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.
With that said, have at it!
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20260320-french-overtakes-arabic-to-become-world-fourth-most-spoken-language
I saw this article recently on how French has ironically seen something of a comeback in terms of overall number of speakers due to the still high fecundity of West and Equatorial Africa where the language remains a lingua franca.
I wonder if it might ironically be creole of French that ends up as a major world language in the next big post-collapse civilization. One should also keep in mind that West Africa will have an improved climate from hot desert to savanna in the future.
I started my own (free) short-story/memoir Substack. I hope it’s okay to use the forum here to share the link to my latest story (well, borderline novella).
“The Only Living Boy in Taipei” – Threads of coincidence tie together three stages of the lives of two boys, from childhood to university to the start of their careers. For one of them, a Simon & Garfunkel album carries a message that connects two days in a life, 20 years and two continents apart.
https://riverpaths.substack.com/p/the-only-living-boy-in-taipei
Again, it’s a free site with no donation option. Not promoting anything for profit. Just looking for one or two interested readers 🙂
I suppose that nearly everyone here does this, but in the off-chance that folks don’t know about Aurelian (https://aurelien2022.substack.com/) I just want to remind folks of why I enjoy Wednesdays so much.
Between the two writers, there is a weekly infusion of thought that I obviously agree with the majority of the time. I suppose this comes across as a plug, but it would behoove folks to stop by over there on the way here. Or vice-versa.
I recently read this passage:
“…the inner being acts through the soul by the will, though the will is not usually conscious…. We (generally) experience sensations in wakefulness, feelings as if in a dream, and will as if in deep, unconscious sleep.”
in a link supplied by another commenter on the topic of Ahriman:
https://anthroposophy.eu/w/images/3/37/Mason%2C_Robert_-_The_advent_of_Ahriman.pdf
I have also been thinking about the vexed topic of intention – what do people intend to do (vs what they actually do) and how I have never been able to “read” intentions – including my own. I do think I can be as inventive as the next person after the fact and supply “reasons” why I did this or that. But I do not have any confidence that I actually can know why I did a thing. I therefore have no experiential basis from which to guess at the “why” of what other people do.
I also have developed an aversion to the style of argument that the effects or consequences of an act are less important that the intentions of the person who did it. If the consequences of an act are negative, I tend to presume that I am meant to do my best to learn to do better. (I’m not saying that I am more than averagely successful, but that is my basic assumption).
But, in my experience, people often slip straight past any consideration of the consequences of an action into pleading that “it wasn’t meant that way, it was done with good intentions” and other such phrases. Which, to my mind obstruct the process by means of which consequences teach.
But, truly, it is also the case that people can have whole, lengthy conversations on the topic of what was intended by this or that action, and to me they appear to be talking of colours that I, being blind, simply cannot see. I tend to think that the passage above explaining that the inner being acts through the soul through the will, which is not conscious, is perfectly consistent with my sense of being “blind” to the matter of intention. But maybe it is this very blindness which may not be universal, but may be uniquely mine, that colours the way I think about actions and consequences?
Perhaps magic is about working “changes in will via consciousness” as much as it is the other way around… 😉
In any case, I would welcome hearing the thoughts of anyone here on the topic of intention and will, and how it relates (or doesn’t) to acts.
Two questions John:
Will there be a King in Orange sequel?
Will the new Yeats book be available in a more affordable paperback edition or just the limited hardcover?
Ready for a weird deindustrial tale with a surrealistic splash? I have a new free short story to share, never before published. A few days before I saw the post from our host about assault with a deadly kitten ( https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/375042.html ) I had decided to pull out a short story from my drawer to revise. I had first gotten the idea for this story back in 2024 and wrote a quick draft, and didn’t look at it much after that. I have now revised it, and it is ready to share. The reason I bring up Assault with a Deadly Kitten, is that my story, The Leonora Carrington Event, is about a mass psychotic break with reality and into surrealism, that occurs one evening when a coronal mass ejection and subsequent geomagnetic storm bring aurora borealis to the Midwest and beyond, bringing further strain to an already strained grid and telecommunications system subject to brown outs and black outs. It also rends a veil in reality causing some people to experience a kind of psychosis and hear and see things they normally wouldn’t hear and see. I thought the timing of me wanting to get this out there, and that post was rather interesting. As for the story, well, I had fun writing it, and maybe some of you will have fun reading it, but whatever the case me be, I thought now was the time to share.
https://justinpatrickmoore.substack.com/p/the-leonora-carrington-event
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/the-leonora-carrington-event
@Degringolade (#3):
I echo your recommendation of Aurelien’s substack. He sees very clearly through the fog of what’s going on in the West these days. I, too, very much look forward to Wednesdays, for the same two reasons as you.
Anyone here have much experience with Gordon White’s spiritual practices both useful ones and not so useful or even negative?
Over the past couple of years I’ve kept encountering Gordon White online, mostly via Youtube suggestions for his Rune Soup offerings. I never dived into his work and some of it seemed to involve paths I wasn’t interested in or at least on the tail end of a very, very, long list of spiritual experiences I want to explore (e.g. ayahuasca ceremonies). Despite that, many of his topics or his spiritual advice resonates with me in a profound way. His maxim, repurposed from a self-development teacher “It’s OK to suck. It’s not OK to skip.” is the perfect example of something that really resonated with a skipping prone individual, such as myself.
Then he passed away and regret he’s gone before I knew more about his beliefs and practices. I picked up his The Chaos Protocols and that’s a reason my opening question included the word negative. I believe at the beginning of his online career he was known more for chaos magic work. I like his book, there’s economic history, some hoodoo magic and sigils but my personal belief is he played fast and loose with summoning different spirits such as invoking Lucifer or Hekate at a crossroads.
Bill and I have come to think of the phrase “Maintenance Free” as one of the curses that afflict the modern world.
When you think about “Maintenance Free,” the message isn’t just “buy a new one, you cheapskate” when an item fails.
It’s that you shouldn’t have to DO anything; you shouldn’t have to wash dishes, cook meals, mend seams, change the oil in your car, mow the lawn, pick up litter, mop floors at the supermarket, exercise, or, basically, do anything that you don’t want to or that you aren’t being paid to do.
Yet the people who are paid to do maintenance are denigrated as manual labor.
No wonder nothing gets repaired. Only poor people must do maintenance.
“Maintenance Free” really has become a curse, along with its less powerful sibling, “Low-Maintenance.”
Hi JMG,
I hope you’re doing well! Forgive me if this would be a better question for your Magic Monday session on your Dreamwidth journal. I have started practicing Geomancy, and I was wondering if you consider the Judge and Witnesses when reading a third party question (aka when the question is about someone other than the querent). I wasn’t sure how to interpret those, compared to how I’d interpret them in a normal reading.
I also was wondering if the twelve houses are basically the same as in astrology, or are related but have their own distinct Geomancy meanings. I recently purchased Parker’s Astrology, to dive more into the technical details of astrology, and I was wondering if their descriptions of the houses is a helpful deepening on the texture of the twelve geomantic houses. I’ve been doing daily geomantic readings, and it feels good to intuitively feel into how the sixteen figures show up in my life, but I honestly feel a bit stuck about the twelve houses, and how to map their life areas onto my day to day life. I feel like having a little more to sink my teeth into for the houses would make that part of it easier to explore, through the readings or discursive meditation. I would assume they too are effectively archetypal symbols (for example, I’ve been taught from other sources that in astrology, they map onto a human’s development, from the initial understanding of self, to having a sense of one’s possessions, then close environment and close connections, and so on). I struggle to fit the geomantic meaning of the 12th house into this regardless, as it seems to have such a distinctly negative meaning in Geomancy that to my understanding it doesn’t in astrology. Any insight you could offer on any of this would be most welcome! And let me know if in the future, questions like this would be better suited to the Magic Monday discussion. Thanks!
If you are interested in seeing one of the great, final marvels of steam locomotives in the U.S., Big Boy (engine #4014), one of a handful left of the biggest steam engines ever built, is still steaming across the U.S. to its home base in Cheyanne, WY, arriving at the end of July.
Here’s one site: https://4014coasttocoast.com/schedule/
Union Pacific: https://www.up.com/about-us/history/steam/schedule
You can upload minute by minute trackers of Big Boy on your phone.
Big Boy steamed past us on Tuesday, 7 July 2026 (300 feet from our house!) from Lebanon to Enola.
I thought our little, obscure stretch of road along the train tracks might have a few onlookers. The road — about 500 feet long — was PACKED from end to end, every place that a car could be parked had a car there, and the people! All ages, many of them wearing some variation of red, white, and blue, and loaded with the kind of camera equipment you normally would only see while on safari.
I met train spotters and rail fans who were following Big Boy’s transit of the U.S., state by state to film and gawk. Based on what I’ve learned, if there’s any kind of public access to the rails, Big Boy fans will be there, panting to see those turbines in action. We met people on our little street who, after Big Boy roared past (that whistle! Modern engines don’t have steam whistles at that volume) raced to their cars to race to Big Boy’s next easily accessible viewing location to the Harrisburg railyard to the Enola railyard.
If you can see Big Boy while it chugs west to Wyoming, don’t miss it.
It was quite an experience.
My sister’s tenant moved out leaving a back bedroom stinking to high heaven of urine from her two dogs. As my sis was trying all manner of rug cleaners, I concurrently read in Kimberly Steele’s fab book Sacred Homemaking that the only thing to get urine out of a rug was an enzymatic cleaner… I informed my sis, she bought some at Home Depot and it was like a miracle – cleaning up the scent and stains.
Shout out to Kimberly for an amazing book filled with household tips and beautiful magic for the home.
On another note – I know some here may not be fans, but I came across a recent podcast of a Jordan B. Peterson lecture on alchemy and Jung and I thought he had some interesting insights. Weirdly, on a previous podcast he mentioned the Fool tarot card picture as an example for one of his presented ideas! What’s happening here😱, lol!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/id1184022695?i=1000776486354
Jill C
Elon Musk is apparently having a conniption fit over casting in the just released, or forthcoming, I am not sure which, latest movie adaptation of the Odessey. It seems that Helen of Troy, surely a minor role in the story of Odysseus, is, gasp, a black woman. The lady a Kenyan actress, Lupita Nyong O, is astonishingly beautiful and also has that true sexual charisma so conspicuously lacking in most Hollywood beach blonds. Farah Fawcett had it and so did Pamela Anderson. Besides those two, not so much. It would, of course, have been highly historically inaccurate to cast a tall, blond Valkyrie in the role, not that either Musk, nor, I suspect, Nolan, have much use for historical accuracy. And to be fair, the Odessey is and always has been legend, not history.
What I am wondering is does Musk regard anyone, such as Mr. Nolan, who does anything noteworthy, like make a movie spectacular, as his employee, whether Musk is actually paying the person or not?
The other day, my spouse and I were discussing an event that we both experienced. One of the things that caught me was how different their memory of the event was. It’s been frequently noted, of course, that this is a common event in marriages; the two partners remembering the same event completely differently. It got me to thinking about just how subjective memory can be, and about how on the mental plane one would have to deal with everyone’s subjective mindsets. From there, I realized that I am not ready for the mental plane; it would be too much for me to deal with. For all the faults of the physical plane, the hard objectivity of it does allow me to process reality and function!
Hi JMG and Ecosophians,
After reading Possum living by Dolly Freed, I look into raising meat rabbits. From a small basement, Dolly and her father could harvest 300 pounds of high quality meat per year without breaking much sweat. This provided a key advantage for their self-reliance life.
Besides, heritage chicken breeds are ideal for eggs but not ideal for meat. Chicken rearing requires grains which the household usually have to purchase meanwhile one can easily provide to rabbits most of green from the garden.
I wonder if you know why rearing and eating rabbits felt out of fashion relatively to chicken.
Have a nice day.
I need to respond to #358 etienne in the last post. Coldly angry best sums up my feelings for your charming request for JMG and all to stay out of Canadian politics as you are so very knowledgeable( in both official languages) and they don’t have a clue.
I’m steering close to the edge here on the blog rules trying to not denigrate your salary class , but lordy, as a mere peasant in flyover country I welcome their opinions.
JMG,
I was not aware until recently of how the tradition paperback format ( mass market paperback) has been pushed out of the entire bookstore distribution route in favor of trade paperbacks and hardcovers. I only discovered it because I went looking for a recent ( 2022) book that was only ever published in mass market paperback form and found I would have to special order ( or perhaps order from Amazon).
According to press releases by the industry this is to improve the reader experience, but seems like an obvious money grab replacing a cheaper format with a more expensive one. Is there more to the story that I am missing?
In my country youth in the Midwest, part of the late spring, summer entertainment was the thunderstorm . Before the storm there was a period of stillness and calm and you would see the approaching storm clouds in the distance. In the USA I feel we are in that calm right now, true there are distant rumblings and concerns and online media drama, but immediate daily life and its business and routine here in the States go on. How long this relative peace will continue I can’t say for sure, but I think it will be longer than many anticipate.
JMG
I’ve noticed a particular trend in thinking especially found in modern politics that’s becoming more prevalent as people become increasingly polarized. Here’s the term I came up with and its definition:
Self-evidence Fallacy – A type of circular logic where one believes that their position is so clearly correct or the natural default, that anyone who disagrees must be uninformed, irrational, deceptive, or otherwise unable to engage in good faith.
I’ve seen this pop up more and more in political discussion. There’s a well known cringey line said among millennials, “I can’t even” which fits this fallacy. Functionally people are becoming more dead set that their beliefs or way of thinking is correct that they refuse to consider the possibility that there is any merit to an opposing viewpoint. Another common phrase I’m seeing said more these days now is “you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into” as a means of not engaging with certain topics. Certain types of atheists are usually the most guilty of this fallacy, assuming that religious people must be under some delusion and that one can’t logically come to the conclusion that there is a god or gods.
Ultimately I see this as a secular rework of the Christian doctrine of Orthodoxy, as opposed to heresy. Labels such as racist, sexist, woke, grifter, etc. are synonymous with the term heretic. But I’d like to get others thoughts on this.
I’ve recently started thinking about setting base states for doing the work. An experiment in setting states and them combining the elements into an overall ‘state’.
Body, Senses, Emotions, Personality, Thoughts, Imagination, Memory where these instruments are vehicles of ‘Mind’ which is a vehicle of ‘Soul’ or ‘Higher Self’ – vehicles and tools within vehicles, but in order to become more ‘human’ it is necessary to master the vehicles of incarnation rather than being controlled by them.
I mentioned on the deadly kitten thread about using a base state for emotion of gratitude for life, but, other emotional states could be utilised if and as required (e.g. courage to face what must be faced) – it is not so much that a particular emotional state is chosen, but a process of using emotions to create a dynamic ‘still’ state that aligns with one’s Ideal.
This led me to wonder if there would be utility in bringing in other areas.
We have numerous vehicles or ‘accommodations’ that consciousness uses to experience a material incarnation:
Body (the mammalian animal body powered by the etheric/vital body of life force)
5 obvious Senses (primary sense signals: touch, sight, hearing, smelling, tasting)
Emotions/Passions (where passion is extreme emotion and emotions derive from astral level)
Personality (the character/ego of the incarnation)
Thoughts (action of investigating ideas and situations, primarily astral to begin)
Imagination (the creative mind at astral and glimpses of mental levels?)
Memory (the ‘well’ of experiences and patterns)
All of these instruments are either ‘signals’ or ‘tools to process signals’ and overall they work together as tools of Mind where Mind is the tool by which the soul experiences this world of dense material reality. My expectation is to find that each verse of the aide memoire ‘Dances on the Paths of Life’ should map to one or more of various instruments, but each ‘tool’ should be harmonized to do work.
Possible base states so far:
Body = relaxed dynamic readiness triggered by vagus response
Senses = turn within, not just focussed out [seal senses?]
Emotions = verse 1 – “In gratitude and awe; with wonder, humility, and respect; By the grace of The Absolute, may I act in harmony and flowing balance.”
Personality = quiet readiness focussed using aspect of Ideal
Thoughts = focussed on awareness of energy flows
Imagination = visualise oneself becoming and being the Ideal
Memory = commit the combined states into memory
But I have a question that has me stumped at the moment: What about Will?
And from that, what is the ‘seat’ of Will and does it classify as tool, vehicle, both or something else?
Ideas appreciated; thank you.
Piracy and AI ruling,
“Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot”
https://apnews.com/article/ai-anthropic-copyright-settlement-claude-books-bartz-74b140444023898aeba8579b6e9f0d63
Some commentary on that from Slashdot;
“That’s because of how the legal question was resolved. Alsup sided with Anthropic on the core issue. He ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted text counts as fair use, a decision widely seen as a turning point for the AI industry. But the ruling didn’t excuse how Anthropic obtained the books in the first place. Anthropic had built its training library from two sources: books it purchased and scanned (fine), and books it downloaded from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Alsup found the second method illegal on its own terms and said that piracy question could go to trial; Anthropic agreed to a settlement soon after to avoid a trial and whatever damages a jury might have awarded.”
So… it’s legal to scan books you own and then use them to train LLMs, but it’s not legal to use scans that someone else made (I’ll assume in this case, they didn’t own the books in question.) Hence… the perverse incentive to buy and re-scan books that might already have been scanned… and the cheapest way of doing it is to chop the spine off.
Internal Anthropic documents about its plan to scan millions of books, revealed in the copyright lawsuit, don’t make clear why the company wanted to destroy the books in the process. A deposition of Tom Harvey, who Anthropic hired to lead the project and who previously helped create Google Books, shows that one company Anthropic contracted to scan the books was Datamation, which offers both high volume destructive and non-destructive book scanning services. In a destructive book scanning process, the spine of the book is cut so the pages can be fed into a scanning machine, which is faster and cheaper than non-destructive book scanning.
Regardless of its original intentions, the federal judge in the copyright lawsuit from authors against Anthropic, William Alsup, found that Anthropic’s creation of digital copies of the books was legal specifically because the books were destroyed.
Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy, Alsup wrote in his ruling. “The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company.”
Hi JMG and Commentariat:
The article last week made me think about how all of us change our views over time. Does anyone know of any habits or exercises we can use to self-check our own assumptions and opinions about the world? For instance, JMG: my understanding of your position on climate change is that it is real and ongoing, but that the Al Gore-esque prognostications of a microwave planet by 2050 are basically disingenuous fugazi. But how often do you re-examine your position, test it to see if it still holds? Is it something you do organically or is it an intentional process?
I’m trying to be a more agile thinker instead of simply letting my views harden into intellectual skeletons of ideology
@JMG
I’d like to follow up on my comment on Magic Monday:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/375450.html?thread=61074586#cmt61074586
You partially rebutted me saying that RPGs hit the big time in the 1970’s, which is certainly true. However, I note that the Satanic Panic made them disreputable for more than a decade, and a torrent of low-quality games and supplements — driven in no small part by TSR itself — did not help. By the late 90’s, if you said you “played RPGs,” you more than likely meant video games.
(Interestingly, this period of decline corresponded closely to Neptune’s transit through Capricorn, which by some accounts put it in its fall.)
This situation turned around shortly after Wizards of the Coast bought TSR in 1998 — the same year Neptune exited Capricorn for Aquarius. WOTC for a time proved a better steward of D&D than TSR had been and the hobby steadily gained a wider audience after this, even they fumbled with the 4th edition of D&D.
But the mainstreaming of the hobby didn’t come until the 2010’s, and was driven by two things: the release of the 5th edition of D&D in 2014, which streamlined the rules in no small part to make it more attractive to less-mathematically-inclined players, and with the popularity of the Critical Role podcast, in which actors play D&D or another roleplaying game as a form of improvisational theater. (Some people would say that’s what roleplaying is, but I come from a tradition that strongly disagrees!) The influx of people who previously would never have considered playing RPGs created the hobby’s equivalent of Eternal September.
It’s this mass fad that I think is going to go the way of the dodo before long. I think we’ll see RPGs settle down to be one option for a weekend among others, and considering the commitment required, a much less common one than now.
On a completely different topic, I recently ponied up the dough for a copy of The Task of Philosophy in the Antropocene to read JMG’s “The Coming of the Post-Axial Age.” A very good read.
One of things I just thought about is that if JMG is right and the Axial Age was a side-effect of Craftsman’s literacy — the spreading of literacy beyond the scholarly class to the artisanal class — spreading the ability to think in abstract concepts, then this has implications for how the Pali Canon of Buddhism should be interpreted. Since the Pali Canon is a recording of an oral tradition — as evidenced by the highly-repetitive structure of the suttas — trying to read highly-abstract concepts into its teachings is probably a mistake.
Hi JMG and community,
I have another question, hope that’s alright! I was reading your essay “A Path Abides”, and I feel confused about what consistites goetia. The extreme examples feel easy enough to understand, but I don’t really know where the line is drawn between summoning a spirit and asking an angel or god to be with you or help you accomplish something. I’m also wondering where the New Age-y “spirit guides” fall into this. I learned energy work from a New Age-y woman a while ago who would say ask for help only according to her highest good, or only from beings dedicated to love, something like that. I’ve read your Druid Magic Handbook and you obviously call on gods and goddesses in that, as well as invoking and banishing elemental energies (and I remember you writing in one of your Geomancy books that elemental energies or planet spirits are basically blind forces, so you need to both invoke and then banish them). Is invoking an element the same thing as summoning a spirit? And what makes it goetia is the intention or lack of banishing? I get really in my head about all of this…I hadn’t had any experience with the Druid gods, so I meditated and then reflected on Hu and his energy, and then I had a series of visions and sensations where I was interacting with him. I’ve had similar connections with some deities in other pantheons, especially Oshun, from Syncreticism. But I go through periods where I’m second guessing myself and wondering if some less helpful being is appearing and communicating with me, and I don’t know how to tell. Sometimes I can also tell that my fear is affecting my vision, the way you described an untrained mind affecting a scrying. I feel a pure and beautiful connection, there’s nothing about the interaction that makes me feel off, but then I read about stuff like goetia and I worry because I don’t know how to tell the difference (like if it could in fact feel good and right and still somehow be a trick). When I’ve felt interactions with what seemed to me to be demonic entities, it always felt like the right way to respond was to hold in myself the purest field of love possible, to love the demonic energy as well, and that seemed to make the energy drop right out of my field. Is something along those lines the right approach for being sure I’m connecting with the deity I’m hoping to? I think part of what also has made me question my experiences is when you say that gods, goddesses, and angels aren’t particularly concerned about human beings, yet I feel them to be incredibly loving, available, and interactive.
Gunstone, no surprises there. West Africa, where French is the common lingua franca (literally!) among dozens of distinct tribal and national languages, is one of the few parts of the world where population is still growing rapidly (though fertility levels there are half what they were fifty years ago, and dropping). As depopulation sets in, I expect migrations from West Africa in many directions, with Latin America a likely destination, and so you may well be right that creoles descended from French will play a large role in the future of language.
Michael, delighted to hear this. Yes, that’s perfectly appropriate for an open post.
Degringolade, Aurelien’s posts are always worth reading. He and I disagree about a great many things, but to my mind that’s a plus, not a minus.
Scotlyn, good! In some occult writings this is called the problem of the divided will. Most of us never manage to will just one thing at a time; far more often than not, our wills are split between two or more mutually incompatible intentions, which is why so few of us ever accomplish much. Worse still, under the pressure of moralistic religious or secular teachings, we tend to repress our own knowledge of the intentions we consider disreputable and focus on those intentions that are approved by our society, even when the former do much more to shape our actions than the latter. The result is a steaming mess. One of the valuable things about meditation, along with related practices such as journaling, is that these practices gradually coax the practitioner into noticing the obvious fact of the fragmentation of his will, to bring all those disparate intentions into full consciousness, and then to choose among them.
Joe, (1) I have no idea yet, and (2) you’d have to ask the publisher, as it’s their choice and not mine.
Justin, ha! I saw what you did there. 😉
Scotty, I haven’t looked into his magical writings, as chaos magic is about as far from my interests as you can get. Anyone else?
Teresa, it’s a very clever bit of propaganda to keep people spending themselves into debt, you must admit!
Sama, (1) I don’t use the judge and witnesses when doing any rotated-chart reading. (2) In my experience, they’re related but distinct.
Yogaandthetarot, thanks for both of these.
Mary, I spent a couple of moments trying to find the least reason to be interested in either the latest hairball that Hollywood has gagged up, on the one hand, or what some kleptocrat is babbling about it, on the other. I confess that I failed utterly in that task. By all means fuss about it if you wish, but I’ll pass, thanks.
Waffles, one of the most unwelcome discoveries we all make sooner or later is that we reconstruct our memories every time we recall them. Knowing that, ironically, brings you closer to the mental plane…
Foxhands, I have no idea. Rabbits are quieter and easier to care for. Kudos, by the way, for reading a classic simple-living text!
Clay, well, it also helped squeeze out the last paperback sales via drugstores and grocery stores, which once competed very efficiently with bookstores online and off. In either case, though, you’re right that it’s just one more attempt to grab money.
BeardTree, duly noted!
Anonymous, that’s technically known as the argumentum ad incredulitatem, or in English, the argument from pigheadedness. It’s one of the classic logical fallacies, and mostly serves as a way for people to say, “When this subject comes up I become incapable of thinking.”
Earthworm, this all seems very sensible. As for the will, if Schopenhauer is correct it underlies everything else — all these other things are expressions of will. It has no seat — it is the seat of all else. As Dion Fortune wrote somewhere, “God is pressure.”
Siliconguy, it’s very mixed news, but at least Anthropic will have to cough up some money. I’m part of that class action lawsuit, btw.
Harry, yes, I track climate change fairly closely, using statistics from various sources as well as evidence from paleoclimatology. I do this with all the things I write about, which is why (for example) last week’s post was about things I got wrong back in 2006.
Slithy, fair enough! I was out of the hobby by the time video games became dominant. I simply remember that in my teen years, every geeky boy I knew was up to his eyeballs in D&D or some other tabletop RPG — Tunnels & Trolls, Chivalry & Sorcery, Traveller, and Top Secret were particularly popular in the circles in which I ran.
Sama, yes, it’s entirely possible to get tied in knots over questions like these. 😉 I suppose the simplest response is to see if you’re treating spiritual beings like vending machines. If you are, that’s unhelpful and will probably blow up in your face. If instead you build relationships with the inhabitants of the Unseen, and don’t go begging favors from them any more often than you would with human friends, you’ll do fine.
i am finding something odd right now like when the war was happening during March-April there was considerable worry and tension about oil,gas but now that we are in a weaker position then in March and April with both BAM and SoH are closed there is not much worry discussed even in India is there something up??
like are people really waiting for a big visible crisis to wake up to this or i am i missing something??
This is a sort of follow-up to an investigation into agency in language that I posted quite a while ago (here and here). It might be of interest particularly for Scotlyn or everybody else involved in healing. I will gladly accept corrections from linguists!
In English and most modern European languages, the usual (active) form of a verb is used both for actions one does with oneself, like “I sat down”, and for actions one does to somebody or something else, like “I sat him down on the table”. The passive form is only used when we want to stress that somebody was on the receiving side of an action: “he was put down”.
In Ancient Greek, there are special verb forms for actions one does on one’s own without involving other persons, e.g. while “paideuo” means “I teach (somebody)”, “paideuomai” means “I teach myself, I learn”. This is called the middle voice.
Strangely for us, many common verbs have no active forms, e.g. “erchomai” means “I go”. Ancient grammarians explained that the meaning of “erchomai” makes it impossible to use an active form like “ercho” – apparently because there is only one person involved. If somebody speaks Spanish or Portuguese or Italian, they might be reminded of emotionally charged forms like “él se va”.
The point I want to actually draw attention to, after this long-winded introduction, is that the verb “to heal”, “iaomai” in Ancient Greek, falls formally into the same category as “erchomai” – there is no active form. In English and other modern languages, we say he was healing those in need of healing. One person heals, the other persons are healed. But in Greek the verb has middle voice – an extremely literal translation of the original “iato” might be “he (involving himself, or drawing on himself) was healing those in need of healing”. Alternatively, it has been suggested that “The ‘healing/preserving’ verbs may originally have had a sense of self-benefit built into the action.”
Well, I found that fascinating to think about!
Nolan Odyssey he turned a homecoming story into an anti war morality guilty story why does the Christian West always do this to pagan epics it has been going on for a long time when will it stop??
Hi JMG,
Thank you so much for both your responses! That is such a helpful and simple approach to interacting with Unseen beings…that really gives me something to work with intuitively without getting lost in the question knots!!
Hello Sama Lindera. I have a suggestion from personal experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-mind
Mushin no shin, “mind without mind”, is a Zen expression which (as I learned) challenges us to be open to our perceptions without filters. In my practice, I call it ego disengagement. This has nothing to do with ego loss. It is an exercise in perception without judgment, analysis or reaction.
This is not a replacement for intention, nor do I suggest any denigration or criticism of intention in our practices and rituals. It is, in my opinion, gathering information of which I can later ponder and attempt to make sense.
I absolutely do not suggest that you change your practices in any way, unless you yourself find reasons to make adjustments or changes. Information — we say “belief” in our spiritual practices, and there are plenty of arguments about whether information and belief have any overlap — motivates my spiritual practices, in ways I never imagined before learning about mushin no shin.
Over on the Ecosophia Dreamwidth site, I haven’t been able to get the nested comments to expand, for the past three or four weeks. I’m wondering if anyone else is having this problem.
@Teresa Peschel #9
That has always been the thing with Americans. They worship the workaholic, but they also believe implicitly that the only reason work carries any value is because it generates money. The actual effects of the work itself almost don’t matter at all, and anything that doesn’t generate hard cash is seen as a horrible inconvenience at best, and beneath them at worst. It’s as you say, this has created a culture where no one will do anything worthwhile unless money is involved, and so nothing is ever maintained, not even their own bodies.
I don’t think this applies as much outside of America (or perhaps Western nations in general), but that attitude has had some influence on cultures around the world, particularly the ones deep in Faustian pseudomorphosis.
@Scotlyn #4
Intention is a tricky thing. I don’t share your blindness to it (at least I don’t believe that I do) but I agree it is often a muddled topic that where people will often fudge things in their own favor, most often to protect their own egos (this tends to be especially true the more fragile said ego happens to be). Perhaps it’s because I feel I have a pretty clear idea of why I do the things I do, even when the picture that emerges isn’t particularly flattering to me, or perhaps I’m simply less cautious than you in drawing such conclusions, but I don’t discount the value of intention entirely. Adults are one matter, but especially in the case of children, they find themselves very frequently coming up against the dissonance between genuinely good intentions and unintended consequences. I think it’s appropriate to be sympathetic, patient, and generous with them especially in this regard.
That being said, when it comes to adults, I have found it best to ignore words about intentions for the most part, and to observe actions instead, and if one is interested, reason backwards to intention from there. That has given me clearer and more consistent results than any other alternative. Even if the extrapolated intention isn’t truly consistent with their inner reality (something you have no way of ever confirming anyway), it usually predicts their behavior better than taking their words and explanations literally. You could argue this is still a form of ignoring conversations about intention, and perhaps that’s true. Perhaps I just feel that while this strategy has served me well, I try to be careful not to dismiss intention entirely. It is as you say, humans often do not even know why they do what they do, so I think it best on occasion to give them the benefit of a doubt, and afford them the sympathy, patience, and generosity we usually give to children for that reason.
All that being said, if repeated patterns emerge that contradict the explanations being put forward, it’s best to judge based on actions rather than words. At least, that’s what I think.
@ Teresa, #9. You might enjoy the new book by Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Catalog, and so much else) called “Maintenance: Of Everything”. I thought it was great.
Re: Odyssey. We watched the movie last Saturday, and I agree that Lupita Nyong’o is both a good actress and a very minor character (actually two) in this epic. Casting a black Helen is a much less important change to the story than giving Odysseus a moral conscience as regards killing people and having lovers while married! I still found the movie a valid adaption for a 21st century audience (and visually stunning).
@ Anonymous #19
“Labels such as racist, sexist, woke, grifter, etc. are synonymous with the term heretic. But I’d like to get others thoughts on this.”
Yes, I do think that there are labels that are being used to mean “heresy” – and there are many “heresy hunters”, from the various civic religions, who make themselves busy finding you out!
In my personal experience the word “denialist” is a common word for “heretic”, and so is “anti-vaxxer”… many of the civic religions that currently have “bite” are scientistic/materialistic in outlook, and so any questioning of current “scientific consensus” is definitely treated as heresy.
@ Degringolade #3: Thank you for linking to Aurelien. I’d been aware of him before, but hadn’t paid much attention. Maybe that’s gonna change. I saw nothing in his post from today with which I didn’t already agree. Naturally, I feel that all this should be obvious to our leaders but, judging by their actions and words, it’s not.
Scotlyn wrote, “I have also been thinking about the vexed topic of intention – what do people intend to do (vs what they actually do) and how I have never been able to “read” intentions – including my own.”
Well, that throws a new light on your query in last week’s post regarding the fatal shooting of a driver who was headed toward an ICE agent. I didn’t reply because your question was limited to the physics of how a bullet could stop an already moving vehicle, and not any question of motives. You later added “Of course everyone is very exercised by the politics question, and by the discerning of the intentions of all the actors question, both of which, to me, are – and no doubt will remain – matters of deep mystery.”
From my perspective, different aptitudes in reading intentions is the reason for all the passionate accusations getting thrown around so enthusiastically. Some people are gifted with being able read others’ intentions like they were written all over their faces. Similarly, some people can read the signature of demonic possession in others’ voice, posture, ingratiating smile, etc. without harboring a single doubt. Some of us can’t figure out why anyone would voluntarily get in the car of a psychopath, only to have their body found by police weeks later, because we can’t miss the psychopathic nature clearly visible in their eyes. That’s part of the reason I so dislike when people wear dark sunglasses!
Taking into account how variable the gift of reading intentions is in the populace, I can better understand why some people are convinced that ICE agent is nothing but the cold blooded executioner of a total innocent. I had simply presumed that he had seen whatever twisted expression was distorting her face into a psychotic or demonic mask as she pressed down on the accelerator. It is hard for me to imagine surviving in a world where one couldn’t see things like that clearly, just as it must be hard for you to imagine anyone automatically presuming that officer could see things like that clearly. Humans really are as strangely diverse as Yeats’ Vision posits.
On the other hand, you had no doubts about the great Covid panic being some kind of psy-op/ mass formation/ power grab. How did you arrive at that conviction? For me it was quite easy, as I could read the ample compromising hypocrisy on the faces and in the voices of all the obedient talking heads. In quite a few cases, I could also see and hear the psychopathic demons peering out through their eyes and using their voices.
Is there an archetype of The Normal? I seems like people use some measure of what they project as normal to make judgements and derisions, especially against anything they view as not normal. Maybe humans in different life contexts project the archetype in different ways.
I did some reflecting recently on the goals of most spiritual paths and realized that in many ways their goals are diametrically opposed to the apparent goals of so-called modern living.
Let’s take the smartphone as an example. Smartphones and social media are tuned by default to be maximally stimulating, provide instant gratification, shorten attention spans, muddle thinking, and more or less leave the user in a constant state of low-level anxiety, from which they will act impulsively. Similar things could be said about television, advertising, the internet, or any number of other things we associate with “modern” living.
On the other hand, meditation, a core spiritual practice in the vast majority of traditions, is boring, difficult, and at least initially unsatisfying, but promotes mental clarity, discipline, and a relaxed, calm state of mind, along with a whole host of other longer-term benefits.
This had me wondering whether this opposition wasn’t accidental, and so I ask: is it actually a requirement of spiritualism to in some ways “go against the grain” of whatever the zeitgeist happens to be? I could certainly see it being a benefit, jostling people out of established habits of thought and action, and we do see this, with various spiritual traditions taking different approaches to sex, diet, and other habits that are usually tailored to their specific cultural context.
But then again, the essential practices (meditation, prayer, etc) haven’t changed notably for thousands of years, so perhaps it isn’t spiritualism that opposes modernity, but rather that modernity has chosen to place itself in opposition to spiritualism? Perhaps it’s a bit of both? Curious to know what you think. I’m still in the midst of this train of thought so I haven’t drawn any conclusions for myself as of yet.
Scotlyn #4:
You write: “Perhaps magic is about working “changes in will via consciousness” as much as it is the other way around… 😉”
That’s called “forming good habits”.
Hi JMG,
I wanted to share this video with you to confirm, debunk, use in one of your posts, or whatever you choose.
https://rumble.com/v7cdyqk-the-duran-with-matt-ehret-how-occultists-and-bankers-manufactured-ww2-germa.html?e9s=src_v1_s%2Csrc_v1_s_o&sci=455468fc-1b5e-4f28-b5da-5c7e2f986b9f
The video is from The Duran, which usually does current geopolitical commentary, but I notice it cropping up in other places as well. Basically the video is about the influence of the occult on the modern political world. Most of it covers pre WWI and to WWII but then at about 50 minutes jumps to the 1970s occult movements. I’m posting this to you because I trust your knowledge of the occult. Some things historically seem to track but I don’t know enough of occult history to know if it’s true.
An interesting point made is how elites are attracted to secret societies as it appeals to their ego. Yet it seems there are many groups that practice magic that are not composed of social elites.
The other sense I got once I saw it going around was that the occult, and I would assume those interested or practicing alternative spiritual beliefs, are being set up to take the fall as the underlying driver of today’s problems. Like a modern witch hunt, which wouldn’t shock me with the rise of Christian Nationalism in the USA.
Anyway, just putting it out there in case you are interested.
On Barefoot style shoes: is there something to them, or are they gimmicky? I’m not aware of any explicitly repairable barefoot shoes unfortunately, but some aim at longevity. I find repairable shoes expensive, and I end up in weird Internet rabbit holes trying to find the right ones. I see many good brands have been inflation-adjusted.
I know you hate it when people say it’s different this time but won’t the nature of the collapse be affected by birth control? Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t people in past collapses end up reproducing anyway even though they were poor and desperate because they lacked contraception? So population only went down due to force of famine, plagues etc? Whereas now if the pressure was severe enough on people they would just not have kids? Wouldn’t this greatly relieve pressure on diminishing resources to the point where the transition down would be much smoother than in past collapses? Since birth control does the job of hunger and pestilence for them?
@ Mary Bennet #13
The problem with a black woman playing the role of Helen of Troy is that, because of that movie and others like it, the most naïve or ignorant of people in this century will think that there were black people in Europe (among royalty, no less!) three thousand years ago, which is simply not true. The Iliad and the Odyssey belong to the European cultural heritage, and must be respected as such.
Incidentally, in the Antiquity, there were, and still are, blond people in Greece and present day Turkey (where the city of Troy was located). Blondness was probably as rare back then than it now is, and therefore much appreciated. The Greek goddess Aphrodite was commonly described as having green-blue eyes. Alexander, the great conqueror, who lived 25 centuries ago and extended Greek supremacy into the Middle East, is always described as a blond.
MBTI is considered pseudoscience by mainstream psychologists who prefer the OCEAN model. But I always found it intriguing, especially the concept of the 8 Cognitive functions (Ne, Ni, Se, Si, Te, Ti, Fe, Fi). To what extent is this stuff actually linked to Carl Jung? Is there any validity in it? I find it interesting that the perception functions all seem linked to time (Si = past, Se = present, Ni = future, Ne = parallel universes, counterfactuals) and so I wonder if the other 4 functions are somehow linked to spatial dimensions in some way?
Overall, I find it strange that none of these personality tests seem to account for the fact that our personalities change quite a bit depending on the situation or people where with, which can bring out different sides of us. I think an accurate personality test would have to be integrated with systems theory: feedback loops, hierarchy of leverage, paradigms etc.
I saw an interesting video lately in a fellow who calculated the human habitability of different climate zones by looking at first their total populations and then their land areas.
The climates with the highest to lowest average population densities are as follows:
1) Humid Subtropical
2) Subtropical Highlands
3) Mediterranean
4) Oceanic
5) Tropical Monsoon/Savanna
6) Continental
7) Tropical Rainforest
8) Hot Desert
9) Cool Desert
10) Subpolar
11) Tundra
12) Ice Cap
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sXpH4dEIkZA&pp=ygUbZ2VvZGlvZGUgcG9wdWxhdGlvbiBkZW5zaXR5
He noted that lack of temperature and aridity are the greatest impediments to human population with the former being more so than the latter.
It will be interesting to see which areas of the Earth become more habitable as it becomes warmer and wetter on average.
Arnav, nobody’s fretting about it so much now because initial predictions that it was going to cause economic catastrophe have turned out to be wildly overblown.
Aldarion, yes, the middle voice is fascinating stuff — a reminder of how much our thinking depends on our language.
Sama, you’re most welcome.
Cliff, do you have a Dreamwidth account? You can get one for free, and if you log in, the nested-comments problem goes away.
Luke, I think it’s more that there’s an archetype of Us, which every culture, community, and decade fills in with its own details. “Abnormal” in practice simply means “Not like us” — or more precisely “not like what we like to think we are.”
Untitled-1, the opposition between the world of social habits and the path of spiritual transformation goes way back, and it usually works out to the same set of bad habits being embraced by the world! It seems to be hardwired into our species to crave the things we need most to overcome.
JP, it’s paranoid drivel, and yes, it’s being used to whip up hatred against occultists so they can be blamed for social problems — the same motivation that drove the witch burnings back in the day. The notion that elites are attracted to secret societies to feed their egos could only have been come up with by people who’ve never met anyone genuinely rich or influential — such people have many other ways to boost their already overinflated self-esteem! Secret societies, rather, are tools that the relatively powerless use as force multipliers. It’s occurred to me rather more than once that our current elite classes may well be pushing narratives like the ones in this video to try to keep the rest of us from forming and joining secret societies to counter their interests and support our own!
Irvine, I’ve somehow managed not to hear about these shoes. Maybe somebody else has an opinion.
MD, nope. Various forms of birth control have been known and used around the world since before the beginning of history, and abortion and infanticide have also been used extensively in many cultures to deal with unwanted children. No, poor people in past collapses didn’t end up reproducing anyway — late marriage, herbal birth control methods and abortifacients, and infanticide all came into play, as well as sharply increased rates of celibacy, because one of the consistent features of societies in economic contraction is that raising children becomes a severe economic burden and too many people simply can’t afford it.
As for the personality tests, I’ve never paid much attention to them, precisely because they’re so rigid. Personality is much more flexible than most tests allow for!
“Anonymous, that’s technically known as the argumentum ad incredulitatem, or in English, the argument from pigheadedness. It’s one of the classic logical fallacies, and mostly serves as a way for people to say, “When this subject comes up I become incapable of thinking”
This reminded me of a question I have regarding will and magic. If someone is being pigheaded and insistent about their delusion, they are thus exerting a large amount of will, which by definition is magic. Is there a use of magic that will fight against this? Mostly wondering how we can see and/or agree on a reality. Or at the least figure out how to deal with people like this.
JMG
…these practices gradually coax the practitioner into noticing the obvious fact of the fragmentation of his will…
and
if Schopenhauer is correct it underlies everything else — all these other things are expressions of will. It has no seat — it is the seat of all else. As Dion Fortune wrote somewhere, “God is pressure.”
Thank you. That has given me a shed-load to think about.
Off the top of the head, if will is ‘the seat of all else’ perhaps fragmented will is a series of reflections via the personality.
If all the tools and vehicles are elements of the thing called mind, and mind is a tool of the higher self, whilst will is the seat of all else, perhaps will in alignment is an expression of soul and fragmented will is a corruption via ego… boggling.
I’m more interested in practicalities than the number of angels on a pinhead [academic philosophy]; do you know of anything [old] published on the relationship between will, mind, soul and personality?
Hi John and the assembled Wizerdren,
1 – In various discussions about Trump’s use of New Thought, I keep bumping into two things; TDS and an unwillingness to sort the new populist policy developing from the national failure to discuss energy. So, is it even possible to discuss the influence of New Thought on contemporary politics? If so, how to? (I’m reading Peale’s Positive Thinking Everyday and might report if anything interesting turns up.)
2 – Tabletop RPGs are getting some traction among disaffected computer gamers because of the woke politics being shoehorned into games played by the Basement Brigade who also don’t like the wokesterism being shoved into popular tabletop games. Naturally, I wonder what will sell for tabletop entertainment as we trend back to letterpress printing. Might you and the commentariat care to speculate?
3 – Since Canadians trying to code-karen on politics came up here, I can report a long history of such pop-offs including telling a Canadian druid that she really didn’t know anything about the facts on the ground much less the US Constitution. Shock! Horror! I suspect the underlying cause is Canada feeling like a double second-bannana – crushed by the Commonwealth and by the US economy. Might occultists find the lack of a hard break with Europe and its effects be worth studying the same way the US and Russian breaks with the rest of Europe seem to be?
4 – Like some other posters here, I can report an us-them mentality existing in the Rust Belt for a long time, but lately there seems to be a self-awareness developing. Much of that awareness includes people who work on one side and people who work hard at playing tricks on the other. A while ago, I’d mentioned Max Scheler’s Ressentiment seeming to be in play. Lately, I’m noticing it in both broad political trends and the us-them in everyday interactions. So far, none of these strains have produced blows where I work; however, is the light air swinging my weathervane to and fro predicting storms or sunshine? (I say a hard rain followed by a prolonged cleanup, btw.)
Madness all around us
Originally I was going to jump straight into asking if anyone else had been noticing some absurdities going on in the thinking of people. I’m glad to have read a few comments first, especially Justin Patrick Moore’s and the link to JMGs post about the attempted bank robbery with the kitten. That is definitely way more out of touch with reality than anything I’ve seen. Mostly my cue has been the economy and stocks, and listening to Mike Rowe’s podcasts about trying to encourage more people to get back into the skilled trades. It baffles my mind how so few people really want to physically work anymore. It seems, at least from the stories shared, is how people are making money with the internet, especially digital creators. They’re often hoping for something to go viral, make their big splash on TikTok or YouTube, and get a big pay day. The stock market seems in the same sort of state of mind. Warren Buffet and Ray Dalio have both mentioned that people are investing in stocks hoping to get rich quick. They aren’t taking the time to research, and they are often making investments based on hope. It’s kind of like the lottery or going to a casino. Basically, most economic growth is propped up in this facade of wealth, but there is very little being done in the physical reality. One good example is our shipping industry, specifically shipyards. Most US shipyards are fortunate enough to get one new ship a year built. Korea, if I remember correctly, produces a ship a week on average. The Administration realizes there is a need to rebuild this industry, but just pumping money into it isn’t enough. It ultimately seems like people are lost in a binary world of numbers and virtual reality, and not connected enough with the real world around them.
@JMG
Yes, that apparent contradiction is I think the core of why I find this realization so fascinating. The path to fulfillment lies, at least in part, in overcoming that which one seems compelled to “want” the most. It’s hard not to look at this and wonder whether things weren’t “designed” that way, for lack of a better term, as if this wasn’t a collective test we were all tasked to overcome. Transcending human nature to better realize one’s true nature.
I’ll continue to stew on it, thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Arnav Jindal @ 29, Hollywood has been (mis)appropriating other people’s intellectual content for at least a century now. I doubt there is any way to make them stop short of boycotting movies altogether.
Peter Jackson’s LOTR was a particularly egregious example, and the trilogy being a widely read and much loved classic, the usual rationalization, Who’s going to notice anyway? was no excuse.
Alderion @ 35 It has been some time since I read the Odyssey, but I do seem to recall that Our Hero had more than one lover while en route to Ithaca. You can count me out of the 21stC audience; I like Homer’s version just fine.
Anyone can dislike any movie or book or opera, etc. What I read over at Salon were angry, vituperative diatribes quoted from X, Musk’s own site, which caused me to wonder does this guy understand that there is a difference between those who do and those who do not work for him. I don’t do X, or Faceplant, or the sites my grands use, so please no one tell me to go see for myself.
Hey JMG
I just saw this on the latest link-dump from Astral Codex Ten. Apparently there’s a reconstructed pagan religion in North Ossetia that appeared in the early 2000’s and is currently followed by a third of the region’s population. It’s called Uatsdin.
https://oc-media.org/how-ossetian-uatsdin-became-the-most-successful-pagan-faith-in-the-world/
An interesting article about the limitations of the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) metric:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-207327309
@Foxhand
I live in the US and have been raising meat rabbits for 6 years now and I am always cautious about mentioning the “meat” part in conversations. Over the last 30-40 years, rabbits have shifted from an inexpensive meat source to the pet category. It’s true they are ridiculously cute but it’s difficult to find a more sustainable meat source. They are currently my Plan B (to help my family pay the mortgage) when my husband’s office job eventually goes away. We raised a few in our tiny, townhouse backyard but I don’t know about a typical basement. Cellar, yes, finished basement, no. The smell (even with pine shavings) would be overwhelming. We live on 3 acres now and I have all the “black gold” I could ask for to put directly on my gardens now. I highly recommend getting into meat rabbits!
“As for the personality tests, I’ve never paid much attention to them, precisely because they’re so rigid. Personality is much more flexible than most tests allow for!”
I always have a hard time answering questions on personality tests. The answer I would choose for most of the questions, if it were an option, is “it depends on the context”.
Miles, you can’t make someone understand something. Seriously, you’ll have an easier time making rocks fall straight up into the sky. As Schiller said, “gegen Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens” — “against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.” Once a person fixes their will on misunderstanding something, all you can do is put up with it or walk away.
Earthworm, Schopenhauer has it that the mind is a product of the will — when the will is blocked and frustrated, it evolves intellect to figure out why and what to do about it. As for sources, I don’t know of anything useful along these lines, alas.
Rhydlyd, (1) I wish I knew something to suggest. (2) My guess is that the move back to old-school gaming will pick up considerably, as it’s not so cheap to turn out vast numbers of games and supplement as it is to print a couple of convenient pamphlets and let people do the rest with their imaginations. (3) Yes, that is indeed worth studying. (4) Once flyover country becomes conscious of its potential power, the nation will be shaken to its core. That doesn’t happen often, but it’s happened; the election of Lincoln, for example, was deeply resented by east coast elites and the US intelligentsia generally because he, and the core of his support, came from the midwestern states, dismissed then in terms that haven’t changed much.
Prizm, please, pretty please, if you haven’t already done so, get a copy of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash 1929 and read it. He talks about exactly that disinclination to work, and the equivalent conviction that it’s possible to get rich quick by some other means, as an essential factor in laying the groundwork for speculative booms and crashes. When you see it — and yes, we’re seeing it right now — that’s a warning klaxon going off in the distance, telling you it’s time to head for the (expletive deleted) hills.
Untitled-1, I think it was indeed set up that way, since our work as human beings is that of integrating the lessons of our animal incarnations with the wider perspectives of reflective intelligence. Being able to take conscious control of usually unthinking passions is a great way to check if you’ve succeeded.
J.L.Mc12, good for the Ossetians!
Mark, of course EROEI has limitations — so does every other attempt at making sense of energy, or anything else, on the scale of entire societies. That said, we work with what we’ve got.
DEATH OF HUSBAND
Hi JMG and commentariat,
today
Wed, 22 July 2026 about 9am
(Mary Magdalene‘s Feast Day)
My husband, known here by pseudonym “Jethro,” real name Jeff, died today, Wed, 22 July 2026 about 9am.
I found him collapsed in the shower stall, deceased. Probable instantaneous heart attack. Age 67. We were married 44 years.
Jeff had been under the care of an MD, and was on various medications. His death came from nowhere.
He didn’t believe in God. He was secular. If he believed in anything, it was “in the universe.”
At the moment, I am fairly rational but, of course, the gravity of it hasn’t hit me.
💨👴🏼☠️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG (but others as well), what is your take on neutering / spaying pets?
JMG-
Your answer (#26) to Gunstone (#1) serves as a fine excuse to ask you how you see the linguistic landscape changing as a result of the end of the industrial era, especially in North America. More broadly, would it be fair to say that, whereas the modern oil era triggered massive linguistic uniformization (in North America and elsewhere, especially in the so-called first world), the post-oil linguistic landscape in North America (and elsewhere) will involve growing linguistic diversity, both because of the introduction of new languages via migration and because of local diversification of existing ones, including English?
(Incidentally, your writings on post-imperial collapse have made several aspects of the post-Roman imperial linguistic landscape -aspects which used to puzzle me greatly- far clearer. Thank you).
In this connection, you might be interested to know that a pioneer of the study of Black English, William Labov, caused quite a stir back in the mid-eighties when he claimed (with a lot of data backing it up!) that the English spoken by Blacks and Whites in Philadelphia were diverging: younger blacks and whites differed linguistically from one another in most respects more than blacks and whites belonging to their grandparents’ generation did. I sense that deeper in-depth study of the issue (including whether comparable divergence might be taking place in other varieties of North American English) was and is a bit of a taboo.
Longsword (# 16)-
Diversity of opinion is what attracted me to this blog’s comment section in the first place. A diversity of opinions on matters relating to Canada does not bother me. What bothers me is seeing a diversity of opinions (on Canada, in this instance) which are all unconnected to any verifiable, lived reality within Canada and solely connected to perceptions created and amplified by the American mainstream media. I tried to explain this in my comment on last week’s thread.
As for the notion that I am somehow a typical member of the salary class…Okay, that made me laugh. Hard. I am an academic, but have only recently managed to land a full-time position after many years of part-time work across North America (We are not called “gypsy academics” because of our colorful clothing or fortune-telling abilities).
Trust me, we younger academics (ESPECIALLY those of us belonging to minority groups not favored by hiring policies) understand socio-economic hardship VERY well (which indeed is what draws many of us to this blog and more broadly to JMG’s work, which explains quite convincingly why the job market is so atrocious for us when compared to the job market academics of the baby boom generation were blessed with).
I meant to leave this comment on the last post, but I wasn’t quick enough. But since it’s an Open Post…
I work for the US Forest Service. We have an old chipseal road we can no longer afford to maintain. When the Green Rush was going on (think Gold Rush, but for weed), the growers really beat the snot out of it with their soil trucks and all the water trucks. The road wasn’t built for that kind of weight. Theoretically, anyone using the road for “commercial use” should be paying a small user fee per load to offset the repair costs, but that never happened.
So, this summer we’re going to have some kind of machine come in that will chew up all the old asphalt and return the road to dirt/gravel. Then all we need to do is run a grader over it periodically, which will be much cheaper. Another sign of the times.
@horzabky, it has been a matter of long and vexed debate among classicists how exactly to translate Greek color words, which sometimes don’t make much sense for us. On the other hand, I don’t doubt there were a few people with lighter skin, hair and eyes then in Greece. We do know the Greeks described the Thracians as red-haired and blue-eyed, and Macedonia borders on Thrace.
I find it hard to believe that anybody in the audience will actually believe Helen of Troy had dark skin just because of the movie – I think it is meant as a kind of jolt, but then what do I know about the audience. We do, however, know the Pharaohs of the 18th and 19th dynasties sent several embassies to Mycenae, and Crete was in constant contact with Egypt, so darker-skinned people would not have been completely unknown among the Mycenaean aristocracy. Menelaos and Helen recount, in the Odyssey, their own voyage to Egypt!
Irvine,
I personally swear by zero-drop and barefoot shoes (with zero-drop being the more important to me). Fixed my chronic low-grade knee pain, and I’ve seen it help multiple people. I haven’t tried the ones with the separate toes, just a nice wide toebox. My husband uses Lem’s for his workboots and they hold up reasonably well. Every time I wear a shoe with drop, I feel like my knees have aged 10 years in 24 hours. But I’ve also seen people hurt themselves by transitioning too rapidly, especially hikers/runners. I do wish barefoot shoes in general were more durable/repairable, but the two goals are somewhat in conflict: a flexible, minimal shoe is not necessarily going to be the sturdiest. You can always make softsole moccasins a few times a year, though, if you don’t mind the look. They wear through quickly but are relatively easy to make.
Two brief retro audio things.
CD sales are increasing. I know many prefer vinyl but it is good to see push back against the ‘Own nothing’ model – https://www.nme.com/news/music/growth-in-cd-sales-outpaces-vinyl-in-the-us-for-the-first-half-of-2026-3957764
Maxell making portable tape players again, yes it uses a headphone jack. – https://consequence.net/2026/03/maxell-bluetooth-cassette-player/
Northwind, oh dear gods. Please accept my profoundest sympathies — been there, experienced that. May I include you and Jeff in my prayers?
Phil, I think it’s an excellent idea. Most household pets are overbred and their genetics are a mess; the survival of the species can be left in the much more capable paws of their feral relatives, who are still very much under the guidance of raw natural selection.
Etienne, the linguistic history of any area is a fruit-basket upset very hard to predict. On first principles, would you expect two Native American nations speaking an Algonquian language to end up on the coast of California, or a very large Athabaskan-speaking community in New Mexico and Arizona? Yet the Wiyot and Yurok peoples of California and the Navaho/Dine people of the southwestern US are where they are, along with linguistic isolates like Takelma in southwestern Oregon, which is apparently unrelated to any known language living or extinct. Thus it’s entirely possible that in 3000 AD, for example, languages descended from English will be spoken only in a region extending from today’s New England through the Maritimes to deglaciated Greenland, while the distant descendant of Québécois French will be spoken by scattered tribal peoples on equally deglaciated Baffin and Ellesmere Islands.
Meanwhile the nations surrounding the Great Lakes might speak a language descended from Brazilian Portuguese, and the southern Mississippi valley could be home to a series of closely related languages descended from French-influenced dialects of the West African languages Hausa and Yoruba. That’s the kind of thing that happens in eras of decline. The one thing you can count on is that current linguistic communities will not keep their current borders, and probably will end up speaking very different languages. I hadn’t read about William Labov — thank you for the reference — but his findings indicate the direction in which we’re moving, with cultural schisms leading to new language generation.
Michael, huzzah on both counts!
@Northwind Grandma,
I am really sorry to hear that. That’s awful. Would you like prayers?
I’ve recently formed a theory of comparative astrology and was hoping see your and the rest of the community’s reactions.
Some background: the standard ‘birth year’ astrology one sees on menus in Chinese restaurants is almost the same as one’s Jupiter placement in western astrology. As the most public part of a horoscope that seems a reasonable point of focus, since knowing a stranger’s inclinations in business and public affairs is a good place to start. One’s Chinese birth sign is not exactly one’s Jupiter placement though, because one cycle retreats every 12 lunar years while the other repeats every 11.86 solar. as a result the correspondence between them shifts every eighty-odd years, roughly the same frequency as Strauss and Howe s fourth turning.
So my theory is: could one mechanism behind the ‘fourth turning ‘ observation of regular crises be that it becomes too easy to game business and public institutions that have been around in the same form for a while, and could the ‘slippage’ of a zodiac animal relative to a Jupiter placement on the same schedule be a way to smooth over the necessary reforms in a more distributed way?
Yogaandthetarot 12
> My sister’s tenant moved out leaving a back bedroom stinking to high heaven of urine from her two dogs.
NOKIMDED RECOMMENDATION
For twenty-five years, as a hobby, I used to be in a cat-rescue network, fostering abandoned domestic cats. Cat pee was a major problem, and I was losing my mind.
Years ago, around year 1998-2000, due to the cat pee problem, I found and used a little-know-to-the-public, the following product. I loved it. I bought it via mail-order by the gallon; it came in quarts too. It smells pleasant; I liked it.
Don’t quote me, but it is a proprietary blend of herbs, I think including tea tree. On the bottle, it doesn’t say.
NOKIMDED
by DSC Products Inc.
Muskegon, Michigan 49442
800/492-5988
It saved our upholstered furniture big-time. It saved my marriage. I sponged it onto polyester-filled cushions, basically all over a long and valuable sofa. And chairs. And rugs. Fabrics took it nicely. One needs to blot the diluted liquid‘s edges, or else it leaves a slight yellowish stain—very pale though.
I tried a lot of things, none of which worked, except this. I have a bottle here in front of me. The label says:
DESCRIPTION
Nokimded is a combination of powerful extracts imported from Australia. These natural ingredients are known worldwide for their antimicrobial qualities. Concentrated economy for professional performance. Whether deodorizing mold, mildew, urine, feces, sewage, flood or fire odors on hard surfaces or porous materials, Nokimded’s neutralizing formulation can be applied with pressure, pump-up or electric sprayers, water based foggers, sponge and injection. Stain resist formula does not contain calionics, gluteraldehyde, quaternary ammoniums, phenolics, alcohol or bleach.
WHERE TO USE
Carpets, upholstery, drapes, clothing, mattresses, insulation, ceilings, floors, walls, padding, furniture, drywall, plaster, and subfloors respond to the mystic touch of Nokimded’s potent neutralizing formula. fire, flood, sewer back-up, pet mishaps, infant/invalid care, hospitals, health care, hotels, bathrooms, showers, gymnasiums, lockers, closets, autos, trucks, trains, planes, shuttles, cafeterias, restaurants, garages, barns, sheds and storage facilities benefit from broad range of deodorizing uses across a variety of dilutions.
Non-hazardous.
ENVIRONMENTAL
Contains only biodegradable detergents.
Contains no toxic materials.
Contains no ozone depleting materials.
Recyclable.
Meets “CONEG” for heavy metals.
————
I highly recommend it. I mean REALLY highly. Nokimded did infinitely better than anything/everything else. Pet stores, yuck.
I forget how I first heard about it. Perhaps a cat magazine in the back section of classified-ads. Or one of my pet-rescue colleagues.
I hope this helps. (I have to keep occupied.)
💨🐈🐕💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Northwind, please accept my condolences on the loss of your beloved husband and partner. One thing I will urge is for you to take control now of your personal finances and other business matters. I know, I have been there, that is probably the last thing you want to deal with. Nevertheless, deal with it you must and the sooner the better. Get papers in order, in a secure location, with backup, so you can remain where you are with a minimum of fuss. Having done so, after that, I would respectfully suggest, sign nothing you don’t have to, and sell nothing until you are in a good frame of mind to be able to make reasonable plans for your own future. Again, my sincerest condolences.
JMG
Data point on dreamwidth, a good one. Last week My laptop got pretty locked up, due to my having to access docusign some spam stuff got in. I could access no email acounts, no web sites, not this website either, but, I could read and refresh the dreamwidth site ! It must not be too taxing on users, needs less memory or somesuch ( I deleted rebooted and all the things and went into a freenzy of commenting here as you saw when the computer went back to normal. so all fine now, but dreamwidth impressed me)
Regarding Nolan’$ um .. ‘Odyessy’ .. I’ve not seen this Hollywood extravaganza of political correctness. But, after having viewed The Critical Drinker’s take, I find the gurrrl bosse’s reCONfiguration .. in this this case, a feminista’s misinterpretation of said mythology, a gross mash-up of epic proportions! This is a blatant example of why TinsleTown is in the doldrums .. Biggly like! For anyone who’s watched “Intersellar”, which is premised on the supposed hypothethical future increase of atmospheric nitrogen as being the big baddy, causing humanity to ditch Earth for other so-called habital realms, sticks in my craw … especially having later witnessed !Brussels! deeming local farming/ranching verboten! … all because ‘GASP’ ..NITROGEN!!! .. the worst of the worstest threats to MANKIND!!!, thus denouncing the above salt-of-the earth ‘miscreants’ as those misinformed peons are considered by Europes finest .. to be cast off, thus reducing food generation as something NOT to aspire towards. To that, I echo the Drinker’s sentiments as to where the whole established Big Film Industry stand amongst rational viewers: “GO AWAY NOW”…..
Hi JMG,
I was happy to hear you had a cassette player and have been watching this space too. Where I live I think most people in the music scene have cassette decks and many local releases come out only on tape. That meme you posted was a good one too. Thinking back to it, I think cassettes were the first thing I ever took to repairing myself, and it probably started with rewinding them with pencils just like that. Then eventually opening them up to try to perform emergency surgery, learning to splice them with bits of tape. I don’t remember ever learning about any of it from anybody, it was just born of necessity, and I guess so basic that you could just figure it all out by looking at it.
I had a quick update from the gardening world – I think it’s been a couple years since I sent one of these so sorry if this is a bit of a ramble here.
Last year was fairly brutal for me crop-wise. I think it was just far too dry and hot, and I wasn’t properly committing the effort I needed to put in to right that manually. Additionally, my neighbour’s tree had begun to really block out the sun across most of our front yard and comes with heavy water demands of its own. Things underperformed!
This year I scaled back considerably, although I built up a couple smaller areas so I could use them more intensively, I built what seems (so far) to be much more sturdy frames, but contained them to specific spots. In the shaded out area I focused on lettuce and some other greens, which are all doing quite well. I have tomato plants, not nearly as many as I have in previous years, but what I have are looking very good, in fact in one area I may be forced to lop off their tops soon as they are getting to be too tall for the frame I built – I spent this morning bending them 90 degrees and training them onto parts of the frame that aren’t used yet to push off this inevitable step. The garden is lettuce, greens, herbs, different types of tomatoes (although mostly cherry), berry bushes and hot pepper plants. Because the areas I’m working on are more compact, it’s made watering them less of a task, and also I have avoided the spots where I had to fight the tree for water in past years the most. It’s all less ambitious than in previous years, but a bit more tailored towards our actual uses. More practical, and less demanding.
As I live in Canada, the weather is not really ideal for hot peppers (at least in my experience), it gets hot enough, but not for quite long enough, so I’ve never really had plants get beyond the first wave of blooms, maybe a half dozen that ripen on the plant, and a bunch that I harvest prematurely and wait for them to ripen off the vine – not terrible, but slightly more trouble than they are worth. This time around I bought more mature plants and it has made a huge difference. I bought one even for close to $20 a month or so ago, and it has pumped out peppers continuously since then. I think this is the way for me moving forward, although I may look into grow lights and just start the plants myself inside.
My sons each have a patch of their own too. They aren’t quite looking after them yet, but they have a feeling that they are theirs and they have picked what is growing there (my attempt to instill that feeling in them). My youngest has strawberries, and I’ve been letting him eat ripe ones from anywhere he can find them in the yard outside his own plants, because it’s taught him to recognize the leaves. My eldest is less interested generally, but he is fascinated with hot peppers, so I planted one of those plants in his patch. I am trying to grow their interest in this stuff, as well as pass along some basic bits of knowledge that are directly relevant. Eventually I am hoping that they come to learn at least how to do the things that I’ve learned to do, which is partially what got me started on all of this to begin with, learning so as to be able to pass it along.
Last of the garden updates is that my milkweed grows well in several parts of the yard now, and I think it’s doing its trick, I’ve seen a bunch of eaten leaves, and a few butterflies fluttering about even.
Thanks,
Johnny
@ slink
Yes, the chip seal is not for heavy use areas. Our neighborhood roads were quite beat up due to post wildfire cleanup and all the heavy equipment on them ! By PG and E, both for power poles, wires and the PG and E subcontracted tree removal, those logging trucks were the worst. Then there was the “public option” of debris removal lot cleanup, with their heavy trucks, these were a county contract with FEMA money to cover shortages from personal insurance, but those of us using a private contractor for cleanup, that was much easier ont eh land and roads and overall cost less to boot.
PG and E did not chip in money to the road association. The county option for debris removal also did not. FEMA told us they only give post disaster road and culvert repair grants to public roads, and wont help private roads, even open to public access and use private in name only private roads like ours. The county wouldnt and wont take our roads into their fold of roads at this point as they wont expand, but in the past, it was because we have no base of “real” pavement and are only chip sealed.
So, I do feel you on the issue of others messing up the roads and not chipping in ! that is why after replacing melted culverts and patching damaged road edges and such we could not afford to chip seal all the roads.
I’ve found myself thinking through something a little odd lately. There’s a concept in evolutionary biology known as r/K selection: essentially, sometimes organisms produce a lot of offspring, and invest less in them (the r-strategy), and sometimes have fewer offspring and invest more in them (the K-strategy). The thought that occurred to me is that you can see both strategies playing out in male human beings in our relationship with women. There’s a guy I know who is about the same social status as I am who has had more sexual partners in the couple months I’ve known him than I have in my entire life; I tend to move much slower, far more cautiously, while he jumps at any opportunity that presents itself. Without birth control, it’s likely that he would have a massive number of children that he would not invest much if anything in raising with a large number of women. I would have children by a single woman, and given my personality I expect that I would put a lot of effort into helping raise them. A lot of the differences between how we treat women and children makes a lot of sense in light of the idea he is an example of an extreme r-selection type, and I am an extreme example of a K-selection type.
I love children, and spent years volunteering with Scouting; he despises them and bitterly complains when they are near him. This means that he is a lot less likely to invest in his children, while I will probably find it comes naturally, since after all I find spending weekends camping with other people’s children does. He judges women immediately based upon appearance; I find an attractive woman interesting, but I find that personality is more important. If all that his biology is pushing for him to do is to get women pregnant and then ditch them, then it’s obvious that personality is less important than fertility; while if mine is worried about things like the likelihood I’ll be cheated on or how well she’ll raise the kids, of course personality is important. If a woman shows any interest in him, he jumps at it; I am far more cautious, and usually move a lot slower. Again, this makes a lot of sense, because once I commit, I am invested in her and any children we might have for the foreseeable future; but for him, with his willingness to ditch his dates in a hurry and pursue multiple women at once, if there are problems, they won’t be his for very long.
One of the differences I’ve noticed that I find more than a little disturbing as I think about it is that when I’m in a relationship I will put a lot of effort into taking care of my girlfriend, because I want to help her blossom and become the best person she can be. I also generally tend to go out of my way to try to help the women I know; while he is actively abusive towards them. Once more, this ends up making sense: if my biology is intending to invest vast amounts of energy and effort on children with a few (or even just one!) woman, then I ought to try to keep any (potential) mate as healthy, physically and mentally, as possible; while if his is pushing for him to get them pregnant and then ditch them for another, then abuse is unfortunately a viable option, because it makes them both less able to resist him and less likely to seem viable mates to other men.
The further thought I’ve had is that an awful lot of the traditional limits on sexuality (harsh punishments on infidelity; bans on sexuality outside of marriage) take on a very different appearance in light of this divide. Most men are probably somewhere in the middle, and likely can flip at least somewhat based on context. So some of these restrictions make it easier for men to switch to the K-selection strategy (such as the severe punishments for infidelity making it easier to be confident that your kids are actually yours), and others penalize the men with r-selection traits (such as encouraging waiting for marriage; not really a problem for me, but it would drive the guy I’m thinking of insane).
This line of thinking has lead me to think there’s a very strong case to be made that the sexual revolution, by removing many of the barriers around sexuality that used to protect women from and penalize the r-selected men, or made it easier for men who could be either (which I think is most of us) to adopt a K-selection strategy, the sexual revolution has made gender relations a lot worse by both making a lot more men abusive towards women and less inclined to assist with raising children, and by making it such that most women have had to deal with far more of the abusive men already out there.
Northwind Grandma,
With your permission, I will add you and your husband to my prayers (to the planets, should that matter), asking that the gods comfort and support you during this challenging time, and that wherever his journey may lead next, he be blessed.
@ Northwind
I am so sorry for the loss of Jeff your husband. I am sure you are still in shock with the suddenness of it. WHile he was secular, can us commentators here keep you in our prayers ?
@Northwind Grandma #60
I’m so sorry to hear this. My condolences for your loss.
@Rhydlyd #51
(2) I think tabletop games are the wave of the future, though as I said I doubt RPGs will command the attention they currently do. (I think of that as a good thing, for the record!)
The nice thing about tabletop games re: politics is that even if obnoxious politics are shoehorned into the rulebooks — and that happens quite a bit these days — nobody can force you to do anything or keep you from changing the rules at your table. Contrast that with video games, which often tie you into centralized servers (with attached microtransaction marketplaces, naturally) that enforce the ruleset and monitor your every communication. And with AI being the hot new thing in enforcement… well, just look up “discord grid ban.” (Which supposedly wasn’t even the result of a neural network, just a faulty algorithm.) And once your account is banned, the money you spent on the game is now down the drain.
Dear Northwind Grandma,
If you accept them, I’ll add you and your husband to my prayers.
> Northwind, oh dear gods. Please accept my profoundest sympathies — been there, experienced that. May I include you and Jeff in my prayers?
Yes, please. That would be nice.
————
In many a post, you mentioned that people are dying left and right (my phrasing). The county sheriff’s deputy (county sheriff is our law enforcement) asked, “Did Jeff have any COVID snots?” I said, “yes, either two or three,” in 2020; now I am wondering. Is this a COVID-shot(s) deaths? No-one will ever know.
I can’t even perceive if I am numb. I bet that means I am (numb).
💨💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hello Mr Greer
Would lile to know you opinion on Henson’s Magnus opus and Sean song, the dark crystal.
I meant swan song , not Sean song. Autocorrect is a such a witch
Dearest Northwind Grandma
I am so sorry for your loss. I always enjoyed hearing about “Jethro” in your hilarious and rich stories. May Jeff rest in peace. Am sending tears of love.
And THANK YOU for the pet urine cleaning recommendation! Will pass on to my sis who will be so grateful.
Take good care of yourself in your time of grief… the price we pay for love❤️
Jill C
Clay Dennis 17
> perhaps order from Amazon
See if bn.com (Barnes & Noble) has the book. They will likely be more expensive than the big suth amurican ribber. I now usually only get books from Amz if I can’t find it elsewhere. And there are quite a few times I cannot find a book elsewhere. It is the times we are in.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@Jennifer K good to hear they’ve helped. I like the durability promise of Xeros. My highly cushioned Sketchers with a marshmallow squish and generous toe box are showing significant wear after just 3 months. Not quite ready for diy shoes, but we’ll see how things go! At this point I’m just looking at clever ways to lean in to shrinkflation.
tabletop wargames seem to be doing quite well in my local area at the moment. The UVic wargaming club has had to go from booking two rooms to three during the school year (during the summer people are away and there’s fewer people playing wargames). One of the local hobby stores has started carrying a bunch more non-gamesworkshop miniatures, which is good to see and very useful for those who don’t wish to pay the GW prices. (They’re stupidly overpriced)
Northwind Grandma, I add my deepest condolences to those already expressed, and will add you to my prayers if you would like for us to pray for you.
@Northwind Grandma, Please accept my condolences. May Jethro rest in peace; and may he find his way in the cycles of Life and Death.
@Northwind Grandma (#60):
Oh my! After so many years with him, that’s one of the hardest losses anyone can ever have to endure!
Being about ten years older than you, it’s a loss my wife and I have already started to brace ourselves for.
Much respect for all your fine contributions to our host’s blogs, and much sympathy for what you’re going through! Best wishes for all the courage you will need.! May the joy that you have known together be present, too, and comfort you in your loss!
Dear Northwind Grandma,
I am so very sorry for this tragic and shocking loss. Prayers for both of you and for all that loved Jeff. Your stories of your family, throughout the years, have always been entertaining and memorable. Wishing you strength for the days ahead.
All my condolences,
CatoctinMountainMama
#9 Teresa Peschel
“Bill and I have come to think of the phrase “Maintenance Free” as one of the curses that afflict the modern world.”
Did you know that on modern cars there isn’t any way to check the transmission fluid?? It’s crazy.
@Northwind Grandma
I’m sorry for your loss. May your husband get a smooth transition to the afterlife.
Prizm 52
> Mike Rowe’s podcasts about trying to encourage more people to get back into the skilled trades
I am a fan of Mike Rowe. He is the greatest. Sometimes it feels like he is a lone voice in the wilderness; he soldiers on. If I were a lot younger, I would have been working at jobs he advocates. I first heard of him through “Dirty Jobs,” roughly 2003. That was an awesome TV series; it is still available to see, but gotta search for it. I was sad to see the show cancelled; it was doing a lot of good.
I equate Mike Rowe with being a Studs Terkel of the 2000s. He wrote a couple books, but mostly he has mastered video documentaries. A sort of Ken Burns guy who focuses on Americans getting back to basics, rebuffing the fluff.
I think Mike Rowe is a born actor with a bent towards creating and being in TV documentaries. He found his niche.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Christopher, that’s a fascinating theory. I’m not sure how to test it, but there should be a way to do so.
Atmospheric, thanks for this.
Johnny, delighted to hear about the garden, and especially about the milkweed. If I ever have a garden again, unless vegetables are hard to come by, I plan on focusing on plants that feed pollinators and other beneficial insects.
William, that’s all quite valid. I remember thinking similar thoughts when I first learned about r and K strategies.
Northwind, prayers coming up. Please take good care of yourself, and get the rest and help you’ll need.
Daniel, my feelings about that are very mixed. I used to own a copy of the Brian Froud book, which was remarkably rich, but when I watched the movie (when it first came out) it was a tremendous letdown — the plot was paper-thin, and the puppets were unconvincing. It could have been so much more than it was!
@Etienne (#62) and other interested commenters:
William Labov was one of the most impressive linguists I ever had the pleasure of meeting. He was a superb analyst, and also a beacon of courage under difficult conditions of fieldwork. His Atlas of North American English (2006) is a masterpiece, IMHO.
I interacted with him briefly in 1964-1967, when i was a graduate student in Slavic linguistics at Columbia, where he happened to be a professor of linguistics. (I didn’t have occasion to take a class with him, alas.) This was when his ground-breaking studies of Black American English were already well underway, and he had already shown that the grammar of that language made use of grammatical categories that standard American English wholly lacked, and which seemed to have some connection with the grammatical categories of some African languages. (It was only about a year and a half ago that he died, a few days after his 97th birthday.)
At the time, the theoretical apparatus to account for such things worked with the idea of linguistic substrata; so his work caught my eye, because the East Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian) also shared some curious grammatical with the Scandinavian languages, which belong to a different Indo-European linguistic family (Germanic) than the East Slavic languages do, and which were not inherited from their (extinct) ancestral languages.
As for your more general question, linguistic diversity always grows over time and across geographic space. Effective networks of communication and transportation can slow the growth of diversity down, as can a sense of geopolitical unity or identity across a region (a national egregore, to use esoteric terminology). In the USA both these things are decisively breaking down nowadays. (See also our host’s fine novel, Retrotopia.)
The networks of transportation and communication are features of the material world. They are breaking down since they require copious supplies of energy for their maintenance. As readers of this blog know, the available supplies of such energy have begun to decline irreversibly.
The national egregore, on the other hand, belongs to the imaginal world (Henri Corbin’s term), that is, the part of the immaterial world that can effect change in the material world. The national egregore of the USA was always a somewhat shaky construct, due to the many diverse cultural (and thus imaginal) regions from which the nation was cobbled together in the late 1700s. Joel Garreau identified nine such regions; more recently, Colin Woodard now claims that there are not nine, but eleven, of these “subnations” (my term, not his) out of which the USA was stitched together in the late 1700s. (See his website: https://www.nationhoodlab.org/ )
One needs both things — networks of transportation and communication and also strong egregores — to hold a unified language together over the centuries. We had those things in the 1800s and most of the 1900s; but they are declining and fading out now. As they fade out, so will a common standard form of English. It may survive for centuries as a written and formal language, much as Latin continued to survive for centuries after the fall of Rome and after Latin itself had evolved into a number of distinct languages (Italian, French, Provençal, Spanish, Catalán, Portuguese, Rumanian, etc.)
As for how rapidly the process will play out, that depends on so many unpredictable details of our national decline, including possible decisive military attacks by some other nation on the USA, that I wouldn’t venture to make a guess.
Jennifer K,
I’m also a big fan of Lems, which I find to be of medium durability. Their new Boulder Boot collab editon with Rose Anvil is the best in that regard. That said, the barefoot shoe market has really opened up in the last couple of years. The latest encouraging trend is that we are beginning to see heritage boot-quality barefoot options. That means made in the 1st world of durable materials (usually leather), using better construction techniques, and often resoleable.
The downside is, get ready to open up your wallet. Theoretically, they will last much longer than the common options, and can be resoled for a reasonable fee by a good cobbler, so it might be a wash, depending on how much you spend now and how often you replace them.
The options I’m aware of include: Jim Green’s Barefoot or AnatomX lines. Not all Jim Green are barefoot/zero drop, so read carefully. They’re out of South Africa, so cheap labor, but seem to be a very kind company who listens to their customers and cares for their employees more than is required by law. The location of their operation means these will be the cheapest heritage-quality barefoot boots and shoes. Also note they have a custom boot builder on their site. More expensive, but you can get something you want that may not be standard.
Texarado boots are seriously heritage quality, if you can catch them in-stock. They cost a lot, but should last forever and can be resoled.
Goral out of England also has some sneakers and boots that are barefoot, so read to be sure. These, too, are insanely high quality with great leather, blake stitching, and fully resoleable. The sole options differ, but you can get a natural latex sole if you don’t want chemical components, or a hefty vibram sole for durability and fewer resoles. Also very expensive, but all of these barefoot options are the same or less than non-barefoot heritage boots and shoes of similar build quality.
I’m sure there are a few more brands out there, as it seems to be a bandwagon everyone is jumping on lately. I fully expect more options next year, too.
pygmycory 68
> Would you like prayers?
Yes, thank you, I would like prayers. I feel closer to you-all here than to anyone local. Funny how that works.
When I feel up to it (in a few days, I guess), today it has become clear that I visit two places: the local Senior Center, and, not far away, a Buddhist monastery.
💨🫥🪷💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Milkweed is quite invasive. The monarchs chose their host plant well.
Polecat, I have not seen the “Hollywood extravaganza of political correctness. “, nor do I intend to. IDK if that description is accurate. I usually don’t agree with what critics think. I do think Lupita Nyong’o has the characteristics one would want to see in Helen of Troy; great beauty, sexual charisma, and the ability to comport herself with royal dignity. Silly me, here I thought we were all about discipline of the marketplace and the public would decide, by not buying, what makes a good product.
I am still wondering why Elon thinks a famous director is supposed please him.
Mary Bennet 70
> One thing I will urge is for you to take control now of your personal finances and other business matters.
Thank you. I will try.
One day at a time. One task at a time.
💨🫥🔢💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@JMG re: The Dark Crystal
“it was a tremendous letdown — the plot was paper-thin, and the puppets were unconvincing. It could have been so much more than it was!”
Thank goodness. These have been my exact feelings about the movie all my life but I’ve never before found anyone else who shared them. It’s most of the way toward a great movie, but it doesn’t make it over the finish line.
I think Henson’s talent was clearly for absurdism (The Muppets, The Cube). Even Labyrinth, his one successful drama, had a lot of absurdist elements.
Northwind Grandma wrote, “He didn’t believe in God. He was secular. If he believed in anything, it was ‘in the universe.'”
Then perhaps we should direct our prayers for your husband’s soul’s journey to his well-esteemed universe, into whose vastness he is now returning. I’m sure our universe is every bit as open to hearing prayers and delivering aide as any god or angel would be. Perhaps the universe is even more responsive to prayer than divinities are, given for how long atheists have been so rigorously withholding all their pent-up prayers from it. What a lonely universe, believed in by many, but befriended by few.
Would you like for us to ask the universe to watch over Jeff’s soul as he begins this new leg of his journey? And whom should we ask to watch over your soul, as you reluctantly learn how to let go of so very many shared goals and dreams?
@JMG
“Being able to take conscious control of usually unthinking passions is a great way to check if you’ve succeeded.”
Ah yes, that is the struggle. I’m about half a year into serious journaling along with the Essenes material and I think I’ve made pretty significant progress during that time, but at times it feels a bit like an extended game of whack-a-mole with myself. Just when I figure one set of things out, something else rears its head and I go “Wait, I’ve been carrying this around the whole time, too?” I’m only going to have to assume this will go on for quite a while, and I’ll just have to take them one at a time.
It’s interesting, the way humans seem to crave things that consistently make them miserable. It’s even more interesting to learn how to see past those things to the possibilities that lie beyond them.
@Northwind #60
Your love for Jethro showed through in the way you wrote about him. My deepest condolences for your loss, may he rest in peace.
Northwind Grandma,
Prayers and sympathy have winged your way. Lived in Green County – Belleville, New Glarus area farm from ages 14-18 and then went to the university in Madison and lived in Madison until age 23 and then moved to California. Wisconsin has a gentle beauty I fondly remember.
@ Mary RE : The Odessey.
Musk seem to just wants attention by any means nothing more. As for that film, I keep hearing the name of it but have no interest in it one bit.
Do note that history is one thing Hollywood gets wrong almost every single time. Great example, anything involving Vikings is almost completely wrong as their versions are closer to Hagar the horrible than reality. Don’t go to Hollywood to learn anything
@ JMG & Siliconguy RE : Anthropic suit.
JMG, I am glad to hear it. I sent a link to you when it first came up as they had trained on a lot of your work. If the payout is roughly where I think it will be, you couldn’t retire on it but it will be a nice little top up of the bank account. You might be one of the rare winners out of this whole bubble.
William 75
> With your permission, I will add you and your husband to my prayers (to the planets, should that matter), asking that the gods comfort and support you during this challenging time, and that wherever his journey may lead next, he be blessed.
Yes, that would be a good idea. Please pray.
Jeff was a very “planets guy,” ”universe guy.” In fact, he LOVED the Star Tracks shows. The various Star Track series’ helped him imagine a better future with compassion.
I believe in reincarnation, and through me, he started leaning in that direction. We had discussions about it. I suggested that in death, he, “head for kindness.“ And “don’t be afraid.”
Jeff had an invisible raw hole,— a deep wound in his heart; he had no defenses around the wound. It was before we met. When I bumped up against the wound occasionally, it was on some different level I knew nothing about, so it was not for me to tamper with. He didn’t perceive the hole. The hole was more than I could handle.
My sense is that this deep hole/wound was from a previous life.
In addition to general prayers, please pray for healing of that wound in this heart. That wound needs special attention.
Thank you. Thank you.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
P.S. I am signing off for the evening.
Nortwind Grandma
My condolences on your loss. I am glad you have ended up in a place that you feel grounded in to go through this bereavement. It helps.
Stephen
On the Odyssey: I saw a hilarious short of Samuel Jackson in drag with a blond wig playing Helen of Troy. It opens with him turning to face the camera saying ” Do I look like an f….ing Greek to you?”
About the Iran war: well, oil is steadily rising, Bab Al Mandeb is also blocked now, so I think it’s more serious than the previous round of exchanges. Trump himself admitted when he signed the ceasefire MoU that the US had only 4 weeks of oil reserves left, so I think the economic consequences have been masked by SPR releases and China vastly reducing its oil imports. People have various theories about why China did that, some say China didn’t want its customers to collapse, they still wanted people to buy products, others say maybe they wanted to stress test their domestic energy sources in the event of a Malacca closure, who knows, maybe both?
Anyway, maybe you will disagree, I am short a prominent memory chip manufacturer, long oil futures, long a few Canadian oil stocks, let’s see who’s right.
Regarding Hollywood movies, I watched the Denis Villeneuve Dune movies, they were visually stunning, but I didn’t like the way he changed the story — Paul’s precognition was depicted very vaguely, I’m pretty sure most people who watched the movie but didn’t read the books had no idea that Paul really could see the future and also had his ancestral memory; they also made Chani “rebel” against Paul.
When I first heard Nolan was directing the Odyssey I knew he was the wrong guy for this, his schtick is to make things “gritty” and “realistic” like what he did with Batman. From what I read he removed any real depiction of the Gods. I asked my friend who watched it if they depicted the summoning of Achilles’ shade, he said they didn’t. I mean if he really wanted to give it an anti-war message, I think that would be the most pivotal scene actually from the books to depict.
Clay Dennis re. Mass market vs. trade paperbacks. MMP were traditionally distributed differently than TPB. MPB were distributed like magazines in that unsold copies were stripped of their covers, which were sent back to the distributer as proof that they had not been sold, and the books themselves pulped after a certain interval. Bookstores return TPB books intact for a refund, just as they do HB copies. These books may be distributed to a different retailer or, after sales have dropped, they are remaindered and end up in stores that specialize in discount books. So you may see the remaindered HB edition of a book selling for less that the freshly issued TPB. I imagine that Amazon, etc. has changed some of this since I took classes in book publishing. MPB books were usually issued only in MPB format, unless they somehow caught on and were picked up by a trade publisher.
Anonymous #19–I ran into the “self-evident” attitude last year. I had been having on-line political discussions with a member of the Pagan community whom I regarded as a friend. I disagreed with him on some topics and mid-discussion he abruptly and publicly declared that he was ending the exchange because I was not arguing “in good faith.” In addition to being Pagan he is an academic. I came to the conclusion that he regarded me in the light of a student rather than as an equal and that while professors welcome discussion there is a point at which the student is supposed to give way and admit that the professor’s position is the more correct one. Well, I am equally educated, though not in his field, so I privately consigned him and the metaphorical horse he rode in on to an unpleasant fate. As you may intuit, my knickers are still in a knot over the incident.
Rita
I’m guessing this Kenyan actress looks about as much like Helen of Troy as Elizabeth Taylor did like Cleopatra, and was chosen for much the same reason. that’s show biz.I bet Elon Musk’s rave against the movie probably helps its sales a lot. As they say ” there is no bad publicity”
A further thought from the discussion of human males and r/K strategies: I am now wondering just how many of the problems seen in upper class women is that most of them are traumatized by their experience in college. It’s hard to think of a more potent system for pushing men towards the r-type strategy than the standard college culture: a culture filled with plenty of young men and women, a general disdain of both commitment and delay in sexual gratification, copious alcohol use, and plenty of casual sex. Since there’s a good reason to think that the r-type is significantly more abusive towards women, this would be a very toxic environment for the young women.
Meanwhile, the lack of parental guidance/vetting, and for the many who moved far from home, any real social support, would also allow many of these young women to fall victim to the abusive sort; the lack of meaningful enforcement against sexual violence ensures that even the worst of the abusers remain active; while the threat of seemingly random and life ruining punishments for something like flirting with someone means that the men who remain K-type even in such a toxic environment would probably tend to drop out of the dating scene entirely due to a much lower average risk tolerance, likely in many/most cases without ever quite realizing why.
The collective behavior of upper class women looks an awful lot like the behavior of those women I know who escaped domestic abuse and still haven’t healed from it: the explosive anger directed at anyone they can get away with hurting, the obsession with being independent, the extreme discomfort with sexuality, the general hatred of men, among other things. If this logic holds, then most of them probably did at some point escape at least one abusive relationship, so the similar pattern is because it’s at root the same phenomena.
Mary Benet#13
Helen of Troy was the woman more similar to the godess Venus, representes by the Planet Venus of platine colour, thence the godess and Helena were platinun blonde.
Northwind,
That is so sad to hear. My deepest condolences.
Jessica
Hey JMG and Commentariat
Since I noticed that Gregg Shorthand is mentioned a few times in your “Ariel Moravec” series, I thought I’d share a new resource for learning it that the commentariat may be interested in.
There’s a new YouTube channel called “Shorthandist” that publishes short videos about Gregg Shorthand, mostly tips and suggestions for practicing it rather than complete lessons.
https://www.youtube.com/@shorthandist/videos
Btw, do you use shorthand at all, JMG?
@ Aldarion # 28
That is a very interesting train of thought. To which I will contribute two things off the top of my head (wherever they have come from – lol!) and then continue to study the topic.
1. I know very little Irish, but I do know that it conceives of emotional and environmental states in a very different way to English – one says “anger/happiness/sadness was on me” or “hunger/thirst/cold/heat is at me” and so on. In Irish it seems that agency is free-floating and action can be the province even of emotions which move towards us and gain traction within us. It is absolutely certain that language shapes our ways of modelling the world, and in English such things are seen as being integral to our identity (a very vexed term just now, in any case) – “I am angry/happy/sad/hungry/thirsty/cold/hot” with no agency in and of themselves.
2. In relation to healing, I do not think of myself as a healer, mainly because I think that I (and every other practitioner or medic) offer treatment, while it is the patient who heals (or who doesn’t). Their healing, in my humble opinion, is a matter of their capacity to discover wholeness and self-alignments and harmonies and resonances within the many layers of themselves – some of them deeply hidden from ordinary consciousness. What we do, in treatment, can sometimes provide pointers or untanglers or symbolic or narrative aids to their healing processes. Sometimes, simply receiving care is itself the key. I do not know how to better map this in language, but, for sure, those processes which are hidden from ordinary consciousness may also be less amenable to being spoken of in any language.
Northwind
I know we haven’t interacted much here, but my thoughts are with you.
Me and Bacon have been together 40+ years and one of us dying before the other is something we have thought about not yet had to face.
May you and your husband be held gently in the hands of the divine.
Take care now.
earthworm
@ Untitled – 1 #33
Thank you for that lovely response and I especially appreciate the point about talking to children about how the consequences of what they do may not match what they meant to do or more importantly what they meant to accomplish by doing it.
In general, I would not say that I discount the value of intention, but that since I find it hard to properly perceive, I have to find other ways to usefully think about actions and consequences. I tend to assume that people (certainly including myself) almost ALWAYS *mean* to do good things – even when we are hurting others, mainly because we are able to separate and compartmentalise, ends from means, and (possibly) means from intentions, in our minds in ways that can rationalise what we feel we “have to” hurt in the present moment as being necessary for the accomplishment of some future greater good. We do like to attach our sense of self to our intentions – to being “well intentioned”, and not to our actions, and most certainly not to what our actions accomplish in the world, and this is key to much.
A few months ago JMG used the term POSIWID (the Point of a System is What it Does), and I think, as you say, this can be a good guide to my own actions as well as those of others. So, I am trying to use POSIWID to examine what it is that I do, and then study the results in the world of what I do, in order to learn to do better. It is very useful.
JMG: “Earthworm, Schopenhauer has it that the mind is a product of the will — when the will is blocked and frustrated, it evolves intellect to figure out why and what to do about it. As for sources, I don’t know of anything useful along these lines, alas.”
It occurs to me that this could be a feature rather than a bug.
The very idea that spirit is enfolded in limitations to experience time, space and matter suggests an inevitable blocking and frustration; and, if ‘god is pressure’ this evolutionary pressure has had countless aeons to express itself from rock to plant to animal before reaching the stage of an intellect thru personality of human beings.
It is sobering to consider that even once arriving in bipedal form, intellect is not guaranteed to function as one might imagine.
That sobriety is then broken with a belly laugh thinking that countless teachers have then stressed the importance of having intellect and personality in correct relationship with consciousness. So, having ‘evolved’ the thing, we then have to learn how to keep it in its place.
There is something sublimely amusing in thinking that after all the pressure to evolve a thing one must rise beyond it.
Not knowing what soul actually is, if will is the soul trying to express itself, but the very thing it has evolved to try and work out what to do (intellect) is like stepping into a hall of mirrors that then also has to be resolved.
I can see why intuition might be considered superior to will because will’s capacity to be wrong could lead to a carnival of errors. Of course, the capacity of the personality /ego to dupe itself means we are learning to dance using jelly legs.
If will is an expression of soul via intellect, and intellect is subject to the limitations of perceptions of personality, perhaps we might be better off trying to align will with intuition rather than intellect?
At this moment, will seems like vehicle and tool, but there is a nagging feeling that it is also something else.
Thank you once again; reckon I’m going to have to sit quietly with this for a while!
John, I appreciate your patient and pragmatic approach to the spiritual path. So many seekers become manic for “enlightenment” or some spiritual state that is “better” than the one they are in now and view the cycles of many lives as something to be avoided at all costs. How may one come to peace with the possibility of many lives to come, while cultivating the attention needed to learn in this one?
@ Christophe #38
“On the other hand, you had no doubts about the great Covid panic being some kind of psy-op/ mass formation/ power grab. How did you arrive at that conviction?”
Very interesting post, and good follow up question. You are right that I do not share your capacity to read all of the things you list. Although, I will say that during all of the years I hitched (without a hitch, as it were) I felt very free to refuse lifts that in some way I could not quantify or express, seemed “off”, and thought no more about it.
As I have said above to “Untitled’1” – POSIWID serves me rather well. 🙂
@ Northwind Grandma # 60
Oh, sorrow! That is sudden, and shocking, and my heart goes out to you. May you find unlooked for strength to bear you up through the coming times, and may Jeff’s passage be eased in whatever way might be most suitable for him.
Northwind
My condolences.
So, there’s an article on CNN about new skyscrapers in Miami. I don’t know if the link will go through. Anyway, all hands, brace for impact:
Money is flowing into Miami as the ultrawealthy move in and luxury developments climb higher. This year, multiple superlative-grabbing skyscrapers will top out, transforming the skyline.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/21/style/miami-skyline-skyscraper-boom
For those who don’t know, look for Skyscraper index on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index
“Thus it’s entirely possible that in 3000 AD, for example, languages descended from English will be spoken only in a region extending from today’s New England through the Maritimes to deglaciated Greenland, while the distant descendant of Québécois French will be spoken by scattered tribal peoples on equally deglaciated Baffin and Ellesmere Islands.
Meanwhile the nations surrounding the Great Lakes might speak a language descended from Brazilian Portuguese, and the southern Mississippi valley could be home to a series of closely related languages descended from French-influenced dialects of the West African languages Hausa and Yoruba”
That almost sounds more like the gradual fate of the Greek-speaking world beginning in the 7th Century than the Latin-speaking world starting in the 5th. At least all the territories of the former Western Roman Empire speak descendents of Latin about from Britain (English is technically a Germanic language but was heavily re-Romanized after the Norman Conquest), North Africa, and Rhaetia (Germanic-speaking Austria and Switzerland). Greek, by contrast, gradually became confined only to its ancestral territories around the Aegean as Slavs overran the Balkans, the Levant and Egypt were conquered by the Muslim Arabs, and Anatolia by the Turks.
I imagine in your hypothetical, much of the Western half of North America speaks descendants of Spanish and possibly even Japanese!
Would you say in this 3000 AD hypothetical, English is still studied as a “classical” language across North America akin to Latin/Greek in the Early Modern Period?
Dear @CatoctinMountainMama,
Thank you for your encouraging advice. Much appreciated. I believe rearing rabbits is highly more advantageous than rearing chicken from several aspects, therefore an important skill for the long descent.
The book’s author did mention the cuteness aspect :
“We have a friend who won’t eat mutton or rabbit because sheep and bunnies are cute, but will eat beef or pork because cows and pigs aren’t (although I’ve seen some mighty pretty cows). The logic of her argument completely escapes me…”
I agree that their dropping is gold for the gardeners!
Regarding the “Plan B”, I am also looking into wool, fur and pelt with breeds such as Angora, Silver fox, etc
Kind regards,
@ Northwind Grandma – deepest sympathies Losing a life partner has to be a massive blow, and best wishes for you here, and for him in the afterlife.
Mary Bennett, Aldarion, and others, re: Helen of Troy being black.
She’s not so described by Homer, to the best of my limited knowledge. However, Homer certainly does describe black Africans as being part of the Greek world, including the aristocracy: an army of Ethiopians comes to assist the Trojans, led by their king, Memnon, nephew of King Priam of Troy.
Ancient sources seem to vary in their identification of Memnon’s kingdom. Some seem to place it in what may now be Sudan and East Africa, others in Persia. These seem far apart but, given the known Persian origins of modern-day African Swahili cultures, perhaps it’s not too far-fetched. Ancient societies were far more connected and inter-related than we tend to give them credit for today.
JMB,
We spoke before about the problem of having a near zero overlap between the Logistics/Operations cohort the STEM cohort. Basically the STEM cohort is getting ever more detached from ground level inputs and outputs.
But the more I speak with the STEM cohort I hear “I have never had to think of [insert required input here] because it wasn’t part of my job to do so.” Which I got to say is pretty laughable because even my new guys know that they need to track the inputs going to and away from them even if their supervisor doesn’t directly tell them to do so.
So is this particular weakness of the STEM cohort a feature because they seem to ring fence what they should or shouldn’t know based on their Position Description more than most of the crew?
Dear Northwind,
Please accept my condolences for your loss, and although today and the days ahead may be dark, there’ll be some light in places here and there. Little patches where the sun will shine in and warm your heart and soul. Go easy on yourself and know that grief eventually passes, even when the memories don’t.
With sympathy,
Chris
Hello, JMG and commentariat:
I’m here again in this new Open Post, but today I don’t have any doubt nor question to ask John and you all. So, I’m going to read your previous comments to write something I think it’s interesting according my point of view.
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Scotlyn # 4:
“people often slip straight past any consideration of the consequences of an action into pleading that “it wasn’t meant that way, it was done with good intentions” and other such phrases.”
It’s interesting that, according a lot of ethics philosophers and “civilized” Criminal Law in most countries, it’s worse to harm another person at will than by accident or negligence. However, not willing criminal acts are prosecuted too, though with a lesser punishment. People need to take care of knowable likely effects of their acts.
Another thought: the worst tyrants in History and religious and secular terrorists alike, always have used as their favorite subterfuge for killing and another crimes, that they commit them “for a greater good”(cough), so they think (or pretend to think) they’re the good guys doing good things in the long term (ahem).
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Justin P. # 6:
“The Leonora Carrington Event”
OK, a good short depiction remembering that known Surrealist painter…it seems interesting as an hypothetical future event…
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Mary B. # 13:
“It seems that Helen of Troy, surely a minor role in the story of Odysseus, is, gasp, a black woman. The lady a Kenyan actress, Lupita Nyongo”.
Yes, I watched yesterday that movie and I can say that according her appearances in another movies, Lupita is a great actress…and yes, incidentally she’s evidently Black. He plays Helen of Troy and Clitemnestra, her “twin sister”, in Mr. Nolan movie. I liked in general terms his Odyssey movie.
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Anonymous # 19:
“Self-evidence Fallacy – A type of circular logic where one believes that their position is so clearly correct or the natural default, that anyone who disagrees must be uninformed, irrational, deceptive, or otherwise unable to engage in good faith.”
It’s a very common fallacy in politics, in addition to the “ad hominem” (personal) attack and the “cherry picking” of facts.
For example, you can see in Animalists-Vegans (together with another despicable woke zealots in the “left”), and within average voters and/or supporters of far right (at least here). They mistake opinion with hard facts, too.
————————————————————————–
Harry # 22:
“Does anyone know of any habits or exercises we can use to self-check our own assumptions and opinions about the world?”
I’ve got a personal system, a non formal one, which seems to work for me (as a middle aged man), but I doubt it can be applied to everybody. Sometimes, I ask myself and then I begin a dialogue within myself, to check wether I’m sure or not of my ideas, and if they match with reality around me. Sometimes I found painful but necessary mistakes in my thougths and feelings, but I think I need to avoid to “fossilize” my mind like a lot of people do when they reach to certain age. I also like to know new tendences around me, for not getting hooked in “old good times” things.
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JMG # 26:
“you may well be right that creoles descended from French will play a large role in the future of language.”
Maybe you and Gunstone are right with French origin languages, but I’ve got some reasonable doubt about these creoles being understable one with the others in the future, and comprehensible with current today French (if it survives to some extent some centuries more). Today, a French person cannot understand Haitian creole, it’s another different language (pidgin).
*****************************************
About Aurelien:
I read his posts less often than JMG ones, but I usually like his views, though I don’t have to agree always with him (by the way, it happens to me the same with John opinions, so no problem here).
————————————————————————
(To be continued)
Northwind Grandma,
I hope you will receive my condolences for your loss and my best wishes for you as you make the transition to widowhood.
On milkweed: I’ve been growing a patch in my backyard for several years, and taking most of the seed pods to a local “nature area.” A few days ago I found a monarch caterpillar attached to my aluminum siding. On the following day it had become a chrysalis. This is a first, and I hope there will be more. Some people devise ways of raising them in soda bottles or whatever. I favor letting them take care of themselves.
My condolences to Northwind Grandma for her loss.
William 75
> With your permission, I will add you and your husband to my prayers (to the planets, should that matter), asking that the gods comfort and support you during this challenging time, and that wherever his journey may lead next, he be blessed.
Yes, that would be good. Please pray.
Jeff was a “planets, solar system, and universe kind of guy.” He LOVED the Star Tracks TV shows. The various Star Track series’ helped him imagine a future with goodness in it. We so need that message to this day.
I believe in reincarnation, and through me, Jeff started leaning in that direction. We had discussions about reincarnation.
My prayer for him in death, is that he “head for kindness,“ and “don’t be afraid.” In Tibetan Buddhism, if one is unafraid at and near death, it is likely that person’s soul will have a better-life-than-the-last-one when one chooses a body of a human in a womb.
Jeff had a hole in his heart, figuratively,— a deep wound, from before we met,— I think from a past life. Nothing happened between us that could have caused it.
Now and then, when I “brushed up against the wound,” I sensed the wound was on a different level of existence (maybe a different plane you all talk about) that I have no idea how to navigate. What I don’t know about,— I don’t mess with. It was not for me to tamper with. The wound was too delicate, like aged lace.
Jeff himself was blind to the hole. I asked him about it, and it wasn’t something he had the least bit familiarity with. I did, however, witness a few times when his sister and mother knew about the wound, and manipulated it for their own gain; he couldn’t perceive THAT either, even though afterwards “he hurt.”
Jeff could not accept that his loved ones were the beings hurting him. I had to step in with them both, halting and preventing as much additional damage to Jeff’s spirit as I could. That is why we banned Sneaky from our lives forever. She is persona non grata.
It was the 1982, the second weekend before Jeff’s and my wedding. Jeff’s mother’s father Grandfather “Isaac” (age late 80s), a man whom Jeff adored and vice versa, took me aside privately, out of earshot. (Isaac had been Jeff’s savior until Jeff went off to college.)
Isaac and I talked. He asked me to protect and guard Jeff’s spirit/soul. Wow! I vowed I would. I understand spirit and soul. Isaac said he would not be around to help Jeff. Isaac died in 1983 (1.25 years later). It was like the game Relay. Isaac handed me the baton. Little did I know, in retrospect, Isaac was warning me of his own daughter, who was Jeff’s mother (here known as “Komoda, the Komodo dragon”) and sister (call her ”Sneaky-like-Gollum,” age 16). Isaac, I venture a guess, viewed his daughter, Komoda, as a threat to Jeff’s long-term well-being. Maybe Isaac was wary of Sneaky too (since Sneaky modeled herself after Komoda).
My sense is that this deep hole/wound of Jeff’s was from a previous life, but that Komoda, Sneaky, and even Jeff’s father exploited. The three of them, in turn, each stuck the sword into Jeff’s wound, and twisted it. None of them believed in God, although I think Isaac did near the end of his life.
For the entire time I knew them (except for Isaac and Jeff), not one of them expressed remorse for anything for 40-odd years, and that is bad. They ‘blitz-damaged and ran.’ I could almost do nothing except get Jeff and I out of range,— it was family dynamics up close.
I noticed their goings-on likely because I was a longtime meditator, which made me “aware.” I saw things firsthand of Jeff’s family, then filed the sights away to retrieve at a later date. Sneaky never trusted me, and vice versa, because I believe she sensed that “I saw and retained.” To watch Jeff’s family implode was an awful thing. I watched Komoda and Sneaky fling themselves off cliff after cliff, like Wile E. Coyote; Wiley hit the ground and came back for more.
Man, the two of them sure didn’t like it that Jeff had an advocate (me). At various times, both had become enraged when I fought them to back off. (What happens to people? Is it a spirit-disease carried by the wind?)
I now believe demons exist and enter people. Secular people are naive; they let demons in. In the mid-1980s, I was such a person. I was in such bad spiritual shape that a demon entered me, where I wrestled with it for a year, finally expelling it. I sorta know a demon’s scent or signature: I get a creepy feeling. Demons are around. They float by until they can do carnate-work through a human. So far, my prayers of protection seem to work.
In addition to general prayers, please pray for healing of the wound to Jeff’s heart. Maybe in death, perhaps we can help soothe the wound with spiritual balms. That wound needs special attention, and I will gently focus on it. That wound is like a week-old infant. Very tender and raw.
I hope this note isn’t too long.
Thank you.
💨🫥🥺💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
John Michael Greer:
You likely already know that Charles Smith just complimented and responded to your post on America’s conflicted economic classes (https://ecosophia.net/a-game-of-musical-chairs/) with a post of his own, asserting that America actually having ten economic classes:
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/conflicts-brewing-americas-ten-classes
However, I just did a search of this thread and saw nothing, so I am linking both URLs
Aldarion # 28:
“In Ancient Greek, there are special verb forms for actions one does on one’s own without involving other persons, e.g. while “paideuo” means “I teach (somebody)”, “paideuomai” means “I teach myself, I learn”. This is called the middle voice.”
Thanks for your comment about Ancient Greek words. I studied it for a year in my high school, and I remember it half as a nightmare, half as an amazing “dead” language (well, not so dead, because modern Greek inherits parte of its “mother” language). I think Ancient Greek is more difficult than Latin (which I studied too with less trouble). Ancient Greeks had another way of thinking, so I grasp their language was strange to us, due to their idyosyncrasy.
“Él se va”-well, it’s something like “he goes with himself (se)”. French has also “Il s’en va” (OK; “`s’en va” it’s too difficult for explaining it by a non mother-tongue French speaker).
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Northwind G. # 60:
I’ve just noticed your comment. I mourn your husband Jethro death, and I hope he’s gone into a good afterdeath situation wherever he has gone. My condolences for you.
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Nolan Odyssey:
I can say I hoped something far worse, but Mr. Nolan didn’t shot a very woke movie, except for a few concessions (maybe Lupita and some another secondary characters?). I quite liked the movie, which it isn’t perfect, but it’s cool IMHO. I think it’s slightly better than (for example) “Oppenheimer”, in its screenplay. Main character is a straight white man, so some stupid feminists here called for the Odyssey boycott, at least in my town main newspaper (cough). And Penelope is a straight white woman, too, and a very clever one, like I understood her in the old book I read a heck of years ago.
I can forgive some C. Nolan occurrences, for example, how people in the Bronze Age said they were living in Bronze Age? It’s like Medieval people saying in their times they lived in Dark Age times (a term made up some centuries after them). Another strange reference is “Sea Peoples”(and how Nolan explain their invasions, ahem). I know this director needed to give some shallow historical frame to a legendary/mythical story, but well, nobody is perfect…
In addition to this, the Iliad and the Odyssey are very violent stories, but sometimes there’s a “Vae Victis!” complaint for the losers, the Trojans. Indeed, some Trojans are depicted as brave and noble warriors in the book. I think the Odyssey is less bloody than the Iliad, (more like an adventures story), and there’s more psychollogy in its characters (I’m thinking in the books now).
My friend who went with me to the movie theater, disliked a bit the Odyssey screenplay. He told me Mr. Nolan had made up too many parts of Homer story, but I answered him artists are free to some extent, to make free adaptations of novels and another books, always respecting the works spiritt. And I think Nolan has respected the Ancient Greeks spirit.
Dear Northwind Grandma,
Please accept my sympathy & prayers for the loss of your husband. That is a major shock.
Thank you for reaching out to me via our host for the freelance work in writing up material for your business with him and his Gustav Stickley inspired furniture. I am sad I won’t be getting to know him further and be working with the two of you. You both had a unique vision of what you wanted to do with that and how you wanted to present it to the world.
My condolences & peace be with you in this time.
In regard to mismatches in the job market,
https://research.com/advice/are-too-many-students-choosing-finance-oversaturation-competition-hiring-reality
“Recent trends suggest that despite a growing number of students earning finance degrees-over 80,000 in the US annually-job openings for entry-level roles such as financial analysts and planners remain comparatively limited.”
Most people want to sit in an air conditioned office and shuffle paper or bytes. The solution offered in TFA is increasing specialization. 🙄
What’s worse is that although there are useful jobs in finance efficiently allocating and tracking capital, most of the field is Advanced Swindling Theory.
Dear Northwind,
Please accept my deepest condolences. I enjoyed stories about your husband. Your love for him was so transparent in those stories. May Jeff rest in peace. May you find strength to continue living here.
Inna 💕
Northwind Grandma:
Please accept my condolences and prayers for you and Jeff!
We all say; “you have to go sometime”, but it is never expected. You had 44 years with him; that’s something.
Cugel
Thanks JMG!
I have a few plants I grow just for pollinators, and one they love that was a happy accident (a trumpet vine). Other than milkweed I have Anise hyssop that somebody gave me a couple years ago and is spreading all over the place (through my pots at the moment but that won’t keep it for long). It’s technically edible, and is kind of neat, tasting like black licorice, but really I just let it do it’s thing because there seemed to be so much activity on the flowers and it requires absolutely no work (the milkweed likes a little bit of fussing and if you break off the flowers the plant will produce more leaves). Similarly if any of my kale or collards survive the winter I let them bolt in the spring and that seems to get the bees up and about the place earlier in the year. Other than that I grow sunset runner beans whose bright red flowers they absolutely love. – they haven’t started blooming yet, but soon!
Anyway, that Anise hyssop seems to do perfectly well in pots, and self seeds and all that. So if you have a balcony at your place it’s not a bad zero effort plant for the pollinators.
I’m far from an expert in this stuff, but I feel like as much as possible I want to encourage the yard to function beyond it’s utility to me, so I’m conscious of watching for the use other animals and plants make of it. Like birds get something (I try to leave the seeds on things I don’t need, plus they use the bamboo frames I build to hunt from), and the bugs and bees and what not. Takes a little creative navigating (and sometimes hiding) to set up spots where I can toss plants and clippings to rot freely, as my partner is a little less enthused by that particular aspect of the project, but the more chaotic the piles (all sorts of different things rotting together, with sticks and big chunks of wood, etc), the more the bugs seem to like it. I like seeing a writhing mass if I go poking around. Plus obviously it’s useful as compost, and I’ll stick half rotten stuff into my pots and earth bags because it seems like that fresh blackened rot (like what last years leaves look like in spring) is particularly rich and exciting. It’s a little hard to know what works and what doesn’t, as something could technically be somewhat harmful, but just not harmful enough to make the plants fail, but I think I understand the basic principle, which is keep things in the garden as much as possible, adding the waste back into the system. Even the weeds I least like are great fodder for the piles, and that turns them into my friends, the same way I love a rainy day when we get them.
Thanks,
Johnny
Considering contacts between European Greece and other continents in the centuries around ~1000 BCE reminded of a contrasting pair of predictions of Spengler’s. He was spectacularly prescient about the existence of a “spring-time” phase of the Chinese civilization, which was uncovered in the years immediately following the publication of Decline of the West: the Shang kingdom with its oracle-reading kings.*
Spengler was being just as original when he proposed that the archaelogists of his time had simply not yet encountered the remains of the early phase of the Apollinian civilization from the centuries between ~1100 and 800 BCE. He proposed a flourishing spring-time phase with Orphic traits. However, here he was quite wrong. Systematic excavations have shown beyond doubt that there was a real gap between the demise of the Mycenaean civilization and the rise of the new Hellenic culture in the 8th century BCE. The “Dark Age” does not simply reflect our ignorance; population in fact plummeted, cities were abandoned (with the notable exception of Athens), and even what was left of the rural population partly emigrated to Anatolia.
Even more interestingly, the revival in the 8th century BCE was hot-started through commercial and cultural contacts with Syria**. Not only the alphabet was imported and adapted at that time, but also countless myths, such as the theogony, and visual ideas, such as chimaeras. What is more, the Greeks were quite frank about Syrian origins, just recall the tale of Zeus and Europa or of the founding of Thebes. While the Greeks had enormous self-esteem, they also always acknowledged the size of their cultural debt towards Egypt – both traits are on display in Solon’s narrative about Atlantis, as recounted by Plato. Today, we know more about Mycenaean and Minoan civilization and their dependence on Egypt and Syria than the Classical Greeks did, which adds to that debt.
So the idea of a Western or European civilization growing up in pristine isolation in Greece was largely made up in modern times (and reproduced by Spengler). The Classical Greeks did not find it necessary to deny their roots in Egypt and Syria.
*: Even more recently, a whole prehistory going back several thousands years before the Shang and involving wildly different city-building civilizations has been uncovered on the territory of modern China, but this doesn’t take away from Spengler’s prediction.
**: Toynbee’s late idea of an “Aramean-Hellenic culture compost”, proposed for Late Antiquity, in fact seems to be present right at the beginning of these two civilizations, too!
Northwind Grandma, I am so sorry to hear of your loss. I wish I could say something that would help, but of course nothing is adequate at a time like this. I pray that you are receiving all the assistance and support (material, emotional, spiritual) you need, and that healing comes soon.
Irvine,
I bought New Balance’s Minimus shoes (wonderful slogan “” ) for running after I read Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run back around 2010. Prior to that I felt my knees got all bothered when running, so I didn’t do it that often. After I started wearing them, I didn’t have any knee problems, and starting running around six days a week. As Jennifer K notes, however, it took a while for my calves and achilles heel to adjust, so I took things relatively slowly initially. I really like how my feet changed after wearing them, as they seemed to spread out and develop a much more complex musculature due to interacting more directly with the ground. I can’t imagine running in anything else. The only time I had an issue with such shoes was when I wore them on a roughly five mile hike in the hills around Kamakura, Japan, and it became painful to walk at the end of the hike. I am sure that was just because I had never used them that way before and they were intended for running, not hiking. I think that you may have to find a pair suitable for the activity you will be doing and you may need some time for your calves to adjust.
I agree with Jennifer K that zero drop is something to keep in mind if you are considering how it will affect your knees, muscles, etc. , only because it seems like the companies put out new modified versions every so often and it may be harder to find ones with thin soles. I switched to Merrell at one point because New Balance stopped making the ones I liked. I haven’t bought any in a while, so I can’t comment on the current market. Also, I don’t know how zero drop with thicker soles are different from those that are closer to the barefoot kind.
Northwind Grandma –
I hope you are supported by the people close to you when you need them.
_
JMG and Wizerdren (I hope you don’t mind my adoption of this term Rhydlyd, did you create it? )
I feel need to chime in on the Canada / U.S tension.
Carney and Trump occupy a lot of space on each others spectrums. They operate politically in a similar fashion; https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/carney-and-trump-more-similar-theyd-admit
Trump and Carney worked in NYC at the same time in ’98. Carney as VP of Goldman Sachs and Trump as Manhattan real estate magnate. Carney’s business as chair of Brookfield assets saw him at the helm of a company with an enormous footprint in the U.S. They both went to American ivy league schools.
They both have enormous egos, Carney more reserved I guess because… British (he had dual citizenship), grown off appointments to globalist positions. Trump pushed up more through Hollywood and mastering power leveraging in the public view.
I am not giving up on the potential that, in typical fashiom, most of what we are allowed to see between these two has been prepped behind closed doors. Canada taking the position as underdog and screening for the US as they pull out of international obligations. Is this conflict closer to a contrived beef you see in the rap scene? We are supporting the Iran war at least in view of reporters. Trump publicly denounced our conservative candidate and threw in his support for Carney after all ( who is turning out to be perhaps more conservative than the Conservative candidate).
Anyway, was hoping half a decade ago that the Canadian leader to break the dismal tide would be a lumberjack personality of some sort, pretty naive in retrospect. A northern Quebecois lumberjack to be clear – this would have been optimal… not a burly McScottish one…
JMG,
Hope you’re doing well! Three weeks ago Michelle mentioned cars that ran on coal, but when I read the comment it was too late to reply. We had those here as well in the years after the war. However, they didn’t have a steam engine, but a regular gasoline one retrofitted to work with a gasogene system that ran on solid fuels, like coal or wood.
Similar contraptions were also used to run stationary applications in rural areas, such as well pumps. It wasn’t great but at least it must have yielded some net energy, unlike biofuels.
Your recent return to the Long Descent comes in very timely for me, by the way. I’m – hopefully – close to the end of my engineering degree and I’m pondering on what exactly to do with it afterwards, so I’m looking forward to reading more!
Northwind Grandma,
Please accept my condolences. With your permission, I’ll pray for both of you.
Christopher Nolan’s “black Helen” appears to me to be a deliberate poke in the eye of western civilization. Some people love to do that. I checked to see what else Nolan has done. The only movie of his that I’ve seen is “Memento,” which I watched at least twice (even though I really dislike tatoos). But in this case, I’m not going to pay good money for a poke in the eye.
Anonymous #122 .. regarding skyscrapers in Miami, considering the geology of Florida, I consider these things as $inkholes in steel-n-glass drag. I remember reading a post by Wolf Richter some years ago, whereby he expanded on the folly of constructing such on the Texas barrier island of San Pedro … which, when mostly completed, started listing due in great part to faulty foundation design … Castles made of Sand and all that. He also mentioned one in downtown San Francisco, which had a case of the ‘leans’ as well.
Northwind Grandma,
I will indeed pray for “healing of the wound to Jeff’s heart” and for healing of yours as well.
Roldy
Are you willing to give us an update on the progress of your Renaissance mind-training/’mentat’ book?
I’d also like to second Daniel’s suggestion/request from last week for a monthly open post to discuss LLMs with both the apocalypse and utopia narratives banned.
Of course, I completely understand if you don’t have the time, or just don’t feel like it.
Anselma @ 111 Helen of Troy was the woman more similar to the godess Venus, representes by the Planet Venus You do mean the goddess Aphrodite, I think.
Such surviving mosaics from 2nd millennium Egypt, Crete and even a few from Mycenean Greece of which I have seen photos, depict brown skinned women with black or brown hair, usually long and curly hair.
The reference to Thracians having red haired deities because they were themselves gingers is from an early Greek philosopher, I think one of the pre-Socratics, centuries past when a hypothetical Helen might have lived. Thracians did infiltrate into Western Anatolia, sometime prior to Mycenean times, as I recall, so Andromache could plausibly be depicted as having light skin and hair.
I have sat through numerous movies, TV episodes, mini-series, etc. in which the iconic beautiful female leads were always played by vapid, characterless blonds, clueless bimbos who couldn’t get through the simplest lines without embarrassment.
I agree with Stephen Pearson, above. Hollywood simply can’t do history. A pity, because the ultimate blockbuster epic, one where the good guys did win and in which the bad guy, a man known for charisma, intelligence and wickedness could plausibly be played by a young Arnold type, would be the Siege of Rhodes.
Mr. Greer, you could grow food AND pollinator plants in a garden setting. I have Agastache and some terrestrial orchids dedicated to one bed .. along with a larger (3’x6′) bed, all in Cilantro … which is in it’s flowering 5-foot glory right now: literally abuzz which various flies, bees, wasps, beetles, true bugs, and what have you. Gonna have a fine crop of Coriander once all the seed pods ripen. So, food for thought should you decide to garden again. Also, the way things are going, it might be wise to (re)start garden – however humble, now .. as a cushion, should events make the procurement of market produce problematic. Luck favors the Prepared, after all ‘;]
GlassHammer #127, STEM grads:
I am trained in STEM as well and find what you describe unsurprising. This lack of concern for anything not directly related to their own job is partly because this is a selection process in current universities.
The people who do the best in STEM are the ones who dedicate all of their mental energy on the coursework at hand rather than looking around. It is partly because STEM degrees tend to be more challenging in terms of coursework, especially in the first 1-2 years of undergrad and many struggle to keep up. This creates people who surround themselves in an imaginary “field” they should care about, and dismiss anything else.
I remember my classmates showed a lack of interest in a course I was taking if they did not take it, let alone if it was from a different degree. In fact, a semester after passing a course, they often lost the ability to discuss what it was that they were learning.
It’s unfortunate, but I can see someone with those habits not caring about where materials come from if it’s somebody else’s job to provide them.
@Northwind Grandma,
please accept my condolences and may I include both of you in my prayers?
V
@JMG
I was interested in your response to Prizm about Galbraith and the great crash and our current situation. When the next great crash comes, do you think it will be organic or engineered? In other words, will some elite figure like Warren Buffett decide now is the time to cash in and crash the economy and sell his stocks? Or will it be more of a cascading of uncontrollable events not tied to anything specific?
Robert, thanks for this. That’s fascinating to hear about these substrates. One theory about the Celtic languages that’s long seemed plausible to me, though I seem to recall that it’s unfashionable these days, is that the marked divergences that separate them from other Indo-European languages (such as sentence structures habitually beginning with a form of the verb “to be”) come from a linguistic substrate, probably a pre-Celtic language related to Berber.
Slithy, yeah, Henson was a brilliant absurdist comedian but his talents were not suited to serious drama. He’s weirdly like William Shatner in that — a master of deadpan comedy who mistakely thought he could be a dramatic lead.
Untitled-1, yeah, it’s whack-a-mole with a vengeance, but all you can do is keep at it with the mallet.
Michael, well, it’ll depend on how the actual settlement comes out, but yeah, it might be a nice chunk of change. I’m not counting on it for anything, but if it happens I’ll plan something fun.
Northwind, thank you for the details on Jeff’s inner wound. I can certainly focus some healing prayer on that. Would you be okay if practitioners of Essene healing were to direct energy toward that? It’s something that spiritual healing can often handle quite well.
Alvin, well, we’ll see! With regard to the Nolan movie, I thought Matt Walsh had something amusing to say:
William, hmm! That also seems quite plausible.
J.L.Mc12, thanks for this. I have a textbook and have done a little work with it, but I haven’t had the spare time yet to really tackle learning it.
Earthworm, well, that’s certainly what most spiritual traditions teach.
Jfisher, what will work for you is not something I can guess. What works for me is a clear sense of my own limitations and an equally clear sense of how far I’ve come in one lifetime of fairly extensive spiritual work — a good ways, but compared to where I want to be, not that far.
Anon, yep. New York City’s political establishment really has cut its own throat.
Gunstone, I modeled it on historical examples. As for what the classical language will be, it might just as well be Spanish, or for that matter Chinese, depending on cultural transformations in the millennium ahead.
GlassHammer, good question. I’ll have to wait for comments from those who know that world better than I do.
Gnat, thanks for this. Yes, I’d heard about it — some comments on Dreamwidth pointed me in that direction. Classes are always something that can be lumped and split in different ways; my four-class system has the advantages of clarity and simplicity, but others may prefer different schemes.
Siliconguy, I wonder how long it’ll take to sink in that cubicle jobs have passed their peak.
Johnny, I’ve always been a fan of compost bins, but the casual heap of stuff on the ground also has its charms.
Aldarion, that was one place where Spengler got sucked into the presuppositions of his culture. It’s very clear from a great many sources that the springtime phase of his Apollonian culture was in the Levant and Asia Minor; the fixation on its Greek aspects is simply a reflection of the fact that after 800 or so, Greek olive orchards and vineyards became a massive source of wealth and many cultural initiatives that had been spread over a wider area came to be concentrated in the Greek peninsula and islands.
Ian, thanks for this.
Miguel, ah, so the gasogene engine was used in your country as well! Coal would make better fuel for that than wood, which some places used.
Jason, Renaissance Mind Training is finished and at the publisher. I haven’t heard yet if it’s on the publication schedule, but I’d expect it to be out early next year. I’m still brooding over the idea of a Dreamwidth post on goLLuMs.
Polecat, oh, trust me, I know. As I get older, though, I’m less fond of hard physical work on hands and knees, and so perennial pollinator plants that will provide me with entertainment — I love watching bees, especially the odd native varieties — are a little more my style.
Well, if Musk didnt like the new Odyssey movie he can go frack himself all the way to Mars for all I care. I haven’t seen it. It strikes me that Musk could just create his own movie studio to relay back to him the things he wants to see. Oh wait, thats what all this AI is for.
I am surprised to hear there isnt a lot of gay sex in the movie, consideeing how long all those sailing sailors were cooped up together. They were ancient Greeks, at that! Maybe if Fellini had directed it…
Do you have any opinion on Henry David Thoreau?
Alot of his works, like most from that era, feel way too wordy for me, but I liked a lot of what I read in Walden. From what I gather of his life he comes off to me as a respect-worthy, if eccentric, philosopher. What is your take?
During the Adocentyn Convention in Providence this June, there was mention of a science fiction short story about using time travel to secure dinosaurs in order to sell them as food. At the time, we couldn’t remember the author or title. After doing a little prowling, I believe the story was “A Statue for Father,” by Isaac Asimov.
@Four Sided Circle #151: it’s not just current universities. I remember being an outlier in my engineering curriculum due to taking the maximum number of out-of-field electives, everything from Theater Lighting to Comparative Religion. (I felt a university education should be well-rounded!) Even then, there was a significant fraction of my fellow engineering students who had to stay an extra year because they had neglected to meet with their advisors and had no out-of-major classes at all!
JMG,
You asked so incredibly nicely I just had to get that book! 😉 Ordered a nice hardcover used copy for less than $10!
More broadly speaking though, there seems to be a sense of “something in going to happen” among people creating a general uneasiness. I think with the general order of things breaking down around us, it’s really throwing people for a loop. Perhaps some who are more prone to acting out strangely are doing so …
Northwind Grandma,
First of all, my condolences. I’ve never lost anyone that close to me (yet) and unsure of what it most feel like, but like many of the commenters here, I wish the best for you as go through this loss.
Regarding Mike Rowe, he is an interesting guy to listen to, and has helped a lot of people consider a different alternative then what we’ve had going for us. If I’d graduated high school about 5 years later he made have helped me go about the choice I had wanted, which was automotive repair, but everyone around me talked me out of it and into the world of computers. Now I’ve swung around and gotten a little less than 5 years into railroad maintenance of way. I didn’t realize he was going into video. It will likely be an interesting foray.
Atmospheric River 77
Thank you for prayers. Even though secular, Jeff would like prayers. He would be open to that. Kindly do.
——
FRAN
I have a 50-odd year old woman friend in town, Fran, who is totally flipping out having been triggered by Jeff’s death. I mean uncontrollable crying, yelling, gnashing of teeth,— the whole nine yards. Really and truly freaking out. It is like she is on a bad LSD trip. Her feelings are getting amplified by years of seeing friends and acquaintances die of COVID, or the shots themselves. I fear for her.
Fran is a healthcare worker who knew/knows both Jeff and I well. Jeff’s death triggered an involuntary response where she is reliving seeing death all around her from past collective COVID nightmares of 2020, her own and others. I think she is having a nervous breakdown. That is what we used to call it,— what do to call it these days? It is like she feels trapped in a revolving door, with no exit.
A little while ago, I visualized Fran’s house (her house *IS* her clinic) and brought to mind St. Julian of Norwich (England). I studied Julian a bit a decade ago. Roughly, Julian witnessed half of everyone she knew, die of the Black Death. Half is the estimate. Half. Julian went into seclusion (and/or was ill herself) and then came out saying “All will be well.” I think this is basically how the tale goes. I visualize Fran enveloped in “All will be well.”
Kindly put Fran in your prayers.
——
MYSELF
I am doing okay. Got three hours sleep. Took phone calls from Jeff’s MD; funeral home. Did some ‘distracting’ things. Not much hungry. Nibbling. Drank water. Fatigued. Laid down. Breathed. Fleeting emotions. Flower essences helping.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@ Untitled-1 #33
That’s true enough except that the highest elites in every culture I’ve heard of disdain manual labor that they don’t personally enjoy doing. Why else would mandarins grow their fingernails to horrendous lengths other than to say “I don’t even have to feed myself?”
I still remember a comment from somewhere or other, where, IIRC, a high-caste Indian man told the commenter that he had never tied his own shoes. He had people for that.
@ Phil #34
Thank you! I’ll have to look for that book.
@Mother Balance #91
Good lord. How can you check the level of transmission fluid?
I guess you’re supposed to let the dealer deal with it.
My brother, a very skilled mechanic, said he installed plug valves (or something like that) in the bottom of his transmissions in his cars so he could drain out the dirty fluid regularly and replace it, like an oil change.
He did NOT understand why it wasn’t standard.
It seems that some of the oligarchs themselves are figuring out that “the numbers don’t crunch” on data centres:
https://energynewsbeat.co/ai/worlds-largest-data-center-project-on-verge-of-collapse-after-blackstone-unexpectedly-pulls-out/
“Pf-ff-ft – pop!”
Irvine 85
Shoemaker is one of the skills that will survive the Long Descent. One division of shoemaking, the tanning of hides and skins, used to be smelly, but apparently doesn’t have to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanning_(leather)
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
“STEM degrees tend to be more challenging in terms of coursework, especially in the first 1-2 years of undergrad and many struggle to keep up. ”
No kidding, but the real crunch is the junior year. Physical Chemistry, Transport (of matter and energy), chemical kinetics, thermodynamics, and for me hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy. The chemical engineers had two semesters of Fun with Distillation Columns instead of the last two classes I listed. The washout rate is very high.
Tunnel vision is definitely a side effect. Starting college late as I did was a big help in avoiding that. I had practical experience in how ‘unit operations’ (as they call them) all have to pull together to get good results. In mining terms, rock goes in, gold and sliver comes out along with a great deal of mud. Ten discrete steps along the way many of which have subdivisions of their own.
If you see a job listing for a process engineer, that means they want someone to manage the overall process and keep all those steps synchronized. No one comes out of college knowing that because they don’t teach it. They can’t, every plant is different. What college can do is teach you a general knowledge of how the physical world works so you can recognize the patterns in what you see.
Thanks for the response Four Sided Circle,
You know….. on paper almost everyone on a major project is a “specialist” not just those in STEM (difficulty and division of labor just creates that) but… if everyone took that “specialist” label seriously nothing would get done and no one would get paid.
You just can’t effectively move a complex tasks through a long consecutive sequence if everyone silos themselves and their knowledge.
You can’t adapt on the fly if you can’t anticipate and you can’t anticipate without knowledge.
Collectively, thank you all for your condolences. I started crying reading them, as I am now.
——
Christophe 101
> Would you like for us to ask the universe to watch over Jeff’s soul as he begins this new leg of his journey?
Jeff would like any type of prayer, any which way and up. He wasn’t picky. I am sure he needs aid on his invisible journey. Growing up in a secular environment, I think he grew afraid of that which is invisible. He embraced science. His interpretation of the world was, “If one can’t see it, it doesn’t matter.” Yet he was a fan of space. Argh!
This is one instance where it is a wonder we ended up together. I am the opposite: I feel the invisible,” the invisible has life. We were wildly different, but we had glue, glue enough for 44 years. The glue smelled good too (like mucilage).
We skirted AROUND the topic the invisible-matter issue, because if we had let the discussion go too far, it would have meant disrespect, and that would have resulted in a knock-down-drag-out fight, and grounds for divorce. One cannot be disrespectful, and expect a relationship to last.
Jeff was dead-set against the invisible. People are weird. He made no sense. I had to accept that “Out with the invisible; in with the material” was one of his core beliefs. I had to respect that. Or else. We never got to the point of trying to figure out from where he got that particular belief.
When we first met, and he witnessed me saying, “I have to meditate. See you in an hour (rounding off). Shutting door, and you can’t come in.” He exclaimed “WTF? How can you sit and do nothing for an hour?” “It’s not nothing.” “But I can’t see it.“ “So what?” The discussion led nowhere.
I think respect for each other’s cockamamie beliefs was how we learned how NOT to fight. We had arguments, but we always kept the language civil and respectful. On the rare occasion one of us was not civil, the other called a time-out: “Not fair!” In today’s language: “Not sustainable!“
We both came from abusive backgrounds, but we somehow learned early how to respect each other. We didn’t disparage.
Recently, JMG wrote something to the effect of “Don’t bother trying to change anyone’s will.” Yep, got that right.
I sure am running on. Thank you for listening.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
ello Northwind Grandma
My condolences on your loss. I have no actual words of comfort beyond that.
FWIW, as being of possible general interest, not specifically directed at Jeff’s wife, the redoubtable Northwind Grandma, Judaism describes four phases of mourning. The first is seven days long. People should bring food, hug the mourner, and sit silently with the mourner (there’s more, but those are all that apply to my fellow Buddhists, pagans, mystics, occultists, esotericists and misfits). Long philosophical diatribes are not welcome, much less stupid stuff like “a better place.” Then there are the first thirty days. Similar, but less intense, not so much food-bringing, more offers of general help. The third phase lasts one year, when one is still saying “kaddish” daily for close relations. Kaddish is a prayer that offers appreciation for the wonders of creation. Then, the fourth, which lasts basically the rest of your life. I’ve been through these a time or two, as have many (likely most) of us…
@Northwind Grandma
I’m sorry to hear of your loss. I lost one of my cousins very much unexpectedly about a year ago, none of us know exactly what is ahead.
Northwind Grandma, I offer you and your husband my blessings and prayers in this difficult time.
Firstly, to Northwind, I’m sorry for your loss. Grieve how you must and as long as you need, just try to stay well yourself.
Unfortunately, I am going to follow this up with some other bad news. Another of the truly great Peak Oil/Decline writers has left the mortal plane. Richard Heinberg passed at the age of 75 due to pancreatic cancer.
https://everloved.com/life-of/richard-heinberg/
JMG et al.,
I just came across what I think is a very important indicator of a widespread readiness among the general public to accept and embrace the peak oil message, in a way in which was decidedly not the case 20 years ago, as many people commenting in this space can attest from personal experience.
Please see the extended quote below. The context is a recent Zero Hedge article Discussing a deep shift an American attitudes as they relate to artificial intelligence, and also to the Internet more generally.
But the paragraphs I quote generalize this attitude even further, in a way that I regard as very clearly indicative of the likelihood that the Peak Oil message will find very fertile soil this time around among wide layers of the population.
Here is the article link, and then the quote:
https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/ai-debates-reveal-deeper-shift-american-values
“Why has the public reaction shifted so dramatically?
“One explanation is that Americans have become increasingly accustomed to viewing wealth through a zero-sum lens. For decades, political rhetoric, media coverage, and even educational institutions have increasingly emphasized inequality over wealth creation as an engine of overall prosperity. Rather than asking whether society as a whole becomes richer through innovation, discussion often centers on whether innovators have become “too rich.” When economic success itself is viewed with suspicion, redistribution naturally appears more reasonable than allowing innovators to retain the returns from their investments.
“A second explanation is declining confidence in upward mobility. During the internet boom, many Americans believed they could personally participate in the gains, whether by starting businesses, purchasing stocks, or finding new career opportunities. Today, younger generations often face high housing costs, elevated student debt, and persistent pessimism about their future prospects. If people increasingly believe they won’t participate in economic growth through ordinary market participation, government intervention begins to seem like the only remaining avenue to benefit from economic progress.”
Robert Mathiesen, Etienne, and JMG,
I am reposting this below from the end of last week’s comment series:’
Thank you for your response, Robert. I did not realize that the people of Lithuania remained pagan so late into history since Christ.
Can you provide a similar historical sketch of the peoples of Latvia and Estonia?
Also, how do all these considerations affect the line of religious division between Catholicism and Orthodoxy that you and Etienne were speaking of?
Like the genocide and mass-deportation of millions of German-speaking peoples from Eastern European countries after World War II, along a roughly parallel line but somewhat west of the one we are speaking of, this Catholic-Orthodox boundary has, I am dimly aware, been the arena for countless atrocities in the name of the Christian religion over the centuries, as I am ashamed to acknowledge.
So I think the question of affixing its exact contours is of some historical importance. Who knows, maybe it is even of substantial contemporary importance, given the war in the Ukraine, the ongoing conflict between the modern incarnation of the Roman Empire in its Eastern (i.e., Russian) and Western halves, etc.
JMG, with your permission, I may post this again the next time you cover something that is tangentially germane in your main post, since it may not be seen and responded to now.
https://theconversation.com/drought-water-shortages-and-crop-failures-how-does-the-medieval-warm-period-compare-with-today-287416
“Although the warmer temperatures produced occasional drought conditions, the overall economic effects of the Medieval Climate Anomaly were largely positive for northern Europe and parts of Asia. It led to large-scale and widespread agricultural expansion and population growth.
Between 600-900, the population of Eurasia only marginally grew from 167 million to 178 million. Between 900-1200, however, it nearly doubled to 324 million.
It was during the Medieval Climate Anomaly that a highly commercialised and monetised economy developed in large parts of medieval Europe, in what historians ”
I recently saw this article on the unusual summer aridity for much of Europe and its comparison to the Medieval Warm Period. It notes how the last time there was such a period, there was actually a significant population and economic expansion of much of Eurasia compared to the previous “Late Antique Little Ice Age”.
Can you see such processes today softening the Long Descent to a degree?
@JMG (#154):
You’re very welcome. I haven’t ever looked into the peculiarities of the Celtic language family, but what you suspect makes enormous sense to me. A couple of millenia ago Celts were everywhere in East Europe (as well as West Europe, and they reached eastward well into the Middle East. Place names like Galicia in the Iberian Penninsula and also in West Ukraine, Galatia in the East Mediterranean, are said by scholars to attest to just how far they once reached.
Thus Celts were in Europe before speakers of the Germanic, Slavic and Baltic languages arrived there, and so they were probably the first branch of Indo-Europeans to settle in Europe. But Europoe (of course) had already long been inhabited by speakers of other, non-Indo-European languages, call them “Xian” languages. In the usual process of cultural assimilation, a Celtic-Xian pidgin language would have been likely to develop. Such pidgins often become the native language of subsequent generations (at which point linguists call them “creoles” rather than “pidgins”). This seems to me quite likely to be what happened in Europe, with the six well-known Celtic languages being descended from such creoles. If so, their grammatical oddities would probably reflect grammatical features of the “Xian” languages which they eventually replaced.
Wow about the building in Miami. Put a steel skyscraper in the salt air, add in assorted hurricanes. sinking land and rising sea levels? Oh yes, most of Florida is built on dodgy limestone which is famous for instant sinkholes, “Instant Hole (TM)” from Acme is not required, a considerable cost savings.
It’s comforting to know the in habitants do not believe the climate change propaganda though. It’s the same group who are the subjects of the Haulover Inlet videos. That is also in Miami. You can count the number of big outboards on those boats as they go by.
Speaking of which;
Mercury 600 VERADO V12
SKU: 16000101A
$82,905.00 Price
Horsepower: 600
Displacement: 7.6 Liters
Dry Weight: 1260 LBS
Engine Type: V12 (Naturally Aspirated)
Fuel Requirements: Unleaded 90 RON Miniumum
Posted too soon: About that outboard;
Real world fuel consumption;
Twin 600s (e.g., Boston Whaler 360 Outrage): At a best cruise (36 mph @ 4,000 RPM), combined fuel burn is about 34.1 GPH, achieving roughly 1.05 miles per gallon.
Quad 600s (e.g., Valhalla V46): At top speeds of around 74 mph, these four massive engines will burn a combined total of roughly 150 GPH.
Money, water, same thing to those people. As Dogbert put it, “Bah! My soft cheese budget is more than that.”
Joshua, Thoreau was a fine writer who, like many fine writers, didn’t really live up to the image he projected. Not many people know, for example, that when he was living in his little shack on Walden Pond, he walked home every day to have lunch cooked by his mom.
Michael_20, thanks for this!
Prizm, delighted to hear it. I have now saved you, for the rest of your life, from falling victim to a speculative frenzy — my good deed for the day. Thanks for the data point.
Michael M, heh heh heh.
Michael G, good heavens. I’m very sorry to hear this. Heinberg and I disagreed about a good many things but he was always pleasant and thoughtful.
Denizen, fascinating. Those are also warning signs of a potential for serious domestic unrest, btw.
Gunstone, it’s pure speculation that the climate processes that generated the early medieval warm period were the same as those that are driving desertification in southern Europe right now. Many things can warm a region! Thus I don’t think it’s safe to use the early medieval warm period as a model.
Robert, exactly. The thing that makes the living Celtic languages fascinating is that Gaulish, the only one of the continental Celtic languages for which there’s a decent corpus of texts, doesn’t seem to have had the distinctive features of the living languages. The Bretons are descended from refugees who fled Roman Britain for Gaul during the Saxon invasions, which is why their language has the features in question…
Siliconguy, bah indeed. Let them eat soft cheese…
Imperium Press’s blog has an interesting article on “The Principle of No Dialogue”, spurred by the Odyssey film (https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/nolans-odyssey-is-beneath-notice). It has some ideas very reminiscent of our host’s recurrent advice (emphasis added):
“I did not invent the principle of no dialogue, nor even name it. Neema Parvini gave it that name, but he did not invent it either. It is an ancient principle which can be seen across times and places. The basic principle is noncooperation with a hostile spectacle. It does not mean “no debate ever,” […] It does not mean “no discourse,” […] These things have their place. It does not mean ignoring the offence or accepting abuse. It means refusing to fight on unfavourable terrain. No dialogue applies when the other party is hostile and acting in bad faith, and especially when power is unequal. In these cases, direct engagement strengthens them and weakens us. […] It helps to understand the difference between discourse and contest. In discourse, your opponent is an interlocutor, and you occupy common ground, beginning from a point of agreement. In contest, the opponent is trying to produce an effect. Truth is beside the point—the subject (in Nolan’s case, the valid interpretation of a core myth) is secondary to the struggle over status, attention, and power.”
JMG,
An encounter with a family friend has me wondering if it’s possible for someone to be enlightened or close to it and not even know it? He is highly conventionally successful besides for being single his whole life. He radiates a very strong energy. Most polarity relationships I have with people seem to be made of a lower order airy energy where the particles seem to have minuscule space between them. The polarity exchange with this person was of the quality of a thin, pleasant liquid. I am a straight man and not attracted to him and he is not conventionally attractive, fwiw, but he was when he was young. He has this laid back, assured, quiet demeanor and people seem to really want to engage him in conversation. But do I imagine him having some fully developed energy centers that he’s conscious of? It’s hard to do so. It’s also hard to imagine him doing ritual or meditating. So the other part of this question is if it’s possible for someone to have developed mental body energy centers and not even know it?
@Denizen of Hillside (#174):
I’m not sure about Estonia, but the boundaries of the Kingdom (or “Grand Duchy”) of Lithuania at times included much of Latvia. It was quite the formidable military power in its day, up to the Union of Lublin.
To the best of my knowledge, the line of division (between Catholic and Orthodox lands) — let’s abbreviate it as LOD — began to be felt well before the 800s at the Adriatic coast, that is, well before the formal schism between Rome and the other four ancient Papacies (or Patriarchates, as they are usually called by Westerners, who are unaware that “Pope” is still one of the formal titles of the Patriarch of Alexandria). It seems roughly to have aligned itself with the much earlier administrative division between Rome and Constantinople in the days of the full Roman ERmpire
And there is a further historical complication, which took shape not long after the capture of Constantinople, the “second Rome,” by Muslim armies in 1453. In the Orthodox Slavic lands (originally in Russia), the concept of a “third Rome,” that is, of a third and final, divinely appointed sovereign master of the whole (Christian) world, was formulated. In view of where this idea developed, it was of course Moscow itself that was by rights that “third Rome,” with all that implied for the future course of world history within the context of Christianity. But these are deep and murky historical waters, and the currents there can sweep us far away from the precise question you asked.
As Christianity very slowly spread northward through that part of Europe, the LOD spread northward as well; during much of the earlier Middle Ages, its precise location was fairly often contested by armed troops in this or that recently Christianized region: hence it’s shifting placement as it approaches its northern terminus at the Baltic Sea.
Bear in mind that in these centuries distinct “sovereign nations,” as we now understand the concept, were not a known thing. That concept only developed, in very primitive form, in the middle 1600s in Europe, and very much later elsewhere in the world, here and there even within my lifetime. Thinking about geopolitics, even in the 21st century, in terms of “sovereign nations” has never seemed to me to be particularly helpful.
You also mention that the LOD, even in its somewhat shifted modern placement, has been “the arena for countless atrocities in the name of the Christian religion over the centuries.” To some extent, yes, that’s what it has been and still is, but the shift in its position over recent centuries has to do with the rise and current power of the artificial notion of “sovereign nations,” now more often defined in terms of different native languages and ethnicities (or “races”), than in terms of religions, as in the past. In my view, for whatever it my be worth, atrocities are “baked in the cake” of human nature, and will continue to happen as long as there are humans on the planet. Primatologists have shown that even some of our closest evolutionary relatives, such as chimpanzees, joyfully and regularly commit atrocities under certain fairly well-defined circumstances. Humans always seek false pretexts for their atrocities: artificial constructs like “nation” or “race” serve Europeans as well now as “religions” used to do in the past, though “religion” still has its day in many parts of the world.
Northwind Grandma,
I, too, offer my sympathies. A loss out of the blue is jarring, core-shaking. May your long-time meditation practice continue to bring you peace. And may your abiding love, respect, and mutual understanding with Jeff bolster each of you into this new phase of being.
@JMG (#179):
Thank you! I had not known that about Gaulish. It suggests to me that the “Celtic-Xian” creolization process only happened offshore, in the British Isles, and happened more recently that I had thought. This makes good sense, too. Islands are refuges for relic populations, as are remote mountain regions (like where the Basque language survived).
Clarke aka Gwydion (#169)
Thank you for your post. The guidelines you provide are beautiful in their simplicity.. It’s hard enough to lose a loved one, without taking on the emotional baggage around death of well-intentioned companions.
OtterGirl
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 7/7). 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 below.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Anonymuz get the strength and resolve he needs in his endeavors for justice, and may truth and justice be served.
May Jule from Iserlohn, Germany (whose baby is due mid-July) have a pleasant pregnancy and birth.
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 Alex R. be blessed in his efforts to resolve his financial situation, and successfully get completely out of debt within the current year 2026; may he find opportunities toward that end, and also the wisdom to recognize and seize them when they come.
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 Kallianeira come to understand or face the entity or issue that seems to have trapped her, causing problems in her material circumstances, causing expensive troubles that threaten to force her out of home and mind, and leaving her burnt out and overwhelmed despite every attempt to find real help. May she quickly find out what to do and how to act to overcome these hardships.
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 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 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.
* * *
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.
Northwind Grandma,
I just saw the news about Jeff, and the general assent for prayers on his behalf, and the request for prayers for healing in Jeff’s heart. Please accept my condolences. For now, I will add an item to the Ecosophia Prayer List that reads as follows. Please just say the word if you would like it to be rephrased in any way, large or small.
“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.”
Please don’t hesitate to ask of prayers on your own behalf as well at any point.
Aldarion #140: Can you recommend a book or three which will give me a grand tour of human civilizations, and how they grew and interacted, during the pre-Greek period? Just reading your short post on the topic was really captivating. I have a need to learn more about the history before Greece, for some reason. I’ve read a bit about Greece, and a lot more about Rome, but otherwise there is a large gap in my general knowledge. And that bothers me — a lot.
Northwind Gramma.
Blessings for you and Jeff, condolences for you.
I shall also be putting you both in my daily prayers.
Annette
Northwind.
I will be sending prayers of protection for Jethro on his journey, and echo the feelings of all of us in this community who are sad for your loss. You have it right. A little bit at a time, don’t be afraid to mourn HOWEVER YOU WANT TO!
And, please, do not forget to hydrate yourself. Eating? You will eat when you feel like it, but water is essential during morning. It will buoy your spirit.
Please be well.
The odd issues with comments is present again. On the homepage, it says there are 179 comments; but the open post itself only shows 178. I’m not sure if anyone else is seeing this, but since it’s the first time in a while I’ve seen it, I figure it’s worth mentioning.
Michael Gray @172
Oh bummer. Richard was a lovely man. He was a friend, though I didn’t know him very well. We met at a talk he gave in Venice Beach CA after the publication of his first book, and right after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. I would run into him on and off over the years and followed his work, though probably have not seen him for the last ten. I have always had huge respect for his work and his integrity. his passing is a loss to the world.
Stephen
@JMG
Duly noted. Fortunately, it’s a particularly rewarding form of whack-a-mole, so I don’t imagine I’ll have any problems sticking to it. Six months isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, and yet the results have already more than spoken for themselves. Integrating the lessons of animal incarnations with reflective intelligence… I’ll have a good think on that. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.
@Teresa Peschel #161
“That’s true enough except that the highest elites in every culture I’ve heard of disdain manual labor that they don’t personally enjoy doing.”
Why yes, of course. Perhaps that is simply what abundance does to people, and so the curse of the mind that Faustian people are dealing with now is simply the default state for the so-called elites of humanity regardless of time or place. I’ve never envied them, for precisely that reason and many others. I have a hard time seeing it as anything other than form of self-infantilization.
@Scotlyn #116
“In general, I would not say that I discount the value of intention, but that since I find it hard to properly perceive, I have to find other ways to usefully think about actions and consequences.”
Ah! It seems I misunderstood you. My apologies. Yes, you mentioned an aversion to this topic, but not an actual dismissal of it, that was my mistake.
“We do like to attach our sense of self to our intentions – to being “well intentioned”, and not to our actions, and most certainly not to what our actions accomplish in the world, and this is key to much.”
Yes, perhaps my characterization of it was overly-harsh earlier, but it is a slippery slope precisely because intentions are so foggy and muddled (even to the person themselves) such that fudging them becomes incredibly easy to do, and so people tend to develop a bad habit of getting very good at that “fudging” (or at least good enough to consistently fool themselves) and never get around to properly examining their actions or their actual effects critically. It’s even easier these days when so many people have roles in society that effectively shelter them from the consequences of their own actions.
On the other hand, I’ve found judging solely by effects to be inadequate as well, for the reasons I stated earlier. A key part of addressing a person’s behavior is meeting them where they’re at, and understanding what led them to take an action in the first place. If you don’t know where they are, you don’t know where they need to go either. That goes when evaluating yourself as well, of course. Perhaps especially so.
In the end, I don’t know if there’s a clear and simple answer, except to avoid the extremes (judging solely by intentions or solely by effects). In reality, most situations call for a bit of both.
“A few months ago JMG used the term POSIWID (the Point of a System is What it Does), and I think, as you say, this can be a good guide to my own actions as well as those of others. So, I am trying to use POSIWID to examine what it is that I do, and then study the results in the world of what I do, in order to learn to do better. It is very useful.”
Hmm, that’s an interesting way of framing it! I am familiar with POSIWID, but hadn’t thought to apply it to myself or other people. It’s true that the concept is similar to what I was trying to communicate, but I hadn’t thought to use that specific framing. However, I could see how viewing things through that lens might provide unexpected perspectives, especially when it comes to my own actions. I’ll give it a try, thank you for the suggestion!
@ JMG : RE “it’ll depend on how the actual settlement comes out” – “I’m not counting on it for anything, but if it happens I’ll plan something fun. ”
Yep, lawyers will probably take the vast majority of it, as is the way of the world. But if you get a decent little pay package at the other end; get a nice, rich, thick stout in celebration.
Northwind Grandma: As I have never interacted with you on this forum I did not think it was appropriate to say anything, but reading through your comments and other ecosophians’ I feel the need to urge you to take. care. of. yourself. If you make yourself ill through lack of (enough) food and/or lack of (enough) sleep this will not make the grieving process any easier. Quite the contrary. I speak from experience here.
Gunstone (#123), JMG (#154): What will qualify as a classical language in the future is probably unknowable today. The only reason Latin became such a language after the fall of the Western Roman Empire is because the Church maintained continuity in Latin literacy and in re-copying manuscripts. Without the Church all that would have survived in Latin would have been inscriptions on stone or metal, which nobody would have been able to read after a few generations. And I can think of no institution today likely to transmit literacy in ANY language over the next few generations, and then centuries, as formal schooling breaks down. Readers of Walter Miller’s A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ might hope that no such institution ever arises, and at times I fear they might be right.
Denizen of Hillsdale, Michigan (#174): Comparing the line between Eastern and Western Christianity with the national/ethnic divide between Germans and Slavic-speaking peoples in Central Europe runs into a massive problem: one can convert from one religion to the next, and clearly people very often did so in pre-modern times, often without real duress. This was true in contact zones involving Christianity and other religions, too. The order of the Jesuits, for example, was long renowned for having among its members an unusually high number of Jews who had converted to Catholicism. The more recent conflicts between German- and Slavic-speakers, by contrast, were far more horrific because these ethnolinguistic identities were perceived as fixed and unchanging, making mutual mass dehumanization pervasive and inescapable (This was something driven home to me by one of the best and most disturbing novels I have ever read, Jaroslav Durych’s “Boží duha” (God’s bow), about the aftermath of the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans).
Robert Mathiesen (#176). The scenario you present for the genesis of Celtic is interesting. I do not believe it for a second. The key feature of a pidgin is total lack of grammatical elements attached to words (grammatical bound morphemes, as we linguists put it), and this is true of creoles too. Thus, Haitian creole (A language I suspect may expand over much of the warmer/wetter parts of -especially coastal-North America as the oil age comes to an end) has (mostly) French vocabulary but not a single French grammatical morpheme (more accurately, no inflectional bound morpheme). This is typical of nativized pidgins, AKA creoles.
The problem with your scenario of Celtic languages-as-former-pidgins is that this is simply not what we observe. The oldest Celtic language for which we have an abundance of written records, Old Irish (the ancestor of Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic and Manx), attested around the ninth century AD, underwent massive phonological transformations (i.e. its sounds changed quickly, as non-linguists would put it), but preserved most of the inherited Indo-European morphology. If you want to postulate a pidgin stage for Old Irish to account for the lost morphology, this is legitimate, but just as legitimate as assuming a pidgin stage between Indo-European and Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Attic Greek, Gothic or Sanskrit (inter alia). This is because Old Irish is morphologically conservative (i.e. it kept a huge number of the grammatical endings, as non-linguists would put it) despite all the phonological transformations it underwent.
Stephen#109
Cleopatra was of Macedonian ancestry..
Dear Mr. Greet, et all – Being well into my seventh decade, I don’t travel much. I often say that I haven’t been out of the county in over 20 years. But I’m very curious about what it’s like, “out there.” When I run across someone who has traveled, I ask what their impressions are. Usually, I get a blank look.
I’ve just finished reading a book, that gave me a pretty good idea. It’s called, “Greyhound: A Memoir.” In 2006, Joanna Pocock traveled by bus, from Detroit to Los Angeles. She kept a journal, and took a lot of photos. In 2023, she repeated the trip. And,noted a lot of changes.
Funky, low-rent districts, beloved by students, artists and musicians, were either empty, or gentrified out of existence. You could hardly get a meal, or a place to stay, with out a dumb phone with apps. Most of which were pretty buggy. I’ve managed to hold the line. My little flip phone meets my needs. Cash is going out of style. There was a lot more homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction, on display. There were more people sobbing. People were buried in their dumb phones, rather than conversing with other people, on the journey. Grand old inner city bus stations, have been closed. Now you’re lucky to find a concrete pad, in a shopping mall parking, lot, out in the suburbs.
That’s a lot of change, in 17 or so years. I guess Joni Mitchell was right, when she sang, in “Big Yellow Taxi.” “Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got Till it’s gone…” The World works hard, to keep us distracted and things of value just slip away. Lew
A few weeks ago I was reading an online post that described the difference between a “warrior” and a “soldier”. **
As the post unfolded what hit me rather forcefully was that, in contrast with a warrior who fights for personal glory and honour, a soldier is, quintessentially, a bureaucrat. A soldier is one of a team, and that team is part of a larger organisation, and a successful soldier is one who fights as a trained and working unit of that larger organisation, both supporting and assisting and adopting ITS larger, organisational, presumably “greater good” purposes.
And then I got to thinking that the original bureaucracies were either organised military bodies or organised religious bodies. And the soldier and/or the priest were, perhaps, the quintessential bureaucrats. Even the use of the collective term “body” here is a precursor to the notion of corporate “personhood.”
Anyway, I thought this might be of interest as a conversational theme here, so… 🙂
** I cannot now find the post that I read, and when I searched, I found a large number of hits on discussion forums, so I guess there are a lot of people talking about this.
JMG,
May I request that you offer some further comments concerning the final post that I included in the comment thread for last week’s post? I reproduce that post below:
“Thank you for your responses.
“I don’t think it is a matter of my not getting it. It is ultimately a matter, I think, of our disagreeing over whether it is meaningful and worthwhile to take up questions of cause and effect even in the context of complex realities that lend themselves more easily to morphological analyses than they do to causal analyses, given our limited epistemic perspectives. I maintain that it is worthwhile, whereas you maintain that it is not.
“I look forward to exploring our polite but fundamental disagreement about this further as you proceed with your series of posts on Peak Oil, which I am obviously following with great interest. I think we will both learn a lot from one another in the process.”
At this time, I would add to those remarks the following further questions, if I may:
1) Do you think that I have correctly delineated the essence of fundamental disagreement, with regard to the entire series of exchanges that you and I have had since you re began posting about peak oil on July 1st?
2) You have asserted that it is futile to employ causal analyses in the context of complex phenomena that exhibit a morphological structure (such as financial market patterns over time). Could you explain to me why this should be the case, given that the individual components or elements constituting the overall morphological structure surely are what they are due ultimately to the law of cause and effect that governs all phenomena in the real world?
My questions are directed to JMG in the first instance, but again, I invite anyone else who has a thoughtful opinion to share to chime in as well.
JMG,
Additionally, there is also a more particular matter of inquiry into whether the specific form taken on by a morphological structure as a whole, in contradistinction to other possible forms that that same morphological structure might possibly take, but does not, admits of causal analysis.
Here, it seems to me, the potentially meaningful and intellectually fruitful line of inquiry revolves around determining which particular causes exogenous to the morphological structure, but nevertheless exerting an effect on the way its form unfolds over time, help to account for why the morphological structure develops in one possible way, rather than in a different possible way – where the possibilities in question arise from laws governing the development of the morphological structure that are inherent to the morphological structure itself.
Thank you in advance for your considerations regarding these deep and difficult questions. I hope our discussion is as helpful to you in further refining your own thinking on these matters as it is helpful to me in refining mine.
@ Robert M and @ JMG – re connections between Celtic languages and Berber languages
Many years ago I watched “Atlantean”, a three part documentary on Irish broadcaster, RTE, made by Bob Quinn (whose work history and biography is described here):
https://www.documentary.org/online_feature/atlantean-and-communal-cinema-bob-quinn
His general theme was the way that people who live along the shores of the seas and rivers wrapping around Europe and North Africa may have closer cultural and linguistic connections with one another than with the technically closer peoples living inland from them, and his specific theme was how these Atlantic connections had shaped Irish language and culture.
If I remember this rightly, there were scenes in the movie in which an Irish speaker travelled among Berbers in (I think) Morocco, and found that they could actually understand quite a bit of what was being said in that language. But even more so, there was a fascinating connection drawn between some of the musical forms used by the Berber people and the “sean-nós” tradition of singing in Irish. (This specific tradition is an a capella form, no instruments, and it is quite distinct in sound from some of the other forms that people think of as “Traditional Irish Music.”)
The documentaries were fascinating, and now I am on the search to find them again. 🙂
It just occurred to me that one of the biggest forms of insanity happening is that despite having passed peak oil, we have these current wars, that are probably related to oil and access to it, so it is being blown up, and wasted. “If I can’t have it, no one can have it!”
Northwind Grandma #168
I, too, am a Northwind Grandma living in the country in the Driftless area of Dane County, WI. If our emailing each other would be to your liking, just let me know. However, if you’d like to exchange emails, I do not know how we connect via the Comments section of ecosophia.net?
JMG et al.,
Karl Denninger just published a very illuminating article explaining the essential nature of the fraud underlying the much of the hallucinated wealth of the AI bubble. Here is the link:
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?blog=Market-Ticker
Essentially, over a trillion dollars in sum total has already been invested by the various large AI companies in the building of AI data centers that are not yet in use. The fraud consists in the fact that this over trillion dollars in debt does not show up on the financial spreadsheets of these companies.
Thus, the fact that these companies in the aggregate are over a trillion dollars poorer in the real world than their hallucinated balance sheets claim they are constitutes a very significant com-ponent of the current financial bubble. (Many companies might probably be properly regarded as bankrupt, that is, as unable ever to recover and repay this debt even under the wildly best-case assumptions regarding the eventual performance of AI as a technology in the real world.)
The question is when this AI bubble will pop, and what the nature and magnitude of the resulting financial crash will look like.
If one views this bubble strictly in morphological terms, one might meaningfully ask this question in terms of inquiring into the timing in the future of when the popping and subsequent crash will happen, given the magnitude of the hallucination involved, with the hallucination itself being understood as a morphological signal.
It seems to me, though, that it is further meaningful also to ask and try to answer causal questions as well. One type of causal question concerns the dynamics of causality inherent to the morphological structure itself. The question inquires into the details of the causally connected chain of dynamic factors that connect the over-trillion-dollars in hallucinated wealth as a contributory remote cause to the timing, nature, and magnitude of the eventual popping of the bubble and subsequent crash as an end-effect. This represents an inquiry into the causal laws that are inherent to the morphological structure of the AI bubble itself.
Furthermore, it also seems meaningful to ask how factors extrinsic to the AI bubble itself, such as the actual performance of AI technology in the real world (which is not yet known, and about which much controversy swirls), or such as the vice-grip exerted on the morphological structure of the AI bubble by the real-world reality of Peak Oil and other energy constraints (which materially affects the rate at which the actual trillion dollar buildout happens, or whether it will happen at all), will also exert their respective causal impacts on the timing, nature, and magnitude of the crash of the AI bubble as an end-effect.
What say all of you? Are these questions of cause and effect only theoretically meaningful in a very abstract sense at best, or are there practical means of inquiry whereby not merely the causal questions, but also the answers to them, become meaningful approximations to the actual truth concerning the matters involved?
Hey JMG and MD
On the subject of pre-industrial birth control, I recall reading that the Maasai had a technique of abdominal massage that was used to induce abortion, and a DuckDuckGo search has shown that this is currently done in Southeast Asia as well.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5920165_Thousand-year-old_depictions_of_massage_abortion
I also recall reading about copper diaphragms being used, but they were abandoned because the copper produced green and poisonous compounds when in contact with mucus.
This blog post has a good summary of the various contraceptive options available to people throughout history, which may interest the commentariat.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080517045452/http://www.plannedparenthood.org/resources/research-papers/bc-history-6547.htm
Dear Northwind Grandma, my condolences for your loss, and prayers for you and Jeff!
Northwind Grandma, please accept my sincere condolences.
Scotlyn, thank you for your comments on Gaelic/Irish conceptualization of emotion! It would take truly encyclopedical erudition to estimate how many of the languages in the world conceptualize emotions the way English and other well-known European languages do.
JMG, that was a most interesting comment on the beginnings of the Apollonian civilization. When you say its origins lay in Asia Minor, do you mean places like Lydia and Ionia, or further east? And what characteristic features of the Apollonian civilization do you see arising in the Levant? I can more easily think of Egyptian origins for temple architecture and statues, for example. Do you mean the polis organization?
Mary Bennet #149
In the “Dupe of Gold ” of Apuleio ( Roman Empire , Augustus time) is described an thetrical representation in wich Venus (Afrodita) is representes by an extremely beautiful young woman with platinun blonde Air.
“Robert, exactly. The thing that makes the living Celtic languages fascinating is that Gaulish, the only one of the continental Celtic languages for which there’s a decent corpus of texts, doesn’t seem to have had the distinctive features of the living languages. The Bretons are descended from refugees who fled Roman Britain for Gaul during the Saxon invasions, which is why their language has the features in question…”
Did you know J.R.R. Tolkien once called Welsh “the senior language of the men of Britain”?
The Celtic languages are also among only 12% of languages in the world to have a verb-subject-object syntax. Gaulish is believed to have still been spoken as late as the late 6th Century and Galatian (a remarkable Celtic language in what is now Turkey) is recorded as still being spoken as late as the 4th Century!
As an archdruid, what do you think about the idea of a reality where the Celtic world remains much larger without being wedged between the Roman and Germanic worlds as in our world?
JMG,
What do you think of Strong Towns, both the book (if you’re familiar with it), and the movement, as a way to help mitigate the long decline?
@ Northwind grandma: my condolences for your loss.
Mr. Greer .. ‘aches and pains’, ‘hands and knees’…. yeah, I grok what you’re sayin. I definitely ain’t no spring neo-dinosaur, that’s why most of my garden space is comprised of 3’x6’x12″ raised beds. Just high enough to make bending over not too arduous, .. and not so wide as to make reaching cumbersome, but still at a level where working with tools does not become awkward. My double plot is such that said beds surround a small center ‘court’ yard*, with about a 3″ layer of flat alder chips laid down; slightly springy .. but firm enough to make walking around quite comfortable.
*I, being the King of Green after all… ‘;]
@ Northwind Grandma
I am so so so sorry for your loss.
I’ve watched my mother grieve when dad died in March of 2022. 63 years of marriage.
Take your time to grieve and remember and love.
Only you know how much time you’ll need.
Gnat @ 188, I strongly recommend a recent book titled The Golden Road. Its subject is early India.
Anselma @ 196, I have seen photos of the coinage of Cleopatra (VII, I believe). In that form of antique propaganda, she was at pains to emphasize her Egyptian identity having herself depicted in Egyptian garb, in reverent posture before an indigenous deity. The Ptolemys had successfully ruled Egypt for almost three centuries by Cleopatra’s time, so I think it is debatable how Greek they remained. I wish I we had a good history of Ptolemaic Egypt available in English.
Mary Bennet #149
Excuse me, I meant donkey, not “Dupe” . But studyin a little bit about this topic I have found that, acording with the Illiada , Helen had a beautiful hair, but they don’t say that she was blonde, but they say the Menelao was blonde in several passages So that is probably that , according the Illiada, Helen was not blonde.
The Greeks didn’t linked Aphrodita with the planet Venus, but the Romans did It and I guess that this explain our image of a platinun blonde godess .
The time span of the literary treatment of this myth linked to a war ocurred in 1200 b.J.C. and writen in 800 b.J.C. finish the year 30 b.J.C. (Apuleio).
A precedent of the cult to Aphrodita could be the ancient black virgins that are frequent in Western Europe (Notre Dame, Lledo, Monserrat ) wich now are adored like variants of the Virgin Mary
@JMG: Do you have a source for that report that Thoreau went home to have lunch with his mom? That is a really interesting tidbit.
Siliconguy @ 177: Those V-12 Mercury outboards look like a godsend for drug runners and coastal pirates who aim to be able to outrun just about anything else on the water. And I doubt that the cost is any obstacle to a big time drug runner. I watched the sales video and noticed how often the Mercury rep emphasized how QUIET these big motors are; quiet = stealthy. Experienced boaters prefer diesel over gas anyway; much less likely to explode or catch on fire.
I just saw this in an email–advertising their garlic–from the seed company, migardener:
The recent Cyclospora outbreak linked to commercially processed lettuce is a reminder of just how many hands and steps fresh produce goes through before it reaches our plates.
The outbreak has NOT, NOT been linked to even one single home garden. Not, I am sure, for want of trying by FDA investigators.
For what it might be worth, I consider migardener to be an exemplary, virtuous company.
Anselmo @196
Thank you. I knew that, but I don’t think that was why they picked Elizabeth Taylor.
Stephen
@ Untitled-1 #193
“A key part of addressing a person’s behavior is meeting them where they’re at, and understanding what led them to take an action in the first place. If you don’t know where they are, you don’t know where they need to go either. That goes when evaluating yourself as well, of course. Perhaps especially so.”
I suppose my personal limitation at figuring out the “why” may restrict me somewhat in this regard.
However in very general terms, I mostly assume that people act because:
1) we are alive and embodied, and life keeps happening at us at speed, and so we “happen” back as and how we can, given ALL of the stresses and strains action around and within us at any given moment, and without ever getting the chance to rehearse beforehand; and that the actions we take under those circumstances will have consequences that range between the Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Unknowable… 😉
2) we can,
3) our acts seem good to us (for some quantity of “us”) at the moment we take them.
Also in very general terms, I mostly assume that where any of us needs to go from here, is wherever any useful lessons from our experiences are able to take us.
Anyway, thank you for your very considered responses! These are exactly why I love coming here. 🙂
KAN, in my case it’s not a philosophical principle, it’s simply utter boredom with Hollywood’s excretions and the verbal flatulence of those with more dollars than sense. I’d rather watch paint dry.
Luke, yes, and it happens tolerably often if a person achieves enlightenment in one life but still has enough karmic connections to work off that another life or two is on the schedule. Very often such people stay single, make few or no karmic connections, accomplish remarkable things, and then die rather suddenly.
Robert, that certainly seems to follow. Roman records indicate that during the first centuries of the common era there were still hunter-gatherer peoples, known to the Romans as Attecotti, in northern Scotland, and the Picts were a mix of Brythonic-speaking Celts and a group of unknown antecedents speaking an equally language that survives only in a few Ogham inscriptions. (Example from a stone in the Shetlands: “ettocuhetts ahehhttann hccvvevv nehhtons.” That last word is probably the Pictish name Nechtan but the rest is a complete mystery.) The evidence suggests a shorter, dark-haired population there, in the Welsh and Cumbrian mountains, and in southern Ireland, speaking “language X,” who were jumbled up with the rest of the population in the chaos that followed the collapse of Roman power.
Ecoprayer, thanks for this as always.
William, so noted, and thanks for the heads up.
Untitled-1, glad to hear it. I trust I can say “Keep whacking!” without being misunderstood. 😉
Michael, thank you. If it’s enough, I’ll probably do so in a British pub!
Lew, thanks for the data points.
Denizen, I thought you misunderstood what I was saying. Let me try again. I do not believe that causal explanations are, or can ever be, anything but “just-so stories” along the lines of Kipling. Since every event in the universe has an infinite number of causes, ultimately extending out to the furthest bounds of the cosmos and the beginning of time, any attempt to single out some small subset of those causes and build an explanation on that basis is foredoomed to failure, and the resulting narratives are no different than any other fairy tale. Please understand that I mean this literally and it is a considered opinion.The reason I said “you still don’t get it, do you?” in that earlier discussion is that all your questions reliably cycle back to trying to push me into talking about causal relationships. That’s not a game I’m willing to play; if I want to write a fairy tale, I’ll do that in the context of fantasy fiction, thank you very much.
Your additional inquiry is a case in point. Once again you’re trying to shove a causal scheme onto a situation too complex for causality to make any kind of sense. That’s certainly your right, if you find such habits appealing, but intellectual onanism of that kind doesn’t interest me at all, because such methods have so miserably consistent a record of yielding failed predictions when applied to complex phenomena. Narrative form provides a much more effective tool for thought here, which is why ancient cultures (smarter than ours in many ways) used narratives to pass on their morphological schemes, and developed narrative-based predictive systems such as astrology. Yes, I know your instant comeback will doubtless be “But what causes that?” or something of the sort — but if it is, that simply shows me that you’re not listening. I do not care what causes it. I do not believe causation is a useful concept. I quite understand that you disagree but please do me the courtesy of accepting that my take on this is what it is.
Scotlyn, interesting. I also note that the so-called Celtic cross, the cross in a circle, is also found quite reliably around that basin — in the Celtic lands, in the Congo basin (the Bakongo cosmogram), in native North America (the medicine wheel), and much more. Some occult traditions hold that all these are descendants of a primary Atlantean spiritual emblem.
Prizm, insanity is one way to describe it. Another is that it’s a cold but rational strategy of denial, aimed at making sure that no rival power gains the advantage of undepleted fossil fuels.
Anon #203, if Northwind is agreeable, the two of you can both post comments marked NOT FOR POSTING with your preferred emails, and I’ll put you in touch with each other.
Denizen, thanks for this. From a narrative point of view, the discovery of previously unacknowledged debt on the grand scale is an important plot engine, and Denninger — a very smart guy — is treating it as such: he’s comparing the current story with similar plot twists in two earlier stories, and on that basis, he’s suggesting that the current story will end the same way. The timing remains unpredictable, as stories this complex don’t usually have strictly defined timelines, but the destination is certain. That being the case — well, do you know the story about old Joe Kennedy and the shoe shine boy?
One day in the summer of 1929 Kennedy (JFK’s dad) took the train down to Wall Street to do some business and, as one did in those days, stopped to get his shoes shined. While that was happening, the boy who was polishing his shoes offered him a stock tip. Kennedy paid the kid, went straight to his broker and cashed out all his considerable stock holdings on the spot, moving the money into the safest of safe securities. You see, he knew that story; he knew that when shoe shine boys are starting to pay attention to the market, speculation has soared beyond reason and a crash is inevitable. He didn’t worry about what causes that, and he didn’t try to time it. And that, my children, is why you’ve heard of a family named Kennedy; old Joe got his family through the crash of 1929 with its assets completely intact, when so many other rich people lost everything. They paid attention to arguments about causation, which turned out as usual to be wrong; he paid attention strictly to morphology. There’s a moral there, for those apt to learn it.
J.L.Mc12, of course. There are an immense number of ways to prevent or end an unwanted pregnancy. The Planned Parenthood paper, typically, ignored most of them — herbal contraceptives and abortifacients were common in many cultures, methods of massage ditto, and many of the women who went to “take the waters” at famous spas in early modern and modern Europe were there to get abortions by uterine lavage. It’s a very complex history that few people know these days.
Aldarion, the crucial Levantine features that became central to eastern Mediterranean civilization, and thus to its Greek forms, were a writing system simple enough to permit widespread literacy, the first drafts of what became the polis system (especially government of independent city-states by elected magistrates), economic specialization dependent on maritime trade, and the rise of effective infantry warfare and the concomitant collapse of agrarian aristocracies based on chariot warfare. Those spread, largely via the Phoenicians at first, all over the Mediterranean basin and further afield in some directions.
Gunstone, being a Druid doesn’t make me some kind of honorary Celt, you know. (The Irish have a good crisp term for Americans who LARP at being Celtic; they call them “plastic Paddies.”) As with your previous alternate-history notions, I’ll pass.
DaHoj, it’s a valuable piece of the puzzle. I don’t know how much it’ll accomplish but I certainly can’t fault the people involved for giving it a good solid try.
Polecat, so noted! We’ll see what happens; my current living situation is doubtless a temporary transition, but heaven knows what’ll come next.
Phutatorius, I read it in a bio of him many years ago. Sorry to say I don’t recall more than that.
Mary, an excellent point!
@ Lew #197
I think you might enjoy the work of blogger, Chris Arnade, as he journals his various “Walks around the World”… 🙂
https://walkingtheworld.substack.com/
JMG: Data point: William’s comment (#191) about the problems he has had involving the proper display of the number of comments is one I have been having for some time (a month or two) as well (I am in Canada).
Data point on a completely unrelated issue: You have repeatedly stated how difficult it must be to be a satirist these days because of how crazy the reality surrounding us is. Are you aware that the same thing was stated in the days of the Roman Empire? Juvenal, in his first Satires, describing the moral decay of Imperial Rome in his time, exclaims (verse 30) that as a result of said moral decay and accompanying craziness, “it is difficult not to write satire” (“Difficile est satiram non scribere”). This was my late supervisor’s favorite Latin quote, and as a grow older I increasingly understand why…
Lew (#197): Joanna Pocock’s experience definitely matches mine: I have been travelling by bus and by train in North America (Canada more than the United States) for over two decades, and it would have been difficult not to notice the physically ever-worsening infrastructure of the stations/terminals and the growing number of homeless/mentally ill/drug-addicted individuals clustered in the vicinity. Plus the near-extinction, thanks to “social” media, of random conversations with fellow travelers (which used to be part of what made such trips pleasant and worth the extra time).
Aldarion (# 207): Cross-linguistic (and thus, cross-cultural) study involving the vocabulary/semantics of emotion is a difficult task, and is NOT for the faint-hearted. If you really wish to delve deeper into the issue, I recommend starting with Anna Wierzbicka’s work on the topic (Her 1992 book SEMANTICS, CULTURE, AND COGNITION: UNIVERSAL HUMAN CONCEPTS IN CULTURE-SPECIFIC CONFIGURATIONS (Oxford University Press) is a good introduction to her assumptions/methodology, and it contains an excellent discussion of the topic of universal versus culture-specific emotions on pages 119-179). Better still: she writes VERY well, with a lucid clarity which means that little to no background in linguistics, anthropology or psychology is required to fully understand her work.
Gunstone (#209): Yes, Modern Celtic languages belong to the minority of languages which are verb-initial. But among other such languages one could list Malagasy, the national language of Madagascar. Which fact has not made any linguist assume that Berber and the Modern Celtic languages must have both had a Malagasy substrate! Beyond verb-initial syntax, Modern Celtic and Berber have about as much in common with one another as either does with…well, Malagasy, actually, or indeed any randomly selected language with verb-initial syntax. And the historical changes which have turned the older, more Greek- or Latin-looking form of Celtic into the Modern Celtic languages just as often often involved changes AWAY from a Berber-like structure. Combine this with the absence in Modern Celtic of even a single word which can credibly be directly connected to Berber, and I simply cannot believe the thesis that Modern Celtic was in any significant way influenced by a Berber-like language.
@Etienne (#195):
I’m happy to stand corrected about the details of the history of the Celtic languages. I know something about the cultural-linguistic history of Europe and neighboring parts of Asia, but (as I mentioned toward the start of this discussion) I know virtually nothing about the grammar and lexicon of any Celtic language. So thank you very much!
As for pidgins and creoles, my theoretical understanding of the goes back to a deeply inspiring course taught by Dell Hymes at UC Berkeley in 1963/4, and my keeping up with subsequent research on the topic only over the next decade or so. I do not remember any mention in the literature that I read then of the absence of bound morphemes in pidgins and creoles, but the fact itself makes good sense.
During the ’60s, courses in the Linguistics Department at UC Berkeley were still generally taught on the theoretical basis laid down by Boas and Sapir — essentially pre-Bloomfieldian anthropological linguistics. (The long-term chairman of the department at that time had been one of the last living linguists to have studied the subject with Franz Boas personally.) And Dell Hymes fit right into that same milieu, which was probably why the Department hired him in the first place.
My own interests were mostly focused on the anthropological linguistics of half-dead “sacral languages,” that is, languages still actively used in ritual practice, but which had no native speakers. (Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I occasionally called them linguistic zombies, or “zombie languages.”) The users of these languages are mostly native speakers of a number of closely related modern languages. In the absence of any thorough grammars and dictionaries of these languages, their users generally understand their sacred texts by close comparison with the grammar and lexicon their several related native languages. This means that one and the same sacred text will be understood and parsed in somewhat different ways by speakers of different related native languages, and also that no one of these several understandings and parsings is more “correct” than any other, anthropologically speaking.
And all that, with the addition of Benjamin Lee Whorf to Boas and Sapir (and Hymes), still remains my own maverick theoretical basis as a linguist. I have always instinctively hated being an up-to-date card-carrying, true-blue member of any group of people, any “team” or “profession,” so such a maverick stance is the only one possible for me.
“Since every event in the universe has an infinite number of causes, ultimately extending out to the furthest bounds of the cosmos and the beginning of time, any attempt to single out some small subset of those causes and build an explanation on that basis is foredoomed to failure, and the resulting narratives are no different than any other fairy tale.”
Actually, I think this passage addresses my personal experience and my awareness of my limitations, rather well. It seems that a person’s “intention” is generally held to be *the cause* of their action, but in fact any given action will arise from everything in the universe that has created any stress or strain upon that person “out to the furthest bound of the cosmos and the beginning of time”…. And while we are all good (including myself) at coming up with “reasons” – anything I or anyone else comes up has always appeared to me to be little different to “any other fairy tale.”
Incidentally, this whole topic was brought home to me not five minutes ago when I dropped something in the kitchen and my lovely husband said what he habitually says at such times – “why did you do that?’… And as I habitually do, I rolled my eyes… because, truly, I have no idea! 🙂 I mean… let’s start with, “well… I was born…” Lol!
@gnat, I feel flattered by your request for books about ancient (pre-Greek) civilizations, but my reading has always been a bit haphazard. Whenever I developed an interest in some particular place and time, e.g. the beginnings of Chinese civilization or the end of the Roman Empire, I have tried to read all freely downloadable archaeological or historical articles on that subject, or read such articles online e.g. at JSTOR.
Some books that do come to mind are
– “What Makes Civilization?” by David Wengrow. You can skip the section about the present, which is rather dated and opinionated. The book is short, but there is a lot of information packed into it which is much newer and quite different from what one usually learns in school or from lay historical overviews. The references are excellent.
– “Pre-Industrial Society” by Patricia Crone, a general overview of how pre-industrial civilizations worked. Patricia was a consummate polemicist in her own area of Islamic origins, but this book is mainstream, very readable and recommended for introductory history courses at universities.
– “A Study of History” by Arnold Toynbee. Quite dated, very long and not all mainstream, but full of facts, narrated in his own very personal voice. I would recommend not only the first two volumes, but also the last (or second-to-last?) called Reconsiderations, which introduces his ideas about the Aramean-Hellenic culture compost.
If you are looking at specific times and places, there are also the “official” series of handbooks, e.g. I read the Cambridge History of Ancient China.
@Denizen of Hillside (#199) posits a “law of cause and effect that governs all phenomena in the real world.”
I cannot accept that such a hypothetical law applies, even in the so-called real world. That law is an illusion.
For me, the universe (in which you and I live) has been experienced throughout most of my 83 years as an immense, sentient, living being, not bounded by the parameters of time and space, matter and energy; it has with a will and an understanding of its own. And its incomprehensibly vast existence means that it appears to be unchanging to such a short-lived, ephemeral species as homo sapiens. It is this false perception of an unchanging, wholly material and energetic universe that creates the illusion of causes and their effects. This false perception also lies at the base of the common human folly of treating Deities and other such immaterial beings as vending machines to be used instead of partners with whom one can and must cooperate, and whom one can court to gain their cooperation.
JMG,
The Iranians are showing that in modern warfare the most important weapon is the good old fashioned cave, In combination with moveable drones and missiles. In this latest stage of the war the Iranians seem to be taking advantage of the US’s technological arrogance and dependence on air defense missiles instead of deep physical cover for its bases . The Iranians are methodically destroying one after another of us military bases ,moving outward from the closest to Iran.
Soon, all US Air power and air tankers will be bottled up in Israel for ( possible) destruction.
In the mean time the dwindling US stockpile of stand off munitions is leaving them with limited options in hitting Iran. Having most of its military, especially drones and missiles hidden deep under ground has put Iran in the drivers seat on this latest stage of the war.
This is also causing the intentional or unintentional removal of us military presence and responsibility in most of the Middle East.
Miguel 144 (and all the commentariat)
Thank you for your generosity (and generosities, plural). Everyone! I am overwhelmed with the large number of people who have posted condolence notes.
Everyone has permission to send whatever sort of prayers (by any name) you have mind to.
I believe positive intentions get translated into the universal language of kindness and compassion.
Female St. Julian of Norwich in 1300s England is but one example, where she prayed for her devastated society caused by the Black Plague: “All will be well,“ she repeated.
This after half the people she knew had died of plague. Half,— can you imagine?
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@JMG
Ha! Indeed, no misunderstandings here 🙂 I’ll keep whacking ’till the cows come home!
@Scotlyn #220
“I mostly assume that where any of us needs to go from here, is wherever any useful lessons from our experiences are able to take us.”
Lessons and experiences can serve as useful signposts, certainly! Apart from understanding oneself internally, simply triangulating from consistent patterns in the lessons one encounters over and over again, and where they seem to lead should accomplish much the same thing. In fact, one can argue it’s a more reliable method when the self is so prone to self-deception!
It’s true that doing all of this in real-time, given all of the factors involved, isn’t at all easy, and even for those who rely on introspection like me, a topic often has to be revisited multiple times (possibly even for years) before it can finally be seen with a degree of clarity!
“thank you for your very considered responses! These are exactly why I love coming here.”
Of course! Thank you for sharing your thoughts as well, I found them similarly enriching 🙂 It’s hard to find such a well-considered commentariat just about anywhere on the internet these days, so I feel lucky to be here, too.
For what it may mean to anyone, they’re flogging a fancy dancy civilization recovery manual on youtube. It’s this big tome with ornate decorations, advertised as papyrus printed, supposedly hand made, and it really strikes me as more of a coffee table decoration for rich people of a certain intellectual set than anything, although others may have a different take on it. I don’t think there’d be takers for it in this crowd, but that such a thing is being promoted might be a brush stroke of detail on someone’s intellectual landscape.
Not related to that, or anything in particular, I had a thought about reincarnation. I imagine that it’s not necessarily limited to this solar system, is it? I mean if someone had a dream about star travel, they might get to experience it that way even though material plane starships won’t ever be a thing. I don’t know why that shouldn’t be the case.
Northwind: I’m sorry for your loss.
Four Sided Circle 151
Not to mention that STEM females will not be able to find a male mate. They have set the bar so high that, by age 40, each female will not have bumped into a male that fits their high specifications.
Working-class jobs for males are the in-thing. STEM females mating with working-class males. Not a chance. Too low on the status scale.
I have a niece (“Millie”) who is in this category, born 2001. Both parents forced her into everything-STEM. She got a B.S. in Bioengineering. I can’t think of a more grotesque subject to major in.
From what I hear, she works (at high pay) on a top-secret team inventing some machine to insert into a human brain. Microchip? Artefusal unintelligence? The stuff nightmares are made of. None of the three have any ethics at all. They live by money-money-money.
Millie’s parents paid Millie’s way through college through saving for her education; Millie has no college debt. Her grandmother left Millie at least $500K (that the grandmother’s boyfriend embezzled via his New Yrk Cty stationary store from 1950-1990) (the whole thing was several millions $, mostly from Fedral govmint contracts.) The parents are not rich, but scrounge to be. They don’t realize that “nouveau riche” is not going to happen.
Millie has 500K to put on a down-payment of a house. This is a nouveau riche family who thinks money buys happiness.
Back to mates.
I think years will pass-by Millie, and she will be 35 before she starts to panic.
Another thing is that Millie’s physique is so delicate, I think she will die before 35. Essentially, unless Millie bears children early (before 30), she won’t have any.
But I don‘t think she will find anyone to whom her parents will say yes. The guy would have to be perfect. Particularly the guy would have to have the correct “will suck up to Millie’s parents” attitude. Millie has no mind of her own; no autonomy. She is a little robot that her “parents built,“ a pressure cooker left on the burner too long.
They believe in STEM. STEM is their religion. Nothing matters except STEM. STEM will eventually strand them.
Millie is not the only STEM female who will not be able to find a suitable male, much less stay married for 40 years, much less stay healthy, much less ditch her parents’ malevolent influence.
Time will tell.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
About that Nolan movie: I guess people are simply sick and tired of Hollywoke’s race-switching being so one-directional. The Greeks weren’t black, their heroes and gods and goddesses weren’t, either. I bet nobody would ever dare to make a movie where, say, Anansi is being played by a white actor. Because that’d be raaacist.
Anyway, I don’t watch Hollywood excretions anymore, so I don’t care one way or the other.
JMG,
Yes, coal would be far better as fuel, but even that was hard to come by back then. It was far more common to burn charcoal or wood chips. I even know about a gasogene engine that powered a well pump which would run on almond husks. I just hope we won’t end up burning forests in a desperate – and futile – attempt to replace fossil fuels.
JMG 154
>Northwind, thank you for the details on Jeff’s inner wound. I can certainly focus some healing prayer on that. Would you be okay if practitioners of Essene healing were to direct energy toward that? It’s something that spiritual healing can often handle quite well.
Yes. That would be wonderful. Essene healing sounds like just the thing. I shall pay more attention when the subject of Essence comes up.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG 154
>I love watching bees, especially the odd native varieties — are a little more my style.
The story goes that the fictional Sherlock Holmes retired to the south of England, and took up beekeeping to keep himself occupied.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Possible schizophrenia / bipolar self-treatment: lick a lithium battery… you get some lithium & shock treatment at the same time.
I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice.
JMG: My comment (#190) generated a message stating that my comment was already posted. It was after I posted once. I was also able to back arrow to the previous page. That is when I saw the typo (mourning, not morning!)
Just for your tech’s information.
I second Scotlyn (#222) recommendation of Chris Arnade. I like his point of view.
JMG (#221) Your reply to Gunstone (#209) made me chortle. Plastic Paddies, indeed. My genome is about 90 percent Irish/Scotch, and my mother was born in Glasgow, of Irish parents, and I would never claim to be a celt. I’m a PNW USAMERICAN, and there was a reason my ancestral O’Neil came here. That all said, I’m applying for Irish citizenship, if only to have the option of Victoria BC. No matter where I end up, there I am.
Phutorius (#217) Thoreau was always dependent on the kindness of friends and family. His cabin was on property owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. He walked to town a lot. He was kind of doing the Sovereign Citizen dodge long before it was cool! (jk)
Forget STEM, get with HEM… Humanities, Ecology, Memory. I wrote a piece about…
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/hem-humanities-ecology-memory
I’ve been reading some reviews about “The Odyssey” in MSM and online in my country, and it’s interesting: most of them seem positive. Well, I can tell you there’s a noisy minority who’s made some negative criticisms against Nolan (a film maker who’s loved or hated without any middle ground).
It’s sad and funny alike I can see two main groups of people making criticisms against last Nolan movie, though by different “reasons”.
First, a few woke feminists who despise how Nolan (and Homer?) has shot a movie whose main character is a straight white man (horror!), who’s married in a “heteronormative” relationship with a straight white woman (more horror!) and he has some fling with another woman (horror again!). Nobody has never said classics and their new REAL artistic versions are a model of traditional morality, so it’s even more unlikely they respect the woke narrow doctrine…unless they become bullshale (which it isn’t the case of this movie).
On the other hand, some right wing people seem upset with that movie. Beyond some subterfuges to criticize it (lack of respect for Homer, “pacifism” and “feminism”: horror!), I think in a cynical mood, their main motive of concern is…They don’t like some minor characters in the movie were played by non White actors and actresses (horror!). Well, I remember old Fu Manchu movies, where main (evil) character was played by Christopher Lee, who evidently wasn’t a Chinese…Let’s draw a veil.
I tend to think that these ideological biased criticism against Mr. Nolan “Odyssey” by usual opposite zealots, show this time he nailed it. I also think he is under a genius like Kubrick, but looking at today commercial cinema, it’s a good movie, methink.
I do see similarities between Phoenicians and Greeks. Would you classify ancient Israel as belonging to the same civilization as Greece? Much has been made over the millennia about the opposition between Athens and Jerusalem…
If you do consider all the Levant to have belonged to the Apollonian civilization even before Alexander, then the new religious and artistic impulse that Spengler called “Magian” would simply be a new and separate civilization, but on the same ground.
Just think of how great it would be for EMTs to roll up in an electric car to a domestic disturbance involving someone gone psycho, pop the hood, and have them lick the battery a few times. It could solve a lit of societal problems.
I have been pondering for some time about the obsession by people in government over box-cutters, or retractable blades. What is going on?
Ever since 11 Sep 2001, when men armed with these slipped through screening and used them to seize the planes, it seems they are The Most Dangerous Things On The Planet.
What brings it up now is how the Trump government is blaming ‘a person with a box-cutter’ for the 350-foot gash in Trump’s new vanity reflecting pool… the one he drove a motorcade through. Do these people have any idea how difficult it would be to cut a gash that long with a hand-tool? Even if it were wet paper, it’d be an enormous task.
Is this indicative of some deeper mind-virus that infecting the current administration, or are they just bugnuts crazy? The only other possibility I can think of is their pathological need to be right no matter what means they are functionally incapable of admitting to a goof-up or a bad idea (like driving metal vehicles over a vinyl mat).
JMG,
I admit I was a bit mind blown when I read your response, but it makes perfect sense. Many people are born with etheric and astral bodies and remain unconscious of them, so someone born with a mental body could be in the same situation. I think this is the case with this family friend. If I told you his autobiography I bet you’d nod along and agree, but I want to respect his privacy.
Another question. Have you heard the stories of giants (9-12 ft tall) still walking the earth? There’s a guy on Joe Rogan’s podcast right now dedicating three hours to talk about it. Apparently there’s some story of one being killed in the Middle East. The giant of Kandahar, apparently. Do you think modern giants are a possibility?
Ecoprayer 135
> 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.
This is good. Kindly add.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Stephen P. # 109:
“I bet Elon Musk’s rave against the movie probably helps its sales a lot. As they say ” there is no bad publicity””
Indeed, I thank him for it. Well done, Elon! You can guess I’m a big “Nolanist” myself, ha ha…but I’m not a big Mr. Musk fan, and I think i’m not the only one in this world who thinks the same thing. People who dislike Mr. Musk, will be Nolan movie audience soon.
————————————————————————
Northwind G. # 132:
“None of them believed in God, although I think Isaac did near the end of his life.”
Being an agnostic or an atheist isn’t the same as being always a bad person, according my personal life experience, and being a believer doesn’t make you always a good guy.
—————————————————————————
Phutatorius # 145:
“Christopher Nolan’s “black Helen” appears to me to be a deliberate poke in the eye of western civilization.”
I see you share the right wing narrative against Mr. Nolan. I’m glad you don’t disguise the real motive of your contempt against this movie under another bland subtefuges, like others have done. Well, like I’ve written before, it’s interesting you share a common hatred against this film maker, though by different motives, with a few woke feminists here, who despises the movie before it was released in theaters-ahem-). Interesting…
—————————————————————————-
JMG # 154:
Matt Walsh has his right to mock Nolan “Odyssey”, which I supose he’s watched before to make this criticism…However, I can say I’m not a liberal woman, but a straight middle aged white man, and I fairly liked it (though I can make some minor criticisms against it, like I’ve written in a comment before this one).
By the way, I think John usually doesn’t go to watch movies…
—————————————————————-
Justin P. # 155:
“I am surprised to hear there isnt a lot of gay sex in the movie, consideeing how long all those sailing sailors were cooped up together.”
Yes, it’s a very straight “hetero” movie, so I’m puzzled by the frantic attacks against it by some right wing people in my country (and I see the same attitude in another places…). The “gayest” thing in Nolan “Odyssey” is the very manly relationship between Odysseus and Eurilocus (his second in command). Well, blacks and more blacks…horror!
———————————————————————-
Joshua # 156:
“Do you have any opinion on Henry David Thoreau?”
I think he was an honest man, with a personal life philosophy not easy to follow in his times, and nowadays. He wasn’t perfect (for example, I guess he was quite misogynist), but he dared to oppose his time militarism and another evils in his times. I also think he was a pacifist to some extent, but it seems some people has picked his thoughts in this or that ideological agenda. Finally, I can tell you he was a very American man, IMHO, but his teachings can be good for people around the world. Indeed, I’ve read some Thoreau book translated to Spanish here.
@ Mary Bennet, you’d probably enjoy Nolan’s Lord of the Rings, then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReiIlKR_zqc
🤡
Northwind, if your niece has a delicate physique and a brilliant mind, something like her present career might be what is best for her. You might recall how many women used to die during or soon after childbirth. I, myself, developed the beginnings of the dreaded milk fever. Fortunately, I am blessed with a fairly strong constitution, and I knew what to do about the fever.
Renaisanseman#243
Really do you believe in the oficial explanation of 911 ?
Ecoprayer 135
> “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.”
————
An addition:
“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.”
————
Henry (tabby) has feline asthma, and a couple other health conditions. It was rare that Henry accepts anyone besides Jeff giving him medication, including me, much less touching him.
Jeff and Henry adored each other. They had bonded. Jeff was Henry’s person, and Henry was Jeff’s pussin. I am absolutely sure that Jeff is looking upon us, hoping Henry can master these new skills. Jeff used to tell Henry: first inhaler, then pill, then wet-food. No inhaler, no pill, no wet-food.
A miracle happened this morning: Henry allowed me to give him his inhaler-dose and give him his pill,— without biting me. May this become not a one-time deal. I was able to calm down Henry where he was less afraid.
The only person Henry would let touch him was Jeff. I sat down with Henry a couple times and talked to him, telling him that Daddy is gone, but that I am his friend, and he really “gots” to let me give him his medications regularly. Or else.
Our other cat, a flatface Persian solid cream color, is doing well.
I have been putting flower essences in Henry’s wet-food. And in the cats‘ drinking water; I have been doing this since 1995, with good results.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG
I’ve finally finished reading your book on the grail and wanted to get your thoughts on my current research/reconstruction of the Templar’s mysteries. I’m under the assumption that sometime after the first crusade, the Templars likely rediscovered ancient Gnostic texts in Edessa. I say this because according to Edessa’s own historical records and the testimony of St. Ephrem the Syrian, Gnostic Christianity was not only the first and dominant form of Christianity in Edessa, it was so dominant in fact that Gnostics were recognized as the true Christians and the orthodox were considered the schismatic heretics (being called Palutians instead, because of a bishop named Palute). Based on the reports of the Templar’s confessions and what we know about Gnostic rituals, I think it’s possible to (re)construct the Templar’s alleged ritual.
The basic outline goes like this:
An initiate is given a robe (probably black, brown, or gray in color) along with a secret prayer or series of prayers that they were to memorize and were told to meet at a location wearing only the robe. When they arrive the initiate was then likely blindfolded and taken to a secret location where the ritual was performed. The initiate would be brought to a building and a woman wearing a robe of the same color would act as the ritual director. She leads the initiate inside the building. The interior is made to look like the night sky. For the main core of the ritual, the initiate stands in the middle of the room and is “challenged” by seven knights who wear animal masks, have animal looking helmets, or the images of animals on their person somewhere. The knights chastise/threaten the initiate and the initiate must respond with the prayer(s) otherwise they fail. Once the seven are “defeated” they draw their weapons as if to attack the initiate, but the ritual director stops them revealing that she is Sophia and the initiate has been “redeemed.” After this the initiate is told to take off their robe (leaving them naked) and to give it to the leader of the knights. The initiate is then brought to an area with a pool of water. A man who is wearing white robes (or was likely naked) then takes the initiate and proceeds to baptize them in the name of the unknowable Father in heaven, Sophia the Holy Spirit and Christ, the Son. The initiate is then dunked in the water. While the initiate is underwater, the ritual director takes a lit torch and plunges it into the water above the initiate. (It’s also possible that they had oil on top of the water to have fire literally on the water). The initiate is then brought out of the water and given a white robe and is then instructed on whatever secrets the Templars had.
This ritual was likely a combination of two rituals found in Ancient Gnosticism called “redemption” and “the baptism of fire.” The redemption ritual was very flexible, but functionally is meant to have the initiate symbolically overcome the rulers/oppressors of the time. This was likely one of the reason the Gnostics looked so similar, but also had wildly different mythologies, they were likely adapting the same core ritual, but in different contexts with different symbolisms. The baptism of fire, or the bridal chamber, as the Valentinians called it, represented the initiates unification or “marriage” to their Holy Guardian Angel, which they believed came from Sophia. The “angel” appears as fire, because the image of angels as fire appears throughout the Bible, most notably the burning bush. In Luke 12:49-50 Jesus explicitly says that he has a baptism of fire. One robe being taken off and a different one being put on echoes Paul’s language of “taking off the old man and putting on the new.”
The grail likely represented the first serious stage of the initiation process after various harmless initiations to weed out potential blabber mouths.
Of course this is speculative and am curious if this makes sense as a ritual in your view? I’m guessing that the Elucidation is subtly adapting this ritual using Arthurian characters and symbols as a means of hiding the more overtly heretical elements from the eyes of the Catholics. As of now I’m looking into the number symbolism in the Elucidation to see if maybe there are more clues that can fill in the blanks. Will update if I find anything.
Northwind,
I’m very sorry to hear about your husband. I’m sending you best wishes during this difficult time. That is tough news.
samurai_47
Luke Z @ 244, please, go watch the charming classic, by now classic, movie The Princess Bride. Don’t bother with the book, which has a stupid factor of about 30-40%. Andre had a rare genetic condition in which his bones never stopped growing.
I just saw a youtube video in which a nice young lady was lamenting to Marjory Taylor Green about how she and neighbors felt betrayed by the Republican party. I can link on request, but the remainder is a lefty commentator who draws the wrong conclusions. I suspect this goes beyond specific policy decisions, although the Iran imbroglio seems to have been a last straw for many. Ever since about the late 50s-60s, the Republican Party has been the party of respectability. Nice people were Republicans. One’s boss, the town mayor, principal of the local school, local business owners, all were Republican. Now, following Jan. 6– call it what you like, this was not a good look for a party which claims respectability–, and worse, the Epstein hearings, the aura of nice, decent, respectable is wearing off. What was important about the Epstein hearings was not any particular revelation or concealment, but that they happened at all. This sort of airing of laundry was not ever supposed to happen to Our Side. Comments to the effect that elites throughout history have always been degenerates, true though the sentiment might be, are no consolation to folks who believed that Our Side was the guardian of goodness, justice and morality.
John Oneil 190
> do not forget to hydrate yourself
Thank you.
I have five 40 oz. water bottles around, one in each room that I frequent. I sip.
> Eating?
Somewhat. Today I had half a sandwich. I just popped in a ready-made dinner into oven.
Task by task. Today my task was to get into contact with Jeff/Jethro’s employer. Done √.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@ Cynthia Christie: If we want to save information long-term, the best way to do it would be to carve everything onto a giant stone wall, like Diogenes of Oinoanda did for Epicureanism:
https://archaeology.org/issues/july-august-2015/features/turkey-oinoanda-epicurean-inscription/
Hello JMG,
Thank you for your response. That does partially clarify where you were coming from, but it does also leave me puzzled as to the complete picture.
If I understand you correctly, you are not denying the universal generality of the principle of causality in a metaphysical sense, but only in an epistemological sense. That is to say, you would affirm that all events in the universe do in fact occur as determined effects of antecedent sets of causes sufficient to bring about those events, and that these causal relations in general exist as a matter of metaphysical necessity for all distinctly identifiable events.
However, beyond a certain level of situational complexity that you have not specified as of yet, you would deny that the cause of any given event can ever possibly be known definitively, at least by human beings, with the epistemic limitations inherent to our state. For any given event that is causally embedded in a larger web of causally interrelated events, past a certain threshold of situational complexity as yet unspecified, our knowledge of how it came about it is so insufficient that we cannot really know anything definite whatsoever about antecedent causality in those particular cases.
On the assumption that I am not mischaracterizing your position, permit me to pose the following additional lines of inquiry, so as to better understand your position in all of its ramifications:
1) Could you please be more specific about what level of situational complexity renders an attempt at causal analysis too epistemologically opaque to bother? You would certainly not say, I think, that a cause-effect situation as simple as one billiard ball striking another, and causing the other to move as an effect, reaches this threshold of opaqueness in situational complexity, would you? A causal situation that simple is fully within our epistemological grasp, is it not? I do not think you meant to affirm this, but I want to make sure that I am not misunderstanding any aspect of your position, because the questions at stake are vital.
2) Also, what about human mental or interior life? That is very richly complex and nuanced field of reality indeed, and yet in my day-to-day practice as a psychological counselor, I advance causal explanations concerning my clients’ inner workings in practically every counseling session I conduct – usually with considerable success, by their own account. Am I deluding myself – and them – here, and should I be using only morphological modes of analysis in working with them (of the sort supplied, for example, by the definitions of various syndromes in the DSM5-TR), and eschew causal modalities of helping clients understand their interior life entirely?
3) Thirdly, does your position not obviate the very epistemological possibility of rigorous empirical science? Modern empirical science prides itself on being able to apply the experimental scientific method, in a conceptually and logically rigorous fashion, to all kinds of complex real world phenomena (including in the mental realm), so as to ferret out and isolate causal connections that are often very deeply embedded within a complex network of complexly interrelated causal relations that serve, in their totality, to constitute whatever phenomenon in the real world may be under scientific investigation. As such, especially in the absence of a well-defined threshold criterion of causal complexity, that specifies the limit of complexity beyond which real world phenomena inherently admit of no further scientific investigation yielding any useful results, how is empirical science itself even possible given the position you have articulated?
4) Near the end of your reply, you assert the following: “I do not care what causes [any given thing or phenomenon that is embedded in a causal network beyond a certain threshold of complexity]. I do not believe causation is a useful concept. “ Perhaps, at their deepest core, our respective positions differ because my modalities of intellectual inquiry are fundamentally oriented toward, and motivated by, the pursuit of truth, whereas your modalities of intellectual inquiry are fundamentally oriented toward, and motivated by, the pursuit of the pragmatic and the useful, accompanied by a certain pessimism about the possibility of finding the truth itself. Is this possible? I must say that your posture also seems to embody a certain mode of pretty far-reaching philosophical skepticism that I do not and cannot share.
Please know and understand that I am pursuing this discussion with you as rigorously as I am because, as I said before, I hold your views on peak oil related subject matter in the highest regard. If that were not the case, I would not be bothering. I aspire toward a strictly disinterested pursuit of truth in my motivations for carrying on this entire discussion.
Untitled-1 193
> Faustian people
If a Faustian person wants to evolve into a good person, wash one’s own toilet. Adopt-a-toilet in one’s home, and wash it regularly. Just one. Not all the toilets around. Be responsible for only one. Caring for a toilet REALLY is not that bad. It really helps one’s psyche to see grunge vanish! It is a way to put order into one small corner of the universe.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@Northwind 235
First, my condolences. Your fondness for “Jethro” aka Jeff was obvious when you wrote about him. I’ll let others with more experience offer advice – I just want to acknowledge your loss and offer sympathy.
On the subject of the MOE (Modern Order of Essenes), I’ve just started the work myself last month, after volunteering for KyleC’s offer of healing hands that he posts on the Magic Monday threads over on Dreamwidth. Worth a try, right? The skeptics can call it the placebo effect; I felt an improvement. So if you are curious, here is where you can get the MOE papers off DreamWidth:
https://octagonsociety.org/archives/modern-order-of-essenes/
@JMG
I will be printing out the first pdf and giving it to friend of mine. She’s gregarious, very active in her church as well as being the VA Whole Health coach for the region’s pilot program. She gave me some unexpected feedback yesterday when we chatted – she says one of the nurses said something to the effect that since I’ve been in the WH program, I’ve become noticeably calmer and more cheerful. Apparently TSW enough for others to notice. (The VA’s whole health program includes not only nutrition/diet and various relaxation techniques, but also things like meditation, incorporating personal goals, and (for a while) art therapy.)
Fun little data point from me.
Katrina (formerly commenting as dfr1973, which I still am over on DW when I am not on that MS satellite)
Etienne 195
> take. care. of. yourself
Thank you. I appreciate it. I need remindin’!
Cordially,
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Etienne 195
> Sudeten German
The “Fran” I earlier mentioned, who is taking Jeff’s death very hard, is second-generation Sudeten German.
Her entire family survived World War II living in Eastern Europe. That in itself was a miracle.
They lived in the Sudeten area, and were unceremoniously expelled in late 1940s because they were ethnically German, still speaking German after being there for what, since roughly 1700. Her parents and she were born in Wisconsin, but both sets of grandparents were among those expelled. Fran has wonderful old-European stories told by one set of grandparents she knew best.
Fran’s German ancestors and my German ancestors fled Germany about the same time for the same reason: that the German aristocracy kept promoting genocide of commoner Germans in the Thirty Years War of the 1600s. The German aristocracy didn’t give a flying frack how many millions of commoner Germans they killed within their borders, 10 million? The number of people who were butchered, by the behest of the German aristocracy, in the 1600s, was appalling. Talk about “aristocracy gone wrong.” Why does this particular German genocide never see the light of day?
About 1700, Fran’s ancestors fled from Germany to Eastern Europe, and my ancestors fled from Germany to America.
For the first time, I have been reading histories about Germany. It is actually difficult to find German histories, almost like German history has been suppressed.
Over the centuries, Nazism is only one part of the German experience, and a rather organic part, too. Nazism didn’t come out of nothing. To understand the how, why, and where Nazism emerged “when,” is highly instructive.
Jews have selectively written biased angles about Nazism, which I feel is unfair.
Anyway, I won’t win fans by saying that people learn what non-Jewish authors have written about Nazism since 1945. People get bent out of shape real fast over this subject. To each his own.
It would be good to read German history written by non-biased authors.
Respectfully,
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Mr. Greer,
My mind was on space travel, and i was thinking about the Apollo missions, and Mr. Musk’s plans for Martian colonies. That got me wondering what do you think the fate of the souls of those who die in space is? If someone were to die on Luna, what would happen to them? Or on Mars, would their soul return to Earth for reincarnation? Would they be stuck reincarnating as Martian microbes, if such things exist? Maybe be carried away by one of those comets you mentioned as taking the spirits of those who consistently refuse to get with the program? If the Apollo 13 astronauts had perished in transit between Earth and Luna, or while over the surface of of Luna? Can you shed any light on this, or at the least, share your personal opinions?
Also, in the above comments of this post you were talking about how sometimes a soul will return to Earth if it has karmic ties, even after it’s reached a stage of development in which terrestrial incarnation would otherwise be rendered unnecessary; you mentioned that some of the characteristics of this type of person is that they make no, or few karmic bonds, but also accomplish great things. My question is, are these things not mutually exclusive? Wouldn’t accomplishing great things on Earth produce more karmic bonds? If not negative karma, then attachments and goals and such. Wouldn’t shedding attachments and goals be more in line of such a thing, and say, they’d end up living as a bum or something to suffer off the karma? Or is that the exact reason they’ve returned? That their entanglements in the world bring them back, and acting those out is what clears the karma, and the risk of making more karmic ties is just a hazard of the particular way of development those particular souls have taken?
Etienne, so noted and thanks for the heads up. That’s interesting, btw, that they’ve redefined pidgin and Creole to exclude grammatical elements; that wasn’t the case when I studied linguistics, admittedly quite a while ago. Is there a term nowadays for a mashup of multiple languages that does not shed its grammatical particles? As for Juvenal, thanks for the reminder!
Scotlyn, that’s basically my take on things, for whatever that’s worth.
Clay, it’s definitely turning into a fascinating test case in the limits of currently fashionable military technology. If it ends with a general withdrawal of US forces from the Middle East, though, I won’t complain.
Cynthia, I suppose the book might be useful for lighting fires, or perhaps in case of a toilet tissue shortage. As for going to different star systems, that’s an interesting point. On any given cosmic plane, such as the 7th (where we are) travel from star system to star system isn’t supposed to be possible — the Ring-Pass-Not at the boundary of each system is absolute. The other cosmic planes, however, fill the same space as ours — a good case can be made that if “dark matter” is more than a product of bad math, the other six planes are what that label stands for — and quite often a system from one of the other planes overlaps ours, so that souls can pass from one system to another that way. Mind you, once you’re there, if the system you’re on moves out of sync with ours, you’ll be stuck there until the two systems come back into conjunction, which can be many thousands of years! I suppose the moral of this story is “choose well.”
Miguel, I’m sorry to say we probably will, but it’ll be a temporary process at most.
Northwind, thanks for this. Healing energy en route — and I’d like to encourage other Essene practitioners to consider practicing their skills by sending healing energy toward Northwind, the soul of her husband, and also Henry the cat. As for Holmes, why, yes, that’s what Doyle wrote, so it may be taken as fact. Do you recall Vincent Starrett’s glorious sonnet “221B”?
“Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game’s afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears—
Only those things the heart believes are true.
“A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.”
Justin, er, have you been smoking a little too much of that wacky tobaccy, or what?
John, so noted! Yeah, I originally heard the term “plastic Paddies” from my late wife, who got it from the Irish music scene, where she had many friends. My paternal ancestry is almost entirely Scots, but I wouldn’t be so tacky as to claim to be anything but an American. My ancestors went out of their way to drop every trace of their ancestral culture the moment they came off the boat, and for good reason — the Highland clearances left deep scars.
Aldarion, it’s always impressed me how often ordinary sibling rivalry is inflated to cosmic proportions. Ancient Israel was on the other end of the Levantine spectrum, being a country of impoverished inland herders and farmers with no exportable crops — but it was still on the same cultural spectrum, and you can find traces of common cultural themes going way back — the Greek titan Iapetus appears in the Bible as Japheth, for example.
Renaissance, oh, it’s the natural response of a gizmocentric culture suddenly being told that all their hottest technology had just been defeated by a bunch of fanatic thugs with box cutters — the box cutters became fetishized.
Luke, I heard of the Kandahar giant. I doubt any such creature has a material existence on this planet just now, but of course not everything real is material.
Anon, thanks for this. That seems entirely workable as a ritual; weirdly, some elements of it appear to be present in a ritual of initiation that was used in some Druid Revival orders as recently as the mid-20th century. I hadn’t encountered the Edessan connection — can you point me to some books in English or French I can use to follow up on it? That’s a fascinating data point, and potentially a useful breakthrough.
Denizen, no, you’ve misunderstood me again, and once again you’ve done it in an attempt to force concepts of causality where, in my view, they don’t belong. I am in fact denying the reality of cause and effect relationships not merely as an epistemological heuristic but on a metaphysical and ontological basis. Let me try this yet again. I deny your claim that “all events in the universe do in fact occur as determined effects of antecedent sets of causes sufficient to bring about those events, and that these causal relations in general exist as a matter of metaphysical necessity for all distinctly identifiable events.” I freely agree that your claim can’t be defended epistemologically — even if your claim were true, that is, there is no way that we could know whether it was true or not — but it also cannot be justified on a metaphysical basis.
The “cause” of any event in our experience can only be the entire history of the universe, limited only by the fact that any given influencing factor must be able to have its influence reach that event within the limits of the speed of light. Thus any time you say “X causes Y,” unless by “X” you mean “the entire sequence of states of the universe from the Big Bang to the present,” you’re wrong. It really is that simple. Like so many people nowadays, you’ve fallen into the bad habit of mistaking convenient mental models as true statements about causes. We can model the behavior of billiard balls quite accurately by using a set of assumptions about solid bodies and motion, and that leads people to think that we’ve explained the behavior. Not so; physicists (and billiard players) simply have a mental model that appears to work fairly well to predict the behavior. Similarly, you have a set of narrative models you use to anticipate the behavior of your clients, and those narrative models are justified empirically because they allow you to anticipate, and to help clients anticipate, some of the complexities of human behavior, and I have a set of models that seem to do a decent job of predicting the process and consequences of resource depletion. That doesn’t make them true.
I recall a story from an anthropology class. An anthropologist and a !Kung hunter in the deserts of Botswana were following a group of antelope. The hunter told the anthropologist, “Pretty soon the young male will leave the others and go up into the hills.” Sure enough, a mile further along the trail, the tracks of the young male veered away from the others and headed for the hills. Impressed, the anthropologist asked the hunter how he knew that, and the hunter explained that it was very simple; at that time of year the young males of that kind of antelope always quarrel with their mothers-in-law and go off by themselves to sulk. The anthropologist recorded this, but didn’t take it seriously; he also didn’t, as far as I know, reflect on how the ecological models he used for antelope behavior were just as determined by the habitual stories of our culture as the hunter’s model was determined by his own cultural forces. Nonetheless, the hunter’s prediction was correct.
As for truth, Kant demonstrated two centuries ago that we can reasonably assume that truth exists but we have no access to it. Before his time, Giambattista Vico showed that we can only know what we make, reminding us that the word “fact” comes from the Latin word for “something that is made.” More recent work, exploring the way that the individual mind constructs the world of its experience out of the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sensory data using imagination and memory, has built on Kant’s insights. Whether you share that recognition is of course up to you, but that is in fact where I’m coming from.
KM Gunn, delighted to hear it. The Essene work really does seem to be one of the best parts of John Gilbert’s legacy, and I’m glad to see it getting into circulation.
Oatmeal, I don’t know what would happen to such souls; I don’t think anyone incarnate does. As for a soul returning to earth to clear up karmic ties, exactly — the great accomplishments are what’s necessary to unwind past karma and clear away remaining debts. The kind of bonds they avoid are the ones that grow out of close human relationships.
Hi John Michael,
I was reading an article in this mornings local news regarding the dust up in the middle east: US military damage sustained through Iran war marks ‘end of an era’ in Middle East strategy.
To be frank, the bias of the article was astounding, but one particular line jumped out at me: Despite US Central Command claiming attacks on more than 10,000 targets, Iran had still retained roughly 70 per cent of its pre-war missile stockpile, according to a New York Times report in May.
That’s an extraordinary claim about the alleged 70%, which in my opinion, appears to be unverifiable. How would anyone know such things at such a removed distance, unless they’re reading propaganda? In the fog of war such statistics on either side, are not to be trusted. The people in your forces lives are on the line, and at the very least there is a certain disrespect on display.
If I may say so, those who practice dark arts, and I define that as magic directed towards an ill intent, are at risk of falling for their own spells. Man, it’s kind of sad to see, and I really don’t know what else to say about it. There are always blowbacks…
Cheers
Chris
Justin Patrick Moore (no. 239), Rice University’s religion department also has its GEM (Gnosticism, Esotericism, Mysticism) program.
https://reli.rice.edu/what-gem
On race-flipping, has anybody been watching “The Chosen” (the one about Jesus, not Chaim Potok)? Jesus is played by a Chaldean (Assyrian Catholic)–which is as close as they could get, I guess–but the other actors are all kinds of races. (The actor who plays Matthew–as autistic!–is Indian.) Which, if you’ll think about it, is not all that different from the old Bible Pageant tradition of having them all be played by white people. Anyway, it’s a good series–it makes some interesting choices, and does some things very well. Maybe someday someone will try to do a Jesus movie where everybody looks the part and speaks Aramaic better than they did in “The Passion,” but this will come at the cost of being harder to relate to. On the other hand, several movies translate the life of Christ onto a modern setting, which can work quite well (just as with the Odyssey–think Cold Mountain). The audience understands that this is representational.
On Helen’s casting, well, how *does* one depict someone whose beauty is proverbial? She can’t be just another pretty Hollywood face; she has to stand out from everybody else.
@ Scotln – Thanks for the tip! Looks like a really interesting website. Lew
@Anselmo (#249):
In 2001/2 one of my undergraduate advisees had two sisters who worked in the twin towers, one in each tower. Each worked on one of the lower floors, and were able to escape by a stairwell. The first one out actually saw the airplane hit the second of the two towers, according to my advisee. That’s good enough for me to think that the two towers were brought down by two airplanes. So the official narrative seems to be at least partly confirmed by that. As for tower #7, I have no strong opinion one way or the other.
Mr. Greer .. Heaven knows what we’re All going to confront going forward, post haste!
anonymous 203
> I, too, am a Northwind Grandma living in the country in the Driftless area of Dane County, WI.
Now THAT is interesting.
I believe, upon request, JMG will forward an emailed note to the other. And/or gives out an email address. I think he needs each other’s permission. JMG, do I have that correct?
I would indeed be interested in emailing.
JMG: Kindly email ”this particular ‘anonymous’” giving her my email address. I say “this particular” because I recall that there were/are other people going by the moniker ‘anonymous.’
I have also seen an email written out in a public posting, in a disjointed, broken up, fashion. I don’t feel comfortable with that method; it feels too raw.
Thank you for the offer. I venture a guess that you had thought long and hard about it.
Cordially,
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hey JMG and commentariat
Just found this essay this morning, it’s a brief exploration about the reasons for the “Autism Accent” that is common among people with Autism. It may be interesting for a few people here. In my opinion it is spot on, I can’t think of any objections to its explanations
https://dispatchesfromtheautismwars.substack.com/p/why-do-autistic-people-talk-like
@Northwind #257
It’s good advice! That alone would do a whole lot of people these days a whole lot of good. I don’t know that many of them will be lining up to do it though 🙂
@John O’Neill
“That all said, I’m applying for Irish citizenship, if only to have the option of Victoria BC. ”
Irish citizenship lets you live in Canada?
Chuaquin @246
I’m going tomorrow!.
DaHoj 210
> Strong Towns
I had never heard of Strong Towns, and jumped on the big amurican ribber, and searched for “strong towns.” There is a book by that name by one Charles Marohn. I read the description.
It sounds like the author is struggling with something that was invented a long time ago. He/they are trying to re-invent the wheel. In my role of amateur genealogist, I researched my County Roscommon, Ireland, ancestry, and in doing so, boned up on Irish history.
TOWNLANDS
The Irish people who have been in Ireland a very long time (earlier than Milesians, earlier than Vikings, earlier than Normans, earlier than the Ulster Plantation, earlier than myths themselves) lived in what are still called “townlands.”
Townlands are in juxtaposition to “market towns.” An example of a market town is Dublin. I don’t know if I fully understand what a townland was/is, and it certainly would be a good research project. As I understand it, townlands pre-dated (hence, are ancient) all other location names of Ireland.
It would good to investigate what a townland of Ireland was/is. When I first learned of townlands, they made so much bloomin’ sense. But I learned about townlands probably twenty-five years ago, and I pretty much have forgotten the important parts.
If we have anyone here who knows about townlands, kindly chime in. I have only read about townlands. I know the group of townlands one particular branch of my ancestors came from, and that is about it.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Northwind Grandma (no. 250): ” I won’t win fans by saying that people learn what non-Jewish authors have written about Nazism since 1945.”
You’ve sent this type of signal before. I’m all for objectivity and diversity of sources, but I can’t help but make assumptions about your political and ethno-racial views. If they are anything like what I am imagining, then they cannot offer the answers you are looking for. You (along with thousands of other people on the internet) are flirting with some truly dark and dangerous forces.
Teresa Peschel 213
and everyone here
> 63 years of marriage
Oh my. That length of time is amazing❣️
> Take your time to grieve and remember and love
I will try.
It is funny, spending pretty much all day today sitting and reading what people have posted this week, I experienced a myriad of very short feelings and some longish feelings. From a minute to half an hour. Powerful ones. Enough to notice and sit back, close the eyes, and say, “This emotion is passing through. It began, therefore, it will sometime end.” One second I feel sad, the next moment strong.
Everyone here with condolences: thank you.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
No, no, not in the past 13 or 14 years.
Just trying to think of a better use for all those Tesla batteries out there, and I thought applying them to America’s mental health crisis might be a good start. For some reason my wife gave me funny looks when I mentioned this idea, too. Ut could be part of an SF horror story though. Battery eating psychotics on the loose might be more entertaining than zombies.
Before I forget it: Some weeks ago my siblings and I were all visiting my parents, and at some point discussed the upcoming Nolan movie. My father remembered a version of the Odyssey he had seen as a very young man, and my sister managed to discover which one it had been: the Italian miniseries of 1968. We watched the first 20 or 30 minutes together and quite enjoyed it. It is an almost literal translation of Homer’s text onto the screen, at least the part I saw, and therefore it takes almost eight hours, at a very leisurely pace, in a sparse, somewhat theatrical setting, with Greek-looking actors. Of course, the audience for such an adaptation will be very different from that for a big-budget feature film.
Ambrose, thanks for recalling Cold Mountain! I enjoyed “O brother, where art thou”, too.
An alternative way to understand karma: The natural state of pure consciousness is bliss. In order to do evil, one must shut down part of consciousness. Completely conscious evil is not possible. This, an evil deed separate the doer (more) from the bliss of pure consciousness. That separation is what is called karma.
A lama of Tibetan Buddhism said that this understanding of karma is correct but for most people is a less helpful way of understanding. That does not make this correct. It just means that it is not completely out to lunch.
By the way, Buddhism is divided on the question of whether every last bit of negative karma must be worked out. Some say yes. Some say that the karma is accumulated by what which knows itself as only the ego and that when that illusion is gone beyond and the being knows itself as ego and as an aspect of All, then the karma evaporates.
On the other hand, if one shifts from being ego-only to be part-of-All-only, the ego is still present (as shadow) accumulating karma. This creates a kind of half-Enlightenment trap.
Looks like the damage to US facilities in the Persian Gulf is greater than has been widely reported.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-25/us-military-damage-to-weapons-bases-soldiers-during-iran-war/106954370
We have to wonder whether they’ll get rebuilt. The US may not be able to manage it while the war is ongoing, and afterwards they may not be able to afford it. And the host countries may decide not to allow them. Reminds me of the Romans “temporarily” leaving Britain in the 4th century.
JMG,
Thank you for your kind words regarding my earlier contribution about Karl Denninger. I agree with you that he is brilliant, though he is also a bit acerbic at times for my taste, and the manifest size of his ego is not too appealing either.
His rejection of Peak Oil is extremely unfortunate – and I think this rejection is related in significant measure to the size of his ego, unfortunately – but his essays about economic and financial matters are definitely worth reading in general regardless.
Related to the prior issue we were discussing, though, I must express some further puzzlement about your criticism of his analytical approach. If I understand your use of the adjective “morphological” correctly, Denninger is in fact taking a strictly morphological approach in analyzing the significance for markets of the trillion dollar hidden AI debt that he discusses, and he is doing so in proper and correct fashion.
You criticize him for going about his morphological analysis the wrong way, but it seems to me that he is going about it in exactly the right way, at least in principle, within the context of that kind of analysis of complex processes and events.
In general, as I understand the term and concept, morphological structures embody particular forms having distinct essential characteristics that define the morphology in question. As such, the morphological method of analyzing complex phenomena and processes inherently lends itself to the particular type of conceptual generalization known as pattern recognition.
And it seems to me that pattern recognition, based on comparing different instances of a common pattern, is exactly what Denninger is doing in his analysis of the trillion dollar bubble! He has identified a morphology associated with the currently unfolding, trillion dollar AI debt bubble that he regards as essentially the same as the morphology of the other, earlier financial debacles that he compares it with.
On the basis of the common elements among the particular instantiations of the morphology that he claims to have identified, he then proceeds to advance intelligible predictions about how the particular form of the current trillion dollar bubble will unfold. What he implicitly claims to be doing is clearly recognizing the phase of development that the currently unfolding trillion dollar morphology is in, then comparing it to the analogous states of development in the already-completed morphologies of financial debacles of a similar kind from the past, and then finally advancing intelligible and intelligent predictions about how the current instantiation of the morphology will unfold, based on extrapolating the essential features of that morphology that correspond to the completed forms from the past.
I do not see what there is to criticize here about his general approach. Now it may be that he is pressing too far his claim that there are as many common elements in the future-extrapolated portion of the presently unfolding trillion dollar structure with the already-completed examples of the morphology in the past as he thinks there are.
But to make the case that you make that he is wrong about his extrapolations requires a much more in-depth analysis of the particular comparisons he draws to generate his extrapolations than it seems to me you provide. That is to say, he may or may not may not be misapplying the morphological approach given the particular details of the case in question, but he is spot on in his general application of the pattern recognition approach in analyzing the situation morphologically. And even if he is misapplying the approach, you have not even come close to showing that he is.
I conclude the foregoing discussion of your criticism of Denninger with two questions for you:
1) If you think that there is anything wrong with my general claim that pattern recognition is a form of analysis that is inherently apt for morphological approaches to the understanding of complex phenomena, then what is it?
2) If, on the contrary, you are willing to grant that I am right in general maintain that Denninger is correct to apply the pattern recognition technique, but you also claim to have identified some particular points in his extrapolation of the present trillion dollar trend where the commonality of pattern between the present incomplete instance of the form, and complete instances of the form from the past, that he claims to identify does not obtain, then what are they?
@Northwind Grandma
My condolences for your loss.
Question about lenient justice system & karma:
In the past, some crimes had harsh sentences: torture, long sentences in inhumane prisons, mutilation, execution. But in the modern West, criminals often get light sentences or a slap on a wrist. Is it likely that since many criminals are not harshly punished, that they have to pay with longer stays in purgatories between lives, and in future lives, instead of working through their bad karma in their current life as in earlier eras? Maybe our focus on rights of criminals and attempts at rehabilitating them is actually making things worse for them in the long run?
Jessica (#272)
No. I was mistaken about that. Wishful thinking.
I’m not going anywhere. Well, maybe Cascadia when the US splits up.
Scotlyn @198
I pondered your post quite a bit, having been a soldier and having been in a war, though as a civilian photo journalist not a soldier or warrior.
I would say that very few soldiers are warriors, though now most warriors are soldiers. there is very little opportunity for the free lance knight roaming about looking for noble causes to enhance his honor and glory.. Also now 75 or 80 0/0 of a modern army is involved in logistics not Front line combat. There are “warriors” who go into the military out of a feeling of patriotism or devotion to a cause. or even a desire for honor. I think that most soldiers who become warriors do so because of a strong bond with their comrades/mates/buddies. Most acts of heroism and most medals awarded involve rescuing wounded comrades. Also having a friend wounded or killed can turn a soldier from apathy to a very active hatred of the ” enemy”.
I hadn’t thought of the army as a form of bureaucracy, but of course it is. That would account for the huge amount of poverty in Britain as the soldiers were discharged after the Napoleonic wars, or the the way the Americans segued directly into the cold war and keeping the war industry alive after WWII.
Stephen
Nortwind grandma
For a different , though well researched fictional, view of the Nazi years, you might enjoy Philip Kerr’s Berny Gunther detective series about an anti Nazi Berlin detective who doesn’t leave in the 1930s and ends up in the SS. The series runs from the 1920s through the 1950s
I understand that meditation done under the influence of alcohol is dangerous; but does this apply to ritual work as well? I find that if I do my ritual work before bed, I sleep much better; especially when traveling. However, I also sometimes have a drink or two, and might be slightly tipsy. Thus far, I have been doing my ritual work in the mornings on days when I might go drinking; but it would simplify things quite a bit for me to just do the rituals before bed each night.
Is it safe to perform the core Golden Dawn rituals (The LBRP, R+C, and MP) while under the influence of modest amounts of alcohol?
Robert Mathiessen #267 The colisión of a planes against WTC is a fact, then. There are too much facts more wich don’t fit with the oficial explanation but suggest that It was a false flag operation.
In Italy there was an organization called Gladio dedicated to false flag terrorist attacks. In Spain several suposed yihadist attacks present details wich don’t match with their oficial explanation and suggest that could be false flag operations.
Northwind #260
You pose an interesting tesis: There was a genocide orchested by the protestant aristocracy of the Palatinate during the Thirty Years War ?
I think that is not possible to speak about German history till Bismark (1860 ?) because Germany originally was a handfull of small kingdons an little principates.
About nazism, a serious atemp of built an history could be found in some writngs and video of a nazi scholar called Jaume Farrerons .I guess that if ask him for an history of nazism , he’ll be delighted. Specially atending your ancestery and your late husband background. ( Heis Spanish and speaks German but not english) He present a YT channel called ” Nostra TV” but if you prefer I can ask him in your name.
There is a historian called Andrei Fursov ( Stalinist) Who states that nazism was backed for the Rostchilds for to employ Germany like a weapon for to destroy the stalinist Soviet Union.
Kfish#255
I think that mud tablets , like did the Mesopotamians Will be better.
Mary Bennet#253 I think that Western societies are discretely ruled by groups wich don’t follow the same moral that common people and that the Epstein affair gives us a hint of this. A ritual in wich the candidate for access to a power group give proofs for to be blackmailed in the case of disobedience to the orders of his masters.
In Spain we had the case of the Girls of Alcácer, in wich three girls were tortured with extreme cruelty . Case wich, acording with several periodists, could be framed in the afored mentioned and in USA you have the crimes of Ciudad Juárez.
@ Northwind Grandma #274
I live in an Irish “townland”. As far as I can tell it is a geographical division in a rural area that tells the postman where to deliver your mail. There is no rural area in Ireland that is not divided into “townlands”. It is only around 10 years or so since Ireland joined the rest of the world in having postcodes (zipcodes), and even now if someone just addresses my mail as: Scotlyn, Scotlyn’s Townland, Killybegs, Co Donegal, Ireland, it will reach me with no problem. Some online retailers dislike addresses that have no numbers or postcodes in them, though, and for many years I would throw random zeros in here and there if they insisted.
My townland is, as I said, a rural division of land, but it includes around 20 to 30 other houses, which are fairly spread out. If I travel the 3.5 km to my nearest local town (which is the fishing port of Killybegs), I would be travelling through several other townlands to get there, but none of the divisions between them would be marked in any way, and people generally might have knowledge of the names of a few of their local ones, pinning their personal knowledge to the people in houses they know to be located in such and such a townland.
I do not think that a townland has, or had, much connection to a strong town, and in general it seems true to say that the Irish never really took to living in towns until a few different influences began to make themselves felt. The oldest was the Christian monastic settlement around which towns began to grow up. Armagh, Kildare, Glendalough and Clonmacnoise would be some examples. The second was the Viking traders (who followed the Viking raiders) and began to set up towns along the ports and navigable rivers – eg. Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick… And third, the British influence which began to establish its biggest strongholds behind “The Pale” in Dublin, while pushing the indigenous Irish further and further back towards the rougher parts of Ireland. Nowadays, Dublin, and its surrounding “conurban” area gathers population towards itself, while the rest of Ireland reverts to its older “densely dispersed” style of living.
Roscommon is apparently linked to some early monastic developments, and its name “Ros Comáin” is reputed to mean “Wood of St Coman”. Lots to look into for you there! 🙂
I want to say that I am grateful that commenter Dennizen has pushed you to say so much about the matter of causation vs morphology.
I find this very applicable to my clinical work. I do think that many people would like to find a singular “cause” for what they experience as a singular “effect” which is their current “disease”. And the system of medical modelling that I am trained in (Traditional Chinese Medicine, or TCM) does not offer me a way to do this. Instead I am trained to find “patterns” (is this equivalent to “morphology”?) of dissonance, and apply treatments that help the elements of that pattern to change towards increased harmony or resonance.
I am very conscious that what I have learned is a set of maps and models that sometimes work well and are useful, but also that every single patient is a unique, non-repeatable, terrain where my map may or may not be useful, and that their terrain has not been shaped by any one thing, but by EVERYTHING that connects them to this world and everything else up until this moment, including their own choices and actions, but also including the choices and actions of everyone else they have ever been in contact with, for good or for ill.
I do think the “one cause” to “one effect” model of health and disease is rife in our society though – and is rather successful at selling treatments aimed at removing or preventing such “single causes” – since this is what most people believe anyway. Perhaps less successful at navigating the terrain which is Everyone Happening to Everyone All the Time, which, to be fair, is rather difficult to model.
Anyway, seeing your thoughts on this in black and white has been very useful for several of my current trains of thought. So thank you.
Michael G. # 172:
“Richard Heinberg passed at the age of 75 due to pancreatic cancer.”
Oh, I mourn his death. Pancreatic cancer is usually very aggressive and it has often a bad prognosis. He was a very respected member in the old good days of peak oil “community”, although I didn’t always agreed with his views. My condolences for his family, friends and every peak oilers.
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Robert M. # 176:
“A couple of millenia ago Celts were everywhere in East Europe (as well as West Europe, and they reached eastward well into the Middle East. Place names like Galicia in the Iberian Penninsula and also in West Ukraine, Galatia in the East Mediterranean”
Yes, indeed a few words in Spanish and another Iberian languages (mainly “children” of Latin) have Celtic origins. Celts lived not only in Galicia, but in some another parts in the North of Iberian Peninsula…For example “Brío” (strength) is a “living fossil” word. Here, some spanish words with a Celtic origin (if you can read in spanish).
http://descubrecastilla.blogspot.com/2014/12/algunas-palabras-de-origen-celta-en-el.html
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JMG # 179:
“Thoreau was a fine writer who, like many fine writers, didn’t really live up to the image he projected.”
Yes, and in addition to your comment about Thoreau, I can also tell you he seemed an hermit in his isolated shack, but he had a lot of friends and often, some of them visited him (or he went to visit them).
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Scotlyn # 198:
“A soldier is one of a team, and that team is part of a larger organisation, and a successful soldier is one who fights as a trained and working unit of that larger organisation,”
I think the paradygmatic example for a soldier was the Roman legionary. Legions worked as a single power, made of joined soldiers. Indeed, if a legionary broke its lineup, was hardly punished by his bosses. On the other hand, you can read in the Ilyad a lot of personal duels.
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I’ve read some previous comments in which some of you debate a likely relationship between Celtic languages and Bereber ones. I think it’s a quite bizarre hypothesis. I can also tell you some fringe scholars here think Basque language is linked with Berberian languages, but their “evidences” are very circumstancial, to say it softly; and there’s some anti-Basque nationalist bias in this theory. Of course, Basque nationalists are always upset with this bizarre hypothesis: they think Basque is the last remnant of a family of pre-Indoeuropean languages and blah blah blah (they’ve got their own biased view).
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(To be continued)
JMG,
Thank you for your response. We are getting into some very deep metaphysical and epistemological waters here indeed.
I have no time at the moment to attend closely to your responses, but I will in due course.
Again, the issues involved are of vital importance; I think we can probably agree on that, at the very least.
What is at stake is nothing less than the most accurate possible understanding of the future implications of Peak Oil on every level of analysis: personal, familial, local, national, and global.
I think the avoidance of some pretty consequential mistakes in assessing these implications hinges crucially upon the discernment of the correct metaphysical and epistemological positions concerning the matters we are debating.
I would respectfully ask you yourself to consider seriously, for example, whether some of the mistakes in prediction that you yourself have made over the past 20 years, as they relate to Peak Oil – and that you have also humbly and forthrightly conceded, which is very much to you credit – do not have their ultimate origin in a in an incorrect metaphysics and epistemology on your part concerning the issues currently under discussion between us.
And that is just for starters, actually; I think the ultimate implications of our developing cordial dispute are much more profound than even anything related just to Peak Oil.
To be continued…
Clay D. # 228:
Yes, American spectacle of aerial theorical supremacy isn’t working very well in real battle fields over Iran: Redoubling in USA mistakes…
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Anselmo # 249:
I think you’ve opened and old can of worms. I don’t consider myself as a conspiracy theorist, but I distrust official version of 9/11, too…
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JMG # 262:
“Kant demonstrated two centuries ago that we can reasonably assume that truth exists but we have no access to it”
He was right, but it seems a lot of western philosophers after him and every modern scientists have pretended not ot know this “sad” truth, or even to debunk it (ahem).
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Stephen P. # 276:
OK, I take note of it, and I hope that you manage to have your own sound opinion about it…
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Aldarion # 278:
Thank you for remembering that old school Italian miniseries about the Odyssey. Well, Italians and Greeks are simillar in their physical appearance, so I think it hadn’t to be difficult for the miniseries crew to choose actors and actresses during its casting.
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Finally, I’ve been scratching my head (in this blog and another online sites) about how this times Mr. Nolan is attacked with more rage by the right wing than by the leftism (a few feminist zealots). It’s a source of amusement for me that “Nolanism” has provoked tantrums in the past more often to the woke left: now, the tide has changed (due to the Black Helen-gate).
I can remember that, when he filmed “Memento”, I read in a Commie magazine, in those times, a bitter criticism by an old school Marxist guy, who claimed Nolan was a clumsy Postmodern artist (horror!). Interstellar provoked tantrums to some ecologists (so leftists), because its screenplay praised to evacuate Earth and colonize another places in the space (well, ironically it’s the same story which Mr. Musk loves). “Oppenheimer” was hardly despised by some leftists (at least in Spain), because its main character was depicted as a cool man, and a good man to some extent (horror!). Oh, and “The Dark Knight” was pointed as a “fascist” movie by a lot of leftists here (with some cherry picked “reasons”, methink).
As a Nolanist myself, of course I can be biased by my taste, but I think it’s strange an artist is booed sometimes by one ideology, sometimes by another one. I ask my self why…
A mathematician named Terence Tao has argued that there is a distinction between intelligence and cleverness, and that so-called “artificial intelligence” like large language models really have artificial cleverness, not artificial intelligence:
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115722360006034040
I remember comments on this blog post that human beings themselves are more clever than intelligent and tend to get the two notions confused with each other.
“Aldarion, it’s always impressed me how often ordinary sibling rivalry is inflated to cosmic proportions. Ancient Israel was on the other end of the Levantine spectrum, being a country of impoverished inland herders and farmers with no exportable crops — but it was still on the same cultural spectrum, and you can find traces of common cultural themes going way back — the Greek titan Iapetus appears in the Bible as Japheth, for example.”
Did you know that Oswald Spengler actually considered Zoroaster to be the primordial prophet of what he called “Magian” civilization that would later include the Abrahamic faiths [1]? The earlier faith of the region of the Canaanites was polytheistic and more similar to their Semitic cousins in Mesopotamia.
So many features that we now consider characteristic of Abrahamic faiths (a dualistic conception of the cosmos between light (good) and dark (evil), a powerful creator being with an adversary, angels, an afterlife composed of two separate locations for the good and the wicked, resurrection, messiah’s, etc) actually only appear to be in the faith of the Hebrews after their return from the Babylonian exile after being influenced by their Persian liberators who allowed them to return to their homeland. For example, before the exile the Hebrews had no concept of a separate “heaven” and “hell” but only a single, grim afterlife called “Sheol”. Angels are certainly reflected in Zoroastrianism; think of the winged figures one sees on ancient Persian temples. I could go on.
[1] – In this, it is known that Spengler was influenced by Nietzsche’s “This Spoke Zarathustra”
“I do not think that a townland has, or had, much connection to a strong town, and in general it seems true to say that the Irish never really took to living in towns until a few different influences began to make themselves felt. The oldest was the Christian monastic settlement around which towns began to grow up. Armagh, Kildare, Glendalough and Clonmacnoise would be some examples.”
The Irish themselves had a dark ages around the time that the Roman Empire was at its height:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_Ireland#Irish_Dark_Age_(100_BC%E2%80%93AD_300)
so it shouldn’t be surprising that the Irish didn’t take to towns until Christianity arrived, which was around the same time that the Irish left their dark ages.
Chris, well, of course. Here in the US, our media routinely makes stuff up in an attempt to push whatever the approved narrative might be, and I’m not surprised to see that spreading elsewhere.
Ambrose, I haven’t seen it, but it may not be that inaccurate to have a multiethnic cast in a story set in that place and time; by the first century AD, the eastern Mediterranean was a very cosmopolitan region, with people from all over the Roman world and also points further afield. (There were Buddhist missionaries in Alexandria by 200 BC, for example.) That was not the case in the days of Odysseus, though…
J.L.Mc12, that seems perfectly sensible to me — and yes, I have the accent, though nothing like so bad as I did when I was young.
Justin, so noted! It’s just that sudden weird comments here often have that source.
Jessica, that’s certainly one way to think of it!
Warburton, I expect those facilities to be abandoned permanently in the near future anyway, for what it’s worth.
Denizen, er, I’ve already spent rather more time on your comments than on anyone else’s, you know, and endless quibbling demands for clarification don’t interest me greatly. You’ve already made it clear that you disagree with me, and I’m good with that. Maybe at this point you should let it rest.
Patrick, that’s another of those questions that no incarnate being can answer.
William, I certainly don’t recommend doing them when seriously drunk, but a little alcohol now and then doesn’t seem to hurt ritual. Meditation’s another matter.
Scotlyn, yes, morphological analysis can also be described as pattern recognition. It’s the only approach that works well in a universe as complex as the one we live in.
Denizen, well, that makes two of us, though in my case, my interest is running even shorter than my time. Tell you what — when you make predictions about the future of industrial society based on causal models that are at least as accurate as the ones I’ve made on the basis of morphology, then it might be time for you to preen yourself on the supposed superiority of your approach, don’t you think? Until then, I think we’ve said what can be said about this and I’ll ask you to let it drop.
Anon, that seems like a very useful distinction.
“Finally, I’ve been scratching my head (in this blog and another online sites) about how this times Mr. Nolan is attacked with more rage by the right wing than by the leftism (a few feminist zealots). It’s a source of amusement for me that “Nolanism” has provoked tantrums in the past more often to the woke left: now, the tide has changed (due to the Black Helen-gate).”
A lot of the right wing these days are former leftists who replaced their ideology but never replaced their habits.
I’m just making weird comments for the sake of making weird comments.
I dont take peoples menal health lighy either. I was very close with my schizophrenic uncle and have had several friends so diagnosed… I am down in Lexington visiting family before heading on our camping trip. My dad and I were talking about lithium mining, car batteries, and the meds his late brother used to take. Thats where that idea came from… I thought the battery might provide a win-win in terms of electroshock plus the minerals. A win-win! Dark, maybe… or maybe I am just touched too!
Again, I dont take the mental health struggles of people lightly. A close friend of mine who is autistic lost his first long term girflriend (over ten years) who we are also close to, to a few breaks recently. She is schizophrenic and was stable for a iong time. They still live in the same apt building together (different units). She has been to the psych ward three times in the past year. It has devestated my friend. My wife went to visit her took her out for coffee when she was in outpatient the second round.
I’d often rather hang out with the so called mad and those on the fringes than the people our society calls normal. Since they moved my dpt to a different building in the industrial hellscape section of the city, I dont get to see a lot of the “weirdoes” who came to the library for shelter. For some reason I always end up talking to and friends with these people.
Better them, and artists and creatives, than some corporate drone living his best life in the suburbs.
JMG (no. 299), sure, Roman Palestine was multiethnic, but the show had East Asian actors in it (for example). I’m fine with that–for the same reason I’m fine with everybody speaking English, and having modern dental care–but it raises the problem of whether their race is meant to be interpreted diagetically. For example, Matthew–a Jewish tax collector–is played by an Indian actor, but never referred to as Indian. (Yes, it is barely plausible that an Indian could have been there, but a Jewish Indian? That seems a stretch, and would distract from the premise that these were ordinary locals..) The actor’s race, like the English, is meant to be interpreted extradiagetically. On the other hand, one of the black characters was said to be an Ethiopian Jew; while another, played by an East Asian woman, dealt in frankincense and perfume that (she explained) came from the Silk Road. So their races were acknowledged. In general, the characters behave like 21st century Americans–there is no sense that they belong to a different culture.
Not sure if this is related, but one of the Pharisees is named Shmuel, a name so Jewish that white nationalists sometimes use it to mock Jews. They could have named him Samuel, to match the other anglicized names on the show. I would love to know what the writers were thinking.
@Anselmo (#288):
Oh, I have no problem with doubting official narratives, especially when they serve to consolidate government power. Moreover, I dare say “false flags” have been sewn and waved for millenia. But none of this surprises or outrages me.
As I have said from time to time here, I was not raised Christian. However, one point of Protestant Christian doctrine has always resonated with me ever since I first heard it articulated more than half a century ago. That is the Calvinist teaching on the inherent depravity of human beings. I have felt that in my bones ever since I was a small child. That is the reason why I have never had any faith whatever in even the bare possibility of anything like human “moral” or “ethical” progress over the centuries, and why I can’t ever bring myself to pay much attention to any claim that such progress might or should happen.
As for 9/11, the real damage to the country was done when both houses of Congress swiftly passed the loathsome “Patriot Act” without giving it more than a cursory reading. That very long and detailed piece of legislation laid the groundwork for all the subsequent abuse and consolidation of power by the Federal Government. Obviously it had been prepared well in advance of 2001; and the people who wrote it just needed a sufficiently emotional moment to push it through Congress unexamined. It matters little to me whether those vile people were content simply to wait for such a moment to happen on its own, or whether they impatiently engineered it themselves. Either way, their inherent depravity!
An ode to Pirsig: What quality is and how it degraded.
https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/on-quality
“The modern cost-down program starts from the spec sheet and asks what can be removed without a statistically significant change in buyer perception this quarter. The thinner steel passes the test. The glued joint passes. The plastic gear where the brass one was, the foam that loses a third of its resilience in two years etc…
Each change is approved in isolation, and each is too small for any buyer to notice on its own. That is the trick. No test compares the product to what it was ten years ago. Each product version is measured against last quarter’s, comes back as “no detectable difference,” and ships. So the degradation compounds beneath the threshold of every individual measurement, invisible at each step and enormous in total. “
Schizoid Panacea was the name of a band I was in during highschool. We weren’t as prolific as my other group the Astral Surf Gypsies, but we had fun in the garage. (Astral Surf Gypsies got one of our albums, Breath of the Rat Lady out on CD from a small label in Poland.).
Thinking of schizophrenia, mental health and alchemy, maybe their really is a panacea out there, an alkahest to restore peace of mind & soul.
(Chews lemon balm thoughtfully.)
@etienne: thanks for the book recommendation!
@gnat: A Cambridge History of Archaic Greece (or similar) would go into detail on the “orientalizing period” in the 8th century BC.
@gunstone: Yes, insofar as there are any dualistic elements in Hebrew scripture, they are certainly post-exilic. Angels (messengers) are not described as winged in the Bible, though cherubim are. More generally, if one group of people, partially and inconsistently (according to the books of Judges, Samuel and Kings) had followed a rule not to make divine images and to venerate a single God, that would by definition be invisible to archaeology, wouldn’t it? No longer texts have been preserved from pre-exilic Palestine (though one stele in Moab has).
More generally still, I will be mulling over what would characterize an Eastern Mediterranean civilization of the first millennium BCE in addition to alphabetical writing. Proto-democratic elements of governance in city states had been present in Mesopotamia at least as far back as written records go, that is Uruk before 3000 BCE.
JMG: Thousands of years doesn’t sound like much in this context. A few dozen lifetimes and the desired destination is in reach again. No? 😉
Also,
Do you think Patton really believed in reincarnation or is that just what he had to tell himself to get through his day? Hitler removal was a pretty darn just cause, but still that job has got to do a number on your conscience.
There was one other thing. What was it…? Oh yeah. This general subject was being discussed recently, but I didn’t find that discussion until that Tuesday, so I held off until now.
Why are those guys the Lemurians opened a channel to thought to be bad? What’s their side of the story?
Keeping in mind that I really took to heart the “two years olds, daddy at work” thing. This is not a thing where the wrong pronouncement will send someone’s eternal soul spinning off into the darkness. The safety is firmly on! 😉
@ Robert # 267
(If I may)
“The first one out actually saw the airplane hit the second of the two towers, according to my advisee. That’s good enough for me to think that the two towers were brought down by two airplanes.”
It does seem to me that there are a lot of things that would have to occur before an airplane hitting a tower becomes an airplane bringing down a tower. Airplanes that crash into towers and skyscrapers do not normally bring them down. And of course there were not *only* two, nor even *only* three towers brought down.
Wikipedia tells us that: “The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists 56 buildings damaged or destroyed in New York City due to the September 11 attacks. Five buildings fully collapsed, three partially collapsed, 11 buildings suffered major damage, and 37 buildings sustained moderate damage. Every building of the World Trade Center either fully or partially collapsed.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_buildings_damaged_or_destroyed_in_the_September_11_attacks
Meanwhile, New Yorkers who had lived there during WWII would have surely remembered both New York skyscrapers that were struck by airplanes (the Empire State Building in 1945 and the Bank of Manhattan Building in 1946) and, following some damage repair, were still standing in 2001. Those who, on 9/11 had witnessed two airplane strikes cause 5 buildings to fully collapse, three to partially collapse and cause major or minor damage to 48 others in New York, would have also had opportunity to compare notes when just one year later, in 2002, an aircraft struck the Bank of America building in Tampa, Florida, totally failing to collapse that building.
As far as I am concerned the 9/11 event leaves me with many, many stubbornly unanswered, and likely unanswerable, questions. Mainly because of my personal status as a member of I the great, and insignificant, unwashed who will never be properly consulted nor properly informed about such matters.
But, a cat can look at a queen, and wonder…. 🙂
“morphological analysis can also be described as pattern recognition” My father who came from a line of Midwest and New England farmers extending back into the 1600’s had this innate pattern recognition. From birth he was immersed in a rural soil based nature based realm. He had an animistic sensitivity and understanding of the weather, crops, animals, the soil. He could discern the difference in the better response of plants to an inch of rain as compared to the response from an inch of well water. My mother noted cats and dogs automatically regarded and treated him as the master when they came into his presence. This also extended to his on the spot analysis of human personalities which aided him in a farm real estate business he pursued later in his life. I knew an older woman with a counseling, therapy practice who could innately read people and situations after a bit of contact.
“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know” Pascal
I had an autistic student with a marked accent as a teenager. Though born and raised in the California Central Valley he sounded like he had a German background. Unusually intelligent and auto-didactic Elon Musk is a hero to him.
Apologies to our host as he has a good streak of humility and kindness and doesn’t fall into the following category.. I once saw a four pictures next to each other of these men – Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, I nicknamed them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and said to myself, “I am sick of rich slightly autistic white men thinking they know what is best for the rest of us”.
Takes one to know one as I have a streak of autism and for me it has been both a strength and a weakness, a help and a heartbreak.
@scotlyn 309: I am not an expert on 9/11. Thank you for mentioning those other plane crashes! From a cursory search, it looks like the planes on 9/11 were at least ten times heavier than the heaviest of the other planes you mentioned (the Mitchell bomber). That is surely a difference to be taken into account.
@Anonymous #297:
I’ve been tinkering around with an idea for a while now, that human intellect operates in three grades: Cleverness, intelligence, and wisdom.
I struggle, though, with definitions. Cleverness is the lowest grade, and the most useful for short-term survival… but how do I distinguish it from intelligence when I see it in the wild?
It’s probably a fool’s errand on my part.
Chris Martenson is an early Peak Oiler, the fact that he ended up on Tucker Carlson is interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNcuzmR4HGY
660,000 viewers is pretty interesting for an peak-oiler…
Tucker’s father was CIA, personally I consider Tucker as part of the Deep State’s alternative.
I think Tucker and Candace may be part of or backed by the US’s equivalent of post-soviet siloviki.
JMG (#262): In answer to your question (“Is there a term nowadays for a mashup of multiple languages that does not shed its grammatical particles?”), I am afraid there isn’t. Which is probably why many linguists have pressed “creole” into service to describe a language heavily influenced by another, when the older and stricter definition of “creole” is “A nativized pidgin”.
Such “mashups”, incidentally, involve as a rule a language (“Matrix language”) clearly taking elements from another. Thus, Modern English is a later, changed form of Old English with a large number of French and Old Norse words/structures, not a later, changed form of French or Old Norse with a large number of English words/structures. This is true of almost all outcomes of language contact: Romanian is a later, changed form of Latin with a large number of words/structures from Slavic languages, not vice-versa, Modern Japanese is a later, changed form of Old Japanese with plenty of Chinese words/structures, not vice-versa…by the same logic, a few centuries or even millennia hence it should not be difficult to tell apart languages in North America which derive from Spanish-influenced English versus English-influenced Spanish.
(There do exist a very few languages, called “mixed languages” or “intertwiners”, where it is difficult if not impossible to tell which of the two languages is the matrix language. The best-known such example, among linguists, is Michif, a nearly extinct language of the Canadian prairies born of contact between Plains Cree and French: in Michif, the nouns, articles, and adjectives are French (complete with French grammatical elements) and the verb is Cree (complete with Cree grammatical elements). It is unclear whether this language arose as a case of French-influenced Cree or Cree-influenced French. But again, such languages are the exception rather than the rule when it comes to the outcome of language contact).
Northwest Grandma (#260): Quite apart from echoing Ambrose’s unease (#275), I wonder whether the word “genocide” (instead of “slaughter” or “extermination”) is appropriate in this context: “genocide” refers to the deliberate annihilation of an ethnic group, not of a social class. And such things happened well outside Central Europe: the Highland clearances, which drove our cyber-host’s ancestors to North America, are (sadly) but one example.
Chuaquin (#294): I quite agree that of the attempts to connect Basque to Berber (or to any other language, actually) none seems to even begin to make a credible case. But your country’s Basque nationalists are quite right: Basque certainly is a pre-Indo-European language, and thus was almost certainly present in Western Europe (though almost certainly not in the Iberian peninsula!) before any Indo-European language was. One last thing- Words can travel even more readily than humans can, and thus I should point out that most words of Celtic origin in Spanish do NOT derive from the Celtic language(s) once spoken on the Iberian peninsula.
(*Sigh*. With the previous paragraph I have probably offended every nationalist in Spain. Perhaps that is why historical linguistics as a field is losing ground: EVERY nationalist with an agenda is and will be against us).
Re: The Twin Towers and 9-11
One thing to remember about the WTC twin towers is that they were built to maximize floor space and minimize structure. They were also built to stand up to an airliner plowing into them – but not necessarily at high speed aimed directly at them with full tanks of fuel to burn and a full passenger load to boot. Combine these two things, and we may be lucky that they didn’t fall right over (and one of them nearly did).
Also: building 7 was a wonky building that may not have been up to Earthquake Codes.
Compare to the tower now at the WTC site: it could likely stand up to a combination 9.1 Earthquake and a 747 with full fuel tanks, baggage and passenger loads flying in at 110% of max safe speed. The two towers struck in the 1940s were built closer to this than the World Trade Centers that were struck down.
Hi JMG and commentariat!
I’ve been semi lurking here for about 9 years now, and that corresponds pretty nearly to the eruption of profound illness that has colored my childhood and dominated my adult life. As of the last couple of weeks, I’ve gained some blessed relief from the constant intense pain, nausea, despair, and fear. I wanted to thank you profusely JMG, for being my entree into the existence of a higher reality; I was deeply traumatized by my premature and violent birth, and the realization of materialist meaningless combined with the aftereffects of that destroyed my physical and mental health and made me a near invalid for the past 10 years. The practices and awareness that you convinced me to take up, though done inconsistently, gave me a base of meaning and hope that was the core of what allowed me to endure this. As a result I also became open to the alternative treatments that have finally after years done real good for my health, as opposed to the debacle that mainstream medicine tried put me through. I’ve come here almost every week for this time, and even innocuous comments here are imbued with awareness of spirit that was one of my only comforts when in crippling pain and nervous dysfunction. Bless you all from the bottom of my heart, and may our lives continue in the spirit that this blog has embodied.
Hello Mr Greer
I have read that you have a new updated edition of “The Ecotechnic Future” published. I have an original copy. Of your books it’s the one I would chuck in the bugout bag. I would like a new copy as my original is getting dogeared but have come across two new issues published in 2021 and 2024, and with different numbers of pages. Which is the new updated edition please?
@Scotlyn (#309):
Indeed, cats can — and do — look at queens, and the queens are better for it.
And I’m not discounting the possibility of 9/11’s being a false flag (that is, more than mere jetliner strikes were involved); I’m just saying that I don’t much care whether 9/11 was one or wasn’t. If 9/11 wasn’t, plenty of other events have been, still are, and forever will be. False flags are quite real, and every government of any competence has them in its potential arsenal. As Immanuel Kant once remarked (my translation), “From such crooked wood as humankind is, no carpenter could ever craft any straight thing.”
That said, I would note that the airplanes which struck those NY skyscrapers in the 1940s were no jetliners, but smaller and lighter airplanes. I flew on cross-country airplanes several times in the 1940s, in my childhood, and those planes were much smaller and much lighter than present-day jetliners. Coast-to-coast flights took about 12 hours back then, too.
(For whatever it may be worth, in the 1940s your in-flight meals were served on china, with metal knives and utensils, and cloth napkins. Also, the US was much less electrified then than it is now. When I would gaze out the plane’s window in the middle of the night, as the plane flew over the mid-western states, the land below us would be almost wholly dark, and the highways there would have only one or two automobiles driving on them from horizon to horizon. Only the cities had street-lights in those days, and only in them was there any noticeable night-time electric lighting. How the world has changed since then, and not always for the better.)
As regards 9/11 like the John and Robert Kennedy assassinations there are chilling problems with the standard story. The stated causations are problematic and morphological pattern recognition may be in play.
Mr. Greer, All … appears that the Saudis have once again learned nothing after hitting the Houthis, to which responded with MAJOR damage to the former’s refinery infrastructure$. Buckle up kiddies! The ride through Economic Hell be straight ahead .. as you wizz past the Trumpsonian/D.C. Kaleidoscope of Errors, self-owned for the most part. Me thinks the pending ‘Arch Ego de Orange’ will become a ruin, even before it leaves the architects design table – too ‘unstable’…
Oh yeah, and by the way, since this topic is bobbing about, some number of years ago I (a Canadian) learned not to bring up my [non-English, non-Welsh British Isles] ancestry to people from that country I meet. I don’t know if the guy was just tired of hearing it because it’s so common or what, but I learned not to try to claim even the weakest, pro forma kinship. I’ll never bring it up again. Until now I’ve been telling if asked, but now that I’ve had another think about it, I think I’ll just say Heinz 57 moving forward.
@Cliff (#314):
i like your three-fold division. As for the differences between them, how about this? Cleverness is skill at getting what you want, whether material things or personal abilities; it does not require understanding, reasoning or language. Intelligence involves story-telling or other, similar forms humans use to make sense of the world in which they find themselves: we are inherently story-telling animals, and without a story we feel lost and confused. And finally, Wisdom arises when you move beyond your convenient stories, and even beyond the mandatory use of language itself; it is a mastery of your existence that does not imply your control of it. “Those who speak, know not. Those who know, speak not” is one of the touchstones for wisdom.
@ Aldarion #313
” it looks like the planes on 9/11 were at least ten times heavier than the heaviest of the other planes you mentioned (the Mitchell bomber). That is surely a difference to be taken into account.”
Thank you. That is a readily observable fact.
The full collapse of 5 very large buildings (each of which is far heavier and more sturdily built than any of the other buildings mentioned), the partial collapse of 3 very large buildings, the major damage to 11 buildings and the minor damage to 37 buildings, is also a readily observable fact.
Everything that I hear trying to connect those two readily observable facts is a theory.
To date, I have not heard a theory that is able to make all of the readily observable facts connect to one another in a way that makes any sense to me.
For myself, I will not speculate. Whatever it was that co-occurred (co-incided?) with the impact of two airplanes upon two of the five buildings which subsequently fully collapsed, I have neither been consulted about or informed about by anyone in a position to know. And it is highly unlikely that I ever will be. Such is my incredibly unimportant position in the scheme of things. Which I am ok with. 🙂
My father was also a marvelous marksman and alpha predator of a hunter. Up into his 80’s he was the one to hand the rifle to if a clean shot was needed. Watching him shoot a pheasant was a fluid Zenlike experience. The bird would rise up, then man, gun, ammo, bird all became one and the pheasant would drop from the sky.
JMG
Thank you for confirming my suspicions. It would not be surprising that elements of the Templar Ritual would wind up in the Druid Revival Rituals, if they were drawing from Celtic sources, as it seems it was among the Celts that Gnosticism ended up surviving longest in the West.
As for sources on Edessan Christianity, the standard book is Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (1971). Unfortunately, western scholars generally shy away from the history of Christianity in the east (probably because it contradicts the safe Catholic approved version of history in the West). The main figure associated with Edessan Christianity was a man called Bardaisan of Edessa, but we don’t know much if anything about his theology because the Church Father’s who wrote against him contradict each other and were writing centuries after his death. There is some speculation that the Acts of Thomas (which draws from the earlier Gospel of Thomas) in its original form was loosely based on Bardasian’s ministry in the far east near India (the Acts of Thomas as they exist now were heavily edited by the anti-natalist Encratites and later Manichaeans).
Also because its kind of hard to find some of the references to the Palutian name I’ll drop a translation here for anyone who is interested, (it should be noted that this is one of the few times where the church Fathers openly admit to changing Gnostic texts as Ephrem admits to rewriting Bardasian’s hymns to suit Orthodox purposes)
“Look! Their hands have lost hold of everything,
And they have no handle to grasp,
They called us Palutians,
And we escaped that (name) and rejected it.
Let there be an anathema on the one
Called by the name of Paluṭ,
If not by the name of Christ…
Paluṭ did not want
People to name themselves after him,
And if he were alive, he would curse
With every anathema concerning this,
Because he was a disciple of the Apostle (Paul),
Who was clothed in suffering and brought to grief
Concerning the Corinthians, who had left
The name of Christ and called themselves
By the names of people.”
-Hymns Against Heresies, Hymn 22, St. Ephrem the Syrian
Also a few weird notes, that I’m not sure how much relevance they have, but are interesting nonetheless. The first is that, according to the theory that Simon Magus and Paul the Apostle are the same person, the first gentile convert to Christianity was King Abgar of Antioch, Edessa. Dr. Price has a good introduction to that theory online here, proceeding the Great Declaration of Simon Magus (likely written by his followers in the early second century)
https://thegodabovegod.com/great-declaration-simon-magus/
The second interesting thing that I’ve noted is that the one of first of the “historical” King Arthurs, Artorius Castus, in his earliest military deployments would have been in the area in near modern Syria, and if he had encountered Christianity there it would have been either contemporary with or just after Bardasian. Interestingly enough it seems this Artorius was plausibly a follower of the relatively obscure goddess Flora one of the twelve gods/goddesses of the Flamines minores. In most forms of Gnosticism, Sophia has a lower form/counterpart called either Pistis (Faith), Achamoth (Wisdom of Death), and/or Zoe (Life). So theoretically it could be possible that this Artorius conflated Flora with Pistis in a form of syncretism before bringing this version of Christianity to Britain.
I found that little factoid about Artorius in the Book the Complete King Arthur: Many Faces One Hero, by John and Caitlyn Matthews.
That’s wild speculation on my part, but Irenaeus does mention a certain Marcus Magus in Gaul in the 180s and Tertullian mentions Christianity spread among the Celts in the 200s. Still I think more evidence is needed.
I also have an update on the Elucidation and what I think the number 7686 could mean. Around the time the Elucidation was likely written (early 1200s) a French Dominican friar named Hugh of Saint-Cher compiled the first Bible concordance with the help of 500 other friars from around the region. (For those who don’t know a concordance is basically an index of unique words found in a text). The author of the Elucidation was probably one of these friars. The concordance number 7686 in the Hebrew Bible is the word יִשְׁגּ֔וּ (shagah) which translates to “sin of ignorance.” The first time this word appears in the Hebrew Bible is in Leviticus 4:13 which reads, ” And if the whole congregation of Israel sin through ignorance, and the thing be hid from the eyes of the assembly, and they have done somewhat against any of the commandments of the LORD concerning things which should not be done, and are guilty;” (Lev. 4:13 KJV). Basically I think the Elucidation’s use of the number 7686 is a condemnation of the entire Church of Christianity falling into the “sin of ignorance” or shagah. You can read more about the concordance here: https://biblehub.com/hebrew/7686.htm
One final note is the Elucidation’s reference to seven cloaks. I think that also ties into ancient Gnostic ritual. In some versions of the redemption ritual the initiate gave each of the seven archons a garment, gravecloth, or “token.” The idea was that when the soul descends into the body each of the seven rulers “clothe” it before it incarnates into the flesh (this is explicitly state to have happened to Jesus in the Ascension of Isaiah). I’m wondering if perhaps the Templars or later groups developed a system in which an initiate goes through seven initiation rituals and after each one receives a cloak or token and then during the final eighth ritual, the initiate gives each cloak back to its respective ruler during the ritual to overcome them. This would tie in with the gnostic idea of being baptized “on the eighth/Ogdoad.”
@Scotlyn 325 re: the Twin Towers collapsing – according to Wikipedia, the two jets that struck were both 767s that had just taken off. Add into that the towers were built at the start of an inflationary period. In 1965, the US switched from silver coins to looks-like-but-not-actually-silver coins: dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and dollars, so that is the tell-tale sign that Johnson’s “guns and butter” nonsense just was not working. Even prior to the first oil shock, Nixon was being skewered in the media about inflation and his “wet noodle” that was gonna “Whip Inflation Now!” or WIN, as I saw on one old campaign button from the 1972 election.
The point of that is: the idea that the contractors might have cut corners in a futile effort to cut costs is possible. Another possibility is at the time, I am told the mafia still had a pretty good grip on the whole building trade in the Rotten Apple, and they demanded a kickback that had to be paid for somewhere else in the budget … and we’re right back to the idea that those buildings weren’t really as sturdy as they looked. It’s still a conspiracy theory, but it is a much more practical one. I don’t take credit for this – actually read it on Denninger’s blog years ago – but it has a better plausibility than some of the other theories floating around.
Ambrose, so noted.
Siliconguy, now there’s a blast from the past. Of course he’s right, and of course nobody thinks through the long term consequences of that steady degradation.
Cynthia, by all accounts Patton sincerely believed it, and had the memories to back it up. His accounts of his previous lives have been compiled into a book, Patton: Many Lives, Many Battles by Karl Hollenbach. As for the Lemurian deviation, the idea in occult tradition is that souls have free will and so can’t be forced to follow the path of spiritual evolution. In a cycle of time long before ours, some souls got so entangled in negative karma and refused so stubbornly to deal with it that they dropped entirely out of the course of evolution, and they were basically left behind with the trash when the solar system to which they belonged finished its life cycle. Those are the entities with whom humanity came into contact in the Lemurian deviation. Are they “bad”? Depends on your definition. Electricity isn’t evil, but you don’t want a thousand volts of it going through your body. In the same way, the demonic beings we’re discussing have their own place in the cosmos, but their effects on humanity have been profoundly destructive.
BeardTree, that sort of instinctive pattern recognition is underrated as a form of human intelligence. It consistently leads to better decisions than the more cerebral forms of intellect, just for starters! As for rich autists, why, you included the relevant point there — the issue isn’t so much autism as it is social class. Nouveaux-riches, autistic or otherwise, are quite often jerks, and just as often very, very full of themselves.
Archivist, Chris was certainly in there with the rest of us in the peak oil scene, but his background was very different from most of ours — he had a succesful career in the business world before setting up as an independent pundit. It’s not at all surprising to me that he ended up on Carlson’s show, since Carlson comes from a wealthy background and both are part of the corporate upper crust.
Etienne, yes, I had English (among others) in mind; it’s been described not inaccurately as what happened when Norman men-at-arms chatted up Saxon barmaids in the years immediately following 1066. The complexities come in, at least when trying to make sense of future language trends, when processes like this repeat several times across radically different language families. Imagine, for example, that southwestern North America becomes the home of a language derived from Spanish with heavy English and Korean borrowings, but the region is then settled by a Cantonese-speaking population after mass migrations from southern China, resulting in a new language in which Cantonese becomes the matrix language but absorbs vocabulary, phonology, and the concept of grammatical tense from the post-Spanish language; then, a thousand years later, a new wave of migration from across the Pacific brings in the language of post-conquest Australia, which has English for its matrix language but takes much of its vocabulary from Malayan languages and classical Arabic and has picked up the habit of agglutination from Malay! The linguists at the university in Gangsyan (金山/Gamsaan after the Chinese settlement, and San Francisco now) would have their work cut out for them…
Derpherder, good gods. I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had such a difficult time of it, and very glad to know that this blog and alternative treatments have helped.
Philip, the new printing is essentially unchanged from the original edition. I saw no reason to modify it. The different page counts in the new editions are simply the inevitable product of new layouts by different publishers.
Polecat, well, we’ll see!
Anon, not much of Druid Revival ritual was Celtic in origin — fringe Masonry and heretical Christian sources contributed much more, but that simply adds to the possibilities, of course. Thank you for the reference to the Bauer book, which I’ll certainly look into. Your interpretation of 7686 is certainly interesting, though I’d have expected it to have some meaning in gematria as well; as for the seven veils or cloaks, that’s a very good point — that teaching is of course found also in the Poimandres, and since there’s good reason to think that the Grail legend is influenced by another of the Hermetic tractates, it would make sense to interpret that element of the Elucidation in Hermetic terms. Are you by any chance planning on a book on this subject?
I like the notion of “readily observable” which has come up at least four times so far in this open post. Of course, what is “readily observable” depends to a great extent on where you get your news. For me it is readily observable that the war on Iran is causing great harm to the USA, and no apparent benefit. I see the “friendship” between Trump and Netanyahu as a very toxic friendship. So here is a movie recommendation about toxic friendships that I’ve made before: The movie is “Sideways,” a highly entertaining story of a toxic friendship, not without parallels in the “friendship” between Trump and Netanyahu. I think the blurb for the movie went something like, “what would you do to help a friend?” Let him wreck your car? Your relationships? Your life?
My mother’s craftsmanship was sewing and perfectly done ordinary food – pies, gravies, mashed potatoes, meatloaf, cookies, roasts, fried chicken, a variety of vegetables from the garden, pot roast, spaghetti meat sauce made from home canned tomatoes, all washed down with raw milk from a Jersey cow and homemade butter from the cream, vegetable and flower gardening, birdwatching, wildflowers. My Midwestern farm youth to me seemed ordinary at the time immersed in fields, creeks, woods, weather, animal, birds, plants, insects, work, homegrown food, small town traditional culture but now looking back it has a glow of magic.
Now that small town, small business, small farm culture that once covered the Midwest (started to die in the 70’s and 80’s is gone, killed by economic changes.
Re: Nolan’s Odessy, I think there’s something to be said for the realistic and gritty approach. There’s this tendency in Odessy adaptations to portray Odesseus as having the soul of a nine-year-old who loves pranks even though he’s this grizzled war leader. A modern understanding recognizes that Odesseus, like all the other Trojan War veterans, has been at war for ten years, and not modern warfare where you shoot the enemy from a distance measured in yards; this is Bronze Age warfare where you and the enemy get up close and personal and try to cut each other open with big knives and when you win their blood spatters you. So they all have serious PTSD.
Then I saw a take from a classics scholar who knows and loves the original epic. She pointed out that, once you get past certain casting decisions, Nolan’s adaptation is actually less “woke” than the original in that every character that is either enslaved or female is basically nerfed. Even the goddesses. “Athena hardly does anything,” she complained, and Athena was, in the epic, one of the major movers and shakers. So it sounds like Nolan got so into his Trojan War vets with PTSD that he ended up hardly using any of the other characters.
@ Robert Mathiesen # 320
Thank you. 🙂
@ KM Gunn Art #328
Thank you. 🙂
@ Derpherder #318
My blessings, if you will have them.
Also, I have always been fascinated by your by-line, and have fun trying to figure out what “derps” are and how they are best herded. 😉
I see that the cause of the Twin Tower’s collapse is being discussed, and I’ve learned elsewhere in this section that the cause of everything is the entire history of the universe, so there you go, case closed.
If only that one quark had zigged instead of zagged. Maybe Trump can go after it since bin Laden’s already taken care of.
Mary Bennet, I am asking more-so about a race of giants as opposed to a genetic anomaly. Thank you for the recommendation though, I might check it out at some point.
On 9/11 it is a physical certainty that the twin towers were not collapsed exclusively due to the airplane strikes. This is due to the physical principle of the conservation of Momentum. The twin towers collapsed at nearly free fall speed ( 11.5 sec vs 10.5 sec). That means that if one dropped a gold ball off the top of one of them at the same time collapse began the top of the tower would arrive at the ground only a second or so slower than the golf ball. This was verified by numerous network television videos analyzed by the architects and engineers for 9/11 truth. The collapse could be compared to frame rates to almost exactly calculate collapse speed.
If they had collapsed in the way the 9/11 commission said that they did the top 25% of the floors would have dropped on the floors beneath them and acted as a hammer to break the structure beneath those floors and then fall further breaking the structure beneath them. Even if the floors below were held together with magic spider webs that took no force to break each section of floor would slow down the mass of falling floors above it by a given amount. This would lead to a collapse speed at least double free fall speed. Then if you add in the energy absorbed to crush hundreds of tons of Masonary and steel the time would be even longer. N.I.S.T. has admitted the twin towers collapsed at free fall speed but has not commented on what that means.
The position of the architects and engineers for 9/11 truth is that the only way free fall speed could have been obtained is if the floors below the damaged section were imploded by some method so that they fell away below the upper section and did not impeded the speed of its travel downward.
Their is no need to find a culprit, or prove their motives to believe in this physical reality.
Ok, on 9/11, I’ve been through the truther lit, and while I won’t comment about the role that American or Israeli intelligence may have played in the attacks, I think the buildings fell down because large aircraft with full loads of fuel were flown into them. The WTC towers had a strong steel core and a strong outer wall, with the floors suspended between them. The outer wall’s structural integrity depended on the floors – the outer wall is basically just a bunch of vertical steel columns. Once the first floor trusses gave way due to heating from all the jet fuel soaked office supplies, the whole thing unzipped.
An interesting little detail that I learned about recently is that the slightly meandering flight path the pilots took to the WTC points to them training in Microsoft Flight Simulator (MFS). At the time, MFS only had 3D models of important and distinctive buildings – otherwise what you got was a flat texture painted onto the ground. The 9/11 flights are consistent with the hijackers using buildings that were rendered in 3D in MFS as waypoints.
For those interested in old norse and runes, I just discovered the Brute Norse blog which has an interesting article on the Aegishjalmur symbol and linking its origin to solomonic magic rather than anything from the Viking Age (https://www.brutenorse.com/blog/2018/5/14/the-gishjalmur), as well as a bit of a takedown on the naming of the Valknut symbol (https://www.brutenorse.com/blog/2017/05/the-valknutr-does-not-exist.html).
Hi John Michael,
Ah, how naive of me, I’d thought that the concept of making stuff up should at least have some basis in plausibility! Mind you, I avoid your news media, but was surprised to see our goobermint owned and run lot rely on such possibly unverifiable statistics and then present them as fact. Is it the new official line? One wonders.
The essential problem with making stuff up, is that further information is treated as suspect by default, whether that approximates reality, or otherwise. It’s like the predicament at the core of your country’s voting systems, in that it doesn’t just have to be honest and verifiable, it has to be perceived to hold that status. If I may, institutions are destroyed one bad decision at a time.
Man, looking at the wider world events and how they are progressing, I’m coming around to the idea that perhaps the retreat of US empire is pushing a situation where it would be remarkably difficult for a similar sized behemoth to emerge from the ashes in the near future. It’s messy, that’s for sure. What’s your perspective on this developing situation?
Cheers
Chris
@281 Denizen. Patten recognition, as opposed to trad heuristics, is a step up in some ways provided it doesn’t fall into its own gerry meandering pit, which it reliably does, especially in an age of barbarism of rationalizations and abstractions. I haven’t followed your back and forth in particular, but I read Deniger or used to, and I imagine the level of selecting which morphology to use is a step up from basic pattern seeking. In any case, you’re squabbling over what morphology to use. And that can’t be settled morphologically. My two cents. I’ve been to Hillsdale MI by the way nice town
Thanks JMG! Bless you! By the way do you have any books by Spenglerian influenced historians or others on the Apollonian culture arising in the Levant and Anatolia, or is it just your own considered idea patched together from all kinds of things? Any books about it would be devoured eagerly. I find the idea extremely plausible given the gaps in our pre Classical knowledge, and I’d love to prove it to myself beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Scotlyn, I would be delighted to have your blessing! I’m a bookish, withdrawn type, and your comments have been a great way to remind me just how rich the real world is.
As for my username, I’ve been inventing complex and strange fantasy worlds since I was 10 or so, I’m extremely, almost obsessively eccentric, and I’m also neurologically very strange from a childhood autoimmune brain condition. All of those seen to fall under Derp, since it was an internet term meaning something in between an oddity and a brain fart. I also have difficulty remembering at times because of ADHD, and often feel like I have to herd my writing and worldbuilding ideas like they’re restive animals in order to keep hold of them. Thanks for asking, and sorry to write a novella!
So, I am increasingly fascinated by the idea of regional gods/egregores acting upon certain parts of the world. In the King in Oramge, you sketched out 2 – the Wotan spirit of northern Germany, which used Hitler as a vessel, and the Changer of North America, which is currently acting through our emperor, Trump.
My question, both to our host and the commentariat – what other old gods do you see acting on certain regions regularly through its leaders, making its presence felt across history? This will take quite some knowledge of regional history and amcient mythology, and is certainly beyond me, but inquiring minds need to know!
I hope I’m not too late to pose a question here to JMG.
I use the fews and the Druid Magic Handbook for divination and I’ve noticed over time that the fews are quite subtle in their meaning. For example, Quert and Duir reversed aren’t necessarily bad, they’re just not ideal.
How do you interpret reversed fews?
John Michael Greer #26: “In some occult writings this is called the problem of the divided will. Most of us never manage to will just one thing at a time; far more often than not, our wills are split between two or more mutually incompatible intentions, which is why so few of us ever accomplish much. . . [T]hese practices (meditation, journaling, etc.) gradually coax the practitioner into noticing the obvious fact of the fragmentation of his will, to bring all those disparate intentions into full consciousness, and then to choose among them.”
John, Have you considered writing a comprehensive series of essays which you might later compile into a book — really exploring this topic? Yes, I know you have written essays on building the will and other essays, and chapters in books, on sticking with one “working” at a time as a foundational principle.
But I would like to see you revisit the central problem in a more comprehensive and focussed way. And, yes, I expect I would buy the book.
In my experience it is THE central problem of manifestation. And it is a deep problem. Yes, meditating and journaling will help you weed out, and maybe even address, many obvious conflicts between intentions. But, the nature of the problem, and the means of solution, goes a lot deeper than that. Language itself creates massive problems — words are slippery. And even if you try to deal with felt-sense end-states (something I try to do) and maybe sigils (gestalts) getting sufficiently clear on what you want and a fairly comprehensive sense of what that will feel like, you probably will miss aspects of what getting that “thing” will DO TO YOU.
Because Buddha was, IMO, clearly right: there are NO THINGS in this universe — only processes and karma. And ignorance has consequences.
Anyway, I think a really comprehensive discussion of how these things work, and how they go wrong, and how to choose wisely, deserves a book or three. And I can think of nobody better qualified than you to write such a comprehensive, wise explication.
in my considerable experience (journaling and meditating and doing “parts work” almost daily for almost 60 years) there is a problem of using WORDS (labels) . . . when there are no actual things in the universe, only processes.
And it isn’t “just” picking one item to will into existence, one “working”, at a time. Yes, it can be that you need to pick one. But too often the problem is actually that The fundamental problem, in my
Re: Schopenhauer
I don’t know how the concept of Will as the primary reality as in JMG’s response to Earthworm in comment #59 works under a monotheistic framework with one ultimate God. How could one Will develop a Mind if it is not blocked and frustrated by anything because It is all that exists?
John O’Neil,
Pity. I had the same wishful thought when I heard you say it. 🙂
I stumbled across an interesting post on Quora today that helped crystallize some things thoughts I’ve had in the past. The post is in answer to a question about why the ancient Greeks worshipped the gods if they were as awful as the mythology portrays them:
https://www.quora.com/If-Ancient-Greek-gods-are-douches-as-what-everyone-who-studies-Ancient-Greek-mythology-implies-why-did-Ancient-Greeks-worship-them/answer/Nyx-Shadowhawk
To summarize what I think are the most important points:
Point 1: The gods are not the myths. This is the single most important point. To quote from the post: “The Greek gods were part of a religion first, mythology second. (Emphasis in original.) … The Ancient Greeks did not worship the figures in the stories, they told stories about the figures they already worshipped.”
Point 2: Some of the gods’ worst behavior traces back to a single author: Ovid. Ovid was a Roman writing at the height of Rome’s empire and the height of its rationalist period. Portraying the Greek gods in a negative light may have been intentional.
Point 3: Ancient Greeks did not have modern values. This one is self-evident, but the post goes into some concrete examples of value differences.
Point 4: The myths are fictional. None of the good or bad stuff in them literally happened. (This relates back to the first point.) They exist to convey ideas in narrative form as part of an oral tradition, not to be taken literally. (You might say they are meant to train the mind, not to inform it.)
Point 5: Polytheist gods are complicated. Examples are given of the many epithets by which Aphrodite and Dionysos were worshipped, all implying very different ways in which the gods interacted with the world, some more pleasant than others.
@gnat #343
“Because Buddha was, IMO, clearly right: there are NO THINGS in this universe — only processes and karma. And ignorance has consequences.”
This has always confused me: if things (objects) aren’t real, why would processes be real? Or karma or any of it?
But then I think many of the Buddha’s metaphysical teachings make sense only in the context of orthodox Hindu philosophies, which is why Westerners tie ourselves into knots trying to understand why he would say something as profound/silly as “nothing has a self.” What he said was nothing has an Atman, but trying to apply that to the standard Western notion of a self or soul, which is very different from the notion of Atman, is not straightforward.
Cynthia, you’ll notice that I haven’t joined in the prattle about those two skyscrapers. My opinion about them is the same as my opinion about JFK’s assassination: the official story seems implausible to me but I don’t ever expect to know the facts.
KAN, “Brute Norse” is a keeper!
Chris, good heavens. Clearly you don’t watch our media, or you’d know that worries about plausibility went out the window long, long ago. It would not surprise me in the least to hear some media pundit insisting with a straight face that water is not wet. You may be right that the US will be the last really large empire for a while; Spain managed a comparable one with 16th-century technology, but nobody’s going to have the necessary edge over everyone else to make that happen.
Derpherder, I wish I did! It’s very much a matter of bits and scraps patched together from various sources.
Paedrig, that’s quite a question. Britain seems to have an underlying goddess-archetype — it seems to thrive best under queens rather than kings — but which goddess it is I’m not prepared to speculate. Beyond that…hmm. That will deserve serious thought.
Tim, well, that’s why I included reversed meanings for each few in The Druidry Handbook, p. 87-107.
Gnat, that’s a fascinating idea and I’ll consider it. That would tie in nicely to a project I’ve been brooding over for some years now — a general handbook on occult training, comparable to Péladan’s How To Become A Mage — since the unification of the will is the essential issue in all occult training.
Patrick, Schopenhauer deals with that. If the one Will does not yet have Mind until it faces opposition, what does it trip over? Itself, of course. Being mindless, and acting as a pressure surging out in all directions, it ends up in conflict with itself, and evolves Mind as a way to try to get out from under the burden of its own self-contradictions.
Slithy, nice. Thanks for this. I’d add a sixth point: The world so often sucks, and that implies that the gods and goddesses who rule it may not be all well-behaved sweetness and light…
Thank you all for your kind words. I read them all.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Since the conversation has wandered over to the collapse of the WTC I noted some parallels between WTC 7 and the recent Pfizer building problems.
WTC 7 was supposed to be a 25 story building, but later they decided to extend it to 47 stories. The original foundation wasn’t built for that so; “The structural design of 7 World Trade Center therefore included a system of gravity column transfer trusses and girders, located between floors 5 and 7, to transfer loads to the smaller foundation. 5 Existing caissons installed in 1967 were used, along with new ones, to accommodate the building.
The Pfizer building was also being extended upwards by either 10 or 19 stories depending on where you measure it from, not every part was the same height. To support the extra weight the I-beams (more of an H-beam due to the extra wide flanges) were supposed to be boxed in with steel plates welded across the open sides. That never happened, you can clearly see that on the pictures of the bent columns. There was also some weird cantilever thing going on at the location the columns buckled. That wasn’t helping as the force was not straight down. So, the over-stressed columns bent. Whether the Mob had a hand in cutting corners or not I can’t say but the buckled columns were near the former roof and would be a prime location for some Value Engineering.
Back to WTC 7, the collapse of the nearest tower bashed in the front of the building and started a fire and also took out most of the sprinkler system. Carbon steel loses 2/3 of it strength by 900 F (so sayeth the Boiler and Presser Vessel Code). It also grows by 6.5 ppm per degree F which doesn’t sound like much but over 800 degrees and a 50 foot beam that’s 3 inches. So you have a weakened beam or column that is 3 inches longer, so how does it accommodate the extra length? It bows.
So what happens to the fancy pants “gravity column transfer trusses and girders”? Nothing good. Stress is not going where it’s supposed to, the steel is warm taffy, the front of the building isn’t carrying its share of the load, so down it comes. No conspiracy theory is needed. (And the melting point of steel is irrelevant, a point that many people seem to be unable to grasp.)
My original question about the new film adaptation of the Odyssey was about who does Elon Musk think he is. The tone of his quoted posts on X, which he owns, sounded to me as if Musk thinks anyone who attracts his attention must be working for him.
I have now seen several you tube reviews, from young women mind, young women with high urban grooming styles, not trad Christian at all, saying don’t see it. From their perspective, black Helen is the least of its problems. They reference no exposition, assuming the viewer already knows the story, bad dialogue, excessively fast scene change, wrong headed changes in the story, to name a few cinematic blunders. One reviewer complained of accompanying music so loud she couldn’t follow the dialogue.
If JMG is right about a new class of entrepreneurs taking over from the managerial caste, surely we could do better than the likes of Musk, Theil, et al.
Beardtree (#331): Actually, the world you grew up in (and describe so lovingly) is one which many children in the Midwest are lucky enough to be growing up in today: those in conservative/traditional Amish communities, that is. Whose language, along with the Mennonites’, will probably play a massive role in post-industrial North America, come to think about it.
JMG (#329): If your scenario becomes real, linguists of the future should be able to differentiate those different strata, assuming the methods of present-day historical linguistics survive or are re-discovered.
Indeed your hypothetical scenario for the American Southwest sounds quite a bit like the (quite real!) external linguistic history of Brittany, where disentangling the different linguistic layers has caused quite a lot of ink to be spilled (plus a lot of sweat and tears, but no blood, happily) over the past century and a half: originally Gaulish-speaking, then thoroughly Romanized linguistically, with this Romance language then replaced (wholly in Western Brittany, partly in Eastern Brittany) by a close relative of Gaulish brought from Roman/Post-Roman Britain, where for several centuries it had been in contact with another Romance variety (British Romance, otherwise unattested directly and now extinct). This ancestral form of Breton may also have acquired a few words from the Anglo-Saxons before or during its speakers’ migration out of Britain.
And subsequently, after its having been transplanted to the continent, Breton was heavily influenced by written Latin and by yet another Romance language (A very heavily Germanic-influenced one, unlike the other Romance languages Breton had been in contact with: French) and lightly influenced by other languages during the same time period.
Is it odd/bizarre that I regret not being able to go into some kind of suspended animation and come back in 500 years to see how all of this kind of language contact will play out across this continent? I like to think I have a solid imagination, but I suspect that the linguistic landscape of North America in 2526, both in terms of the spoken languages and the written standards (I am certain the plural is appropriate here!) will be far, FAR stranger than what I imagine, or perhaps indeed, could imagine. I also suspect the same could be said of its future ideological/religious landscape, too.
@Etienne (#62)
The big drop in the academic job market occurred in the middle of the baby boom passing through universities. The oldest baby boomers were financially supported (PhD and tenure track job at 25 or 26 without debt) because universities were rapidly expanding.
But by the time the middle of the baby boom was finishing their undergraduate study, grad school (except for STEM subjects) had dried up. Universities were preparing to contract, pre-tenure faculty were purged, and university funding was slashed because universities were seen as having been a hotbed of dissidence (especially against the Vietnam War), and the first oil shock started the economy downhill for ordinary folks.
Joan (#332)
“So it sounds like Nolan got so into his Trojan War vets with PTSD that he ended up hardly using any of the other characters.”
It may be that the film will turn out to be prescient, that an epic about traumatized vets from a prolonged war of aggression trying to find their way home may be relevant for the US.
@ Derpherder # 342
Dear Derpherder – May your restive flock be fruitful and bear you many deep and wonderful and useful thoughts! 🙂
I’ve been reviewing references in dolmen arch, occult philosophy workbook and other places in relation to will and can see why a certain reticence on the matter could be in order.
Haven’t watched any movies for a while but just saw a clip of a father saying he has a 7 yr old daughter and he didn’t think that something called ‘minions’, presented as a children’s film should be exposing children to the idea of summoning demons (monsters) as a ‘fun’ activity (link below).
From the occult philosophy workbook: “The retrograde motion of souls from the human kingdom back to the animal kingdom, happens most often at certain phases in the cycle of history.These cycles move between periods of greater spirituality and lower population, on the one hand, and greater materialism and high population on the other. It is in these latter periods, when materialism is at its peak and it is easiest for souls to lose track of whatever knowledge they have of the mental plane, that falling back to the animal level becomes most common. We are in such a period at present.”
How will is aligned and directed seems critical… if we are in a period of up welling in narcissistic self absorption coupled with devolutionary tendencies, things could get quite wild.
Sometimes it seems like there is an attempt to hijack will and set it on a particular direction… like Mao’s red guard… start with the children where the raw will is not yet tempered by the processes of maturation and ‘mental’ evolution. Kids are effectively little animals that have to learn to be human.
It was one thing watching adults be manipulated through ‘entertainment’ like the normalisation of torture; but confusing children about sexuality and now kid’s entertainment is saying a bit of fun summoning monsters is fine and dandy?
https://x.com/SaltyBitch_52/status/2080796933572948335
If this is the case (animated kids movie), I’m less concerned about peak oil as peak human stupidity in the realms that extend beyond the physical.
Covid response was one area of frying rational thought, but once they come for children in such a way, trouble is afoot (or riding a pale horse)?
Hello Mr Greer and the commentariat!
@Northwind Grandma
My heartfelt condolences to you, and my prayers for Jeff’s safe passage to his next destination, your well-being in this difficult time, and for Fran, that she may find her bearings and that indeed all may be well for her. Your posts are always a source of insight and inspiration, and I sincerely hope my thoughts are doing some good.
Mr Greer, you often place into contrast your view of magic as causing changes in consciousness according to will with the Harry Potter school of thought, where basically anything can be done without any limitations and consequences whatsoever. I was wondering about the origins of the Harry Potteresque view on magic. This obviously was not a concept that was invented in late 20th century by JK Rowling – it looked too familiar and like something that had existed for a long time already (that familiarity has certainly contributed to its widespread acceptance and popularity). However, I could not identify its origins or any traditions it might be associated with. Could you help?
Regarding the woke film version of the Odyssey, wasn’t this the right time, and possibly, the last opportunity for it to be made? The ancient Greeks were constantly reworking their myths and legends to address current mores and concerns. Homer himself has done the same when he composed his epics based on what had already been distant history – his works are certainly the best, but by no means the last word on events. We shouldn’t blame Nolan for making a Hollywood film instead of an archeological/anthropological treatise. I should add that the film adaptation has brought a welcome increase in interest towards ancient Greek culture, and some rather thoughtful examination in mainstream media on where Nolan was faithful to the spirit of the original, and where he was not. As for the fuss resulting from the casting of a black actress as Helen of Troy, this is just a projection of current obsessions and insecurities regarding race which were totally alien to the ancient Greek mind.
PS to that last:
‘When I grow up”
https://youtu.be/wct_ybBvW3I?si=RpfHp49uViYxIW0R
The intersection of software creation, music creation, and the spiritual realm has left me with an interesting problem.
This is all about my app that I built to accompany my guitar. I mentioned previously that I think there’s a spirit who takes control of the rand()omness that I coded and plays music with me. I still think that.
What I’ve realized though is that my coding is incomplete as regards how to pick the notes out of what I’m playing. (Not Fourier – I don’t get that level of math, and the tone of the library manuals annoyed me) I was learning about transverse waves at the same time as coding the interface to the guitar, and I’ve lately realized there’s a better way to code it that reduces the errors.
The thing is, and here’s what usually doesn’t come up in coding: what if the thing I’m calling “error” is part of what lets my spiritual bandmate in to play with me? Maybe I shouldn’t fix this “error”. Maybe the fact that it’s touch and go whether the app will report the fundamental or a transverse element is a crucial part of the doorway that lets my partner in to play.
You know, I think that’s probably true. The music is fine as is. There’s the odd time where it’s like, oh partner, you kind of muffed it there! And it’s hard to play through and carry it. But there’s way more times when he makes pure magic. You know what, I’m not going to eff with it.
Thanks for helping me work that out.
Oh right, I forgot!
JMG: That was actually the whole thing that interested me in your mention of the Lemurian deviation, my wonky and fickle brain now reminds me. I think there was some kind of tie in with the idea that demonic entities might be showing up through LLM activity? Not that I’m a fan of those things, but I had wondered why spirits that show up that way are thought to be demonic. Do you think spirits showing up through machines in general are a thing to be wary of? Would my thing be included in that even though it is not an LLM or anything similar? I’m obviously not thrilled about such an idea, but if you do have any thoughts that bear on that I’d like to know them.
Regarding your comment, I would say that “their effects on humanity have been profoundly destructive” is as good a definition of bad as anything anyone’s likely to come up with. I sure can’t beat that. If that is true, then yeah those guys are bad.
If they also have an adverse effect on, say, crows, then I really have beef with those muckers!
Hey JMG
A few days ago, I finally decided to read the book that you’ve referenced since the ADR, “Muddling towards Frugality” by Warren Johnson. I’m currently around halfway through it, and already I can see how much of its content founds its way into most of your writings about industrial civilisation’s predicament and future.
I wonder, do you think that there’s anything in this book that could do with some revising, anything that it got wrong about our current situation and future? So far i think it’s pretty spot on.
Home page shows open post with 350 comments, go to post and 349 comments show. Post a comment and see ‘preview’ but now 350 comments show. Refresh page and reverts to 349 comments.
Open a new browser instance and before even opening any pages or links get warning “Caution, you are now entering a sub-realm – The owls are not what they seem” /sarc
Keeping in mind the possible patterns of future migration among other things, can you picture the Western half of the USA becoming separate (particularly given the expansive deserts that will develop in the middle) and remaining a relatively large, cohesive unit for longer akin to the Eastern Roman Empire? The Western USA after all represents what Peter Turchin calls the “meta-ethnic frontier” among other things and it is often historically in these areas where the remnant or largest successor states of various empires survive or expand again.
Patrick H. # 283:
“But in the modern West, criminals often get light sentences or a slap on a wrist.”
More often than it should be fair for their victims… However, sometimes “shale happens”, so this or that criminal suffers random whoopings or even worse attacks by their prison buddies, not always are “fair” punishments, but I’m thinking karma can also work in prisons.
On the other hand, the myth of sexual criminals hated in prison by the other inmates maybe isn’t so mythic…I was told by a person a time ago that usually prison rulers give orders to prison wards (at least here) to shut up for not telling the other prisoners who are imprisoned due to sexual attacks, but sometimes this system fails and rapers and child molesters have some problems (ahem). Maybe these “accidents” happen not only here.
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About 911 and hypothetical false flag attacks:
Useful idiots within terrorist organizations exist, and it’s also possible (but dangerous) to infiltrate zealots and terrorist groups by insiders working for this or that secret service. I point it as work hypothesis, not as a confirmed truth. Who knows?
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Anonymous # 301:
Oh, no argument here. Why I didn’t thought in that nasty but true fact you’ve written about part of nowadays righters?(Thanks).
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Etienne # 316:
Maybe I didn’t explain my view about Basque as a language in that comment I wrote. I don’t deny some Basque people still speak nowadays a non Indoeuropean language, non linked with another known European languages. Indeed, I know it’s a pre-Indoeuropean language. What I didn’t like is how some Basque nationalists have made up an ideology based in that real historical truth, to add it some fake hisotrical facts (which it isn’t the same as denying the isolation of Basque within Neolatin languages here). For example, that before the Indoeuropean invasions and then the Romans, today Basque people ancestors lived in a happy edenic-like matriarchy (with no serious archeological evidences, methink).
On the other hand, it’s possible some Celtic words could have arrived to Iberian Peninsula “latinized” from Gaul, yes…but maybe not all of them in nowadays Castilian Spanish.
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Joan # 332:
No argument here. Well, it’s Mr. Nolan interpretation, but is less woke than it seems to usual outraged right wing people. Indeed, I’ve seen in some MSM here some shameful attempts to explain the “Odyssey” in reviews, with a mediocre and unlikely outcome. Good attempt!
I can say Nolan decision to put non White actors and actresses in his last movie as MINOR characters maybe isn’t a concession for wokesters, but a suggestion to show that old story isn’t only for Western people, but for all mankind (an universal story/legend, methink). I think this idea respects the original book spirit.
Ironically, there aren’t any explicit nudes nor sex, and Odysseus family seems a very traditional one, and oh!, no gay relationships; those aspects in the movie seem to have been under the righters radar, because they are obsessed with the Lupita-gate. When the wise man points at the Moon…
It’s a pity political tension and polarization affect art, too.
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JMG # 350:
“the official story seems implausible to me but I don’t ever expect to know the facts”
I tend to share your opinion. Unfortunately, deep truth evidences in those events is well hidden or…maybe destroyed, methink.
JMG: I missed your reply about 911 when I wrote previously. My original comment on the subject was a joke; as to any serious view I might have on the topic, I’m more or less aligned with what you said about both that and JFK, except that in the case of 911 I’m not sure I even know enough to call the official story implausible. I do believe that any relationship between government pronouncements and truth is strictly coincidental, but I can’t say beyond that.
Thank you, commentariat, for a very interesting open post chat this week. So much to think about.
JMG, an astrology dilettante once told me that I was a “new soul,” never before incarnate. What on earth does that mean? I certainly have never sensed any previous lives like many of you have spoken of, but I feel the echo of my ancestors stories in my core. My predecessors were part of the great Scot/Irish migration to North America in the 1800’s, and I’ve often wondered if my automatic opposition to anyone telling me what to do is based on remembered feelings of discrimination and repression? It is palpable, and evident in my siblings, and my parents as well.
Any thoughts?
@Etienne #354
Recently I read about a study on trying to determine the much lower incidence of allergies among Amish children. Their conclusion was childhood exposure to the barn and farm environment with its mixture of animal hair and other animal stuff, manure, plants and plant residue, dust, dirt, insect stuff and so on, the natural backdrop of my childhood. No handwashing before meals for us unless there was visible and obvious gunk.
Again seeing young men running around on electric scooters instead of a car. A high school teacher I had, a Korean War vet shared in class once that when in Korea he had casually told a Korean friend he had made that he had a car waiting for him in the garage at home. His friend told him he was a liar, that no way could a young low level soldier have his own car.
I realized even then that the ownership by ordinary people of a large complicated
metal contraption was actually an oddity. That an older teenager via a part time work during the school year and a summer job could attain car ownership like my son did 20 years ago was a temporary phenomena. Rising costs has made that a difficult challenge now. A harbinger of how coming social change comes through meeting painful limits and not through wise consideration and foresight.
Speaking of the benefits of Amish barn and farm dust exposure on the young to prevent allergies and autoimmune diseases. I could see the pharmaceutical industry concocting an expensive preventative therapy to give young children based on artificial exposure to doses of patented synthesized essence of barn and farm crud instead of just rolling in the dirt with the animals as done formerly. I could tell tales of the “therapy” I underwent in my youth.
Thank you KAN, Slithy and those who share links to what interests them. Often, it interests me as well.
OtterGirl
I am honestly rather surprised that no one else appears to be passingly familiar with Strong Towns.
Their website is here: https://www.strongtowns.org/
They are one of the other few places on the internet where people of different political parties actually show up and work together. I am interested in their work, but far too rural for any practical involvement.
They are about human scaling the urban environment by liberalizing zoning laws and slowing automotive transport through neighborhoods. They have noted particularly that projected city expenses outstrip projected city revenue and that the most tax revenue comes from dense, mixed use neighborhoods, which are also the cheapest to provide city services to.
They have a great many articles available to reader types, and I know they offer a podcast but I am not a listener type so cannot speak to quality. While they do not seem to be aware of the concept of the Long Descent, there is much overlap in practical goals with those who are preparing for that.
I had been thinking recently about Robert Bellah’s concept of civil religions after I had visited Wikipedia recently. I had gone to look up Waldorf schools after seeing them mentioned in an older Ecosophia article, and saw this paragraph in the article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education ):
“Many Waldorf schools have faced controversy due to Steiner’s connections to racist ideology and magical thinking. Others have faced regulatory audits and closure due to concerns over substandard treatment of children with special educational needs. Critics of Waldorf education point out the mystical nature of anthroposophy and the incorporation of Steiner’s esoteric ideas into the curriculum. Waldorf schools have also been linked to the outbreak of infectious diseases due to the vaccine hesitancy of many Waldorf parents.”
In addition to some of these being flat-out contradicted by later parts of the article, the paragraph in general reads like a scientific version of “Waldorf schools are blasphemous and heretical, and if you send your kids to them, you’ll go to Hell and so will they!” Another useful confirmation of Bellah’s thesis. I’ve noticed that a lot of leftist writing uses “controversial” as a code word meaning “bad”. Have you ever seen the pet causes of progressive groups referred to as “controversial”, followed by a list of sins, in this way?
Slithy Toves #349: I’m glad you asked! It gives me an excuse to post this particular video on this topic by famous Caltech PhD particle physicist and creator of Mathematica, Stephen Wolfram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07jmttVw2Yo&t=612s. (How the Universe Generates Time and Space from a Single Rewriting Rule).
But you can also look at it linguistically and realise that it is very difficult, actually impossible, to say what is a particular thing and what is not. Linguistically the word is “nominalization”: taking a process and calling it a thing in order to make it easy to pigeonhole and “talk” about. But, obviously, deforming a process into a thing in order to pigeonhole it introduces endless distortions, errors, and complications.
Buddha was *way* ahead of his time, and a great original discoverer and thinker, but he clearly acknowledged his debt to his yoga teachers.
Hi John,
I saw you mention the JFK assassination. I find it hard to believe that Oswald acted alone simply based on the fact that Jack Ruby wanted Oswald silenced. And I too never expect we’ll know the whole story.
JMG
Thank you on the clarification on the Druid Revival. I wasn’t planning on writing a book or anything, I was mostly just trying to track the redemption and baptism of fire ritual after its initial suppression by the church and how iterations of it survived.
Gunstone @ 364, it seems to me that a functioning nation nowadays must have two things. One is the ability to feed itself. The other is the ability to defend itself. I do believe that tiny nations, Luxemburg, Montenegro, etc. will not long survive, no more than a century. It saddens me to contemplate the likely loss of unique cultures and traditions.
CA might in the long run revert to being a part of Mexico, but I do suspect that there very well might be a union of the PNW states with British Columbia. Such a nation, call it the Pacific Republic, I think could flourish.
The American composer, Samuel Barber wrote an opera about Cleopatra, in which the lead was sung at the Met by the great Leontyn Price. I can remember hearing it on the Saturday opera broadcast. Not only that, Barber wrote the role specifically for Miss Price.
Jessye Norman was renowned for her portrayals of Hellenic characters. She was the go to dramatic soprano for Stravinski’s Jocasta, for example. She sang Berlioz’s Cassandra in her long overdue debut at the Met. That video, Les Troyen, is one of the best (my opinion), opera recordings I have seen. Dido was sung by the redoubtable Tatyana Troyanos. Norman and Troyanos in the same recording. It just doesn’t get much better than that.
The impression I am getting is that two virulent factions are quarreling over which of them gets to “own”, and thereby interpret, classical history and culture. Bret Deveroux had a biting takedown of one of those factions a few Fridays past: https://acoup.blog/2026/07/10/friday-friday-july-10-2026-on-the-chud-vision-of-roman-history/
Looks like at least one AI lab is moving into astrology:
https://unherd.com/newsroom/midjourneys-astrology-expansion-brings-ai-to-the-soul/
When the toxic Canadian air rolled into NYC, it didn’t take long before I saw people everywhere in masks. I’m sure many were leftovers from the cooties drama. In this one instance, I get it. It was bad and the poison in the air was palpable. Still, an inner voice came to me and it sounded a lot like my now gone, ex-marine brother.
It told me, Jeff, embrace the suck.
Indeed I did, sans mask. That little bit of advice is covering a lot of ground there days. It must as it seems we’re in the early stages of a global energy war, a sitzkrieg here, a blitzkrieg over there. I still think about your earlier chart reading and that Jupiter’s placement could help the US pull out a victory abroad. Can’t see how at this point but the future is funny that way, what you least expect generally happens. The whole war, both Ukraine and Iran is a big suck and Iran especially has made me think about thoughts I harbored after Trump’s first victory.
Is this guy just controlled opposition.
It’s been such a mixed bag. What do you think?
Jeff Childers and the Promethean ladies keep me optimistic that he isn’t but that’s about it. Fact is, he’s made a wreck with Iran. The Honest Sorcerer paints a bleak picture, that even if peace were to come tomorrow, the global energy flows are such a mess that tumultuous changes are pretty much baked in the cake. Just another suck to embrace, I suppose. I have young kids to pull through this mess. Makes me wonder, will I be able to do it.
I kept this from the bad cat. It’s been heartening to keep my head on straight.
these are serious times and will not be kind to the unserious.
Kunstler had this line on Friday and it’s one of the most succinct truths I’ve ever read from him, we should put it on a banner over Wall Street.
Capitalism that can’t self-correct invites financial and political violence.
Love those two but you are far and away my favorite light in these dark times. Looking forward to the 5th Wednesday post.
According to a graph here on oil and natural gas production the early 2030’s will be the inflection point leading to the end of the relatively halcyon days we have had. And because of current conflicts it could be sooner.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/no-oil-no-transition-no-economy
I’m probably late to the discussion, but…does anyone else feel really let down by the semiquincentennial? I was 8 years old in 1976, and I remember it as a very exciting time, a whole year of tributes and celebrations. It seemed like everything had been painted red-white-and-blue or emblazoned with the “Spirit of ’76”; it was a national birthday party and for a geeky kid like myself all the focus on history was fascinating. The 250th? It feels like an afterthought. In the current climate it was inevitable, of course, but not only am I disappointed, I feel like today’s kids have been robbed of something.
There are still wildly differing theories about how Celtic came to the British Isles and when. There is an idea of “Celtic from the West” by Barry Cunliffe and John Koch, where Celtic is formed in Iberia (perhaps as early Indo-European is influenced by Aquitanian/Proto-Basque) and spreads to Gaul and Britain, and central Europe, back in the early Bronze Age maybe 3000-2500 BC or so.
However the mainstream view has been that it started in Central Europe (Hallstatt culture from Austria) and reached Britain around 500 BC replacing an earlier unknown pre-Celtic substrate.
I find it intriguing that there is a Cornish name for St. Michael’s Mount, a tidal island near Penzance, of “Karrek Loes y’n Koes” – literally ‘the grey rock in the forest’ It was 3000 BC when the island was fully connected to the mainland and surrounded by a forest, which occasionally still turns up on the beach in the form of preserved wood when the sand shifts after storms.
It could however be the preserved tree stumps that inspired the name, or it could still express a folk memory of the island being connected by a direct translation of the name from whatever language existed prior to Celtic.
@JMG “If it’s enough, I’ll probably do so in a British pub!”
Don’t forget the steak and chips with mushy peas and gravy. Absolute perfection. Couldn’t do it any better than that.
I will say this, the local beer scene here in Australia is expanding wonderfully. Lots of stuff that really packs a punch. In the last year I have come across at least a dozen really decent Imperial Stouts. That thick molasses almost coffee like taste with a bitter end note. Just brilliant. Better than the usual mass produces larger junk that get pushed the world over. Nothing against a larger, just the large that is made in volumes that fills swimming pools and is ‘Refreshing’ almost like a glass of candy.
@ Siliconguy #352. RE : WTC 7
I am always amazed at how engineers try to head these things off but are always outdone by the ambitions of others. It is said in engineering that you design something to be 6 times stronger than its actual purpose. That is so that once you have some low grade materials, questionable constructions and a few design changes along the way, you still have a little buffer at the end.
An old Zen story.
There was a Zen temple being constructed and it was known that the other temple in the next village was not of the best of terms with them. They were always having a feud with each other over various things.
There was going to be a big ceremony on the Friday to celebrate the main beam of the building getting erected and slot into place. On Thursday night before the ceremony, some people from the opposing temple sneaked in and cut 1 foot of the beam so that when they went to put it into place, it wouldn’t’ fit.
On Friday, the big event came and everybody saw that the beam add a foot cut off. The main engineer said, raise it anyway and try to put it into place. Despite protest they went a head and it fit in perfectly. Everyone was amazed that it worked. The Engineer simply said “I knew those in the other temple would try to cut a foot off, so I deliberately made it a foot longer.”.
It is a very much a mind set that seems to be vanishing nowadays as the runaway freight train of efficiency picks up speed.
Etienne, the reason my imaginary linguistic history sounds real is that I modeled it on real examples. I have a longstanding interest in Native American linguistics — I’ve studied two West Coast languages (Lushootseed and Takelma) and at one point was fairly adept at the Chinook trade jargon, a fascinating patchwork made of half a dozen Native American languages plus hefty servings of English and French, once spoken all over the northwestern quarter or so of North America. (My late wife and I used to use it as a private language on buses and the like, though once that got a startled reaction from an old Native American woman a few seats ahead of us.) As for wanting to spend a while in suspended animation, oh, trust me, I get that. I want to schedule a new incarnation here around 2500 to see how things are shaping up.
Earthworm, oh, it’ll have to be boobytrapped in ways that will repel or confuse (or both) the unworthy. That’s hardly difficult, though — occultists have been doing that for many centuries.
Soko, to the best of my knowledge, the Harry Potter notion of magic is an invention of Victorian children’s literature, and was based on simpleminded borrowings from mythology and folklore. As for the movie, color me completely uninterested in the whole squabble, for reasons mention above.
Cynthia, anything electronic is open to the subnatural, but the subnatural is a very big place, like the natural and the supernatural! Electric guitars and amplifiers seem to tap into spirits who like to encourage wild parties and hot sex, but that’s as close to the demonic as they get. My guess is that you’ve got a subnatural spirit interested in your music, but it need not be one of the specific batch of nasties I described.
J.L.Mc12, it’s been so long since I read it that I’m not sure.
Earthworm, the owls are certainly not what they seem. 😉
Gunstone, my guess is that it’ll go the other way, with the Pacific coast falling into chaos long before the eastern half of the continent does. It’s too vulnerable to mass migration.
John, a new soul is somebody who’s just reached the human level after the usual sequence of animal lives, and is figuring out how to be human. Most astrologers who make such judgments are pretty clueless.
BeardTree, a step in the right direction!
Ethan, yep. If I’d had children they would have gone to Waldorf schools, but then I make a beeline for what the mainstream rejects.
Peter, that’s one of many details that just doesn’t fit.
Anonymous, I’d encourage you to reconsider. A book on that would be worth having.
Jeff, embracing the suck is about all we can do. As for Trump, what too few people realize is that he’s a moderate. He’s not trying to bring down the system — he’s trying to make the minimum changes in it that will keep it from tearing itself to bits, and the privileged people who hate him are too clueless to realize that he’s their best chance for survival.
BeardTree, it’s definitely worth watching.
Sister Crow, most of the people in power, on all sides of the political landscape, desperately want the rest of us not to think about the fact that our country was founded by a revolution against clueless elites. That’s why so many people in authority are avoiding saying a thing about the semiquincentennial.
Mawkernewek, I’ve mislaid the article, but a team of scholars pointed out some time ago that legends in Scotland and northern Australia preserve accurate descriptions of geography before the oceans rose after the last ice age. Thus that Cornish name comes as no surprise!
Michael, I’m delighted to hear it. I don’t expect ever to visit Australia but if I do I’ll be sure to order some stout.
Hi JMG,
July has five Wednesdays, coming up, 29 July. Possible topics haven’t been discussed. I gather it will be you who chooses the topic.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Peter at 375: Reluctantly, here goes regarding “Jack Ruby.” First of all, he was a mobster, and his birth name was Jacob Rubenstein, which is not exactly a Sicilian-sounding name. He was originally from Chicago, where his parents, according to Wikipedia, were orthodox Jews. He apparently received “an offer he couldn’t refuse” from some other mobster, who’s name also was not exactly Sicilian-sounding. It was important that Oswald never be brought to trial, where the gov’t’s evidence against him could be subjected to close scrutiny by defense attorneys. Thus, Oswald had to go, and “Jack Ruby” was the guy for the job. (There are some cynics, like me, who remember these events well, and have just never quite managed to “get off the grassy knoll.”)
“I stumbled across an interesting post on Quora today that helped crystallize some things thoughts I’ve had in the past. The post is in answer to a question about why the ancient Greeks worshipped the gods if they were as awful as the mythology portrays them:”
I mean, you can ask the same questions regarding e.g. if the Abrahamic god is as awful as portrayed in the Old Testament, then why do so many Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc worship the Abrahamic god?
Northwind, er, we had a contest as usual at the beginning of this month. (Under the circumstances, I’m not surprised you don’t recall it.)
Phutatorius, ahem. If you think that Italians were the only ethnicity involved in mid-20th century organized crime in the US, think again. If you’re curious about Jack Ruby’s ethnicity, names you should look up include Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Moe Dalitz, Arnold Rothstein, and Meyer “Mickey” Cohen, just for starters. (The website of Las Vegas’s Mob Museum is a good starting place for each of these.)
On the subject of antipodean stouts, I have some tasting notes on my dreamwidth at https://k-a-nitz.dreamwidth.org/tag/beer
Chuaquin
As I said to you I would, I went to The Odyssey yesterday. I liked it,though that is an oversimplification. If I hadn’t known the story I would have found the time/ place sequences a bit confusing.
I think every generation and ideology is going to interpret a legend in the way that conveys what they feel is the pertinent message to the people they are trying to reach. Homer himself was telling a story hundreds of years later about something that might not even have happened, and geared the story towards what would resonate with the audience he was trying to reach.Many of the issues seem pertinent to today’s realities, but I suppose they were intentionally presented that way.
I haven’t followed the controversy and right wing hatred of the movie, especially about the casting of a black woman as Helen of Troy, so anything I would say would just come from my very strong anti right wing bias.
Mary Bennett@377
For a brief period in the 1960s I lived across the street from Leontyne Price. In warm weather she would rehearse with her windows open and I would sit on my balcony and listen to my own private opera performance.
It has always been my hope that there would one day be a Cascadia, and that, if I come back, I might be a part of it.
I think desertification will affect the northern 1/3 of Mexico and the SW 1/4 of the US, making a CA reunification with Mexico unlikely.I would love to see a union of SW BC, Western WA, OR, and CA, and perhaps even Northern Baja, climate permitting. I would wish it to resemble Moorish Andalucia. No harm in hoping.
Stephen
@ Beardtree #370
“I could see the pharmaceutical industry concocting an expensive preventative therapy to give young children based on artificial exposure to doses of patented synthesized essence of barn and farm crud instead of just rolling in the dirt with the animals as done formerly.”
I think that industry is well ahead of you… inasmuch as there is already an established class of pharmaceutical products commonly given to young children as an “expensive preventive therapy” for which “patented synthesised essence of barn and farm crud” is as apt a description as any other I can think of. 😉
#Archdruid, Putatorius
Cervantes, in his novel, “Rinconete y Cortadillo” describes an organization of organizated crime in the city of Sevilla, in the C XVI, wich was focused to the comision of roberies ,and attacks with blades by contract. This organization enjoyed the complicity of policy, and protected to his members in the case of been detained and judged. The targets usually there was traders and rich peasants, but never people of the Church. And the clients who ordered attacks with blades , there was nobles. In those times Sicily was member of the Spanish Crown, so that It is possible that the present Mafia could be relatiotaned with the described organization of Sevilla.
In the movies of “The Godfather” is mentioned that :
1) Corleone was protected by police, judges and politicians.
2) There was a Jewish mafia, beter relationated with political power than the Italian.
3) In the core of Italian state there was a criminal organization able of to kill the Pope and very much powerful that every usual mafia.
Northwind Grandma, please accept my condolences. I had only skimmed the comments earlier, and managed to completely miss your sad news. Best wishes to your kitty, too, may he adapt quickly to the new reality.
For those who, like me, worry about all the crap we’re producing, here is another installment of Ma Nature Is Awesome: https://phys.org/news/2026-07-bacteria-dissolved-uranium-stable-compound.html
I had already stumbled upon articles about new bacteria being found that eat plastic. To me, the timing is somewhat ominous: if the cleanup teams are already shuffling their feet this loudly, it won’t be long before the innkeeper starts putting the chairs up…
@JMG 388: Yes, of course. But I was responding to a specific post and I didn’t want to “beat a dead horse.”
JMG: Ha! Any spirit that’s looking for hot sex and wild parties will have better luck at a gathering of accountants than here in my world!
I don’t know what “subnatural” is and Google provides a rationalist definition that isn’t really relevant here. Hitherto, any spirit that wasn’t anchored to a material plane body was supernatural. I’m sure if it was anything to worry about you’d’ve said though.
“. I have a longstanding interest in Native American linguistics — I’ve studied two West Coast languages (Lushootseed and Takelma) and at one point was fairly adept at the Chinook trade jargon, a fascinating patchwork made of half a dozen Native American languages plus hefty servings of English and French, once spoken all over the northwestern quarter or so of North America.”
That must be quite an experience. I have read that the Indigenous languages of the Western Hemisphere have a reputation for being among the most baroque languages in the world. In many such languages, practically every verb has an irregular past and future tense. More significantly, indigenous Western Hemisphere languages have a “polysynthetic” linguistic morphology where one can often form a whole sentence with a single highly infected word!
@Phutatorius #386):
Although I am generally uninterested in, and skeptical of, so-called “conspiracy theories,” I think almost any one of them is more likely to be correct than the official government view of JFK’s assassination. For me, the clincher was the fact, which I remember well, that the Warren Commission, once it had considered the evidence it had and issued its conclusions, ordered all the evidence it had viewed to be destroyed.
That is the ultimate sign of bad faith, and it utterly shattered my ability to trust anything any government, including ours, would ever do in the future.
@Sister Crow (#381) and JMG (#384):
I’m with you, Sister Crow, that the semiquincentennial is a huge letdown. I was 34 when the bicentennial happened in 1976, and it was a huge deal then. (One of my ancestors, Isaac Cushman, fought in the Revolutionary War; he died and was buried in the army, probably en route to or from some battle, and was buried by the road. No one now knows where his remains lie.)
And I think you’re spot on, JMG, about today’s people in power. My wife and I both proudly come from generation upon generation of folk who cheered on, and sometimes actively participated in, any resistance to clueless elites, however violent. Sometimes they were revolutionaries, sometimes criminals, and the difference between the two is not always a real thing. None of them trusted any government implicitly, ever. One of my all-time favorite quotes comes from Lord Acton, a historian: <b."Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."
Hello Mr. Greer,
I was wondering about spiritual traditions and their use of water to deter evil spirits. I understand that crossing fresh water is supposed to throw off the trail of nefarious entities, but do the traditions make distinctions amongst the type of crossing? So is there a difference between say swimming, rowing a boat, or walking across a bridge? Also, is there any value in chlorinated pool water or is that so polluted that it no longer matters. Any light you could shed on the relevant spiritual traditions would be greatly appreciated.
JMG: “it’ll have to be boobytrapped in ways that will repel or confuse (or both) the unworthy.”
A mild excursion in praise of pattern recognition:
***
A soldier considered that his enemy’s behaviour was unworthy and the enemy considered that his enemy’s behaviour was unworthy too, though each had a different measure of what was worthy and what was unworthy.
And yet each side, enemies as they were, used the same maxim of ‘by their worthiness shall ye know them’.
Each citadel used the same language, and in order to confound their enemies, each side, to protect their respective citadels, set out elaborate patterns in their minefields, patterns that the worthy would recognise and the unworthy would not.
In this manner they sought to protect their treasures because only the worthy would be able to safely navigate their way.
This went on for many generations and the approach spread out into other areas of life, where the worthy would recognise truth and the unworthy would not. So it came to be that even their books were written in this manner, and to confound their enemies even further, falsehoods, errors, red herrings and other mechanisms were used to keep the unworthy at bay. The worthy would recognise truth, the unworthy would not.
Things went on like this for several hundred years until a plague ravaged the people of both sides. The survivors, fearing death, tried to reconcile themselves with the survivors of the other citadel, but neither could get further than the minefields because they did not recognise the patterns and were therefore unworthy. As unworthies they were blown to smithereens in the minefields.
The last living worthy of each citadel, each carrying their ‘Book of Knowledge’ passed through the protective minefield of their respective citadel and met in the no-man’s land between.
They tried to discuss their books but each saw falsehood where the other saw truth and the layers of obfuscation and mechanisms to sift the worthy from the unworthy complicated matters no end and each withdrew lest they batter each other for being unworthy.
The citadels fell into ruin and voices were heard there no more.
One hundred years passed and a new people came across the land; they saw the citadels and they saw the patterns in the minefields but did not recognise them. The wise amongst them wanted to look more closely at the patterns by being further away from them, so they constructed hot air balloons and, looking down from above and were able to draw the patterns and see the paths. The drawings were dropped to the ground in sturdy containers where the people could use them to navigate the paths. The wise in the balloons flew to the centre of the two citadels and landed.
There they found the books of knowledge of the worthies of each citadel – it was a puzzling thing – both books used the same language but they said opposite things. One book said that long hair was worthy, the other that short hair was worthy. The book where long hair was worthy said that a smooth face was worthy, the one where short hair was worthy had long beards as worthy… and so it went on and on.
After some time considering things, the wise of the new peoples came to recognise the patterns – the two citadels expressed polarities, but the polarities had been embellished with falsehood and illusion to confuse what each side saw as the unworthiness of the other side. They began to strip out the extraneous mechanisms and leave only what appeared to be truth. After some years they found that each book had half a truth and it was only by bringing the two halves together that they were able to rise beyond to a further truth that none of them had known before.
***
But yes, dogs with wings is trouble we do not need!!
@ gnat #374
Thank you for that video, fascinating… 🙂
I do like to think that the universe created time and space because the universe loves music and dance.
Not a properly science-y explanation, but it works for me. 😉
Mary B. # 353:
“The tone of his quoted posts on X, which he owns, sounded to me as if Musk thinks anyone who attracts his attention must be working for him.”
I agree, ha ha…Musk usual opinions tell to clever readers much more about Elon own personality than about his target (Mr. Nolan). I guess Elon Musk suffers a god complex (omnipotence delusion?).
Youtube criticisms agains Nolan last movie: Although I disagree (well, maybe I’ve watched the Odyssey in an alternative universe), I’m glad those negative criticisms are centered in artistic alleged “holes” in Nolan movie, not based in ideological partisan biases. Thank you!
However, I’m quite puzzled after reading a person complained music was too loud so it was difficult to hear dialogues…Maybe the Spanish dub I watched was better than the english original version…
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Soko # 359:
“We shouldn’t blame Nolan for making a Hollywood film instead of an archeological/anthropological treatise.”
Indeed, he’s a commercial filmmaker, not an art-house film director. In addition to this fact, written literature (novels and poetry) aren”t the same as screenplays for movies. It’s a “necessary evil” to cut and change original works: reading isn’t the same as watching images (they’re different kinds of art with different own codes).
———————————————————————–
About Odysseus suffering PTSD:
I don’t like everyday life problems “psychiatrization”, so I’ve got some reasonable doubts Nolan depicted the Odyssey main character as a “crazy” traumatized man, due to war. However, I tend to understand Odysseus decided to put and end to the long war against Troy (with the in-famous Horse), but maybe he didn’t thought about direct consequences of his idea/act (be careful with your wishes!). It’s interesting it seems a similar situation as the one Oppenheimer lived after his Bomb was used in 1945, to some extent. I think he felt sad, guilty and ashamed after the final Trojans massacre by his brothers in arms. Not exactly ill, but harmed.
I think it’s a likely interpretation of Homer story, so IMHO it respects to some extent the classic work spirit (not another Nolan occurrences, like for example the anachronic Sea People mention).
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Ethan # 373:
“Many Waldorf schools have faced controversy due to Steiner’s connections to racist ideology and magical thinking”
Of course, Herr Steiner was an occultist, so a black beast for materialist scientificists…On the other hand, claims about Steiner racist ideology are a bit malevolous, maybe loosely based in an historical fact: some Nazis like Rudolf Hess wanted to join Steiner ideas to their Fascist ideology. It isn’t strange, because some another German culture geniuses (like Wagner and Friedrich) were used as part of Nazi propaganda, after their death, previous to the ’30s. Ironically, Hitler didn’t like Steiner ideas…
Wikipedia is usually very biased to its own ideological agenda, I don’t have to tell us which one…
————————————————————————
Michael G. # 383:
“the local beer scene here in Australia is expanding wonderfully.”
I’m glad for this success in beer scene there. Here in my town we’ve got a modest beer scene, with a few craft beers. By the way, Spanish word for beer (“Cerveza”) comes , according some people, from a Celtic origin, Latinized as “Cervesia/cerevisia”. Maybe Gaul? Hhowever, other says it comes from the Roman goddess Ceres. Who knows?
I’m reading now Lionel Shriver novel (and essay?) “Mania”, which, since its first page, is a very sarcastic attack against woke ideology, replacing race, gender and another of its pet favorite “sacred cows” with love for the dumbest people, and hatred against the smartest people (intellectual supremacism, ahem). She depicts a funny and ominous social hysteria in that book against “clever and smart people”, supporting the less smart people revenge against them, due to a dangerous agenda, preached by the usual suspects: scholars, artists and journalists.
Main point of view comes from a very inconformist and individualist woman, maybe Lionel “alter ego”.
If you replace “smart people” with “straight white men”, you can do the math: “Two minutes of Hate” against evily evil people.
Another part of her novel tells the reader how the Jehovah Witnesses cult works for brain washing their membership everyday…Well, there are some “strange” coincidences in their “modus operandi” with woke evangelic zeal, ahem…Not casually, methink.
It’s interesting Shriver is -n her real life- an evident old school feminist who believes in evil Patriarchy (Ok, nobody is perfect), but she’s fed up enough of current wokesters madness to write such an evident satire against nowadays doctrine…
Have you read this novel? In that case, what do you think about it?
JMG (off list, if you wish) – Someone sent me an interesting website on Tolkien’s private numerology: https://www.thewindrose.net/predictions/
I know we disagree about the primary nature of Tolkien’s crux symbolism (The Shadow), although I admit yours is the strongest critique out there that I’ve found, but I thought you might be more than passingly interested in this, if you ever dip back into his stuff again! Cheers, and well wishes, as always. I find it ironic in a great way that you (not a Christian) are one of my primary teachers, and am grateful for it. I still have aspirations of rescuing Tolkien from the fundamentalists and other ilk that trammel his Art. Call it creative misreading, if you stand by your interpretations!
Back to last week’s blog post on Decline and Fall:
I was rereading “How the Irish Saved Civilization” last night, and came to the description of 4th Century AD Rome and the character of Ausonius the Poet, a card-carrying member of what sounds dreadfully like today’s affluent woke intelligentsia – and an A-number-1 lightweight all around.
From there, Cahill described in detail the Roman society, economics, and politics in general in those years; read it and look around you today, with a cold chill running down your spine, 17 centuries later.
Jessica, Aldarion, Chuaquin:
I guess that Odysseus was not traumatizated, but defeated and unable for to return to Itaca like a loser.
Acording this vídeo with subtitles wich can be translated to the English, the Illiad and the Odyssey gives a mythic account of real events linked with the collapse of Bronze Age, due to a climatic change that caused a severe drought in the Eurasian Steppe and Middle East leading a cascade of invasions wich caused the rupture of comercial and political links between the empires of that time and their consequent collapse.. (Theory of Likov) With the exception of Egypt. So, the Illiad describes the failed atemp for the conquest of Troy. Intent that exhausted the Mycenian Empire and finished in a retreat. And the Odyssey describes the exodus for plundering by the Mediterranean sea of the Achaeans and Danaans merged with more peoples wich in the present receive the collective name of Sea People.
So the characters of the Illiad were loser chieftains who had lost their power and their wealth in their respective homeland and try to adquire wealth by the mean of pillage or the work like mercenaries. Like Menelao,who had recovered his wife Helen, worked as mercenary for an Egyptian pharaoh.
Jessica, Aldarion, Chuaquin:
Excuse me I forgot to add the link of the video: https://youtu.be/y4eW0_DqroI?is=0VBaYeAwC5PsmQys
Kyle,
Wow, thank you for letting me know about those! But ooh, I almost wish you hadn’t told me! Ultimately those Texarado boots are exactly what I want, but the idea of shelling out that much is making me feel a bit Scrooge-ish.
Since (almost) nothing is off-topic: I had a weekend-long celebration of my birthday in typical boomer style. On Saturday the family and I explored previously unvisited corners of Philadelphia’s commuter rail system, and on Sunday my family indulged me by letting work on a couple of projects with my eldest son: we changed out the clockspring* in his car and installed an expansion tank** in our water system. (I’m proud to say my son can now solder copper pipe with the best of them!)
That IS typical boomer style, isn’t it? :{)
Roldy
* The clockspring is the gizmo behind the steering wheel that gets all the signals to and from the buttons for the cruise control etc.
** The new water meter has a backflow preventer, so the overpressure valve started sending hot water onto the basement floor whenever the water heater would run for too long.
Northwind,
I am praying for Jeff, for the wound in his heart, for you, and for Henry. I am so sorry for your loss.
To the film controversy: I must say that the actress who plays Helen does nothing for me, but her casting was absolutely brilliant. Everyone has to have an opinion on this, because everyone is talking about it. If they had cast a beautiful Greek woman, I don’t think I would even know the film existed. All this for a bit part! I’m not watching it either way, but I must respect the marketing genius at work.
@Ambrose,
You warned that looking to non-jewish authors for a history of the Third Reich is to go down a dark path. Do you seriously think a Frenchman or a Pole or a Russian incapable of telling the history of those years? Or even a German? They all bring different perspectives– and you would have found some of each in the camps with the Jews.
Would you feel threatened if I suggested it was important to look at the Ottoman Empire from more perspectives than just the Armenian? If not, why not?
@ Mary Bennett,
I am sorry, but how does your complaint about Elon Musk differ from his about the director? Mr Musk is no more beholden to make public pronouncements palatable to you than Mr Nolan is to make films palatable to Mr Musk. You are of course not beholden to me to make any kinds of comments, palatable or otherwise, but I’m not sure I see the difference here.
All: About the United States’ semiquincentennial celebrations (or, rather, non-celebrations): I think JMG’s answer (#384) to Sister Crow (#381), along with Robert Mathiesen’s approval of this answer (#399), only goes so far in explaining this. After all, what would stop any number of ordinary Americans (with or without the participation of their local governments) across the country from each throwing a fine and MASSIVE birthday bash, complete with all the alcohol, food, flags and fireworks such celebrations entail?
As a non-American who once lived in the U.S., I definitely sense that there is a much deeper issue: Americans’ basic faith in the bedrock soundness and legitimacy of their country and its institutions has, over the past couple of decades, thoroughly collapsed. The rising popularity of secessionist movements, often given very overt support by perfectly mainstream politicians (something which I think would have been utterly unthinkable in the twentieth century), definitely supports this impression of mine. And thus, the total absence of any kind of grassroots support for any celebration of the American semiquincentennial anywhere points in the same direction.
JMG (#384): As a speaker of Chinook Jargon: if you ever pay a visit to (especially rural) Quebec (There is a fine craft beer scene in the province. Just sayin’) you would find much of the local French very oddly familiar-sounding. The French words of Chinook Jargon came from the mouths of French Canadian “coureurs des bois”, and they remain quite recognizably popular in origin. You would hear such familiar-sounding words as “le yâbe” instead of standard French “le diable” for “the devil” (widely used as a pejorative/augmentative: “ça pue le yâbe!” “It stinks to high heaven”)….or “drette” instead of “droit” for “straight, really” (“C’est drette là!” “It’s right there!”).
Chuaquin (#403, last observation): Spanish “cerveza” definitely comes from Gaulish, and entered the Latin of Gaul and later entered Spanish from French or Provençal (probably long after Gaulish itself had died out in Gaul). French still has a very archaic-sounding word for “beer”, “cervoise”, which descends from this same Gaulish word (And most French speakers know the word on account of its being used as the word for “beer” in that fine, timeless classic of French literature, Astérix).
No need to post publicly if not sufficiently relevant – I’ve made a vow to post on Open Threads until the novel is finished – I am done with Chapter 21 and half-way through Chapter 22! Still having fun 🙂
Northwind, I’ve added Henry to the list!
@Chuaquin,
Shriver had another book ” The Mandibles”, published way earlier in the performative progressive era ( 2016) that also amounted to a scathing critic of all things Woke. She was early to the game with that one.
So … the Orange de Julius is ‘moderate’?? Well, after diving egohead first straight into Israel’s wishes-were-fishes modus mis-operandi, right there with a host of parasitic NeoCON$ – both in, and outside of his admin… ,Vapid Media – to include both mainstream AND our vaunted neoMAGA intertoob influencer$, stupid quazi-christian Scofieldites, etc, etc, … well, moderate goes entirely by the wayside! As for privilege .. Trump wears it in spades .. what with the in-your-face insider trading .. over-the-top look-at-me propaganda, $oothsocial bla bla bla … well, don’t blame me if I feel just a wee bit JADED!
A while ago you said that you believe liberalism fell over dead a couple of decades ago because it could not survive collapse of the belief in Progress. Something that occurs to me — maybe it was obvious to you but it just hit me tonight — is that you can get pretty far explaining contemporary “progressivism” if you assume that it’s what happens when liberals quietly replace a belief in Progress with a belief in Apocalypse.
To believe in either Progress and Apocalypse, you almost necessarily have to judge the present (and particularly the West) as bad, to be replaced as soon as possible by some better future state, but if you believe in Progress you can be patient: the present may be what’s standing in the way of the future, but it’s also a necessary bridge to the future, which will have to come sooner or later because that’s what Progress means. So as long as you believe in Progress you can both believe that the modern West is deeply flawed but also good enough to love it and build upon it.
But if you believe in Apocalypse, then the sooner the modern world falls, the sooner you can bask in your glorious utopian birthright. The present is nothing but an obstacle to be gotten rid of soon as possible. And this seems to explain much of the motivation of many modern “progressives.”
As a side note, I remember when it was live topic among left-leaning thinkers to discuss what the difference was between liberals and progressives. If I’m right, ironically the most salient difference is that progressives do not believe in progress!
> World Trade Center buildings
In 1988 or thereabouts, I lived in Danbury, Connecticut, and took a train several times to do genealogical research in Manhattan and Brooklyn. This was a couple decades before censuses and vital records were digitized (where they were made available online). In 1988, it was all paper books, paper files, paper and pen, microfiche and paper copiers. I was researching relatives who had been born/resided in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens from 1850 onwards. I was looking through births, marriages, deaths. I also took sojourns to various cemeteries; I felt emotions after finding the gravestone of my father’s father’s father (b1863) (and family).
During those trips, one of the World Trade Center’s ground level was Port Authority where my train came in at. I remember walking out onto the street where cars and pedestrians were, and looking straight up along one side of the tower. I could not see the top.
I remember saying to myself, “This height is just not natural. Humans are not supposed to be up that high. I felt the danger. Heebie-jeebies. I feel the same about airplanes: people shouldn’t be that high up. There is something sick about it. And people wonder why plane crashes happen. “It’s the height, stupid.” I shook my head. “They are all nuts. A bunch of idiots! What does up, must come down.” I turned on my heel and headed for the courthouse. I avoid skyscrapers. I flew a limited number of times when I had no other choice; maybe twice. Skyscrapers, planes, etc. are abominable; anything higher than five stories is too high. I am a country girl at heart.
That is what I felt looking up from street level at the base of one of the WTC towers. “Insanity. What are they thinking?”
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Like all of us Rudolf Steiner is a mix of the true, the false, the good, the beautiful, the ugly and the bad, with the bad stuff not negating the good stuff or the good justifying or excusing the the bad. The mix just is. Hopefully the good and the beautiful and the true become more of us as time goes on. A lot of good in Steiner IMO, but part of his world view was undoubtedly racist views of the different divisions of humanity as he understood them. Understandably his present day followers keep those portions of his writings on the down low.
JMG 384
> Sister Crow, most of the people in power, on all sides of the political landscape, desperately want the rest of us not to think about the fact that our country was founded by a revolution against clueless elites. That’s why so many people in authority are avoiding saying a thing about the semi-quincentennial.
In 1760s American colonies, “Taxation without Representation” was foundation. Those three words still mean a heck of a lot.
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
TylerA (no. 412): “You warned that looking to non-jewish authors for a history of the Third Reich is to go down a dark path.”
Nothing wrong with non-Jews writing about the Hitlerzeit. However, the suggestion that the field has been too Jewish-dominated to be trustworthy, sends certain signals. *That’s* the dark path.
By the way, JMG’s wayward cousin Tanner Greer (who studies war and geopolitics) has written about his experiences teaching the Iliad in China. He has some fascinating and illuminating perspectives on the text:
https://scholars-stage.org/how-i-taught-the-iliad-to-chinese-teenagers/
@ Robert Mathiesen #304
“…one point of Protestant Christian doctrine has always resonated with me ever since I first heard it articulated more than half a century ago. That is the Calvinist teaching on the inherent depravity of human beings. I have felt that in my bones ever since I was a small child. That is the reason why I have never had any faith whatever in even the bare possibility of anything like human “moral” or “ethical” progress…”
Robert, as always you make me think, and so I have also been thinking about this…
One formulation of this teaching – which I grew up thinking of as the belief in “total depravity” – goes as follows:
“Since the Fall, all people are inescapably predisposed to evil prior to making any actual choice, and are unable to refrain from sin.”
This sense of humans (and also all of nature) being utterly fallen, contaminated, and evil – without having ANY possible choice in the matter – pervaded my own childhood, since it was the whole reason given to me by my family for everything that Jesus did. We are born lost and in need of being saved from our utter depravity, which exists in us and around us before any choice is even possible, and therefore… Good News! Jesus died to save us!
It seemed to me (as, I later found out, it seemed to Pelagius in the 4th century), that this teaching ITSELF could lead to people continually committing depraved acts, and making no effort to do any better, in the self-comforting knowledge that “sure this is how I am, the devil is in me, and sure, I cannot expect myself to do any different”… and that there was a laziness to it that could be morally self-defeating.
I do not want to argue that people are inherently good, either. People are not inherently good or inherently evil, but capable of millions of ways of interacting with one another, most of which will be neither outstandingly good nor outstandingly evil, but occasionally will be one or the other. To me, people are inherently PEOPLE, which has its perennial mix of good, bad and ugly, but which ALSO contains choice – and I think that is the key thing missing from the concept of inherent depravity, and inherent contamination and taint. If you put choice back into the picture, then you also put in duty, responsibility, relationship and participation – none of these make sense if there is no choice.
I do like how Solzhenitsyn framed the matter (and there is no doubt at all that he witnessed some depravity up close and very personally during the course of his life):
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
There is good in us, there is evil in us, and there is a great deal of humdrum ordinary “meh” in us, but everyday there are choices, duties, responsibilities inherent in our relational participation in the world, that we cannot outsource to some saviour (or conversely to some devil) who “makes me do it”, because we are not lost, we are just finding our way around strange, sometimes new, terrains, and somehow muddling through them as we learn…
And this is the place I have got to after being raised with the “total depravity” teachings. I do expect myself to choose, and to go on choosing every day, knowing that the line between good choices and bad choices lies within me, and that the potential for choosing badly will always be present. But, regardless, never outsourceable. And in general trying to use the lessons of experience to learn to do better. Not to BE better, since I can never BE better than my actual acts and words and their effects. But to DO better based on whatever I have learned from my last doing, seems possible.
Anyway, as always, thank you for promoting some thinking. 🙂
@JMG
Mawkernewek, I’ve mislaid the article, but a team of scholars pointed out some time ago that legends in Scotland and northern Australia preserve accurate descriptions of geography before the oceans rose after the last ice age. Thus that Cornish name comes as no surprise!
You’re perhaps thinking of Patrick Nunn’s Worlds in Shadow: Submerged Lands in Science, Memory and Myth (2021), and you can add Tamil to the list. It’s one of the things that convinces me that the Celts spread east from the Atlantic, rather than west from the Alps (referenced in another comment). Nunn’s personal website has links to interesting articles.
Re: Ausonius (406):
I wouldn’t call Ausonius Woke™️ (he did, after all, write a poem about a slave he bedded on a regular basis), but instead someone akin to the Gerontocracy presently running this nation. We’re talking about a man conversant in the by-then rigorous, backward-looking mannerisms who was retired by The Empire at the age of Eighty.
I have taken the time to mull over some ideas about the first millennium BCE in Greece and the wider Mediterranean. Obviously, there is room for much more mulling!
Spengler defines his cultures “morphologically” (his word) by reference to root symbols. For the Apollonian (Classical Greek) culture he thinks the root symbol is the isolated, self-sufficient human body as shown in free-standing human sculptures, especially nude ones; in temples that are meant to be looked at from the outside more than from the inside; and in city states that jealously defend their complete autonomy. I outlined the problem with Spengler’s timeline for the Apollonian culture in my earlier comment: it starts abruptly ~800 BCE by adopting and adapting many traits from Lydia, Syria, Egypt and other places instead of developing in place.
JMG radicalized this observation by positing a shared Eastern Mediterranean civilization of the first millennium BCE that started out in Asia Minor and the Levant. This makes a lot of sense for the writing system, even though Spengler points out that the Greeks mistrusted writing for a very long time (e.g. in Plato) in a way the Israelites apparently didn’t.
The other three traits JMG suggested are less characteristic of a new culture. Independent city-states had existed in the Levant and Mesopotamia since ~10000 BCE, and Steven Mithen suggested in “After the Ice” that the Jordanian site of Wadi Faynan had a town hall before ~9000 BCE. City-states temporarily lost their autonomy to empires like Egypt and Akkad, then recovered it when those empires weakened. Economic specialization dependent on maritime trade definitely increased in this period, though Uruk had strong maritime trade since the 4th millennium BCE and Byblos since at least the 3rd millennium BCE. Massed infantry formations had also been present in Uruk since at least the 3rd millennium BCE. They were temporarily reduced to second place by horse-drawn bronze chariots, but came again to the fore with the introduction of iron.
In summary, it seems that the alphabet and the introduction of iron enabled the very old cultural ground of the Levant to recover its temporarily lost autonomy in this period, and both these innovations (along with many other cultural traits) spread to Greece and elsewhere. I don’t think Spengler’s root symbol makes sense for Asia Minor (outside the Greek colonies) or the Levant. The definition of a common Eastern Mediterranean civilization would therefore be much more pragmatical and less mystical or intuitive than in Spengler, more like Toynbee’s definition of civilizations.
With such a pragmatic definition, the question then is if the time around the first century BCE and CE actually saw the rise of a new “Magian” culture (according to Spengler) or a resurgent Aramean civilization (according to Toynbee).
I do tend to think there was a very sharp contrast between Greek and non-Greek (including Aramean) culture which shows itself in the haughty isolation of the Greek-speaking elites in the Greek-founded cities dotted all over Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia (Alexandria, Gadara, Antiochia, Seleucia etc.) for over a millennium, from Alexander to the Saracen conquest. Syriac (Arabian) only really came into its own beginning in the 3rd century CE (Bardaisan, mentioned upthread, was still writing Greek around 200 CE in Odessa), and it seems to me the cultural symbols sharply changed around that time, as Spengler and Toynbee both observe. I am not sure if it is better to speak of a new Syriac- and then Arabic-dominated culture supplanting the older Apollonian one, or of a new phase in an ongoing Eastern Mediterranean culture.
Two errors introduced by the spell checker: “Syriac (Arabian)” should read “Syriac (Aramean)” and “Odessa” should read “Edessa”. Sorry!
I did not realize how prevalent throughout Israeli society is the conspiracy theory that October 7th was deliberately allowed to happen by the Israeli government:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/03/how-netanyahus-top-general-became-his-strongest-challenger
‘This cluster of conspiracy theories holds that senior military and intelligence officers deliberately failed to wake him in time to prevent the Hamas invasion. According to a survey conducted by Reichman University, as many as half of those who voted for Netanyahu’s coalition in 2022 have come to believe in such deep-state theories. The purveyors of these theories include commentators on the Netanyahu-friendly Channel 14 and Netanyahu’s son Yair, a podcaster and social-media bomb-thrower who combines the blood loyalty of Donald Trump, Jr., with the s***posting energy of Laura Loomer. Tally Gotliv, a Likud member of the Knesset, has claimed, falsely, that American intelligence intercepted a telephone call between the partner of Shikma Bressler, a left-leaning protest leader, and Sinwar, the Hamas leader who planned the attack.
“It’s much more pervasive than 9/11 conspiracy theories in the U.S., and it’s not hard to figure out why,” the journalist Amos Harel told me. “It’s hard to explain to yourself what happened if you believe that Bibi is God. How did it all collapse so completely? Someone needs to be blamed.”
Aldarion @ 427 That is a very interesting post. It gives me much to think about. One small addendum: regarding the nude statuary, in the archaic and classical periods, males only were depicted in the nude, and then only, or at least usually, if they were gods or heroes. In the famous decorated craton depicting the marriage of Dionysus and Ariadne, the couple are shown in post coital languor, the god as a nude young man and his bride clothed, gazing at her husband with grave tenderness.
I think one of the reasons for the “very sharp contrast between Greek and non-Greek (including Aramean) culture” must have been the very different geography and landscape in Greece as compared to the great river valleys in which the older civilizations arose. It looks to me like the Greeks borrowed and adapted what they found useful from the older civilizations. However, I see no evidence that they abandoned their Indo-European heritage.
Anonimo#429 Is a fact that Netanyahu encouraged to the politicians in charge for give money to Hamás for to destroy Al Fatah.
And was imposible for Hamás to organize that massive attack with the ignorance of Mossad.
Looks like Ukraine is trying to get involved with the Iran war:
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/26/ukraine-strikes-iranian-vessels-tehran-accuses-kyiv-of-hostile-act.html
Ambrose#422, Tyler
Is necesary to remark that we don’t live in Narnia ? There is a clear manipulation of the history of III Reich and a great business exploiting the guilty complex of Germans and Frenchs for the crimes commited against aleged Jews.
About “the total depravity of man,” in the Calvinist religions – I like the Norse wisdom better, “There is nobody so good as to have no flaw, nor so bad as to be good for nothing.” (The Havamal, #133, from Jackson Crawford’s translation of The Poetic Edda., made a little more general by me.)
TylerA @ 412, You surely don’t mean to imply that only the rich and famous can be allowed to be opinionated? I would say the difference is that I don’t think Mr. Nolan is my employee, nor that he needs to consult me about movie making. The movie doesn’t interest me, but I find myself very interested in the commentary around it considered as a cultural phenomenon. In general, I don’t think heroes’ journey type stories lend themselves very well to film.
Spengler noted, talking about modern times (for his day) and at some point, remarked that nobody considered slavery to be immoral before coal was in widespread use. To me, that makes perfect sense: the work needed to be done; raiding to get slaves to do it was pretty standard in the stories from the ancient world.
I also note that as early in the days of the Julio-Claudian Caesars, a bureaucracy of freedmen was doing the work of running the empire, and that lasted a good long time. I’m only talking about the Latin West right now, for all that some people insist that Byzantium’s presence during the western Dark Ages meant that Rome never fell. Once the eastern Empire split off from the West, it was about as Roman as …… well consider, in the 22nd century A.D. , “America” spins off Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California, and a lot of the western agricultural regions, and the inhabitants thereof say “Adios, gringos.” Are they still American?
@Scotlyn (#424):
Oh, I didn’t ever go full-on Calvinist. It’s just that coming from my Christian Science/New Thought/Swedenborgian/Spiritualist/Agnostic family background, my original take was that reality was fundamentally benign and good, if only one could overcome somehow the ancient toxic delusion that the universe of time and space, matter and energy was in any sense “real.” (In that religious world, Jesus was definitely not Divine, merely an uncommonly wise human.)
So for me the notion of real, eternal evil (alongside of real, eternal good) was liberating in ways I couldn’t have anticipated.
KAN, so noted and thank you.
Anselmo, organized crime exists in every society complex enough to have laws and law enforcement, and is remarkably similar everywhere due to convergent evolution; it’s worth comparing the Mafia and the Seville organized crime scene to the yakuza, the traditional Japanese criminal underworld, which is a homegrown phenomenon but has nearly all the same features as the Sicilian Mafia. The US has been a playground for ethnic mobs since colonial times; the Irish were the most famous mobsters of 19th century America, for example. It’s simply a normal part of American life.
Athaia, that’s very good news indeed. Huzzah for the uranium-gobbling bacteria!
Cynthia, I talked about the subnatural realm here:
https://ecosophia.net/the-subnatural-realm-a-speculation/
Gunstone, the complexity of the verbs varies from language to language, but yes, it’s quite common for entire sentences to form a single word in most Native American languages. I used to know the Takelma word for “I go wherever there is dancing.”
Earthworm, ah, but nobody’s laying land mines. There are simply doors that require certain mental capacities to open, and books explaining how to develop those mental capacities are being published in pallet loads.
Celadon, thanks for this, but, er, this isn’t Tolkien. This is a fascinating but highly idiosyncratic take on Tolkien by a writer who admits he’s only read Tolkien’s fiction a few times, and has constructed his own system based on his take on Tolkien’s etymology. It belongs on the same shelf with the very ingenious writer who proved to his own satisfaction that Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” was an allegory of the business cycle.
Patricia M, yep. History actually does repeat!
Roldy, hmm. Not in my experience — you didn’t waste lots of money and you apparently had a good time, so I’m not sure how typically Boomer it was! 😉
Etienne, that’s one of the ways you can tell the coastal dialects of Chinook jargon from the inland ones. On the coast, where I grew up, “devil” or “evil spirit” in the jargon is “deaub,” pronounced de-AUB; inland, it’s more often “leyaub,” pronounced leh-YAUB. I’m pretty sure the difference depends on whether the pronunciation was borrowed from sailors along the coast or couriers des bois inland. In the same way, a mouth, or the mouth of a river, is “lapush” (lah-PUSH) on the coast and “laboos” (lah-BOOS) inland. Most French words borrowed into the jargon, as you’d expect, absorbed the article into the word, where it lost any grammatical function — “Kloshe kopa nika lapush” is “tasty to me,” literally “good in-relation-to myself mouth.” (“Kopa” is an all-purpose preposition, “with” or “near” or “in relation to,” while “nika” is “me, mine, myself,” or any other first-person singular pronoun.) The jargon has all three persons and singular and plural numbers in its pronouns; its verbs take on past and future tenses, and its adjectives have comparative and superlative forms, but in all cases it’s by adding elements in a sort of early stage agglutination. It’s a fun language; a 300-word vocabulary is enough to say just about anything, and it had begun to develop a literature of its own when it got swamped by English. People of my dad’s generation on the Washington coast still remembered some of it.
I’ll stop with the autistic perseveration now.
Shinjuki, glad to hear it.
Polecat, compared to the hard right wing, yes, he’s moderate. Deal.
Slithy, granted, but once you abandon progress what you have left isn’t liberalism. It’s some form of radical utopianism which contradicts all the core principles of liberalism; that’s why our self-proclaimed liberals these days are busy denouncing free speech and insisting that equal protection under the law is racist.
BeardTree, he inherited those ideas from the Theosophical traditions in which he had his training; you find that sort of thing all through the spiritual writings of the time. They can very easily be discarded, as I did in The Occult Philosophy Workbook, without damage to the rest of the system.
Bogatyr, no, it was a couple of journal articles I have stashed away somewhere, with multiple authors in both cases. The Tamil material is something else again, and if I ever redo my book on Atlantis I’ll be delving very deep into all of this.
Aldarion, good. All of this is relevant, and a useful reminder that any historical theory is by definition a very blunt instrument in comparison to the complexities on the ground.
Anon, that’s a sign that Israeli society is lurching closer to the outbreak of civil war. Once a significant share of the population comes to see its government as being in league with its enemies, away you go. Do you recall how the Roman-Jewish War ended? The Romans had an easier time of it in the siege of Jerusalem because the defenders were divided into two hostile factions that put as much energy into killing each other as they did into defending the city against the Romans…
As for Ukraine, Zelensky et al. know that unless the US starts giving them much more support, their goose is not merely cooked but cremated. The Russian army is moving relentlessly westward, Putin’s starting to talk about handing Ukraine’s western oblasts over to Poland and Hungary (from which they were taken in 1945), and there are rumors flying that another 50,000 North Korean soldiers will be on their way to the front shortly, to get invaluable experience in modern warfare in the fight for Slovyansk and Kramatorsk. Picking a fight with Iran is a desperation move to try to get the US mired in a ground war.
Patricia, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if that happens!
Hi JMG (and everyone discussing the Dark Crystal),
I wanted to pipe in and say that it came out when I was about 6 or so, and a friend of my mom’s son saw it and had nightmares, so she wouldn’t let me see it, but bought me that same Brian Froud book. I would be curious to hear JMG’s thoguhts on it, as it’s got a kind of occult (or maybe pseudo-occult?) vibe and I spent a lot of time flipping htrough its mysterious pages. It’s one of only a handful of possessions I still own from my childhood.
I remember liking the movie when I ended up seeing it, but watched it within the last couple years with my sons and was surprised how simplistic and uninteresting the whole thing was to me now. That book was much more evocative and intriguing.
Thanks,
Johnny
@Patricia Mathews (#434):
The earliest religious texts I was ever exposed to as a child were Old Norse ones, though they were presented merely as part of my living Scandinavian (Danish) cultural heritage. I still love Eddic poetry, especially the Hávamál and the Vǫluspá.
And Jackson Crawford’s translations really sing to me, as does his “Cowboy Havamal.”
Scotlyn #424, Robert Mathiessen
If you’ll be raised in a catholic environent you’ll have not these problems about the human depravation, because the rationality of catholicism is not binary , but ternary, because the Trinity.
With regards to William Shatner, as I can’t imagine there being another chance to say this around here, the film he did with Roger Corman called “The Intruder” is very interesting. Shatner himself isn’t amazing in it, but he is decidedly less campy than anything else I’ve seen him in.
The movie is set in a small southern town on the verge of integrating the black and white kids into the same school, and it was filmed maybe a year after this actually happened in the town it’s set in. Most of the people are not professional actors in it, and int’s fascinating to hear the way they discuss this issue. I found it eye opening anyway!
The themes of the movie are that Shatner is an aggitator who travels from LA to this town to stir up the population their against this happening, thinking that he is a puppet master who can accomplish goals he cares about (I think mostly advancing his own career) by using these people this way, but comes to learn that actually he is only successful beause there are a large amount of people who already agree with him there, and he was just a convenient figurehead for them to rally around, but he ultimately loses the crowd when he tries to steer it in directions it isn’t interested in heading in.
Thanks,
Johnny
I’ve been thinking there’s a certain resemblance between main “reasoning” used by some righters, outraged by the “Lupita-gate” in Nolan “Odyssey”, and woke doctrine.
If only white actors and actresses must perform European characters, this people really think western/European culture is a “watertight compartment”, isolated from people of different cultures/races.
I think this narrow minded attitude is (to some extent) like an opposite mirror to current dumb idea within wokesters called “cultural appropriation”. According this term, everybody who adopts or uses a non-western cultural element, is a sinner who should be punished for “stealing” that culture and their lack of respect and blah blah blah. For example, a yoga teacher who’s white is “guilty” of this “evilness”, because he/she isn’t an Indian from India.
Another commonplace is when they remember that in the past Hollywood used white actors to represent non western character, well, I won’t defend this tendence, but…I’m going to ask an uncomfortable question for wokesters and righters: Are there real closed identities for everybody in this world which prevent any cultural hybridation? I doubt it very much…
@Bogatyr (#325):
Thank you for pointing me to Patrick Nunn’s website. True ancient aboriginal traditions have long been a strong interest of mine. I have a couple of his articles downloaded, but I didn’t know of about most of his research.
There are more than a few places where indigenous oral tradition accurately remembers events that happened many thousands and even some ten thousands years ago. Nunn has looked into many of them that I was not aware of.
Phutatorius # 386:
Yes, Jack Ruby was a Jew or at least “from Jewish origins”. Not much people in the US (and even less outside the USA) dare to remember, or simply they don’t know, that Italo-American mob criminals have been only a part of the American organized crime: in addition of Jewish gangsters, I think there’s been an Irish Mob. And finally, Latin mobsters aren’t any surprise in US criminal underworld.
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Stephen P. # 390:
Thanks for your opinion after watching Nolan “Odyssey”. Well, I remember you again that cinema language is different from written Literature, and I can also say I’m quite puzzled by some part of this movie audience complaining they hadn’t understood well some scenes (or even worse, the whole movie) by themselves…Because Mr. Nolan had thought (maybe in a wrong way) that the “Odyssey” story is known for everybody, or it should be known.
If Nolan has hoped his audience knew at least roughly that story, I think he’s in his right to have decided it. The “Odyssey” has been going around the western world since more than 3,000 years ago, and there are things named “books”, for widen its information for the movie interested audience, methink.
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Anselmo # 392:
“2) There was a Jewish mafia, beter relationated with political power than the Italian”
Well, they are “only” movies (very well shot!), but even as fiction, even today I’m puzzled how Ford Coppola managed to avoid any claims by the usual people, due to his supposed antisemitism…Maybe because Jew mobsters were near as real as Italo-American gangsters.
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Anselmo # 407, 408:
Legends and myths can be very fantasized and changed real historic events, after a long time they happened. The problem is to find which part is real and which one isn’t real. By now, I won’t support not deny that theory, but I think it’s another hypothesis for trying to explain the Sea People origin (a mystery until now for historians).
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Etienne # 413:
Thank you for confirming to me the true Celtic origin of “cerveza”: So, the goddess “Ceres” explanation is wrong (maybe biased for Latino-philia and Celtic-phobia? Who knows?).
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Clay D. # 416:
Oh, “The Mandibles”, yes, I read it some years ago. Very sarcastic, too. My feelings and thoughts when I compare it with “Mania” is she’s been more centered in her last novel in the woke social hysteria than in economics topics, methink. A sign of times.
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JMG # 438:
“there are rumors flying that another 50,000 North Korean soldiers will be on their way to the front shortly,”
According MSM here, Zelensky said there were more than 30,000 N. Koreans waiting to be sent against Kiev regime. Well, thousands more or less, if Ukraine leader claim isn’t a mere (fake) tantrum to ask for more weapons and money as usual, it seems that war is going to be internationalized even more. Add to this chance the “smart” Ukrainian attack against Iranian ships. What could be wrong for Kiev ruler?
Anselmo (no. 433) “There is a clear manipulation of the history of III Reich and a great business exploiting the guilty complex of Germans and Frenchs for the crimes commited against aleged Jews.”
Not you too! Is the idea that the Holocaust never happened (“alleged Jews”?!), or that it wasn’t really the Germans’ fault, or that their guilt over it has been weaponized?
“Slithy, granted, but once you abandon progress what you have left isn’t liberalism. It’s some form of radical utopianism which contradicts all the core principles of liberalism; that’s why our self-proclaimed liberals these days are busy denouncing free speech and insisting that equal protection under the law is racist.”
In the words of the book on Critical Social Justice,
“Of course we all have the right to say whatever we want, but there are consequences for what we say. In a pluralistic society that claims to uphold the ideals of equality, speech must be chosen in ways that are cognizant of context. We wouldn’t speak to our boss the way we might to our friends. These are choices of context-appropriate speech, and we all confirm to these speech considerations on a daily basis. Rather than feeling resentful (an indicator that our internalized dominance is being challenged), we might consider our ability to adapt to changes in language as an indicator that we are growing in our critical social justice literacy” (Sensory & DiAngelo, p. 209)
As a more (in)famous meme puts it:
https://xkcd.com/1357/
“but nobody’s laying land mines.”
Minefields was what came into mind on the fly when I wrote the reply, but perhaps mindfields might have been better.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m ll for caution in this area, you know what you are doing and I look forward to hopefully seeing the result.
“There are simply doors that require certain mental capacities to open, and books explaining how to develop those mental capacities are being published in pallet loads.”
Bacon told me today that she’d read an article about young people searching for clear and defined moral guidance, and that things like the wishy-washy woke church of england was not cutting the mustard.
My point with the story was that in certain stages of ‘degradation’, people need ‘truth’ more than cleverly hidden teachings. But saying this, I am still in agreement with you and if you can fashion a work that does both things (i.e something for whatever capacity a person might have), then I am all for it.
@mary bennet: Thank you for mentioning the painting of Dionysos and Ariadne! It is lovely, and yes, the female statues are mostly clothed, too. I think Spengler was incredibly brash and dogmatic in many places, including the “root symbols”. Though that makes him fun to read in a very particular way!
I agree that the environment of the Greek peninsula and islands, and even the early colonies in Ionia and Italy, is very different from the valleys of the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris. However, if we mostly consider the Eastern Mediterranean excluding Egypt (so Palestine, Syria and Anatolia), these are not big river valleys either. There are a few smaller rivers, of course, like the Jordan or Orontes, but then there are a few rivers even in Greece. Jerusalem actually receives more rain than Athens does!
So what fascinates me is that a Greek-speaking elite dominated these regions, who had their own extremely ancient and rich history, from 333 BCE to 636 CE, almost a millennium, and during all that time the Greek rulers rarely learnt the language of their subjects, while their subjects never abandoned their own languages, especially Aramean (though many did learn some Greek). I don’t know of a comparable situation that persisted for so long anywhere else in the world, and it indicates both that Greek culture was enormously attractive (even after the Maccabean revolt, Greek culture crept back into Judea) and that there was a very wide chasm between Greek and native culture.
What I don’t know is in what way the (partially) Indo-European origins of the Greek language would have contributed to the prestige and distinctiveness of Classical Greek culture. It seems to me that the chasm that separated Classical Greek culture from those of speakers of other Indo-European languages (Scythian, Celtic, Germanic etc.) was even wider.
Ambrose (no. 446)
“Anselmo (no. 433) “There is a clear manipulation of the history of III Reich and a great business exploiting the guilty complex of Germans and Frenchs for the crimes commited against aleged Jews.”
Not you too! Is the idea that the Holocaust never happened (“alleged Jews”?!), or that it wasn’t really the Germans’ fault, or that their guilt over it has been weaponized?”
Keep in mind not merely the Holocaust but the broader aims of Generalplan Ost, which if implemented would have made the Cambodian Killing Fields look like a State Fair!:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
One must keep in mind that the Jews were only the #1 group that Nazis wanted to eliminate. They casually made plans for the mass extermination of entire demographic groups like ordering portions of food at a restaurant. Before WWII, the Third Reich was taking disabled GERMAN ARYANS (not Jews, Romani, Communists, etc), loading them into vans, and pumping exhaust fumes into the back to kill them as being “unworthy of life”!:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4
Johnny, the occult material in the book version of _The Dark Crystal_ was drawn straight out of classic Pythagorean sacred geometry and number mysticism, and of course Froud’s art was so much better than the movie! Even so, if Henson et al. had done anything even remotely interesting with the plot, instead of falling back on the sort of knuckle-dragging moral posturing he used, it could have been a decent movie. Imagine, for a moment, that the UrRu and Skeksis were equally unbalanced, just in different ways; that the darkness of the Dark Crystal itself was an inherent feature related to mystery, and the moral dimension of the whole story was richly complex, rather than the sort of grunting “Me good, them bad, ugh!” that it turned out to be — well, it would have been worth watching. Oh well.
Earthworm, moral guidance isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m surprised that wasn’t clear from context. There are technical methods the clueless shouldn’t know; that’s the point I’m making.
JMG has many times talked about fusion power being a bit of a dead end. There’s the text of an interview here with a couple of US nuclear weapons experts who visited the Chinese testing area in 1990, and there’s this exchange,
Hawkins: They were also trying to emulate what Livermore was doing at its National Ignition Facility, researching the use of laser beams to ignite fusion. But theirs was basically half the size of Livermore’s design. I asked the head of their program, “Why are you so small in comparison to Livermore in fusion research?” He replied, “We don’t have the money. But we’ll do all the same research. And in the end, we’ll not have achieved ignition—and neither will Livermore. Yet, we will have done it for half the price.” I thought that was very insightful, powerful.
https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/national-security-science/0720-behind-the-bamboo-curtain
Makes me wonder if the Chinese are treating AI the same way.
“I used to know the Takelma word for ‘I go wherever there is dancing.’
I guess that, given your professed ineptitude in the dance department, you did not find this phrase useful enough to remember, but…
Oh what an absolutely delightful phrase! 🙂 Life-affirming and joyful!
@Robert Mathiesen #437
Thank you! I guess we may all discover new ways of thinking in the course of a lifetime, and when we find the new ways are effective to liberate us from an old mental trap, we will work for these ideas for a while, until the next discovery puts everything into a larger, and/or alternative, perspective, and so on.
I am glad you found your discovery liberating… as did I. 🙂
Ambrosio#446 Really the nazis didn’t prosecuted Jews, but so called Semites without regard of their religión. And ,indeed there was a huge slaugther of Semites and Gypsies. More than oficial acounts , because is purpose of propaganda weapons and fake proofs for Núremberg trial. I find more trustly the stories of the survivors and witness. I recomend the next novels:
1) “The Painted Bird” wich describes the sufferings of a Jew who survived alone during the campIgn of extermination of Jews in Hungary, that provoked a trauma wich made him an unadaptated man the rest of his life, described in another novel.
2) “Kapput”:by Kurtz Malaparte, in wich refers the crimes and cruelties comited against labeled like Semites by Romanians, Germans and Ucranians during Barbarosa Operation…….. Yes the Ucranians, our allies in the war against Russia , were enthusiastic murderers of Semites and Polish peasants, with a brutality wich sicken to the German nazis.
3) “I want to give testimony” by Victor Klemperer, wich describes the dificulties for survive in the nazi Germany for the author; a protestant Semite married with a German woman.
Is necesary to say that currently,in Palestine , Ucrania , Irak and Siria our allies are comiting similar atrocities than the comited against Semites during the year 39 to,45 ?
@ Anselmo #441
¡Gracias!
You know I was actually raised in a Catholic environment, in that the country I grew up in, Costa Rica, is a Catholic country. My family was, and is, there as missionaries. In later life, my parents have become much more ecumenical, and worship in many prayer groups that are denominationally mixed, usually with a majority of Catholics. 🙂 As it happens, this ecumenism was not so much the case during my early childhood, when the lessons that I was responding to took hold within me and required my choice to walk away.
I do remember an occasion when I was six, having just moved into a new neighbourhood, and getting to know some of the children around me. I met and played all afternoon with two sisters, roughly my age. When I saw them the next day, they crossed the road, and wouldn’t look at me. One of them shouted, “we can’t play with ‘evangélicos’, they worship the devil.”
Well, there is no environment which is entirely nuanced from top to bottom.
Still, I have personally come to appreciate both the divine trinity and the use of the ternary to harmonise the binary, through my studies of druidry practice. You are correct to point to the uses of “threeness” in theological thinking… 🙂
OT: One of my fellow residents, Fletcher Crowe, has finally deciphered the Voynich Manuscript, along with co-author Mona Ashour. They started with the fact that some of the characters were in Arabic; a specialist in Medieval Arabic worked from there to discover that the codex was a Cathar manifesto from the time of the persecutions, which also details their theology and practices. Book signing here in The Village Saturday, August 8th, in our largest assembly place. So, there’s another neat piece of discovery.
Forgive me, but I am finding this an amusing distraction from weeding.
Replacing minefield with mindfield kind of fits but loses the simplicity of the metaphor.
Still, how about mindfields as forms of patterning in barbarism of reflection, where the citadels represent divided minds of both individuals and groups as well as a wider representation of the world of polarities?
Getting blown to smithereens could be cognitive collapse where the blinkers of perception have narrowed so much into the abstract that connection with reality is impossible to maintain; the blinkers on perception are a fractal hall of mirrors where the books of knowledge morph over time into books of madness, and where each ‘polarity’, in their respective certainties, is an example of the opposite of one bad idea being another bad idea… which puts me in mind of emotional opposites in the form of the emotional sphere but no connection to the mental sphere of rational thought or moving beyond the opposites.
No-man’s land is the space outside of limited perception and thought, but getting there is only the start of a reconciliation process that may fail if not approached in the right way. Hot air balloons represent expanding and raising consciousness / perception, and flying to the centre of the citadels could be the equivalent of short path whilst the canisters containing maps for guidance represents the long path.
Okay. Enough. I need to go and do some work! Thank you for your patience.
“moral guidance isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m surprised that wasn’t clear from context. ”
Oh it was clear; I was thinking tangentially that a search for guidance indicates a potential audience dissatisfied with what they are currently being offered.
“the moral dimension of the whole story was richly complex, rather than the sort of grunting “Me good, them bad, ugh!” that it turned out to be — well, it would have been worth watching. Oh well.”
Maybe I should start working on my Harry Potter fanfiction where Harry Potter fails his task of defeating the evil Voldemort, because he is entirely focused on defeating the evil Voldemort because Voldemort is evil, while other people end up joining forces and succeed at defeating Voldemort because they have a more positive vision of a post-Voldemort world and other goals that aren’t related to defeating Voldemort.
Anselmo, i won’t quibble about terminology (“Jews” or “Semites). If you agree that Hitler ordered the mass slaughter of ethnic Jews (and other non-combatant populations, as Gunstone points out) and that this was bad, that is enough for me., I agree that Israel has been committing war crimes. That they are by no means the only ones doing so does not excuse any of the perpetrators.. I’m afraid the world has been abandoning the pretense of following such principles. There is much to regret about the collapse of civilization.
The August 2026 issue of The Atlantic has an article about a fast-growing Christian movement that targets demonic forces.
It describes the work of Mike and Andrea Brewer, who are part of “a charismatic Christian movement that has drawn millions of Americans with the promise of supernatural encounters with God and visions of cosmic battle.” After serving as missionaries in India and Haiti, in 2016 the Brewers settled in Maryville, Tennessee, and founded the Well. “The Lord spoke so clearly,” Mike Brewer told reporter Stephanie McCrummen. “He said, ‘I’m giving you and the Well a mandate for the full eradication of witchcraft and demonic activity in the region.’”
At the Brewers’ prayer meetings, some people experience being freed from demons. One young man began shaking and crying, “a catharsis Mike declared to be God’s victory over the demon they later identified as Odin, because of the man’s participation in a white supremacist prison gang that embraced the Norse God.” Several people experienced being freed from addictions or from severe anxiety and depression. One person went through an elaborate process of renouncing curses and revoking demonic rights; when it was over, she said that now she really believed she was a child of God. “Deliverance leaders told me that they identified demons by the ways a person might be tormented,” McCrummen writes. “Feelings of worthlessness was Belial. Sexual confusion could be Jezebel. Anger could be Thor, who was under the command of Odin. The Brewers estimated that they’d delivered many hundreds of people, enough that they decided they were ready to move into the next phase of spiritual warfare.”
Andrea Brewer started gathering spiritual intelligence. “She kept track of what demons have been identified during deliverances at the Well.” McCrummen writes. “As she drove around the area, she told me, she made note of Masonic lodges, Tarot card readers and anything that made her feel uneasy.” The article details the Brewers’ efforts to drive out demons from Southland Books and Café, a store on the same street as their church, which they consider to be the stronghold of Lilith in the region.
The article takes eight pages, so there’s a great deal more information to absorb. When I checked the Atlantic website, I learned their least expensive offering is an annual digital subscription for $90 per year. If you google search “buy The Atlantic magazine August 2026″ you’ll find individual copies of the magazine on places like eBay and Etsy.
“I’m giving you and the Well a mandate for the full eradication of witchcraft and demonic activity in the region.”
“over the demon they later identified as Odin”
“she made note of Masonic lodges, Tarot card readers and anything that made her feel uneasy.”
“The Brewers estimated that they’d delivered many hundreds of people, enough that they decided they were ready to move into the next phase of spiritual warfare”
Oh dear. Demons in human suits? Paging Buffy. Paging Buffy Summers.
Seriously though – dogs with wings is one thing, but self-proclaimed chosen people with mandates from ‘their’ God to eradicate anyone or anything that makes them ‘feel uneasy’ is disturbingly widespread.
The capacity of this world to produce deeply stupid, patently insane and just plain mean people really makes me wonder if earth is the universe’s insane asylum.