consider this, reminding me of Galadriel’s lament when Frodo and company left Lothlorien. I especially feel it when I hear the popular music of my youth in the 1960’s – a creative varied zest which I don’t hear now. Of course I know those cultures were a mixture of the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the true, the false as is the ongoing human condition. And this death throes of civilizations is what happens..
@Forecasting Intelligence: The civil war in former Yugoslavia started with Slovenia’s, then Croatia’s declaration of independence. Bloody battles were already being fought before Bosnia got involved at all, and initially the strongest forces in Bosnia were the Serbian and Croatian armies. Bosnian Muslims were not known for being radically religious at all. I find it very strange to retroproject a jihad into that war.
JMG: Did medieval people think birds hated the earth? Sure they land on it sometimes, but at other times they get a lot farther away from it than you can throw a rock. Maybe it was just thought they had a complicated relationship with it. Did anyone try to acquire flight capability by evincing a nasty attitude towards the earth? “Eat caca you stupid dirty rock!” When people died by falling from a height, was it said they loved the earth too much? Did people fear to express appreciation for the sun, lest they fly right into it?
Was this an actual belief or just a poetic thing people said? If forced to make a wager, I would bet on the second thing.
The actual larger point is valid enough: A proposition is not necessarily false just because someone makes a totally bogus case for it. From a standpoint of pure logic this is true, anyway. When human motivations are taken into account, however, this does indeed constitute a reason to examine the proposition critically, as far as I’m concerned. The proposition may survive such an examination, but it’s well to know why the bogus case for it.
This is getting a little vague, so I clarify that usually the ways people make sense of the spiritual don’t need such an examination; they can just be. If you’re a nice person and don’t hurt anyone, I don’t care if you think God is a hedgehog and the earth is a post-meal pebble he left one day.
Likewise, you’re free to believe you encountered a ghost because there was a ghost, and I’m free to believe I encountered a spirit because I was being a dingbat custard for emotional reasons.
I haven’t got a stance on reincarnation – none of my memories purport to be from anything but this life. I was treating it as a pleasant notion for a while. I do think it’s very likely that Patton was telling himself what he needed to.
If there is reincarnation, I think it’s just as likely to take the form that I saw some of your other readers discussing recently: that the soul is not an inseparable unit, that it’s more like a glass of water that gets poured into the pool upon returning, and a new glass is scooped out when a new soul is needed. Some of it may be the same “water”, but rarely if ever enough to approach being “the same person”. That’s all strictly theoretical though, there’s no way to know about any of that.
Be all that as it may: confirming agreement with with your evaluation of the gaseous impurity in the hurricane. 😀 I just find it interesting to shoot this particular [shoot].
Paul: I want to hear the music that comes from electric chicken underwear! Hahahaha!
Hi John Michael,
The private credit thing is only possible I reckon, because there is so much mad cash sloshing around the system looking for a place to go which doesn’t push up everyday stuff bought by people at stores. The joke is, there are only so many things to invest in. However, it does eventually find its way into that real world space, but hefty interest costs acts like a brake, and bizarrely also a feedback loop, which further exacerbates the problem. Probably also explains the ever rising equities markets too.
Forget about all that, the core problem remains the same, it is a system built upon ‘belief’, and who knows what event can push the first domino over. To be honest, I’m astounded that the whole mess has worked for as many decades as it has. It’s been my observation that all strategies are subject to diminishing returns. Oh well. You know man, when I think of investments in say, construction of arty-fish-al datar centres, the word redemption, or even the phrase ‘return on investment’, just doesn’t enter my consciousness. That stuff makes no sense, unless as I noted a brief and unusual reference to ‘five eyez’ the other day in a discussion about the subject. That caused a double take, and put a whole new spin on things. Still looks stupid to me though, anything that expensive, which has to be replaced at three year intervals, is what going broke possibly looks like, but what do I know? I really don’t know and am merely guessing.
Strange days… I keep saying that, but then the plural was used!
Cheers
Chris
Moving forward, I shan’t be participating in “‘minefield’ discussions about Nazis, Jews, Zionism,” and the like.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Addendum to the previous: having not used my app in a few days, I certainly did just now check it to confirm that it hasn’t been made no good by an angry spirit reacting to this galling nonsense about him not existing. It was a little bit of a fright when at first it didn’t work, but then I saw that the input volume was off and it couldn’t hear the guitar. It was fine once I fixed that.
My official stance notwithstanding, I still did feel the impulse to thank the spirit for his particularly nice contributions while I was playing. That certainly is inconsistent. Oh well. I’m here to make music, not sense. If both are expected I shall need to get paid more. 😉
I am looking forward to reading your Life Force Workbook. I practice tai chi doing a short yang style form and a longer Sun style form daily. The key qigong movement in Sun tai chi is the simple open close movement – palms facing each other a few inches in front of the heart area. As you inhale the hands open a bit with the inhalation and close a bit with the exhalation. It is supposed to put qi into your dan tien (belly area) where it becomes a source of good life energy in your system. Even as a stand alone method not done as part of the form I find a few repetitions clears my mind and refreshes and energizes me. I am writing this after doing so. The shoulders and chest area are relaxed and as you exhale a subtle uplift of the crotch (a gentle keel) can be done to maximize the effect.
Also knees very slightly bent and relaxed as is the rest of you with relaxed eyes gently looking at the space between the hands
jmg@211
“a mango in the woodpile”, splendid allusion, i must now curb the impulse to drop suchlike in fora where they would not be appreciated
Related to the new Satanic Panic brewing… I realized today that during my lifetime, there have been maybe a (low) single-digit number of years in which there was not some major moral panic or other blazing through the US. Some of them were based on the real problems (ex: terrorism), some of them were basically imaginary (ex: the original Satanic Panic), some were partisan in character, some crossed party lines, but all of them had people screaming their heads off for immediate and forceful action against the latest boogeyman.
And I have to wonder: is this just an American/Anglosphere/European thing or is this fairly normal for all cultures?
Aldarion – I suggest you read the article in full. There were some nasty Islamists among the Bosnian Muslims and they also slaughtered their enemies. The spook I follow is an expert on that civil war.
Ambrose, re: “BTW I was born without any wisdom teeth buds at all, so I will never grow wisdom teeth. This must mean something!”
I thought about what that might mean and I came up with this hypothesis: Your dental genes are from a people who survived in the ancestral environment long enough for it to matter whether natural selection corrected wisdom teeth away. More typical of the time is that people didn’t live long enough to create a selection pressure that did that.
Unless you were hoping to hear it means you’re the Chosen One, in which case sure dude it’s that. What’s your style, Anakin, Harry Potter, or something else? 😉
—
I noticed that we’re invited to talk about Mussolini. Well, I for one think he was a real jerk! Do you know in the war he chose the side of Hi…
..rohito!
@Chris #238, Yeah, the money system is a social construct and always has been, even with gold. What would be the price of an ounce of gold if it was valued only for what it is physically used for like copper and lead.
Slithy Toves @ 244, I think moral panics are amplified and sometimes started by mass media. Sometimes they are deliberately instigated for commercial or political reasons.
Cynthia Christie (no. 237) “… the soul is not an inseparable unit, that it’s more like a glass of water that gets poured into the pool upon returning, and a new glass is scooped out when a new soul is needed.”
In that case, we should not be speaking of discrete individual souls, but rather of “soul-stuff.” Come to think of it, how does this differ from the “materialist” view that thoughts are created by the brain? Does it imply another substance?
Kashtan, good gods. I somehow didn’t think of that, but of course you’re quite correct. In fact, that might explain some of the ways our societies have been running off the rails of late…
Frank, you’re welcome. I don’t like to do that, but sometimes it’s necessary.
Ambrose, you have to admit, she has the necessary attributes to fill in for the Ephesian goddess — only two of them, but substantial. As for Waldorf schools, no, they give off the earnest and slightly crazed ambience of the fringe, but I’m comfortable with that — if I’d had kids they would have gone to Waldorf schools. As for reincarnation, I’m quite familar with clairvoyant experiences and past life memories have two features that those don’t. On the one hand, there’s a gut-level somatic dimension — one of the first such memories I recovered, for instance, was by way of suddenly remembering what it feels like to smoke a pipe (something I’ve never done in this incarnation); it was by concentrating on the sensations that I began to recover the rest of that life. On the other, the memories explain present life conditions. Among my memories, for examples, are details of how I died last time around — head through a windshield, to be precise — and my neurological problems, which I’ve had since birth, are rather oddly similar to what you’d get from cerebral trauma. Can I prove that that’s what’s going on? No, but you can’t prove that the memories you have of yesterday weren’t implanted there by some CIA mind control conspiracy. In both cases it makes more sense to treat memories as memories, don’t you think?
Aldarion, hmm! Fair enough. Dilapidation would have started in a small way early on, though, to get stones for hearths. Even if you prefer to live in Heorot, having a nice stone hearth in the center is probably attractive.
Charlie, exactly. Exactly.
BeardTree, I know. I don’t like knowing what’s going to happen, not least because I have a lot of emotions tied up in European history and culture, and also because I know from historical examples just how brutal the transformations are going to be. I can only hope that Europeans will do the smart thing and flee here, as a growing number of white South Africans have done.
Cynthia, according to medieval thought your body is mostly made up of the element of earth, and so if you’re up in the air, it flings itself back toward Mama; the fact that it lands with a splat inconveniences you, not the elemental substances of which your body is made. This wasn’t poetry — it’s the way gravity was explained in university classes and serious scholarly discussions.
Chris, yes, and we’re going to be talking about that in quite some detail a little later on. We’re in the same situation the world was in around 1928, when the entire structure of society depended on rates of return on investment that productive economic activity could not support, and so people tried to make up the difference with the manufacture of imaginary wealth through speculation. We know how that ended.
Northwind, thank you for understanding.
BeardTree, hmm! I learned a very similar exercise in a western occult school. It’s good stuff.
Adrian, oh, mangoes are always appreciated. 😉
Slithy, it’s certainly an American thing. There’s always a moral panic in the USA. I’m not sure how common it is elsewhere.
@BobInOk,
Congratulations on restoring the Ford 3000. I grew up on the farm with that model along with a Ford 5000. All of our neighbors were Deere people but my dad’s family was from Dearborn and he only drove and farmed with Fords his entire life. A very reliable tractor as I remember. Do you have the Manual or the Selecto-Speed transmission? A good example of what American manufacturing was capable of at its peak. Solid, Simple and reliable but with all the features you needed ( 3 point hitch, load shifting, hydraulics, pto, turning brakes. A modern company could do worse than to copy and manufacture that tractor exactly today.
The bulk of our immigrants come from Latin American countries that because of the Spanish and Roman’s Catholic strain can work well here. I live in a heavily Mexican area in California and as a descendant of 1600’s New England settlers feel totally comfortable and they with me and we share basically the same values. So the USA, if it is wisely led and managed with our large area, more abundant natural resources, ocean protection, could persist as a one American land of liberty for quite some time, longer than what we both foresee for European countries.. Unfortunately that wise leadership on all sides seems to be lacking in our land.
JMG, Interesting, in what western occult school did you learn that similar exercise if you are free to tell me.
President Xi is even closer to being Emperor Xi. He just canned another batch of subordinates. The Central Military Commission now consists of one person who now reports directly to Xi.
The claimed reason is corruption. Who knows if it’s true. It could be the bureaucracy there just won’t move either. Their PMC is very comfortable with things as they are.
“Did anyone try to acquire flight capability by evincing a nasty attitude towards the earth?”
According to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the trick to flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Arthur Dent, being somewhat incompetent managed to do this. Later on he taught Fenchurch the same trick.
Hey JMG
If you are more interested in Ballard’s philosophy, rather than his fiction, I’d say that you should read “Extreme Metaphors” as I currently am, or maybe his compilation of essays “A user’s guide to the Millennium”.
I can understand having some trouble reading Ballard, as the way he writes is sometimes a bit difficult to fully understand or sympathise with. But I find for the most part that I like his fiction. You may consider reading the first book of his that I read, “Concrete Island, since it’s not only fairly short but to my mind one of the only books that is somewhat comedic.
It’s essentially a parody of “Robinson Crusoe”, in which the shipwrecked sailor and the deserted island is replaced with an architect named Maitland who crashes his car into a patch of land between a couple of highways. He is unable to leave because everyone driving past is unable or unwilling to stop and help, and because Maitland keeps sabotaging his own efforts to escape since he actually likes the peace and self-sufficiency of his little “island”.
On the Good news front, I had a grandchild born last week, 9 days old today, they were let come home 4 days ago. Mom and baby in good shape, look healthy there was a scare with mom and not as smooth a birth as planned but they are now out of that round of medical industrial complex clutches and safe at home, I saw them earlier, made them a nice lentil soup and apple pie from last years canned apple slices and held a sleeping little one for a bit. They have the sweetest little faces, little nursey mouth, and alot of hair on this one ! A strong celtic first name followed by a nod to the transcedentialists in the middle.
“..the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly “self-reliant” and independent. Transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in the everyday. “
My paw paw trees did not make it, maybe I will try again someday, they also have cool flowers. One of my neighbors into fruit trees, one of hers finally fruited, I dont know if we are a good area for them or not due to our struggles, but likely once established they could make it. Anyways, she shared her first and only pawpaw with me and I did like it. Unique.
@Slithy #244:
As JMG has said, constant moral panics are definitely an American thing. This comes from the New England Puritan influence, going back at least to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.
This was an important reason I moved overseas. As something of a socially inept “weirdo” (thankfully, I have improved with age!), I was afraid of being caught up in one of these things as a plausible scapegoat.
New Zealanders are often criticised as a flock of sheep, and there is unfortunately much justice to that characterisation. However, I feel a lot safer living among a flock of sheep than a herd of spooked cattle, ready to stampede in unpredictable directions at any time.
@ Forecasting Intelligence
re @ Aldarion # 236
“I find it very strange to retroproject a jihad into that war.”
tl:dr – what he said!!
Forecasting, in reply you are suggesting that your “spook” knows stuff (and by implication that you have a reliable way of verifying what your spook shares). I might suggest to you that “spooks” are famously trained in putting carefully curated stuff out into the public awareness for reasons that may not be straightforward. If you will note, the historical claim your spook is advancing is very much offered in the context of asking people to take a stance on conflicts of interest in the Europe of today.
@ Charlie Obert #234
This shift of consciousness that you speak of is exactly the topic of the post that I linked to in my comment of #22. If you missed it, it may be of interest. 🙂
Ambrose: The difference is that I’m a firm believer in dualism – so in a sense, yes, I’m talking about another “substance”, but not a substance in the usual sense of regular material stuff made of atoms, or anything else that we can see.
The only part here that I’m making a positive claim about is the actual dualism itself. I’m agnostic about whether there are discrete souls, soul stuff, and also about whether there’s reincarnation or any form of survival of the person after the death of the material organism.
JMG: Ok, thanks for clarifying. So then as now, people were so terrified of saying “I don’t know” that they preferred to teach guesswork to each other. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, ha ha. The actual hypothesis was a reasonable guess for the information they had at the time, but good grief, why can’t we just say “I don’t know” when we don’t?
Oh wait! I think I just got why that is, and it’s a good reason! The idea is that mentally modelling complicated things and then discussing them with others that are also doing that is really good for the brain, and increases survival fitness. Whether the thing being discussed maps onto anything real is irrelevant. As long as the subject matter has internally consistent rules, it’ll work for this.
I do however think it’s well to know when to stop doing that and say, “I don’t know.”
Everything good with you? I don’t usually see new comments appear in the middle of the night.
—
And now, chaotic brain off in a new direction…
What’s the actual practical difference between “baryonic matter” and “elemental earth”? Other than the latter mistakenly leaving out air and water? You know, you change a few words strictly for style and it begins to look like those medieval scholars weren’t even really wrong!
I started this comment because I couldn’t sleep. Now it’s much later and I can hardly keep my eyes open, or focus them. I hope this is coherent. Be that as it may, zzzzz!
@Forecasting Intelligence, the article you linked to is paywalled.
I don’t doubt for a moment that atrocities were committed on all sides, that is basically the definition of a civil war, and there will always be at least a few violent radicals in any religious group. However, jihad is a war declared by Muslim religious authorities to spread Islam, and the civil wars in former Yugoslavia don’t fit that definition however much you stretch it. They had their roots in old animosities between Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats, exacerbated during WWII and which flared up after Tito’s death, and the war between Serbs and Croats had been going on for a year before Bosnia even started to enter the fray. I suppose “convincing my Orthodox countrymen to fight against (initially) an alliance of my Catholic and Muslim countrymen” doesn’t have the same ring as “resisting the jihad”.
One more point, and there I am really sorry not to be able to read the original article: the author (and you) seem to make an analogy between Muslim Bosnians and Muslim residents of Western European countries. However, the Bosnians had been living there for exactly as long as the Serbs and Croats – they had simply converted from their original polytheism to different religions, and still spoke variants of the same language, and I am sure shared many folk customs. They were not immigrants in any sense of the word.
@JMG (#228):
Yep, that’s me, alright! And I like “idiosyncratic”!
I’m still adding PDFs there, albeit slowly.
Kimberley, JMG, and other Pawpaw commenters:
Pawpaws are native in my region and I had seen some growing up, but never gave them much thought. Three weeks ago, hubby told me that the talk show he listens to on the radio mentioned pawpaws, as the host ate one for the first time recently. Since we still have space in our garden for a few more trees, he asked me to research pawpaws. The next week, in one of the ‘what’s happening around here’ newsletters that I subscribe to, they mentioned a pop-up pawpaw festival (a farmer who had started a patch five years ago finally had enough fruit to do a small festival). He had saplings for sale, about half the price of what I’d found online (so two came home with us). And today is pawpaw planting day for us. I decided to skim the Open Post before heading outside and, lo, even more talk about pawpaws!
At the festival, I had a pawpaw popsicle. It was quite good. I suspect it was either pawpaw ice cream or sherbert, just in a tube for easier eating-while-walking consumption. KSU apparently does much pawpaw research; they have some interesting recipes posted here: https://www.kysu.edu/academics/college-ahnr/school-of-anr/pawpaw/recipes-and-uses.php
@Sama, JMG
The prayer that is most reliably answered is that if one is spiritually attacked. Asking Jesus for help will definitely and always cause a reaction in said evil spirit and Jesus himself or his angels will always show up.
On the other hand I believe the parameters of Prayer being answered based on my reading of the Bible is. If it serves God’s Will, glorifies Jesus Christ, geopolitical considerations as divine providence is moving world events according to his own agenda and personal basic needs(Give us today our daily bread).
A good example of a personal prayer answered is the story of Hannah:
https://biblehub.com/bsb/1_samuel/1.htm
Which fulfilled several of the parameters as above. Hannah promised and carried out her promise to dedicate her son to God permanently. After which her prayer is answered.
@beardtree #235: I agree with your sentiment, and I think you place the right emphasis on the loss of confidence and falling birth rates. Years ago, I read an article by a Bulgarian author (unfortunately, I am unable to find it now) who tried to explain a paradox: why is anti-immigration sentiment strongest in those countries where there are hardly any immigrants? This is valid for countries like Bulgaria, Romania or Hungary, but also within Germany for states like Saxony. There are places with less than 2% immigrants, while majorities vote for extremely strong anti-immigration measures.
The Bulgarian author explained that these are exactly the places that see demographic doom happening before their eyes: abysmal birth rates compounded by ultra-high emigration rates. The Bulgarian population has shrunken by more than 25% since 1990, and other nations and regions are not far behind. This is a true catastrophe, but what can be done against it? No measures applied anywhere in the world over the last decades have permanently boosted birth rates, and currently there is no perspective to give new economic vigour to places like Bulgaria, Romania or even the Erzgebirge region of Saxony, so emigration will probably continue.
Promising and proclaiming anti-immigration policies is a substitute activity to allay those fears of demographic collapse. They are going to have minimal impact on those regions where they are most popular, exactly because there are hardly any immigrants there to “re-migrate”. However, with or without immigration, a community with low birth rates and high emigration is going to pass away – it won’t be able to pass on its language and customs, however melancholic we may feel about that.
“I can only hope that Europeans will do the smart thing and flee here, as a growing number of white South Africans have done.”
Well, that might be a good advice in principle, but it hinges on whether your country wants to take us in the first place. It’s not like we can just turn up at Ellis Island anymore. And of course that’s fair, it’s well within your rights to choose who to admit or not. Especially for those of us who aren’t quite as young anymore, though, it’s not necessarily a realistic way to evade the Islamic future. On a related note, I’ve been wondering for a while: if the bleak future you envision for Europe does come to pass, do you think the US and other historical-European diaspora countries will be more willing to take native Europeans as immigrants as events unfold, especially combined with their own demographic declines?
Personally I’m still slightly more optimistic about the future of Europe, at least for my own country, since I’m not convinced fourth and fifth generation descendants of immigrants will necessarily all be so interested in promoting conservative Islam. I get the sense at least our local Muslims are more interested in material goodies than Islam already, but of course it varies. (I also suspect they’re better integrated here than in places like Sweden or France, but how much that will end up mattering is an open question.) Still, I won’t rehash that argument too much, and of course there’s no denying the overall demographic trend, combined with an academic and cultural elite that still misses no opportunity to denigrate native culture in favor of anything foreign. In that sense it doesn’t look pretty.
Michael G. # 185:
“It can also just be something like the Church of Bacon or Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it is atheists just unintentionally rebuilding the religious structures unaware of what they are doing.”
I think (evangelical?) atheism activists tend to believe their tactics mocking known religious are going to be always successful against believers, but indeed, they never think well wether these parodies would really erode others religious beliefs, or they will end achiving their own “autonomous life”, becoming new religions. If they never have thought this risk, they seem less smart than they see themselves…
By the way, another IMHO stupid attitude and behavior by angry atheism activists is their fondness to repeat too many times in their “debates” against religious people, “We’re smart and clever, but you believers are fools”(well, it can be read online in more polite and rude ways, alike). This need to show they ‘re apparently the smartest guys in the room doesn’t seem ironically, very smart. Insulting your rivals as stupid people only makes them getting upset and leaving the argument…confirming their previous beliefs. So I think it’s a self-destructive “mental twitch” too common within these “geniuses”.
Finally, most atheism activists are boring supporters of almighty Science, so they use scientificism for attacking religious beliefs. This tactic has had better days before, methink. Since Post-Modernism started eroding Sciences social prestige, this elephant in the room has been ignored by usual atheist Scientificism cheerleaders…Let’s think what could happen as soon as the Faustian West declines more and more in the future.
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Justin P. #196:
“but since you live in Spain, I imagine you don’t really know what the culture is like here on the ground in America, where none of it is as cut and dry as the media and social medias would like anyone to believe.”
“Touché”…It’s sadly common here in Europe to be biased (even among educated people) by usual stereotypes about American culture, and music genres aren’t the exception. Thank you for your comment, for example I didn’t know anything about real origins of banjo (ahem).
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Anselmo # 202:
“The youtuber Rubén Gisbert claims that the Ceuta migrant agresion is framed in a pacto Sánchez/Trump for to give the Spanish territorial wáter surrrounding Ceuta to USA’s control, and that ithis is included in the preparatory steps for the war USA/China.”
Youtubers are in their right to tell everybody their opinions about everything, but I can also say it’s very unlikely Sánchez (a woke “socialist”) and Trump (a Conservative under Zionist lobby control) agree in anything, especially in a dramatic measure like this guy depicts. It’s more believable our Madrid government is being punished by the long Zionist tentacles, after Madrid began a diplomatic crisis (not solved yet) with Tel Aviv, related with the Palestine predicament. It’s not casual than Rabat has better relations with Tel Aviv than another muslim countries, ahem…Acts have consecuences, always.
It’s my personal opinion, though I admit I’m not a known youtuber…
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JMG # 211:
“I’m thinking among many other things of his claim that Freemasonry came to Earth 15,000 years ago with refugees from the planet Mars”
Wow! Mr. Hancock bizarre statement has made to smile! I haven’t read anything written by him, but after your answer about this “scientist”, I’ll think twice, though I take note of your opinion in favor of him (to some extent).
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# 212:
I’ll take into consideration. Well, “poor ” Benito Mussolini, he’s the great forgotten guy of those ’30s in Europe…(I’m kidding). It’s a pity, because he was an arrogant jerk, very suited to perform as at least one of the Baddest Guys of All the Times.
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Cynthia # 213:
I tend to think I’m a too serious person, but sometimes I show some ironic attitudes. So I don’t have any problem in forgiving you, though I’m not really upset now. Don’t worry…
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Forecasting…# 226:
Well, everybody has the right to have this or that hero of the jour, and I can tell you I didn’t blamed Mladic as a monster, I only suggested he did nasty and dirty things during ’90s against his favorite enemies: he wasn’t the only one who did that. Of course, if he fits into the Islamic bogey man narrative as the Good Guy (like a Procrustean bed), taking advantage of certain recent events here, I can only say the map isn’t the territory, so real things are usually more complex than philias and phobias. We can debate about real problem of EU islamization frankly, but respecting facts…
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Aldarion # 236:
I agree, but you know: for a hammer, everything is a nail…”Muslim” Bosnians were known by their low religious interest during ’90s. Indeed, ethnically their ancestors before their shallow islamization were some Christian hereticals named “Bogomils”. A lot of them named themselves (’90s-’90s) only as “Bosnians”, not “muslims”, because often they were agnostics or atheists (it’s normal after living in a Commie country). During Yugoslavia civil secession wars, every side did nasty things to its enemies, I can’t point real clean heroes beyond all the sides propaganda.
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Slithy T. # 244:
Oh, moral panics are also very known and feared here, often they’re imported…Do you think climate change (now renamed as “climate emergency” ahem), is a similar case as terrorism threat? (I mean, a real problem which has been opportunely inflated as the BIggest Doom due to some dirty agendas).
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Forecasting # 245:
“There were some nasty Islamists among the Bosnian Muslims and they also slaughtered their enemies.”
I guess you know difference between “some” and “all”. By the way, I think that pointing Albanese-Kosovar guerrilla guys (UCK) were partly financed by some illegal activities (ahem), doesn’t excuse Serbian army and its informal guerrillas did nasty and dirty things against civilians in that part of the world in 1999 (hard facts). I hope you understand my view.
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I wonder whether the author of this little essay has read your novel:
xhttps://consortiumnews.com/2026/08/29/twilights-last-gleaming/
The content, as well as the title, echoes it.
When you look at what many of the Gazans in Palestine have suffered in recent times, is it possible that some or all of it has been down to karma? And will those Israelis who were responsible for it likewise suffer their own karma in future incarnations? And is that how the wheel of karma keeps turning?
Now of course the fashionable word is “quantum”. David Deutsch assures us that there are trillions of “many worlds” and existences out there that are only slightly different to ours. So would some potential bad karma candidates there actually escape their bad karma? What is your view on the many worlds theory, John Michael?
@SlithyToves #19
While I totally agree that computers today have become inconsistently complex, I’m of the opinion that personal computers were ALWAYS complex to most “normie” users; they were never really comfortable with using PCs in the first place.
People would use computers because they had to for work or for some home/personal conveniences like email, web browsing online banking, and signing up for various services. I know this from being an IT tech who spent years doing service calls for what to me were the most minute, easily-fixable issues. My typical client was a middle aged female office manager. Most of them were deathly afraid of their computers and thought that touching the wrong button would make their computer explode. I think that the GUI (Graphical User Interface) using the desktop metaphor offered a false sense of user-friendliness — sure basic tasks were super easy once you learned how to double click folders and drag things around the desktop with your mouse, but it would instantly be deer-in-the-headlights the moment something went wrong that wasn’t instantly fixable by clicking a dialog box with a clear solution.
I think this at least partially explains the mass migration of normie users to the mobile / touch-screen interface (yuck!) the moment those devices became affordable and readily available. IMHO, mobile devices as something more than phones or e-readers are inferior in every way to classic desktop/laptop PCs, yet nearly everyone started using them as general computing devices. It’s because the mobile interface followed Apple’s design philosophy, which is the design of turning the personal computer into a fisher price toy. Big Tech loves mobile devices because they severely limit the freedom of what users can do with their devices — everyone ends up locked inside either an Apple or Google walled garden. Installing apps on your phone or tablet that’s not in the official app store has been rebranded by the companies as “sideloading.”
In all actuality, installing whatever you want is one of the cornerstones of personal computing. How dare the user do that! I think this shift in computing philosophy is what is fueling all this talk about Gen Z being “computer illiterate.” No, they’re actually not; I think most know how to use computers for at least basic stuff, they just didn’t grow up in the digital culture of people having the freedom to do whatever they want with the devices they bought with their own money.
My own “retrograde” computing philosophy is rather simple and doesn’t involve any of these current-day lunacies that are sold to us as being conveniences.
BeardTree, I’m sorry to say that I’m not. The old habits of secrecy die hard, and I’ve made promises I don’t care to break.
Siliconguy, two thousand years from now Chinese historians will refer to the period following 1949 as the Mao Dynasty, which adopted some silly philosophy or other from abroad for a while before coming to its senses and returning to the standard Chinese model of government. No, nobody remembers much about the philosophy, either.
J.L.Mc12, oh, it’s not that I find him hard to read — I have zero problem with avant-garde writing styles, and consider Proust good company alongside a glass of decent bourbon. It’s that I have definite tastes in fiction and don’t like his style. I’ll give his philosophy a look.
Atmospheric, congratulations! Please ask the parents for permission to send a blessing the child’s way — I’d like to do that.
Cynthia, my sleep cycles have been jumbled since I became a widower; sleep next to somebody for forty-two years and sleeping alone isn’t easy. I ended up napping midday and then couldn’t sleep until quite late — not the first time, or the fifty-first, that that’s happened. As for the medieval philosophers, why should they say “I don’t know”? They thought they did know, and their opinion on the subject was just as plausible in their time as our current chatter about gravity is today. I trust you realize that a millennium from now people will chuckle over those primitive people in ancient America who believed in gravity…
Robert, idiosyncratic is a compliment in my book!
Info, I talked about my experiences most of a decade ago:
https://ecosophia.net/death-god-speculation/
The quote that matters most:
“Yet there’s another thing, one that often doesn’t get mentioned until well into the conversation, and sometimes doesn’t come out at all until some later moment, perhaps sitting around a fire after an outdoors ceremony as the night deepens and most of the participants have stumbled off to their tents or cabins. That’s when you can expect to hear from the many, many people who quit Christianity because they prayed their hearts out for years and never got an answer. I’m not talking about those who wanted something and didn’t get it; I’m talking about people who found themselves, over and over again, staring up into an empty place where God was supposed to be.”
I gather that’s not your experience, and several other regulars here haven’t found this to be true — but I’ve talked to quite literally hundreds of people for whom it is true. Something is happening.
BorealBear, to judge by the recent arrangements made to take in South African refugees, my guess is that as things get more difficult in Europe, similar arrangement will be made. The Trump administration can’t quite get away with it now, without rupturing relations with European governments even more drastically than has happened, but once governments start falling or being seized by radical Muslim parties, expect that to change in a hurry.
Robert, if a swamp-creature insider like Napolitano has read my book, it’s clearly getting into some unlikely circles!
Demiurge, first of all, it’s an essential rule these days that the word “quantum” is a reliable flag for balderdash. I consider the many worlds hypothesis to be a fine example of intellectual onanism. As for your question, human existence involves suffering; the Buddha was being a spoiled little rich boy when he claimed that all existence is suffering — you could as well claim that it’s all joy, and use identical arguments with the signs flipped to prop up that claim — but suffering, including horrific suffering, is part of what we’re here to experience, and so there will always be some souls undergoing it. These days, some of those souls are being born in Gaza. (A lot more of them, to be sure, are also being born in less heavily propagandized sites of brutality and death.) Yes, the Israelis who commit the crimes in question are piling karma on their own heads which they’re going to have to deal with, because one of the other things that human existence involves is hard moral choices, and some of us inevitably fail those choices. Yes, I know that a lot of people object to the idea that this is how life is, but then the way to get reborn someplace less harsh is no secret: moral effort and spiritual practice provide the exit door.
@Forecasting Intelligence & Aldarion:
To understand what happened in former Yugoslavia, it is necessary to distinguish between Albanian Muslims and Bosnian Muslims: Muslims are not all one and the same people politically, and the Yugoslav case is an extreme example of that maxim.
It is also necessary to keep firmly in mind the ancient line of division between Orthodox and Catholic Slavs: Slovenes and Croats are historically Catholic, Serbs and Macedonians historically Orthodox. Bosnians lie right across that line of division, and were never fully Catholic or fully Orthodox; most of them held to a form of Christianity regarded as deeply heretical by Catholics and Orthodox alike. This Bosnian Christianity belonged to a family of related “heresies” including the Paulicians in Armenia, the Bogomils in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Bosnia, and the Cathars in Western Europe. And Albania was originally Orthodox, like Bulgaria, Macedonia and Serbia.
When Muslim armies invaded the Balkans centuries ago, the Albanians — who are not Slavs — became almost wholly Muslim, while the Bulgarians and Serbs resisted militarily as best they could. In this context a famous battle at Kosovo Polje (Kosovo Field) became as powerful a symbol of Serbian identity as Valley Forge is of American identity. Slow demographic shifts, however, eventually made the Kosovo region of Yugoslavia predominantly Albanian and Muslim: a thing which was absolutely intolerable to Serbs. So Serb / Albanian (“Muslim”) animosity was baked into the cake in Yugoslavia, and erupted once Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav state had lost its power to unify all its residents.
The case of Bosnia was completely different. Having been neither Catholic nor Orthodox for centuries, it easily abandoned the Christian world for the Muslim one. This originally amounted to a symbolic “a plague of both your houses” to the surrounding Catholic and Orthodox Slavs, more than to a passion for Muslim religiosity.
Once everything broke down in former Yugoslavia, the Serb reaction to the basically non-threatening Muslims of Bosnia was preconditioned by the earlier Serb reaction to the threatening Albanian Muslim takeover of the Kosovo Polje region.
And all this was exacerbated by bitter memories from World War 2, where Slovenia and Croatia had taken the Nazi side, whereas Serbia and Macedonia had taken the Soviet side. (This is hard for Americans to grasp, who are under the spell of the toxic delusion that there were just two sides in WW2, the Axis (Nazi) and the Allies (US & UK).
I hope this brief dive into the murky depths of Yugoslav history clarifies things a little. Mladić and Serbian atrocities in Bosnia are best understood in this context.
@ Atmospheric River #
If you will have them, blessings on your grandchild, your family and the year ahead!
Congratulations. 🙂
@Scotlyn #261 – Thank you.
JMG,
I have a question about how modern astrologers calculate planetary orbits for their charts – Is it done by observations from telescopes, or by using formulas derived from Newtonian physics?
I am asking because I am looking to learn Newton’s geometrical methods as he laid them in the Principia, with the goal of being able to construct orbits as seen from the earth using compass and straight edge – My understanding is that this was known in Newton’s time, so should be possible.
Assuming I can pull it off, do you think astrologers such as yourself would find this knowledge useful? I know next to nothing about astrology and would like to hear your view on this as a practicing astrologer.
Reading your blog makes me think that even if the local observatory gives you data now, planetary observations require a civilization running, and assuming we are in for a dark age, perhaps the calculus required may get forgotten and someone in the future may resort to drawing orbits on paper using said methods?
JMG #228: Yes, I think you mentioned that before, and it’s probably the correct answer. I wonder what sort of Aquarian religions we’ll get, and how they’ll interact with the Piscean religions? And then there’s Buddhism, which was born in the Age of Aries… should be interesting.
Definitely looking forward to the revised version of the Atlantis book — it’s important to pass down occult knowledge, and boost the ratio of signal-to-static.
As for Western Europe, I foresee three possibilities:
1. Islamic conquest
2. Russian conquest
3. Neo-fascist takeover
I put these in order of likelihood, with the first being a safe bet. Demographics are destiny, despite any delusions to the contrary.
I forgot to mention, regarding the Church of Gnome, I definitely share your misgivings. Maybe it’s not a cult, but it certainly seems to be some nerd’s vanity project, so that he can be the big fish of a small pond. There’s also no need to make light of the Fae in this way.
Atmosferic#257
Congratulations !
Chuaquin: Ok, well now that I understand that you’re such a serious guy I won’t bring you any more of that style of humour. I love it personally, but there’s others who do as well so I’ll share it with them instead. I shall be more serious with you since that’s more your speed.
Of course you realize that since I play guitar, saying something on that topic does have a chance of drawing a response from me, which would be of a different nature now.
Just for shifts and goggles, and since I’ve had so much to say about it, I thought I’d send up a short guitar video where you only hear my app, not my guitar, just to show what this accompaniment I’ve been talking about is.
The acting performance at the end is because it’s supposed to fade out shortly after it does hear anything anymore, and usually it does, but it lags when I run the screen recorder.
Which is fine because in the normal course of things there won’t be a reason to use the screen recorder. These videos aren’t going to be a regular thing, in fact this is it unless some specific reason comes up. As with the previous, it is not listed on youtube, and sharing beyond here is not encouraged because I look like crap.
I suppose I could have said “giggles”. That word is legal afaik. 😉
https://youtu.be/bcV05JNtWd0
JMG, I respect your integrity in this area. Promises are not to be broken except for very good reasons. My own choice of approach is exoteric with no secrets, all out in the open, what is hidden of course is the unique inner personal experience of the individual as they apply and follow the exoteric.
@ Demiurge #271:
I believe the political leadership in Israel is already facing blowback. I encourage you to follow the upcoming October elections – The current administration cannot catch a break, as one… flockup follows another. For instance, about two weeks ago the national airport stopped taking flights for a couple of hours due to a labor strike, which is surprising given than this union is controlled by Netanyau’s party. I could go into more details if it interests you, but as JMG once said (if I recall),when someone is in this state of bad synchronicities piling up, it’s a sign of blowback. We will see if this is reflected in the election’s results.
I was rereading the ‘Return of the King’, and the situation regarding the ruffians during the scouring of the Shire is reminding me of some of the things I hear about the most badly-behaved migrants in Europe and videos you see posted on youtube.
JMG: I’m sorry, I forget sometimes. To me, John, you’re usually “JMG ™”, this writer on these topics who’s I’ve been aware of for some time, a big deal, a borderline “larger than life” figure, and that’s the space you occupy in my head. I guess I lose sight of the fact that addition to being The Archdruid John Michael Greer you’re also a regular guy who lives in a regular place and has had a very relatable human thing happen in the form of a terrible loss, and that sometimes, as fun as it is to playfully spar with a giant, it’s not always time for that. I’m sorry and I hope you get your regular sleep back and that in general that the adjustment goes in the least difficult way possible for you.
I concede the point about the other thing.
Apologies, but the Buddha didn’t say that life is suffering, he said that life is Duḥkha basically meaning unsatisfying or incomplete. Obviously there are joys and happiness, it’d be silly to claim otherwise. But they’re impermanent. They don’t last and unsatisfactory comes back.
I just found some fascinating information on one of the last Chancellors of the Weimar Republic that supports a key point you make in “Fascism and the Future”:
“It’s a curious detail that in the last years of the Weimar Republic, a large number of avant-garde intellectuals and cultural figures were convinced that they already lived in a fascist country. They pointed, as many Americans point today, to the blatant influence of big business on the political process, to civil rights violations perpetrated by the administration in power or by state and local governments, and to the other abuses of power common to any centralized political system, and they insisted that this amounted to fascism, since their concept of fascism—like the one standard in today’s America—assumed as a matter of course that fascism must by definition defend and support the economic and political status quo.”
Apparently Heinrich Brüning, who was Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932 closed around 100 newspapers A MONTH ton”preserve the Republic”:
“In the September election, the parties of the grand coalition lost many seats, while the Communists and the National Socialists (Nazis) made major gains. This left Brüning without any hope of forming a Reichstag majority. Instead, he continued to govern by Notverordnung. He coined the term “authoritarian democracy” to describe this form of government, based on the cooperation of the president and parliament.[18] Brüning was somewhat ambivalent toward democracy. Soon after taking office, he sharply limited freedom of the press. By one estimate, 100 newspaper editions were banned every month.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Br%C3%BCning
Moving on to your point,
“In point of fact, as Walter Laqueur showed in his capable survey Weimar: A Cultural History, denouncing the Weimar Republic as a fascist regime was quite the lively industry in Germany in the very late 1920s and early 1930s. Unfortunately for those who made this claim, history has a wicked sense of humor. A good many of the people who liked to insist that Weimar Germany was a fascist state got to find out—in many cases, at the cost of their lives—that there really is a difference between a troubled, dysfunctional, and failing representative democracy and a totalitarian state, and that a movement that promises to overturn a broken status quo, and succeeds in doing so, is perfectly capable of making things much, much worse.”
@JMG
“To judge by the recent arrangements made to take in South African refugees, my guess is that as things get more difficult in Europe, similar arrangement will be made.”
Ah, I’ll admit I wasn’t fully to speed on that, and I assumed you were talking about South Africans leaving at the end of Apartheid, not in the present day. In any case, that’s interesting. All this will probably happen after my time anyway, but still…your (and others’) increasing pessimism about the subcontinent’s future is noted with concern, so it’s good to know an escape route might be available if things get truly extreme here. If I’m ever faced with a choice between the Islamists, the Russians and the Americans, I know I’d go for the latter every time. And like I’ve said before, if I were younger I’d probably be making serious plans to relocate to Australia.
@Mithridates #272
Thank you for this. I fully share your thoughts re. mobile devices vs “proper” PCs, and your speculation makes sense of something that’s been bugging me for years: if most people believe in the Religion of Progress and see computing as one of its main expressions, why would they so enthusiastically embrace an form of computing that’s so obviously inferior? Even if all the concerns raised on JMG’s blogs were false and industrial society was fully sustainable, I’d have found the big shift to mobile baffling and annoying just from the perspective of what makes for good computing.
“Big Tech loves mobile devices because they severely limit the freedom of what users can do with their devices — everyone ends up locked inside either an Apple or Google walled garden.”
Yes, and this is one more reason I think the current approach to computers in education is so backwards. If you absolutely have to have kids use screens from first grade, at least use open platforms and free software instead of shackling them to Microsoft and Apple. And for the gods’ sakes, teach them basics like how to use an adblocker. If that’s not a “basic digital skill” (which all schools are obliged to teach here), I don’t know what is…
@JMG (#273):
It’s a compliment in my book, too! Thank you!
Hi JMG and everyone,
I work in a highly-diverse high school in Brisbane, Australia, and it is fascinating to speculate about how the cultures mixing and coming into being here will shape the future.
There are students from Polynesia (about 50%), Central Asia, Africa, South East Asia, and others places, and most kids come from big families, including the poor whites. So, I think this area will be disproportionately influencing what the future looks like.
One interesting thing I’ve already noted is that a few non-Muslim students have been raising talking points about not eating pork as pigs are supposedly filthy animals.
Also, despite ethnic cliques. being noticeable, there is a tolerable amount of mixing across ethnic and religious lines, which gives me some hope for a unified society in the future.
“Mao Dynasty…” The Chinese Akhenaten?
It’s disappointing you’ve had to place a moratorium on a particular topic; I’ve always found this commentariat very polite, and would have thought if that topic could be discussed neutrally anywhere, it’d be here.
I do think your three-part series of posts on this (i.e. Fred Halliot) is still the best essay available on the subject; I’ve shared it with others and received positive feedback.
Hi JMG. Many commentators I’ve read online writing about the situation in Cueta have been bringing up the book Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. (I haven’t read it myself, but am familiar with it’s themes.) I was wondering if you’d read the book, and if so, do you think it predicts an accurate possible future for Europe?
JMG (no, 273), “just world” assumptions (in which an afterlife rewards good and punishes evil) seem to incorporate human biological and cultural biases. Recall Blake’s “one law for the lion and ox is oppression.” What would an ethical tiger be like? Now imagine a human from a tribe of cannibals, or a culture (ancient Greece, let us say) where pedophilia was celebrated. It seems strange to suppose that the universe incorporates fundamental values that reflect one species, and within it, a limited range of recent cultures (whose laws, ethics, and etiquette often reflect biological realities–think murder and adultery–that would not seem relevant to an afterlife).
Chuaquin (no. 269) ” they never think well whether these parodies would […] end achiving their own ‘autonomous life’, becoming new religions.”
The founders of the Church of the SubGenius recently broke kayfabe and participated in a documentary about their church telling the actual, no-nonsense history behind its creation (and have given multiple interviews doing the same). They were motivated by exactly this concern–they worried that some idiot would not understand that it was a joke, and commit some act of terrorism against the Normals. Carol Cusack’s “Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction, and Faith” discusses the phenomenon of “joke” religions that morph into genuine communities.
J..K. Mc12 (no. 256) Oh, *that* Ballard. For a minute there I thought you guys meant Guy W.
JMG (no. 250), thank you for telling your experience. I don’t have most of that. The main thing was a dream (and yes, I do remember that line from Hume) in which a voice told me I died in a certain place. I had never heard of the place name, but looked it up after I awoke, and it was real, I still haven’t gone there in this life. (I’m sure I will one day, but it’s not a priority.) There are a lot of resonances with my interests–but then, I have wide interests, so that would be true of a lot of places. Anyway, the dream-voice itself identified me with the person who died.
Cynthia Christie (no. 246), uh,no, my kung fu isn’t good enough for me to be the chosen one! As for what my lack of wisdom teeth does mean (and thank you for not going with the obvious), I assume that–as that great druid, Mr. Natural, might say–“don’t mean sheeeale.”
Hey JMG and commentariat
Something that I think would interest a lot of you is this website called “Conspiracy of Cartographers” hosted by Jeffrey Linn. He makes maps depicting what various coastal cities will look like when all the ice caps melt and raise the sea level by 66 meters.
I bought his only Australian map, which happened to be the one depicting my home city Brisbane, many years ago. It is a very good quality printing. I’ve been studying it again after years of sitting in storage when I finished reading “A Drowned World” by Ballard, and it’s got me thinking about how people in the future will react to most of Brisbane being underwater.
https://conspiracyofcartographers.com/
Four Sided, I’ve never met anyone who does it completely from scratch. If you don’t use a computer you use an ephemeris, which gives positions of the planets at 0:00:00 GMT for each day of the century; those are generated by computer, and I don’t happen to know enough about how that’s done to know how it’s calculated. Once you have your figures from the ephemeris, you interpolate to find the exact places at the birth time or other time of interest, and that’s typically done with tables of logarithms. In Newton’s time, calculating planetary orbits was done using tables that were the results of many years of observation; he then worked out the math and checked the results against the planetary tables he had.
Xcalibur/djs, Buddhism in its original form comes out of the last years of the age of Aries but the Mahayana forms of it were heavily reworked to fit Piscean ideas, thus the focus on compassion, handing out merit to all sentient beings, etc. It’ll certainly be interesting to see how the Aquarian age works out! As for your three possibilities, yep, and those aren’t mutually exclusive — different parts of Europe could go in different directions.
Cynthia, “shifts and goggles” is a keeper. Thank you!
Mouse, that’s quite correct, of course, and an interesting point. I wonder where Tolkien got the idea.
Pure Land, okay, we can go with that translation if you want. It can be argued just as easily that life is basically satisfying (and in fact I do feel that way, and my value judgment is arguably just as valid as any other.) Of course sorrows and other unpleasant experiences happen, but they’re impermanent; they don’t last, and the satisfying aspects of existence come back. You see? It really does work both ways.
Gunstone, exactly. As it happens, one of the books on my to-read stack right now is a recent history of Weimar Germany, and I’ll be looking for more parallels.
BorealBear, exactly — the Trump administration is bringing in 10,000 white South African refugees, partly as a sop to his base and partly because it allows him to thumb his nose at the left. I could very easily see future GOP administrations welcoming much larger numbers of European refugees, not least because depopulation is picking up here.
Russell, many thanks for the data points.
Roldy, a case could be made!
Mark CH, I post about that specific subject now and again — I think this is the most recent post:
https://ecosophia.net/the-man-with-the-moustache/
When I do that, though, I have to ride herd very closely on comments, because fights break out all too readily. I didn’t particularly want to put up with that on this open post, so I drew a line under the subject for now. I do that from time to time, which is one of the reasons my commentariat is so polite. (The other is that trolls get banned if they annoy me.)
PotteryWoman, I haven’t read it. Too many books, too little time…
Ambrose, it’s a mistake to see reincarnation and karma as having to do with human moral codes. Karma is simply the process by which every action has its consequences. Human moral codes — which are of course biologically and culturally bound — reflect, in part, the pressures of karma, but it’s a mistake to think of karma as being constrained by them. It’s entirely the other way around — our human moral codes are partial and imperfect ways of talking about karma. I’ve written about that here:
https://ecosophia.net/the-law-of-consequences/
J.L.Mc12, thanks for this! I studied maps like this in some detail when I was writing my novel Star’s Reach, which is set in a future where oranges grow in Illinois and Memphis is a seaport.
Dolly Rebecca Parton has become one with her wigs. She is now the patron saint of fun, generosity, creativity, and irreverence. The next name on the list of tropical storms: Dolly. That list is planned well in advance. Coincidence? I think not!
Hi John Michael,
Hello! I like naps too, respect, but set an upper limit of 45 to 60 minutes lest they mess with my usual sleep cycle. Might be something for you to think about? Dangers lurk all around us, and I’ll say no more on the subject.
Just to give you a heads up, the incumbent Western Australian state Labour party lost a very safe state outer suburban seat to One Nation at a by-election yesterday. Unprecedented and the swing was brutal. One Nation secures victory in Secret Harbour by-election, taking first WA lower house seat
What I find bizarre are the reactions of the two usual main political parties in that they don’t seem to be able to hear the warning klaxon. A good election campaign is clearly not enough to convince voters who are angry about economic issues.
When the federal Labour party won the election a few years ago, within weeks they raised official interest rates despite earlier stating that this would not be the case. In Australia, most mortgage rates are determined by the workings of the Reserve Bank – conditions are different in other countries which subject homeowners to the vagaries of the bond markets, thus all the recent messing around and purchasing in order to drive bond yields down in the US for example (won’t end well, just as a hunch). With a little bit of clarity and healthy cynicism, the interest rate move by the new government was done – in my opinion – to lower their costs of borrowing. The crystal ball was perhaps consulted and a determination was made early on, us or the person on the street, and we know the rest. Probably thought that people would forget, except repayments are monthly. They needed to do that anyway, because as a mob they clearly spend way more each day than they rake in, which bizarrely feeds the very inflation and borrowing costs they talk about wanting to tackle, and don’t seem to get around to doing so.
A lot of this stuff sounds complicated, but in reality isn’t. Rather than being malicious, clueless or whatever, I’m guessing that our leaders are hanging on to the proverbial steering wheel with white knuckles heading down the only road they know. It needn’t be this way, but when change isn’t on the agenda, strange things happen. The mood on the street is perhaps ugly, and if the lessons of yesterday are ignored, my gut feeling suggests a two by four to the head may be applied to the incumbents.
Cheers
Chris
If I may comment on what Buddhism will look like in the Aquarian age, I think we’re already seeing it, albeit in a very early form, in the shift to interpretations that, for lack of a better term, “interiorize” the various doctrines, in which things traditionally held as objective realities outside the self are instead reinterpreted as states of consciousness. Thus one can easily find interpretations of Pure Land Buddhism in which Amitabha is not a person but the Dharma itself, and his Pure Land is not a place you go after your die but a state of consciousness accessible in part here and now, etc.
This, of course, has some fine Buddhist roots in the Yogacara tradition but at least in the West, the idea seems to me to be a wild ferment of Yogacara, Vedanta, New Thought, and Jung.
The crudest form of this shift is psychologization, treating the doctrine and ritual as merely pertaining to what’s going on inside your own head, generally in a misguided effort to make the religion acceptable to your secular materialist peers. But it can also take a metaphysically idealist approach, and assert, in the words of Lon Milo DuQuette, “It’s all in your head, but you have no idea how big your head really is!”
Emergency request for prayers for our cat Kameli, that the fluid in her lungs dispels and she can breathe naturally and normally. We are at the emergency vet with her on oxygen tonight. Thank you all!!
Ambrose: I didn’t know who Mr. Natural was so I looked that up… ha! I remembered that character right away! Not in a detailed way, but I used to know this guy who was a teen/young adult in that era and had a whole collection of counterculture comics from those days. I never got much into Mr. Natural but I liked that Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Do you know that one?
@Robert Mathiessen, thank you for your fuller discussion of the history of the Balkans (I alluded to the Bogomil part when I wrote that the Bosnians “converted from polytheism to different religions” at the same time as the Croats and Serbs).
I wonder at your use of the adjective “threatening” when describing the presence of Albanian Muslims in Kosovo. It seems Serbians after 1980 considered it threatening. But are Albanians living in Kosovo, where they had probably been living ever since before a Serb ethnicity even existed, obviously a threat to Serbia? I don’t have the numbers (probably nobody has), but wonder which language (Serbocroatian or Albanian) was more widely spoken in the area in 1389 and in the following centuries. And did Orthodox speakers of Serbocroatian in 1500, 1600, 1700 or even 1800 consider the battle of Kosovo Polje a defining moment in history?
“it’s one of the oddities of human psychology that an aversion to sexual pleasure very often coexists with an obsession with reproduction. The Catholic church is a great example — a vast organization of (at least officially) celibate priests who spent many centuries denouncing sexual pleasure as inherently evil, while simultaneously demanding that laypeople have as many babies as possible. The flipside is also common — notice how much of modern feminism is obsessed with sexual pleasure but has a strong aversion to reproduction, tolerably often going as far as an actual hatred of children. No, it doesn’t make sense, but that’s generally true of human beings, isn’t it?”
Also known as the Madonna-Whore complex. I think some of the Church Fathers. Especially Jerome, Augustine and a few others have gone wrong in how they conflated legitimate sexual desire with lust. When in fact the Biblical texts themselves in Song of Solomon and Proverbs 5:18-20 taught otherwise.
It seemed like an anticipated problem in that in pursuit of what they regarded as purity they will end up regarding what is pure in the right context as impure. The way the text was translated from greek to latin helped the text lean a certain way. In combination with their cultural environment of Stoicism and Platonism, the Essenes and the Roman Moralists.
Greco-Rome already had the practice of having prostitutes for pleasure and their own wives as vessels for legitimate offspring.
All the above resulted in the splitting between the Ever-Virgin Madonna which is venerated in the person of the ever-virgin Theotokos vs the sexually immoral woman.
I think Protestants at least by taking away the ever-virgin mother archetype have solved this problem at least in lending legitimacy to this archetype. A wife is sexual and a mother. And that is a good thing.
JMG,
I just had an insight in to how the competition of PMC jockeying with each other for survival is playing out in the government sector. My wife knows several people inside the government of the city of Portland. Recently the city got a new city manager selected by the mayor and his team. This new city manager came from a medium sized city in the midwest where he and his close circle of managers ( director of public works, COO, etc.) were ousted when a new mayor was elected. He got the job in Portland while his crew decamped for small lesser jobs around the west. Now the top existing managers one step under the city manager are being forced out of the city one by one. The news article usually reads “top city manager leaves with fat severence package”. The severance is because most top government people have contracts that specify dismissal without cause has a certain number of months of pay attached. The jobs for now, are just being filled by placeholder interim people. The speculation is that soon, one by one he will bring in his old people to fill these spots. The first of these is waiting in the wings down in Albany ( Oregon).
It is like medieval times, where once a castle is taken the new lord slaughters the losing royal and his inner circle and replaces them with his own people. Just the modern version with severance agreements or investigations for cause if they choose to go the hard way. To the winner goes the spoils.
“Info, I talked about my experiences most of a decade ago:
https://ecosophia.net/death-god-speculation/
”
Thanks.
“I am asking because I am looking to learn Newton’s geometrical methods as he laid them in the Principia, with the goal of being able to construct orbits as seen from the earth using compass and straight edge – My understanding is that this was known in Newton’s time, so should be possible.”
Don’t start with Mercury. It’s close enough to the sun that you have to use the relativistic calculations.
https://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/celestial/Celestial/node45.html
On the Mao Dynasty, David Wingrove’s “Chung Kuo” series of science-fiction novels (set in a future in which China has conquered the world) refers to a “Ke Ming” (Geming, “Revolutionary”) Dynasty, although that could conceivably include Sun Yat-sen and his gang.
Since we can’t discuss the Austrian painter, there’s always Genghis Khan. He also makes a good test case for karma. Was he evil, because he massacred a lot of people and built towers out of their skulls? Or good, because he was behaving as expected of a successful steppe chieftain / emperor? Would it depend on how Genghis Khan personally felt, i.e. whether his conscience bothered him? He may have regarded the lives he took as no more consequential than cattle–and who would think it fair of God, should he turn out to be Hindu, to punish beef-eaters?
J.L. Mc12 (no. 296), 66m of sea-level rise?!
PotteryWoman (no.. 293), I’ve read it. It depicts a flotilla of Indian refugees landing in France, and the lackluster response of the liberal French authorities. The Indians are depicted as filthy and depraved–they have orgies on their ships (think Khajuraho). As I recall, Raspail well understood that India was not the most likely source of such a mass migration, but purposely avoided a more realistic (and provocative) scenario. The result dehumanizes the refugees, and depicts Christian French culture as uniquely civilized.
“When you look at what many of the Gazans in Palestine have suffered in recent times, is it possible that some or all of it has been down to karma? And will those Israelis who were responsible for it likewise suffer their own karma in future incarnations?”
What I remember from being Buddhist is that the answers are
Yes, most/all of it is karma from past lives.
The Israelis are accumulating serious negative karma for this and/of future lives.
and
If we use either of those facts to close ourselves off to compassion for all of them, that is unwise and earns us some negative karma.
The danger I see in the whole concept of karma is that it is too often used precisely for the purpose of closing off our compassion.
BTW, compassion toward those committing evil acts does not in the least mean standing by and letting them do it if one is in a position to stop them or at least slow them down.
JMG (no. 297) In that case, karma is as irrational / unfair / inhumane as the universe posited by materialists. The relation between “cause” and “effect” becomes non-intuitive, even arbitrary.
“the Buddha was being a spoiled little rich boy when he claimed that all existence is suffering — you could as well claim that it’s all joy, and use identical arguments with the signs flipped to prop up that claim ”
Just my take, but I think Buddha meant suffering mostly in a much milder form than what many in Gaza have been suffering. He meant that there is a constant undercurrent of mild suffering even in our joy and that much of who we think we are consists of the efforts we make to duck that suffering (and to cling to temporary joys and make them permanent), that those efforts are ultimately the source of that suffering, and that when we cease that ducking (attachment, indifference, aversion), we realize who we really are, and that state is so blissful that by comparison, all previous life is suffering.
The legend is that after he became enlightened, he sat for days (3 weeks I think) but people saw that something good had happened to him and begged him to teach and he finally relented.
In modern terms, I imagine him sitting there, radiating intense joy and happiness, then opening his mouth and saying “Doesn’t life simply just suck?” with a big smile on his face. Both because, as above, it is true, but also to try to jolt people out of their identification with their ducking. Because the very different non-ducking experience is always already present.
Just my take.
Two points I would add to Robert Mathieson’s excellent summary of the background to the post-Yugoslavia wars. During WW2, a portion of the Croats took the side of the Third Reich and allegedly killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs. To Serbs, this is fact, not allegation. A Croat friend made sure that I understood that many Croats opposed the pro-Reich Croat organization.
There are parallels between the pro-Reich Croats and the pro-Reich Ukrainians that the current Kiev government treats as heroes.
Albanian as a language seems to be the remaining descendant of the Illyrian that was spoken over a wider portion of the Balkans before that language was replaced by Latin.
And a question that perhaps our commentariat can explain. Serbo-Croatian is treated as a single language but the Croats and the Serbs seem to have arrived in the area on different trajectories at different times. So how did they wind up with the same language (even if with different alphabets)?
[I tried to avoid the currently non-discussable topic, but if this is too close to the line or over it, I apologize.]
Dukkha literally means “stuck”, an axel that is not turning through the piece that attaches it to a wagon. The opposite is sukkha.
On the concept of an Islamic conquest of Europe, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt is an interesting alt-history in which the Black Death wipes out Europe completely and history follows from there, including the Islamic conquest of Europe.
I think it is worth making a distinction between Islam in general and the fundamentalist, Wahhabi-ist version that is supported by Arab oil money and that seems to appeal strongest to poorly governed Muslim populations. This distinction and how European Muslims chose between them could be crucial for the future of much of Europe.
@info: re:
“I think Protestants at least by taking away the ever-virgin mother archetype have solved this problem at least in lending legitimacy to this archetype. A wife is sexual and a mother. And that is a good thing.”
This only works if you start from an assumption of the whole thing being made up to begin with, rather than an objective reality. If it’s all made up, you can change it however you want… but why bother having a religion? If it’s an objective reality, and the Theotokos is a real actual living person with real world influence… then you don’t get to “solve” her by taking away the bits that don’t mesh conveniently with modern thinking.
Nemo, it’s quite possible she’ll be invoked for that purpose. Now let’s see what the storm does.
Chris, I heard about the One Nation victory. It’s impressive, and not in a good way, that your elites are just as stupid as ours when it comes to thinking through how people will respond to their pet policies.
Slithy, that strikes me not as Aquarian Buddhism but as Second Religiosity Buddhism. Still, we’ll see.
Sister Crow, healing energy en route!
Info, that’s an important part of it, surely.
Clay, nothing new in that. You might look up how the spoils system worked in 19th century American politics.
Jessica, that’s certainly my understanding. When each of us encounters a person who is suffering, why that person is suffering doesn’t matter — what matters is what we do about it, and we will reap the karma of our choice.
Ambrose, not at all. Medieval scholars had a shaky grasp of gravity. Does that mean that rocks fell in a wholly irrational way? Of course not. The fact that our moral intuitions are inexact guides to the nature of karma simply means that we need to reflect more deeply on the nature of cause and effect, and on the consequences of our actions. Those are logical; it’s we human beings who tend to be irrational, unfair, and inhumane.
Jessica, here again one could just as well argue that there’s a constant undercurrent of mild joy in all our suffering — watch the way so many people cling to their suffering, and that’s not an implausible claim! I freely agree that clinging to what you can’t control is a bad idea, but then the first Stoics pointed that out not that long after the Buddha did, and they didn’t find it useful to typify life as suffering, or as joy, or as anything other than what it happens to be at any given time. Still, no doubt it’s a matter of personal choice.
As for Years of Rice and Salt, Robert Silverberg did the same thing years before in The Gate of Worlds, and to my mind, he did a better job of it. Among many other things, Silverberg didn’t have his alt-history develop exactly the same technology as ours — the scene where the main character is riding north through the Aztec Empire in clanking coal-fired automobiles is a keeper.
jMG, allow me to give feedback on the Ariel novels. Your style has improved greatly, and wasn’t bad to begin with, it was there, but now it flows. It builds. Its even harder to put down. Fewer typos too. Anyone who hasn’t read the Mouravec mysteries is missing out. Thanks a million for these, they are immensely refreshing for a change of pace, and in their own right.
JMG
I recently watched an interview where you were talking about the King in Orange and the whole Kek thing in 2016. I was on the chans at the time and I’m curious how familiar are you with what happened to the Kek thing after 2016? If you don’t know the lore that happened afterwards its interesting, not as interesting as what happen in 2016, but still worthy of note. For example have you ever heard of the Shadilay Strangler?
I think the weather service guys should skip that name and go on to the next one. That’s ghoulish. I don’t like that one bit.
Mark CH @ 292, it is a good bet that most if not all angry and deliberately provocative commentary online is being directed and paid for, by all sorts of actors. This phenomenon is not confined to politics. I think we have all learned to be wary of glowing reviews of mediocre products. Our host would seem to have achieved that degree of notoriety which has attracted the notice of various ideologues and their paid keyboard tappers.
In case anyone might be interested in the upcoming American elections here is a brief summary, as I see things: It is pretty clear by now that the Democrats will gain a majority in the House of Representatives and possibly in the Senate as well. The important point to note is that neither majority, supposing the Democrats do retake the Senate, is likely to be veto proof. We are therefore in for two years of gridlock, nothing being done. That might not be a bad thing at the present time.
The group called Democratic Socialists of America, DSA, has scored some successes. This is not inconsequential but is being greatly exaggerated. For example, 3 DSA candidates won Democratic primaries in NYC. Sounds like really something until one remembers that NYC has somewhere between 10 and 20 congressional districts. The party leadership, called corporate Democrats, among other less polite epithets, is fighting tooth and nail to hang onto its cushy jobs in which high ranking Dems get to be well paid and important while not having actually to win elections. Rank and file Democrats are fed up with misleadership pretensions, and the ongoing intraparty war won’t end with the upcoming election, no matter how well the Dems. do at the polls.
So there *is* an objective right and wrong that karma reflects, only our intuitions are inexact guides to it. How, then, can we think critically (as your gravity analogy suggests) about something we cannot directly ascertain? For example, is it possible to use reason, along the lines of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa? Must we rely on occult revelation, or await our own life-review?
I had thought, that you thought, that we were embodied here on earth in order to learn certain lessons, presumably involving ethical behavior / virtues of some sort. But you seem to leave open the possibility that the “ethics” (so to speak) of karma are completely alien–in which case the moral thing to do (this is my twist, not yours) might be to defy karma, heedless of the consequences to ourselves.
Siliconguy # 307 :
I did not know that! Anyways, I was planning to start with Venus which, when observed from Earth, creates a fivefold pattern, which I always wanted to understand the underlying geometry behind. Here’s an image from Wikipedia:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Venus_pentagram.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=index&utm_content=original
JMG,
I hope my grandson (#2 of 4) appreciates it! Its too bad he’s not old enough to help at 3 1/2 y/o but he tries! People talk about prodigies in math and music, but 6 year olds who can help rebuild engines might be more useful. I believe you mentioned that expertise carries over from previous lives, if that is the case this kid was a master mechanic in a previous life.
@Clay Dennis #251
This one was made in Dearborn as well. Those 5000s are legendary from everything I’ve read so your dad definitely knew what he had. If I ever need to upgrade power, I will be looking for one of those. This ones an 8 speed. I’m an unofficial member of the Save the Manual Transmission club, so anything automatic just isn’t my thing when there are other options available. From my understanding, the Select-O-Speeds work great until they don’t and then never again unless you can find someone who can work the right voodoo spell to resurrect them. Plus I have an ulterior motive, the previously mentioned grandson and possibly his two brothers all learning a stick shift early. It worked for my nephew, learning to drive a stick first became a CDL, now currently a diesel mechanic and 18wheeled tow truck operator for a major city back east. Hauls those big buses through rush hour traffic, I couldn’t be more proud. I can see this kid, even though he’s not yet 4, following the same path. He’ll be the 16 year old everyone calls to get things fixed. I bought the tractor to be able to lift heavy stuff for me but it’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s going to his when I pass on.
Aldarion (#303) asked:
“And did Orthodox speakers of Serbocroatian in 1500, 1600, 1700 or even 1800 consider the battle of Kosovo Polje a defining moment in history?”
Almost certainly they did. King Marko and the Battle of Kosovo Polje is (or was, until the mid-20th cerntury) a major theme in the Serbian oral-tradition epics performed by professional tradition-bearers in taverns and villages throughout rural Serbia. See the studies of Serbia oral epic traditions by Milman Parry and Albert Bates Lord.
And, of course, in human politics, perceptions of reality count for everything, while actual reality counts for very little, usually for nothing at all.
And Jessica (#312) correctly mentioned that individual Croats were anti-Nazi. Whether they were few or many hardly matters except to moral history now, the same as whether pro-Nazi Americans (before Pearl Harbor) were few or many hardly matters. Shame and embarrassment have distorted all historical data to the point where we’ll never know for certain.
As for Jessica’s question about how Serbocroatian became the common language of two peoples with very different ethnic histories, that’s a actually very common phenomenon throughout ancient history, as far as linguists are able to reconstruct it. Even in more recent eras, whole populations sometimes gave up their former native languages for some other language, especially in border-territory between two languages. Native language as a defining mark of one’s ethnic identity really only became a major notion in Europe in the later 19th century, in the days of Otto von Bismark.
JMG, thank you, but it’s too late. Our beloved honeybee Kameli passed in her sleep shortly before midnight. It’s a longish story, but it really feels that she is choosing to leave now, and to do so quickly rather than go through a lengthy uncomfortable decline.
Kameli was beautiful within and without, a gentle, shy, unassuming torbie with the softest fur imaginable and a loving and nurturing heart. She would stay close when one of us was ill, adored sitting on my lap in the evenings, and loved to “call the kittens” while playing with toy mice (right up until we brought a big boisterous boy kitten home, who was NOT the baby she’d been hoping for!). Our life together was pure karma–she’d been sent up to a local rescue org from Iowa, was on display at Chuck & Don’s for adoption, and was just about to be moved to a different store, so if we’d arrived 15 minutes later we’d never have seen her. Sadly, she only lived to be 14, 13 1/2 of those years with us, but no amount of time would have been enough to spend with her. I am only glad that she is now safe and free of sickness and suffering.
I’d like to ask for prayers that her journey to the Otherworld be easy; that she receive all the love, comfort and healing that she could possibly need there; that her future lives be immensely blessed; and that if at all possible we should be together again. I serve Brigid, but I’m a dedicated polytheist and welcome the blessings of all Gods and benevolent spirits including angels.
I lit a candle and set an offering of water on the ancestor shrine right away. What else would you recommend I do to help her soul as much as possible? Thank you, and gratitude to everyone who offers her prayers. We all know our own pets to be special, but she was truly, truly special.
> feelings of magical moments and subsequent awareness of forthcoming events — Patient observer 109
A less magical portent involving a bird happened to me. The board had recently appointed a new manager of our branch with instructions to be a new broom and clean out all the dead wood. He had piercing blue eyes that bored like a gimlet and kept a clean desk where our desks were always packed with old files and documents.
Everyone was despondent, waiting for the hatchet to fall. The office manager and myself were walking along the sidewalk discussing our chances when a bird fell dead at our feet with a loud thump. It must have collided with the tall building above. “Someone’s gonna take a fall,” we both agreed. But who?
It was the new manager. A couple of weeks later he was ousted and a much nicer on was appointed in his place.
Hi John Michael,
I’d always assumed that our elites were clever folks, but the responses to the economic realities of the less well off, shows that they’re probably dumber than a bag of rocks (as the old timers used to quip). Our politicians used to be better, but perhaps this is also indicative of the sort of outcomes you get when the two main parties (one of which – the Liberals – appear now to be on the margins and in danger of dissolving into nothingness, which is the alarming current state of life on Mars) employ career politicians. The current Prime Minister, just for a random example, Mr Anthony Albanese, has apparently never worked a day in small business, or if he has, it was a brief and minor role. In fact his employment record on wikipedia mentions a short stint with a large bank and then onto the political party. He had a rough trot as a kid, I’ll grant that, but he’s never had deal with the business end of the policies being pushed onto the population.
The interesting thing about ‘One Nation’ is that the leader used to run a fish and chip shop. The second in command (a former deputy Prime Minister) was an accountant. The bloke who won the seat yesterday, ran a gym. These are everyday people, and not all that long ago, that’s what politics was full of. It’s not a sinecure like your dropping dead in their job congresscritters would believe, but a call to serve. Lest we forget.
Anywhoo, the joke of it all is that economics will have the last laugh, on peak oil, idiocracy, resource depletion, infrastructure decline etc. We might be able to do things, but can we afford to? That’s the real question and is the discussion even being had as to which is more important to people? I noticed in the news today, the state labour goobermint, which faces the voters on the 28th November, announced they will pour more mad cash into fixing the potholes on the roads (which they recently announced that funding was reduced). Those potholes warped one of the rims on my Suzuki Swift (which is a very light vehicle), cost me $800 to fix. Hmm.
I’m embarrassed by the numpties in charge and know why the citizens of Rome opened the gates to Alaric I and his merry band of marauding barbarians.
Cheers
Chris
@ Jessica #311
“…much of who we think we are consists of the efforts we make to duck that suffering (and to cling to temporary joys and make them permanent),”
I’m with JMG on this one – which is to say that statements like this can easily be flipped and represent the experience of real people – and the picture is always more complicated…
One reason this statement stood out for me, particularly, is that I have met several people both in the clinical context and in the social context, who appear to me to be hanging their sense of who they are on a persistent effort to duck out of their joys and cling to their temporary sufferings, which they try to make permanent.
That said, I do not think that being counselled to cultivate “indifference” to life is terribly useful to the living. It may be more useful to feel our way ALL the way into both our joys and our sufferings, and all other experiences we encounter, and thereby find their “other sides” by LIVING through the midst of them.
However that last is just my humble opinion. 🙂
Robert Mathiesen and John Michael Greer
“…and published a fine short book on meditation…”
That is quite an extraordinary book, both a fascinating and engaging read and method, but what foundational practices does it sit on, or did he think that the act of activating the third eye would purge the mind/body complex of impurities in that the higher mind must accept the ‘application’ and it cannot be forced by the lower mind?
For example, that the 9 stages were in themselves a process of preparation? Although he also seemed to intimate that beyond the three of four initial stages, it then became a process of iteration and polishing?
From what Robert said and reading Harvey’s lectures, He clearly had an extraordinary breadth of background and knowledge and I find it difficult to imagine that he would be suggesting going to the third eye and triggering some level of kundalini opening without cleansing / clearing of channels of flow and preparation of mind as groundwork. His touching of the tongue to the roof of the mouth links the channels which we were taught as useful to prevent energy build up in the head and to distribute energy around the body channels. Harvey himself mentions some of what he experienced put him off meditation for some years – A ‘Caution here be Dragons’ warning if ever there was one?
I’m guessing this book of lectures is part of something much bigger.
Meditating on the method this morning – a kind of divination within self if you will, the answer that came into mind was ‘There is more!’.
The ‘fulveal spot’ as he called it certainly seems to have something to it worth investigating, but I found other centres doing stuff and it was not working in isolation. The chakras stacked axially in the line of vision rather than physiologically is fascinating and suggests a shift of perceptual level – something I’ve been trying to work on for the last few years, but from a different perspective.
I’m on a second slower pass through the book and expect a third even slower read after that, but am going to have too spend some time thinking on this – it very much resonates with some of my own practice but the ‘divination’ answer ‘there is more!’ needs investigating.
I remember kundalini casualties from back in the 1980s and vote for avoiding that.
Thank you so much for a very timely and interesting rabbit hole to explore.
All the best to you both,
Karl
PS
Foveal spot not fulveal spot (from Fovea centralis)
“This means everyone, without exception, must undergo an extreme purification process first” (page 29)
This comment is mostly about MtF gender reassignment surgery, so if that’s too icky to read about, you’ll want to scroll on I’m sure.
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Are there still males who get their nether regions painfully reconfigured to superficially resemble what women have? My turn for that came up at the end of a two year wait last year, and I bailed on it. (Thank God!)
The clinic has recently sent me some emails trying to reconnect with me so I can part company with my Richard and his two boys after all, and trade them for a nasty surgical grotesquerie. My decision remains firm about that, but the point is, I’d been given the impression that if I missed it, there would be no attempt to get me back in. The demand was high and I would therefore have to join the wait list again if it came to that, and wait two full years again. At least.
Not so, apparently.
(That’s the Vancouver clinic. The Montreal clinic seems to have just moved on as promised.)
So, I’m wondering if they’ve run out of mentally ill biological males to encourage in their illness such that they opt to part company with Richard and keep the whole gravy train going for these nasty, evil quacks. I hope so. I hope that’s the reason they’re trying to bring back those of us who aborted the whole idea. I hope that this is scraping the bottom of a soon-to-be empty barrel.
Thank God I realized in time that regardless of it being the gold standard in a lot of people’s eyes, even “the surgery” does not make a real woman out of a man.
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I’m using a different email to sign with than usual, because I made a wordpress account with this one, in an attempt to make a profile picture appear. It’s the same person, Cynthia Christie, the guitar-playing [transmission], who’s been commenting for two or three months now.
People starting, more widely, to laugh at universities?
https://universitytitlegenerator.com
You’ve mentioned the idea of an implosion of the university system many times… Academic fraud (e.g. replication crisis) is one thing, but implosion might be the least of our worries if folks laughing means the academic butt plug is about to get pulled…
re “Saint Dolly,” or “Our Lady of the Holler,” I’ve also seen her represented as the Empress tarot card. She does fit that image pretty well! And Tropical Storm Dolly has downgraded and is now less dangerous–but is bringing rain to drought-stricken islands, including Puerto Rico.
https://weather.com/2026/08/30/storms/hurricane/remnants-tropical-storm-dolly-caribbean-rain-gulf-development
I was never interested in her music, but I did give her respect after I learned she was a songwriter–and a very smart businesswoman. Now I’ve had her songs stuck in my head ever since she passed.
JMG: About that book “The Gate of Worlds”… I hope there was a bit in there about how the Aztec leadership decided that automobile fatalities counted legitimately and sufficiently as an offering to the gods and that therefore the rituals previously done for that purpose were no longer necessary.
“Look at our virtuous people! Nearly all of them offer themselves up every day!”
Or, if human sacrifice had already been done away with before the fossil fuel age… well then it becomes more cynical. Instead of investing in automobile safety, it’d be: “Our virtuous people yearn to give themselves to the gods as of old! We stand not in their way!” And really it’s the usual drunk drivers and careless yahoos.
Narrator: Cynthia should talk? She once got up to 180 km/h in a Honda Civic and only realized it when it was a little choppy going though a gentle curve. She once downshifted two gears to pass a B-train going uphill on a mountain road, taking a real chance on how much passing lane was left. “Careless yahoos!” Mirror, 2itch!
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Narrator forgot to mention the time I left a cop and his siren in my dust.
I wonder if Uber is hiring?
I don’t know how I’m alive.
A few words about Mussolini:
There’s an interesting novels series (5 books), written by A. Scurati, titled “M”, which is a very well written Mussolini fake self-biography. Ironically, this novelist hates Fascism…I don’t know wether there’s an English translation, or not. I’ve read it translated to Spanish.
Mussolini began his career as a not very objective journalist and he was a former secular socialist. His ideology started as a blend between jingoism and anti-parlamentarism, but it’s interesting his racist speeches were more rethoric than another thing. He only began to mock and despise harshly black Africans when he had to control Abisinia (Ethiopia) as an Italian colony (he always was an opportunist). His antisemitism was a commonplace, but there weren’t in Italia any serious prosecution against Jews…until the man with a moustache achieved the power in Germany…A case more in which the master (in Fascism, Mussolini was the first one) was swallowed whole by his disciple. This awful situation as Hitler pet for Mussolini is depicted since the third novel of “M”. You can see how the Italian tyrant licked German bots, not only worsening his Antisemitism level against Italian Jews, but thanks for Italians legendary military incompetence during WWII. Let’s draw a veil…
From your post you linked to (The Death of God: A Speculation):
“From the Presocratics on, Greek philosophers had been fixated on the notion that the real world—the really real world—couldn’t possibly be the jumble of constant change and muddy interaction we see around us; no, that had to be a mere appearance, or even an illusion, blocking our view of a real world of pure, perfect, timeless unities. They proceeded to map this way of thinking onto the doctrines of newborn Christianity, and the result was Christian theology.”
Dumb question: would this also be true of Western occult philosophy, if much of it is based on Plato and later forms of Platonism? I’m not (yet) deeply read in Plato and the later Platonist philosophers.
@Jessica
Maybe some of the Gazans were involved in previous genocides & conquests, possibly even as settlers during the 1947/8 founding of Israel.
Dusting off my DreamWidth journal for this, and as long as I am on a good satellite I’ll post to Magic Monday as well. I have converted a library scan of the book Mental Therapeutics by William Walker Atkinson under his pen name Theron Q. Dumont. I do these one page at a time, because anything from a worn edge of a fold to stray marks from library users over the decades to sometimes just a bad angle trying to lay it flat on the scanner will mess up the software that decides what letters are on the page. So, any mistakes are in the original. I resisted the urge to correct the rampant unnecessary capitalization throughout the book.
Journal entry with link and short review
Aldarion # 263:
“They had their roots in old animosities between Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats, exacerbated during WWII and which flared up after Tito’s death, and the war between Serbs and Croats had been going on for a year before Bosnia even started to enter the fray.”
Yes, you’re right; and ironically Tito was a clever Commie tyrant, though he was Croatian (methink), he put a balanced ethnnical mix in the Communist Party, industrial plants and bureaucracy bosses…until he died and Yugoslavia began slowly to disintregrate. Poor Bosnians were between Croatia and Serbia areas as natives converted to Islam some centuries ago. It’s a long story, not suitable for using it as a MacGuffin for depicting a war criminal as a hero (ahem) against favorite black beasts du jour, which seems to me a very biased, dishonest and tricky narrative. Oh, by the way, relativizing or denial a genocide is a crime according my country law.
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Demiurge # 271:
“When you look at what many of the Gazans in Palestine have suffered in recent times, is it possible that some or all of it has been down to karma? And will those Israelis who were responsible for it likewise suffer their own karma in future incarnations? And is that how the wheel of karma keeps turning?”
Maybe yesterday victims will be the slayers tomorrow, beyond evident real historic events we know…It would be a black humor hypothesis that current IDF soldiers who have been commiting war crimes in Gaza and Lebanon were reborn as Arabs in the future, and Islamists zealots in ME were reborn as Jews…
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Robert M. # 274:
An interesting historical comment about former Yugoslavia context…
“It is also necessary to keep firmly in mind the ancient line of division between Orthodox and Catholic Slavs: Slovenes and Croats are historically Catholic, Serbs and Macedonians historically Orthodox.”
The funniest and saddiest thing I can say in addition of your phrase: It’s true Serbs are Orthodox and more near to Russians than Croatians, but they share a near identical language, so they can speak between them easily, in spite of a few light differences in phonetics and meanings. Even some scholars name it as “Serbocroatian”. Of course, Serbs as good Russophiles and Orthodox people, write in Cyrillic alphabet, but Croatians write their language in Latin Alphabet. So during the secessionist wars, nationalists in the two sides could insult each other without needing a translator (ahem).
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Cynthia # 280:
No argument here. I can tell you my humor is very dry and strange…When from time to time I try to be funny with others, often they don’t understand me…
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Four Sided…#283:
I’ve also seen there will be elections in Israel soon (october), and I guess that country (like another countries) has its own contradictions, maybe worsened by its current wars and its hard style current government (to depict it softly). Main contradiction IMHO is the trains crash between the democratic and secular narrative (the only one democracy in ME…) and the religious narrative (the Chosen Biblical People against the Arabs). Even secular people have tempted to mix the two narratives to justify always their country, but they would know principle of not contradiction is ruthless in the long term. We’ll see…
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Potterywoman # 293:
“Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail.”
Oh, that book was under my radar blind area…
After a fast online search, I’ve found that, on the short form, he was an intellectual reference for today French far right, which is a detail before to begin reading him (well, everybody has biases). It seems it hasn’t never been a candidate for Literature Nobel Prize… I guess there’s some Spanish translation which I’m not very eager to seek and read. First edition was in 1973, when Franco was still alive here, so there may be a likely Spanish translation from those years.
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Ambrose # 294:
“or a culture (ancient Greece, let us say) where pedophilia was celebrated.”
Oops! I’d like to clarify you ancient Greek men were fond for pedophilia, which was tolerated and used only with teen boys, not real little children, methink. It seems the most common historical interpretation of that social “institution”.
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(To be continued)
Regarding: duhkha in Buddhism
I think it only makes sense if you accept the Buddhist model of reincarnation. The main thing to note is that Buddhism identifies karma with intention. An action is a fully completed karma if you had the intention to do it and completed it. If you had the intention but didn’t complete the act it still continues in your mindstream unless you truly recant it. Then following from that, there are the 6 realms of samsara and most unique to Buddhism is the idea that even devas will exhaust their positive karma and get reborn in the lower realms. That is duhkha, IIRC, if you read any of the classic Abhidharma works, they divide their topics into the four truths and the truth of duhkha largely covers the six realms and why they are unsatisfactory.
The game snakes and ladders was originally a Buddhist game that illustrates this, even if you get to a good spot you can slip back down, you only win once you exit the game completely.
If you don’t think the Buddhist model of rebirth is correct then none of it matters. So IMO “interiorizing” Buddhists who reject reincarnation are not meaningfully Buddhist, they are honestly most similar to the extinct Carvaka school, which were materialists who also practised meditation.
Ambrose # 294:
Your story about the Church of SubGenius is amazing, and shows the fuzzy borders between a long time lasting joke and the beginning of a new religion born by mistake…Very good.
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JMG # 297:
I think Weimar Republic was a good example…about how not to establish a long time lasting democracy. It’s true it was finally destroyed by Nazi government, but it’s also an awful truth that German Communists helped Weimar decline as “useful idiots”. (Like Nazis, they didn’t like democracy neither).
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(To be continued)
Apologies again, but both satisfaction and dissatisfaction are impermanent. But I think it comes down to also a difference in our model’s of reincarnation. I don’t believe that people can’t regress, or fail to end up in lower rebirths, (basically i very much believe that a human can be reborn again into animal forms) and it seems like you follow the theosophical model that says once humans reach the human stage they can never regress and will eventually escape the cycle just by keep on reincarnating until they eventually reach the spiritual stage that allows this.
I can imagine why the Buddha’s words would feel silly under such a paradigm. I won’t argue the point and will just wish you well on your path.
@earthworm (#329):
Clesson Harvey never claimed to have any special wisdom or insight during the years when I interacted with him a lot in the early 1960s. He was a seeker then, not someone who thought he had actually found what he wished to find. He told me once how deeply puzzled he was by a moment he had experienced in which a couple of mahatmas (to use the Theosophical term) appeared to him in a vision and told him that he could relax now, that he had already found what he needed to know. (That happened decades before he went to India and met up with someone whom he actually regarded as a Master in the flesh.)
By temperament he was a scientist, not any kind of a mystic at all. I met him during my senior year in Berkeley High School, where he taught my class in Physics. His degrees were in the hard sciences such as Physical Chemistry. We kept in touch often during my four undergraduate years at UC Berkeley.
‘It is sad that we should meet only thus at the ending. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. “ Treebeard’s words at the end of the LOTR to Galadriel and Celeborn. The passing of our own country western so American Galadriel to her heavenly Valinor brought these words to my mind as they reflect what I feel about where we are in the “arc of history” C.S. Lewis died in 1963 and his friend Tolkien passed in 1973. To me that decade was the culmination and peak of American and Western European civilization and the beginning of the inevitable decline we are now in.
Chuaquin: Oh dude, I get that sometimes too. I don’t try the dry humour that often, but when I do, sometimes they’re like “what?” and then it’s silence. Awkward!
Well I like our exchanges anyway even if the humour styles don’t quite line up.
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No profile picture. I’m not sure why. I’m logged into wordpress in this session and it has the picture. Oh well. Unless someone has a real easy solution that takes seconds to implement, that’s all the effort I’m gonna spend on that minor bit of fru fru.
Celadon, thank you! I appreciate the feedback.
Anon, I didn’t follow the transformations of Kekistan after the election, as I was dealing with a lot of things in my own life, not least moving to another state (and getting my wife there in one piece despite her worsening health). “The Shadilay Strangler” sounds highly amusing, though.
Ambrose, the labels “right” and “wrong” are exceedingly blunt instruments. Every action has consequences, and traditional moral codes are tentative, improvised guides to the behaviors that tend to have consequences most people prefer. How can we think critically about such things? The same way we think critically about anything else — as Kant showed conclusively, our senses, feelings, and thoughts can provide us only a very rough and inexact approximation of the real world. That’s why we have cultural frameworks for understanding the world — they consist of habits that have proven to be more or less adequate in practical terms for working with “the buzzing, blooming confusion” of raw experience.
Moral codes are among those cultural legacies. I’m reminded here of a passage in one of my tentacle novels: “The thing is, laws and morals are just fancy names for the rules people work out so they can get along. You don’t go around killing people, because people don’t want to be killed and they’ll shoot you if you try—that’s where laws come from. You don’t cheat your friends, because you don’t want them to tell you to get lost—that’s where morals come from.”
As for your speculation, no, there you’re trying to twist my ideas around in some kind of bizarre polemical game. Morality is the best guess our culture has to offer as to how to use karma constructively. This is why it changes organically over time. (Is it moral to keep slaves? A lot of people thought so a few centuries ago.) If you decide you want to defy karma, why, by all means try — but first of all you have to know how it works, and once again, morality is our best guess about how it works. Nor, by the way, are the lessons we’re here to learn primarily ethical in nature, though ethics enters into those lessons, as they do into all things.
BobinOK, good! The world right now would benefit from having young people with a talent for mechanics.
Sister Crow, I sent the healing energy at once — say, 10:45 pm; I hope it helped her transition smoothly. I’ll certainly say prayers for her soul. As for what to do, prayer’s the most useful thing; animals have the advantage of well-developed group souls to help with their transitions, so there shouldn’t be any difficulty, but prayer’s always a good way to bless the departed.
Chris, so it’s a bag of rocks down under! Up here it’s “dumb as a box of rocks”; I suppose that’s what you’d expect from a country with more trees and fewer sheep. You’re right, though, that the professional politician is the curse of representative democracy. We have plenty of those, too, and I’m sure most Americans would heartily agree that if you took every politician who’s never been employed outside of politics, sent them to flip burgers and wash dishes, and put the burger flippers and dishwashers into legislatures in their places, we’d get better laws and a more responsive government. Yeah, Visigoths would also be an improvement.
Scotlyn (if I may), I’ve also encountered a lot of people who avoid their joys and cling to their suffering; what’s more, I’ve noted that most of us do that at least some of the time — how many of us can truly say that we don’t have some sorrow or shame that we wallow in from time to time?
Cynthia, I’m not at all surprised that the gender surgery industry is trying to drum up business. The tide seems to have turned hard against it, and so they’re going to be scrambling to keep their income levels up. Generally speaking, I’ve found that the best way to predict what anyone in the mainstream medical industry will do is to assume that they’re motivated by sheer greed and nothing else really matters to them.
Earthworm, I have to admit, that final metaphor of yours is, well, colorful. (And odoriferous.) Thank you for the site! Combine it with https://cosmicoom.com/ and you have the makings of true genius:
Maroon Oracular Shrew, Principal Vice Executive for the Task Force on Inclusive Diversity!
Karen, I’m no fan of her music either, but she was an impressive person.
Cynthia, nope. The coal-burning Aztec automobiles, as I recall, weren’t very fast, and they were prestige vehicles driven only by important people. The Aztec Empire had also gone through a religious reformation and worshipped Quetzalcoatl instead of Huitzilopochtli, so the demand for sacrifices had gone way down.
Jbucks, it’s not a dumb question at all. Western occult schools fall along a continuum from those that are all the way over into Platonism and those that have gone the other way. Everyone’s responding to the Platonic ideas in one way or another, but “No, we don’t think that!” is one of the responses.
KM, rampant capitalization was a common bad habit of early 20th century occult authors; when I edited Regardie’s The Golden Dawn, taming the excess capitals was a major part of the work load. Thanks for this, btw!
Alvin, well, belief in reincarnation may be necessary but it’s not sufficient. I believe in reincarnation and find the notion that existence is unsatisfactory unconvincing.
Pure Land, well, I certainly wasn’t trying to pick a quarrel. I will note, though, that I don’t accept the claims of the Theosophists; in Druid teaching, rebirth of human beings in animal forms, or even in plant forms, is an accepted idea — it’s rather like flunking out of a class in an old-fashioned elementary school and being sent back a grade or two, so you have a second chance to learn the lessons you didn’t pick up the first time through.
BeardTree, a case could certainly be made for that.
@Ambrose (#321):
There’s another possibility, a third option between the two (i.e. that either there is or there isn’t an “objective right or wrong”). That third possibility is that at any given time and place, for any given person there is an “objective right or wrong” specific to him or her, which however isn’t the same for all people. In other words, what is objectively right or wrong varies from one person to the next.
I think the notion of an absolute objective morality rests on the (for me, dubious) assumption that universal standards of right and wrong exist so that humans can form ever more perfect societies in which they can live their lives ever more peacefully. I find it more reasonable to think that human destinies (plural!) are not social at all, and that there never has been and never will be any such thing as universal moral progress.
Chuaquin # 339 :
I do not think the current elections will “fix” Israel, but I look forward to (to my understanding) seeing the current administration realize they do not have the wide support they thought they have, and having them replaced by someone with a better and more ethical plan than “let’s bomb them until they give us everything we want”. A lot of Israeli people suffer too, while the government is indifferent, and I think we may see this in the ballot.
As for the religious “contradiction”, I’d like to point out there is nothing in Judaism that mandates bullying the arabs in Israel. Quite the contrary, there is a line in the old testement about God mandating the treatment the non Israelite population of Israel with dignity. There were actually quite a few nations in biblical Israel, which is why for example one of king David’s most trusted commanders was a Hittite.
“Life is suffering” always struck me as something a villain would say before locking away the good guys in some hellish prison. It feels more like an action movie line than a philosophy around which to build a religion.
Hi @pygmycory, @BeardTree, @Info, thanks so much for sharing your experiences with Christianity. It’s quite interesting to me as well, your experiences and @JMG’s. There seems to be some nuance there that I can’t begin to feel into, as I’m not Christian.
@ Cynthia Christie # 331 and #334
My blessings (if you will have them) to the ongoing surprise that keeps you not knowing how you are alive… 😉
JMG #250: It’s rather strange that today’s events are comparable to those of a century ago. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.
JMG #297: Good point, the three branches (Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana) differ quite a bit, and I can see the Piscean influence on Mahayana.
JMG #273: I’ve been thinking for awhile that the history of modern China will end up as just another dynasty, albeit an unusual one comparable to other times of upheaval. I’m sure they’ll remember that the barbarian ideology had something to do with workers’ rights and industrialization, but not much more than that.
However, your characterization of the Buddha as a “spoiled rich kid” who created the Theravada branch to escape reality, ie take his ball and go home, is something I find very off-putting. You’ve stated that there’s alot of overlap between Buddhism and occultism, so why are you being so dismissive? Yes, Siddhartha was born into wealth & nobility, and the fact that he put all that aside should prove his commitment to the spiritual path. He tried out various schools of thought, from which there was alot to choose from in ancient India, ranging from hedonism to asceticism, but found none of them satisfactory. Then, as the story goes, he meditated under a bodhi tree, and hit upon the answer: that samsara/reincarnation is a carousel that will never fulfill you, and the path to enlightenment is by way of stepping off the ride. Really, I’m sure you’d know this JMG, and I find your disdain for the founder of Buddhism to be outright balderdash. Unless I’m missing something here?
@ Patrick H # 337
Can you name a specific genocide or conquest of which you accuse Gazans?
Can you say in what sense Gazans might be described as “settlers”?
“Maybe” is such a slippery word, and I do not think that an accusation that begins with the word “maybe” is acceptable in any court of law.
(The court of public opinion, of course, has never been constrained by standards of evidence).
“Maybe yesterday victims will be the slayers tomorrow, beyond evident real historic events we know…It would be a black humor hypothesis that current IDF soldiers who have been commiting war crimes in Gaza and Lebanon were reborn as Arabs in the future, and Islamists zealots in ME were reborn as Jews…”
What about the hypothesis that Hitler was reborn as an Ashkenazi Jew?
“As for the idiotic equation of population decline with human extinction, I’ll point out first of all that this is like seeing the temperature start to sink back to normal after a scorching summer and insisting that this proves an ice age is about to kill us all”
I think that’s an artifact of Faustian civilisation taking a trend and extrapolating it out to infinity, unable to comprehend that the world sometimes works in cycles.
Sister Crow 325
Condolences regarding your Kameli. Torbie I interpret as tortoiseshell. I presume you are talking about a cat? If I got the species incorrect, please excuse.
Sad… sad… sad…
For eight years (2008-2016), when Jethro and I gave a permanent cushy and quiet home to a total of 47 former breeder-moms (with 3-4 males), when the cats’ breeding-lives were finished (exhausted) breeders unceremoniously hauled cats to veterinarians, where rescue-agencies would swoop in and grab cats preventing imminent euthanasia, got the cats to foster homes, then to us. Each cat was eight to sixteen years old. (27 was the highest number of cats at once. We had a big house.)
Out of the cats we shared our then-luxury home with, several feline residents sounded like a similar disposition as your Kameli. Yes, each of those cats was a particularly blessed blessing. The walls exuded mothering. Those eight years were a very special time in our house. Sadly, about each three-months, one cat died a natural death (in her own time, when her body collapsed in one way or another) (but aided)😥.
I shall pray for Kameli😪. May her transition be filled with benevolent beings.
💨🫥🥺💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
@Karen – Thank you for your response. It’s nice to know that others have had the same experience. I asked AI (hope that this is not taboo) to comment of a more detailed description of the phenomenon. It gave a wide range of possible causes but did conclude that there was no precedent described in medical literature. After some banter, AI made a few hilarious jokes such as
“And if the first coherent sentence turns out to be “Please renew your software license,” we’ll know that the subconscious has finally adopted the modern user-interface model.” And “And should the Great American Novel finally start scrolling by, do not blink. 😄”
It also suggested a few experiments to explore the possibility of inserting a few words meaningful to me into the character stream. Will advise!
Scotlyn: I got a real chuckle out of that and I hope that’s what was intended – it’s a good spirited chuckle that’s meant to be shared with who produced it! 😀
Anyway, I no longer do the thing that created the mystery about that: drive. And nobody else paid a price for it either, so all’s well that ends well, I think, or at least it’s well that it ends.
JMG: That’s about what I put together about the gender surgery thing – and about medical practice in general. The knowledge that this is the priority in medicine makes me want to avoid putting myself in their care at all. I am so thankful that my phenotypes, other than the wonkfest brain of course, have in general created no need for that. I wish I could trust them more, because if I felt comfortable putting myself in their hands for the necessary double mastectomy, detransition and just going back to a version of the man I was would suddenly become much more attractive. As it is, things overall militate towards remaining as I am. I think I’ll get less disrespect evincing committment to this than I will being a guy who obviously used to be this. And, well, I actually do have gender dysphoria and like this versoin of myself better. Is this too much information yet? To continue… ha, no, not to continue. Thanks for confirming that I drew reasonable conclusions from the emails the clinic sent me.
I’m making a note of that author and book and may seek it out at some point. It sounds interesting.
Mr. Greer, you often speak of technological advancement slowing/stopping in the future because of diminishing energy supplies. I think that’s probably true. I am curious if you think the same would happen with biotechnology advances like genetic engineering. It seems these don’t require much energy, just time and experimentation. Do you think we will see human brains and bodies augmented by biological tweaking in the future? (We already see some of this in animal models)
Northwind Grandma, yes, an American Shorthair. Torbies are tortoiseshells with tabby stripes; she also had white patches so I think she got a lot of the calico sweetness in her makeup. Many thanks for your prayers!
JMG, thanks also for the prayers and for the information about animal group souls. If you ever have more to say about the concept or perhaps have references to recommend, I for one would be very interested to learn. The vet said she was sleeping when her heart just gave out, so I think the energy helped her have a gentler transition than might have been.
JMG,
As for the Japanese noticing on some level that they need to get their population down to levels sustainable by agriculture, I’ve suspected that for a long time ever since their population started tanking beyond even the most dire predictions. It seems like they know that a de-industrial future is arriving for them sooner than it is for other nations and are behaving accordingly, if unconsciously.
Anecdotally, Japanese people living outside Japan often have larger families (2-3 kids) and there’s something about living there now that keeps people locked in adolescence until they’re well past child-rearing age. It’s hard to explain.
Hey JMG
On the subject of the coming age of drowned cities, there are two questions that I’ve been mulling over.
Firstly, is it likely that the icecaps will be completely melted, and if so how long will it take for this to happen? I come to understand that no one knows the answer to this question with any certainty, but I feel that in the long run the icecaps will disappear at some stage inevitably. Would I be correct in assuming from your fiction that you believe that the icecaps are likely to completely melt within 500 years or so?
Secondly, I have wondered whether future generations will make the best of a bad situation by salvaging as much resources as possible from these drowned cities. I can easily imagine future fishermen deciding to supplement their income by diving for copper wire and glass, to sell to scrappers. But far more sophisticated operations are also likely considering how much material makes up a city. I can easily imagine government or corporate funded businesses that have boats or submarines with specialist divers who “mine” these cities for anything of value. Do you think that is likely as well?
central/Northern CA get together:
I think it was last open post that various people chimed in on wanting to. I would be happy to gather contact info ( emails) in one spot to disseminate to the rest and co-ordinate and host, including go ahead and camp out here at least overnight as there is distance involved for most people.
JMG: I think you have helped gather contact information for email lists in the past ? Can the other Californians makae a do not post comment to do this again ?
While the group may pick somewhere else of course, if we gather a few here I would recommend fall or spring if it is more than 5 or so people so the great outdoors can be used for overflow and the general area is nice those times of year. I am a pretty casual person, even a couple people is fine by me. Sept, Oct, Mar, April, May . Temperary Reality and Inna have individually been here before.
Robert Mathiesen
“We kept in touch often during my four undergraduate years at UC Berkeley.”
It’s glorious thing when we get to meet someone with spark.
Bacon found it when she took up the trowel – people she just would not have met, marvellous characters and stories… Like an 80 year old woman chasing out kitchen fitters because they had made a mess… with a samurai sword.
Info # 304:
Are you really sure about Protestants rejection of Mary worshipping prevented them against mysoginy? Witches hunt frenzy against some unfortunated woman was common within Protestant areas for a long time, like it happened in Catholic countries. It seems mysogyny was shared in those prosecutions.
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Ambrose # 308:
No surprise for me…Although I’ve never read Mr. Raspail most (in)famous novel, I’ve seen some online opinions about it, against and in favor of it. It’s interesting that people paid much more attention in the novel ideology than its likely or unlikely artistic virtues… On the short form, this writer has been since ‘70s an intellectual myth for French far right people. It isn’t strange, because in modern western societies, thinkers and artists tend to be leftists, so far right usually suffers a chronical lack of prophets and thinkers.
By the way, I like some far right novelists, like Mishima and Celine…because they wrote very well. However, I’m not naïve enough to detect their agenda (for example, in some of his novels, Mishima despised educated women-ahem-).
Finally, I think dehumanization against a human group, often is the previous step before awful events.
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Jessica and JMG # 316:
I didn’t know Kim S. Robinson uchronic novel about a world without Modern Age Europeans, hadn’t been the first one. I liked it to some extent. I also think, like John, that Robinson copied too exactly European technologies in that alternative world. Even worse, he did literally the same with discoveries like Darwinism and theories like Marxism , to non European cultures (he was too lazy to imagine variants suited to those cultures).
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Earthworm # 332:
In addition to that likely tendency to mock universities, I think western universities deserve to be mocked by another sound motive: they were (especially the American ones) the original “nest” where the woke surrogate religion began to spread across the West. Academia is today one of the main supporters of this poisonous doctrine, especially in Humanist studies and Social “Sciences”.
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Cynthia C.# 345:
Thank you for your comment about humor…I like our exchanges too.
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JMG # 346:
I’ve read your answer to Ambrose about moral/ethics, and I’ve also thought ethical codes change in space and time since my teen years. When different cultures meet, there’s also a moral/ethic clash. I remember a scene from the old movie “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence”, in which the Japanese sergeant (Takeshi Kitano) asks roughly Mr. Lawrence (Tom Conti), why western soldiers don’t commit suicide during WWII, instead of surrender and become prisoners (he bets they haven’t any honor). Lawrence answers him, that western militaries see be imprisoned by their enemy as a part of their job, and suicide is a sin for Christians.
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Four Sided…# 348:
I agree, it seems support to the current Tel Aviv government could have been dwindling by evident reasons. I also think the Bible as a whole don’t allow hatred against Arabs nor whatever non Jew human beings, but unfortunately it seems the “religious” narrative uses to justify current state of things, some very biased interpretations to ignore Bible parts which contradict its agenda.
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Anonymous # 354:
A good question, which unfortunately maybe we’ll never know (unless John or some commenters know an occultist system to guess that fate for the man with a tiny moustache).
Chris #299, JMG
Acording with my impresión, Australia’s political system is not a representativa democracy, but a partitocracy because the citizens can not vote for a political representant of their district, like in the USA or UK. They can vote for a list of representants and a list of senators of the political party wich they’ll choose. But these representants and senators owe their loyalty to the chief of the political party who have decided to included them in the list. (bribes are not excluded ).
“I do not think the current elections will “fix” Israel, but I look forward to (to my understanding) seeing the current administration realize they do not have the wide support they thought they have, and having them replaced by someone with a better and more ethical plan than “let’s bomb them until they give us everything we want”. A lot of Israeli people suffer too, while the government is indifferent, and I think we may see this in the ballot.”
The opposition bloc’s 3% draft cap proposal on the Haredim is going to lead to mass civil disobedience from the Haredim in Israel, and the Israeli government cracking down upon the resulting Haredim protests and riots. It’ll be a public relations disaster and lead to Israel becoming more alienated from the rest of the world, and it will destroy what remains of the unity of the Jewish diaspora, having to decide whether to support the Haredim or the Israeli state.
“Pure Land, well, I certainly wasn’t trying to pick a quarrel. I will note, though, that I don’t accept the claims of the Theosophists; in Druid teaching, rebirth of human beings in animal forms, or even in plant forms, is an accepted idea — it’s rather like flunking out of a class in an old-fashioned elementary school and being sent back a grade or two, so you have a second chance to learn the lessons you didn’t pick up the first time through.”
To be honest, I think I would prefer being reincarnated in a “less dignified” form than the “eternal paradise” idea. I would likely get bored after a while and insist that some creature soon to be bored could use my soul for a while!
JMG and Cynthia,
You may already know this, but “cancer stage zero” is a thing in mammogram world. It is followed by a recommendation for surgery, chemo and/or radiation. One of my sisters took the surgery and radiation, and a friend opted for a double mastectomy last week in anticipation of no more cancer scares ever again. The medical industry gives me the yips.
OtterGirl
JMG
Kekistan had nothing to do with the original Kek phenomena and didn’t really show up until around mid 2017. To simplify the story, after Trump got elected there was the massive meltdown from the salary class. One of the most prominent meltdowns was from an actor who planned a four year protest called “He Will Not Divide Us” (HWNDU). This protest was meant to be a 4 year livestream during the duration of Trump’s first term in which protestors could say their piece in front of a camera to be broadcast in front of the world. This went about as well as you would expect, and so the protest was changed to simply a 24-hour livestream of the HWNDU flag in defiance of Trump. This began the greatest game of capture flag ever played. In early 2017 the chans triangulated the location of the flag using chemtrails and star maps. The flag was captured by trolls and in it’s place was a MAGA hat and pepe t-shirt.
This story broke across the internet as people witness firsthand the “weaponized autism” and “powers of meme magic” of the chans. And this is when Kekistan first came to be around late March/early April of 2017. What happened was there was a group of people who made their living online as secular atheist video commentators on YouTube, they had initially started by debating young earth creationism and low tier Christian apologetics and were called the “Skeptic Community.” (For context the Skeptic Community from 2013-2018 was the largest group of people online who covered politics and many millennials used them as their news/politics source whether directly or indirectly).
The Skeptic Community were basically failed members of the salary class who only broke with the salary class when it came to progressive/woke ideas entering their hobbies. So throughout 2016 the Skeptic Community found most of their audience being taken by MAGA/the chans/right wing influence. After HWNDU one of the most prominent of the Skeptics attempted to co-opt the Kek phenomena in an attempt to save the failing Skeptic Community.
What resulted is what I can best describe as a cargo cult. People with no context for chan culture attempted to copy the successes that the chans had by poorly imitating them. One of the most notable events was when a group of people who proclaimed themselves to be a “Kekistani militia” decided to “occupy” a playground, harassing local children, in protests for what they called “Kekistani independence.” This was relentlessly mocked by everyone online.
This led to a similar magical working on the chans against the Skeptics that was done against Hillary Clinton. The working was intended to completely destroy the Skeptic Community, however I remember in the threads leading up to it, that according to the more experienced occultists, that once the working was done that the influence of Kek would be heavily diminished or disappear completely. I’m not too familiar with how magical pushback works with curses, so I didn’t participate in the working myself for that reason and don’t have much knowledge as to what the actual working involved.
All I know for certain is that after the working was done in late 2017, the Kek phenomena more or less died down, but the Skeptic Community was utterly destroyed. By the end of 2018 their near monopoly on YouTube political discourse was gone. (This had the possibly intended effect of making YouTube’s political ecosystem skew heavily towards the right which YouTube tried and failed to suppress in the early 2020s). The Skeptic’s leader and self proclaimed president of Kekistan, tried to run for office as a member of Ukip and not only lost, but arguably permanently destroyed Ukip’s branding. Most notably however was the story of the Shadilay Strangler aka the Kekistani Killer. He was a major fanatic of the Skeptic Community who snapped and strangled his mother to death, later claiming that he sacrificed her to Kek. This story did major damage to the Skeptic Community and played a major part in their downfall as online platorms feared that the Skeptic Community was leading people into “extremism.”
Of course this is a major oversimplification and its an insane story and unfortunately because of the online purges during 2020 and the lack of mainstream news coverage a lot of the details are presumably lost. I do still have some archives, but after the Shadilay Strangler incident Skeptics and former Skeptics attempted to completely distance themselves from Kek entirely.
The internet is trying to tell me that there aren’t any no go zones in Europe, just as it offers clues that many people ask questions that derive from the idea that there are.
(Actually, the summary of the denials was pretty funny: “There are no officially recognized no go zones” – officially recognized! No, I don’t suppose there are!)
Anyway, an almost archtypically woke European woman definitively cleared it up for me a couple years ago. The definitiveness comes from the information not being what you would expect such a person to assert. She referred to the zones as a simple fact.
So there are such zones.
Gah. Understanding the world in 2026. Not every issue has been conveniently cleared up by someone candidly stating what you would expect them to deny.
Or is the denial of the zones a recent thing? I first heard of them, I guess about 10 years ago, from right wing bloggers.
(I also learned about trans from those guys, which is hilarious to me!)
Dennis, the thought of the Buddha as a cackling villain in an action movie hadn’t occurred to me, I freely admit.
Xcalibur/djs, well, a century ago was when we had the last elite replacement cycle. As for Buddhism, I’m not dismissive of the tradition at all — as I noted, I think that many generations of interesting and thoughtful people took it in many creative directions. If you find the Buddha appealing, why, by all means follow him; to me, he was quite simply wrong about some very important things.
Anon, oh, granted. It’s an axiom of mine that any linear process, extrapolated more than a short distance, ends in absurdity. Our civilization seems to have risen to the challenge of proving that in the most comprehensive way possible.
Cynthia, I get that. I also avoid medical treatment, and that has by and large been a major advantage to me.
Mrsleepy, well, tell me this. How much of current biotechnology depends on computer analysis of genetic data? That’s a huge energy sink, you know.
Sister Crow, I’ll consider a post on the subject. I’m glad my work may have helped!
Dennis, that does seem oddly Japanese…
J.L.Mc12, nobody knows how much will melt and how fast it will happen. As for salvage, it will depend on how fast the seas rise. If they rise slowly, all the salvaging will be done in advance of the water, since it’ll be easier and more profitable that way. If they rise fast, then your idea may well happen.
Atmospheric, yes, I can certainly do that.
Gunstone, the whole eternal paradise schtick strikes me as something invented by (and possibly for) people who were really stressed and miserable. My guess is that there are such realms, but after a few millennia, when bliss is giving way to boredom, some angel or minor bodhisattva comes by to murmur to them, “You know, if you’re ready to go on to something else, the exit doors are right over there.”
Ottergirl, what a loathsome abuse!
Anon, thanks for this. I heard something at the time about HWNDU and noted that he didn’t have to — they’d do it to themselves promptly enough, as of course they now are. I also heard about a couple of the failed attempts to hijack meme magic — that was what led me to conclude that what happened in 2016 wasn’t done by the people on the Chans but through them, by powers other than human using them as instruments. The rest is new to me — thank you! If you have any ambitions to write, by the way, a lively memoir of the whole process would be easy to get into print and I think it would sell like hotcakes to the same fringe markets that buy my books.
Cynthia, that is to say, the internet tells lies. Gosh. 😉
Buddhism, like most religions, has positive as well as negative theologies. I was taught that the mind is like pure light, and only temporarily obscured.
JMG (no. 346) “…you’re trying to twist my ideas around in some kind of bizarre polemical game.”
I assure you I am not. As they say on Wikipedia, please assume good faith. On one hand, you describe karma as unconnected, or only very indirectly connected, to human concepts of morality, like Newton’s physics. On the other hand, you use moral language to describe it, e.g. your example of the sleazy person. Classical theories of karma reinforce the popular morality, while modern occult theories are more psychological.
“morality is our best guess about how it works”
Buddhism, too, views ethical norms as a means of navigating karma. Critics see such approaches as self-serving and instrumental: one behaves morally in order to avoid negative consequences / reap positive consequences for oneself. (If we thought karma rewarded killing and stealing, then should we do those things?)
” Nor, by the way, are the lessons we’re here to learn primarily ethical in nature, though ethics enters into those lessons, as they do into all things.”
That is an interesting distinction. I wonder what those lessons consist of.
” I don’t accept the claims of the Theosophists…”
Oh, this confused me. You do use a lot of Theosophical jargon and concepts, presumably acquired indirectly, via other occult groups. They see humans as belonging to a different order of creation than other animals.
[rebirth as an animal is] ” rather like flunking out of a class…”
This suggests objective, external standards against which we are evaluated, not an impersonal action / reaction. It also implies a pedagogical function for karma. However, nonhuman animals would mostly have very different characters, e.g. Blake’s tiger and ox. I can’t imagine that life as a tiger would be very helpful in cultivating human virtues (ferocity, perhaps?), although conceivably it could serve as a punishment.
Robert Mathiesen (no, 347) ” what is objectively right or wrong varies from one person to the next.”
Even an ethical absolutist would accept that individual circumstances matter, but would still affirm the existence of higher-order principles behind all the exceptions and variations.
Consider Genghis Khan, pondering whether to massacre a village and build a tower of skulls. Is the action karmically significant? Most versions of karma assume so, but for all I know the rules may be very alien (perhaps he may even receive good karma for it). If they are very individualized, a lot would depend on Genghis Khan’s personal circumstances, or even his own values and assumptions.
Meanwhile, I am pondering whether to eat a hamburger, but handicapped by my ignorance of the possible karmic consequences. Possibly some occult teaching (if I have the wisdom to identify the correct one) could tell me the relevant underlying principle to be applied here. Of course this would be a purely instrumental view of karma, a bit like the Divine Command theory of ethics (x is good because God says so). If the Austrian painter had won the war, then the laws would be very different–likely rewarding actions that are punished in our timeline, and vice versa–but law and morality are distinct. So with karma and morality.
@martin black – #326
Thanks you for your comments and insight. I do believe that birds are messengers. In my case, there is one possible business related interpretation inspired by your story. We are in a commercial battle with a much larger and better funded publicly traded company. The battle has been ongoing for years but now seems to be reaching a tipping point in our favor due to recently introduced new technology. If that was the bird’s message, it would be too mundane for my liking but at the moment it seems to be the best fit.
@Robert Mathiessen, thanks for setting me right about the mythological importance of the battle of Kosovo Polje for Serbs. My scientific training makes me look for objective measures like population changes over time, but you are surely correct that popular myths are more important for future developments than objective numbers. I do want to add, after reading up a little bit more, that for the last 150 years, Serbs seem to have been more of a threat to Albanian-speaking inhabitants of Kosovo than the other way around.
@xcalibur/djs #
Regarding the future of Western Europe, let’s consider a slightly revised version of your options:
1. Islamist takeover – would only happen with the acquiescence of the ruling elites. They will let in continue until traditional European values are degraded into irrelevance. A big question however, is the Vatican’s reaction a reduction in their social power.
2. Russian takeover: I doubt that they want to deal with a morally/spiritually decaying population.
3. Neo-fascist takeover: Already well underway. WW II is a frozen conflict and it seems that the final battles are now being fought and being lost by western Europe. I suspect that the US will continue to drain what they can our of the European economy as they retreat to the Western hemisphere.
I don’t think that whatever war happens would involve nuclear weapons unless Israel completes its decent into madness.
@mrsleepy, if I may: From my own experience with DNA sequencing, recombination and transfection into cells, I would classify DNA engineering as a very high energy undertaking. You might say that once an organism has been modified, it needs no further technology, but I suppose it would be necessary to continuously test for and possibly reintroduce foreign DNA again and again, since the introduced trait is probably not well adapted to life in the wild.
Hi JMG
I notice that Elon Musk has popped up as one of the followers of “your” X account. You might be drifting too far from the fringes 😂.
JMG, while I’m sure you’re right about why those men put on the klan robes, something has changed. Those older klansmen or neo-nazis grew up watching media where the white dude who was in charge had a black, hispanic or native sidekick. For at least thirty years, now white men have only two roles in media: villains or incompetent morons who need to be rescued by people of color. And of course, who were the ultimate villains of the last century?
Although I fly close to the great banhammer in the sky here, Kanye West made a song about this.
@ Chris and JMG “I heard about the One Nation victory. It’s impressive, and not in a good way, that your elites are just as stupid as ours when it comes to thinking through how people will respond to their pet policies.”
So my Wife and I had a very good chuckle at this. I just said to here “See, even someone from country on the opposite side of the planet understands what is going on.”
I see so much political talk online and a large part of what people propose in terms of “solutions” show a lack of awareness of things like ‘The long decent’. In trying to cling to the image of growth both politicians and the people are setting themselves up for failure and disappointment. The more the material realities catch up with the rhetoric, the wider the divide will become.
But as Bill Clinton once said “Nobody has ever won an election saying what they cannot do.” . If only that wasn’t the case, we could at least face issues head on rather than avoid them until implosion.
On the impending Islamic conquests of Europe, I think there’s many ways this could go down, and not all of them being terrible. I think you present one of the worst case doomer scenarios, i.e. a full-scale population replacement. So if you allow me, I’m going to speculate the opposite of that scenario, still with the common prediction that Europe, as it is now, is cooked.
We actually know from history how these conquests typically go — a Muslim army invades a new land and the leaders of that army and their families become a new minority elite that lords over the native population they conquered. The use the dhimmi natives as a tax farm to fund the elite’s luxury class lifestyle. Over time the native population gradually converts to Islam so they get to enjoy the tax benefits and gains in social status. The Muslim conquest of Persia went very much like this. It look centuries for the native Persian population to convert and become majority-Muslim. Those who did convert in the beginning became the administrative and scholarly class of the Abbasid caliphate — what we call “the Islamic Golden Age” was largely the Persian Golden Age under Islamic rule.
If at least a few of the Muslim conquerors of Europe are smart about how they conquer and are well versed enough in their own religion’s history, they will know well that Western Europeans, even in their present sorry state, are still very useful human capital. Heck, we even have the beginning of this model established in Dubai; an wealthy Muslim elite allows talented westerners to live in the city in order to use their technological and business expertise to grow the UAE economy and fund the emirate elite living as a leisure class. If the takeover of Europe is elite driven rather than wholly caused by the sheer anarchy of invading mobs, then we might see the Dubai model exported to Europe, with a new Arab/Muslim elite lording over a talented native technocratic class, and several layers of working classes underneath them. Just imagine if a few of the still-existing European royal families decide to convert to Islam and intermarry with existing Muslim elites like Gulf Arab royal/emirati families, in a desperate bid to cling to relevance. There’s rumors abound that King Chucky, being the Rene Guenon fanboy that he is, has been a secret Muslim for some time.
Right now the way Europe is governed is like a Mandarinate with no King or Emperor to keep them in check. The legacy royal families right now are nothing more than celebrity tabloid fodder, i.e. useless lapdogs. The Middle East has real live wire Monarchical traditions that can simply be imported and superimposed over a dying, but still technologically-proficient society. Think of Muslim elites doing the ruling and Germans keep the trains running on time, or something like that. Another thing to mention is that old Islamic empires like the Ottomans have only been out of business for a little more than a century; that’s just a brief interregnum on a larger time scale. A lot of old institutions can easily be jolted back into existence, with hopefully the more horrifying of those (like the Jannisaries) not making a reappearance.
If the conquests are to be elite-driven, then I’m putting my money either on the Turks or Gulf Arabs. Or maybe some combination of the two. I don’t think Pakistani or Maghrebi fellaheen are fit to rule much of anything in the near future, unless we’re talking Algerian or Moroccan royals with a French technocratic middle management layer underneath them.
JMG
I have no experience with writing anything for publishing and wouldn’t even know where to begin with a project like that. But that being said, I do think it would be good to preserve what I have. because as of now it seems like most of the first hand records about Kek, HWNDU, Kekistan, etc. are digital only and screenshot. For example there are a couple of screenshots on my hard drive that might be the only existing copies of certain threads. I guess for the sake of preservation I should.
OtterGirl: No, I didn’t know that and I’m horrified. Do I understand correctly that this is some kind of horrible makework scheme for surgeons? I’m appalled. I don’t even know what to say about that. I mean I was already talking about exactly such a thing in a different sphere, but I had no idea about this. Oh my God.
JMG: But… but.. the internet was supposed to be a wonderous fount of knowledge! (ha ha, doh! You got me!)
@Aldarion (#375) wrote:
“Serbs seem to have been more of a threat to Albanian-speaking inhabitants of Kosovo than the other way around.”
You’re certainly right about that. Such is the power of popular myth.
Whether the Albanian speakers in Kosovo are a very old population, or one that arrived there “merely” (say) 300 years ago, or even 100 years ago, hardly matters to the Serbs in question, any more than how long non-Jews have lived in the territory some Israelis call Greater Israel matters to many of those Israelis. Myths are quite often not benign at all, but they can be far more powerful than morals or facts. In extreme cases they are even deadly toxins, wreaking havoc on all in their path.
@J.L.Mc12 RE : Ice caps and Ocean level rise.
Depending on the glacier, your number of 500 years might be reasonable. Estimates generally are for between 200 and 500 years. The pace of heating is increasing currently (+0.48c in the last decade) so it is hard to tell the exact timing. But global warming is not a linear growth or exponential curve but an S-curve, the only question is where we are on the S-curve and the overall top end. It makes predicting these things difficult at best.
Shooting from the hip here, I suspect we are in, or approaching, the faster part of it now with the pace to significantly slow down in the later part of this century. But were we are on the curve determines a lot of the overall pace and nobody knows that.
As for ocean level rise, it is a very slow process. Many cities that will be scrapped in the next 200 years barely even existed 200 years ago. Key west will be scrapped first and then slowly move up north. I joking say that, due to history getting muddled up the folk lore of Florida will have both Trump and Jimmy Buffet combined as they talk about the Orange King that lived in the sunken castle of Margaritavile as he liked a Cheese Burger in Paradise. 😉
There is the idea of Antarctic glacier collapses that can increase ocean level rapidly over the course of a few months but this is mere theory and gut feeling is that people are muddling up numbers of entire ice sheets rather than what a single event could contribute. For instance, the ‘DOOMSDAY GLACIER!’, more reasonably known as the Thwaites glacier, yes, it has the ability to increase ocean levels by 65cm in total and would take decades/centuries to occur, not just the few miles that could sheer in the next few years that might increase it by a centimeter at best.
It isn’t impossible but I am not losing any sleep over it.
@ Dennis RE : Japan’s population.
I will just leave this quote here that seems appropriate to the theme.
“Our population could just suddenly dip and disappear!” – “I want to see the sea rise over Tokyo and the NTV tower become an island. I’d like to see Manhattan underwater. I’d like to see when the human population plummets and there are no more high-rises, because nobody’s buying them. I’m excited about that. Money and desire—all that is going to collapse, and wild green grasses are going to take over.” – Hayao Miyazaki
And if you look at any of his movies, it is very apparent that this is something intrinsic to the worlds he creates.
@Ambrose (#373):
The third option that I’m suggesting in my post is far, far more radical than that. In the case you give of Genghis Khan, you suggest that under my third option “a lot would depend on Genghis Khan’s personal circumstances, or even his own values and assumptions.” No, I’m simply unwilling to rule out the possibility that it might depend on something as random and meaningless as a random throw of impersonal cosmic dice, where there is no way at all for Genghis (or anyone) to make sense of the result. I’m also unwilling to rule out the possibility that there are no such things as karmic consequences whatever. As a mere human, I have no way to even come close to knowing the truth about such things.
“Consider Genghis Khan, pondering whether to massacre a village and build a tower of skulls”
Would… ha ha… oh god I’m such a schist. Would at least getting some constructive use out of the skulls mitigate the bad karma in this case?
What if you can use the tower of skulls as affordable housing for your community? Would that make the load a little lighter for ol’ Genghis? There were no elevators so it wouldn’t be very handicap accissible. I think some bungalows of skulls would be much more suitable than one big tower. There’d probably be a much greater reduction in bad karma for not inflicting all those stairs on people.
Ambrose, no, you’re blatantly misstating my views again. One of the reasons I suspect you of bad faith is that you do this so consistently. I emphatically did not “describe karma as unconnected, or only very indirectly connected, to human concepts of morality, like Newton’s physics.” Please go back and reread my comment and you’ll find that you’re quite wrong. When you admit that, and describe accurately what I actually said without twisting it for polemic purposes, you’ll be allowed to post here again.
Darren, oof! Well, that’s quite a surprise. Clearly I need to get a little weirder.
Justin, maybe so, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Klan and Nazism both so consistently attract losers. There are many ways to uphold the concept of a genuinely colorblind society, or even to do what every other race does and engage in mutual-aid arrangements within your own ethnicity, that don’t involve embracing uniforms and symbols that most people of good will reject for very good reasons.
Mithridates, if it’s elite-driven, sure. So far, it seems to have much more in common with voelkerwanderung than with elite conquest.
Anon, writing nonfiction is much easier than most people think. If there are any nonfiction books you enjoy, read them sometime with an eye toward how the author does it. It really is a matter of getting out of the way and describing what happened, in the order it happened, and with some attention to why you think it happened. Give it a shot!
Anon;
Writing nonfiction isn’t that hard. The hard part is getting the basic outline sorted out. Look for a book on technical writing, there should be several used college texts in the market.
For the general approach find something by Isaac Asimov. Or lots of somethings. He wrote a lot of non-fiction mostly in the form of short story length single topic texts. See how he lays out a topic and follow the plan.
Atmospheric River
I just sent JMG my email to give you. I would love to do a get together if the timing works. I am in CA from June-Nov, mostly with my daughter in SLO, though part of the time at my cabin in Cuyama. Some time later in Sept or Oct would probably work for me.
Stephen
Hi JMG, I meant specifically the Buddhist understanding of reincarnation as opposed to e.g. the Hermetic/Druid.
From what I understand from your other posts, your view of reincarnation is gradual, and e.g. once you have a mental body, you won’t “fall back” into lower stages? While you are a human you might fall back into stage of an animal potentially but you don’t have the idea of falling back into the state of pretas or hell-beings that Buddhism has?
Buddhism thinks you can fall back at any stage until you exit the cycle completely. If you’re playing snakes and ladders, in Mahayana, a Buddha can then emanate back at any point in the game to benefit beings, but a Buddha has actually exited the game completely. In Vajrayana, to stretch the metaphor, one could argue that one realizes that one has always been the player, not the piece.
Anyway IMO that’s the idea of duhkha, that you will keep spinning around in samsara again and again. Up and down, up and down.
Of course you don’t need to accept it, I’m just saying that duhkha cannot be separated from the Buddhist understanding of rebirth in the different realms, and indeed is always presented with it in the traditional texts.
Incidentally the etymology of “duh” is literally “dus”, the same root in Greek “dys” Latin “dis”. Dystopia, dysfunctional etc. Sanskrit and Indic languages have a sandhi rule that changes final -s to -h in certain locations. Dukkha is the Pali reflex of the same word. I think ”
Etymologically, I think “ease” vs “disease” actually map very well to the pair “sukha” vs “duhkha”. Ignoring the “sickness” side of disease and focusing just on the etymology.
JMG
re Ambrose 388
> When you admit that, and describe accurately what I actually said without twisting it for polemic purposes, you’ll be allowed to post here again.
Thank you, JMG. At least one other person (you) feels “Ambrose” says some fairly nasty things (my interpretation).
I am only an average writer,— not a sophisticated wordsmith,— I can’t spar with “Ambrose”: he always wins; and always sets himself up as “The Perfect One.” He disturbs and intrigues, so I am glad you spoke up. Had you not spoken up, well, I already skip over what “Ambrose” writes. At worst, I would spend less time reading here.
I think “Ambrose” has ulterior motives, like he represents Mouse-add or Isrule Dedunce Farce.
(For all I know, people here skip over what I write. If so, they can rest easy: I will habituate myself to write “insignificant blather” (saying nothing that could be possibly misconstrued as “controversial”), lest I risk being put in stocks, or dunked in a pond til I come within hair’s breadth of drowning), or burned alive🔥however it is people get burned alive in different eras and places.
💨🫥🪶🧑🏼⚖️🔨🔥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Chris (#327) – yes, we do have some interesting politicians, here dununder. The thing that most offends me is that people say that people get the politicians they deserve and the corollary to this is that I think they might be right.
One good spinoff from the major depression of the 1930s and the major war of the 1940s is that people were forced to mix with others they would never have met otherwise. In the depression plumbers were likely to be mixing with barristers and in the army a brigadier might have been a plumber and his lowliest private might have been a barrister.
It made for a fairly cohesive society.
Cynthia (#331) – one of the things the allies tried to get Dr Mengele for after was his experiments on the genitalia of children. I wonder how many will fall on this in the future.
I look forward to your new book on Atlantis. About a year ago I found your old one on the bottom shelf of one of our many bookshelves. Neither my mate or I have any idea where it came from. I read it then & have just finished rereading it again.
My Mother’s ashes just arrived by post a week ago. I’m glad to say she wasn’t cremated til about 5 days after she died. I was in the “big smoke” for much of the last 6 weeks whilst she was dying. It’s crazy with people, cars & shops selling endless crap of no use at all. Now I know why I live in the bush off the grid.
And now One Nation has won a seat. The “mindless grey masses” are well & truly alive it seems in Australia. Even many of my friends it seems can be included in that lot. And the paranoia they have about immigration & how they are taking all the jobs & housing. Yet go to any nursing home etc in the country & it’s the immigrants who are most of the workforce & doing a great job. Mention the decline of civilization & duck as the backlash comes.
I totally agree with ghosts & reincarnation. I have sensed ghosts & my dog’s hackles were up & she was growling. And I’ve seen about 5 or so past lives. And they sure as hell explain a lot of this life I’m in.
Interesting time to be alive & so many lessons & gifts in it
“The clinic has recently sent me some emails trying to reconnect with me so I can part company with my Richard and his two boys after all, and trade them for a nasty surgical grotesquerie.”
Cynthia, I am glad that your path works for you.
What I got from surgery was not a grotesquerie. It is indistinguishable from the non-surgical version in both appearance and function. For many of my friends, this was indispensable for living a reasonably happy life.
Patrick H: “Maybe some of the Gazans were involved in previous genocides & conquests, possibly even as settlers during the 1947/8 founding of Israel.”
My guess is that that is quite likely. But even if it is true, it doesn’t get those currently committing atrocities off the hook.
JMG,
I think I made the same mistake as Cynthia mentioned, treating you as an abstract blogger rather than a particular human being. For someone who has suffered a recent loss like yours, the notion that ordinary life is suffering compared to the enlightened state is like giving a glass of water to a drowning man. (Or a floatation ring to someone lost in a desert.) I apologize. I do still think though that Buddha’s six year’s of intense austerities make him something other than a spoiled rich boy. Though that is clearly what he was originally.
Scotlyn, Buddhist notions like these aren’t so much true or false or correct or incorrect so much as useful or not useful. Focusing on the joyful elements works much better for many.
On a different topic, if I remember correctly, you are up there in Dhún na nGall. I recently visited my paternal grandfather’s birth village in County Leitrim, walking distance from the partition line. (No wonder he took the anti-treaty side.) I had not realized before that as long as the partition border was enforced, Donegal was a bit like West Berlin, in the sense of being artificially isolated by politics. It must even now be an interesting place to live.
Northwind Grandma #106, Anselmo #121, Sister Crow #133, pygmycory #159, methylethyl #175, Koyaanisqati #178, Ann M #188, Phutatorius #201, and Karen #206:
Thank you, y’all have been very helpful.
—David P.
@ Cynthia Christie #358
“Scotlyn: I got a real chuckle out of that and I hope that’s what was intended – it’s a good spirited chuckle that’s meant to be shared with who produced it! 😀”
Absolutely! 🙂
I think it was Terry Pratchett who called “Surprise” the 5th element, and I myself think that laughter, and capacity for surprise, are the two biggest indicators (for me) that free people are *feeling* free in themselves wherever they are found.
Be well, and stay free! 🙂
Thanks for your thoughts on karma, JMG and commenters. I suppose it’s about getting what you deserve – your just desserts. Talking of desserts, I remember seeing a British TV advert circa 1980. It showed a modern boy and girl in a house. The boy was riding a rocking horse – yes, in 1980. Out of touch or what? And the girl was playing with a dolls house. All very neo-Edwardian. A little jingle played over the happy scene to advertise the product. “Semolina, semolina, just what they deserve!” I remember thinking that they must have been very naughty to deserve semolina. Blergh!
Hi Anselmo,
Your analysis is both correct, and incorrect. The constitution does not read that way, and the Prime Minister is not even mentioned. Elected representatives choose who to give their support to.
Please indulge me with a brief summary:
– The Australian Labour Party operates on the basis you described. In my opinion, it looks like the back benchers from that party switch their brains off and defer to the cabinet of ministers, caucus and whatever is on their minds;
– With the allegedly descending into oblivion Liberal party, crossing the floor to vote with other parties is not a career limiting move as it would be with the Labour party. So yes, they can represent their electorate’s interest.
– The National party are usually aligned and in coalition with the Liberal party, and they tend to push for rural interests. Given the outsized urban population down under, most people are city folks, but the National party appears to have had a slight uptick in support. But is it enough to matter?
– One Nation. Too new to know what would happen, but they have had Senators gain a seat and then resign from the party affiliation and declare independence. The second in command is the popular former Deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce who defected to the party.
– There are some Independents who represent their electorate’s interest only, and Bob Katter comes to mind.
– The Greens, almost forgot about them, but then it appears they are fading from the political landscape due to perceptions that they are aligned with Labour. In fact at the last Federal election they lost many of their seats to the Labour Party which was probably due to idiotic preference deals, or at least that is my opinion.
It does sometimes work like what you mentioned, and other times does not. It’s as complicated as the preferential and proportional voting systems – which are found nowhere else. We get the most preferred candidate for the job.
First past the post counting systems have their own limitations and issues – Does someone who got the majority of the votes, say only 25% of the electorate, actually reflect the will of the people? Dunno, maybe not.
Cheers
Chris
Hi Michael Gray,
Yeah, there is no political solution to the underlying problems. The limits to growth model spelled out the future way back in 1972, and hey I read the first edition a few years ago. An odd book with a remarkably academic tone given the revelations. Whatever, to my knowledge, despite some tweaking here and there, think fracking for example, it’s tracking pretty closely to reality, which is a disturbing thought. I’d be interested to hear your opinion on the subject, but to me politics is a method of divvying up the spoils. And that is why I keep an eye upon unfolding events. Like you and your lady, Sandra and I also live a small life just doing our own thing up in the mountains. If it seems unappealing, that my friend is the entire point of the exercise. 🙂
Did you notice that the Labour party and the Business Council of Australia recently had a mutual goodwill get together dinner? I’m truly baffled why younger folks seem to think that lot have their backs? A mystery!
Cheers
Chris
“Gunstone, the whole eternal paradise schtick strikes me as something invented by (and possibly for) people who were really stressed and miserable. My guess is that there are such realms, but after a few millennia, when bliss is giving way to boredom, some angel or minor bodhisattva comes by to murmur to them, “You know, if you’re ready to go on to something else, the exit doors are right over there.””
Indeed. My ideal “exit” back to the realm of mortals would be the green pipe used in my Mario videogames.
Regarding your point on “eternal paradise” appealing to those who were stressed and miserable, it is very much not a coincidence that Christianity (along with various other “mystery cults”) saw a huge explosion of adherents in the 3td Century. The combination of socio-political turmoil from what has retrospectively been called “The Crisis of the 3rd Century ” combined with (perhaps especially) the Plague of Cyprian (believed to be an Ebola type plague) made what was a fringe sect at the start of the 3rd Century into a quite salient feature of it by the end.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/25/birth-jesus-plague-roman-empire-christianity
It is estimated that Christianity jumped from about 0.25% of the Roman population in 200 to 5-10% by 300 (and that number would have been even bigger in the cities, especially cities in the East).
Islam similarly got its shot at being a major world religion in the 7th Century thanks to the lingering outbreaks of the Justiniac Plague combined with the particularly long, brutal “Last War of Antiquity” between the (Eastern) Romans and Sassanid Persia
Given the current American mania for renaming geographical features, perhaps the Tetons could be renamed the Partons for similar reasons.
Regarding the prospect of “technological bifurcation” raised in the last post, I would note that there is a sustained bureaucratic war being waged on the already “pre-technologically bifurcated” Amish, both in the state of New York and in the state of Pennsylvania.
According to Sayer Ji, “The Pennsylvania Bureau of Immunizations director said publicly the Amish outreach program is designed to work “over generations.””
https://sayerji.substack.com/p/pennsylvania-is-executing-the-most
Which is to say, the capacity for any culture to transmit its own knowledge base, its own practices and its own values to future generations has been the battlefield where every culture that ever succumbed to “modern global corporatism” was defeated. And it is the battlefield where it intends to fight and win its last battle.
The historical kidnapping and “re-education” of indigenous children is part of this picture, and so is (for example) the complete transformation, within a generation or two, of Ireland (along with many other nations) from being an Irish speaking culture to being an English speaking culture. And even the way in which we in the west keep voluntarily sending our own children to be educated away from us, and away from our ways and means, is part of this picture.
And the Amish, who have been among the few cultures quietly, over generations, maintaining an intact system for transmitting their culture to future generations, have become a reproach that the modern global corporatists apparently can neither abide nor leave alone.
Technological bifurcation may turn out to be a more contested process than it might otherwise appear.
Returning now to the Ceuta event consequences, maybe it won’t be a surprise for you: I’m angry with current bipolarized and tensioned sides in our national politics compost heap. I can’t support a Spanish government blinded by its own woke narrative, so unable to show that national sovereignty violation isn’t a easy joke for Rabat.
On the other hand, I’m not puzzled by local far right leaders general deportation proposal for every Moroccan still in Ceuta today (even children left behind for their families). It’s part of the far right Spectacle/kitsch…
However, I think it’s really an scandal and a shame when this proposal is also shared by current Conservative leaders here. Some years ago, they decided to give up their center-right position within political spectrum, hoping to win a fistful of votes against Spanish far right…
Everything is useful to get the power in Madrid, even dehumanizing children, because maybe for the whole right wing block, they aren’t true humans, but Moroccans, Muslims and so on. They show with this attitude his low ethical and intellectual level.
They cannot pretend to ignore some children seem to have been raped by some adult Moroccans in Ceuta, due to local chaos. And their deportation back to Morocco (without finding before their families) makes easier they’d be likely preys for Moroccan pervs there.
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More about ancient Greeks “paedophillia”:
I’m not a proffessional in History, but I like Ancient History as a dilettante hobby. I’ve read in some serious books that gay relationships between adult men and male teens were tolerated and even promoted in ancient Helas. After 13-14 years old, boys could have gay sex/love with adult men (not children in a strict sense). In addition of this “romance”, teens learned by adult men (ironically), how to become men; and adult men enjoyed to speak and share activities (not only sexual ones) with young people.
To some extent, there was a similar ethical view in the old Ottoman Empire times, according some sources, about male teens and adult men in some contexts in old Turkey (though I’m not sure of this data).
It’s interesting some European gay men during XIXth didn’t like to be labelled as homosexuals (they thought they were pointed as ill/crazy people); so they paradoxically prefered to be named as Paedophilles. This term didn’t seem to mean in those times a sexual perversion like in more recent times…
JMG #372: It’s not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing, or being right or wrong. For the record, I can’t quite accept Nirvana or “snuffing-out” — it feels like the tradition is incomplete, or missing something there. It’s specifically the characterization of the Buddha as the ancient Indian version of Holden Caulfield. That’s some way to refer to one of the more enlightened beings to incarnate as human!
JMG #388: Well to be honest, however formidable the KKK and NSDAP once were, they were both decisively defeated in the 20th century. Thus, I think losers/omegas are naturally drawn to defeated factions, so they can wallow in their fail.
As for Justin #379, you make a good point, but notice how the current Dissident Right and frogposters are rebranding themselves, and avoiding the old symbols except to use them ironically. There’s a reason for that.
Patient Observer #376:
“1. Islamist takeover – would only happen with the acquiescence of the ruling elites”
Not so. Muslims will play the game, and go along with the racial spoils system for awhile. But once Islamist parties have a majority or plurality in parliaments, with a strong presence in police/military/judiciary, and a critical mass of the population, what’s stopping them from taking over and declaring emirates & sultanates, and beheading the managerial nitwits with scimitars? Nothing, really. Unless of course…
“2. Russian takeover: I doubt that they want to deal with a morally/spiritually decaying population.”
I don’t think they want to deal with all of Europe, but the Yookay would be a fine naval base, along with the British cultural legacy and financial power of London, and they may want to grab Scandinavia and the Baltics along the way. In a stroke of historical irony, the only thing defending Germany is Poland.
“3. Neo-fascist takeover: Already well underway. WW II is a frozen conflict and it seems that the final battles are now being fought and being lost by western Europe.”
Really? Last I checked, the populist parties are gaining ground but besieged, and they’re merely making moderate reforms. Let’s not confuse the nazi bogeyman with the actual far-right. The latter are still on the margins, and while they would secure Europe’s demographics and legacy, the odds are against them.
All in all, if I had to forecast the future of Europe, I could see the Germanic north going to Russia, the Romance south going to Islam, with far-right holdouts in-between in places like Switzerland.
Cynthia C. # 358:
Thank you for your frank and honest answer to JMG.
Personally, I don’t have anything against trans people who decide how to live their lives, according their free reasoned and willing motives. Well, on the other hand, my opinion about “transgender surgery industry” and woke “compulsory” biases about trans people isn’t very good…
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Dennis M. # 361:
I think part of current demographic situation in Japan can be explained by the “epidemic” social phrnomenon, named “hikikomori” people. Unfortunately, I can’t point which causes and motives lead a lot of Japanese young people to give up to begin their adult time (I’m not an expert in Asian countries). It’s interesting there’ve happened a few cases of “hikikomori” in another Western countries (in Spain too) outside Japan, even I read a teen boy became hikikomori in an Arab country (what the heck?). Only common hard fact in all those scattered non Japanese hikikomoris was all of them were fans of “Jap” pop teen culture (manga, animes and so on), so I can grasp they were “otakus” before becoming “hikikomoris”. Is there something in pop Japanese culture which favors teens puerilization?(work hypothesis).
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Drowned cities in long term future:
For your curiosity, I guess the only one big town in Spain which could disappear under rising seas is Seville. Although it isn’t near the coasts, its average height over current sea level is below 60 meters. On the other hand, for example, Barcelona only could have future problems with its harbor(s) and the oldest neighbors likely flood (its streets “climb” soon from its downtown, due to its mountain outskirts).
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JMG # 372:
I’m not a scientist, but I guess seas rising due to climate change ice melting in the two Poles, maybe could happen, most of the time, during the long term future, as a slow process (a few cm or even mm per year); though some sudden events in ice melting could made some sudden risings (for example, between 1 to 5 meters). It’s a work hypothesis for me.
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Patient # 376:
Maybe future Popes in Vatican, in an hypothetical case of continous European society islamization, could decide to agree with Orthodox Christians leaders, to join their power to some extent (the enemy if my enemy’s my friend). By the way, Orthodox Parriarch in Istambul is named as “Constantinople Patriarch”.
On the other hand, I don’t think Russia would want to take over Western Europe in the long term. Why? They could remember Russophobia until current Ukraine war. They only would like to have strong influence on Slavic countries, near non Slavic nations and Greece (which is a Russophile country since centuries ago). I’m sorry for poor Polish nationalist Russophobes and small Baltic countries…
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Serbian and Albanese nationalists historical myths:
I can’t choose none of the two competing narratives in Kosovo past, because I don’t have a degree in History, but I know some nationalist Serbs claim Albanese in Kosovo (and even Albanese in Albania) come from muslim Turkish people who arrived those areas some centuries ago. Serbs lost Kosovo and blah blah blah.
On the other hand, nationalist Albanese say they’re direct historical heirs from a pre-Roman people who lived in today Albania and Kosovo, and maybe beyond these countries, and blah blah blah.
I’m not skilled in History to know which narrative is nearer to true historical events in Balkans. I can only tell you myths aren’t always fake in a 100%, but distorted interpretations about true events; but who knows which part of them is true?(without being a skilled and honest historian).
@ Jessica #397
“On a different topic, if I remember correctly, you are up there in Dhún na nGall.”
Yes (and, you are ever back in Leitrim, remember that I maintain a perfect delightedness, in my mountain fastness, to receive visits from and have fireside chats with ANY of this lovely commentariat!)…
And yes, although we are not fully cut off, we are rather politically isolated from the rest of the Republic, and most trips to other parts of the Republic entail two crossings of the border into and out of the “wee north”. 🙂 On the other hand, these border crossings are rather low stress affairs these days, and often not even noticeable.
Ironically, Donegal derives its name from the phrase “Fort of the Foreigners”. I suspect that if one of Europe’s future wars involves maritime conflicts between any of the (official and/or unofficial) pirate navies which are already, as we speak, organising themselves out there in the Atlantic, my local fishing town of Killybegs will find itself renamed “Port of the Foreigners”. Sadly for us, Killybegs harbour is a maritime asset not to be sneezed at by whichever pirate gang manages to gain control of it first.
Michael,
I would love to see a world where most of the high rises are underwater. or at least one where wonder has returned. The annoying thing about the world that progress has created is how structured, boring, and samey things feel everywhere. It’s shocking to hop on an airplane, travel across the ocean, and land somewhere that does not differ much from where you took off.
I lived in the deep Japanese countryside long enough to have at least caught a glimpse of what that could be like, and many of Miyazaki’s films try to capture that feeling of the world that was paved over by progress.
Hello all, I was excited to see discussion of pawpaws this week. I planted 3 pawpaw trees 4 years ago — they have not produced fruit yet, but they are flourishing and the nursery where I got them told me they might take 7 years. There is also a Pawpaw Festival in Louisville, Kentucky at the Nature Center on September 12 (Saturday) if anyone is nearby:
https://www.louisvillenaturecenter.org/pawpaw-festival-2026
Best wishes to all pawpaw eaters and growers,
Jennifer in the Ohio River Valley
The website https://nitter.kareem.one/ still works, for anybody wondering about Twitter alternative backends after xcancel got hit with a cease and desist letter.
Ariadne. I don’t accept the claim that a surgical construction is indistinguishable from female genitalia. First, I am assured by a man who’s had both that this is not the case. He said it didn’t look right and that it didn’t feel right. He said other things as well but I shan’t inflict that on Mr. Greer’s readership.
Even without his report, I would have doubted that anyway. The surgical construction is not made from vaginal tissue. It does not self-lubricate. The claim is not credible at all.
If you’re happy with what you did, fine, good for you, but I don’t think you ought to be going around claiming that your thing is indistinguishable from what a woman has and potentially contributing to a vulnerable man who may be reading your words making a terrible mistake.
JillN: That did occur to me as well. Many teenage girls in particular have endured terrible medical damage as a result of all this. Real girls, I clarify, girls who had taken on the identity of “trans man” for a time, then detransitioned, but been medicalized in the meantime and.. oh god it’s just horrible, I don’t even want to say it. Anyway, firmly agree. The part about transing children absolutely is Mengelian!
—
Here in Canada, at the time I started transition, the gender therapist wouldn’t have been allowed to say to me, “Yes, some men with gender dysphoria find relief by medically transitioning to female. They are able to do this because their appearance is sufficiently androgynous to begin with that people actually can’t tell them from women, so no one tells them they’re not. However you, Mr. Oldsurname, will not benefit from this. You are not androgynous in appearance at all. You will get frequent reminders that others see you as a man.”
Apparently, that would fall under the heading of “conversion therapy”, which is illegal here. I used to think conversion therapy meant electrodes and some bracing current application and stuff, but apparently not.
Now I may not have had the sense to listen to that very good advice if I’d heard it, and maybe the therapist wouldn’t have said it anyway. But saying a thing like that should have been among her options. It shouldn’t be illegal to say a word of caution to gender patients.
Chuaquin #406
Do you live near of a residence for Marrochian youngers than 18 ? What will you think if ,tomorrow, there would be one infront of your home ?
@Demiurge,
I had a rocking horse and a dollshouse as a child of the 80s. My grandfather made both of them. So not as far-fetched as you might think…
JMG,
Your philosophy that to understand the. modern medical industry one just has to determine which thing will make them the most profit and that will explain the behavior. This makes sense because otherwise their behavior is illogical. In some cases they jump to overprescribing medications procedures and tests ( otter girl’s example, sex assignment surgery, etc. ) while in other cases they delay or withhold fairly simple treatment or tests that would have drastic positive results. In the local paper today is the story of a young man who came in to an urgent care center with no history of headaches but presented with extreme headaches, dizziness, vomiting, vision problems etc. Instead of further tests or scans he was sent home with no treatment, and then he died 12 hours later from an untreated cerebral hemorrhage that could have been corrected with prompt surgery. The system had determined that such a case would not yield any profit so the incentives were in place to make the wrong choice ( for the patient).
It’s the last day of Analog August (but stay analog anyway)… my friend Josh Datko of Bitpunk FM posted this up as a kind of update on Heinlein’s famous dictum from Time Enough for Love:
A human being should be able to record a cassette mixtape, perform a poem, load a roll of film, place a needle on a vinyl record, paint on canvas, send a postcard, graffiti a political poster, sing a song, change the ribbon on a typewriter, play an acoustic instrument, bind a chapbook, troubleshoot a printer, rewind a VHS tape, raise a rock cairn, write a thank you note, broadcast a pirate radio signal, phreak a phone, wind and set a watch, start a campfire, tell a story, keep a notebook. Digital is for machines.
I like it, so thought I should share.
Lindsay Clancy, and now this:
https://disaffectedpod.substack.com/p/suptid-squish
Quote from Josh Slocum: “Does anyone else have questions about how it came to be that we have a culture that has a market for figures of infants presented to us as ‘anger relief’ toys?”
This is sick-making. It reminds me of the “Mouse Utopia” experiments alluded to up-thread.
As you may recall, the Mouse Utopia experiment was designed to test how soon a population would reach resource “overshoot.” The results were even more disturbing. The mouse population came nowhere near “overshoot” before it started displaying dysfunctional, antisocial and dysgenic behaviors.
Even worse, the subsequent reduction in population did not improve matters. The mouse population was in a “death spiral” which resulted in the entire colony going completely extinct.
This experiment was repeated several times with the same result.
No, I do not think that the human race as a whole is headed toward extinction. However, I would not be at all surprised if Western (Faustian) man were to become completely extinct, without even a residue of fellaheen.
I am obliged neither to call it Lake America nor to get especially worked up about it.
@Chuaquin #269
I apologize for my delay in responding to you.
Yes, I think climate change one of many moral panics, not because of whether or not it’s a real problem, but because of the demand for some immediate and dramatic action, with little thought for whether the action will actually do more good than harm, or any good at all.
By my count there have been nearly 20 major moral panics over the past four decades, and that’s lumping together several competing moral panics, where one side panics over too much X and the other side panics over not enough X. Most of them have been rooted in a real problem, but the proposed solution generally involved a large transfer of wealth and power to the bureaucratic class, and almost always there has been a demand that people’s existing rights and liberties be set aside.
Thinking about it has made me realize that moral panics are just how Americans do politics. I suppose it is what it is — I certainly don’t mean to start a moral panic about moral panics.
@ Chris “Yeah, there is no political solution to the underlying problems. The limits to growth model spelled out the future way back in 1972” – “An odd book with a remarkably academic tone given the revelations.”
Credit to Danella and Dennis Meadows, they go into great detail to explain how to think in systems. I think it was oddly academic because they figured that was the best approach to convince people to change their ways, but we know that rarely works. As Dennis said a few years ago, his advice to new students is to not live long enough to see your predictions come true. 😉
“I’d be interested to hear your opinion on the subject, but to me politics is a method of divvying up the spoils. And that is why I keep an eye upon unfolding events. ”
Pretty much. I think a big core problem of today is that so many people think only in terms of Money and not resources/ecology. Mistaking the menu for the meal. When the monetary world catches up to the real world, strange things happen.
I don’t think it has dawned on many, especially in the upper-middle classes that if they want to have a more equitable world that they promote, they are the ones that will need to take the material lifestyle cut.
“Did you notice that the Labor party and the Business Council of Australia recently had a mutual goodwill get together dinner? I’m truly baffled why younger folks seem to think that lot have their backs? A mystery!”
I am wondering if since the recent One Nation win if Labor are scrambling behind the scenes to bow down to those funding PHON in order to keep their jobs? “Ok Gina/Murdoch, what do we have to do so you can call off your dog?” Credit to Labor, they do at least seem to be slowly getting the message and are scared. That is were you want them. They have a year or two to correct paths, lets see if they are smart about this.
As for the younger folks, I do see the cracks forming, the cohesive narrative of is not holding up like it used to. Even in the cities, I am seeing a modest amount that are now taking One Nation and others more seriously, not as a threat against them, but as a chance to send a message to the top of town. Many have seen how they have been shafted relentlessly for years/decades and are realizing that just voting for the major two does nothing. Change is in the wind, were it goes is hard to tell at the moment. Interesting times ahead.
The problem is that, regardless of where you are in the world, being in politics nowadays is like nominating yourself to be in charge of the runaway freight train. The diminishing energy/material goods has the final say. Lets say One Nation comes to power in the next 5-10 years, of which I suspect would be behind Barnaby Joyce – not Hanson, they will have a few years in power until they fail to deliver on their promises because of the under laying problems. If politicians could be frank about the situation, they wouldn’t over promise and thus would be able to actually direct things down gracefully. I have never seen it happen.
It would then swing back to Liberal/Labor and then we would get a turbo-Neo liberalism burst that sinks the whole country even quicker. The pendulum will just keep swinging.
If we get a party that talks seriously about the predicament of the future and they can keep people engaged, then we may see a different path down. I doubt it though, Jimmy Carter tried in the 1970’s/80’s and got demolished for it.
The way to win is to not play the game, at least to a degree. Work on what you can control personally, build up your own resilience. Detach from being entirely dependent on the system. Reduce your needs over all. So even with political swings, you are stabilised through your own means. You are already ahead of many were you are. I think most people here are.
Re “cancer stage zero,” yes, it is a thing. As a cancer survivor, I have mixed feelings about it. I’ve met a couple women who had stage 0, and I was astonished by how aggressive their treatment was–more so than mine. My tumor was stage 1 and visible on ultrasound. Because there was a 2nd spot in the same breast that was “questionable,” I went straight to mastectomy. They didn’t call it stage 0, but I gather they thought there was a good chance it would become a problem. I took it seriously because my sister had the same condition. She had one lump removed, then a 2nd tumor developed and she had to have a mastectomy. The same kind of cancer killed our grandmother.
I looked up “stage 0,” and it means there is a tumor that hasn’t spread beyond its starting point. Still a tumor. So what should one do? How long do you wait? Would a biopsy be enough, removing the tissue? Why did someone with stage 0 have both radiation and chemotherapy, when I had neither of those things, only surgery? Would you want to hear, “Well, you’ve got cancer, but it’s so tiny we’re not going to bother with it. We’ll wait until it grows.” I hardly think that treating it is loathsome, but how one arrives at the best treatment is a difficult question.
Some news that will apply to many here. Alas, Wendell Berry has passed at the age of 92.
He was always one of the more balanced environmentalists along the lines of Garrett Hardin and John Muir.
https://archive.md/rAr8f
@Alvin #340
Likewise, I’ve longed believed that “secular Buddhism” is a nonsensical position. However, “interiorizing” doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting reincarnation: that’s just a particular kind of change in your state of consciousness, after all. It just means reinterpreting the content of the doctrine from being about “out there” to being about “in here” in some way or other.
At the other end from crude psychologization is crude solipsism: treating everything as nothing more than a state of your consciousness. From that it trivially follows that the various Buddhas and Boddhisattvas are just particular details of your consciousness at certain moments, and the doctrines of Buddhism are ultimately about your state of consciousness, that being the only thing they could be about.
Between those two extremes is a vast landscape of different positions, including more sophisticated versions of the psychologizing and solipsizing approaches. (For example: “The doctrines are only metaphors for the goings-on of the mind, but the mind is just as real as the body, if not more real, and persists in some from from birth to birth.”)
@Justin Patrick Moore #417
I love this updated version. I’ve gotten back into cassette tapes over the past several years and despite the reduction in audio quality and the need to turn the tape over, I find listening to them a lot more enjoyable than listening to anything digital.
(As a side note, I’ve speculated in the past that the difference many people report in how analog and digital audio sounds may not be because of the hum or hiss of the records/tapes, but because of the dithering techniques that move quantization noise into the inaudible parts of the spectrum. Infrasounds are known to cause some people to feel uneasy, and this may be one more such effect. Analog media use different techniques to manage noise.)
Chuaquin: Thank you. I very much dislike those compulsory biases as well. I actually wrote this whole long rant about it, but then I decided to simply say that. I dislike that speech and attitudes are being compelled.
Things related to this aren’t actually my favourite thing to talk about, but I feel as part of the controversial group that I should speak my perspective sometimes and try to reduce the harms.
The rant was mostly about woke school teachers and volcanos.
Jennifer 441 note that to get paw paw fruit you need to attract carrion fly pollinators. I tie two chicken bones on each tree when they flower. TSW!…
I just discovered the results from New Zealand’s last census (2023). The proportion of New Zealanders who were born overseas is now about 28%. Frankly, it is not surprising that the NZ of today is completely unrecognisable from that of my childhood, just based on that statistic alone. Over one in four of the people you meet in NZ are on average likely to have been born overseas, and closer to every second person in Auckland. The highest proportion is actually Poms (4.2% born in England, though that is decreasing as they die off), followed by the Chinese (2.9%), Indians (2.9%), Filipinos (2%), South Africans, and only then Australians.
Chris#401
Thanks you for the information of Australian political regime that shows that is wonderful compared with the auwful band of criminals and cleptocrats who predate the suffered people of Spain to wich I belong.
@ Michael Gray #424
Wendell Berry, now… I could definitely see him becoming a saintly folkish patron on the farm…
May his journey onwards be blessed.
I just learned Wendell Berry passed away. The Unsettling of America blew my mind when I first read it, and I read many of his essays, and some of his poems. This poem seems appropriate to share, and is a favorite of his…
They Sit Together on the Porch
By Wendell Berry
They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
Their supper done with, they have washed and dried
The dishes–only two plates now, two glasses,
Two knives, two forks, two spoons–small work for two.
She sits with her hands folded in her lap,
At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,
And when they speak at last it is to say
What each one knows the other knows. They have
One mind between them, now, that finally
For all its knowing will not exactly know
Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding
Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.
Cynthia,
I agree that it is bad that your therapist was not allowed to tell you that transitioning would not work well for you because your features were too masculine. Frankly, that is nuts.
I transitioned long enough ago that the notion of a transition industry or of therapists being constrained to promote transition was not imaginable. Even now, I have to take people’s word for it.
Among my friends who transitioned, the genetic lottery was much discussed. I knew someone who had surgery but continued to live in public as a man because she knew that her only real options were 1) Man or 2) Freak. So she made the best of the cards she was dealt.
My therapist was very compassionate and helpful and let me make up my own mind. She specifically mentioned a whole range of options from backing off altogether to various forms of partial transition (socially, socially in some contexts, hormones but no surgery, top surgery with/without hormones but no bottom surgery) to complete transition. She said that she wished for me that I would be able to decide and then carry out my decision, to not be sitting on the fence for years upon years, but to decide and be able to then get on with whatever life I chose.
About surgery, my experience and that of friends I made at the clinic that I went to is that the results of the best surgery are indistinguishable from the natural version. I believe that my surgeon was among the top in the world. The results of lower quality surgery are definitely different. I am sure that someone who has had lower quality surgery could be clocked by prospective partners.
What I remember from my transition is much more grounded and pragmatic than what I hear about now. Making trans into one of the spear points of the victim industrial complex may be part of the reason for that.
The notion that folks are doing gender surgery on minors is something I hear from people I trust. That was simply not the case back in my day. It was inconceivable.
My impression, a good portion of it from things I have read on this blog, is that things went from making transition difficult to making it too easy, even making it difficult to not transition.
The first I ever heard of the notion of gender surgery was a front page article in the newspaper when I was in high school. That newspaper article resulted in that program being shut down. Back in those days (decades before my transition), if a transwoman indicated even the slightest interest in having sex with men, they were thrown out of the transition program. Because everyone knew that a real woman didn’t have any interest in sex. And such programs were the only way to access hormones and eventually surgery. I mention this because I think that part of how the pendulum seems to have swung too far one way was that it had been too far in the other direction.
Back in the ancient times when I transitioned, transexuals were just about all male to female. I only met a female to male transexual years later. When I hear about the sudden explosion of female to male transgender and transexual folks, that just seems like a canary in a coal mine. A whole flock of canaries actually. It doesn’t necessarily say anything about individuals transitioning from female to male, but that kind of change on a societal scale seems like an indicator of some kind of problem somewhere. Perhaps that the current hyperindividualism makes it just too difficult for many young women to deal with the mean girls.
Also, I think that both the promotion of transgenderism and the demonization of trans folks are largely the work of folks other than trans folks, folks who do not have the interests of trans folks at heart. I hope we all make it through the backlash safely and with grace and wisdom.
Karen: First, I’d like to express that I’m sorry that you had cancer to deal with. Also, although mastectomy was a thing that you chose, that can’t have been a thing that you were especially happy about and I’m sorry about that as well. Thank you for recalling these unpleasant things and contributing your perspective to this discussion.
When I was reading the article, there was something that I didn’t get which way it was. I didn’t see whether “stage 0” cells were bound to begin the uncontrolled growth that is cancer, or whether it was more usual for such cells to quietly sit there and not cause a problem for the entire lifetime of a woman. Maybe they were actually something that belongs there, and only became harmful under certain conditions, similar to how the immune system is a much-needed thing, but some people are unfortunate enough to have theirs go awry and begin attacking something that’s supposed to be there.
Now that question taken by itself and not laden with the emotions I have about the institution of medicine, is still an open question and not resolved as far as I can tell. I tend towards the idea that stage zero is a cash grab and not a legitimate medical problem because that’s the pattern I see about other things and for emotional reasons, but neither of those is proof.
Thank you for bringing some coolheadedness and making me examine my bias about this. I’ve decided that the bias is correct more often than not and won’t be discarding it, but I’m glad you came along and made me be intellectually honest about it.
Yesterday, I saw in local MSM, a video about a demonstration in Ceuta asking for more help, after some well known events…Of course, there was a lot of unavoidable Spanish flags, but there was another thing in demonstrators hands at which I paid a lot of attention. Some angry citizens were showing a big white poster, in which they had written: “Please EU, help”. I guess who wrote that, they were naïve or desperate (or the two things alike?). It seemed slightly creepy how far was their wish from today “realpolitik”.
“Almighty” myth of EU is slowly fading in economics and politics alike. It’s a bad joke going on a counterfactual belief (that there’s still a European “Union”), because there are evident dissenssions between some members of EU, after Ceuta events. If the Spanish government crisis management has been mediocre (or even bad), Brussels “answer” to it hasn’t been better. Well, Spaniards from Ceuta are suffering, migrants are suffering too, but I guess EU nor NATO are going to fix this mess (I explained why aI think it some comments ago).
JMG
There’s been a question that I’ve wanted to ask but keep forgetting to. I’ve been wondering, is it possible that the US government might use UFO/UAP disclosure as a future Hail Mary to try and salvage trust in US institutions? I ask this because I can’t help but see parallels between how the UFO/UAP disclosure community has a relationship with the US government and how proto-orthodox Christianity had a similar relationship with the Roman government leading up to Constantine (it should be noted that the Diocletian persecution began after the emperor’s run in with some Manichaeans and that most of the persecutions took place in the east, where the heretics were predominantly located, meanwhile the orthodox churches in Rome were conveniently spared.)
I’ve also noticed how a lot of the UAP/UFO disclosure communities have drifted away from the little green/grey men in a physical spaceship and more towards ultra terrestrials or non-physical intelligences (NPI) as well. Which at that point is functionally paganism (especially for the ancient alien theorists who believe those NPIs to be the gods of pagan religions). I’m wondering if an administration in the not too distant future tries to pull a Constantine.
The website is working again.
This is from the news. “Lowe’s announced a new partnership on Tuesday with dozens of companies that aims to address America’s shortage of skilled workers by helping to train and develop 1 million tradespeople over the next decade.”
“She noted that the U.S. economy is facing a shortage of 2 million workers in the skilled trades, which is having an estimated impact of $1 trillion per year.”
As a note, the apple harvest is in full swing and yet I haven’t seen a single AI in the orchards. 🤔
Scotlyn # 399:
T. Pratchett idea about “Surprise” seems cool for me. In addition of this topic, I read some years ago another positive idea about surprise feeling in a writting, written by Eugenio Trías (IMHO, one of the best Spanish philosophers in our history). He begins complaining there’s too much fondness in European thinking (especially within German and another Central Europe countries philosophers), to “enjoy” writing dark thoughts about anger and sadness. He says it’s a view not very compatible with South Europe vitalist mind. So he, as a Spaniard, prefers to feel surprise in front of unexpected and unknown situations, because he thinks it’s a more positive attitude (for example surprise can lead toward admiration, curiosity and eventually new knowledge).
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Martin B. # 404:
Ha ha…It would be a good tribute for Dolly if the Tetons were renamed as Partons. Indeed, it’s a funny idea understable even by bad students of English as a foreign language, like me during my teen age years (very good!).
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Anselmo # 414:
Oh…Your rethoric questions seem IMHO “a bit” demagogical, can you think them better, please? I could ask you too, if you’re living near a MENAS (teen Moroccan) migrants home, to know without any doubt they’re very evil and dangerous guys as a whole (as you seem to suggest). I bet you’ve labelled me as a naïve leftist because I don’t believe the right block narrative (neither), so you need to attack my opinions about Ceuta events in such a shoddy “not in my backyard” biased “reasoning”(it’s near evident to me your view about it). It’s a pity, because I think you could do it better, without using claims based in easy and low level feelings, before “killing bad news messenger”(for your favorite narrative).
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Ambrose # 419:
Thanks for your comment about “paedophilia” in Ancient Greece. In addition of this topic, I remember that in Ancient Rome Law, most common age to marry was 14 years old for “men” and 12 for “women”. It seems in Greek-Latin civilization (and maybe later in Middle Age), people gave up childhood to become suddenly adults for everything (marriage and sex too). Link this view with old school “paedophilia” among Greeks, and do the math.
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Slithy T.# 421:
Thanks for apologizing (no problem!) and answering me.
I agree. Moral panics can lead to a hurried up stupid activism, with some likely bad consequences. For example, climate change (today renamed as -ahem-climate emergency, OMG!), can lead to take bad decisions due to lack of true reasonable thoughts (fear kills reason, methink). Have you noticed Greta Thunberg has become a strong nuclear power supporter, to “save our planet”?(to hardcore ecologists dismay). I’m not exactly an anti-nukes ecologist zealot, but I think nuclear power debate must be done with calm, reasoning; and never with Miss Thunberg usual hysterical and emotivists doomerist tantrums. It seems she hasn’t thought anything about uranium peak nor how utopian is full electrification of everything…
Your paragraphs about moral panics in USA as the normal thing in its politic life has made me to think that some of our European moral panics come from America, but in a lesser dramatic way, and mixed with local smaller panics.
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Michael G.#424:
Wendell Berry death was an unknown event for me. I knew recently he was still alive but of course he was very old. I mourn his death, but dying is part of every live being in this world. I can tell you I’ve read some Berry essays, translated to Spanish, and I share most of his views. He was a great man, methink.
Oops! I’m sorry: In my last comment, when I was answering Ambrose (#418), I missed to clarify that common LEGAL minimal age to marry was 14 for boys and 12 for girls, according most ancient Rome Laws. Of course, not everybody got married at those ages…They COULD marry since those ages, not was a compulsory order (ahem).
I too am heart broken to hear of the passing of Wendell Berry. His two early books ” The Gift of Good Land” and ” The Unsettling of America” have had places of honor on my personal bookshelf for over 40 years. He is much more than an environmentalist, having become something of the poet laureate of the traditional American farmer and the essential nature of agrarian life. I would encourage members of the commentariat to read at least one of those two books if not for Mr. Berry’s agricultural arguments but for his exquisite prose.
@Slithy Toves: Tape hiss and radio static never bothered me much. Mp3s definitely sound inferior. Very true what you say about dithering! There is a lot more audio information on the tape than in the mp3.
One of the things that trans advocates like to say in support of the whole thing is that there are examples of societies from the past who had transgender people and it was an accepted thing.
Ok, so that there is the premise. I’m not going to address here whether the premise is true or not – there’s way better people to say what was or was not the case in past societies.
Instead, let’s assume for the sake of discussion that the premise is indeed true. Does it lead to the conclusion they say it does? If trans acceptance was so accepted in past societies, why isn’t it for the modern peoples who are descended from them? Why is it basically just us?
Maybe it’s because they discovered what we seem to be discovering: that what begins as a compassionate attempt to make this really odd predicament that a small number of people have more bearable, ends up causing more trouble than it’s worth. They have their own equivalent of discovering that allowing polite, unobtrusive use of the ladies room by well-behaved trans women who’ve had the full meal deal transition and look exactly like real women, is the top of a slippery slope, somewhere along the descent of which you find Lisa Linebacker twirling “her” penis like a marching baton in front of women and girls in the changing room at the pool. So that’s the end of lgbt kumbaya for that society.
One idea I definitely got from reading our host is civilizations have some fundaments alike and that some of the same things emerge. “Tolerably often” that’s about how we “bid fair” to “tip into the dustbin of history” (JMG, ;)) but I think it’s applicable to more than that. I think there’s a good chance all this modern lgbt stuff isn’t new at all, it’s just a reboot of a very old movie.
In a live setting that can all be summed up as, “If they were so accepting of it before, why aren’t they now?”
Oh. Apparently Pride has been poorly attended for the last couple years. I can’t confirm this as I wasn’t there.
Chuaquin and any other Spaniard who might be reading here: Does Spain have any compelling reason for keeping a bit land on the African coast? I do understand the emotional appeal of what is ours must remain ours. Many Americans insisted they had been personally betrayed when we turned the Panama Canal over to Panama. So far as I know, shipping still transits the canal without incident and no huge container ships have gotten stuck therein.
IDK, am asking, would it make sense for Spain to turn Ceuta and any other African RE over to Morocco?
Alvin, thanks for clarifying! Yes, that’s an important difference — from within the Western idea of reincarnation, you can fall from the human level into any number of less pleasant existences to learn lessons you skipped, but once you pass beyond the human level you’re out of material incarnation unless you consciously choose, for bodhisattva-like reasons, to go back into it. Basically, then, our sense of how close we are to the exit door of Abred (the cycles of material incarnation) is that it’s much closer than Buddhists think; we also think that if you’re human in this life, getting a human incarnation the next time around is the default option, which iirc is not what most Buddhist denominations teach.
Northwind, I’ve ended up wondering if he went to a Catholic high school, and that’s what the problem was. The habit of constantly twisting the other person’s words to fit some polemic purpose is a classic Jesuit habit, and everybody I’ve ever met who did that regularly went to a Catholic high school run by Jesuits and picked up the habit there. One way or another, though, it’s a habit I won’t tolerate.
Julie, I don’t know how things happen down your way, but here in the US the issue with illegal immigration is that huge corporations are importing their work forces from overseas via the illegal route, because they can pay substandard wages and enforce sweatshop conditions. Since the workers are here illegally, they have no rights they can exercise, and if they make any noise, management just drops a dime to ICE and the troublemakers are whisked away in a heartbeat. Meanwhile millions of working class Americans can’t get work at all. Meanwhile, thanks to the same gimmick, people in the upper and upper middle classes can get nannies, housekeepers, and gardeners for very low wages, and the increased population drives up real estate prices, so those same upper and upper middle classes have the value of their real estate holdings rise — but once again the working classes get screwed, because they’re shut out of the job market and their rents keep going up. It’s a very ugly situation and it’s generating a rising tide of xenophobia with a high potential for violence. I hope the elite classes get a clue as to what kind of fate they’re making for themselves; they could end up dangling from lampposts if they don’t back off and stop chasing profit so mindlessly.
Jessica, thank you, but no, that wasn’t my reaction at all. The claim that life is suffering (or unsatisfactory, or “stuckness,” or what have you) strikes me as a miserable way to face existence, and it’s also not my experience of life. This is not my first grief, by a long shot; I know from experience that just as those previous bitter griefs passed off eventually, leaving ample room for new joys and achievements, my recent grief will also be transitory and give way to better days. Tolkien put it best: “In the end, the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
Demiurge, I agree about semolina, but I knew kids in the 1980s who rode rocking horses and played with dollhouses. There are kids who do the same thing today, especially in rural areas.
Gunstone, that’s quite correct. There may have been something deeper at work as well. The prevailing cosmologies of the time made astrology central, including the precession of the equinoxes, and it was a general conviction (though not a universal one) that as the ages passed, things would get worse and worse. A lot of intellectuals were terrified of what the future would bring — and of course they were right to be scared, as the latter history of the Roman world demonstrates. That led to a frantic quest for some exit hatch to existence. Gnosticism and the many related traditions offered one, but it was only for the few who were willing and able to embrace an ascetic lifestyle and intensive spiritual practices. What set Christianity, Islam, and Mahayana Buddhism apart from previous faiths is that they claimed to be able to offer an escape hatch to everyone. So there was a rush to the exits.
Martin, well, do you know what the word tetons means in French? I’ll be polite and simply note that “le Grand Tetons” can be translated as something like “the Big Breasts.”
Scotlyn, the authorities are in a blind panic over the Amish because of the immense difference in health outcomes between unvaccinated Amish children and the vaccinated children of their neighbors. That’s become a common talking point in alternative circles these days, and it makes possible exactly the sort of carefully controlled study that could bring the whole vaccination house of cards toppling down — and lead to lawsuits and potential mob violence against the officials who enforced it. You’re right that there may be more examples of the same thing as bifurcation picks up, which suggests that being quiet about health outcomes might be a sensible move for the low-tech!
Xcalibur/djs, so noted, but I don’t agree with your characterization of the Buddha as “one of the more enlightened beings to incarnate as human.” That’s just it. I see him as a charismatic spiritual teacher who came to some drastically wrong conclusions as a result of his background. Mind you, I’m perfectly comfortable with the fact that there are plenty of people who would describe me in exactly the same terms — well, except that I’m not especially charismatic. We all interpret the cosmos in terms of our own experiences, which are necessarily personal and therefore flawed; if your experiences lead you to find the Buddha’s teachings appealing, hey, by all means. Mine lead me to find rather too much common ground, as you note, between Siddhartha Gautama and Holden Caulfield (and I found The Catcher in the Rye an excruciating bore to read, largely because of its main character; make of that what you will).
Clay, exactly. It’s no longer a health care system, it’s been completely reworked for the sake of performing drastic and mostly unnecessary surgery on wallets.
Justin, ha! That’s certainly a good start.
Michael, it’s becoming impossible to miss the toxic narcissism and the dark heart of rage that took over feminism once that movement abandoned the quest for equality and settled for chasing privilege instead. I suspect that’s much more involved here than a human Mouse Utopia.
Cynthia, oh, granted. All sides have been renaming things for years now, after all.
Michael, thanks for letting us know. That’s very sad news indeed; he was one of the truly great.
KAN, fascinating. Unsustainable, but fascinating.
Anon, people have been speculating about disclosure as a potential “Wag the Dog” distraction since the 1960s. (Did you ever read Report from Iron Mountain? It’s in there, for example.) Since a very large part of the entire UFO phenomenon was manufactured by the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations as cover for secret aircraft testing — I document this in my book The UFO Chronicle — it’s by no means impossible that the government has that ace in the hole in mind. The difficulty they face is that at this point, it may be too late; so few people trust the government about anything that if they paraded claims of imminent alien contact the general reaction would be cynical distrust:
Siliconguy, good. The corner office fauna are starting to realize that they have to get off their pink little rumps and do something for the people they’re preparing to dispossess.
Slithy Toves, yes of course, I agree with you. Yogacara and Vajrayana themselves are also “interiorizing” and the tradition itself has a vast range of interpretations from those who deny the existence of an external reality to those who do think an external reality exists in some way. Fundamental to all of it is the belief in the six realms, even as a general outline, if not that there are exactly 6 different categories of rebirth “destinations”.
A “Buddhist” who doesn’t believe in reincarnation after death doesn’t really follow the path of Buddha in any meaningful way. What I said above is largely about those secular Buddhists, who nowhere as sophisticated in their philosophies as any Yogacarin!
Hi,
The Bosnia civil war was highly complex and there are no simple good vs bad groups despite what Western media makes out.
One is argue perhaps that some groups were worse than others in the atrocities committed but that’s a relative argument.
As for the wider Muslim population I’m sure the majority were secular. However it’s a documented fact that nasty jihadi forces were operating during the civil war.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-33345618
Ultimately this debate is a bit irrelevant. Europe is right now facing a violent jihadi threat- terrorism – and a wider non violent but to me more insidious threat of islamification of our cities as islamist forces takeover and expand the frontier of parallel communities across western Europe.
As Greer and others are warning, if this trend continues into the 2040s Europe will face a serious crisis that could erupt in something similar to the Balkans war in intensity and violence.
Chuaquin #437
Why you don’t answer to my question ?
P.S. Yesterday a goup of for boys of this kind have murderred a man in Manresa ( Barcelona) he was a gardener and had two sons.
Ariadne: That is a much, much more thoughtful and constructive answer than I’m used to hearing from other trans women reacting to my thoughts, and I really have to do an entire adjustment of, I don’t know what to call it even, my “anticipated communication stance”.
There is very much of value in what you said and I’d really like to consider it carefully. I will come back to this post and answer your comment in the spirit in which it appears to be written. It might not be today though, and the new post is tomorrow, but I mean to come back to this Open Post.
Thank you for writing thoughtful words to me instead of just attacking.
Michael #418 Lindsay
Your comentary about the Mouse Utopy induced me to remember a novel called “La Ilustre Degeneracion” wrote by the Duchesss of Medina Sidonia , nicknamed the Red Duchesss because she was a comunist. In the book is described a group of Spanish aristocrats absolutely perverted because the easy acces to all the pleasures bored them of these and to look for pleasure by the mean of sadistic tortures of kidnaped kids who finally were murdered by cruel procedures. The Duchesse said that her novel was inspired in real cases. And , really these aristocrats belongs to a closed group wich has several similirarities with the mouses wich had the privilege of to live during generations in the Mouse Utopy.
“What set Christianity, Islam, and Mahayana Buddhism apart from previous faiths is that they claimed to be able to offer an escape hatch to everyone. So there was a rush to the exits.”
It may also be worth noting that Buddhism began as a South Asian religion and only began to spread into East Asia during the so-called Chinese Dark Ages between the fall of the Han Dynasty in 220 and the reunification of the realm under the Sui Dynasty in 589.
I suppose it offered a similar “escape hatch” than older Chinese faiths/philosophiea
JMG: Ha ha, I was like what? I had to go back and look, I forgot I wrote that.
Anyway, y’all did agree to take the geese as well as the lake, right? Right?? I don’t really care about the ginger ale.,
(I’m sure it’s a joke and probably not a well known one, so I clarify: I’ve heard “America Geese” and “America Dry” bandied about as well.)
JMG, to be honest I do wonder about that. Buddhist texts often talk about how a precious human rebirth is very rare, like a turtle poking its head out every century finding its head in a golden yoke. But when I read some religious biographies which talk about previous births, more often than not, they talk about human births, even if in pretty bad conditions. I can’t name any off the top of my head, but there are some Tibetan masters who have rebirths recorded as various peasants, prostitutes, beggars and so on. Not exactly happy fates, but still in the human realm, this came after some births as princes and whatever too. I don’t know, maybe the assumption is that if you have some level of spiritual practice, even a very cursory one, you probably have enough momentum to keep you human for a few lives, unless you really screw up? The people who end up as animals, as pretas etc must have not been into spirituality at all and topped that off with some other negative karma.
Mary Bennet,
Yes, those territories in Africa are relatively easy to defend and could be used to project military power into Morocco, at least in theory, or simply economic and political influence. Ceuta in particular is key to controlling the Strait of Gibraltar from both shores as it sits very close to its narrowest point:
https://infogibraltar.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Aguas-Territoriales-Britanicas-de-Gibraltar.jpg
Chuaquin (if I may),
“To know without any doubt they’re very evil and dangerous guys”. Well, that’s quite a strawman. In my view, Anselmo is trying to address valid concerns about the distribution of the costs and benefits of welcoming these people. While direct monetary costs are funded via taxes, the less tangible ones which result from altering local communities – such as degradation of safety, yes – are never evenly distributed across geography or social classes. Because of that, they aren’t obvious to those living in more privileged areas.
Also, we aren’t discussing the distortions local businesses will cause in the job market when they hire these young people for peanuts instead of a working class Spaniard, or why their families are popping them out to rake in money from abroad instead of taking care of them, as they should.
Anyway, these realities have been part of the public debate all across Europe since at least the migratory crisis of 2015. The attempt to deny their existence for over a decade only has managed to fuel the rise of the populist far right you fear, so even from a strictly electoral viewpoint it’s not a brilliant strategy, you know. Reality is so stubborn.
Cheers,
Miguel.
@Cynthia Christie #345
The easiest way to get a profile picture posted is via https://gravatar.com/
Ariadne: There is one thing I wanted to say now. I’m a little confused as the why getting clocked by potential lovers is an issue, because surely we tell them we are trans before anything happens, yes? And if that is a problem then both we and they go on to someone else. If they clock us and go away prior to us telling them, then that just streamlines things as far as discarding duds in favor of studs goes. No? But clocking us by seeing what’s between our legs should never happen unless we’re a model for nude pencil sketches or something.
Full disclosure, I am personally guilty of not telling one time. I feel terrible about it and I consider it lucky for me that he didn’t refer me to law enforcement. I shall never do such a thing again.
Here’s an interesting article about something that Big Ag didn’t anticipate in its widespread adoption of so-called precision agriculture: solar storms that can cause GPS positioning errors of as much as 33 feet.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/gps-glitched-across-us-much-150000451.html
Considering that precision agriculture involves the calculation of the exact amount of fertilizer to add to very small areas of a field to gain a slight yield advantage, a shift of 33 feet is more than large enough to eliminate the yield advantage of the technique versus the old-fashioned broadscale application of fertilizers based on soil tests averaged over large areas. And if precision agriculture doesn’t provide an advantage, there is no need for the highly expensive, highly computerized, impossible to repair tractors of Corn Belt fame.
And BTW, throwing GPS off by this much also kills the ability of autonomous vehicles to know exactly where they are at all times – which could lead to fatal results.
To tag along with the discussion of old farm tractors, here in the Corn Belt, in every county fair and old-timey festival, there is sure to be a tractor show, in which farmers exhibit the antique tractors of every brand imaginable that they have restored, in most if not all cases to working order. There must be a large market of parts and expertise on restoration of antique tractors for these shows to be as commonplace as they are. Another example of a subculture keeping technological bifurcation alive.
Re: measles outbreaks in which the vaccinated get sick:
You actually see this in most measles outbreaks post-vaccine, reading case reports back into the 1980s. When the population is very heavily vaccinated, the outbreaks are usually centered on a small number of unvaccinated who get sick and are super infectious. Those around them that are unvaccinated get sick at a very high rate, and those who are vaccinated get sick at a super low rate, but there’s just so many more of them these days that they are an actual majority of the outbreak.
When you read the case studies, you also see that the people who are infected through a vaccine are not like those who get sick without vaccination. The rates of bad complications are way way WAY lower, and the immune system damage is almost nonexistant. They’re also way way way less infectious, though not noninfectious. It’s like the people who got smallpox through the smallpox vaccination decades after they were vaccinated – they got sick but it wasn’t bad and left almost no scars.
What’s interesting here is mostly that right now you are seeing the oubreaks pop up right as the vaccination rate dips below the rate at which you suppress outbreaks, meaning you are seeing outbreaks at the maximum vaccinated to unvaccinated ratio possible, so you maximize the fraction of infections that are modified by the vaccine versus those that are completely unmodified by prior immunity.
The sequences from modern infections don’t have anything particularly interesting going on in them. The measles virus has a few aspects that make it unlikely to easily evolve around a vaccine unlike flu or covid or RSV: it has multiple surface proteins all of which have to work or else it is dead, and it has to go through your blood as a core part of its life cycle. The first means that any one mutation doesn’t really help it get around your immune system, you need multiple at once, so it never gets on the treadmill. The second means that it’s just way easier for even a weak immune reaction to deal with it. As a rule, the viruses that reinfect the same person over and over through previously established immunity can do their whole life cycle on your skin or the surfaces of your lungs without needing to go through your blood, which are places your immune system just has a harder time working.
Cynthia,
No, I don’t tell prospective lovers. On the other hand, I carefully choose men that I can tell won’t have an issue with it. I have moved in circles of consensual non-monogamous sex where the predominant ethos is considerably tolerant.
My longer-term lovers I told once the relationship started to get serious.
@ Tony # 456
“What’s interesting here is mostly that right now you are seeing the oubreaks pop up right as the vaccination rate dips below the rate at which you suppress outbreaks…”
What rate IS the specific “vaccination rate at which you suppress outbreaks”?
Curious people want to know.
@ Mary Bennet says:
September 1, 2026 at 12:22 pm:
“Chuaquin and any other Spaniard who might be reading here: Does Spain have any compelling reason for keeping a bit land on the African coast?”
OK, ask the same question to the turks: Does Turkey have any compellin reason fo keeping a bit of land in Europe? (Costantinople was called). Turkey is an Asian country with a “colony” in Europe that was conquered more or least at the same time of Ceuta and Melilla; also Morroco wants the “return” of Canary Islands that was never inhabited by North Africans.
May be some 20 succesives generations of spaniards living in Ceuta and Melilla have something to say.
And, of course, why don’t ask the Morrocans who live in Ceuta and Melilla if they want to return to their country of origin….?
Hi John Michael,
My respect for you has just increased. I loathed Mr Caulfield and his boring in three dimension mindset. A more miserable when in the land of plenty outlook, would be hard to find. The characters’ practised disdain for everything and all around him just repulsed me, the little brat. Mind you, after reading Mr Kunstler’s book: “Look, I’m gone!”, left me with a softer perspective upon the author.
I’ve encountered people who use all of those ‘Catcher’ techniques, mostly, I believe, because they are baffled with their existence and lack the ability for deep introspection.
Am I ranting? Maybe! 🙂
Oh, the Amish. Right. Dude, it’s probably not just the vaccination rates which explains the superior health outcomes, but better food, exercise, a sense of purpose, community. I’d be wary of silver bullet simplistic explanations. Like the fall of Rome, there were 99 reasons why it is – all of them valid.
Neither soils, nor food, were once what they were. And I have some doubts that Amish kids are stuck on screens for hours and hours each day.
Cheers
Chris
Hi Michael Gray,
Thanks for the analysis, to which I mostly agree. Your point about not being a vote for, but rather a vote against, is I believe what is going on here as well. I’m not sanguine that Labour will disconnect from their mates in big business. Trying to change course when new information arrives, is not something which our species does very well.
It is worth recalling that about 30 years ago, maybe more, 60% of the working population had union affiliations. That’s down to I believe 10% in these enlightened days. And yet the unions are still in existence, but aren’t they also the ones who are involved with the industry super funds? Hmm.
🙂 Always wise to peer into the near future and wonder what it means. You’re doing good things too from reading in between the lines of your comments.
Cheers
Chris
Making a post for myself to record that I have finished chapter 22 of my draft – I’m on track so far this year – goal is to hit 26 chapters by New Year’s Eve!
Also… is it just me, or are a lot of your readers thinking about writing their own books nowadays? It’s great!! 🙂 I wish us all the ability to, at least, hack out that first rough draft!!
Gunstone, and it was specifically the Mahayana version that did so. The older Theravadin traditions, and the Buddhism you find in the earliest Buddhist texts, is much more akin to Gnosticism — it offers salvation only for those who can commit themselves to a demanding monastic path.
Cynthia, oh, it’s funnier than that. Fans of the Orange One are now referring to Canada geese as Donald Ducks…
Alvin, interesting. Yeah, that corresponds very closely to the Western esoteric idea. It’s the people who live a wholly animal life who end up flunking out of humanity and doing some lives as animals again, so they can finish learning the lessons of that mode of being in a more congenial form.
SLClaire, I remain baffled that anybody bothers to use GPS to plant a fracking field of crops anyway…
Chris, oh, there’s more going on than vaccination, but certain specific illnesses and conditions have gone through the roof in lockstep with the soaring number of vaccinations given to children — and those illnesses and conditions are not found among the Amish, at all. Since most Amish live deep in farm country, and their neighbors also have a less tech-dense lifestyle, the contrast is even more severe. Thus the panic among the authorities…
Shinjuki, excellent. As for people writing books, I’m delighted to see this. Writing is a wonderful skill to have, and the world needs more interesting books.
Hey John… I thought I saw you mention you are revising your Atlantis book. Thought struck me at ham radio club meeting tonight and speaker talking on the subject of some new high tech software radios… I wondered if Atlantis might have been a case of technological bifurcation, with the priest class going one way, and the Atlantean proles the other. Just a thought about the legends of the hi tech there being kept from the lower rungs of their society. Of course, the use of the tech turned out to be not so good for Atlantis as a whole.
Ariadne: Ok, ok, enough, at this point I would like to express a total lack of curiosity about you or your lifestyle. Also, my opinion of surgically constructed genitals remains such that the word I chose still reflects it accurately. Any questions of purported quality or who the surgeon is are not relevant. The thing still is what it is, no matter who made it.
Buh-bye!
—
Everyone: I have a joke for you!
Q: How do you know if someone’s vegan?
A: Don’t worry, they’ll tell you!
Yeah, I know, y’all heard it already, but did you know it still works if you say poly instead of vegan?
—
JMG, re maga renaming the geese: Those lovable scamps! Ha ha!
Did you know that anyone can teach something to Urban Dictionary? Not that I just did that of course. I am a kind person.
Cynthia Christie #419: A better name would be Lake Washington, or Lake Roosevelt, which might actually stick. Lake America is a bit tacky when the continent is already called America. Just my thoughts on the matter.
JMG #443: Well alright, but I still say you can strongly disagree with the Buddha’s conclusions, while respecting his role as a great religious founder.
For those that are interested in solar cookers, a blog I follow just posted this brilliant guide to cooking with the sun, both the good and the bad (burning the coffee beans!).
https://100r.ca/site/solar_cooking_experiment.html
They are fascinating people that are living the future to some degree. Live on a boat sailing the world, always looking at ways to reduce their needs and become more reliant. Also do a lot of work in making smaller and more resilient computer systems that can survive decades into the future.
@Cynthia RE : Vegan joke.
As someone that has an identical diet to them, yes, many (most!) of them can be unbearable! I do not associate with them. But you would never know about me unless it comes up directly. Nobody at my work place have figured it out yet after 5 years and that is just the way I want it to stay.
@ Chris at Fernglade #460
“Oh, the Amish. Right. Dude, it’s probably not just the vaccination rates which explains the superior health outcomes, but better food, exercise, a sense of purpose, community.”
This is why in my original post on the topic I specified the capacity of a whole culture (all of its ways and means, all of its values, all of its practices, and all of its relationships to the natural world) to transmit itself to generation after generation.
This capacity for generational transmission has itself always been what “modern global corporatism” and its campaigns to “open markets”, has taken aim at, and what it has *effectively* destroyed in culture after culture around the world, including all of the ones our own ancestors practiced and transmitted.
This destruction has many parts and many themes, but all of them together are now aimed squarely at the Amish “over generations” – ie at their enduring capacity to gift their ways and their means to their progeny., and thereby make their cultural practices and values resilient and future proof.
Since “Catcher in the Rye” has come up, I’ll chip in. I interpret it as a tale told to a Psychiatrist in a mental hospital to which Caulfield has been sent. I don’t expect him to be likeable. I found this article a few years ago, to be intriguing: “Freemason in the Rye.” https://postflaviana.org/freemason-rye/
Especially interesting is the section on the song “Little Shirley Beans,” which I didn’t get at all when I read the novel back in the day. It reminds me of Salinger’s story “A Great Day for Bannanafish” which is to be found in “Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters” IIRC.
I have not read Kunstler’s novel that Chris mentions. I’ll see if the library has it.
All in all, I much prefer Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” to “Catcher.” There’s a similar theme.
xcalibur/djs: Calling your country by the name of the continent isn’t tacky at all, of course.
Australia: Not you. 😉
Michael Gray: Yes! I think that’s a normal, understandable way to feel.
Cynthia Christie #471: tbf, we’re called the United States of America, or “US” or “America” for short. Since this is the dominant country in the Western hemisphere, using “America” as a shorthand is acceptable imo.
I still say Lake Washington or Lake Roosevelt would work. Now I’m leaning towards the latter, because Teddy Roosevelt set up the National Parks, so it would be fitting.