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 — 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 chatbots they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their followup 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.
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In mostly unrelated news, I’m delighted to report that The Book of Haatan, the second volume in my series of Ariel Moravec occult mysteries, is now in print in hardback, paperback, and e-book formats. Here’s the blurb:
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Occult detective Ariel Moravec investigates the theft of a mysterious grimoire.
Ariel Moravec has started her training as an apprentice mage and amateur sleuth, under the tutelage of her grandfather, Dr. Moravec. Her days are spent garbling herbs at Aunt Clarice’s hoodoo shop and working through the foundations of French occult literature.
But her studies are interrupted by the disappearance of a book that might well be a powerful work of black magic. Assisting her grandfather on the case, Ariel finds herself drawn into the tangled history of Adocentyn.
Legend has it that the town is home to the hidden treasure of a long dead pirate. As Ariel begins her own hunt for the treasure, she discovers that she is not the only person searching. Could the treasure be related to the lost book of magic, or a masked prowler roaming the hushed streets of the old city?
The threads of the case unravel and intensify, and Ariel finds herself racing against malevolent forces that will stop at nothing to find the treasure first…
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If you didn’t get around to preordering a copy, you can get the paperback here in the US and all the versions here anywhere in the world — or, of course, from your favorite full service bookstore.
I wonder what everyone here thinks will actually happen to the migrants that are in Europe right now. I’m somewhat confused by the fact that the current migrant crisis is compared only to the great migratory hordes that demolished the Roman Empire instead of being compared to the sea people from the bronze age. The vast majority of them are military age men, not the people groups of the past which had families and skilled people such as blacksmiths, shepherds, carpenters etc.
In the past Europe didn’t have borders so clearly defined as now. Today, if the borders were enforced, migrant passings would drop by at least 90%. The only reason these people are even here is that the borders were opened wide by people with ill intent or from incompetence. And it was shown that they can be deported if there is a will.
The great migrations of the past were mostly organic because they were crossing land on foot, from Asia into Europe. These migrants were brought here on planes and boats requested by NGOs and other seedy people. Algerian migrants in Ireland are not an organic phenomenon like steppe tribes settling in Europe.
One obvious aspect is their skin color, and by that I mean, it’s impossible for a Turk to not stand out in Central Europe let alone a black African. If it took several generations for past migrants to integrate, it will take at least three times as much for these people or they might never integrate, unless the whole continent changes skin color. I suspect mainly because of this reason they will have very little integration and live in enclaves, if they stay. Humans all over the globe, of all races, tend to stick to their kind. I am a product of certain past migrations here in Romania (partial mongoloid facial features are common in my mother’s family), if those mongol-type dudes from the past had actual yellow skin I would have been very isolated.
Most of them live in big cities, I’m not sure how this will factor in their fate. Also, most of them live on fat government hand-outs so it begs the question if they will leave when Europe gets too poor even for them; and the few that have jobs, have very shady and shoddy contracts.
I don’t understand why people are being so fatalistic about this. You cannot stop the looming petroleum crisis, but you can definitely stop the migrant crisis. Enforce the borders and deport them, they are a net drain on European coffers by any measure. All it takes is the will of the managerial class.
The migrations of the Roman Empire also happened because of climate change. We will see those migrations too, but what we have now, climate migrations are not.
I get why people draw parallels to Rome, but this is different on so many levels. My claim is that it’s more different than the same. I doubt the fate of these migrants will be the same as of those during Roman times.
Alice Friedemann of EnergySkeptic.com has called “peak oil” as of 2018. In his recent “response” to Doomberg’s irrational energy exuberance Chris Martenson of PeakProsperity.com also detailed how shale is almost certainly peaking this year. We all know there’s no new energy savior on the horizon to take us higher.
Personally, I believe all the political & economic instability since the late 2000s are symptomatic of the end of global energy growth. If we are indeed slowly rolling over then we’re not even past the opening act of craziness.
If, according to Michael Hudson, Europe millenia ago inherited the Fertile Crescent invention of money and debt without the necessary amendment of reliable debt jubilees enacted to prevent ballooning debt crises, could that be another reason why the “inferior” barter economy is employed during dark ages – not so much having to leave the use of money behind, but the form of money use that has been tainted by special interests; a kind of cyclical repudiation?
Hudson seems to refer to the European invention of democracy as the problem, rather than the solution to debt spirals, because a debt jubilee or forfeited tax collection are a souvereign’s decisions (whether they are kings or chairmen), and once democracy gets captured by monied special interests, as it tends to be, that safety valve gets closed.
(The current machinations that ‘The Great Taking’ describes seem to be an absurd ‘debt jubilee for the rich’ scenario’.)
One should add that Hudson mentions droughts and floods as occasions when the state forfeited tax collection. Could it be that the more stable climatic conditions in Europe, at least initially, led to more sustainable boom cycles, postponing demands for fundamental changes for, well, millenia?
Changes which in Europe only happened inadvertently, like in times of the Black Death resetting things, in the absence of a government able to do so?
Will capitalism have to be saved from democracy?
A radio bulletin has just come in over the wire… The ISTA, Imaginary Stations Travel Agency, presents…
On Thursday 28th March via WRMI we have a dreamy paradise lost of a show called WSFR – Lost Island Radio at 0200 UTC on 9395 kHz. Get those bags packed and that passport at the ready as you are going to be transported to a dreamy destination far far away.
Don’t worry, you won’t be marooned as we will bring you back safely to your armchair after the hour concludes. Tune into WRMI at the alloted time (Do give yourself enough time to check in and settle down of course) for some paradise island classics.
Imaginary tiki torches provided on a first come first basis!
https://www.reddit.com/r/shortwave/comments/1bp513g/wsfr_lost_island_rado/
For our European SWLs we have the following this coming Sunday:
Beaming to Europe via Shortwave Gold on Sunday 31st March 2024 at 0900/1300 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and then at 2000 UTC on 6160 kHz and 3975 kHz. This week we will bring you the worldwide sounds of Skybird Radio International. Tune in, chill out and listen to sounds from all around this planet of ours.
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Speaking of radio, as the librarian for my ham radio club, new book titles come across my radar screen from time to time, and I purchase those that I see fit. The following will be new to my clubs library as of April 1st, just in time for our next meeting… other ham operators here might like to pick up a few of these as well.
First up in our selection of new titles is Wired for Wireless, the story of a lowly coffee barista who left work every afternoon totally jacked up on espresso and needed something to do with all the energy. One day she wondered into a shack in the neighbors back yard where they heard a strange pulsing sound and a rotund man tapping frantically away at a switch. She had stumbled into the world of ham radio and could never look back. After learning morse code she finally had something to do with all that excess energy. By Jackie O’Hara, KO8FFE
For all the dedicated homebrewers in my club we picked up a copy of the now classic, The Dumpster Divers Guide to Hacking Together An All-Band All-Mode Quantum Transceiver from Parts You Can Find In the Trash. Written by the acclaimed ham radio homebrewer Dr. Oscar Grouchavich, GR5BGE, this is the book that tells you how to get it done on a budget. Grouchavich shows how even the most money constrained ham can get in on the game of quantum radio and start making contacts in parallel dimensions and timelines.
Some of our members prefer the digital modes and all that can be achieved through hooking up a computer to a radio. To that end we purchased the new how-to guide from author Crosley Bendix, KA2OS, considered by many to be the guru of FT8. In this new book he previews the next digital mode currently being test-driven by a team of world class contest operators, FT888. FT888 has new features for making contacts backwards in time, if you happen to have a Quantum Rydberg radio that is. Getting up to speed with quantum radios will be discussed at the next meeting, so be sure to be there, or tune in transdimensionally via the remote viewing switch on your radio. We hope to the Quantum Rydberg radios we have purchased running for summer field day when FT888 will be unleashed on the unsuspecting world.
For those who prefer to lurk and not transmit (otherwise known as scanner fans) the club is considering picking up a copy of Amateur Radio for the Antisocial: It’s Not All About the Ragchew by Alan Hall. But if this book is for you, you probably won’t be at the meeting anyway.
JMG, as a fan of the first Ariel Moravec novel, I’ll be sure to check out this second installment. Looking forward to the read.
You and your commentariat might be interested in the experiments of a “zero-input” farmer I follow. To quote his latest: “How people grew crops during preindustrial times is mostly a lost art. Almost nobody who was doing this essential agriculture in that time were capable of writing down their precise methods. The exact feel for the techniques often fails to translate into text anyway, and the world we inhabit is different on multiple fronts anyway even if we occupy the exact same patch of land as our ancient forebears. The key question of how people managed to feed themselves for the last few thousand years will not be answered by looking in any library. But there are surviving threads from this time that are around, and I was lucky enough to spot one recently.” Here’s the full post, which is not paywalled, and you do not have to subscribe to Substack to read it: https://zeroinputagriculture.substack.com/p/the-instinctive-whim
Lastly, and my apologies if this is a better fit for frugal Fridays, but Anthony and I have published instructions for making basic sauerkraut, which I would put as perhaps the #1 food for the deindustrial age. Again, no paywall and no need to sign up; just hit the bypass button at the bottom to read the post. There’s also a video of the “crunching” action needed to get the cabbage + salt to make its own brine: https://www.brunettegardens.com/p/your-basic-sauerkraut
John, I was curious about the price of the hardcover editions for your occult novels. It says they are 30 pound but normally 60 pounds on the website? I thought I had pre-ordered The Book of Hataan, but it turns it was The Way of Four Elements. Couldn’t find much info about the hardcovers… are these limited or special in any other way?
Whatever edition I choose to go with, I’m looking forward to reading it!
I picked up a copy of The Book of Hataan, thinking my granddaughter would be interested. I thought I’d read it first, and now my daughter has got it and I’ve had to order the first volume, The Witch of Criswell so I can send them as a set. I hope you’re already working on a third in this series — we call them the Nancy Druid mysteries.
JMG,
The medical industrial complex is spiraling downhill even faster than you might have imagined. The local catholic health care system ( with the most hospital beds in town) just shook up the local anesthesiology business by changing to a specialist nurse based system with doctors supervising ( at a ratio of 3 to 1). For the last 25 years nearly all the anesthesiologists in town came from a single doctor owned practice contracting with the 3 hospital groups in town. This group was obviously not thrilled with this new setup and refused to go along so the catholics went to a anesthesiology practice in Seattle owned by a private equity group ( Bain Capital) to contract for these services. Of course they had problems getting enough nurses and doctors to move to town on a moments notice so nearly all elective surgeries had to be canceled for a period of several months.
Today I learned that my niece’s fiancé, who is an emergency room doctor in Madison Wisconsin, also works for an ER doctor contracting business owned by Bain Capital. He is thinking of quitting and moving to some rural hospital or something which does not yet have this horrible model as it is apparently just as bad for the doctors as it is for the patients.
Hello – I’m reading Dion Fortune and getting a bit spooked by her constant admonishments that to practice ceremonial magic competently requires the guidance of a teacher. The only esoteric lodges I can find in my locality are Masonic. Setting aside the other potential benefits of joining, does joining a Masonic lodge enhance the likelihood of finding a teacher, or do you recommend simply being diligent about the risks of the solo path? Thank you!
Rafael, au contraire, many of the barbarian incursions into the Roman empire were politically arranged — the Visigoths petitioned Roman officials to be permitted to move into the empire to stay out of the way of the Huns, for example, and Vortigern invited the Saxons into Britain. Nor were they visually similar by the standards of the time — many of the barbarians were strapping six-foot blonds, who stood out dramatically among the shorter, dark-haired Mediterranean peoples of the Roman world in much the same way that Algerians stand out in France and Turks in Germany. That said, since native Europeans have among the world’s lowest fertility rates these days, and the immigrants have a higher fertilty rate, what’s going to happen is quite simple: in a century or so, much of Europe will be Muslim, and most of its inhabitants will look like Algerians, Turks, etc.
TJ, exactly when the peak of liquid fuels is reached is almost an academic question at this point, because so much energy has to go into extracting fuels from the increasingly low-quality reserves. You needed 1/3 of 1% of the energy in light sweet crude from shallow wells to cover the energy costs of extraction; for fracking, it’s well over 10% and rising. Of course nobody subtracts the energy costs from the output, which is a little like claiming your business is profitable by simply not recording the operating costs! In effect, then, we’ve been in the peak oil window since a little after 2000, and that’s going to continue until energy costs make it unfeasible to keep on extracting low-grade fuels — but long before then, the industrial world will be in a world of hurt.
Michaelz, exactly. The problem with money, as I pointed out quite some time ago in my book The Wealth of Nature, is that it facilitates economic parasitism through debt. In times of expansion, that can be allowed; in times of contraction, it’s lethal, and that’s why societies in dark ages stop using money altogether and shift their economic activities into forms that don’t allow debt-based exploitation. As for capitalism, it won’t survive either, because once economic contraction sets in, the average business and the average investment will both lose money; in that kind of economic environment, capitalism implodes, to be replaced by subsistence economies and nonfinancial (i.e., religious) economic activity.
Justin, many thanks for this as always!
Brunette, many thanks for both of these, and I hope you enjoy the novel.
Justin, they’re high-quality hardbacks, though as far as I know they’re not limited. The price — well, costs of everything are soaring these days. (Officially, inflation is under control, but nobody told my wallet that…)
Jan, funny! The third volume in the series, The Carnelian Moon, is already in the publisher’s hands, and the fourth volume, The House of the Crows, is about half finished. There are going to be others; I’m having enormous fun with the series, and sales are apparently quite respectable.
Clay, I expect the US medical industry to collapse in the not too distant future, not least because vulture capitalists are swooping in, extracting all the wealth they can, and then leaving the carcass to rot.
Tony, most Freemasons these days have no more clue about esoteric spirituality than the average postal clerk, so you won’t get much help there. Keep in mind that Fortune, like most occultists in her day, was using her writings to recruit members for her organization; a great many people have taken up ceremonial magic all by themselves with excellent results. So in your place I wouldn’t worry about it.
We are thrilled and shocked that I can announce this:
Thanks to watching and reviewing hundreds of Agatha Christie films and writing the definitive book on them (https://peschelpress.com/agatha-christie-she-watched/), I was invited to speak at the annual Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay! Visit https://www.iacf-uk.org/ My events are on Thursday.
I’ll present a whirlwind tour of international Agatha films; I’ve been given 45 minutes so I’ve got to be super fast. I’ll follow that by being on a panel discussing her films. Wow!
But my question:
Does anyone here live in or near Torquay or have visited in the past? Google Earth and maps and local websites can only tell you so much! We do plan a side trip to the Eden Project in Cornwall as the domes there are as close as I’ll get to the domed city of Panschin in my fiction series. We’ll probably have to rent a car and — shudder — drive on the wrong side of the road.
We’ll spend a few days in London before and after our full immersion at the Agatha Christie festival. This is a business trip for us (my first time in England, ever) so we’ll visit everything connected with our annotating projects, along with a side trip to Bath for the upcoming Jane Austen movie project.
Anything we should know?
If we’ve got the time, I’d love to meet other Ecosophia fans in person!
If LeGrand Cinq-Mars is reading this, check your email!
We’re fast approaching re-watching “Checkmate” and I’ll need your help interpreting those @@&^$$~ subtitles and the subtleties of Mandarin Chinese.
John, I get it about the cost. My question was just out of curiosity for further details, not a complaint about the price, FWIW. Thank you! Nobody told my wallet either…
When I spend that kind of money on books I know they will be around for awhile, unlike if the same amount gets spent on two measley bags of groceries that seem to have disappeared once they get home.
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Speaking of inflation and migration, there are also a lot of migrants from California coming to Ohio. We now have something of a Californian diaspora in my neighborhood. I don’t really have a problem with people getting out of that state, except now my property taxes have almost doubled. The price they spend on a house there is nothing in Ohio. Of course, if we sold our house now, we wouldn’t be able to move back to our neighborhood. (And I don’t want to leave just now because it is one of the most walkable neighborhoods in the city.)
Hi JMG, I know dream analysis isn’t your bag but hopefully this question is broad enough for you to weigh in on. I usually have rather mundane dreams which are the usual mishmash of people and places rearranged in the standard dreamlike fashion.
Once in a while though I’ll dream of people and places that are very specific but I can’t recall ever meeting. Is it possible these are past life memories? I find it hard to fathom how my subconscious could fabricate characters that are so specific and idiosyncratic.
Do past life memories often reveal themselves first in dreams? I have no past life memories otherwise other than the occasional deja vu at certain geographic sites.
Hi JMG and friends,
Last week’s post and discussion was very interesting, especially on the topic of trying to understand complex systems which defy our attempts to model.
Recently I’ve been reading a bit about Jain philosophy (Jainism is an Indian-origin religion which sees an austere lifestyle focused on preventing harm as the means to liberation). One concept in Jainism which captured my interest is anekantavada, which argues that reality is so complex that no one perspective is able to accurately capture all of it. Instead, the best method with which to learn about reality is to accept multiple viewpoints as correct and to seek the conditions and limitations that make them so. (In Jain teachings this idea is expressed with the parable of the blind men and the elephant). In a way it’s an ancient precursor to dialectical discourse, where the fusion and conflict of multiple viewpoints leads to the truth.
In the context of our current world, anekantavada could help us as a civilization grapple with the various crises we face. Rather than accepting only a technocratic, mathematical model of the world, those in charge could instead accept all viewpoints, from those of the farmer and off-grider to urban perspectives to more spiritual viewpoints, and yes, even the technocratic view. From that mix of ideas and viewpoints a more accurate picture of reality can emerge.
Of course I don’t expect our overlords to actually do something like this, but it’s something the rest of us could try to implement as well.
Well, thank you for the response, I still wish deep down that we can revert the trend, despite knowing that Europe can be seen as receiveing a sort of karmic justice. There are a few more topics …
I
Mr. JMG, I very much like to see your take on the rise and fall of the Roman Catholic Church as an empire. I remembered how the RCC in the middle ages was basically a supra-national entity which acted like a world hegemon, at one point dividing the world between the colonial powers of Spain and Portugal. It will be interesting to read an essay presenting it as civilization that went through the usual routine.
II
If you’re going to do another essay on nuclear power, it will definitely have to adress this claim that’s spreading like wildfire on social media, that nuclear power is too expanisve because it has too many unnecessary regulations and because it’s the activists who are making it expensive.
Thank you as always!
Hi JMG,
I am Arnav from Mumbai, India Age:24.I have been reading your work for the past 8 months and listening to various podcasts you have done. You are the most influential writer out there who has changed my perception of life with both collapse and occult stuff.
At least in India, unlike the West, there is this optimism for the future that since the economic liberalization of the 90s the middle class will grow and grow. Things are going to get better but as One knows it is just not going to happen, unlike in the West where normal people have some trade skills and because of having homes with backyards know some gardening skills but because of extreme status-conscious in a developing country like India people like me from UMC don’t learn any actual skills because of having cheap labor.
As a UMC urban city slacker(working a remote software job that pays in USD) what 5 steps do I take to make my life more sustainable/go to the path of some self-sufficiency?? (I know you get this question a lot but it would be great if you could give some tips) PS: After my question on the last Magic Monday I ordered the book Druid Way so will be shipped to me by today.
@Clay Dennis, JMG: Have you seen this article:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/03/after-appalachian-hospitals-merged-into-a-monopoly-their-ers-slowed-to-a-crawl.html
More proof of medical collapsing now…
I will take this opportunity to remind all that the 7th Annual Ecosophia Midsummer Potluck will be held June 22, 2024 at our house, behind the Charles Dexter Ward Mansion in Providence, RI. Only 173 days to go! Sign up here. I look forward to your presence, and once again, whomever comes from furthest is welcome to stay in our guest room.
The other day there was an article on CNN by an oncologist about what Kate Middleton’s cancer signifies. He mentioned that cancer rates among those under the age of 50 have skyrocketed, almost doubling for those born after 1980. He blamed the usual suspects, sugary drinks, a sedentary lifestyle, alcohol, red meat, etc. He also clearly stated that this rise in cancer is also affecting those who should be healthy; the active and those who meticulously watch their diets. He didn’t mention a certain experimental medicine that was introduced to the population in early 2021. My gut feeling is that this is a consequence of our general environment; plastics, radiation, poor diet, modern medicine, etc. It is just one more thing that will raise the death rate. I am guessing that the average lifespan for a millennial will be less than 70 years all told.
Thinking about the market gardeners in Oregon that got mentioned last week, and about farming with limited water resources in general. One of my garden projects for this year is making and using ollas and porous spikes with pop bottles, and I’ve been looking up a lot of information on dryland farming and gardening online. I’m not really water-limited, but I’ve been finding that my summer fruiting crops show problems with inadequate water parts of the time, like poor fruit set (squash) and cucumbers that vary in width dramatically over the length of the cucumber. I don’t want to water every day all summer, so I’m going to try ollas and porous spikes to even out the water supply for these crops in the hopes of getting more and better fruit without using lots more water and time.
You could probably do a lot in Oregon by growing fall/winter/spring crops. Coastal Oregon’s climate is fairly similar to where I am, but somewhat warmer and drier. You’re still going to have the problem that while most of these do much of their growing when there is rain available, an awful lot of them either start or finish at times of year when rainfall has become problematically erratic.
Installing rainwater harvesting and using it to finish off or start crops might go a long way towards making this work. Of course, doing this on a large scale with big cisterns(s) costs $$$ to install initially and cheaper smaller systems aren’t going to go very far on a seasonally dry area of 0.5 acres+.
If you start your fall seedlings off indoors they use less water and should be easier to start than if you direct seed. Even chitting them before planting (which I’ve used for years for fall peas) reduces water requirements to get them started while leading to better germination over direct sowing. That’s why I do it when I’m not water-limited. I’m also planning on doing indoor seedstarting in July/August this year in hopes of a) getting better germination at that time of year and b) increasing the amount of time the young plants have to grow before frost and lack of light slow things to a near-standstill c) reducing water use over direct planting and d) not using garden space outdoors that is currently occupied by summer crops until they’re actually finishing.
Also some super-efficient irrigation of a smaller area during the summer might allow cultivation of a few summer crops over a smaller area. Ollas, porous capsules, deep pipes for trees. These do take some initial investment if you need a lot of them, and they do require time to water, though there are ways to set up systems that reduce the time. I don’t have enough experience with this to guess. Ask me next year and I might have more of a clue.
The government seems to be going after 1/2 acre+ plots that are selling products. What if you irrigate 0.4acres from your well as your subsidence garden, and use rainwater capture/dryland farming to grow food for sale?
Just trying to think what small farmers hit by this sudden changes in rule enforcement could do to keep growing.
I should probably mention that the attack on animal keeping under the pretext of tiny operations being CAFOs seems to have been overturned. Which is a triumph of sanity that I’m glad to see.
I suppose everyone saw the Baltimore bridge collapse. It’s a shocking video; the bridge collapsed like a house of cards. The last truck driver who drove over it was lucky; the construction crew on the bridge was not. There are plenty of conspiracy theories about why it happened, but that’s not what I wanted to discuss.
The thing that I find interesting is that the news media associate the phrase “mass casualty event” with this incident. They don’t often do that, and I remember JMG had a dream about a hospital announcing a “mass casualty event”.
This phrase also just recently spiked on Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=mass%20casualty%20event&hl=en
So, I wonder if it all has some metaphysical significance or if it is just a coincidence. Your thoughts?
JMG,
Totally agree that the EROEI is even worse than the pure statistical volumes. Steve St Angelo of the SRSRoccoReport.com has been discussing the “Seneca Cliff” wherein the deteriorating EROEI itself leads to a far higher than expected overall decline in energy than even most sober observers expect.
On related news, apparently the US had made some claim to Bering Sea territory which Russia just flatly rejected. The “resource wars” are well underway in varying intensities.
Something in the air? A recent column in the Telegraph is channeling the theme of your first post this month on depopulation, right down to the impact on investment returns…
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/26/population-decline-should-terrify-the-west/
@Clay Dennis: My younger daughter’s husband an anesthesiologist, and the hospital he worked for in Albuquerque pulled the same stunt on him over a decade ago. He moved to Colorado and is now in a situation where he’s on call for several – maybe 3 – different hospitals, if I remember correctly. She can never tell when he’s be home. However, she has my nephew in Denver in her family and her in-laws in Albuquerque for at least emotional support, and of course, her sister in Florida.
The practitioners I’ve been seeing for primary care, cardiology, and gynecology are all PAs or advanced practice nurses or nurse-practitioners.
Actually, “vulture capitalist” is an insult to Mother Nature’s cleanup squad. These guys are birds of prey.
JMG, feel free to delete this if it violates your non-LLM comment policy
I was wondering do you think there is a spiritual connection between declining fertility rates in the western world and the desire to create and empower AI & LLM and such?
Syntase and Weeping Willow
just wanted to thank you again in case you didn’t see my last comment on last weeks post. the Blainey, Mundine interview was fascinating.. Scarey how one person’s position, such as Pascoe’s ,becomes so PC that it can be threatening to challenge it.
Stephen
I downloaded the Gilbert stuff you so generously shared. I’m sure it’s in there but I remembered you mentioned the Triad of real faith, good intentions, and I think the third was either knowledge or praxis. Guess it’s my clue to start. Are those related to wisdom, power, and love? My other question may be for other commentators…interested in Swedenborg on the Trinity. He’s a cursed of being Sabellian but I’ve always felt something was odd or a bit off about most Trinitarian modern understandings. I’m not even sure most people understand what the patristics meant or intended to defend. I’m approaching this from a traditional but fairly wide open minded perspective
Accused not cursed. Haha
Small error in my previous post: Only 87 days to go!
JMG, I’m sorry this is coming quite a bit after the fact, but I haven’t been very active online lately, so it wasn’t until recently that I saw your tribute post for Sara. I was deeply saddened to learn of her passing, but thought your tribute to her was beautiful. Please accept my condolences.
John Michael, I’m wondering if you are getting any read on the Baltimore harbor bridge collapse. Our government and their pet media have officially denied any shred of a possibility of terrorist involvement. So, now that it has been officially denied in record time, the believability that some terrorist hand was likely involved in the act has gone way up. Alas, that believability can not translate into probability, as the two may not be in any way coordinated — though, of course, they very often are…
Given that the US regime has spent the past two years trying in every conceivable way to provide the Ukrainian regime with encouragement and assistance in putting the Russian-regime’s miles-long Crimean bridge out of commission, there would be a certain tit-for-tat brilliance in the Russian regime, on its very first try, figuring out how to take out the US-regime’s miles-long Baltimore harbor bridge in response. That scenario is lent plenty of credibility by displaying the signature Slavic characteristic of reciprocal escalation, which has been such a hallmark of Russia’s tactics throughout its recent military campaign.
From the metaphysical side, any Russian involvement in the harbor bridge collapse sounds utterly par for the course for a truly ill-conceived spell gone horribly, terribly awry, all raspberry-jam-like. How on earth can our befuddled neo-cons be magically literate enough to have gotten themselves ensconced in power, yet prophetically clueless enough to continue pursuing the same disastrous tactics over and over again? It does seem as though lemmings learn considerably faster than neo-cons do! I am now seriously NOT looking forward to finding out how the idiotically hamfisted curse our neo-cons cast over Moscow’s Crocus City Hall will end up, ever so predictably, rebounding on the US…
On the other hand, our infrastructure is falling apart all around us in such dramatic fashion that I wouldn’t have been in any way surprised had the harbor bridge simply collapsed under its own weight, even without that little extra nudge. As for the reliability of container ships… well, it’s hard to forget Evergreen’s “Ever Given” that got itself lodged sideways in the Suez Canal for a week, or Evergreen’s “Ever Forward” that got itself stuck in Chesapeake Bay mud for a month, or all the container ships that have capsized themselves on sandbars. I wonder if miles-long bridges have now become the new sandbars for our container ships to run themselves afoul of? What strange webs this civilization has woven, and what peculiarly large flies are getting caught in them.
Your post last week on the ambitions of the technocrats got me thinking again about Ivan Illich.
In the early seventies he was invited to participate in the discussions of the Club of Rome. After getting a general impression of what they were up to, he turned around and instead wrote a pithy and humorously titled book called Tools for Conviviality (full text easily searchable online) in which he not only skewered the idea that managerial elites could guide us through ecological crisis intact, but also put forward an original philosophy of technology based on what he called ‘radical counterproductivity’: the idea that beyond a certain intensity, any technology inevitably frustrates the goals it was designed for and becomes an end in and of itself rather than a means.
I am frequently tickled by how closely this deeply traditional Catholic priest and our esteemed Archdruid agree in their foundational ideas about how stuff works. Tools for Conviviality opens with the pregnant sentence, ‘During the next several years I intend to work on an epilogue to the industrial age’.
I am also convinced that over the course of his intellectual career Illich dropped increasingly heavier hints about his views on the history of magic as revealed in the transformation of Christian society into technological society.
I know the coming month doesn’t have five Wednesdays, but I’m putting in my vote for this topic early!
In my local news I see that the federal government has offered a 1.5 billion dollar “loan” to a private corp. to restart the Palisades nuclear plant on the east side of Lake Michigan. It closed in 2022 after 50 years in operation. If it works (and what could go wrong) this restart from “mothballed” status will be a first. Gov. Whitmer has supported this idea. I think that with the push for EVs it’s no secret that we’re gonna need more electric power and apparently nobody really believes all that fervently in renewables. Worst case, I suppose, is more wolf habitat.
https://www.wlns.com/news/michigan/feds-offer-1-5b-loan-to-restart-palisades-plant/
Tony C and JMG
I just wanted to comment that this is jurisdictional (as all answers seem to be for anything dealing with Masonry). My Lodge (Oriental 20 in Mesa, AZ), and many of the Lodges in the State of Arizona have a strong presence of esoterica. We’ve had phenomenal results in recruiting youngish (in their 30s and 40s) members when we focus on having discussions revolving around esoteric topics in our Friend to Friend group (a group for those interested in Freemasonry and joining our Lodge).
This interest only seems to be increasing where I am. Now that many of those initial visitors are full members, it’s gotten to the point where we are having meetings at the Lodge library every week outside of our standard meeting nights to have discussions and they are well attended. JMG, I’ve been enjoying bringing up many of the topics I’ve learned from your books, and having great discussions with a diverse group.
I’ve long wondered if this is a West Coast vs East Coast thing, a generational thing, or something else entirely (or a combo). Many of the older Masons are only somewhat interested in these topics, but they also tend to be heavy into the appendant bodies and enjoy the education on such topics when done in Lodge.
Tony, definitely visit the Lodges near you to get a feel for them, as you may be pleasantly surprised. Here in the Wild West, esotericism is thriving in Freemasonry.
Trubrujah
Hi JMG,
Recently I came across an an article in the German online magazine “Multipolar“ in which the author argues that the jungian archetype of Mars is back. Here´s the link to the original article:
https://multipolar-magazin.de/artikel/rueckkehr-des-mars
I’ve translated the first few paragraphs with an online translator (deepL):
The return of Mars
In ancient times, war was not imagined as the result of conscious decisions made by individuals, but as an effect of the gods on human consciousness. In the light of the current desire for war, it can be stated: Mars is back. A contribution from the perspective of analytical psychology.
MALTE NELLES, March 15, 2024, 0 Comments, PDF
What has actually happened to the German public? People are complaining about “war fatigue”, “compulsory military service” needs to be reintroduced and Germany needs to become “fit for war”. The German Federal President calls Russia’s leadership “evil” and the Green Party’s Anton Hofreiter, previously better known for his commitment to organic farming, is calling for the total mobilization of all resources against Russia.
Until recently, quite a few Green politicians were still busy looking for four-leaf clovers in the garden of the Waldorf kindergarten, but now Cem Özdemir can be seen in field camouflage on a visit by the military police. And the pictures don’t stop there: EU Parliament Vice-President Katharina Barley is calling for a nuclear bomb for the European Union, and politician and Bundeswehr Colonel Roderich Kiesewetter even wants to “take the war to Russia” and triple the “special funds” for German rearmament. Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, Annalena Baerbock and Boris Pistorius have already fired so much verbal ammunition that it is difficult to select individual quotes from their verbal battles.
How do peace doves become cruise missiles?
What has happened to the pacifist-socialized political representatives in the Federal Republic and also to those in the German media landscape whose identity was also based on “never again war”? Did they suddenly realize – and this is probably the official interpretation and self-description of the actors – just how power-obsessed, cruel and dishonest Putin is and draw the only rational conclusion of an unconditional rearmament and escalation? Is the sentence “Ukraine must win this war!” just a political calculation or does it perhaps also say something about the state of consciousness of the people concerned and the German public? How do doves of peace become cruise missiles? How does war in the mind develop its inimitable dynamism and longing for completion?
Rational, politological but also conventional psychological explanations are not sufficient to understand the 180-degree mental turnaround that public actors have undergone within a very short space of time and on whose path Germany has embarked. Now that mythical-religious and essentializing concepts such as “evil” and “the enemy” are once again in vogue, it makes sense to look at current events from a mythological, “archetypal” perspective in the tradition of the Swiss depth psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. In Germany, the country of “Never again war!”, a new and at the same time well-known archetype has constellated in the public consciousness – according to the thesis elaborated below. Mars, the Roman god of war of antiquity, has returned from the mental asylum to which he had been banished for over 70 years. The spirit of war is out of the bottle again and dominates the public consciousness, especially that of the media.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
It does indeed feel to me as if people are literally not themselves, as if someone (or something) has taken over their minds, and I’m thinking: maybe he (the author) has got a point.
Of course he doesn’t argue for the literal existence of gods, but what’s your take on it? Could it be that the God Of War (whatever he’s called) is making his presence felt (again)?
greetings
Frank
Since JMG’s post mentions Adocentyn, it’s apropos to mention an actual organization inspired by that tale.
https://adocentynlibrary.org
The Adocentyn Research Library is run by people I know. After amassing and cataloging a collection of 18,000 books, ephemera, art objects, and Tarot decks, it opened to the public. The collection began with donations from the private libraries of its board members and bequests from deceased Pagans. More donated books arrive every week. The Pagan community, both locally and far away, supports the library with money and labor. The ARL is located in an urban area served by public transportation.
This year has been a grand spiritual opening for me.
I think I have a few valuable things to tell there.
In November I met a man not yet 30 still, who specializes in Coaching, Astrology, Healing Massage, energetic work and mostly personality development and trauma therapy.
I engaged with his program by January and he also pointed me to several spiritual gatherings and events that were all beneficial. One woman he works with, I guess around 50, learned from an indian Yogi, who was also on videoscreen in several ceremonies. There were fire ceremonies and meditation seminars for around 15-20 people each, including one retreat in the mountains of Austria.
A sweating hut in the country side with an old Austrian devoted to shamanism with 7 other people as well.
Also, I have not come to it yet, dancing events where drugs and alcohol are banned, for around up to 150 people.
The austrian woman who learned in India taught some of the basic known yogic breathing and third eye opening exercises.
Among them:
– Resting on your spread knees and exhaling through the mouth with your tongue stuck out for cleansing
– fire breath raising your arms with your hands fists and your thumbs pointing to each other, breathing in through the nose very rapidly, ideally also putting your lower belly in and out below navel, after several rapid breaths holding and pulling the breath upward, for as long as possible, until releasing downward
– looking with your eyes towards your third eye
– breathe in and imagine energy through your lowest base spine gland upwards through your third eye, breathe out making it sink back again
– Put your middle finger to your third eye and close on nostril each breath with either thumb or ringfinger, breathe in through one nostril and always breathe out through the other
I do it 20-30 min every morning and it helps. I include from QI Gong Meditation pulling my arms above the head raising the energy and then letting your focus think from above your head through to below your feet, your arms slowly follwing, and the converse exercise raising energy up as well.
The people in groups from 15-20 on 5 to 6 occasions were all friendly and respectful, which is the achievment of the man whose program I follow because he is a good leader to all these ceremonies and spiritual gatherings he creates and overlooks.
Some look like Hippies, some were Hippies, ages are on average mid thirties to mid forties with outliers below and more above. However, everything goes reasonable and little is over the top. The Yogi woman is quite in another world sometimes, the man I talk about however always very much down to Earth.
I must accept that I know how to deal with people from various social subcultures and categories, nevertheless will never be fully part to any common social group, he said to me.
That makes sense, at least I can now see people gathering for spirituality in a I’d say beneficial and healthy fashion, and I can gather with people without drugs and alcohol, as thing I had for at least 10 years hoped for.
Valuable advice I got, things like taking Vitamin D supplements in a higher dose with K2, because the latter prevents a higher dose to draw calcium from your bones.
Advice about the healthy setting of boundaries, communication, inner affirmation, cleanlyness in thought and habits, and so forth.
The “inner child” meditations, where you meditate you enter a beautiful house in the wild, where your inner child sits down below in a comfortable chair in front of a fire and you visit it to interact. This is our human part that is distinct from our social imprints when growing up.
Health needs to be treated on all levels, as he says. In 2020, my body was very smooth and flexible, I was entirely without anything unhealthy, breathed a lot and did Qi Gong exercises, my liver certainly unburdened through food, smoking, alcohol, anything. Energetically great. Yet anger and unbalanced emotion never subsided;
The man said he knows someone practicing Tibetan Buddhism competently, very good at sourcing and directing his Qi, but still with a broken inner child in him, hence not happy.
Discursive Meditation techniques like the Spiritual Alchemy of the Octagonb Society are certainly ways to fix exactly this issue.
The sweating hut with the group of Shamanism interested people was good too, the hut was created in a rural plot. Here, a man between 35-40 I guess plots his vegetables, somewhere further a partner has a small farm, together they deliver to about 100 families vegetables, honey, eggs and limited meat.
He is quite a firmly convicted true ecologist and gardener, who told us the soil on his not too big land improves steadily since he works there. A lot of interesting knowledge about it all.
He also offered me to try out working with him, as he often has these international volunteers too, if I am interested.
So these times have given me good practices, and connections, and many options this year.
Non spiritual people often ask me why I work only part time in the government office where I do administrative work connected to IT and computering, if I don’t get bored with so much time on my hands.
No, one life isn’t enough to follow all I want to follow through with my good time on my hands!
Hi John,
What is your opinion of RFK Jr? For the most part I like his political platform but I’m not sure about his mental stability. He’s had a somewhat sketchy and controversial life, likely due to the trauma of his father’s assassination when he was 15. My brother is voting for him and feels he has put his past problems behind him, telling me that “people can overcome and change for the better”. I agree with that sentiment but I’m not sure he really has. Thanks!
I just thought I would tell you that I’ve been posting the like to “An Unfamiliar World” to a lot of places on the Internet. I really think that post is one of your recent “must-reads” for people who really want to understand what is happening in this world right now and why (not in the least because not a few people on the right would like to use the fact that the Total Fertility Rate in the developed world is rapidly declining to breathe new life into the homophobia I remember all too well from the eighties and the nineties).
Hello JMG, I think that the refugees (invaders) coming and coming to my country Turkey will cause huge social explosions and events and most of them are men of military age and I am tired of hearing bad news every day and I have no trust in the government nor the people. As we want to get rid of the first early elections and because of the policies of the government, many young people have started to move away from traditional Islam, you know me from the conversations… I also think that the Ancient Turkish Belief should be resurrected, I want to resurrect the pagan beliefs and get in touch with the ancient Turkish Gods, about the gods. Would it be beneficial if I made small rituals with colors, symbols and candles with the information I have? However, the real Right is rising in my country and it seems that it will go towards the Extreme Right, a return to militarism, which is one of the main veins of Turkish culture, seems inevitable!!! I’m waiting for everyone who wants to answer!!!
Hello all, I share this as an essay which may interest some on this board.
https://crookedtimber.org/2024/03/25/capitalism-is-dead-long-live-capital/
The final point is why I share the link: we can no longer rely on the fact that we live in a shared reality with each other. A privatized algorithm influences what information we see of the world, and through that how we navigate it. If magic is the ability to change consciousness at will, then this looks like something very weird to me. I wonder if the Tower of Babel is the right metaphor.
Clay @8,
Having quit the formal medical system when Covid hit, then quit the contract public health sector soon afterwards, I share your concerns. In one group I still participate with, of the four other physicians, one is still working (a few more years until kids graduate college), one moved to a software/bioengineering company, one left the hospital to work in a small private group, and one is doing charity care. I personally know three others who quit prematurely and become farmers. Medical system spokespersons talk about burnout and seeking to support workers, but actual improvement is lacking.
Prevention makes sense – take care.
I would like to take this opportunity to highly commend our host for his amazing work over the past few years in revealing, demystifying and disseminating – in these blog posts and through his many publications – the hidden occult mystery school teachings. I offer my sincere and deep gratitude. Your service in this area (and many others) is invaluable and so greatly appreciated.
The discussion about the fae this monday got me wondering: considering that with industrial society’s decline it should be expected that nature will reclaim a good portion of the globe (as with the case of Chernobyl), can we expect a resurgence in the power of such beings as industrial society declines, or is their decline a foregone affair, regardless of the fate of industrial society?
@Rafael + JMG
Actually, it seems that big, crowded cities are fertility-killers all around, regardless of ethnic background of the cities’ inhabitants. Fertility might seem real high among the first and second generations of immigrants from poorer countries, but subsequent generations tend to suffer the same low-fertility rate as the native population. So I think just assuming recent trends will continue the same for the next century may be an incorrect model to base predictions on.
Secondly, wouldn’t rural demographics be more relevant in terms of predicting the demographic profile of Europe’s post-industrial future? Basically, it’s the people who have a lot of practical skills and can work the land who will be the inheritors of European soil, regardless of whatever their physical appearance might be. Recent genetic studies of Italy throughout multiple eras have shown that Imperial Era Rome sample data is skewed highly in favor of Eastern Med and Near Eastern genes (almost all to due to both Greek colonization of Italy and later immigration from other provinces) vs. Iron Age Italian samples (native population). Samples from after the fall of Rome don’t show much of those Near Eastern components present, suggesting the imperial urban populations mostly died off or emigrated to the Byzantine East when the Western half of the empire collapsed. Post-collapse samples do however show a significant influx of Central and Northern European genes (especially in Northern Italy), obviously due to Germanic migrations. But it should be noted that these newcomers largely settled rural areas and eventually intermixed with locals; Italy overall though seems to have gone back to a more Iron Age type genetic profile after the Western empire’s collapse.
IMHO, Rafael makes a good point about immigrants in Europe being crowded into urban ghettos, with many of them living off welfare benefits from the state and having little in the way of lucrative job skills (the immigrants with professional skills and education tend to assimilate into the host culture), and probably not practical skills that could help them weather a major collapse. (Who is going to grow the food??) So I see these immigrant populations being in the same boat as the native managerial classes — genetic dead-ends. Back to the Rome comparison, I think Turkish and Algerian immigrants in places like Germany and France are more comparable to Egyptians and Syrians living in the empire’s big cities rather than they are to Visigoths. Present day EU politicians are not giving Turks and Algerians large swathes of rural land to settle and establish villages and farms for their own sustenance. What happens when economies collapse and welfare handouts dry up? If EU politicians and monied interests end up using men from immigrant backgrounds as “Foederati”-type mercenary soldiers to do their dirty work, then that could throw an interesting spin on things.
Finally, there’s the real chance that if there’s a large scale European population contraction across the board, there might end up being migrations from the Russosphere (and maybe other parts of Eastern Europe) to grab up the emptied lands and put them to productive use once again. Once Russia throws off the last vestiges of Faustian influence and returns to their own native traditions, they could very well experience a population rebound.
“European companies no longer generate sufficient profits to fuel the social model”
One can ask if any company does. The current darling, Nvidia, is a one trick pony (AI processors).
The article is targeted at Europe.
https://www.eurointelligence.com/
Europe’s next financial crisis
@Peter #21: FWIW, I like RFK Jr. precisely because of his past as a drug addict. Not in some sort of “trippy” counterculture kind of way, but because a lot of people in 12 step programs have had to do inner work on themselves and make contact with a higher power. He says he begins his day with prayer & meditation, as do many in recovery. Someone like that might be good for addressing the opioid crisis here. I know he is a politician, or has become one anyway, but its good to have third options. & I like him also as a simple escape from the binary tug and just the option of having a third option. What becomes of it is another matter.
Hello. Long time reader, though I haven’t commented in a while.
I wish I had your confidence in predicting the future. My brother said that we’re currently facing two crises- one in the environment and energy, and the other is Big Tech and Silicon Valley spreading their tendrils into everything. And he says we can’t do anything about either, so we just have to see which crisis swallows the other. Either Big Tech solves our energy problems and ushers in a new golden age- one where they control everything- or our current tech becomes unsustainable. I’m sure I know which one you expect to win, and if I thought that collapse was *worse* then Big Tech controlling everything I’d be inclined to agree. But I’m a pessimistic person.
I’ve been really anxious about AI lately- mainly the image generating AI. I see you have a ban on discussion of AI, which is understandable, so I won’t say any more about it except to say that my anxiety led me to decide to quit the internet a couple weeks ago. I still read the occasional article (or blog, more on that later) but for the most part I’ve stayed offline since then. At first it went well for me. I was enjoying life more and making connections I would never had made when I was spending too much time on the computer. But my anxiety has been getting the best of me, and I haven’t been able to do much of anything. I really need to get busy on my garden though, so I’m going to have to push through.
I do sometimes wonder at why Luddism hasn’t become more popular. If you spend time on the internet you will find a lot of people- especially younger people I think- nostalgic for a simpler time before life revolved around our devices. And if the internet can popularize the idea of a month of no masturbating, or a month of no drinking, and other similar lent-lite type challenges, why not a month long break from our devices? Or at least a week? It’s easy to blame the technology itself- Big Tech made this stuff too addictive, so people can never get away from it. And that’s part of it. But I think there’s a deeper problem. Literally the only way to sway public opinion these days to any meaningful degree is to be on the internet. And no one who makes a living on the Internet is going to undercut themselves like that. It makes me worry about the future.
On the subject of collapse, I recently looked at Tom Murphy’s blog ( https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/ ), which is pretty wild. He used to be a sober and fairly anodyne voice in the Peak Oil space, I think. But now he seems to be a full blown Primitivist. He’s certain that humanity will revert to a hunter gatherer state within something like 10,000 years from now, and views that as a happy thing. I’m not mocking him- I actually find a lot of this very compelling. Though I confess I find the question of whether we will all be hunter-gatherers in 10,000 years less interesting then whether we will face a major energy crunch within 100 years.
@TJandTheBear
About the US claims, can you provide a link to some article? I would like to read up on it.
@Corax
I think you are correct in saying that current migratory trends won’t necessary continue for the next 100 years. Maybe they won’t even continue for the next 20 years. Either way, European world dominance is over for at least the next several hundred years I imagine.
I am a carpenter by trade with most of my work being countertop installation for middle and upper middle class residential homes. In the last ten years I have been inside thousands of individual homes and I’ve noticed a pattern. Neutral colors are dominating interior design and white is used ad nauseam.
We are told that a large number of modern ills are a result of “toxic whiteness.” Could this obsession with the color white in interior design be a collective unconscious response to the demonization of “whiteness?”
@Christophe #32 – I live in a concrete apartment building that was built in the mid 1980s and which will be torn down soon because it’s on its last legs. As with buildings, so with bridges, I think; no terrorist explanations needed.
@ Christophe,
If there was any terrorist angle to the Baltimore bridge disaster, I don’t think the Russians had anything to do with it. It turns out that the captain of the ship that took out the bridge is Ukrainian…
Teresa, huzzah! That’s wonderful news. May you have a grand time and sell at least 3 godzillion copies of each of your Christie-related titles while you’re there.
Justin, it certainly appears to be a durable copy. As for California, I get the impression that anybody who can get out of the Leaden State is doing it. Makes me wonder whether something really horrific is going to happen there soon.
Douglas, yes, but that’s only one of the possibilities. Clairvoyance often works through the dream state, and so does precognition. So you may just not have met them yet!
Hobbyist, hmm! Yes, that seems like a very sensible concept, and one that would be well worth putting into practice.
Rafael, (1) Toynbee argues that great religions and great civilizations are the two alternative forms of large-scale human social organization — religions rise as civilizations fall, and vice versa. I’ll consider a post on that. (2) Funny how they never get around to explaining why countries that don’t have all those regulations can’t make nuclear power make a profit either…
Arnav, there is no simple answer to this! First of all, I have no personal experience with conditions in India; second, I don’t claim to know which countries are going to end up prospering as the Western world crashes and burns, but some will, and India might well be one of them; third, I don’t know your personal circumstances, interests, talents, and limitations, and all of these have to be factored into a personal response to the messy situation we’re in. Two things I’d suggest are, first, make sure you spend much less than you make, and two, consider getting a job that isn’t dependent on the US dollar — its value is likely to decline sharply in the years ahead of us.
Justin, yes, I did. That’s a fine example of the way the US economy is busy cannibalizing itself, with the medical industry one of the leading perpetrators/victims.
Peter, thanks for this. I look forward to seeing many of you there!
@JMG
“religions rise as civilizations fall”
Right now civilization is falling, Christianity will fossilize according to the idea of Second Religiosity, meaning that we can expect a figure like Mohammed in the next decades. In the past Mohammed appeared between Rome and Persia. Now it would be fitting if a prophet appeared between China and the US (in Japan) or Russia and the US (somewhere in Central Europe maybe).
@ Rafael — “US claims”? Not sure what you’re asking. If you can please clarify I can definitely provide more specific links.
JMG:
(and Rafael). I think the more interesting question is what will the demographics of Europe look like two or three centuries from now. While it is certainly the case that the next several generations of Europeans will be a function of who is currently having babies (the migrant families), there is also a lot of evidence that suggests that the second and third generation children of those migrants revert to the replacement fertility of those they replaced or already at capacity muslim nations like Iran (i.e., negative). Overlaying this dynamic is the fact that the entire system is still overwhelmingly dependent on the import of non-renewable energy, which has its own diminishing return rate.
All that to say, there is a distinct possibility that the Europe of 200+ years into the future may well resemble what was Europe of the late neolithic/early bronze age in that there will be societies of shorter and somewhat darker people making a sustenance level living off an out-moded technology in the footprints of our current big cities (vastly reduced in scale, of course), being invaded at their borders by… larger blonder nomads from the West Asian steppe. All the more likely considering Russian peoples (or some subsets of them) may well be able to sustain industrial era food and energy consumption levels much further into the future given their ample gas and peat resources.
As for the Americas… Tough to say. But it’s probably a safe bet to assume that warming climate combined with political/economic collapse of our current order is going to drive a lot of people into previously undesirable areas of Canada while the differences between the American South and Mexico gradually erode…
Best,
Chris W
@TJandTheBear
You mentioned something about the prelude to the Resource Wars, the US claiming some Russian territory in the Bering Sea. I wanted to read more on that.
Greetings from Moscow. Mr. Greer, I have been a regular reader of yours for over 15 years now, but in that time have left only a handful of comments. I mostly prefer to take it all in and contemplate. Today, I decided to write something, in part because over the past year I have been given the opportunity to contribute columns for a fairly well-known, non-mainstream publication (I guess that’s how I will describe it). While I am certainly on an editorial leash, the leash isn’t terribly short, and I am able to at least broach some deeper ideas. I won’t say who I am or where I write, because I am not here to plug my own work. I bring this up merely to say two things: writing incisive big-picture stuff is extremely hard, and to say something original is even harder. Now that I am trying to plough something resembling the same field, I am more amazed than ever at how good you are. I mostly reconfigure and recombine ideas that are already out there, and probably only rarely offer a truly fresh insight. I will also say that my outlook has been profoundly shaped by reading you for many years, and that your influence is probably visible to anyone who reads me and also your work.
Here’s something that I have been thinking about. I have come to see Russia as fundamentally subject to the same deeper forces of cultural decline as the West, even as it is experiencing a renaissance of sorts after the abyss of the 1990s and is avoiding many of the spectacular manifestations of decline currently on display in the West. There are a lot of good things I can say about what’s going on here. Russia still has something of a coherent culture with a shared historical memory; still has a fairly competent managerial class; it has clean, safe, and orderly cities, it is investing in infrastructure rather than letting it become dilapidated. It is clearly prevailing in the current conflict with the West, which has engendered a palpable sense of optimism here after quite a lot of uncertainty.
Nevertheless, there seems to be a level at which societies evolve that is entirely impervious to current events or political winds. Consumerism and materialism are deeply ensconced here and it is highly corrosive; the digital age is spawning a generation of atomized and emotionally stunted young people staring sullenly at their phones and blatantly disregarding old mores of speech and conduct; new construction in the suburbs of the cities has a uniform bleakness to it, it’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time – the modern ethos. As is the case everywhere else, Russia produces no writers, composers, or painters of any note, and many of the country’s ancient traditions that somehow managed to survive 70 years of communism are simply fading – not owing to any sort of political agenda but simply on account of the inexorable march forward of modernity.
Rafael #1 – A few thoughts: Talking from a German perspective – the country receives a lot of influx from different ethnicities – not all of them like each other. You probably won’t find blacksmiths or other trades among them en masse, but as far as my very limited insight goes most groups do things a little differently than the natives do. For example, when we visit our local farmer to fetch some fresh milk, quite often families with a muslim background are there too, buying something like 100 litres milk for making cheese. A few days ago, first came the Syrians, then the Afghans and the other day a small Kurdish family. The Russia-Germans who have re-emigrated to Germany form their own widely branched family clans which usually amass a large spectrum of practical skills, steadily increasing their capital. The list goes on.
Even if a government was willing to stop the influx of people, there are a lot of them already here and – big city or not – demographics currently is not on the side of the natives. At least in Germany there are certain political actors who are more or less openly fantasizing about sending those who are already here back – but I doubt that they will succeed in building enough political momentum to come even near to achieving anything in this regard. And if they succeeded? I would be very surprised if the migrants in question would go quietly.
Speaking of Germany – and possibly of most other European countries belonging to the “western world” – I think the most likely outcome for the near- to mid-term future is a certain level of chaos and partial breakdown of public order. In the end – depending on how things are developing in Eastern Europe – I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point a certain hegemon steps in who because of his own multi-ethnicity and his good ties to different parts of the world is in a good position to foster a new order. But if that doesn’t happen? I’d bet on chaos and instability for a long time to come.
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
@ Rafael
I live in France, in a département (the French equivalent of an American county) east of Paris where the native white French population has become a minority at least 20 years ago. Only people above 60 or so are still majority white, like me (I’m 67 year old, btw). My wife is of Chinese-Mauritian ancestry (mostly East Asian, mixed with some Indian ancestors). Our children look white and consider themselves white. One of them married a Moroccan woman of Arab and Berber ancestry; she’s a Sunni Muslim. Immigrants often live in enclaves (or what turns into an enclave, for reasons familiar to Americans moving to ever more distant suburbs). Where I live, the future is already here. Crime and poverty, but still not bad enough to make you flee, unless you have children of school age.
A conversation I recently had with a good friend of mine, a middle-class woman of Lebanese descent (European features, dark skin). She was adopted as an infant by a white French family. She has a white husband, a white-looking daughter, a white son-in-law and grandson.
She told me: Only racists are against immigration. I have black female friends…
I replied: Give me the name of a single nation that didn’t suffer after becoming a minority in its own territory.
She: There’s none… But whites deserve to pay for what they did in the past! They must pay for white supremacy, racism, colonialism…
I didn’t reply, for it would have been futile to start an argument. She didn’t seem to realize that when her 3 year-old grandson grows up, his white skin will make his life difficult, and there will be no place for him to go.
My eldest son married in Morocco. My wife and I were present. Beautiful country, friendly people, all the signs and administrative documents are bilingual (French and Arabic). The bride’s family treated us like princes. French is spoken by everyone who is educated or works in commerce or tourism, although the country has been independent since the mid-fifties. Last but not least, an average French income makes you several times richer than the average Moroccan, that’s why about 80,000 French nationals chose to retire in Morocco. Several mayors of big cities and government ministers are women.
There are details, though, which remind you that you are in an islamic country. You can’t marry a Moroccan woman unless you make a formal conversation to Islam (which my son did. Ah, l’amour….). And don’t think of proselytizing or, if you are a Sunni Muslim (99% of Moroccans are), of converting to another brand of Islam. Some Moroccan dude who converted to Shi’a Islam was sent to jail for one year in 2023, under the pretext that he had “forced” his wife and children to convert. Link below, in French:
https://www.bladi.net/maroc-conversion-chiisme,99151.html
When I spoke about it with my daughter-in-law (a modern woman who loves wearing miniskirts in France), she replied that Shi’as are not true Muslims. Since I generally avoid arguing about religion, I didn’t tell her that, in my opinion, the problem is not whether Shi’a Islam is “true” Islam or not.
Need I tell you, Mr Greer, that there are no druids in Morocco? Jews, Shia Muslims and Christians are tolerated. The other religions are simply unknown, atheism is better kept secret. It seems to me that the average, law-abiding, peaceful Moroccan (most of them are) views the local variety of Sunni Islam as part of their national identity, a mainstay of their culture, and a guaranty of social order and morality, both public and private.
I offer blessings once a week to everybody who requests them. If any of you might like to receive a blessing, you can get more info (and sign up for next Wednesday) here::
https://thehiddenthings.com/weekly-blessings-13
And since these blessings allow me to improve some of my skills, you‘ll also do me a favour by signing up! 🙂
Milkyway
@TJandTheBear I think he meant the claim about US shale oil and gas production.
Given how big a role US shale production has played in the energy world lately, I’m pretty interested in this. I’ve read some stuff suggesting that US shale oil (but not gas?) has peaked. Gas still seems set to increase, though, even if gas output *per well* is declining. Fracking plays do peak very quickly, though, so who knows?
Re: “Religions rise as civilizations fall.” The latest hit movie on the market is a more-or-less faithful adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 blockbuster novel “Dune,” whose popularity seems to mirror that. I read it first as a set of serials in Analog Science Fiction, and read it basically as just more science fiction, but a very good science fiction. The timing of it – the mid-60s – was just as the Boom Awakening was starting to stir, and ecological issues were a straw in the wind. David Lynch’s 1984 movie was a freak show, as much a parody as its near-contemporary Starship Troopers. (The one good movie, one that him home, made from the kind of s/f we call classics, was 1984. And then, it was just taken a a slap at the USSR.) I note that 1984 was the year that you, JMG, tried to buy some dulcimer music and a snotty little store clerk blew you off. Well, at any rate, Dune is back and making it big, which says the issues it raised speak to the concerns of whoever watches movies these days. I won’t go into the political bowdlerizing such as the de-Islamizing of it, and some of the casting, and (yuck, sticks finger down throat, get the barf bag) turning Alia into a passive acted-on character, as if Victoria was still on the throne or Eisenhower in the White House, instead of the sassy, sharp-tongued, gleefully nasty little kid she was in the book. After all, you have to placate the Morality/Political Correctness Police. However ..
Dune – the movie, and the book issued as a movie tie-in which is actually the original novel in Tall Trade Paper format, and the fact that it’s done seriously, though with a lot more battle-porn and fewer serious details, tells me a lot.
It tells me my grandchildren’s generation is ready for the issues it raises.
(One comment by a reviewer that does sum up the book’s major flaw as literature, and of the characters in generally: “Everybody’ always overthinking everything.” P.S. I mail-ordered used mass-market paperback* copies of Gawd-Awful Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse Dune. Let’s see the series through.
*Small apartment keeping it simple, and hey, I’m not going to be around forever.
Ecosophian #22 re the Baltimore bridge collapse: “So, I wonder if it all has some metaphysical significance or if it is just a coincidence.”
I note that the bridge is named after Francis Scott Key, the author of our national anthem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key). Symbolically, perhaps a warning about the imminent collapse of our nation (though I sincerely hope not)! I hope for everyone’s sake that I’m reading too much into it, and that the bridge collapse was simply a tragic accident.
There are some people on the dissident right who are now seriously considering the possibility that America is its own thing and is not a part of Europe. This looks like the beginning of America throwing off its Faustian pseudomorphosis: https://im1776.com/2024/01/18/the-american-nation-ethnogenesis/
To quote,
“Darryl Cooper: You’re leading us into a conversation I’ve been having with myself for a long time. Most nationalists (of whatever stripe or temperament) have taken for granted America’s role as an outpost of European civilization in the New World. Mainstream conservatives might, for fear of alienating non-European political allies, shrink from referring to our civilization as European, instead substituting “Western” or “Judeo-Christian,” but meaning the same thing. Racialists, for their part, insist that our European roots are the indispensable basis of American identity. In fact, I’ve seen some of the more sober and measured white racial activists (the type that might be found giving speeches at an AmRen conference) begin to refer to themselves as European Americans, emphasizing their status as a people in diaspora. This view, however it’s formulated, sees America as a junior partner to Europe in a broader civilizational project. Consider how many American nationalists use Greek statues or Dutch paintings for their social media avatars. Why not a giant sequoia, a bighorn sheep, or a strutting cowboy?
Americans who view their country in terms of the European-style nation-state have good cause for despair, because the level of demographic transformation already baked into our cake would be fatal for, say, Poland, Greece, or Israel. A people must settle territory in order to hold it and make it theirs. The original English colonists had no choice but to call on unlimited numbers of immigrants — first from Scotland and Ireland, then from Germany, and eventually from the half-civilized hinterlands of Europe — if they were to pacify the natives and claim the West before it fell to Spain, Russia, or other powers. The price of Manifest Destiny was the sacrifice of America’s English heritage, but, even with reinforcements from all over Europe, America’s appetite proved to be larger than its stomach. Our failure to adequately settle the territory conquered in the Mexican-American War left a vacuum that has been filled with migrants from Mexico and the rest of Latin America.
My questions, then, are these: What if preserving America as a nation-state was never in the cards? What if, given the vastness of our territory, the length of our borders, and the teeming impoverished masses to the south and east, it was inevitable that others would push in before it was possible to truly make every inch of the country in the image of 19th century America? All of these are preliminary questions to the real question I’d like to consider: What if it was never America’s destiny to be a junior partner in European or Western civilization? What if the Western Hemisphere is a new civilization that is our destiny to lead? Five hundred years from now, historians could very well see this outcome as obvious and inevitable. If Europe cannot muster the will in the coming centuries to hold off the exploding populations of Africa and the Middle East, a view of America as an outpost of European civilization will seem quite anachronistic. How would it affect our view of demographic change, or our relationship to Asia, Latin America, and Europe, if America was understood not as one of many European nation-states, but as a civilization state in embryo?”
Rafael: “but you can definitely stop the migrant crisis. Enforce the borders and deport them, they are a net drain on European coffers by any measure. All it takes is the will of the managerial class.”
Rafael, First of all, the “managerial class” went out of their way to ABET this invasion; why would they have a “will” to reverse it? Second, “deport them” is much easier said than done. At what cost and, how exactly, are you going to “deport” people — after you’ve abetted, or at least, tolerated, their invasion for some years? What if they don’t WANT to be “deported”? What if they country you thought they came from disavows them?
The US, of course, already is well down this road. No matter what Trump says, presuming he gets elected, he is going to have an enormously difficult time getting the legal system, and the citizens themselves to go along; much less the “civil servants” who facilitated this controlled takedown/breeding experiment.
I’m just saying. Regardless of who gets elected, I’m making plans to get out. It’s going to be a heck of an “adventure” in the US. In the “EU”? OMG. I can hardly imagine, but none of my imaginings go very well for that profoundly NON-DEMOCRATIC nominalization!
Winslow, cancer rates among younger people shot up in the mid-20th century, and now they’ve taken another leap upwards; my guess, though it’s only a guess, is that the latest spike is a combination of the mess we’ve made of our lives and that untested experimental drug that so many people got in early 2021. Death rates in general have spiked upwards, too. It promises to be a real mess.
Pygmycory, back when I lived in Seattle there used to be a fine book titled Winter Gardening in the Maritime Northwest which covered cool season gardening in detail. Worked very well, too.
Ecosophian, yeah, I thought of that.
TJ, yeah, combine depletion with rising energy inputs and you’ve got the makings of a world-class mess.
Florida, I’ve noticed that quite often, when I bring up a point in my blog, somebody in the mainstream media picks it up in short order. I wonder if they realize that they’re serving as a signal amplifier for the fringe…
Oleg, in a certain sense, yes. As fertility collapses and all the other measures of cultural vitality follow suit, true believers in the myth of progress are going further and further into denial, trying to find some reason to insist that the grand march from the caves to the stars is still under way. The current Augmented Idiocy hype is just the latest bit of handwaving, as even Rolling Stone has noticed.
Celadon, I don’t recall citing those three factors before. One way or another, you might consider meditating on the parallel.
Frank, thank you for this.
Christophe, the fact that the US government insisted that it couldn’t have been terrorism within a few hours, without any noticeable investigation, suggests to me that as usual, the US government is lying. Beyond that, I’m simply watching the whole thing with a raised eyebrow, and wondering what shoe is going to drop next.
Dylan, the similarity of ideas isn’t accidental; I real a lot of Illich back in the day.
Phutatorius, at this point the entire Federal government is being run as a slush fund for the corporate elite, so this doesn’t surprise me at all. I suggest letting the wolves know in advance so they have plenty of time to pack their bags and start looking for nice den sites in the vicinity. 😉
Trubrujah, this is very good to hear. In every jurisdiction where I’ve been a member, brethren interested in esotericism have been a very small minority, and as often as not they’ve had to keep their mouths tightly shut because the Grand Masters were fairly devout Christians and wouldn’t tolerate the faintest hint of esotericism in lodges.
Frank, this is fascinating in a horrible sort of way. I’m not at all sure what’s behind it, but it reminds me very much of the way so many Democrats in the US turned into bizarre caricatures of themselves the moment Trump came on the scene, and then doubled down over the Covid fiasco. German history being what it is, I’m profoundly concerned.
Deborah, as I’m sure you know, I got the name the same place they did; Adocentyn is a legendary city mentioned in the Picatrix, the great medieval manual of magic. Mine was, in the slightly alternate history that underlies my occult mysteries, given its name in colonial times by Elias Ashmole, who crossed the Atlantic to found a colony for occultists.
Curt, interesting.
Peter, I’m watching his campaign with some interest. I tend to distrust Kennedys as a matter of principle — Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot should be read by anyone who still believes the hype that’s been manufactured around the most successful family in Boston’s Irish organized crime scene — but he’s certainly entertaining to observe.
Mister N, I’m sorry to say that the homophobia is probably unavoidable at this point, but it’s likely to vary drastically by region. Thank you for spreading the word!
Yiğit, I don’t know Turkish religion or culture well enough to have an opinion on the matter.
Boy, thanks for this. It’s important to realize that magic can be misused, and one of the most self-defeating uses of magic is the attempt to change consciousness so the world looks the way you want it to look. That’s also very popular, of course!
John, thanks for this.
Furnax, they’re on their way out one way or another, having mostly completed the process of experiencing material incarnation. The question on my mind is what else might find its way into some similar niche in the future.
Corax, we’ll just have to wait and see, now won’t we?
Siliconguy, yep. At this point, if corporations had to pay all their own costs, none of them would make much money and most would lose money hand over fist. Since the costs are being passed on to the government and the economy as a whole, it’s the government and the economy as a whole that will fail first.
Warren, Silicon Valley is really good at consuming energy but they have yet to come up with any way to generate it. As for Luddism, what too many people don’t realize is that you can pick and choose; I’ve never owned a cell phone and don’t have any social media other than this blog and my Dreamwidth journal, and so I suffer from a lot less stress than net addicts do.
Jfisher, fascinating. Yes, that would seem very likely — the return of the repressed is a powerful force.
Mister N, I’m sorry to say that the homophobia is probably unavoidable at this point, but it’s likely to vary drastically by region.
It’s already off the charts in Russia, which has a TFR of 1.4. They recently passed a law, much to Dmitry Orlov’s detestable delight, that outlaws any sort of LGBT-rights advocacy. Not that Russia was ever an ideal place to be openly homosexual, though.
Subject: Gratitude to the Greers
Been working on this list for a while. Now I realize the both of you should be thanked. Dear JMG and Sara, thank you for:
(1) Warning us away from “bad work” by explaining the raspberry jam principle, a.k.a. the law of repercussion. Lots of people insist it ain’t so, that they don the magical equivalent of hazmat suits. Naaaaaw. The jam totally ignores your gloves, spatulas, hip waders, etc. Who do you think you’re fooling?
(2) “Human beings think with myths as inevitably as we eat with mouths and walk with feet.” “Symbols and images are the tools of our thought.” That’s deep, man. We all think in stories. So us “advanced” modern people have myths. Even if we think we don’t … You mean, the Vulcans aren’t going to beam down and fix everything?
(3) The cult of progress. “A man must worship, whether he knows it or not.” Don’t know what smart dead person said that. I knew all humans worship, even if they don’t admit it, but hadn’t even thought of progress as a religion. What a concept!
(4) Philosophy. The map is not the terrain. The model is not reality. We can’t comprehend reality. We can’t help but think in maps, models, myths, but we need to be aware of their limits. And that’s about as far as I want to go with philosophy. I got all the neoplatonism I wanted in the Narnia books.
(5) The American Empire. OMG. Yeah, it’s a thing. It’s an empire. A declining empire. Oh darn.
At the very end of the population shrinkage post three weeks ago, I posted the following comment in some haste. I have now added references and would be very happy about feedback, especially from people with some experience in the building sector.
In Canada, Germany and Portugal (and probably in many other countries), the lack of affordable houses and apartments has become one of the top political concerns – in Portugal it has just helped topple the government, from what I read, and in Canada and Germany it might (see the recent RCMP report).
The exploding prices are clearly due to demand being much higher than offer. The refugees from the Ukraine war, plus (in the case of Canada) an enormous number of temporary workers and post-secondary students, plus investors who don’t plan to live in their second residences, have made it even more difficult to keep up with the demand. However, what grabbed my attention is that both Canada and Germany have tried to increase the offer by stimulating residential construction through fiscal and other means, and have fallen far short of their goals. What surprises me is that in spite of the enormous demand and the incentives from governments, construction activity has actually fallen in 2023:
According to StatCan, “On a constant dollar basis (2017=100), the total value of investment in building construction fell 11.6% to $143.9 billion for the year… The residential sector cooled off from 2022, declining 16.9% to $94.0 billion in 2023. This retreat was broad-based, with nine provinces posting declines.” The target of the German government is to build 400 000 units per year, but in 2023 only 245 000 were built, and expectations are for even lower numbers in 2024 and 2025.
There is certainly incompetence involved, excessive bureaucracy, quite possibly corruption. But getting enough housing built has got to be a top priority for governments right now, and I think the lackluster response by construction companies shows there are fundamental reasons that governments have been unable to change.
It seems to me that the diminishing energy available per capita makes construction more expensive than buyers can afford, and investors are quite aware of this and are therefore reluctant to build. If the trend continues, each person, on average, will be forced to occupy less and less square meters of the existing apartments and houses. Reducing the number of new buyers and renters (e.g. by reducing immigration) would help, but the falling construction activity makes me wonder if it would be enough. Who will want to raise one, or two, or more children in a space designed for only one or two adults? Or in an apartment shared by more than one couple or family?
If true, this would be a very direct link between a decrease in energy available from fossil fuels, and greater reluctance of young couples to have (more) children.
We look back at the Victorians who made bright green wall paper using an arsenic compound and Romans with their lead pipes for their water supply and wonder how they could be so stupid. We are no better with microplastics permeating reality, hundreds of “forever chemicals” likewise, nitrogen fertilizer run off, pharmaceuticals urinated into our water, pesticides wiping out beneficial insects and bees and more. The negative effect of these modern arsenics and lead pipes is starting to be realized. They really should be worked out of how we do things and be banned. This all came into play after WW2 yet a modern society had functioned before then. Instead of plastics things were done with glass, ceramics, wood, metal, rubber, and natural fibers. Those who come after us will shake their heads in astonishment at our stupidity like we do with the Romans and the Victorians. Instead of the old slogan “Better living through chemistry” it’s “Worse health through chemistry”. The coming end of a fossil fuel based economy will by itself gradually reduce and mostly eliminate the use of these products, but the residual effects will be with us a long time.
I believe that conspiracy mongering vis a vis the Baltimore crash is bought and paid for distraction away from the reality that the capitalist rulers don’t have no clothes on. It isn’t only governments which engage in this sort of propaganda. I suggest the reality is much more dull, and I expect, when someone who knows how to do the relevant research writes the definitive book, the Big Crash will turn out to have been an example of cascading malfeasance by all concerned, from the bridge builders–why did the whole thing come down?– to the various companies involved in chartering, manning and maintaining the vessel–how many of somebodies cousins simply did not do their due diligence. Not forgetting govt. inspectors.
Hi John, I found your essay https://www.ecosophia.net/a-primer-of-magical-combat/ to be among the most helpful and actionable pieces I’ve ever read. It’s been a while since this post, and the election is much closer. Any chance you are planning to — or can be persuaded to — write a part two?
If you had a whole book as high-level actionable as this, I would buy it. I find myself stopping myself several times a day, thinking of this post, and reminding myself to elevate my thinking.
Teresa Peschel #11
I spent some of my teenage years living in Torquay & have visited twice a year lately in connection with one of my hobbies. It’s a shadow of its former self now but still lovely – in parts! You may want to visit the iconic Kents Cavern (https://www.kents-cavern.co.uk) to see the cave bear skull embedded in the ceiling, or the pretty fishing village of Brixham across the bay, and the prehistoric stone rows & hut circles on Dartmoor are a short drive away. Berry Pomeroy 15th century castle’s worth a visit too, or on the way back from the Eden Project, Cotehele, which is tiny, beautiful, older & grander by far! I will email you at the address given on your website & see what else you might be interested in!
Rafael, I’d look to Southeast Asia, Africa, or South America as seedbeds of the next major prophetic religions, as those are fringe areas in today’s global society. Europe is a possibility, as it’s becoming a fringe area, but in that case the prophet is most likely to be an immigrant from Africa or the Middle East.
Chris W, oh, granted. Once you take it more than a century or two, migration and ethnogenesis start pulling in opposite but mismatched directions, and new ethnic groups start emerging.
Cloven, interesting. That doesn’t surprise me at all. The sense I’ve had for some time is that Russia is on the brink of giving rise to a new great culture in Spengler’s sense, but that’s going to emerge in the Volga basin, not in Europeanized cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, and it won’t be a fast or an easy process — it never is. The existing structure has to decay in order for the new one to be born. Modernity? That’s a fancy name for the process of rotting.
Patricia M, I’ve noticed that with some interest. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of it.
Kurt, I’m delighted to hear this. Half the things Cooper says are rephrasings, in far-right jargon, of things that I’ve been saying for years — which suggests that once again, my strategy of perching comfortably on the fringes and saying the unspeakable is paying off.
Mister N, I know. The fact that the US government has been pushing a gay and lesbian rights agenda abroad guaranteed that anyone opposed to the US would pick that up as a convenient weapon.
Nemo, thanks for this.
Aldarion, that’s certainly one major factor. On the other hand, real estate is a gargantuan share of the investment economy these days, and in order to keep on propping up a decaying economy, real estate must keep on rising in price so that investors can claim a positive return on investment. All these official programs to build more houses are, I think, slush fund generators allowing public money to be privatized, while pretending to solve the problem. Keep in mind, too, that if real estate prices reverted to a more reasonable level, tens of millions of middle and upper middle class families would lose most of their notional net worth — something that would kindle a political explosion of Godzilla-esque scale.
BeardTree, yep: “fewer living through chemistry.”
Gnat, I’ll consider it.
@JMG,
I have that book. I’ve read parts of it (there’s still a makeshift bookmark in it), but never really got that much use out of it. Not sure why. Maybe I should take another look at it.
>Neutral colors are dominating interior design and white is used ad nauseam.
Let us know if the 70s brown/beige/orange starts to return.
>Christophe, the fact that the US government insisted that it couldn’t have been terrorism within a few hours, without any noticeable investigation, suggests to me that as usual, the US government is lying. Beyond that, I’m simply watching the whole thing with a raised eyebrow, and wondering what shoe is going to drop next.
Perhaps. Just maybe. The other shoe was Baltimore? The timing of it is very suspicious. Almost like a tit for tat going on. It made my ears swivel when they came out so quick to say “Wasn’t us, not our fault, was ISIS-K”. The Russians have a sense of humor, right after Baltimore they said something like “Wasn’t us, not our fault, was ISIS-NJ”.
If this is true, I suspect a lot more shoes will start getting flung around. 2024 certainly is a raging dumpster fire however you look at it. A dumpster fire of flaming shoes.
Maybe it was just incompetence and crumbling infrastructure. Something something glass houses, something something throwing stones…
Hello Ecosophia community!
I wanted to ask you all as a foreigner, if I could get some suggestions about states or places to move to in the U.S. I am a mexican student of the occult, artist and software engineer that enjoys nature and my living spaces to be away from the noise (and madness) of the city but still a close to it (say, 20-30 minutes bus driving range or so). I like museums, small towns, cafes and libraries. Since people here mostly seem to think the way I do I thought it was a good place to ask. I have visited some places in the last couple of years: LA (not a chance unless I were filthy rich, the vibes are horrible), Boston (good, I liked it but traffic was intense), Providence (I liked the vibes a lot but perhaps a little small for me).
I’ve researched online San Antonio and Austin, Texas; Virginia, North Carolina, Upstate New York and Pennsylvania. This coming weeks I’m renting a motorcycle and looking for a new place here in WA meanwhile and perhaps I’ll finally meet the folks at Bellingham. Before the next ecosophia potluck I will ride from Tennessee up to Providence and was looking into exploring for a few weeks.
Thanks in advance!
It might be safe to say that the future of Europe and the US is an endless ocean of blood. God has decided that the White man will drink from the cup of His wrath to the very last drop. I’ve decided to make my peace with this decision. I’m assured that after I leave Europe for business reasons, my father and mother will be somewhat secured by their little farm. Given the coming collapse of infrastructure, this might be the last time I will see them face to face.
Dear JMG,
“ […] one of the most self-defeating uses of magic is the attempt to change consciousness so the world looks the way you want it to look.”
Now that’s a point to be meditated upon!
Hi John Michael,
Congrats on the new book, and kudos for your work ethic. Yes, getting things done requires will, huh? 😉
How’s that national debt going these days? I’ve got a hunch that when expanding that monster is no longer feasible (which is different from the word ‘possible’), the population will decline in all manner of ways, leading to a bust up of err, (if you want to call them as such) asset prices. I know predictions are hard, but the crows sure are circling in the strong changeable winds, and was wondering if you had any insights? I don’t expect you to tell me what they are, but the vibe is very weird lately. Are you sensing that?
Cheers
Chris
@Celadon #28, Ah, the Trinity, a favorite of mine. My understanding of what the Patristics came up with as they grappled with the experiential and scriptural distinctiveness of the Divine Three Persons they knew is that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a quasi quantum physics reality where you have a united superimposition of eternal states. So if a gallon of water was trinitarian in nature all of the water would be ice, all of it liquid and all of it vapor simultaneously. For as it says “there is none like God”.
Bishop Kallistos Ware in The Orthodox Way says this “ We believe that this threefold differentiation in God’s outward action reflects a three fold differentiation in God’s inner life. The distinction between the three persons is to be regarded as an eternal distinction existing within the nature of God himself; it does not apply merely to his action in the world.” The Three persons are not moods or masks we encounter of an undifferentiated unity expressing itself to us.
In my own experience the Persons are different in who they are but the same in what they are – God. But I also realize a polytheistic take on what I experience is the Father, Son( who has a splendid human taste of Jesus of Nazareth along with deity) and Holy Spirit are a pantheon of 3 gods working together each with his own personality but also having the common nature of being a deity which would be the common taste of Eternal God I encounter with each of them as me being a much smaller being than them. I recognize at this time, as it says, “we know in part” But I can only be faithful to what I have known and met. “in your presence is fullness of joy” Psalm 16:11. I find joy in the Living God. May you also.
@Celadon #28 Trinity addendum. Kalistos Ware’s detailed discussion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in his book The Orthodox Way is beautiful and well worth reading.
Dear Archdruid emeritus,
as your personal experience, shared with us here – my heartfelt condolences – and other deaths of people in my surroundings – some natural, some induced – have brought the question to my mind, which I have been ruminating about, I will now ask it here.
What is the perspective on euthanasia from an occult point of view?
Would you advise to stay clear of it by any means, or are there potential situations, where it could be acceptable?
And what does it do to one’s soul?
Thank you ever so much for your spiritual guidance.
Hi John Michael,
Wow. When the mainstream media begin saying the sort of things I’ve been banging on about for about a decade almost word-for-word, you know things are not good: This isn’t the 30s I was promised.
A very thoughtful analysis. It’s that vibe man, I tell ya.
Cheers
Chris
@John Michael Greer: I didn’t choose my words very wisely perhaps. I don’t think Silicon Valley is going to solve the energy crisis, but maybe some other technologist does, within the next hundred years. The result would be the same, though. More power for the tech sector, more control over our lives.
Patricia Mathews- #64- in my middle school Spanish class I do a little “what if” activity (let’s learn about the subjunctive) where I ask how would they feel if they woke up in the universe of the last movie they watched. I was astonished by how many 13 and 14 year olds had seen Dune 2, and had enjoyed it. They didn’t want to wake up in that world, but they liked the movie. I did coyly suggest that perhaps we already live in the universes of every movie they named. I’m encouraging them to expand their thinking- Dune is closer than they think.
I’m going to use the opportunity provided by furnax’s #45 post and mention something on the malevolence of the fae. If they’re on their way out, it’s quite possible that the remaining ones are those that were “left behind” because of their huge screw ups. I also think that this decline of the fae might be cyclical–I remember you, JMG, saying once that Greeks were trying to escape the nadir of astral influence because of equinoctial precession. When things start to go “up” again, it is possible that the fairies will return in full force.
Another possible reason for the decline in fae numbers maybe that they are incarnating into humans. With human population dropping, it may be that the fae numbers will rise again.
Other Owen, I’m quite prepared to be wrong, but it really does seem odd. Keep an eye on Victoria Nuland, though. She’s been gloating for a while now about how badly ordinary Russians are going to suffer. The standard Russian policy is to respond to terrorism with targeted assassinations of the people behind the actions; if she suffers a sudden messy death in the near future, that’s a sign that the gloves are really coming off.
Rafael, I’m glad to hear that you know exactly what God is thinking. He hasn’t gotten around to telling me anything about his plans.
Boy, good. It’s a point a lot of people could learn a few things from.
Chris, I love writing fiction. I’d probably do it just for the fun of the thing even if I didn’t need to pay my bills. Speaking of paying the bills, the US budget deficit long ago passed into the realm of delirium; the US will have to default on its debts, and at this point everyone in government is just kicking the can a few more feet down the road at a time. Yes, the vibe is getting very weird. Hang on to the toboggan, here we go — wheeeee!
Mats, it’s not a problem for a dying person to stop eating and drinking, and die naturally a little sooner than otherwise; that’s a very old and common human practice, found in most cultures, and acceptable in nearly all of them. Other than that, it’s either suicide, murder, or a combination of the two. It’s especially bad when, as in Canada, medical personnel — who are supposed to heal and help — are encouraged to talk people into letting themselves be killed to save the government some money. That’s mass murder, and the karmic blowback from it on everyone involved from politicians to clinical staff will be ferocious.
Chris, hmm! That’s very good to hear; if the mainstream media is admitting that, we may be closer to radical change than I expected.
Warren, and if pigs had wings we would all catch our breakfast bacon in butterfly nets. We don’t have a century; we don’t even have a few spare decades. Peak oil is already tightening its grip on the throat of the industrial world. All the gimmicks currently being proposed to get more cheap energy were known and tested in the 1960s and 1970s, and failed; they’re still failing, and they’ll continue to fail, because of hard physical limits based on the power law and the law of entropy. The tech bros in Silicon Valley don’t get this. They’re driving toward a brick wall with the pedal to the metal, serenely convinced that their car will somehow sprout wings and soar into the stratosphere before they hit. That’s the curse of the myth of progress.
Anonymous, well, we’ll see.
Regarding mass migration, the elites will do everything in their power to keep the flood-gates open, even as it de-stabilizes society further. The reason is that native fertility rates are way below replacement, so without migrants, there would be an overall contraction. A healthy economy could withstand this, but we have an unsustainable ponzi scheme economy run on debt, which would implode in that case. The elites understand this as well as I do, thus to keep the numbers going up, they import hordes of fertile people from the 3rd world, attempting to forcefully integrate them into a rainbow of producer-&-consumer units. As you’ve noticed, it’s not exactly working out.
We’re already in Cold War II against Russia, China, Iran, and BRICS generally. It may or may not escalate to WWIII, but in either case, I predict they will win, and rightfully so (the West no longer deserves victory, having lost the Mandate of Heaven). This will send shockwaves through the West as Liberalism faces peer-level defeat for the first time in its modern history, and the oligarchy loses its legitimacy.
As for the Baltimore bridge, it’s hard to say really. Occam’s Razor leans towards the Competency Crisis, but sabotage cannot be ruled out.
To pivot from current events, I was meaning to contribute to that Fae discussion, but it got too late (I had lots of driving to do on Monday). I wonder if there’s any truth to those old tales about time dilation, their weakness to cold iron, and their non-human blue & orange morality. I was planning to ask about that on Monday, and whether its possible to get along with them (or if they should just be respectfully avoided), and if a resurgence of wilderness and magic might increase their numbers. A discussion here might work just as well, but it’s up to the host. Would also be interested in reading recs on that race!
@Augusto #80 re: Places to Live
Well, I’ll go ahead and chime in on Texas, if only for the selfish reason of encouraging more Ecosophians to be closer by to me!
The way I see it, here are the pros: close to home for you, plenty of Mexican culture if you want it, no state income tax, if you stay outside of the most desirable parts of the big cities, living is very affordable, and there’s a whole lot of different outdoorsy stuff within a few hours drive/bus ride (no big mountains without leaving the state, but other than that, we’re pretty covered).
As for cons, well: it’s hot, but unless you’ve totally acclimated to Seattle, that might not be so bad for a native Mexican. Most places, and especially the big cities, are not walkable at all, and buses/trains aren’t much better. And, if you’re concerned about children and grandchildren, or even further, well, much of the state might be underwater in the next few hundred years if our host is right. Also, much of the recent prosperity of the state has been based on oil, so that could also mean harder times to come in the near future.
As for where, well, I live in Houston, which has an amazing food scene for its size and rather good museums, a decent zoo, and nice parks, but is urban sprawl driving hell. Austin has lost pretty much all of its small town funkiness in the last decade or two, but the scenery in and around it is gorgeous, parts of it are actually walkable, and thanks to the subsidies provided by University of Texas student tuition, the bus system is better than most Texas cities. Parts of downtown San Antonio are actually remarkably walkable, lots of history, and again, close to the gorgeous hill country. Also a much more Mexican city than most Texan cities of comparable size, but historically so, so it’s pretty well integrated culturally. Not sure on public transit there.
One thing I’ve heard as well is that for folks with the kinds of preferences common in this crowd, it might be worth checking out some of the even-smaller cities and towns, as Texas has a lot of small cities/medium towns that aren’t known outside of the state – places like Waxahachie or Pflugerville (though many of these places are on the outskirts of major urban areas and have become more suburban in recent years). I’d likely recommend staying away from the panhandle or far west Texas, though, if only for climate reasons – the panhandle depends on a fossil aquifer for all of its water (underground water that got trapped millions of years ago and can’t recharge from rain), and we’ve been pumping it like mad for cotton and other cash crops for 150 years, so who knows how long that’ll keep up.
Anyhow, wherever you end up, may it bring you blessings and happiness!
Jeff
Happy Spring!
To all those following along with the Ecosophia Prayer List posts, please take note that the changes regarding how long posts would appear for detailed at the beginning of the year, and detailed in the FAQ, will come into effect even for the older posts that had been grandfathered in at that time starting from April 1st. Now…
At this link is the full list of all of the 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. 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.
Erika’s partner James has recently had new tumors appear, and he is currently in hospice care.
May James’s hospital stay bring him healing.
May Erika’s service of love and care for James be strengthened and supported by all.
May their hindrances be swept aside and may none harm them.
Tyler A’s wife Monika’s pregnancy is high risk; may Mother and child be blessed with good health and a smooth delivery, and be soothed and healed from their recent pains and discomfort in a manner that supports a positive outcome to the pregnancy.
May Deathcap’s friend Mike, who has begun a 5 week course of radiation treatment after a nearly fatal surgery for a malignant tumor on his leg, be healed of his cancer and return to full health quickly and as completely as possible.
May new mother Molly M recover quickly and completely from her recent stroke and the lingering loss of vision and slurred speech that ensued, and may newborn Lela and husband Austin be comforted and strengthened through this difficult time.
May John Michael Greer’s wife Sara Greer, who passed away on February 20th, be blessed and soothed as she moves into the next stage of her spirit’s journey. And may John Michael Greer be blessed and lent strength in this most difficult time.
May Frank Rudolf Hartman of Altadena California (picture), who is receiving chemotherapy, be completely cured of the lymphoma that is afflicting him, and may he return to full health.
May Just Another Green Rage Monster‘s father, who is dealing with Stage 4 Lymphoma, and mother, who is primary caregiver, be blessed, protected and healed.
May Kyle’s friend Amanda, who though in her early thirties is undergoing various difficult treatments for brain cancer, make a full recovery; and may her body and spirit heal with grace.
Lp9’s hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
JMG, I’ve been a reader of your blog for more than a decade now. I mean this as a compliment: it’s been quite scary to see most of your predictions coming increasingly true. It feels eerie, in so many ways…the certainties of the era I grew up in are disappearing one by one! A new world is being born, and it’s not going to be an easy delivery…2024 is barely three months old and already is one hell of a year.
Regarding the Key bridge: I like the “old salt blog” website for things nautical. Both of the videos they posted show the ship making a starboard turn into the bridge support. Supposedly the is after the ship lost power. I don’t know what the tide was doing at that moment, but it wouldn’t be hard to find out. Tide tables are more common than astrological charts.
Here’s the link: https://www.oldsaltblog.com/2024/03/baltimore-key-bridge-collapses-after-being-struck-by-container-ship-mv-dali/
Xcalibur/djs, with regard to the fae, the material I passed on is most of what I was taught on the subject, and there are other occult schools that disagree with that teaching. We’ll just have to see.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Bruno, trust me, it’s been just as uncomfortable for me. I keep on trying to point out that my posts and stories are meant as warnings, not instruction manuals! Nobody in power seems to be listening, though.
Phutatorius, thank you for this.
Greetings JMG,
About the first comment by Rafael, what can be the reasons
the people in power want so many people from other countries to come to Europe.
I have thought of various reasons like dilution of the cohesiveness of the locals’ political
power , world empire view with the goal of mixing everyone , economic benefits for the upper class.
What do you think are reasons?
PS: I used Tony C as my nickname on this blog for several years. Someone else is using it today,
so I will go by Tony .
One factor in housing costs are laws and regulations.
The local fire captain has a rant on the horrific burn rate of the ‘new green drywall’, which amounts to ‘you will die’. It is also nasty to produce. But that stuff is mandated, and it is more expensive than the old stuff.
You must have certain ratios of bathrooms to bedrooms, abide by UBC (which is not local climate friendly), build in closets, etc.
Can’t build a non-electric apartment building. Many areas ban off-grid houses as well as non-electric.
And it just goes on and on.
When people start ignoring the regs, housing will get much cheaper. The current way to ignore them is to have more than the legal number of residents. But there will come a time when the safety, ‘environmental’, and fashionable building regulations get ignored, and much cheap and livable housing appears.
You’re welcome, Stephen Pearson.
There are things deeply wrong with how things are going here in Australia. For starters, we have an unelected WEF alien from Seattle in charge of making sure we’re not allowed to say anything on the internet that isn’t far-left cant. This is a tyranny, and one of the things we’re not allowed to point out is that the political class has decided that they’ve really been the aborigines all along, and that the way they are beating down the population isn’t grotesque ethnomasochism. They believe in decolonisation, see, and if they’re the aborigines surely they won’t be included in the massive mountain of corpses decolonisation prescribes. They disgust me, and I won’t stop hating them if they succeed in shutting me up.
On Magic Monday, I mentioned being interested in the esoteric effects of scuba. One of the first places I’ve started is looking at the physiology of diving, since the physical effects of diving are likely to have links to esoteric effects; and this has pointed me in an interesting direction. There’s a phenomena known as nitrogen narcosis which occurs with diving: basically, under pressure, nitrogen (and nearly any gas that can be breathed) turns into a narcotic. This effects divers even at shallow depths, unless they use special breathing mixtures; which are expensive enough that they are almost never used except for by people who are doing dives deep enough that nitrogen narcosis would be dangerous or fatal.
This suggests two things to me: the first is that this might be an explanation for why centres of intellectual activity have been unusually likely to be located at higher elevations, since nitrogen narcosis “starts” having effects at pressures only marginally greater than those at sea level, it seems plausible that high elevations and the corresponding lower partial pressure of nitrogen would have the opposite effect.
The second is that I now need to look into the esoteric effect of mind altering substances, since divers are essentially always under the influence of a narcotic; it’s usually mild, since most divers are smart enough to avoid going down to depths where it has a serious effect; but it is one of the factors which make diving unusual compared to being above water.
This is, however, a topic I know next to nothing about, so I’d like to ask if you know anything about the esoteric dimension of mind altering substances, since this seems likely to be a major factor in the esoteric side of scuba diving.
Regards the bridge, collapse. Denninger’s opinion is that it was caused by green mandates.
Ships of this size used to have engines that would only stop due to mechanical failure, but in order to achieve new emission standards they now have to be computer controlled. Which means that in the event of an electronics failure the engine cuts out.
But they are only steerable if the engines are running.
Lose the engine, and the ship is going where the wind and momentum take it, in this case the bridge column.
The tell is the ships lights go out and then the second they come back on, smoke comes pouring out the funnel like the engine room’s going full ahead, to try, unsuccessfully, to regain control.
Supposedly the ship had had a series of problems with its electrical system the cause of which they hadn’t been able to pin down, too much complexity.
Of course it could be the KGB messing with the electrics but if so this would be an operation going on for months, unlikely.
A few months ago I learned about John Murray Spear. (Hmm, that name has an oddly familiar cadence to it.) His story is striking in the context of the belief structures contributing to the current predicament. Have you ever written about him?
Spear was a Universalist minister in the 19th century, advocating for abolition, equal rights, prison reform, and abolishing the death penalty. In the late 1840s, he got involved in the Spiritualist movement, and eventually around the early 1950s claimed to be channeling associations of spirits (including specific ancient philisophers, Benjamin Franklin and other Founding Fathers, and other notable then-deceased historical figures) for instruction in how to improve society in various general areas such as governance, agriculture, health, education, and human welfare. Along with the so-called Governmentizers, Agriculturalizers, Healthfulizers, Educationalizers, and Beneficients, there were also spirit associations of Electricizers and Elementizers relating to technologies. Some of their ideas became increasingly radical for the time, encompassing for example complete sexual equality and free love.
Around 1953 Spear and his followers began a project supposedly directed by the spirit of Franklin and the other Eletricizers, to build a machine that’s been variously described as a perpetual motion engine, an artificial man, or a mechanical messiah. It roughly reflected the form of a human, but more in the manner of an abstract tabletop sculpture than like a mannequin or robot, with different parts representing different organs or faculties. It was intended to provide a new form of motive power, electrical in nature but tapping its power from benevolent spiritual sources and able to power other machines, that would free humankind from all forms of labor and usher in a new Utopian era of freedom from work and want. It wasn’t supposed to be a mere invention like the steam engine, but some sort of transcendent philosophic breakthrough, a fundamentally new kind of thing or being.
To attempt to activate The New Motor, Spear enacted elaborate rituals (again under the apparent direction of spirits) most notably including a “birthing” ceremony where a woman follower underwent (apparently simulated or psychosomatically induced) labor pains to transferring spiritual “wombic” energy to the device. It never worked, though the group kept trying for a while, thinking that the machine needed time to “gestate” or that it would activate itself when the state of the world was ready for it. Eventually, Spear reported that an outraged crowd destroyed the device, but this was never confirmed by anyone else, and The New Motor may have next turned up in Colorado in 2019, unless that’s a replica.
In retrospect it seems a bit eerie how much of the present Spear appears to have at least anticipated, in a distorted monkeys-paw-wishes kind of way.. (I rather doubt it was Benjamin Franklin et. al. guiding his ideas and efforts, of course.) Might his machinations (pun intended) have had some lasting effects? Am I justified in suspecting this already strange episode had some stranger esoteric dimensions to it?
I’d like to apologize for the double post, but this is something else I think is worth sharing: I think that the ability to scuba dive has the potential to be a major difference between the next round of dark ages and the prior ones. It’s actually got fairly simple technological requirements: the ability to work metal to create weights and the air tanks; the ability to compress air (which was invented around 1500 BC); the ability to create the breathing tubes, inflatable pockets, and a wet suit, all which can be made with natural rubber; and the ability to create glass for the goggles (this last one is not strictly necessary, but it is a lot easier to see through the goggles).
All of this is within reach of a non-industrial society, and having it would provide massive benefits: the ability to salvage shipwrecks deeper than a freediver can reach; scuba diving would make it a lot easier to gather resources ranging from pearls to sponges to fish from the ocean; “frogmen”, people trained to engage in military combat and capable of attack from the water have all sorts of military applications; and the list goes on. (This is also ignoring the esoteric potentials, which will probably take at least a few centuries to work out)
However, just because it could be done doesn’t mean that it’s guaranteed to survive: even if all the elements needed to create scuba gear survives, it’s possible that the idea of putting them altogether to make a scuba suit might be lost. Even if the fact people in the old days used to be able to spend hours underwater survives, and people don’t think of it as a legend, it seems likely to me that it would not be obvious how to make scuba work if the ability to do so is lost.
I think I’ve found my thing to try to preserve for the future: it has massive potential, but it could easily be lost; and many of the potentials won’t be obvious to those who don’t know how to use the technology, which, given the somewhat high costs, are mostly members of the privileged classes. This makes it into the perfect thing to try to triage, as the combination of high risk of getting lost and high rewards if it survives makes it into something where actions I take in the here and now have the potential to shape societies around the world in positive ways for centuries to come.
Patricia Matthews #25
I have been dealing with quite a few medical personnel lately in Cali and have found the PAs, NPs, and nurses to be very competent and capable of doing almost all of what an MD can. If the medical system has time to evolve before crashing through greed, I could see them becoming the norm, and MDs just being specialists. It would also save on the brutal cost of becoming an MD. Whether that happens, of course, is another story. It seems to make too much sense to have much chance of success.
Stephen
Perhaps it is no surprise, though it is amusing, that the Feds are considering cattle tag mandates. Do they anticipate a return to the kinds of tax receipts from antiquity?
For my part, I find it difficult to accept that the inner chambers of the bureaucracy are capable of contemplatating that scenario. Although as observed in last week’s post, some elements may be slithering in that direction.
@Corax,
I have heard of experiments with rats, and I think It was Martin Pall who referenced at least once such study, in which irradiation with microwaves at levels typical in cities rendered them gradually infertile, such that the fifth or so generation became completely and permanently infertile. OTOH, I haven’t heard of rats disappearing from cities. I have, however, documented the loss of birds and insects in one city and a vegetable field with seven smart meters facing it. Perhaps the reason rats still do okay in the cities is that by necessity they live mostly underground.
@JMG
Was that supposed to be sarcastic? I should have said that what I said was my opinion obviously, I haven’t received special revelation. And instead of White people, it would have been more fitting to say that about Western civilization. I’m thinking in the idea of Nahum 3:19, where the fate of the evil empire/civilization of Nineveh is described, and God is not happy.
@sgage, the ship’s captain was Ukrainian…
I was leaning toward really sad and shocking accident, or divine statement on how fragile our modern system really is and how shoddy maintenance can take down so easily, but now I wonder.
If there is any group of people that would be justifiably angry at the US, it would be the Ukrainians, who have seen their country overtaken by violent rightists and a million of so of their fellow countrymen sent through the meat grinder to protect the interests of a distant hegemon, who sold them all down the river on sweet nothings.
Christophe,
What indicates to you there was a curse involved in Crocus City?
After having heard so much about Wendel Berry over the years but never really read anything from him i decided to buy one or more of his books. Since he has written so many books, making it hard to know where to start i bought a collection of his essay spanning from 1969 to 1990. Not even halfway through, most of the essay’s could have been written yesterday and. I just keep nodding in agreement to what he was writing about in the 1970’s.
@Greer That’s why they will never find a “cure” for cancer. Since that would require changing our entire way of life.
I do wonder if someone is trying to send a message. When the children who are supposed to grow are dying of a disease thats basically uncontrolled growth. And the elders who used to be the memory bank in the community is dying of a disease thats making them forget. (Alzheimers)
Regarding assisted suicide etc. I remember William Catton saying in a peak oil documentary that we are a culture that cant say No. You see that in Canada. They just have to keep expanding the groups thats eligible for euthanasia. We cant just say that here is the line and we are not going to cross that line. We always find a reason to say yes to another patient group.
Hi y’all, longtime reader, first-time poster!
I was animated by JMG’s comment above that we may expect the emergence of a prophetic religion from currently-peripheral regions of the world, such as South America or Africa. I wanted to talk about the implications of the so-called psychedelic renaissance, and in particular the widespread engagement of both the moneyed class and working people in Western societies with psychedelic entheogens.
It’s a vast topic so I can’t address everything here, but suffice to say that in my opinion the dissemination of plant and fungal psychedelics out of their ancient indigenous contexts is an event that will have lasting repercussions for centuries into the future. Unlike the synthetic psychedelics that require some serious chemical engineering, plants such as Ayahuasca and San Pedro cactus can be cultivated outdoors with relative ease in a tropical climate, and are already being grown in a clandestine or even open manner in Hawaii, Florida, and regions of the Southwest (the confusing drug policy of the US government means that the cultivation of such plants is entirely legal, while the preparation for consumption is a felony). Given that enough people now know about their effects, these plants are here to stay, at least in climates where they can be easily grown outdoors. This is a matter of public record, and by no means an advocacy for illegal activity. Psilocybe mushrooms are even more easily grown and disseminated, and at this point very well-known.
Now, I do not buy into the millennarian nonsense that these plants and fungi are going to save this society or cure all our woes. However, I do think that it’s significant that a new groundswell of inchoate religiosity is emerging around them in the Zeigeist, and they are being disseminated globally. These are highly powerful spirits of initiation that are being propitiated for a wide range of purposes, from the most banal, onanistic pipe dreams of the moneyed class to desperate pleas for mental and spiritual relief by working people and veterans struggling against opioid addictions, combat trauma, and existential despair. The parallels to the adoption of Christianity in the Roman Empire seem salient, in my opinion.
Given all this, I wonder if one variant of religiosity that will persist beyond the industrial age, as one of its offspring, is the broad dissemination of entheogenic cults centered around the consumption of psychedelic plants and fungi hailing from Latin America and, in the case of the particularly potent and perilous plant Iboga, from Central Africa. If so, it would be quite the rejoinder to centuries of attempts by the Spanish Empire and other such institutions to destroy and suppress such cults in their native contexts.
@Rafael #1,
I think that migrants from Northern Africa and the Middle East will eventually take over, while local European populations die out. Migrants can still use violence, while we have forgotten how to do it and are too old anyway. Migrants will slowly take the monopoly of violence away from the state, at first as criminal gangs and policemen, and in the future by supplanting the state altogether.
Their religion – Islam – will take over and Christianity will disappear relatively quickly except for small pockets. Our other religion, Scientism, will go away more slowly, but it, too will disappear. I expect the imported Islam to become significantly different from the current varieties in Northern Africa.
It is not a pretty picture as far as I am concerned, but we Europeans (I am Italian) are by no means innocent victims. European culture took a wrong turn at the time of the French Revolution, and we are too far gone by now. We have gotten wrong the basic things of life: the relationship between the sexes, among generations, between people and nature, between body, mind and spirit. It is too late to assign blame now or trace back where exactly it all went wrong. We screwed up. We will simply go into the night as we deserve.
Eastern Europeans (the Poles, Hungarians, Russians) who still hang onto their identities seem to have the same problems, but in lesser measure. So who knows, they might outlive the Germanic and Latin people by a couple of generations, if they don’t get themselves into something stupid like a nuclear war, which does not sound impossible these days.
But Western Europeans are confused about their place in the world: we think we rule the world together with our friends and allies, the Americans. Instead we are occupied countries and American “culture” is eating us from within. We deserve no mercy.
You cannot really stop migration by closing borders. You could, for a time, but the price in the long run will be to turn decaying countries (like Italy or Germany) into empty shells. Which would then crumble and cease existence altogether. What should happen instead is a lower rate of migration, say a maximum number of people per year.
The whole idea that migrants will pay for our pensions is of course nonsense. There will be no pensions in 30 years. But migrants will learn our languages and institutions and ideas and keep them alive, although in mutated form, for a while longer. As a culture, we have no own children to hand our traditions over to. So we must resort to other people’s children.
I see things from an Italian perspective: we are right in the middle of the Mediterranean. The people on the other side are not exactly strangers. We have been trading with them and fighting them for millennia. There were Arab emperors in Rome, Italian communities in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Turkey. There were mosques in Southern Italy under Frederick II. We taught each other philosophy and mathematics. Italians helped Algeria win independence. Venice and France were allied of the Turkish Empire most of the time. Pope Bonifatius VIII offered Suleiman Pasha the title of Roman Emperor.
It was not always a happy family story: we went to the Crusades, they looted coastal towns and kidnapped people for centuries. But some understanding and coexistence are possible.
I play the classical guitar: I would be glad if, two or three generations down the road, someone living in my village plays Giuliani, Rossini, Tarrega or Paganini. I would prefer him or her to speak my language, too; but if that does not come to pass, then I will just listen to the guitar.
Teresa #11: I live about 10 miles from Torquay, inland. I may be away at the time of the Festival but might have some useful local information for you. I have a friend who runs personalised local tours including one on AC.
Dear JMG – is there a way for people on this forum to exchange contact details securely?
@ beard tree, thank you sir, that’s close to what I’m getting too!
@JMG,
I would like to offer a perhaps unusual perspective on decline: that of technical communication.
The strict meaning of technical communication is writing manuals for machines or industrial products, but an extended definition comprises communicating all kinds of technical knowledge: everything from manuals to technical drawings, technical training, apprenticeships, most non-fiction writing and documentaries, down to Youtube tutorials and online forums.
All societies rely on technical knowledge to exist, but ours much more so, given the role machines have come to play in our life. Most people in an industrial country would not survive, if technical knowledge were to disappear.
The “official” part of the discipline, i.e. writing manuals, has changed dramatically since the early ’80s: until then, technical writers were the rare engineers who, next to numerical skills, also had a thing with language. A rare skills combination, but not impossible to find at the time. They were people who understood the product and were able to put that understanding into words. Technical writers were also supported by other figures that have almost disappeared today: editors, draft reviewers, typesetters, publishers.
The 1980s were the time of the early desktop publishing software packages like WordPerfect or, later, Microsoft Word. They made redundant most people working in publishing departments, and turned technical writers from technical experts into software users: content ceased to be important, the important thing was that it could be created efficiently in software.
The early 1990s saw the second major revolution, the one that continues until today: single-sourcing. Technical documentation is now typically created in small modules stored in a database. Different writers write individual modules which are then assembled into documents at the end of the writing process. The physical location of the writers is not important: the database is accessible from the internet anyway. This caused, for example, the Indian or Romanian tech writer communities to balloon, while the American and Western European ones have shrunk dramatically.
Today’s documents are also created under the so-called “separation of content and presentation”, meaning that a writer will focus on the structure of a document, but not on the way it looks: the layout is applied automatically.
You will notice the progressive loss of control for the writer on the document. From being “the expert”, the writer became relegated to hurriedly putting other people’s thoughts into words, then lost control on the document as a whole, and now s/he is even deprived of control on what used to be called “the visual rhetoric” of the document.
The theoretical underpinnings of technical communication have been similarly going down the drain: in the past, technical communication was a generalist discipline borrowing from pedagogy, psychology, philosophy, literature, anthropology and engineering. As an example, the German researchers who developed the “Functional Design” approach in the late 1980s borrowed from Wittgenstein’s ideas; in the 1970s, Carroll developed “Minimalism” using deep insights on human psyche. Today, such exploits would be unthinkable: researchers usually do not have the theoretical groundings to say anything meaningful about the field, and repeat uncritically what software vendors claim in their marketing materials.
Another process that influences manuals is a proliferation of norms and regulations from various national, international and supranational bodies, that cause manuals to become bloated and that worsen legibility. Another still is the decreasing literacy of both writers and readers, due to worsening schooling systems, but also to ever more international readerships: manuals are written by ever worse writers to be read by ever worse readers.
Manuals are now everywhere, and are usually perceived as a nuisance. People will just throw them away after they unbox their new gadget. They are right (I am a technical writer; still, I never read manuals).
Storing technical information digitally has its own risks, of course: the infrastructure keeping the servers alive might stop working; the storage medium might reach the end of its lifespan; cybercriminals or foreign powers might deliberately destroy it, steal it or hold an organization hostage. It will not come as a surprise that the EU is pushing companies to deliver more technical documentation digitally, and less in print. I am sure other countries are doing the same. Fingers crossed.
One would not need to worry about storage problems too much, if a community of experts existed to be able to replace any information that might go missing. Unfortunately, things are not looking good on that front, either. Many technicians and engineers are retiring in Europe. Their replacements are too few in numbers and not prepared enough to keep things going. Some things will get forgotten, and we do not know which ones.
Training departments have been downsized and devalued over the past few decades. Where in the past older technicians would become trainers before the end of their career, it is now “training developers” (i. e. people who know software, but do not necessarily know how to train) who give trainings. “Training developers” are very efficient in the sense that they cost little and replace several trainers. But they are not always the people who can answer your questions.
Our betters are not blind and can see the problem. They also have a solution ready: more technology. In particular, something called “Information 4.0”, a side-project of the WEF’s Industrie 4.0 delirium. Machines will learn to offer tailor-made technical information to users who have by now lost the capability of processing information. An algorithm will make up for the poor quality of today’s information, and for people’s poor education and reading skills.
I cannot say where all of this is going. But again, technical information is what keeps us alive. Technical communication is how we keep the Megamachine running. I think that we are doing all the right things to saw the branch we sit on.
For the better, perhaps.
>The tech bros in Silicon Valley don’t get this. They’re driving toward a brick wall with the pedal to the metal, serenely convinced that their car will somehow sprout wings and soar into the stratosphere before they hit
My sense of it is that they too, live on what I call “Three Week Island”. What do I mean by that? Most hoomans are primarily aware of three weeks – last week, this week and next week. If anything has happened outside of that time window or is going to happen outside that time window, it might as well never happened or will never happen. Some hoomans live on Three Day Island. You can imagine the cluster their lives are.
It was a great surprise to me to discover that they also lived on Three Week Island. But they do.
>Well, I’ll go ahead and chime in on Texas
My standard advice, if you primarily care about climate goes some thing like this. Which do you hate more – shoveling snow or spraying for bugs? If you detest shoveling snow, live somewhere south of I-40. If you hate spraying for bugs, live somewhere north of I-40.
I wouldn’t move to TX for the weather, that’s for sure. Move there because they’re more family friendly, because they’re more business friendly. And they have what’s left of the good oil. But Dallas (to pick an example) regularly has all the humidity of the eastern half of Murica will all the hot deserty temperatures of the western half. Nothing like seeing regular highs in August of 105F with humidity at at least 50%. And then they get faceslapped on a semi-reliable basis with a polar vortex plunging winter temps down to something that Minnesotans find refreshing. I think last year, Dallas went into the single digits F?
Takes a real man to live deep in the heart of Texas…
Hi John Michael,
🙂 There’s something quite fun in the act of creation with words. I hear you. Man, I used to get paid for essay writing for the hippy press, but that stopped over a decade ago. Now I simply write for the enjoyment of the art.
The debt predicament is an absolute dogs breakfast which will end badly one of these days.
It is amazing that such topics are now being openly discussed, that’s why I mentioned it. It certainly doesn’t mean nothing. Look if the housing market, or even other speculative markets crashed, it’d be bad, but probably for younger folks who are excluded from those markets (through no fault of their own) it might open up opportunities.
I don’t much see how things can continue as they are. House prices relative to incomes down here are crazy. It’s funny how the main political parties treat the problem as a supply issue, and yet they push to artificially apply continual pressure to the demand side of the story. There was an odd note on this subject over the past week or so. The building industry demanded importing an extra I dunno, 91,000 workers or something like that in order to increase the supply of housing. Except all those workers would have to live somewhere too. It’s like a circular predicament where the proposed cure exacerbates the problems. Nuts! And I won’t even mention the strange arguments down here about natural gas…
Given your novel Twilights Last Gleaming is sort of looking like a how-to manual, what do you reckon the chances of Retrotopia doing the same?
Cheers
Chris
JMG, one more thing: about your strategy of sitting on the fringes. It works better than if you went mainstream – for example, if you were a Harvard professor or something. In the fringes, you reach less people, in number, that’s true…but those you reach, you do so pretty deep in intensity, because they have to come to you, and keep listening of their own accord. Some of these people, over time, and on their own way, will propagate the ideas they learn here into the mainstream. Furthermore, you’re independent, thus not shackled and restricted by the often unspoken rules about things that are not to be said, or that are only to be said in a certain way…
#Aldarion
I’m no expert in the field by any means, but the high prices of habitation, specially renting, are also a major problem here in Spain, i dare to add that, for what i heard, there are lots of flats and houses empty in our country,in the hands of a “bad bank” created in the aftermath of the 2009 crisis. They all belong to the people who couldn’t pay their debts, and they are kept out of the market in order to keep the prices artificially high.
An interesting consequence of this is the “Okupa” phenomenon: Since renting is more and more dificult, many desperate people just occupies and empty house if they can get away with it, for as long as they can. After all, when they are evicted, they van simply repeat the process with no penal consequences. This threat, in turn, has caused landlords to become even more afraid, and renting has become EVEN MORE dificult.
@Chris W #57 re: the differences between the American South and Mexico gradually erode…” ….
Not the American South, which is deep Dixie and has a lot less to do with Mexico. But the American Southwest, and from there, a lot of the dryland West, yes, of course.
Re: Yavanna #65 – Wow. That is synchronicity, isn’t it? Does the star-spangled banner still wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? Note: that’s not one question. it’s three.
@Augusto #80 – I strongly suggest the state of New Mexico, especially northern and central New Mexico. The southeast side is for all practical purposes a colony of Texas, but the southern Texas city of El Paso is for all practical purposes southern New Mexico’s largest city.
Warning: Albuquerque, when I left it, was plagued with crime, homelessness, and the like. But then, I was 3 blocks off the main drag, and a mile east of the University; and the city is on the intersection of 2 major Interstate highways; I-40 running East-West and I-10 running North-South, meaning the bad guys need only find a motel and settle in. However, the smaller communities around it are fine. Santa Fe, north of Albuquerque, is an overpriced tourist trap over a sub-layer of authenticity that will be here when the tourists leave. The northern mountain communities have been there since the Conquistadores and are pretty clannish about it. Still, that’s the flaws any location will have, and New Mexico is quintessentially Southwestern. Buenvenido!
Has anyone read ‘On Resistance to Evil by Force’ by Ivan Ilyin (or Danilevskii’s ‘Russia & Europe)’?
Reading a sample of Ilyin’s work shown on the site of the river that shall not be named, several things stood out including:
“This is the spiritual law: the non-resistor to evil is absorbed by it and becomes possessed. For ‘evil’ is not an empty word, not an abstract concept, not a mere logical possibility and not a “result of subjective evaluation”. Evil is first and foremost the spiritual inclination of man, inherent in each of us, as if for some, living within us there is a passionate desire to unbridle the beast inside, a gravitation that always strives to expand it’s field and to overtake us completely.”
“After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ilyin has experienced a tremendous revival in Russia where his books have been republished and widely read. In 2009, the government of the Russian Federation, with the personal involvement of President Vladimir Putin, negotiated the return of Ilyin’s remains to his mother country where he and his wife we reburied. They sleep in the soil of the Donskoy monastery in Moscow, awaiting the return of their saviour.”
“Force in itself, for Ilyin, can never be justified as being righteous, but is instead an unrighteousness that becomes mandatory for Christians in certain situations due to their human limitations”
Also an interesting reference to Nikolay Danilevskii who once again, I’d never heard of:
“The second was Nikolay Danilevskii (1822-1885), an expert in fisheries whose scholarly studies branched into climatology, ethnology and geopolitics. His 1869 publication, Russia and Europe was incredibly prophetic, and formed the cornerstone of pan-slavic ideology. The idea of the cyclical development of civilisation types from youth an health to decrepitude and disintegration which are contained in Danilevskii’s work would come to the knowledge of Western audiences through the later writings of Spengler”
Philosophical, religious and political arguments and positions aside, I wonder if this gives some depth to understanding where the Russians are at today?!
I’ve just ordered a copy of Ilyin’s book and am interested to see if and how they navigate not getting locked/tied into opposition rather than using something as a thrust block (Fortune).
If the Russians are working from serious philosophical foundations as opposed to the superficial emotional venality and petty evils of the west, things could get very, very interesting indeed.
Anyone read or have thoughts on Ilyin’s book?
Hey, I recalled a question I wanted to ask JMG and the readership at large, since it’s something that has intrigued me for a long time. Do we know anything about the effects of constant electromagnetic exposure (i.e. cellphone signals, wi-fi, etc)? I know 5G is the topic du jour, but I’m really interested in the more basic forms. Are there studies on the matter I could read about? Thanks in advance.
JMG,
Do you have any reading material you could suggest about the Fae? Ever since I read Dion Fortune’s description of “non-human” I have been fascinated. That resonated really strong with me, although I do feel her characterization was quite biased and colored by personal experience.
@Augusto #80 and Patricia Matthews #124:
I’d also suggest New Mexico. (Patricia, I like your description of the southeast part of the state: “for all practical purposes a colony of Texas” – also agree on Santa Fe, “an overpriced tourist trap,” although there are still museums and cafes there, and now even public transportation).
Albuquerque does have a crime and homelessness problem, but it depends what part of the city you’re in: it’s worse near the main drag (Central Ave aka Route 66). There’s less of both in Midtown, where I live, and in the northeast and the “North Valley.” We do have cafes, museums, public transportation, libraries, and mountains nearby if you like hiking.
Also, there are smaller towns around the state where there’s a library or bookstore and a cafe or two: Taos, Socorro, Alamogordo, Silver City, Ruidoso, and “Truth or Consequences” (yes, that’s really its name), to name a few. Each town has its own character: Taos, for example, has an artsy old-hippie vibe, while Socorro is a university town.
Did I mention the weather? Sun shines 300 days a year in most parts of the state, and humidity is low. Temperatures depend of course on elevation and how far north you are, but you don’t get the extremes of heat that you’d get in Texas or Arizona, or the extremes of cold and snow that you’d find in the Midwest.
@John Michael Greer: I hear you. And I don’t discount all that. I used to very strongly believe we were seeing/ about to see a collapse. And. I don’t see it as debunked or anything like that. But while I still think it’s a strong possibility, I don’t believe in it as strongly as I once did. I do hope you’re right though, crazy as that sounds. Because if the technologists win I don’t trust them to build a world where people will want to live.
Hello Mr. Greer,
You recently had an interesting discussion about Faery in your dreamwidth blog. That got me thinking about your book on monsters. You mention (at least in the second edition, I have not read the new edition) that Sasquatch is quite possibly just a large ape, and therefore hardly a monster. However, you also bring up Fae and talk about their ability to confound human consciences. You propose this as a possible explanation for at least part of the UFO phenomenon and the Big Hairy Monsters, or BHMs, people see. You have also talked about how you need to go out of your way to contact these beings, and how they were once a mighty force in the world but now only exist in remote mountainous regions. You also say to try to avoid these creatures, and that they pose real dangers to us.
All this got me thinking about the use of satellite driven emergency gps units and how they are changing the world of hunting. A couple decades ago very few people went solo hunting in the mountains because of the associated danger. But now you can have a gps unit with a distress call and you can call for help regardless of cell signal. Thus, a lot more people are heading into the deep woods by themselves.
So all this got me thinking about possible encounters with spiritual beings. As you know most of our culture is influenced by either Secular or Christian views. A secular minded person will probably have a mental breakdown if they encounter something strange like this. From what I can gather many do. I have heard a number of stories about experienced woodsmen who after a strange experience never enter the woods again. A Christian would probably invoke the name of Jesus and treat such an event like it was an exorcism.
What would you do if you were deep in the woods, let’s say alone at night, out camping/fishing/hunting or what have you, and you encountered paranormal activity?
@Patricia Ormsby 110 wrote ” but now I wonder If there is any group of people that would be justifiably angry at the US…” Do you remember the Nordstream sabotage back in Sept of ’22? Payback perhaps?
Tony, I discussed that in quite some detail a few posts ago:
https://www.ecosophia.net/an-unfamiliar-world/
BoysMom, and of course there’s that! As we go deeper and deeper into dysfunctional abstractions, issues like that are becoming ever more pervasive.
Taylor, interesting. The occult traditions I’ve studied have very little to say about narcotics and other drugs other than “don’t use them, they don’t mix well with our practices,” but I know there’s literature out there.
JP, au contraire, it’s standard Russian procedure to plan for the long term, and it wouldn’t be out of character at all for them to hack into a bunch of ship computers on the off chance that they could use one or more of them to cause disasters to enemy nations with no warning and plausible deniability.
Walt, not only haven’t I written about him, I wasn’t familiar with him until you mentioned him. What a classic, American visionary! I’m not at all sure if his work caused our current mess, though it certainly expressed some of the core concepts of the modern delusions of progress in an epic form. I’d love to get a look at the god-machine, though…
Taylor, if that’s your calling, go for it. Building a strong case for the spiritual dimension of scuba will go a long way to help, since religions tend to rise as civilizations fall.
Joseph, I don’t think they’ve got any coherent image of the future at all, other than an indefinite prolongation of the present by any means necessary.
Rafael, it was indeed intended to be sarcastic. I recommend leaving God out of such discussions, as he makes up his own mind what he’s going to punish — and when.
Heian, Berry’s always worth reading, and rereading. As for cancer and Alzheimer’s, yes, both of those make good metaphors for our current state.
Ingimynd, er, I suppose you don’t know that this same thing has been going on in the Western world for about two hundred years now. Every few years some drug gets scooped up by certain circles in the intelligentsia and treated as the key to universal enlightenment. Did you know that chloroform once had that reputation? The famous mystic Anna Kingsford, a major figure in 19th century alternative circles, used to huff chloroform and insisted that it let her see God. Me, I grew up in the waning of the period when LSD had that reputation and saw the rise and fall of half a dozen other drugs afterwards, and so I’ve heard all this same rhetoric about a psychedelic revolution before. It never goes anywhere, because when you get stoned, you’re just getting stoned. Spiritual awakening requires sustained effort and personal transformation, not just drug trips.
Disc_writes, hmm! That’s fascinating, and a very clear microcosm of the broader plight of the misinformation economy.
Other Owen, I wonder if it’s just that, or if they’ve got a vision of the future stuck in their heads that’s hopelessly dysfunctional.
Chris, here’s hoping!
Bruno, that’s why I decided to turn down a shot at an academic career in the early 1990s; one of my professors let me know that he’d be glad to help me go on to a master’s degree if I wanted, with a doctorate and a career ahead. I thanked him, thought about it long and hard, and decided against it, because I wanted to write whatever I chose, without the harsh restrictions that were increasingly closing around what little was left of academic freedom at that time. So I deliberately pursued a career as an occult author instead, to guarantee me a spot as far as possible out on the fringes, where I could say absolutely anything. It seems to be working.
Earthworm, no. Interesting; I’ll put both of them on the look-at list.
Furnax, there’s a lot of research into that; I learned a fair amount about it when I got my ham radio license, but that was quite a while ago, of course, and I don’t recall the sources. Anyone else?
Dennis, the book you want is The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies by Rev. Robert Kirk. It was published in 1691 and is readily available for free download:
https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/secret-commonwealth-of-elves-fauns-ebook.html
It’s generally considered the best classic account of the fae.
Warren, not collapse, decline. The reason people miss what’s happening around us is that they’re expecting a Hollywood-style catastrophe, which we’re not getting, and fail to notice the steady erosion of our technological society and our equally steady descent toward a dark age, which is.
Stephen, I discuss the BHM issue to some extent in the third edition of Monsters; it’s clear that some BHMs are large bipedal apes and others are paraphysical beings. As for what I would do, why, it would depend on the nature of the activity. I’d have magical protections in place, of course, but if the activity wasn’t obviously hostile I’d behave the way I do when I see a wild animal: I’d sit very still, with all my senses wide open and a defensive device close to hand, and see what happened. Approach many paraphysical beings that way and they’ll either communicate with you or calmly acknowledge your existence and go about their affairs.
Rafael,
Here’s a video on the subject:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/toi-original/russia-lambasts-unacceptable-and-rejects-u-s-claims-of-over-1-million-sq-km-in-the-arctic-and-bering-sea/videoshow/108829953.cms
—
Warren,
Check these videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__DEDPhs5O4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw8LOS2y8qs
It seems to me that people are asking the wrong questions with regard to the Baltimore bridge ship collision/collapse. Whether it was sabotage or incompetence is not really important in the long run. The important question is at this late stage of a declining empire will it ever be rebuilt?
At the point the Russians would probably have it replaced in about 9 months and the Chinese in about 6 months. But I would guess we won’t get a new span up in less than 6 years if at all.
I continue to find it quite striking how the left is pursuing increasingly self-destructive policies. Like their corporatist supporters they seem to be remarkably short-sighted. I could list dozens of examples but the most striking these days is that regarding potential “hot” conflicts. If Biden gets us into a war with Russia, China, Iran or even North Korea then the very first thing that would happen would be a multi-generational loss of Democratic voters.
For example, even if one hit the US with a broad-based E.M.P. it’s estimated that a majority of the population wouldn’t survive six months. That majority would be from the “blue” areas on political maps — population centers.
@sgage @Christophe
One of my uncles was a spy during the Cold War. He was German-American and could pass for Bavarian well enough to fool anybody except real Bavarians.
The Russian and Ukranian languages are very closely related, to the point where there are Russians who insist that Ukranian is just a dialect of Russian as part of their contention that Ukraine should be part of Russia. I can totally believe that a ship captain with a credible-seeming Ukranian passport, who sounds Ukranian and even has the right body language, would actually be Russian.
Grist is back. Is it time to get another collection of deindustrial stories together?
“Imagine 2200 celebrates stories that envision the next decades to centuries of equitable climate progress, imagining futures of abundance, adaptation, reform, and hope. We are looking for stories that are rooted in creative climate solutions and community-centered resilience, showing what can happen as solutions take root, and stories that offer gripping plots with rich characters and settings, making that future come alive.”
https://grist.org/climate-fiction/imagine-2200-contest-submissions/?utm_campaign=clifi-events&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=imagine2024
>Every few years some drug gets scooped up by certain circles in the intelligentsia and treated as the key to universal enlightenment
Did you know that the pilot who wigged out and was trying to pull the fuel shutoff valves on that Alaska Airlines flight, that he wasn’t on shrooms at the time but that he had taken a good amount of them a few days before? People talk about enlightenment as this good thing, but what if there’s a downside to it too? He talked about living in a bad dream that he couldn’t seem to wake out of. And he so desperately wanted to wake up out of this “bad dream” he had found himself in. He was also wanting to open the cabin door and do a cordless bungie jump and might have done it if the nice flight attendants hadn’t strapped him down.
This video goes into a lot of what will be meaningless technical details to most people but pay attention to the story after he takes the shrooms – https://yewtu.be/watch?v=988j2-4CdgM
My personal opinion on these things. You roll the dice when you take them. One of two things happen. Either you’re ready for the revelations and you integrate them into your life afterwards. Or you aren’t ready and the revelations gnaw away at your sanity until you’re thinking that, oh, pulling fuel shutoff valves in midflight sounds like a swell idea. I wonder if Lovecraft ever took shrooms?
@Taylor Burgess (#102, #105)
Narcosis is not the only issue with breathing a nitrogen-oxygen mixture at high pressure. A more deadly threat is decompression sickness (aka ‘the bends’), where upon returning to the surface the nitrogen bubbles out of the blood in much the same way as a freshly-opened can of soda pop. Whether or not a diver is sensitive to narcosis would be discovered almost immediately; decompression sickness would not be found until returning to the surface at the end of the dive – often done in haste when (and because) the air supply is running low. Pure oxygen cannot be used as it becomes poisonous at high pressure. [Trivia note: astronauts in the Apollo missions did breathe pure oxygen, but the cabin pressure was turned down to about 5psi. You can’t do that in a scuba suit.]
To solve this problem, scuba tanks are filled with a helium-oxygen mixture so that the nitrogen is eliminated without poisoning the diver. The ability to preserve scuba technology through a ‘dark age’ is thus contingent on maintaining both the ability to produce (and store) both pure oxygen and pure helium and the ability to control the quality of the result when mixing them. That could be challenging in a world without ready access to things like electrical power and precise instruments.
The other thing that could be a stumbling block is that the pressure regulating valve requires precise machining work that could never be performed in a medieval smithy. Without that valve, the dive is impossible because an hour’s worth of air would be lost from the tank in a matter of seconds.
The ability to work underwater for more than a minute or so at a time is also a very useful skill to preserve while society around us flushes itself down the drain. If we can find low-tech solutions to these two problems, we can preserve that skill; as you quite rightly pointed out, the rest is straightforward.
As to the long term effects of EM radiation a quick Google search shows a huge collection of papers. Lots of people are worried which is a good thing, the things you didn’t think to worry about are what gets you. The search string will get you started.
long term effects of electromagnetic radiation
Then there is this quote of the day;
“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: Our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” – Daniel Kahneman
@furnax 126: a good resource is the microwave news website. I was a radar tech in the air force many years ago and have followed the subject for decades. Microwave news is here: https://microwavenews.com/
Hey John,
Before I got interested in western occultism, I had interest in eastern philosophy, particularly Indian philosophy such as that contained in the Upanishads. As much as I love eastern philosophy, it’s not my culture and I don’t think I could ever understand it on the level that I could potentially understand western occultism, so I have been studying western occultism instead.
I have a particular question related to this. In Indian philosophy there’s the meditative experience called samadhi where one becomes united with the Absolute. “A soundless state of breathlessness. A blissful super consciousness state in which a yogi perceives the identity of the individualized Soul and Cosmic Spirit.” Is there an equivalent to this in the western tradition and if so, do you know any books/resources about it?
The Biblical prophets had a unified vision on how God acts when empires, nations and civilizations get uppity, and that is, God will allow the evil of an empire to return on it and destroy it, how and when exactly, who knows? I’m no prophet, I just know that, if God is consistent, this will happen to the West too. Drinking God’s cup of wrath is a Biblical expression for this event. That’s why I brought up the book of the prophet Nahum, who poetically details how God will make Nineveh drink His cup, he describes God as a warrior, how He undresses the city, which is personified as a woman, to show her nakedness to all her victims so that the small people can laugh back after all the abuse they have suffered. And my favourite part, Nahum 3:19, “for who hasn’t been touched by your evil”. There are memes online about how the British Empire has been at war with almost every country in the world. And how far reaching is the tyranny of the American empire.
I’m really sorry for being brash in saying that God will punish White people, I just completely equated Western civilization with White people, and it sounded really callous. I can’t do anything on my end, but can I request that you delete that comment of mine, number 81, it was getting late, I was tired and what an awful thing to say.
C.S. Lewis, Christian arch-apologist once said “They err who say ‘The world is turning pagan again” Would that it were! The truth is, we are falling into a much worse state.”
He wrote this poem portraying the glories of paganism entitled ‘Cliche Came Out Of Its Cage’
You said ‘The world is going back to Paganism’.
Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes,
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes,
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses
To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem.
Hestia’s fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before
The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands
Tended it. By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother
Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. At the hour
Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave
Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush
Arose (it is the mark of freemen’s children) as they trooped,
Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance.
Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods,
Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men,
Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged
Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die
Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing.
Thus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune
Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions;
Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears …
You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.
2
Or did you mean another kind of heathenry?
Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth,
Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm.
Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll
Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound;
But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods,
Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand,
Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope
To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them;
For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die
His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong
Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last,
And every man of decent blood is on the losing side.
Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits
Who walked back into burning houses to die with men,
Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals
Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim.
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs;
You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).”
A general question about appropriate fan tech, to see if folks here could help: I have been experimenting with using fans to drive humidity out of my apartment by directing air out the windows. I like it better than AC, and I read it is much more energy efficient. Last summer I managed, using some common sense, to bring noticeable relief from the humidity that I believe builds up during the day and remains trapped in my apartment long after it clears from the air outside when the sun goes down.
This year I want to take this to the next level and see if I can create efficient apartment-wide currents that will efficiently carry excess humidity in the evening, to create a man-made air corridor (which is what a well built house would have, but like many people I live in a ranted apartment I did not design). Rather than reinvent the wheel, want to draw on other people’s experience as it seems like something the appropriate tech people have looked into.
However, my duckduckgo-foo has proven inadequate, and I could only find vague references to the possibility, or recommendations for ceiling fans (which I can not install as this is not my apartment, so I am limited to pillar fans). Does anyone have any practical experience and knowledge they care to share, or can direct me to some resources? I would appreciate any help in my quest.
Hello JMG and friends,
I am looking forward to the new Ariel Moravec story.
Sometime last year or so I told about a man I met who grew up plowing with horses. It was normal. Within living memory.
Several weeks ago I had another one of those conversations, with my mom, this time. She said, “You may not remember this, but when you were young” – circa late 1970s – “there was government money available through programs, for rural people to upgrade their plumbing, because at that time, outside the city, MOST people in the province didn’t have indoor plumbing. Or at least not toilets, at any rate.”
And I don’t see how we don’t RETVRN to that, fairly rapidly. It’ll happen at the edges, in rural areas, first: run-down rural homes just won’t have the money to replace a septic system, so they’ll build an outhouse. At first they’ll be embarrassed to talk about it, or perhaps they won’t want to run afoul of environmental legislation, so you won’t hear too much about it. Until it becomes more common, and gradually comes in the same way as any social innovation.
I don’t know what the forum etiquette is here, with respect to resurrecting comments from prior threads, but there were some gems that I wanted to respond to and didn’t get the chance.
From here: https://www.ecosophia.net/an-unfamiliar-world/
Stephen Pearson’s comment #67:
“I live most of the year in Mexico. I fear they are just now happily settling in to the last available cabins on the Titanic.”
Thanks for this great turn-of-phrase, and for the comment as a whole. I think about this frequently. This is not a slam against Mexico, to which I’ve never been.
But the fact is this: I see a lot of people, including real-life personal friends of mine, moving to Mexico, Central America, other places, to “escape the decline” here in Canada, and I just can’t fathom what they’re thinking, or whether they are doing any assessment of the future.
I frequently think that people moving to these places are looking for something where it’s still 1990 – and will be forever. Where the value of their North American dollar will never collapse. Where they’ll be able to coast for the rest of their lives. And so forth. And I just shake my head, thinking that as far as I can see, that’s not in the forecast.
Kkfish at #141 says:
“Imagine there being unpopulated forest between towns, because there just weren’t enough people to use it!”
Ummm… Canadians just don’t understand these things. Imagine there NOT being!
I have always wondered how far back you have to go, in European history, to find a time when a trip through the woods was legitimately daunting, even life-threatening. I bet not that far.
Onwards, here’s an article of interest to some, in one of Canada’s leading papers. I find it hilariously honest:
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/secret-rcmp-report-warns-canadians-may-revolt-once-they-realize-how-broke-they-are?taid=65fb43cd29a2b10001c7738d&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
I wanted to save this for its own comment, the reason being that what one might call “armchair sociology” is one of my favourite online hobbies.
From the previous post, Dennis Sawyer #388 says:
“Among the people I’ve met in my neighborhood, I am the only person with a housewife, and people treat us like lepers when they find out. Here is what I have found out about them:
Many men in this class would be aghast to have a wife that “does nothing.”
Bingo, thanks for your comment, Dennis. I could talk about this at length, ad nauseum, and I won’t, but I’ll condense a few thoughts.
I want to preface by saying that I hope nobody takes any offense to any of this, everyone is entitled to his or her own feelings, these are just mine.
I recall a time, way back when I was in medical school, being introduced to the world of the UMC/PMC professional. It was not a familiar world to me. As a consequence, I dealt with many of its social norms awkwardly, at first.
One of these in particular was the idea about marriage, and marrying someone of roughly similar profession/education. To be frank, I was taken aback to find that it was a social norm for doctors to marry other doctors (or at least something similar), and further, it was something of a faux-pas to choose a woman who hadn’t “made something” of herself.
“How peculiar,” I thought, “I don’t understand this at all. If I’m going to have this successful career and make some money, why would I want a woman who does the same?”
Well, I didn’t, and in the event my wife is a stay-at-home homeschooling mom, and we like it that way.
But I spent no shortage of mental energy trying to figure out what was WITH these other men, who WANTED to marry other doctors. Because it wasn’t something I shared and I just couldn’t understand it.
My best answer, after many years, is something like: it has to do with social pressure, and social class norms, which are far more powerful than misfits like myself might imagine.
Part of the reason I felt the issue was worth commenting on is because you do see this, in the online discussion, from the “redpill” crowd and so forth. It’ll go like this:
Man: Men aren’t attracted to careers, stop thinking they are.
Woman: Oh yeah, then how come, in practice, they do marry women with careers?
And it’s a fair question, with multiple answers, but definitely one of them (and IMHO the strongest), is: the PMC exerts very powerful pressure with respect to appropriate class behaviour. The men aren’t attracted to the career per se, they’re attracted to… not being shamed.
Of course as a general rule the best way to live is the way you want, as I expect the commentariat will agree.
#17 Arnav
I just returned from my first trip to India to visit my husband’s extended family in Ahmedabad. My kids (ages 11 and 13) both said they could see themselves leaving the States and moving to India. Besides the big issues of water and heat, I think Indias de-industrial transition will be easier than the States. I was super impressed with all the tiny businesses in Ahmedabad – hand cranked fruit juice stands, scooter repair shops, peddle-sewing machine tailors set up on the sidewalk. You may not have many hands-on practical skills, but you are surrounded by people who do.
All you have to do now is experiment and try out a ton of hobbies to see what you are good at and what you enjoy doing. Bicycle repair? Building solar dryers? Making tire sandals? Book-keeping (the old fashioned way with pen and paper)? Mending? Creating herbal medicines? Printing books on a letter press? Building rocket stoves? Brewing beer (since you aren’t in a dry state like Gujarat)? Growing mushrooms (can be done inside)? Building Super Adobe houses (check out CalEarth’s work, perfect for your climate and the heat)? Making knives from scrap metal?
My husband was taught that you make a ton of money to hire people for everything else. Under my influence, he has learned that he enjoys making things with wood. We moved from the DC suburbs to outside of a small town in Northern Virginia and now have 3 acres. In the last two years, he has built me a bridge, a rabbit tractor, a quail enclosure, an outhouse, 3 huge composting hot boxes, a greenhouse, and a rabbity. YouTube is amazing for learning things! You have the time and money now, start exploring new hobbies that can transition into a full-time job in the future. You got this!
I would also start connecting with your local food movement. You can volunteer on farms (through programs like WWOOFing) to gain experience and see if you like growing food. Even if you end up hating getting your hands in the soil, you will have made connections. Farmers will be important people to know in the future. I went to college with the woman who runs Vrindavan Farms outside of Mumbai. She is going wonderful work.
https://www.vrindavanfarm.com/
Do some farm stays with friends and family on vacation (you don’t have to work on these stays). Make it fun. Check out both biodynamic and permaculture farms.
Personally, I would do as JMG suggested and try to live on half your salary. Save up and buy some land outside of Mumbai (that can be reached by train) and is in a village or small town. A place you can build a big cistern, a Super Adobe house (which is cool without air-conditioning), and plant tons of trees. Go there on the weekends and find a caretaker to live there and help you take care of animals (goats, chickens, etc…). But that’s just my preference. Cities in India are going to be miserable without air-conditioning. Get involved with the movement to plant Miyawaki Forests in cities.
Just my two cents (or maybe more). I was introduced to JMG’s work 11 years ago and have had found much joy in “collapsing now to avoid the rush.”
Good-luck,
Caroline
For Whateveh Its Worth, since the topic of prophecy has come up, I never could buy the idea that the Book of Daniel was all about the time we live in now, and that all these countries and alliances were predicted with 100% accuracy from some images a guy saw in a vision.
>I see a lot of people, including real-life personal friends of mine, moving to Mexico, Central America
There are no good decisions anymore. Is it the worst thing you can do? Probably not. But is it a good idea? No. This is the warning I’d give – https://yewtu.be/watch?v=eud5AurOxm0
Clay, an excellent point — and whether or not it gets rebuilt will be a useful measure of just how far down the curve we’ve actually gone.
TJ, oh, it’s not even necessary to be that extreme. What does it take for the Democratic party to lose the loyalty of the African-American and Hispanic communities, on which their power has rested for years? We’re seeing the answer right now.
Bridge, I’d have to find a publisher. The press that issued my earlier collections has gotten out of that business.
Other Owen, no, but it doesn’t surprise me for a moment.
Enjoyer, you can read about that in mystical literature; Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism is a good but lengthy study. In Western occultism it’s recognized that such things happen but they’re not of central importance to the path, being (despite the hoopla) simply transitory experiences; the work that matters is the slow refinement of the mind and soul, not any sudden bursts of illumination that might happen en route.
Rafael, no can do. Now that we’ve had a conversation about it and it’s part of the record, it stays. For what it’s worth, I don’t think it was particularly callous — just a common habit to which I tend to object.
BeardTree, thank you for this! What a fine, noble, scornful poem. Of course, being Lewis, he portrayed Paganism in its most idealized form, giving it a consistency of virtue that he would never claim for his own faith! But it’s a grand vision, and shows just how much respect Lewis, unlike too many Christians, gave to the highest reaches of the faiths that his faith supplanted and exterminated.
Four Sided, I wish I did. This sounds like a very fruitful avenue of experimentation, though.
Bofur, it depends on how many people still remember how to dig a proper pit toilet or, better still, make a proper composting toilet, and how many people know enough about horses to use them to pull the plow. One of my very early Archdruid Report posts talked about this —
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2006/07/climbing-down-ladder.html
— and I’ve discussed repeatedly the fact that it’s going to be necessary to recover as much of the old knowledge as possible now, while it’s easy to do so, so that it’s still around when needed.
Justin, oh, agreed. How do we know that the time the prophets were speaking of isn’t 10,000 years further in the future? Alternatively, it makes sense to see the words of prophets as timeless expressions of symbolic truth that don’t necessarily relate to any one time.
@Horzabky:
“whites deserve to pay for what they did in the past! They must pay for white supremacy, racism, colonialism…”
Oh me, oh my, thanks for that comment. I still see a shocking amount of naiveté about this topic out there, due to be wiped away within the next decade.
People are saying “Twitter has gotten racist since Elon took it.” I make no comment either way on whether this is true (or acceptable), but I will say, in an increasingly bleak world people are going to want outlets for their rising anxieties, and what we’ve seen so far is the tip of the iceberg.
Speaking of Wendell Berry, I recently read a review of his latest book ‘the need to be whole: patriotism and the history of prejudice.,’ that inspired me to read it and it was well worth the read. The review was scathing. The reviewer hated it, and he proceeded to take down Wendell Berry so severely that I knew it the book would be worth reading. I figured that if the reviewer hated it that means that berry wrote the book he needed to write, and he did.
He had been asked by a current woke author to write a paragraph in support of his latest book. And Wendell berry wrote this book in response. It is his critique of current issues framed within the history of his own life. Yes, sometimes his own thoughts ramble, but they are worth listening to.
I wrote him a letter after reading the book expressing gratitude and he wrote me back. A kind, gentle man who seems happy to connect with his readers, like our host. I highly recommend it.
For they who asked re: Torquay and the south west of England.
1.5 hrs away: https://museumofwitchcraftandmagic.co.uk/visit/
Nearer: https://www.dartmoor-prison.co.uk/
Also 1.5 hrs away https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/tintagel-castle/
Map of various: https://www.visitbritain.com/en/destinations/england/devon
Dartmoor definitely worth a visit. There’s a nice walk out of Princetown on the old rail track. Go and see a couple of tors such as Hound or Haytor.
JMG,
One interesting thought has occurred to me: it may be possible, if a large number of esoteric divers emerge, to determine which practices are affected by narcotics at the time of use, and which ones are affected if people use narcotics in general, regardless of if they are under the influence at the time of the practice. Nitrogen narcosis is the only narcotic effect I can think of which can be reversed in a matter of minutes: which means it might function very differently from ordinary narcotics on an esoteric level, and interact with practices in very different ways.
It might be worth tracking my meditations in particular and see if they are at all affected by whether I’ve done a dive recently, and if I have, if I’ve gone deep enough to have had more substantial effects from nitrogen narcosis.
Old Steve (#139),
First, you’re right that I forget to mention the regulator. However, there are two different types: the first is the open circuit system, in which exhaled air is allowed to leave the system, released as bubbles into the water. This is less efficient than a closed circuit system, where the air is recycled; but it is more common in practice because closed circuit systems require much more sophisticated valves, and the increased costs mean it’s more effective to just accept the loss of air. It’s easy to craft a valve that will reduce pressure from an air tank to the ambient pressure; but much harder to create valves that can enable air to be re-pressurized, a necessity for a closed circuit system. There’s also the issues of dealing with carbon dioxide, which could be another factor making closed circuit systems difficult or impossible to manufacture in a non-industrial society; since I haven’t used them, I haven’t looked into how they work yet, so I can’t comment past this. Crafting valves for a closed circuit system may very well be beyond the capacity for a non-industrial society; even if this is the case, an open circuit system would still allow for a lot of scuba diving.
The use of any amount of helium is not common, at least for the dives I do. We almost always use nitrox (nitrogen and oxygen; which is ordinary air), trimix (oxygen, helium, and nitrogen) is only used for extremely deep dives; heliox (helium and oxygen) is actually only rarely used, being pretty much limited for quite deep dives given how expensive helium is, and that the benefits only emerge at depths deeper than most of us go. This means that for most of our dives there is no need for anything more than pressurizing air; and so while less than ideal, the losses associated with an open circuit system are preferable to the dramatically increased costs of a closed circuit breathing apparatus.
I’m also not sure where you get the idea that you can prevent decompression sickness with helium from, or that it’s impossible to know if people are vulnerable to it prior to surfacing. Decompression sickness occurs when any gas comes out of solution in the blood; it could be nitrogen, helium, oxygen, hydrogen, whatever gas is being breathed. It’s also possible to avoid without much effort, by tracking depths and making stops on the ascent.
This is also why people are trained when scuba diving to track air supply: running low and being forced to do a rapid ascent is a very, very risky thing to do, and it’s easily avoided. Only beginners should ever make that mistake; and they should not be diving deep enough that decompression sickness is a real risk anyway.
Determining when to stop and for how long is fairly easy: and even if the information is lost, it would be fairly simple to redetermine this; although it would make deeper dives extremely dangerous for awhile while it’s worked out.
Preserving deep diving abilities could be useful; but it’s entirely possible to go down over 100 feet without any issues from nitrogen narcosis using nitrox, and with almost no risk of decompression sickness as long as the proper staged ascent process is followed. This is deep enough that many of the major benefits from scuba diving would still be apparent.
Yes, as symbolism, the books of the prophets can offer their wisdom to those who feel called to those particular truths. For instance, I once had my own visionary ritual experiences (scrying) that I wrote down, as one does, and contemplated. Later I was reading the Book of Isaiah and was struck by the image in chapter 35, verse 1 where it is said, “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.” I then stumbled upon an interpretation of this chapter in a book by New Thought writer Emmett Fox that gave a symbolic, personal interpretation. It resonated with me, and still does. I had a found a little key to unlocking my own vision and its connection to the Biblical text. Through meditation and introspection I found a truth, but it wasn’t something that related at all to other prophecies in the book of Isaiah as pinpointing my own time and country, but as you said was a timeless “aha” that spoke to me across the ages. In that sense, I think the sacred texts of all nations, can teach us things as we interact with them, rather than, especially with the Bible, looking to them to give specific dates, times, figures and nations.
I grew up in the World Wide Church of God. It had already had many failed predictions from Herbert W. Armstrong and Garner Ted before I was even born. Then the church splintered when I was becoming a teenager. Some still think we are in the end times, but I made it through 2012 alright, and I remember when you were blogging around that year, material for Apocalypse Not, and the world is still here twelve years later. But some Jehovah’s Witness people I know assure me the end is just around the corner.
@TJandTheBear
Thank you for the link. It looks like nothing but the desperate flailing of a flailling state.
@JMG
When you say “common habit”, you mean exaggerated apocalyptic claims?
JMG, this may amuse you. C.S. Lewis once said he felt like “a converted pagan living among apostate puritans”
@Furnax
These books go into (differing)depth about different aspects
Arthur Furstenberg’s the invisible rainbow
Randy Lee’s the mitochondriac manifesto
https://themitoman.com/
Online resources, there is plenty more out there but my brain and search engines are failing me right now
https://stopsmartmeters.com.au/
https://emfempowerment.com/
Mr Kemble
@Enjoyer #142 I once had a similar question concerning the states of consciousness attainable through the Buddhist and Hindu paths, asking what the Christian equivalent was, my answer was. a sudden transitory experience of the personal love of God towards me as an individual human being and my love towards him (not a unitive all is one state). Religions do not all teach the same thing! And then I returned to the slow growth and refinement of my mind, body and soul in the knowing of and expressing of that love. I have a feeling that western Christian based esotericism and occultism would say the same thing. But I practice exoteric Christianity.
@ thrifty1 #75
Thank you! I don’t know how much time we’ll have and I don’t want to waste a moment.
If you’d like to email me directly, use tdbpeschel @ gmail.com, removing the spaces before and after the at symbol.
We’ll be walking around Torquay a lot, moving from event to event, and I want to see as much of the town as I can.
Teresa
@ Robert Morgan #115
Thank you! I’ve already reached out to Unique Devon tours. If they can take us to the Eden Project in Cornwall it will save us and the local roads from crazy American drivers.
This is all such a thrill!
Teresa
John Micheal Greer,
I came upon an old post of yours “Mentats Wanted: Will Train,” I very much enjoyed it and for the past year I’ve been studying much of your work and meditating upon it. Thank you for all the clarity and insight you provide!
Some things are still difficult for me to study though, like languages and history. Much of it goes unremembered. I thought that maybe you could point me to a resource that could help me become a better student through a system. For now I’m doing my best with discursive meditation, memory palaces, and reading and writing unsystematically.
Thanks!
Eamonn.
Bruno’s comment above reminds me of something: if I recall correctly, you once stated that you’ve long had a visceral sense that the US would have another civil war around 2024. Of course visceral feelings don’t always come true but…
Uranus enters Gemini next year, and what we’re arguably the three most significant, nation-redefining wars that the US has been in — the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II — all occurred during Uranus in Gemini. Since the nation was born with Uranus in Gemini, we also experience a Uranus return during those periods, which may explain why they were so nation-redefining for us.
Since you’re a mundane astrologer, I’m curious if you think this is a pattern that predicts war for us in the near future? I’m also curious if you still have that feeling.
For clarity by “predicts war” I mean a massive, nation-redefining war with major stakes for us.
Tamar, good for Berry! If he can still extract an angry, flustered denunciation from the purveyors of the conventional wisdom, he hasn’t lost it yet. I’ll put that book on my get-to list.
Taylor, excellent. Yes, that would be worth doing.
Justin, one of the things I like about New Thought teachers like Fox is precisely that they have that kind of symbolic sense of scriptural meanings, and so can avoid the self-defeating pursuit of failed prophecies.
Rafael, no. The habit I have in mind is that of insisting that your personal moral judgments must also be those of the Divine. I forget who it was who said that a fanatic is someone who knows what God would do if He knew all the facts; most of us have at least a little of that in us.
BeardTree, it does indeed amuse me.
Eamonn, I wish that such a system existed. You’ve got the basic tools, or at least some of them; it’s the task of your generation to start the process of creating the system that your descendants will bring to perfection.
Slithy, the entire technique of gauging history by outer planet ingresses into signs is a new one, and still needs a lot of testing. That said, whether or not we have a civil war, we’ve certainly got a nation-redefining crisis dead ahead; I say this from the point of view of a mundane astrologer, but also from the point of view of a student of history, since it always takes such a crisis to remove the dead hand of a failed ruling class from the levers of power.
“it depends on how many people still remember how to dig a proper pit toilet”
Gee, it never occurred to me that there was an art/science to creating an outhouse. You don’t just…. dig a hole?
I’ll have a look at the 2006 piece, for sure.
@Jeff #94
Thank you for your elaborate response!
I’ve never been to Texas, but I’ve heard nice things about it and definitely the presence of ecosophia folk is an encouragement!
Closer to home is definitely a plus and for me and any cultural thing that is miles away from modern consumer culture is vital as Seattle’s is dwindling. My art school, Gage Academy Atelier, just had to move to Amazon’s headquarters… from the gorgeous old building it was housed in. I need those things for living, as my brain needs constant stimulation of good music and art, nice streets and friendly people of which Seattle has less and less –Joe Bar Cafe closed down, as well as many others and houses and nice buildings are being torn right and left to give place to uglycism. I arrived yesterday and the vibes hit me like a ton of bricks. Walking down the streets to the store a homeless women gave me a look of desperation I will have trouble forgetting, I’ve never seen homelessness before moving and I can’t stomach it yet, sending her a blessing being my only consolation!
Transportation and walk-ability are one of the things I don’t like about Texas, but I really like the people, its prosperity even if temporary, and I would be willing to drive my car up if the vibes are good and the activities and people around me are pleasant because it seems it is necessary in Texas. I am fine with hot or cold, my body adjusts pretty rapidly but I do prefer sunny, where I grew up 90F is standard. Hill Country looks very nice, and the well integrated hybrid culture sounds actually very appealing. I am not concerned much about the future of the state I would move to other than an academic sense, even for myself, because it is obvious to me the I am just passing by as I mature, learn some lessons and habits from the amazing people that live and have lived in the U.S before getting back home. It’s obvious now my mental health requires my own country, it’s people and it’s particular art scene, and I have to take care of my parents and brother at some point. The advantages of that are many, first of all, my visa is pretty light, no competition, remote work and allows me to move anywhere in the U.S I want; it always takes just a few weeks to renew and I don’t have to be enslaved and worried about getting a green card or not, of which my fellow Mexican engineers are, as they slowly become something I abhor with my whole being. Dramatic, yes, but God I rather die with my hands on sculpting clay than to become a depressed little consumer-cog with stock options, an overpriced house made out of cheap materials on stolen land and looking at my bank account every day as the only consolation to a miserable life… That’s the life of your office-variety Seattle software engineer. Looking at other folk that came with me, and the ones that do similar things back home on the big cities, I want none of it. For as much as unpleasant my stay in Seattle has been though, it definitely showed me that it is better to live the life you want with the dangers it comes with than to carry on with the actions of a timid man, and of course, it was also here that I encountered occultism, I am pretty sure that is the reason I am here, but now that Linda is retiring, even Quest Bookshop won’t be the same.
Those pointers on Texas are really useful! I just looked for train from Seattle to Texas and might be a good time to take it, the only long distance train I’ve been on has been from Boston to Providence and it was fantastic so I would be willing to try more. I still have some time here, and I am pretty sure I can find a place that suits my needs in such a big country! I am really thankful for your message, and if I end up going, I’ll let you know! A question though, you said Texas is going to be underwater or did I misunderstand?
@Patricia Matthews #124
Many thanks for your warm thoughts and pointers regarding New Mexico! For all practical purposes a colony of Texas is funny. I will add it to me research list, it’s history sounds interesting for sure. I will probably be careful Albuquerque from your description.
@Yavanna #128
A friend of mine has an earthship in Taos! Thank you much for your description of the nice places around an in Albuquerque. Alamogordo (fat Alamo) and Truth or Consequences are really funny! The “pueblo” style houses is something I’ve always wanted to see too. If I end up making a trip to Texas, I’ll see if it is possible to check out New Mexico in person.
JMG, That’s an appropriate description so I looked it up for future use. It was Finley Peter Dunne who said it.
Fred and JMG, the elites seem almost to be under a spell. Last week a commenter shared a disturbing piece from Spengler about the Washington elites and on X I came across excerpts from an interview with Orban on March 22. He states that Brussels has been captured by a “war psychosis” and that things that were impossible only 3 months ago are now on the table. He seems very concerned. He suggests that the overriding issue at the coming EP elections in June will be pro peace or pro war, and that after that all other issues have to be sorted out. https://miniszterelnok.hu/en/decisive-issue-of-ep-elections-is-who-is-pro-peace-and-who-is-pro-war/
That is quite a coincidence, Strauss and Howe have generational turning on a cycle of 80 to 90 years. Uranus takes 84 earth years to orbit the sun.
George Friedman has an 80 year institutional cycle and a fifty economic cycle that both peak this decade.
Peter Turchin says we have too many elites fighting over too few positions, and also too much “popular immiseration” and expects things to blow up violently.
There is plenty of expectation for trouble ahead. Sort of like the beginning panels of one of Calvin and Hobbes toboggan or wagon rides.
Mr. Greer,
First off, my condolences to you on the passing of your wife. I’m glad that things went well regarding Sarah’s conviction to do enter into her next journey as she saw fit, and that you had the strength to help her see that through.
A question: Have you read any of Michael Crichton’s works .. either fiction or non .. and if so, your raves or criticisms.
full disclosure for whatever it’s worth: I’m a big fan of his writing.
Hello all good folks here,
A delayed thought/ comment on population declines: I am aware that there are places / provinces here in Canada where the indigenous population is growing faster than any other. Certainly also aware that there is a growing resurgence of indigenous culture and language as they struggle past the centuries long colonial invasion and attempts at genocide and cultural eradication. I identify as colonist/settler, but stand back and marvel at the resilience of these peoples in the middle of so many circumstances stacked against them for so many long years/ centuries. They may be getting their land back one way or another in the future.
Sorry to say do not have stats to back this up, but wonder if there are other places in the Americas where it might also be the case?
peace,
BeardTree #160 I am not a Christian, although I have nothing against Christians or Christianity. I am interested in western esoteric paths such as Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and Kabbalah, which do lean toward an ‘All is One’ pantheistic kind of view of God which bear striking resemblance to some eastern views. Some Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart and others have also had somewhat similar views. But yes, not all religions are the same, and views like these are a minority in the exoteric mainstream religions of the west.
I just wanted to take a moment to say to everyone, especially long time readers and commenters, sorry to sound like a broken record about my church of origin, over the years. It did have its good parts. I reliably think about other aspects around Passover, God Friday and Easter. That said, I wish any body who is observing these days my best. Have a good weekend and time well spent with family, friends and congregations.
One little tale that might be fitting for this open post: After a one year break we recently visited old friends. The break was owed to our diverging perspectives on a lot of things – the last straw was a discussion about the conflict in eastern Europe. We had a heated discussion and whenever I managed to fully articulate an argument I heard “that’s all propaganda, I don’t believe this!” – although in the same discussion she admitted that she (of course!) doesn’t read RT or any other news outlet with might propagate a Russian perspective. Well that was rather saddening and I stopped actively seeking to keep up our otherwise regular meetings. Fast forward one year: They reached out for us and we met a few days ago. It was rather pleasant and we largely avoided any critical topics. There was one incident, though, where I had suppress a laugh:
Our friends showed us a Tiktok-video of AfD (rightwing-populist party in Germany for those who don’t know) member Maximilian Krah. Now I don’t do TikTok and I don’t like AfD but I also don’t demonize them (as my friends does). The gist of the video is basically this: “1/3rd of young men don’t have a girl-friend. You are one of them? Don’t watch porn, go a lot into the fresh air and don’t let you make believe that you have to be soft and left. Real men are right.” I think I was supposed to join my friends in ridiculing the video – but I couldn’t. First of all not watching porn and being a lot outdoors is a good idea – and then of course “real men are right” – if you take the archetypal meaning of “man” and deduce what archetypes can be found in the concept of being “right”, well “real” men are right, which of course doesn’t mean that every real man is an archetypal one. But addressing “low status white males” who might have problems finding their role and place the invocation of the archetype might not be a bad idea, after all.
So there’s that. I have to say that with each passing day I feel more alienated to the society I live in and what started as a mild discomfort has reached a definitely unpleasant level of pain. The above is just one harmless story, of course, but there are days when I am really asking myself how is this going to work in the long term?
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
https://worldastrologyreport.substack.com/p/are-we-coming-togetheror-falling
Hi JMG and everyone,
Are any of you familiar with this astrological aspect coming in 2026?
From the article:
The geometry of this configuration—a minor grand trine of Pluto, Neptune and Uranus with the additional testimony of Jupiter in Leo—is truly remarkable. It comes in July 2026, just a few months after a conjunction of Saturn and Neptune at 0° Aries, the first degree of the entire zodiac: talk about new beginnings.
The article shows the chart, which resembles a basket.
Definitely worth a read.
Also, this 🤔
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-west-bank-settlers-red-cows-third-temple#:~:text=If%20all%20goes%20to%20plan,to%20be%20built%20in%20Jerusalem.
Most would be aware also of the Christian Zionists and their desire to bring on the second coming.
JMG, you’ve written about Apocalypse cults (I’ve actually got both copies 😆)
Do you think that Israel, or at least, sections of it resemble a doomsday cult, with perhaps, all the inevitable consequences that generally go along with such outfits?
One other point, many years ago, probably in the 80’s? I had a book called the Bible Code, it was an interesting and entertaining read, how true, who can say . Unfortunately I no longer have it, but I do remember it mentioned Bibi and that his time would mark some not good things, so to speak.
Has anyone else read it?
The situation over there is just awful and really weighs heavily on me. I thought prior to this that we were living in a time of huge shadow projection by ‘our betters’, but in this instance I think we have reached peak shadow.
I could say more but I think you get my drift.
Regards, Helen in Oz
Re: John on Samadhi
I see, yes. Even in the east the attainment of Samadhi isn’t always seen as the goal. Some groups see Samadhi as important but fleeting experiences that are on the road to enlightenment. Of course, others see it as the goal itself. This is kind of the reason for the debate in Hinduism and Buddhism over whether enlightenment is instantaneous or gradual.
I agree with you that the slow refinement of the mind is of central importance. After all, that’s the hard part, isn’t it? The day to day growth, the gritty life world. Slowly perfecting the will through the mundane choices that we make each day. I know that’s the hardest part for me.
Discwrites 117 I used to teach technical writing at a local college. Mostly basic stuff like how to write a memo. Most of the kids utterly failed at writing simple instructions for assembling a bankers box- like the rubric I gave them didn’t exist…. Oh, and I had them assemble the boxes themselves…. Berserker
Things went strange today for this evangelical, Pentecostal type. Today after time spent in prayer to the Father I had a revelation of the fellowship of the Archangel Michael and Mother Mary who as friends both helped me deal with a sudden bout of temptation and the presence of the tempter (I needed archangelic protection) I had an experience of the difference between veneration and the worship which belongs alone to the persons of the Trinity. For me veneration means the respect and reverence due to someone above you, better, with more authority. Unlike Jesus, Mary doesn’t have the taste and feel of humanity combined with deity, but is supremely, beautifully perfectly human. Michael is angelic naturally and is pleased to serve, help, protect me, Hebrews 1:14 and I now have new unseen friends to call upon and be with. Despite their being so far above me Mary and Michael in a peculiar way were my servants and brethren, at my side not above me. The greatest in the kingdom of God are servants of all as it says. It is all a gift of grace to the imperfect not gradual attainment of spiritual worthiness. Strangely wonderful. With a bit of quick thinking and adroit use of my reasoning mind I was able to place the experience into my Biblical framework. I will be exploring this.
@Augusto #80 – consider moving to Lancaster, PA! It’s a great mix of rural and small city, with Lancaster City having a great restaurant scene and cultural events, and the surrounding countryside basically synonymous with “bucolic.” There is a limited bus network to smaller towns throughout the area if you didn’t want to live in the main city. There is also frequent Amtrak train service to Philadelphia and New York so it’s easy to get around the larger region. Real estate prices are reasonable compared to larger cities like Philadelphia but of course higher than they were a few years ago. They just opened a brand-new library building downtown and the surrounding towns also have good libraries. There is a large Spanish-speaking community here, mainly Puerto Rican I believe, and overall the vibe in the city is very cosmopolitan.
Would love to meet you if you end up passing through – you can contact me via b.renounce252 at pass inbox .com
@Caroline (#143)
I can’t resist. What is a rabbit tractor?
Here’s a video of someone walking around the Eden Project recently which came up on my Youtube subscriptions today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08jyXp46rgI
Its been a few years since I’ve actually been there, so I suspect some of the plants have grown up a bit more.
Cotehele I’d also say is worth a visit, the orchard should be nice in September.
The Uranus in Gemini link is interesting. Also interesting is that these wars occurred about 80-90years apart, which is one person’s long lifetime. Roughly the same length of time it takes for the young people on the scene to have no conscious memory of the last one, and to blow off the lessons of the last one. Not during the war, but when the dust settles and people are feeling secure again. See also Nathaniel Hawthorne in the 1840s, the hippies in the 1960s, and so on.
I’m starting a list of significant astrological events in this decade, and that decidedly goes on it.
@Aldarion #71, JMG:
This reminds me of the current situation in New Zealand, particularly Auckland. Here, we are in the midst of a bona fide speculative mania, and have been since at least 2020.
There is a local on-line radio station “Reality Check Radio”, to which I listen semi-regularly. Recently, there was a round-table political discussion around the new coalition government’s plan to make housing more affordable. One of the commentators (who is a landlord, himself) stated, “I laugh at these fools in Parliament who think they can somehow bring rents down. Don’t these clowns realize that rents never, ever go down? They only ever go up!.
Ri-i-ight~ And trees grow to the sky, past the ionosphere and all the way into outer space, too!
A local economist, Keith Rankin, wrote a critical article on the speculative mania here:
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2403/S00017/empty-rentals-and-investor-friendly-taxes.htm
He quotes another local economist (and property speculator) thus:
“Quote from [Gareth] Morgan: ‘Look at me, I own six houses,’ he stated on The Nation. ‘I don’t have tenants; they just make carpets dirty. I do it because I know you [other investors] want to get in on this as well, and so you’re going to bid the price of those houses up.'”
So! This guy makes ZERO return on investment, and only buys properties hoping that a “greater fool” will come along and pay more.
Where have we seen this behavior before? Oh, let’s see … The tech bubble, Enron, the Savings and Loan debacle of the 1980’s (anyone still remember that one?), the 1987 stock market crash, the 1929 crash, the Tulip mania, the Mississippi Scheme, the South Sea Bubble…..
As JMG says, “Seen one, seen them all!”
There’s been a bit of discussion above above about the Dali captain’s (the ship which crashed into the Baltimore bridge) nationality.
It seems the captain is Indian, not Ukranian, along with most of the crew. I don’t think it’s terrorism, nor conspiracy, just a simple screw up of engineering at precisely the wrong time.
Bofur @146
Thanks for the compliment.
Most of my expat friends in Mexico are Canadian, and most are in their 70s or late 60s. I am 84. Almost all of them are there because they like it and because they can live much cheaper there. I think we are all aware that we are not going to survive much of a decline anywhere., even within our own bodies. There are a few Canadians and US who do think they are somehow going to survive a decline in Mexico that they wouldn’t in Canada or US. It is ludicrous; most of them can’t even speak Spanish.Some of them hate the current Canadian government so much they are blinded by it. I don’t talk to them about it. What is the point?
Interesting post and your point about marriaige. If the couple gets on or loves each other and both are happy with whatever the arrangement is, I can’t see that it is anyone else’s business.
Stephen
I am reading the Narnia books with my daughter. She doesn’t care for human protagonists; we started with The Horse and His Boy and are now in The Magician’s Nephew.
There are two contrasting mage-like characters. The Hermit of the Southern March is a mysterious person. He, and especially his dwelling, seem allegorical. The obvious comparison is to the walled garden where Digory plucked the apple, but I feel I haven’t quite grasped the reference. Are there any out-of-Narnia models for either the Hermit or his dwelling? I vaguely thought of the Romance of the Rose, which I haven’t read.
Uncle Andrew Chatterley is called a magician and has a fairy grandmother, but I noted that he uses scientific language to speak about his work, and his aims (and those of other evil magicians) are compared to those of scientists. Lewis made an explicit approximation between certain magicians in the school of Francis Bacon and the proto-science of their time (Paul Kingsnorth generalized the claim that science and magic both seek power). Is Andrew Chatterley modelled on some specific magician of the early 20th century?
As I read the last 50 comments or so, I have NPR on. There’s a program on the efforts of Ukranian women to access abortion pills in the past two years. Of course, the program depicted this as a heroic battle for women’s rights. It’s clear to me that when the women have turned against the next generation, the society is doomed.
I read today that the Captain of the Dali was no longer the Ukrainian, whose service on the ship ended over a year ago, when she was under another owner and name.
I always thought it was considered bad luck to change the name of a ship.
Also, on the way out of the port, the ship was under the guidance of a local pilot, who is very familiar with the local waters.
Meanwhile, here in Providence, part of a major highway bridge was abruptly closed in December due to failing structure. It’s not as heavily used as the bridge in Baltimore, but it’s another sign.
Bofur, nope. First, you need to know how to put it in a place where it won’t contaminate your water supply and where water from the water table won’t simply fill it; then you have to know how to dig a deep pit and shore up the sides so they don’t tumble down to their angle of repose, resulting in a crater rather than a pit. And of course you also have to know how to dig it so that the sides don’t tumble down on you as you’re digging, turning your would-be toilet into an impromptu grave. Most people who’ve never done that kind of work drastically underestimate the knowledge and skill required to do it right.
Augusto, thanks for this.
Boccaccio, I see it in a different light. I’m fairly sure that the elite classes running the EU have for many years now planned on turning it into the nucleus for a global government. Its expansion eastward was the first step in that process; the second, crucial step was going to be the dismemberment of Russia and the absorption of the fragments into the EU, which then would become the world’s largest and most resource-rich power, poised to gobble up the rest of the planet in short order. It’s the centuries-old European dream of world conquest in a new form. The difficulty, of course, is that the EU and the US both fatally underestimated Russia’s capacity to resist and strike back.
Over the last two years, as a result, they’ve gone from what they thought was the brink of success to what is all too clearly the brink of disaster. Russia has humiliated NATO-trained and -armed forces on the battlefields of Ukraine, exposed the weakness of Europe and the US for all the world to see, and is making damaging inroads into the African and Middle Eastern neocolonial arrangements that have been central to Europe’s prosperity since the Second World War. The current war fever in Brussels and its satrapies is a sign of desperation: if Russia wins in Ukraine, it’s Europe that will end up isolated, impoverished, and humiliated, and the EU that will probably be broken up and absorbed piece by piece by a Russia-centric Eurasian order. For what it’s worth, I think the European elites are going to be clobbered in the elections, since so few Europeans want a war with Russia — but we’ll see.
Siliconguy, that may be the best metaphor I’ve heard for our time yet. 😉
Polecat, I read a couple of his early novels many years ago but barely remember them. Sorry.
Hankshaw, fascinating. I wasn’t aware of this. Anyone else have further data?
Justin, you’ve mentioned it rarely enough that I’d forgotten that detail of your backstory. That is to say, don’t worry about it.
Nachtgurke, fascinating. You’re right that it’s good advice.
Helen, thanks for these. I’ll be delineating the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, but aspect patterns like that aren’t well understood yet; it’ll be interesting to see how that site’s predictions match what actually happens. As for Israel, it’s really sad to see it imitating the last two independent Jewish states in the same region and setting the stage for its own destruction; it’s as though nobody there bothers to read the scriptures any more.
Enjoyer, it’s the hardest part for everyone, which is why it’s the most important. Get that mastered and the rest is easy.
BeardTree, doesn’t surprise me at all. The old sacramental branches of Christianity, the ones that make a point of offering veneration to saints and angels as well as worship to the Christian god, seem to have the most spiritual vitality at this point.
Michael, if you can get a copy of The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith, get it and read it; you’ll find an astounding amount of deja vu as you watch the local bubble head for the inevitable bust.
Peter, do you have a source for that?
Aldarion, it’s been long enough since I’ve read the Narnia books that I can’t really help you — I didn’t like them even as a child. The uncle, though, is at least partly Lewis’s parody of an entire subculture of early 20th century occultists who claimed to be scientists. Aleister Crowley was one of them; he used the slogan, “the method of science, the aim of religion.” As usual with him, neither of those were correct.
Peter, on the other hand, if you’re living in a war zone and you know there’s a real risk you’ll be without power, water, and food, that may not be the best time in the world to risk becoming pregnant!
The notion of Mexicans reclaiming the southwest that the US took in the Mexican War has come up a few times here. The notion is common on both sides and may well play a meaningful role in the near future. However, it is historically an oversimplification. (Though the mythical version will play the more important role.)
It is worth paying attention to the actual process of nation formation because much trouble in the world arises from ignoring it. Such ignoring (or pretending) is a key factor in both the current war in Ukraine and that in Israel-Palestine. Understanding how nations actually form also may help us if the United States and/or Canada breaks up into multiple nations in coming decades.
TLDR: A United States still in formation and made up of two antagonistic clusters of states took from a Mexico that was at an even earlier stage of its formation claims to land most of which was held securely by indigenous tribes and the rest of which comprised a number of enclaves that were themselves in a colonial relationship with the core Mexican region around Mexico City and that had little love for the distant Mexico City government. Much of the land taken would not be settled by Americans until after the Civil War.
It is in the nature of nations as imaginary collectives to create myths about themselves that project themselves farther into the past and as inevitable, not accidental. Some nations have natural boundaries: An island or a peninsula separated by mountains (Iberia for example) has a natural form, but more often the boundaries are the products of historical accident.
At the time when Japan thinks of itself as having started as a nation, “Japan” (Yamato) was an enclave of Sinofied Koreans in a sea of people who did not consider themselves subjects of the emperor (or know who he was for that matter). Look at a map of “China” four thousand years ago. “China” covered about as much of the current People’s Republic as Rhode Island does of the United States. At the start of the Russia-Ukraine(US) war, both sides claimed to be the descendants of Kievan Rus. However, Kievan Rus was a Swedish Viking city for slave-trading (of the ancestors of the Russians and Ukrainians). In other words, nation formation takes time. Often a lot of it.
When European settlers arrived in the Americas, they staked land claims that were often unbounded. Many of the original 13 colonies on the east coast simply marked off a stretch of coast and claimed an indefinite extent of land inland. In Cleveland, Ohio, there is a university called Case Western Reserve. The “Western Reserve” was the western reserve of Connecticut, which nowadays ends hundreds of miles east of Ohio. In theory, some of these colonies claimed land extending all the way to the Pacific Ocean, but no one paid any attention to such claims.
Similarly, the Spanish colony centering on Mexico City did not have much of a northern boundary. Russian Alaska had no official southern boundary. The Oregon Territory was claimed by the US, the UK, Spain, and Russia at a time when none of them controlled much of it. Boundaries were eventually set as the colonies of the various nations ran into each other. When Mexico gained its independence against the background of the Napoleonic Wars and the decline of the silver mines that had become Spain’s main interest there, it inherited the colonial boundaries that Spain had set for Nueva Espana. It ran from what is now the northern boundary of Panama through all the rest of central America, through what is now Mexico and beyond to no one knew exactly how far. The nations of Central America (other than Panama and Belize) broke away from Mexico fairly quickly. The pre-war boundary between the Louisiana Purchase US and Mexico that one often sees was only set a decade or two before the Mexican War and marked nothing real. There were basically no Americans or Mexicans on either side of that border. Only indigenous tribes. (Most of whom were themselves newcomers to the area thanks to the massive changes brought about by the arrival of horses and guns.)
The reason why the Mexican government invited Southern slave owners to settle in Texas, which is what set this train in motion in the first place, was desperation. Its hope was that if the Americans could not conquer Texas from its actual owners at the time (the Commancheria), at least it could form a firebreak against Commanche raids into what is now northern Mexico.
Militarily, the war was quite one-sided (despite valor on both sides). The United States could have seized all of Mexico and doing so was discussed at the time. Three factors prevented that. 1) Much of the North did not approve of the war in the first place and feared an outcome that would reinforce Southern dominance. 2) Annexing all of Mexico would have added a huge number of Catholics into a United States that identified as a Protestant nation. 3) Once the United States moved into what is now northern Mexico, it encountered much more hostility and resistance from the general population. It is not a coincidence that this began at about the same line that Spain had drawn as its line of actual control decades before. In other words, the new boundary between the United States and Mexico was drawn approximately at the northern edge of actual Mexican settlement. It is worth noting that even what then became and still is the northern part of Mexico attempted to secede from Mexico more than once in later decades.
Curiously, Mexico was not the only polity in the area that started out with claims to more land that it could settle and hold and eventually consolidated successfully into a more compact area. In its original boundaries, the Utah territory included not only the current state of Utah but also the southwest corner of Wyoming, half of Colorado (including all the famous ski resorts), and most of Nevada (but not Las Vegas).
Here you are, a series of news releases from the company that runs the ship, Synergy Marine Group, from Mumbai, India.
All 22 crew are Indian it seems.
https://www.synergymarinegroup.com/dali-imo-9697428/
Looks like a genuine accident with the crew having done all they could without steering power to avoid hitting the bridge.
Sorry to bother you here like this JMG, but you’re the only dude I know freakin’ otherwise appreciative enough to share this with. So, I’ll get right to it. On Easter Sunday, March 30, 1975, down in the Lacandon Forest of Chiapas, Mexico, I had my face kicked in (triple fracture of the left zygomatic arch) and was beaten down with machetes.
All that left some nice scars, down to the skull, but nary a scratch and an interesting pattern. After four days at a corn storage hut, Indios, a British hiker, and missionaries got me (finally) into the Clinica Juan Graham in Villahermosa where I was cleaned up and a few days later my father brought me back to San Diego.
I have several working theories about what, there, happened, but that is another topic. What interests me is that there is a repeating pattern in the calculation of the Easter date on March 30. I know how it’s calculated by the Roman Catholic Church (first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox), but, and I’m sure that all Easter dates conform to this pattern, this has recently become of interest.
So, I recon back to that Institute for the Study of Cycles, which I’d brought up earlier, which I know you’ve explored – ok. So I related it to a snake skin, cycles contained within cycles moving through time with the motive force of said snake.
And to have more fun, imagine looking through the eyes of the quetzal bird, or eagle, atop that serpent, which I relate to the vision of the future pulling the eternal history of said cosmic serpent along into the future.
I could study the periodicity of the cycle:
Easter Sundays on March 30
1975 March 30
1986 March 30
1997 March 30
2059 March 30
2070 March 30
2081 March 30
2092 March 30
But, that would bore me. You once mentioned that if you really stood outside of time, you would perceive the entirety at once – or something like that. So, jff, if you have an eternal being, then you might consider that you’re already operating from that being’s position. Your placement into this world, across the arrow of time, would be a form of art.
Imagine looking through the eyes of civilizations born, living, and dying (thank you for introducing me to Oswald Spengler). And coming to realize the futility of the testing ground the feathered/winged serpent offers.
So now, big leap – how would you suggest getting back into that forever, from which one might have come?
I’m not married to the notion that John Murray Spear’s actions were responsible for, or contributed to, any particular subsequent developments. It’s conceivable, is all. Also, it’s interesting to see a case of a Religion of Progress being explicitly presented as a revealed religion, outside of SF and satire (“Our Ford” in Brave New World being an example of both).. And the timing of Spear’s venture might be a milestone worth taking into account in the timeline of planetary influences. What else was imminent at the time? The American Civil War. Jules Verne. Early (but not yet practical) electric motors already existed, as did Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
To me, the most striking part of the story is the ways Spear’s vision (like his machine, if the one found in 2019 is genuine) seems to have skipped ahead to our own times. His New Motor wasn’t a robot, but his ideas about it seem to land closer to modern robots and AIs and desperate dreams of free energy than to most of the real and fictional technologies that captured imaginations through the remainder of his own century.
I’m surprised you hadn’t already known about him, but only because that’s never happened before in my experience! I guess Spear wasn’t really connected to any of the esoteric traditions whose lineages you trace. Even with regards to Spiritualism, he seems to have put his own idiosyncratic spin on it from the very beginning, and eventually was repudiated by the movement’s mainstream. Quite one of a kind!
Further to your reply at 54 to comment 16, that nuclear energy fans can’t explain why nukes don’t show up in low regulation regimes. One of things corporate capitalism has proven to be most effective at is regulatory capture. If there were energy/ monetary profit to be made from nuclear power it is reasonable to suppose that energy companies, particularly the moribund oil extractors, would have captured those regulations in North America. As they have not, my guess is they have long since done the calculations and quietly show them to keen youngsters who think they have a great idea..
Chiming in about the astrology of zhe next years, the Cancer ingress chart of 2024 for Germany has Saturn in the first house of ordinary people and the Moon in the tenth house of the government, both square each other. The seventh house of foreign countries is governed by the Moon. These pattern, together with the dignities of the planets involved, seems to presage a risk of war, probably a risk of German involvement of an ill-fated mission to Ukraine.
About the EU governing the whole world: ever since I saw in a book photographs of people and their belongings around the world, I knew that a functioning world government is impossible.
@Augusto #168 re: Texas Going Underwater
First off, if you do come visit to check it out, let me know! As I said, I live in Houston, but I have family in Austin, so I’d be happy to meet up and show you some stuff.
As for my comment, yes, though I might have overstated slightly, and very likely not on a timescale relevant to the duration you elaborated on in your response. If folks like our host are right that global temperatures are heading for something like those of the hypsithermal, and that big chunks of the polar ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica (but not all of them) will melt, sea levels stand to rise ~50+ feet. Most of Texas, including where I live, is very flat, and so that kind of sea level rise would move the coast well inland. If something more extreme happens, melting all of the ice caps, raising sea levels 250 feet or more, then something like half of Texas (the currently most habitable and inhabited half), would become part of the Gulf of Mexico.
In the meantime, what’s a more reasonable concern is coastal flooding during hurricanes becoming more common, more widespread, and affecting areas farther inland. Houston’s poorly situated to deal with all of those, being very flat and well-supplied with bayous, so it’s on my mind (my house is only 75 ft above sea level and about a mile and a half from the nearest bayou). All of the other stuff has more to do with my hopes to put down roots for my family in the long run.
Cheers,
Jeff
@Gerard Oneil #179,
There was a discussion a few years ago in ISTC (the UK association of tech writers). The last techcomm program had just shut down following post-2008 cost savings, and they were wondering what to do next.
I do not know how the discussion ended in the UK. You can now do online degrees from Irish or French universities, and I did an online MSc myself. But it helped me form the opinion I still hold: technical communication is taught in the wrong places and to the wrong people, who then react like your students (or my fellow students).
You either have whole degree programs in tech comm, where graduates become software operators without any insight in what they are writing. They will write in the active voice and use controlled languages, know DITA, use the right software tools, put hazard warnings in the right place according to ANSI 535.6… but their manuals will still be unreadable.
Or it is offered as a one- or two-semester course in engineering courses. But most engineers are the wrong people to learn technical writing and will resent it, rolling their eyes every time they say the word documentation. They will do the course to get the points and spend as little effort as possible.
The real skill behind technical communication, i.e. explaining things to others in a way that they understand, is hard to teach and is something one learns by being the learner in the first place. It requires wanting to show others not just how to do something, but give them a taste of how great it felt to do it, so that they might feel it too. It is something you experience when your father teaches you to fix your bike, but not when someone explains the principles of Information Mapping.
In Trinitarian terms (Body, Mind and Spirit), engineers take care of the Body (the machine, the material part), and technical communicators take care of the Mind, the idea of how the machine works in abstract, and the layers of abstraction we created about what a manual has to look like (boring as hell). No one takes care of the Spirit, the spark of joy within. And that is the end of technical communication. No amount of AI-generated futuristic marketing newspeak will put back life in what is basically a dead body.
I wonder if crowdfunding for saving a bookstore would be more in the Venus or Mercury department for charity? The store specialises in children’s books and graphic novels, apart from some typical left-wing issues.
Hi JMG, I saw this and was reminded of the discussions on cerebrospinal fluid. This abstract, with diagrams, is about how the fluid drains through a network of lymphatic vessels behind the nose:
https://www.ibs.re.kr/cop/bbs/BBSMSTR_000000000738/selectBoardArticle.do?nttId=24483&pageIndex=1&searchCnd=&searchWrd=#none
– John N.
Hey Arnav
I have some advice for you concerning where and how to learn about adapting to the de-industrial future.
Firstly, there apparently already is a group exploring Peak oil as it affects India, https://www.peakoilindia.org/about/, which you may as well investigate.
Secondly, Low-Tech magazine and its sister site No-tech magazine is full of interesting articles of relevance to the de-industrial future. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
Thirdly, apart from learning from your more rural, working class neighbours you should remember to pace yourself as you change your lifestyle to be more suited to decline. Don’t try too much too soon since too much radical change causes to many complications and stresses. Be gradual.
Hey JMG
Recently I have been watching a YouTube channel owned by an Italian museum dedicated to Leonardo DaVinci, displaying working replicas of his machines and more unusually his innovative musical instruments.
https://www.leonardo3.net/en/museum/museum-collection/
I wanted to know if you have ever looked into some of the things DaVinci invented, or maybe recorded, and if so what did you think of them?
You think Russia will dominate Europe somehow? Can they do that with deindustrialization incoming? The West is getting deindustrialized, but that time will come for Russia too, no?
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in New Mexico, mostly ABQ (Albuquerque), Santa Fe, and Taos and vicinity. The culture and geography felt quite distinct. Even in cookie cutter suburbs, which easily feel the same across huge portions of North America, I always knew I was in New Mexico. Some of the land has intense energy and there is lots of history. The sky looked a different color blue, more like turquoise, when I would come over Raton Pass from Colorado, though I don’t understand how that could be true.
ABQ has much of interest city-life wise and great hiking in the Sandias on the eastern edge and crime (vehicle theft off the charts) and 3-way racial tension (white/black/brown). Some really nice towns on the periphery.
As said above, Taos is artsy (many gay women I am told by a resident there) and Santa Fe is crowded and congested with a large inflow of new folks, which was accelerated by the covid-induced move from big cities. Amazingly old history for a US city.
@hankshaw (#173)
If one looks at the entire Americas, there are places where the original population was never replaced and that have been majority indigenous all along, such as Bolivia and parts of Peru. Much of the Mayan areas in Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala still retains much of their culture and might thrive post-civilization. (Interesting how indigenous people’s who ran freer societies before settlers arrived lasted far longer than the better known imperial states such as the Aztecs.)
In North America, the Navajo reservation is larger than some small states back east and could become a nation of its own (if climate change doesn’t make the area completely uninhabitable. It is marginal as it is). Also, the Pueblos along the Rio Grande felt to me psychically healthier, more intact. Those folks are living more as their settled, agricultural ancestors did, as opposed to nomadic tribes who were displaced and had their ways of living radically altered. Also, the trauma of the arrival of settlers was back in the 1500s and 1600s for the Pueblo Indians, whereas for say the Lakota, it was more recent, sudden, fast, and nasty. (Some of the Plains Indians went through such a roller coaster ride. The arrival of horses and guns made life there a true paradise (at least for the men), then the arrival of settlers turned it into hell.)
@Stephen Pearson: okay, thanks for that, Mexico makes a lot more sense for the 60s-70s-80s set.
But in the past few years I’ve legitimately seen people with presumably decades of life left, emigrating to these places and I just think to myself, “Well, you’re only halfway there, you might be right that we’ve got problems in Canada but I don’t think you grasp the global picture of where everything is going.”
@JMG, well, that’s nearly incredible, about the outhouses, I never imagined, and I say that as someone who actually thinks about this stuff a lot.
I live in an old house whose history I would like to know more about – for instance, there is a dug well out back, and I have always assumed that there must have been an outhouse at some point in the past, but I don’t know where.
Got some homework to do, I’d say.
@Aldarion #71
What you say, and the kinds of figures you cite, would appear to be very true of Ireland, also.
Add in a smoldering sense of frustration and building anger in young “gig-working” adults of today’s “precariat”, whose stagnant wages are thoroughly consumed by their rents, who are continually pressed to pay more in rent, while accepting less and less quality, and who have no hope of ever securing a home to call their own. It is growing into a social force, all of its own, looking for expression.
Teresa Peschel
I’m guessing you are coming to the UK from the USA. Remember most rental cars will be “stick shift”, so I’d be booking in advance if you need an automatic transmission car. Also I’d be booking the smallest car you can (you may end up with a free upgrade), the roads are narrow in that part of the world. I’d be getting the train from London, and hiring the car down there (in advance), the drive would be a nightmare, especially getting out of London. Driving on the “wrong” side of the road isn’t a problem, just take your time. I’m a Scot that has driven in San Fran, San Diego, Florida (over the scary million mile bridge to Key West), and Los Angeles, and now live in France, and never had a problem (although we did lose our car in SF because we forgot where we parked it… those d*mn grids 🙂 !
Remember all major galleries and museums are free entry in the UK. Lunch at the top of Tate Modern is rather lovely (even if you don’t love modern art). I do, it has a top notch collection. National Gallery also excellent. St Pauls Cathedral is walking distance from Tate Modern Gallery (it costs money). Sounds like there is more than one of you, the Underground, buses, and trains are perfectly safe (although *very* crowded at rush hours). You may be able just use your credit card as a ticket – it works out the cheapest cost for the day (so if you do loads of journeys it doesn’t charge the separate journeys, it automatically gives you the day-pass rate, check online). No one smiles or speaks and is always in a hurry (think New York – where “politeness is a vice” 🙂 – it’s not even in the same league as London 🙂 , although you will meet nice people. And just as there are no “no-go Muslim areas” (just ridiculous 🙂 ) in London, not everybody “hates Americans”!!! Soho, a good central place for a break and a coffee (a wee bit like NY West Village used to be). A walk in Regent Park and maybe Camden, if that takes your fancy, is nice. Avoid Oxford Street (it’s like a cheap, uninteresting, run down 5th Avenue… without Tiffany’s!). Everywhere is busy and “not cheap” (although the USD goes further these days thanks to Brexit and the catastrophe of the Conservatives. Have fun (I lived in London for around 30 years). You’ll do a lot of walking! Michael
Teresa Peschel
If you haven’t already, you should check this series out, old and probably grainy, but Joan Hickson is the Miss Marple absolutely without equal:
https://agathachristie.fandom.com/wiki/Miss_Marple_(BBC_television_series)#:~:text=Miss%20Marple%20is%20a%20British,Christie%20novels%20have%20been%20dramatised.
Also David Suchet’s Poirot is perfection – with lots of gorgeous Art Deco architecture: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094525/
Njura wrote, “Christophe, What indicates to you there was a curse involved in Crocus City?”
In my experience of the unseen dimensions, there are curses, prayers, grudges, bindings, blessings, betrayals, obsessions, healings, suppressions, charities, distractions, etc. involved in and influencing and pulling on every interaction in the universe. Divinities, angels, humans, and sea slugs are all of us weaving those complex intentions together to the best of our abilities. We’re also all being influenced by each other’s intentions, which end up seriously affecting how much competence and balance we’re able to bring to our own workings. Should we allow sufficient imbalance to accumulate within us, our intentions then tend to veer further and further towards the cursing side and away from the blessing side.
Given the gruesome nature of the slaughter that took place after that Пикник concert, I’m not at all sure how curses could possibly not have been involved. Most of the time when I become suddenly, unaccountably exhausted or confused or disheartened, it doesn’t really take that much effort to identify what curses have been hurled at me by whom — and that’s just from routine, everyday effects. I have to imagine that any of the victims of the Crocus City Concert Hall attack would count it as anything but a routine, everyday event in their shortened lives. The perpetrators of that terrorist act presumably had to psych themselves up for it by practicing cursing, grudgeful, obsessive workings. If not, they would probably the first terrorists ever to wreak that kind of twisted chaos without availing themselves of any cursing.
There’s also the long history of public statements by neo-con politicians and apparatchiks giddily willing their unbridled malevolence onto their targeted adversaries by casting curses, bindings, and betrayals at them. That glassy-eyed, fanatic look neo-cons get when they talk about destroying Russia or its culture or its people, did you think that was just their idiosyncratic way of offering blessings and healings? The neo-cons have not succeeded in expressing any overwhelming outpouring of charitable love for the fallen concert goers, instead exhibiting a somewhat different suite of emotions. Are there any magical workings that you would naturally associate with the emotional suite they currently have on display?
Hi John Michael,
It’s a good hope, and you never know where ideas will flow and end up.
Due to all sorts of reasons, I’m getting a bit more time for work about the property. Anyway, I’m taking that opportunity and running with it. Sometimes the Gods gifts come in strange formats. It’s funny, but it’s not the only path I could have chosen, but this year has a really weird vibe to it, so I dunno. Thought it best to be guided by the winds of fate in this instance. And the work around here, really does need doing. When you’re uncertain, have you ever been guided by that sort of intuition? And did it work out?
You almost caused me to crash my car the other day. Nah, not really. When driving I often enjoy podcasts. So there I was just listening to a podcast I downloaded, and you were talking about politics and a certain female candidate campaigning unnecessarily in a windy city electorate, probably because they were being stupid. Anywhoo, you then went on to say something along the lines of: Zippy the pin-head could have won there. Your sense of the absurd is quite amusing! Thanks for the good chuckle at the spoken words.
Cheers
Chris
Regarding shipping: it is standard practice to use local pilots who are very familiar with the bays/rivers/ports and the local winds and tides to control large vessels in American ports. Thus, it hardly matters who the captain was or where he came from. If news stories get interested in that, I suspect it’s a red herring. Each port has a pilot vessel used for transporting local pilots out to incoming ships before they enter the port. In SF Bay, the pilot vessel would meet incoming ships outside the Golden Gate. If you had a sailboat berthed on, say, the Alameda Estuary, that pilot vessel was the worst offender of the “no wake” rules. The local ferry boats were the next worst.
Jessica, granted, but that’s irrelevant for the future. What matters is what popular opinion in Mexico says, and based on what I’ve been told, they read the situation very differently.
Peter, many thanks for this. I have to put up with enough disinformation these days that I like to ask for sources when it comes to controversial claims.
Cobo, incarnate existence is the process of getting back to where we once were. That’s the whole point of it.
Walt, I have plenty to learn, even when it comes to American esoteric traditions — I’m always finding new things, or being told about them by others. Spiritualism isn’t something I’ve studied that much, and the fringes of Spiritualism were productive of a huge number of oddities like this one.
Rob, that’s an excellent point, and one that I’ll keep in mind for the inevitable debates to come.
Booklover, ouch. Yes, an applying square between a malefic and the Moon like that can be a warning of impending war, though Saturn is less bellicose than Uranus or Mars. Certainly it’s an omen of very serious trouble.
Njura, Mercury, since it’s both a business and concerned with books.
John, thank you for this!
J.L.Mc12, you’re good at finding things I’ve never paid much attention to! Sorry, but I haven’t had the time to pursue that either.
Rafael, deindustrialization isn’t an instant process, and Europe is deindustrializing a lot faster than Russia.
Chris, I rely on intuition fairly often in times of uncertainty, with good results. As for Zippy the Pinhead, just one of the services I offer. 😉
JMG,
Since the conversation drifted into being a “pick and choose digital Luddite”, I’m looking for some technical assistance related to my own “digital Luddite” status. You see, I use an old style Nokia phone, the cheapest brick I could muster. It’s not distracting and most text based websites display fine on it. I read most of my blogs through RSS feeds, this one included! However, there is not an RSS feed available for individual comment threads. Would it be possible to change that, so that I could scroll a feed of your commentariat on my dinosaur of a phone? If not, well, no worries.
I’d like to suggest another ecosophian meetup/potluck for those who are lucky enough to dwell in Texas and can’t (or don’t want to) travel to the far east coast for the Great Kahn’s potluck (not intending to compete, just offering a second-place gathering). I can offer up my home: I live in a medium-sized metro area about 90 miles NW of Houston (or as I like to say when people ask where the town is: halfway between Snook and North Zulch)*. If we do it the same day as the Rhode Island gathering, maybe we could have a (very brief-I hate screens almost as much as our host claims to) zoom or facetime hello to the official crowd?
This is coming a bit late in the postings, so people may mot see it. With our host’s permission I’ll repost it (maybe on Magic Monday and or Frugal Friday and if there is interest, I’ll figure out a way to sign up/RSVP.
*Geographically, it would be more accurate to say “halfway between Snook and Kurten” but “North Zulch” is more fun to say.
Correcting: Andrew Ketterley had a fairy godmother
Thank you, JMG, my first thought was Crowley, but I don’t know much at all about him!
I know you appreciate Lewis’ space trilogy. What do you think about Till We Have Faces? After I grew up, it became my favourite novel of his.
@bofur #147: The shame that compels professionals to marry other professionals surely has in part a straightforward economic foundation. Some years ago, a professor of economics at UChicago wrote a heartbreaking open letter. He earned $250 000 a year, his colleague and wife likewise, and Obama was planning to raise income taxes in their bracket. However, as he proceeded to demonstrate in his open letter, every cent in their income was already accounted for and they couldn’t afford to give any of it away: a house in a good school district, two overseas vacations a year, saving for their four children’ university tuition and so on. Absolutely nothing was left at the end of the year!
If he had married a woman in a lower income bracket, or if they had decided that one of them would work reduced hours or stay at home entirely, the reduction in their standard of living would have been unthinkable, apocalyptically worse even than Obama’s tax.
My wife is ambitious and hard-working, but when we met, she earned about five times less than I did. Young people at church are taught not to choose marriage partners based on physical attraction only, and that is of course sound advice. However, is avarice and status consciousness a better guide? I am not speaking about the importance of choosing a reliable, conscientious partner, but about the desire to duplicate one’s already comfortable income.
Re: immigration and collapse of empires
I think one of the future risks of immigration for the US empire, as was the case in the Roman Empire, was that the natives didn’t want to serve in the army anymore: too risky, low pay, too many years, so the barbarians jointed the roman army in droves to have access to the land (=money) and roman citizenry in some areas they were the majority of the troops; exactly the same situation starts to happens in the western armies today, and with the decline of trust in the imperial institutions, less and less native people are interested in sustain a regime that only benefit thieves and thugs, so the ranks, more and more, are filled with barbarians, and then the loyalty started to displace from the abstract imperial institution and thieves to the real strong charismatic leaders; also with the decadence of the imperial cultural forms, it stop being admired by the barbarians that return to their ancestors’ culture, religion, social forms and loyalties (reconstruction of the Ibn Jaldun’s “Asabiyyah”); soon the “external proletariat” knock the door at the border, and the empire start to dissolve in chiefdoms and later kingdoms (or charistamic republics) with mixed population.
The sudden new militaristic approach of the German elite I think happened because Germany has now a new Reich, an economic Reich, with the consolidation of the UE with Germany in the economic center; and always an economic Reich end becoming a military Reich, as we will see with China in the not too distant future; and it does not matter how many wars or how painful they were in the past.
All of this is aggravated by the fact the Europe has few natural resources to maintain a huge consumerist, aging and entitled population; and the main provider of those essential natural resources is Russia, so a new “Lebensraum” is required for the western elite and masses to have access to “their” resources.
All of this will end the same way was ended with the other western attack on Russia: Baltic Crusades (Teutonic) invasion, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth invasion, Swedish invasion (Charles XII), Napoleon’s invasion and recent WWII German invasion, with a crushing defeat of the western armies; because as Ernest Jünger wrote about the eastern front in WWII : “we are fighting the Titans of Pain” (the russians)
Cheers
David
What do you think about this news, I honestly see the future of Israel is not promising at all.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-gaza-war-and-the-red-cows-of-prophecy/
https://prophecyinyourpocket.com/blog/two-solar-eclipses-to-cross-over-america
I don’t believe in prophecy, second link, the astrology of this year’s eclipses, it is probably a self-fulfilling prophecy
“Bofur, it depends on how many people still remember how to dig a proper pit toilet or, better still, make a proper composting toilet”
JMG: My answer is that few people nowadays know how to dig/make a toilet without flushing water. And even fewer would like to use them.
In my personal case, I’ll say to you that I built a composting toilet some years ago in my property, in my town’s outskirts; my field had no running water and I’m a bit ecologist, so I built another little hut with a composting toilet inside. OK, it wasn’t beautiful to see it, but it worked well for almost 10 years.
When people realized that I was using such as toilet, they panicked about it. According that town people I was going to die from dysentery or tiphus soon. Well, I’m here alive and well today…My family and friends didn’t want to piss/poo in my toilet, because “there wasn’t flushing water”, which in their opinion, it was antihygienical and dirty (?).
Even sometimes I was called ‘a disgusting PIG’ by some of my neighbours about it…By the way, I used the old compost (more than a year old) to fertilise some rose bushes, which grew beautiful and strong. When I told this to the people, they almost got sick.
Yeah, it was a cultural shock for them and I think this could be called somewhat like “coprophobia”. Even I feared a complaining report from the Town Hall sometimes, though it never made real.
Building a composting toilet isn’t very complex, IMHO, but you have to be careful with hygienic measures, of course (no flies, please!). For me, the strangest difference with conventional toilets it’s the urine separator. But it can be made without expensive tools and materials.
Here, a link if you want to build a composting toilet.
https://greencitizen.com/blog/diy-composting-toilet/
You can also buy it, but it’s cheaper and funnier the DIY in my opinion.
Discwrites-“ No one takes care of the Spirit, the spark of joy within. And that is the end of technical communication. “ Spot on. Said spirit is utterly crushed by our education system. For what it’s worth my students were all systems management and national security majors. My take is that about 5% of students really yearn to learn. And yes that includes the meta cognitive aspects of learning about learning….
There is a good book on John Murray Spear by John B. Buescher, The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear, Agitator for the Spirit Land (2006). A supplement, also by Buescher, can be found at iapsop.com/jbb/2021__buescher___revisiting_john_murray_spear.pdf
The machine in Colorado is pretty clearly a very clumsy fake, probably from the same workshop that was producing a fair number of fake “vampire hunting” kits some years back. There is no way that Spear, a former Unitarian Universalist minister and a Spiritualist, would ever have used a Roman Catholic crucifix as a central part of any apparatus he designed. And the object in the right rear compartment of the drawer appears to be a planchette for use with an alphabet board (a precursor of the modern “ouija board”) , which method of getting “spirit messages” wasn’t actually invented until the 1880s. (Planchettes for automatic writing are earlier, but they always have a hole for a pencil to pass through, which this planchette does not.)
One of the things I honestly don’t get about the push for immigration: If those places are also declining in fertility, what happens when there are no more immigrants left to bring in? I’ve noticed a lot of people seem to think of them as essentially an inexhaustible resource.
(Then again, they’d hardly be the first resource considered inexhaustible…)
https://www.audubon.org/news/apparently-magpies-and-crows-are-using-anti-bird-spikes-make-their-nests
A fun link on a (for me) dreary Good Friday
It seems to be the case that religions, particularly the more sacramental religions, are useful to the individual and beneficial for spiritual development, even if they are not absolutely true in every doctrinal detail. The Catholic or Orthodox Christian, for example, who reaches what comes next at the end of his life may be a bit surprised at the details, but he will be able to look back and see that all his prayers, liturgies, and icon veneration were a great help to him.
All that being said, what do you make of the exclusive statements about salvation and the awful threats of hellfire? If they are genuine, I suppose we all ought to make our way to the one, true, correct religion and stay there. But since the various religions rather unhelpfully cannot agree on which of them is correct, we have to make do the best we can. Do you think the “extra Ecclesiam nulla salus” statements and threats of a divine boot in the face forever are there for training the mind in some useful way, or are they tools of fear to keep the people in line?
Just some thoughts I’ve been pondering lately, and I know these open posts are a great place for discussion.
Thank you.
I wanted to thank JMG for answering, and Phutatorius and Mr Kemble for sharing their sources! As it turns out, I’m always baffled by the way in which observations that were commonplace in the past become somehow verboten. In this I’m referring to the clear consensus shown in The Invisible Rainbow that even very mild electric “fluid” had quite strong effects upon the human body, and that somehow this just got “forgotten” by overeager progress-cultists.
I will say, though, it does get tiring learning about the way in which so many things were taught or divulged was utterly wrong. Guess that comes with the “question everything” business!
JMG, big question time: can nature be worshipped as a deity? Is that what you do as a Druid? Thanks.
JMG,
Previously you said that the Centers (in the Five Rites) are “swirling patterns of astral substance in the astral body.” Are these swirling patterns the Vortices?
(If yes, are they always “lined up”? Or is getting them to align part of the outcome of doing the Rites?)
I also just obtained and read “The Book of Haatan”. Very fun. I’m looking forward to seeing how this series unfolds underlying occult teaching and practice, wrapped in the guise of fiction…
Robert Mathiesen,
While my guess is that the machine’s a fake, the issues you raise don’t sound particularly damning to my mind. There’s no reason he couldn’t have come up with the idea of an alphabet board and planchette, only to have it lost with the machine. As for the crucifix, many non-Catholic occultists have recognized that the crucifix is a more powerful symbol than the simple Latin cross — that may have been decisive for him despite any antipathy he had to the Catholic Church.
Mr Greer, you wrote:
“For what it’s worth, I think the European elites are going to be clobbered in the elections, since so few Europeans want a war with Russia”
Sure, but the “elites” know it as well as we do, and they have a few cards up their sleeves. Here in France we elect our members of the European Parliament next June, and opinion polls show that Macron’s party is going to get severely defeated by Marine Le Pen’s party. I think that’s why Macron is hyping the risk of war with Russia, in order to create again what got him re-elected in 2022: the nation instinctively supporting the chief of the State in time of crisis. Russia invaded Ukraine on the 24th of February, and the French presidential election took place in April. People were stunned by the war in Ukraine, which no one had expected, and turned to the President for leadership.
Macron is, in my opinion, a very cynical person without genuine empathy. He talks about sending ground troops to Russia, but it’s just hot air, unless he thinks that the Russians won’t dare killing French troops. Well, there are already several hundred French troops, undercover, in Russia (teaching Ukrainians how to use César cannons, for instance), and Piotr Tolstoi (the vice-president of the Russian parliament) said a few days ago to a French journalist that half of them had been killed already. There was no denial from the French government.
Last week I went to the pharmacy to buy some common, generic antibiotic for dental surgery I’ll have next week. The employee, a young woman, told me that there had been a shortage of that particular antibiotic for some time, and she didn’t know when they would be resupplied. I said, jocularly: “What! And we’re not even at war yet!”
I saw her shudder. She had listened to Macron’s speech the day before, and she was truly frightened. I reassured her the best I could: “We won’t send 15,000 ground troops to Russia because we don’t have them.” It seemed to work. I’m sure that there are millions like her in France, who are afraid that war is coming, and next June they will vote for the party in power, just like the Americans, who always re-elect a war president.
I found the antibiotic I needed in another pharmacy (“You are lucky, monsieur, for we’ve only a few boxes left!”). Incidentally, I’d never heard of pharmaceutical shortages in my life before a few years ago…
Over the past couple years I’ve been looking into Vedanta and New Thought. I’ve found the idea that consciousness is the primary reality compelling, although I think New Thought has closer to the right ideas about what to do about it (i.e. don’t try to escape into “pure non-manifest consciousness,” whatever that’s supposed to be like — at least have some fun with it first).
I’m wondering if anyone can recommend any New Thought authors who really get into the metaphysics behind their techniques, rather than downplaying them in the name of practicality or to gain wider acceptance of their ideas.
One of things that keeps me interested in Neville Goddard, possibly the most radical of the New Thought teachers, is that he readily discusses his (more than a little incoherent) metaphysical ideas and is blunt about asserting that consciousness is the only reality. Most New Thought authors just
(Amusingly, Neville and I hold exactly-opposing metaphysical views that largely work out the same thing in practice: he holds that creation is thoroughly complete — every possibility already actualized — and I hold that it’s radically incomplete — only determined as far it needs to be.)
@Cloven Kingdom
I’ve seen people defend Russia as this bastion of emerging Christianity and saying that certain statistics about Russia were just lies. What do you think?
From what I’ve read online, Russia is incredibly corrupt, an overwhelming number of people are alcoholics and drug addicts, many divorces per capita. How much of this is true?
Hi JMG,
I looked at the age pyramids of Iraq, Syria and Venezuela.
They have had lots of babies in recent years, which corresponds to their years of war / post war ,
and extreme hardships .
I am wondering if there are intense hardships for the populations in Western countries, and Eastern Asia in the future there may be another baby-boom?
The conditions of conception and growth for those babies are hard yet that seems to be a pattern
even if there were not many resources in those countries at the time.
Any thoughts on that?
@Aldarion #217:
Heh, I am sure I can sense the sarcasm dripping through my screen, off your comment.
I should add that, in case it isn’t clear – I would think it is clear, but you know – I wasn’t passing judgement* or saying that anything is wrong with marrying whoever you want. I just meant, that when I was young, I was taken aback to find that this was a social class expectation.
Anyhow, as for the financial stuff, you’re preaching to the choir over here, I’ve said this a thousand times. People have no idea, they think $300k a year sounds like a lot, but it goes away awful fast if you have fancy home, fancy cars, boat, luxury vacations, ski trips, swimming pool, horses, etc., etc.
And then what do you do when one day they come to you and say you can’t keep your $300k job unless you take a special medicine? Oh dear, this was not well thought out, at all.
*Actually there is something I pass judgement on, which is, the PMC’s fanatically rigid social class strictures.
Less of a question, more like two data points:
1. Here in Chicago, elections are shaping up in 2024 to be VERY different from 2016- and it’s all the fault of the elite immigration push. Chicago, characteristically, is furious. And *uncharacteristically*, united in a way I’ve never seen. Everyone – and I do mean everyone, every neighborhood, every ethnic group, every single profession except the most highly paid(and private-security-protected) PMC is absolutely livid at the poorly disguised plan to ruin our city by flooding the streets with the scum of the world. For the first time in my life, whites, blacks, the Polish, the Indians, Muslims, Puerto Ricans- even Mexicans!- all of them agree on one thing:
They are all voting for Donald Trump.
It took the Elites/PMC acting out in bald-faced detail every single accusation Trump leveled at them, but it happened.
One thing just twigged in memory from an earlier comment on this blog, regarding that “The Deep State is just like you and me!”: You said that the elites have lost control of the narrative and are letting their opponents define them. I can’t think of any other explanation for this immigration push. It’s political suicide- Everyone now hates them. Was just talking with a neighbor yesterday that we’re all certain the Mayor is being blackmailed, or something, because his career is already finished. And given how angry everyone is it’s not out of the question that he may be rather more personally finished if he doesn’t back off from this madness.
The conspiracy theories about how this is all some sort of hideously evil plan to overthrow the country/democracy and place us all under the thumb of immigrant thugs freshly joining the military makes no sense either, because another thing you said is also true: They are nowhere near smart enough or competent enough to pull that off.
Even the cheap labor element isn’t working- most of them are illiterate. They can’t work. They’re not even useful slaves. The crash in inner-city property values that you postulated, while a possible motive, doesn’t seem to be happening either- and if this won’t do it, nothing will short of a much more generally catastrophic crash.
The only explanation that I can think of is what you said in The King In Orange:
The Changer of Ways took their weapons, shoved them in unmentionable orifices, and said “Fine. That’s all you are.”
Since they clearly intend to use immigration as a weapon/tool *somehow*, it seems appropriate.
From a psychological standpoint, and to use the terms of Dion Fortune, they completely defined themselves in opposition to Trump. Trump being “anti-immigrant” they became “anti-anti-immigrant” and began insisting that immigration no matter what is unequivocally good all the time no matter the extent, because Trump said it was bad, full stop, that’s the end of it, SHUT UP WE KNOW BETTER THAN YOU. Defining themselves in opposition, becoming a block he can use to step on up to the presidency again.
That’s the only explanation I can think of that makes any any kind of sense.
Second data point: AI is already more expensive than hiring a human in one absolutely critical area. The world’s oldest profession.
I have more than a few SWer friends, and one thing that the AI brouhaha had everyone running scared about is that Ersatz E-Girls would run everyone out of business.
And it has already failed.
Mind blowingly, this is for a very simple reason: The AI Girlfriends are far, far more expensive than the average OnlyFans subscription.
For example one friend(let’s call her Scarlet) has a $6/month subscription, and makes a fair amount of money selling videos and custom content in addition, with the benefit of being a real living breathing human being whom you can actually talk to. The average AI girlfriends start at $25/month, and their custom videos and the like are similarly more expensive. And conversation is like pulling teeth.
I guess my point is that this is supposed to be the part of the TechBro business cycle where this is all heavily subsidized (the way Amazon and Uber crash prices when they enter a market), so if it’s *already* that expensive then they must have serious operating costs that they are keeping hidden.
Which *then* means that once the investor cash dries up and they are forced to raise prices, it’ll be something like $60 a month. Or more. Plus the in-app purchases!
At that point, if you can hire a real living breathing way-better-at-conversation human being to do something for 1/10th the price of the robot… Why wouldn’t you?
Tl;dr: this is quite possibly going to be a far more quickly self-terminating phenomenon than anyone in the mainstream currently realizes.
Hope these were enjoyed and thanks for this as always!
Matt
As a American whose ancestors came in the early 1600’s and were revolutionary war soldiers and cousins of John and Samuel Adams I am distressed by the refusal of our leadership to follow John Adam’s advice to “not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy” and other follies. More from Asia Times
https://asiatimes.com/2024/03/this-is-the-way-the-west-ends/
But every empire declines and dies. It’s like watching a train wreck, but unfortunately I am a passenger on the train.
@Augusto #80
If you can handle the heat and wild shifts in humidity, I recommend the NE side of San Antonio outside loop 410 or any of the small communities along I-35 between San Antonio and New Braunfels. You’ll have to research bus routes as they are few and far between. The bus is call VIA. https://www.viainfo.net/
If you decide to stay in western Washington I would recommend the city of Marysville. Marysville is host to Jennings Park, the nicest park north of Green lake, the town hosts many community events including the upcoming Strawberry Festival (https://www.facebook.com/maryfest.org/), and it sits just outside of the Sound Transit tax district. Sound Transit still serves Marysville and you can take a bus from Cedar and Grove Park & Ride straight to downtown Seattle. https://www.soundtransit.org/
@Jessica . . . It is worth paying attention to the actual process of nation formation because much trouble in the world arises from ignoring it.
Thanks for the history. What do you think will happen now that the land is rather fully occupied? Do you have any particular thoughts about South America? It seems strange to me that those countries have existed for such a long time, with no international (as opposed to civil) wars in, in at least, the last century+? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_South_America
Argentina and Chile, in particular, would seem to have been ripe for the resource-picking. What am I missing?
About Rbt. Kennedy II. I do plan to vote for him. I doubt he ever will become president. No, I do not believe that a protest vote is “wasting your vote”; au contraire, I would argue that tamely voting for whomever everyone else you know supports is wasteful. What I like about Kennedy is that he does have actual policy proposals for some of what ails us. Also he does focus on the shocking state of ill health of most Americans, AND, places blame squarely where it belongs, on our industrialized food system. For the record, I personally think more blame should go to food, you should excuse the expression, processors than to farmers.
I find it rather bleakly amusing that folks who voted for GWB, an alcoholic until about age 40, I believe, want to complain about Kennedy’s former drug habit. What I like about his campaign is that he draws attention to issues that others in politics, very much including both major contenders, studiously and deliberately ignore. What I don’t like is that he appears to have almost no political instincts. He is not HRC level clueless, but there have been some shockingly bad decisions, most notably his full throated support for Israel, which has not prevented him from being labelled anti-Semitic, a designation which, lately, I consider little more than a joke in bad taste.
He does highlight a complex of issues, such as anti-war,(in Europe at least), rebuilding infrastructure, regenerative farming, pharmaceutical company malfeasance, corporate capture of government agencies, gaining control of our borders–the USA either is or is not a sovereign nation–around which I believe that a new party can coalesce. And, I hope, his campaign can serve as notice that anyone hoping to fund a new party had better understand that those issues can no longer be ignored.
@ Michael #208 and #209
We’ll be taking the train or the subway (tube? underground?) as much as possible and walking the rest of the time.
As for our side trip to Cornwall, it looks like we can arrange with Unique Devon Tours to do the driving, thus saving us and the English countryside from disaster.
Yes, we’ve seen all the Joan Hickson and David Suchet films. In fact, we’ve watched and I’ve reviewed over 250 Agatha Christie films by now. The first 201 made up the book that got us invited to Torquay so I could speak about her! We’re currently slogging through the international films. Tonight (Friday, 29MAR2024) is the four episode conclusion to Ms. Ma: Nemesis, a 32-episode Korean drama combining several Miss Marple novels in one.
We are so looking forward to this once-in-a-lifetime trip.
Deathcap, I’ll have to check with my tech guy.
Aldarion, it’s a fine novel. I wish he’d done more adult fiction.
DFC, yep. Nicely summarized.
Zarcayce, my response to prophecies like these is always, “Well, let’s see what happens.”
Chuaquin, granted. The transition to pit toilets and composting toilets will have to wait until things get bad enough that the sort of moronic pride you witnessed has become a disposable luxury.
Robert, thanks for this!
Brendhelm, I know. I see the current rush by elite-supported NGOs to maximize illegal immigration as a frantic last-ditch effort to stave off a financial catastrophe. Like so many people these days, they don’t have the luxury of long-term thinking — it’s purely a matter of keeping things from falling apart right now.
Justin, I saw that, and laughed good and hard. Good for the crows and magpies.
Christopher, claims like those are a particular blemish of the Abrahamic faiths. They’re partly tools for keeping people in line and partly the normal result of people who have trouble believing the more improbable elements in their credos furiously demanding that everyone else believe in them too, to bolster their own belief.
Furnax, good. Once you start asking questions like that, a lot of unexpected doors open.
Bruno, lots of people do, including some Druids. That’s not my particular take, but it’s a valid one.
Random, yes, and that’s part of the outcome.
Ridgely, delighted to hear it. I’m having enormous fun with the series — #4 is now past the halfway point, and I have the next two already outlined…
Horzabky, well, we’ll see. The old tricks don’t always work, especially if they’re done in a sufficiently tone-deaf manner.
Slithy, well, what do you think of William Walker Atkinson? He’s my go-to New Thought author and has quite a bit of metaphysical material.
Tony, oh, there will be ups and downs as we go into population contraction, and some baby boomlets are likely. The overall curve will go down, though, because of the mismatch between population and resources.
Matthew, I’d wondered if something like what you’re seeing in Chicago might be taking shape. Still, we’ll see. As for the AI business, I’m glad to hear it; I don’t have any personal contact with the sex trade, but I have nothing against it, and anything that allows people to make a living providing a service that others want to pay for strikes me as a good thing.
BeardTree, I get that. I’ve been watching the train heading into the wreck for more than forty years now.
Mary, voting for a third party candidate is anything but wasting your vote; it’s one of the ways that ordinary citizens can pressure the big parties. If enough people vote for a third party candidate, one or both of the big parties panic and begin reshaping their policies accordingly.
Matthew #223 says:
1. Here in Chicago, elections are shaping up in 2024 to be VERY different from 2016
Well, that’s encouraging! I was afraid Biden would be swapped out, in favor of someone else, before 2024, in the interest of “plausible deniability”!
So have people finally learned, do you think? (Learning is behavior change, and — in this case — I mean behavior change which spans more than one candidate and more than one election cycle.)
Did you happen to catch the RFK Jr. introduction of his V.P. pick? https://www.kennedy24.com/nicole-shanahan-speech. My first thought was that I would have preferred he pick someone less “left wing”. But I am thinking she, with her nervousness, authenticity, and more “progressive” bent, counterbalances him positively. I am thinking she — rags to riches and all — makes Kennedy/Shanahan an authentic alternative to those who still identify as “Democrat”. I think her speeches will improve. And I am optimistic she really will make a difference in getting on all 50 state ballots; notwithstanding DemonRat “Lawfare” efforts.
Compare RFK to Biden; Compare Nicole Shanahan to Kamala Harris. This is getting interesting.
JMG, the Kybalion guy? Strangely enough I was thinking as I wrote the comment that I needed to reread that book. I’ll definitely be doing that as well as reading his more explicitly New Thought works.
Can you recommend a book other than the Kybalion that delves heavily into the more philosophical/metaphysical themes?
Thanks for the recommendation!
Hi JMG,
Not sure if you heard, but Chris Martenson pulled up one of your Ecosophia.net essays, read a bit and praised your writing on one of his YT videos in the last month or so. Also, Nate Hagens mentioned you twice in the last couple months on two of his YT videos. Seems your ideas are continuing to spread and bubble up. Perhaps a “Heh, heh, heh” is in order? 🙂
I know you were on the peak oil circuit with Chris and expect you met Nate there as well.
Two other odd bits. Nate came back from a couple weeks or so staying with friends in India about a month ago. He mentioned that he wanted to focus more on building community in his upcoming videos. Perhaps it’s just me, but he seemed to have a touch more deer-in-the-headlights look that he sometimes gets. I wonder if he may have bumped up against part of the unseen in India in a way that was not easily brushed off and did not fit within his scientific world view.
Second, just finished listening to Chris’ “Peak Prosperity Podcast – America’s Burning Edge with Ann Vandersteel” on YT. His guest is a Christian and made some clear statements in that regard near the end of the video. Chris mentioned that he just finished reading the bible for the first time. They made some Christian conversation, which I was not expecting from Chris.
Seems there are things afoot and moving.
Best,
_grey_
Hi JMG,
Which planet should I invoke for help finding my first job? And what color candle should use?
Thank you!
I just want to interject against an earlier point made about the so-called unavoidable “Muslim takeover” of Europe. If we are moving towards a more localized economy centered around agriculture and whatever raw materials the surrounding lands provide, it seems to me that a lot of these migrants are in a much worse place than many white Europeans. There is a relatively small “model minority,” it seems to me, of (mostly rural) Westerners who are already more self-reliant than the contemporary average demographic, and this group has better conditions for survival in a “post-progress” reality. People of Muslim migrant background seem, in a way, to have ironically a strong belief in the West’s economic progress. They are usually in occupations or on welfare dependent on the type of globalized service economy which is ultimately doomed. Also, just looking at the drop of fertility globally, in Muslim countries as well, these groups could probably encounter an equally significant drop in the fertility rates when opportunities dry up. I fail to see many having the necessary skills or motivation to pick up a shovel and start growing peas and rye in the Scandinavian hinterlands or the like once things turn worse.
I also think compared to Germanic groups, etc., who took over after the Roman Empire’s decline, they don’t have the skills that can muscle the same people who control the remaining resources to do their bidding. The socially/economically powerful individuals among this Muslim population, I also perceive to have strong ties to their home countries, like vacation houses, family, etc. Many seem to intend to return there when the standard of living drops, and are already doing that or turning to other more economically feasible places. I do agree, however, that we’re probably gonna see an ethnically divided Europe, which will mirror racially places like South America or in terms of cultural/religious diversity, the Middle East.
My last point in terms of the future: wouldn’t it be possible for a new, more cohesive cultural/religious identity to emerge from the varying new spiritual beliefs and ideologies in the near future? A more ecological mindset, possible continuation of ethnonationalist beliefs and whatever is left over by the “Western tradition,” together with emerging neopagan and new age spiritualism, could possibly make for a new religious movement that will fuel new vitality into surviving groups who adapt to this new reality.
>If enough people vote for a third party candidate, one or both of the big parties panic and begin reshaping their policies accordingly
Also keep in mind the Rs and the Ds NEED each other. If one of them goes, so does the other. So pick the one that looks like it’s limping and give it a good old third party kick. At this point there’s no real difference between the two. Neither will ever represent enough of the interests of anyone on this board to matter, that’s for sure.
“Jessica, granted, but that’s irrelevant for the future. What matters is what popular opinion in Mexico says, and based on what I’ve been told, they read the situation very differently.”
You seem to be saying that the opinions of over 100 million Mexicans are more powerful than my “facts”. I agree 100%.
Bofur @206
I guess to me, it makes sense for anyone to go wherever or stay wherever they want so long as they make a warriors decision. Is this a hill I am willing to die on, and very likely will., regardless of whether they are 20 or 70. The thing I find annoying is that so few of them are prepared to accept responsibility for their decisions. and whine as soon as reality kicks in, just as they did with leaving their previous place..
I often find myself reminding people” This is not the dress rehearsal; it is the show”
Stephen
>I’ve spent a fair amount of time in New Mexico, mostly ABQ (Albuquerque), Santa Fe, and Taos
Nobody ever talks about Roswell. Or Dulce.
>if Russia wins in Ukraine, it’s Europe that will end up isolated, impoverished, and humiliated
I’d say there might be a new Iron Curtain by mid-century. But instead of being there to keep the people of Russia in, it’ll be there to keep the people of Europe out, who will probably be part of something either like the Ottoman Empire or a Saudi Arabian Caliphate.
But who knows what the future really holds?
The US gov’t has loaned money to restart a nuclear power plant in Michigan (https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/historic-reversal-us-restart-shut-down-nuclear-power-plant-first-time-ever).
The tone of the article is funny because it assumes “green” environmental types will be up in arms, but I thought most “greens” are for nuclear power now, perhaps knowing that a future of endless growth can’t be powered by renewables alone.
The article is also funny because it argues that it’s about time the nuclear age got restarted in the US again. The pattern I’m seeing is one of desperation: going back to old techs (fracking, nuclear, etc.) in the hopes that it will deliver us from our own bad choices.
It’s funny in a sad way watching modern society flail about for something, ANYTHING, that will keep business as usual going for just a little while longer.
Gnat #239
Thank you.
I haven’t read as much about South American history as about other areas and have only been to Brazil. But why should that stop me? 🙂
The one thing that I have consistently read is that much of the continent is naturally divided up. Not many nice long navigable rivers. Big mountains. For example, Chile and Argentina are mostly separated along most of their impressively long border by quite high mountains. No big religious or linguistic differences either. And leftists have complained that the continent was developed to export resources to the outside, so the transportation links most lead out, not within the continent. One obvious exception would be the Rio de la Plata and that is precisely where South America’s most destructive war took place.
So conflict in South America seems to occur mostly within nations, not between them, right? Sendero Luminoso in Peru, back and forth in Bolivia, decades of civil war in Columbia, military coups and murderous dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Even Uruguay got into the act briefly. Fascinating how Ecuador went from leftist (even helping Assange) and a peaceful place where 1st worlders retired to rightist and massively crime ridden in just a few years.
The biggest area that is not divided up by nature would be the Amazon and the regions to its south, but that is all within Brazil.
I have no idea of the odds of it happening, but if there were going to be a war in South America, the obvious sides would be Columbia (on behalf of the US) vs. Venezuela or British Guyana (with lots of outside help, especially the US, think Ukraine) vs. Venezuela because of the resources recently discovered in a sparsely inhabited part of Guyana over which there has been a long-standing boundary dispute even before anyone knew that there was oil there. Bolivia and Peru both hold a grudge against Chile, so that would be an obvious place for a war to happen if the general climate became more cantankerous.
One could argue that one of the reasons for the absence of wars is that the continent has been dominated by one outside power bloc (UK transitioning into US), not a site of contestation for different blocs. (Cuba being the obvious exception.)
As the US declines and China rises, that might change.
Going farther back in time, it probably helps that the colonial powers were declining powers (after the initial phase). If it had been France and England instead of Spain and Portugal, they probably would have torn the place apart fighting each other. After all, the Netherlands seized and held a chunk of Brazil for a couple of decades when it was a rising power.
Argentina is a sad case. Thanks to the beef boom in the late 1800s and the near absence of an indigenous population or former slave population to use as super-cheap labor, it had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world around 1900 and tried to industrialize and nearly made it. Bad luck that they bet on open trade in the 1930s when everyone else was closing up, then closed up after WW2 when open trade was the better strategy. Not sure Argentina was ever financially sovereign either. A failed nearly 1st world state (Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina) may provide some lessons for first world countries in decline about what to avoid.
I would wish them better.
My god. Offering me the chance to pontificate is like Frodo offering Galadriel the One Ring. Just that I don’t have wisdom accumulated from 10,000 years of learning. I hope this was useful.
@B #180
One of the reasons why I was considering Pennsylvania or somewhere in the East Coast more generally is because of it’s history. Lancaster looks beautiful! Thank you so much for your availability, I have saved your email and if I go to PA I’ll let you know. I know that NYC is probably the last place that would be good for me to move to, many people seem a little crazy there, but as a mexican NYC has always been one of those places that sound fancy. I also like big cities for wandering (just not for living), so many things happening and odd corners to peak around. And of course, it has been the center place of many things historically so being relatively close to those places is a plus. The Institute for Hermetic Studies is also in PA! As for Puerto Ricans, would you believe me if I say I don’t know any yet? As for Amtrak, I’ve been patiently waiting to see how long it is going to take for Mexico to catch up, we recently had a plan for re railing the whole country after the Tren Maya (ecologically disastrous unfortunately) started operations, given that Porfirio Diaz basically built rails all around the country in his time.
@Jeff #168
Going at this point is just a matter of time and organization skills so I’ll ping you! I just checked and I do still have your number, so thank you!
I understood you were not referring to a short term timescale but considering it has a very big coast with the Gulf of Mexico, it does make a lot of sense. I am happy to see you have taken JMG’s advice of considering those things for the near and far future, you seem to know your surrounding’s geography well. Since my life has been very hectic since I graduated, I really haven’t had the mindset to consider those things yet with the exception of water resources. I hope Claudia Sheinbaum, or whoever gets elected as the next mexican president, starts to consider those things, because mexico is heavily unprepared, for as much as ritual offerings to Tlaloc, the rain god, often work (really).
@Misty Friday #238
Thank you! I’ve heard of Marysville but only in passing. I just checked and it is only an hour long bus ride so I will actually see if I can check it out this weekend now that the weather is nice. Thanks for the tips about San Antonio, my research LibreOffice document just got a few items to expand on.
“My answer is that few people nowadays know how to dig/make a toilet without flushing water. And even fewer would like to use them.”
I’ve noticed that national forest campgrounds are less crowded than expected, and that’s probably part of it. The pit toilets are not composting, but there is no water in most of the campgrounds. Add to that most of them are out of cell phone range and the younger crowd just isn’t interested.
Slithy, that’s the one. He was far and away the most influential New Thought author in America for a decade on either side of 1910. The Kybalion’s his most famous work, but he wrote scores of others. Here are 22 available for free download, including some of his best New Thought titles:
https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/william-walker-atkinson-books.html
And here’s literally everything the man wrote, 6728 pages of it:
https://archive.org/details/the-complete-works-of-william-walker-atkinson
The Law of the New Thought, The Arcane Teachings and Your Mind and How to Use It might be particularly up your alley.
Grey, interesting. Well, if either of them wants me on their podcast, they know how to find me!
Savannah, Mercury’s your friend for this. The candle should be orange; burn it on a Wednesday during the hour of Mercury.
Pripp, well, we’ll see. It’s not the current immigrants but their grandchildren who are the ones who matter for the longer term. As for the future cultural/religious identity, sure, and something of the sort will doubtless come into being — that’s typical during the descent into a dark age.
Other Owen, bingo. Frighten one, you frighten them both.
Jessica, that is to say, your interpretation of the inkblot patterns of history is less influential than the rather different interpretation of those hundred million Mexicans. Yes, exactly.
Other Owen, I don’t claim to know for sure, but the winds are certainly blowing a particular direction.
Tim, exactly. We’ve run out of future, so the past is the one resource that remains.
Siliconguy, economic contraction could also be involved there; these days, camping isn’t cheap.
@Slithy Toves (#239) wrote:
“There’s no reason he couldn’t have come up with the idea of an alphabet board and planchette, only to have it lost with the machine. As for the crucifix, many non-Catholic occultists have recognized that the crucifix is a more powerful symbol than the simple Latin cross — that may have been decisive for him despite any antipathy he had to the Catholic Church.”
Your objection is certainly valid if by “he” you are thinking of any old random occultist at some not-tightly-defined time and place. But John Murray Spear was not “any old random occultist,” but a man with quite strongly held uncommon views; and he built his machine at a very specific time and place, in the midst of passionately fought controversies that have long been forgotten by almost everyone.
Do you know about the history of Universalism in the United States? It began as a full-throated rebellion not just against Roman Catholic Christianity, but against each and every sort of traditional Western Christianity (including Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, etc. etc., as well as Catholics), and it was still operating in that mode in Spear’s day. A Universalist minister could no more have used a Catholic crucifix as he worked toward some worthy goal than he could have used an image of Satan. And Spiritualism, though less inflexible, was hardly more friendly toward traditional Christianity in any of its forms — especially during its first few decades, when Spear was building his machine.
As for further specifics, the planchette in the drawer has the 20th-century narrow form, not the broader form of the 1800s.
It all comes down in the end to specific details of the newly-discovered contraption, not general possibilities. Its faker was not all that knowledgeable about Spear’s own times.
I have a few thoughts on RFK Jr’s campaign considering his recent choice of Nicole Shanahan for VP.
RFK Jr’s choice of Shanahan has brought much scorn from the populist right, but with Trump as the Republican nominee few of them would have voted for RFK Jr anyway. If the Republican nominee was an establishment figure, RFK Jr might have more success with the populist right presenting himself as the only real anti-establishment choice, but few of Trump’s base would switch to RFK Jr even if he had picked a more right leaning VP. He has gotten some positive attention from the right in recent years due to his stance against the covid narrative and against cancel culture and many of the excesses of the authoritarian left, but I’d say his popularity among the right is really more of a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” phenomenon. RFK Jr is a liberal, just more of an old school one who is still skeptical of the establishment rather than turning into a woke authoritarian. That limits how many votes he’ll pick up from the right.
Shanahan, similar to RFK Jr himself, comes from a liberal Democratic background but has parted from them in recent years. I don’t believe some of the assertions from the right that Shanahan is an establishment plant. The actions of the Democrats have turned more and more against them in recent years. Donald Trump was a Democrat for most of his life too. Shanahan’s walkaway moment has just been more recent. Selecting Shanahan shows to me that RFK Jr’s main target audience is others like him from leftist or centrist backgrounds that have been disillusioned by the way the Democratic party has turned in recent years. He’s also getting a certain amount of following from those formerly politically apathetic. I follow the RFKJrForPresident subreddit, and have seen several comments from people mostly in their 20s who’ve never voted before because they’ve never thought it would make a difference but are planning to vote for RFK Jr. The choice of Shanahan also shows a desire to reach out to younger voters.
I think there’s a good chance that he will make increasing inroads among these demographics. So many who vote Democratic these days only do so out of fear that if they don’t, the far right will take over. There are out there who lean left and have only heard the mainstream narrative that RFK Jr is a crazy right wing conspiracy theorist, but if they actually get a chance to hear him speak or read what his positions on issues actually are, will realize he’s not what the media says at all and may be worth voting for. Many of RFK’s biggest supporters, including Shanahan herself, have followed this pattern.
Covid and the vaccines aren’t talked about much anymore and RFK Jr has so far focused on other issue in his campaign, but quiet doubts of former true believers could come into the open if his campaign makes inroads on the left. On a practical level, Shanahan’s money will help the campaign to counter the propaganda of the mainstream narrative. The populist right tends to already know more about Kennedy’s actual positions on issues relative to the left which at this point mostly believes the propaganda, but that means there’s more potential to reach out to leftists who are ignorant of Kennedy’s actual views.
I’ll still say that I doubt he’ll win this election, but I think he has a good chance of bringing a center/left populist movement into American politics. He originally was running as a Democrat with the goal of remaking the Democratic Party as Trump had with the Republican Party, but the Democratic Party wouldn’t let that happen so he’s had to chip at it from the outside. Trump will most likely win this year, and if Biden and the Democrats lose badly enough it’s possible that either the Democrats decide to include more of RFK Jr’s populist platform, or if they’re too stubborn, they could collapse entirely and be replaced by RFK Jr’s movement.
I believe we’re starting to see decline of the woke scene after it’s peaking in 2020 and 2021. People have falsely called this before, I remember some thinking it would end with Trump’s election in 2016 and instead it just kept getting bigger, but I think there’s a key difference this time, which is that in 2016 the woke were mainly dealing with outside pressure while now it’s starting to implode from within, as Matthew (post #236) describes one of the ways it’s doing so through the migrant crisis it’s brought on. San Francisco’s recent moves to get tougher on crime are another example of this. I suspect that the detrans movement will have the same effect on the trans ideology within the next few years. The decline of woke-ism will leave a vacuum which a new populist movement could take advantage of.
For myself, the foremost reason that I’ve been enthusiastic about the Kennedy campaign since the beginning is because he’s serious about the modern world’s health crisis, enough to have spent a good chunk of his life working on it, and is willing to consider vaccines and EMFs as a contributing factors, which many others concerned about environmental health won’t touch. Whether or not he would be able to improve our health situation significantly as president, his campaign is bringing attention to issues that have been largely ignored for too long. I also agree with a good chunk of his other positions, and for the majority of those I disagree with, neither Biden nor Trump would be any better, so that makes the choice easy for me.
The young folks I know dont mind lack of ammenities. My youngest and a friend are camping this rainy weekend in National Forest that doesnt even have a pit toilet and picnic table, everything was full. But, yes, that did mean they picked up a folding table and a few things at the store before going, so yes, you do need gear. that is because it was for 3 nights. That one and friends will just park and sleep in general on trips, like pull over in Nevada at some national Forest and sleep in the car in the snow, then continue on the trip next day. Rough camping in National forests is alot cheaper than California state park fees of $35/night, plus reservation fee, plus extra car fee per night, plus you have to pay for a shower.
Of course the young lady at the market I saw 2 weeks ago with the 4 inch nails, no, those young people I dont even understand how they get thru life in general without roughing it.
There’s a great many puzzlers in today’s world. I wish I had someone to explain things to me, slowly.
One of them is how the Russians have as yet failed to finish up the war against Ukraine. Wouldn’t a fast, decisive, overwhelming thrashing have been a gigantic propaganda coup? Had they not heard of Bltzkrieg, the combined arms surprise attack? They must have, Or maybe they teach less history over in those parts than they do over here in these parts.
I keep reading about the massive Russian superiority in war production ie they were apparently not boneheaded enough to offshore their heavy industry. And don’t the Russians outnumber the Ukrainians at least three to one? Maybe the duration of this war points to the inadequacy of a three to one numerical advantage of attackers over defenders.
Or maybe numbers aren’t the deciding factor. Here you have two countries whose fighting age men apparently have no great enthusiasm for dying for either, both of them howling kleptocracies, the larger of which happens to have oil.
So you wonder, if collective self-belief and self-confidence are force multipliers, what is it when the opposite is true? Not that I blame them. Would I want to suffer death or dismemberment for Wall Street?
Anyway, it’s not just the Russians that make me wonder. Do you think that American elites are imbeciles? I read a few times these last few weeks that Macron doubled down on the idiocy of sending troops to help Ukraine.
Would the heroically tailored Macron lead them? Does he have Napoleonic delusions? Or maybe he’s expecting the indomitably coiffed Ursula von der Leyen to do the job. I know, for one thing she’s Prez of the European Commission and besides, the Germans said nein, nein, nein, no way no how.
No matter, never say never. The Germans, after all, got sucked into giving up the mighty DMark. If they were dumb enough to do that, maybe they’re dumb enough again to go to war against Russia.
Hello Mr. Greer,
I would like to ask you some questions about your views of reincarnation.
First, do souls generally stick with one life form for a while or jump around? For example, is it common for a soul to move from bear to lion to zebra and so on, or do you usually pick a species and stick with it until you have learned what that species has to offer?
Second, to what extent does your final moments affect your afterlife versus the summary of your life? So suppose you lived a terrible life and turned it around at the end Ebenezer Scrooge style. Does Scrooge’s afterlife get heavily influenced by his final years or does every moment play an equal role in deciding his after death state?
Finally, do you think we have an idea of what comes after a person finishes their human incarnations or is that literally incompressible?
Thank you for your time!
Europe’s Muslims seem to be in a precarious position to me. Like the Jews of old Europe they live in the closed off Magian urban style which makes them a very easy target of Pogroms which I gather will come back into being as times get worse and worse and scapegoats are looked for. They are far and away still a very small minority at present and could very easily be targeted for violence or even deportation .
@Bofur
Trust me, us mexicans are sick of people from the first world countries looking for an escape to their lives, a way to coast forever and the misery industrial societies create as much as people from first world countries are sick of immigrants coming to their countries for money and offering cheap labor. Personally, what really, really, REALLY, annoys me is when they try to make our country a fantasy version of their own, without even taking the care of learning the language or trying to learn our customs. Just like a few days ago when they were complaining about loud music on the beach. What did we do? Hundreds of musicians went and played very loud music in front of their hotels 🙂 I also made the mistake of inviting an american friend to a small town close to where I grew up, only to be embarrassed when she kept constantly raising her voice in english to the store clerk. As cruel as it may sound, when she got Moctezuma’s revenge (that’s what we call when foreigners can’t get out of the bathroom because they are not used to the food and water) I chuckled to the realization there is no way most foreigners can survive there without being close to a hospital. She had to be put on an IV… My only consolation really is that now moving to Mexico for foreigners is really expensive in terms of taxation, alas, I don’t know how those are enforced.
Just a quick update on my pawpaw venture. One of each of the named varieties is showing green buds! The 4th one, the repeat that’s a little farther out into the front yard than maybe I was happy with anyway, doesn’t look as lively. Honestly, after SLClaire’s mention of grafted trees not being so reliable, I’ll take it. It’s a promising start, if nothing else. And speaks highly of my friend’s grafting skills.
Also got a cluster of banana trees transplanted on Wednesday, dug up from the neighbor’s clump. 3rd quarter Moon in Scorpio, the genitals, seemed like the perfect planting window for bananas! 😉 She said “don’t bother fertilizing them, just water the shale out of ’em!” I put them right below our compost operation, and the soil was lovely, full of worms. Watered them in with creek water. I have a feeling they will do really well there. In our climate bananas die back to the ground every winter, but I have actually seen fruit bunches on hers, when we have long warm summers.
The new apricot out back is a climate hedge in the other direction.. Waiting for the Asian pear to arrive, to plant in the same hole as the Euro pear I picked up locally. I thought we might try twisting their long slender trunks together.
Blueberries, red raspberries, and blackberries are loaded with blossoms; fig is leafing out; rhubarb, comfrey, and nettles coming on strong. Thinking about adding an asparagus patch.
My son and I found a few morels Thursday afternoon, and a black bear den…and watched a couple of very colorful rainbow trout doing the Spring thing. Good day. Good week!
Hi JMG,
No doubt you’re currently putting the finishing touches to your delineation of the upcoming solar eclipse. I was looking at the chart for The Netherlands where I live and noticed that the eclipse occurs closer to the cusp of the 7th house than it does for London. I then looked at Brussels, the nominal capital of the EU, and saw that it’s just into the 7th house, but only 11 minutes from the cusp. I think that that could be as strong an indication of the eclipsing of Western Europe’s influence in the world as you could possibly imagine. Also, seeing as the 7th is in Aries, Mars is afflicted by Saturn and the Moon rules the 10th house, war looks to me like a distinct possibility. Your mileage may vary, and I sincerely hope it does!
Mr Kemble (#159 or thereabouts) linked to the site belonging to Randy Lee “The Mito Man” whose stuff I have enjoyed reading before, and I was very glad to be reminded of him.
But if you click on the bare .com link, all you get is a “coming soon” banner with no links IN to the actual site – it looks like a dead site. I really wanted to reread some of the articles there, so I pootled around and eventually came up with a full link to the book page that works – https://themitoman.com/the-mitochondriac-manifesto-the-book/ From that link the rest of the site including articles and posts, can be viewed.
@Beardtree re: “https://asiatimes.com/2024/03/this-is-the-way-the-west-ends/
“This is the way the West ends..
Not with a bang, but a whimper.”
Hey JMG
Yeah, I’m afraid I do have a habit of finding things no one else cares for. It’s something of an entertainment to my friends and occasional annoyance to my family.
You would probably be interested in many of the things DaVinci drew and occasionally created, bearing in mind that there’s some question as to how much of what he recorded was completely invented by him or copied from others. Apart from his famous and well known flying machines, human powered tank and automata he described a rapid-fire crossbow that used a built-in latchet system, various novel string and wind instruments, a swing-bridge, building machines such as cranes, a steam-cannon, an adding-machine, a semi-automatic file-cutting machine, as well as his many famous notes on painting and optics which have been compiled into a artists instruction manual.
I could easily see many of his ideas being recreated in the de-industrial future, and I hope that they will.
Thank you, JMG! I forgot one part of my question about which planet to invoke – since the answer is Mercury, what is the number of times to perform the invoking? And what is the source of those numbers?
Savannah
Hi John Michael,
Ah, many thanks for the confirmation of your process there. And many times I’ve been faced with a lack of information, yet all the same had to plot a course into an uncertain future. It’s hard to know, but I do wonder how widely intuition gets used in our society. Has your training ever touched upon this subject? I’d imagine that in some ways it is tied up with exercising free will, and also the murky energies of assistance and/or guidance. Hmm. Dunno. I could understand how disregarding such nagging thoughts could stifle that facility and build internal pressure in a person.
Cheers
Chris
Mr. Greer,
In your opinion, should I expect for urban areas in the US, Europe and Japan to still have electricity by the mid 2040s?
Will major banks from the West still hold by 2040s? When do you expect the big players in banking to completely die?
Thank you in advance for the response!
I have to hand it to the Americans: whatever happens, they can come up with a conspiracy theory to explain it. In the case of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, the alleged small explosions going off simultaneously with the collapse have triggered the usual crop of conspiracies. But seriously, if a support gets knocked out, “this sucker will go down”, to quote an ex-president. Explosives add about as much as a firecracker when you have an atom bomb.
The FSK bridge is a very efficient structure from an engineering point of view. You are getting the maximum bridge for the minimum amount of steel and concrete with that particular design. Every part is doing its bit; which means there is no spare capacity to take an unexpected load so it all fails at once.
Personally, I think the Dali’s crash was an unplanned accident. But I do have a conspiracy theory as backup. It’s a case of “who benefits?”
The shipping traffic that used to go through Baltimore must now go through nearby ports, and use their labor and transport contractors. So they would be Suspect No 1.
Then the bridge will need to be replaced. It will almost certainly be a cable stayed bridge, an appropriate design for an over-water bridge. The deck units can be prefabricated on shore and floated out to be hoisted into place with the minimum of disruption to shipping traffic. And it just so happens that a very similar bridge was recently replaced with a cable stayed bridge in Long Beach. The designers and contractors for the replacement bridge would be Suspect No 2.
Long Beach International Gateway replaces Gerald Desmond Bridge, 2020
>watching modern society flail about for something, ANYTHING, that will keep business as usual going for just a little while longer
They’ve been doing this for *checks notes* about 2 decades now. The problem they are in (well we too, we’re involuntarily along for this ride in this clown car) is they are running out of ways to defer and extend. And if you can’t extend, then you can’t pretend. And then everything gets depressingly real.
>Would the heroically tailored Macron lead them? Does he have Napoleonic delusions?
No, he’s scared because his party is very unpopular and he’s hoping to get his war on so that he can remain in power. Basically, he lives on Three Week Island and he’s just doing whatever looks appealing in the short term.
@smith: giving up the DM was quite explicitly the price for reunification. Other than that, yes, I can’t disagree.
@jessica: the French also tried twice to take part of what is now Brazil, once in Rio de Janeiro and once in Maranhão. You probably know that, but I wanted to mention it. They have a crush on Brazil too the present day…
Many Brazilians credit (or blame) the royal family due keeping the country together after insistence.
Kashtan, some people on the right are now saying that RFK Jr. and Trump must be in cahoots, because RFK Jr.’s choice of a running mate guarantees that he’ll take no votes away from Trump and many votes away from Biden. As for the broader hope of a left-center populism, I think that’s almost certainly going to emerge, and fast, once the managerial elite loses its grip on power; at that point a populist takeover of the Democratic Party will be a very likely turn of events.
Smith, blitzkrieg passed its pull date almost two decades ago. I’ve discussed that in two posts:
https://www.ecosophia.net/notes-on-stormtrooper-syndrome/
https://www.ecosophia.net/deindustrial-warfare-a-first-reconaissance/
The short form is that the Russians are handling a very difficult situation in a very competent and utterly Russian fashion, and focusing with laser intensity on the kind of battles they know they can win. As for the leaders of the notional West, as I’ve noted already, I see their war fever as a sign of utter desperation: they thought they were about to win everything, and now they’re about to lose everything. Impending doom will get extreme reactions from a lot of people.
Stephen, (1) it varies depending on the specific needs of the soul. Each soul is unique, and developing its potentials can take a soul on any number of paths. (2) It has some effect, since the state of consciousness you’re in before you die is the state you’re in when you enter the afterlife, but you’re going to have to deal with everything you’ve done in an incarnation during the after-death state; if you spend most of your life in a low and relatively brutal state, all those experiences will have to be reviewed and processed, and you do that in a level of the astral plane that corresponds to the state of consciousness you were in: that’s the source of beliefs in hell. (Equally, the higher and more loving your state, the more pleasant the review of those parts of your life will be: that’s the source of beliefs in heaven.) (3) Not quite incomprehensible. Just as our minds in incarnation assemble the world of our experience from our perceptions of the material plane, the minds of those who have passed beyond matter do the same thing from their perceptions of the etheric plane: thus things seem almost as solid there as here, and even more vividly real. The chief differences are that the interruption of death is no longer necessary, you have the memory of all your incarnations to draw on, and being without “this muddy vesture of decay” allows a much clearer and richer perception of the cosmos. The work of learning and growing goes on.
PumpkinScone, there were pogroms against Germanic barbarians in late Roman Europe, too…
Grover, glad to hear it.
Hereward, the London chart is ominous, and my delineation (which is about to be posted) talks about a serious risk of war. Interestingly, the US chart doesn’t include that feature, so it looks as though Europe is on its own at this point.
J.L.Mc12, yes, you do seem to have a talent for that! It’s a worthwhile talent and deserves to be cultivated. (And no, I haven’t forgotten about Solresol — it’s moving up the stack.)
Savannah, eight times. Each of the old planets is assigned a number in occult tradition: Saturn is 3, Jupiter 4, Mars 5, the Sun 6, Venus 7, Mercury 8, and the Moon 9. I don’t happen to know the original source but it may well go back to the Babylonians.
Chris, the whole reason that occultists are taught to practice divination is as a way of training the intution. Once you’re good at intuiting the meaning of a random selection of cards, or what have you, intuiting the meaning of seemingly random events in everyday life isn’t hard.
Rafael, it’s hard to say. Predicting a date for this or that milestone in decline is among the more difficult tasks I face, and I don’t usually attempt it.
Martin, ha! Nice.
Other Owen, yep. But if I’d predicted in 2006, when I began blogging, that we’d be in our current situation in 2024, I’d have been assailed by a great many people as a doom-obsessed fanatic.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110623202324/http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/johnmurrayspear.html
More info on Spear at the link
Quite interesting. More to him then the machine!
There’s one particular partner exercise in the meditation retreat I wanted to share, very curious:
For 5 minutes you sit facing the other, feeling into each others aura (but don’t be intrusive)
Then for 5 minutes, look each other into the eye.
Then hug, for a longer time.
This one was very interesting, and naturally very different with each participant. My experiences were these:
– The young woman (mid twenties about), who complained about her hard time after the separation from her boyfriend before
Her aura felt like cutting knives into mine. When we opened our eyes, there was distrust in her eyes in the beginning, but that softened up. Hugging was intense and friendly
– The mid thirties crazy hippie woman from russia
Her aura drew energy from mine when I wasn’t taking care. Interesting exchange of glances, friendly
– The only other male, about in his mid twenties. I noticed he seemed to feel competitive against me before, though I myself harbored no such feeling.
Im in my mid thirties and maybe part to my mystical interests, my competitive ego has diminished already.
The exchange of glances was distrustful on his side in the beginning, but soon turned to trust. Friendly hugging. He was much more friendly to me thereafter.
– The end of forties friendly and wise yoga teacher from the Netherlands
Her aura was more powerful as I expected. Exchange of glances with mutual trust.
– The polish woman in her mid forties living in London. We had talked before while I brought her and others in my carto the mountains, her sitting besides me. We both had experiences with black magic, insecurity, drugs and malevolent energies.
– Her aura felt a lot similar to mine, and we ware in general very similar souls. When looking into each others eyes, we could only laugh the whole time. We had talked through both of our darkness already, so being serious felt like something unnecessary.
– The japanese woman living in Austria in her mid forties, apparently with a history of abuse as a child
She was the most distanced and wary one, maybe due to her culture
– The ~mid to end twenties yoga woman
An interesting and energetic exchange.
This exercise is something you might want to do with friends, spouses or others. But beware, a lot can come up there!
Best thing was, I didn’t know what we were about to do before, that’s great, you cannot establish your social mask that way, you are necessarily very open and exposed that way.
@ Smith
“Wouldn’t a fast, decisive, overwhelming thrashing have been a gigantic propaganda coup? Had they not heard of Bltzkrieg, the combined arms surprise attack?”
It is a complex issue, but on Blitzkrieg tactics specifically: Blitzkrieg relies heavily on the element of surprise. The attacker has to be able to amass enough troops for a decisive punch where the defender does not expect it. General consensus nowadays is that with ubiquitous surveillance available to a modern army (all those satellites, surveillance planes and drones) it has become virtually impossible to amass enough troops for an overwhelming strike without the opposing side finding out about it well in advance. I say “virtually impossible” because it is still not completely impossible. For example, Ukrainian Kharkiv counteroffensive in September 2022 was a successful Blitzkrieg operation.
This article gives a good overview of the current thinking in relation to Blitzkrieg tactics
https://warontherocks.com/2022/11/ukraine-and-the-future-of-offensive-maneuver/
Kashtan & JMG, while I am not crazy about Kennedy’s VP pick, I will say that she is cute enough to not provoke derision from the testosterone crowd, an important part of Trump’s loyal following. And said derision, always aimed at Democratic spouses and female candidates, has been a feature of Republican campaigns for decades now.
It is such a wealth of interesting stories and knowledge here in this blog, both the articles and the comments.
Takes such times and energy to read through it all, and that does not take into account all the useful links people provide here!
Lucky I had nothing to do some times this week at work, so I seized the opportunity and read the backlog of articles and comments here, since the previous open post because I didn’t find the time since February. There was so much going on – in a positive way, but demanding on me still.
Blessed that I only commuted 15 minutes to my work place and only work 30 hours a week on four days, and even the half hour of lunch pause is included in the work time. Privilege of working for the government of Austria.
I will contribute a little what I observed these past times, politically, socially:
I read the newspaper “Kurier” recently. All those major newspapers are corporate in one way or another. But the ultra-liberal “Der Standard” or “Falter” are siding more with international think tanks, while “Krone” and “Kurier” are more on the side of domestic industry and commerce, and the latter in Austria still seem to hold against all to much allegiance of our country against trans atlantic interested, but it’s a fine line.
Our green environment minister (“ministry of climate” for what it’s worth) cheerfully anounced our country has improved its CO2 balance. The newspaper argues it may be due to recession in our construction sector and other parts of the economy.
Immigration is a topic. Even “Der Standard” writes about it in a way that wasn’t possible in 2015. There’s problems…with violence and traditional norms coming from elsewhere, not everyone coming here wants to be part of the show.
Kurier writes that unlike the Syrians in 2015, these people from Afghanistan and other parts of the middle East are two thirds illiterates.
They now are to be schooled in special schools for whole weekdays, to make them fit for our labor market. And they shall be compulsed to take courses about our “values” so they don’t beat women and deny equality.
After all they are stupid in will change their ways just because some impersonal government agency tells them to, I am convinced.
In the lower class district of Vienna on a major public square (“Reumannplatz”) some adolescents molested two young women. A young man stepped in and was immedeately stabbed. I think the youths were Chechnyans.
The governments announced a “weapons ban” on the square (…that’ll help) and two containers forming an improvised police station there. There’s a lot of adverts for joining the police force. I heard work conditions have deteriorated for them, no one wants to do the job anymore except for candidates who are unfit for service (Autrian police standards, this being still a wealthy little country, are higher than in much of the US).
The newspaper in an interview asks “How can it be there is a rising unemployment in Vienna, yet there’s a shortage of people for nursing and care?”
The answer is, because conditions are so bad there people either don’t want to join or try to escape this kind of work. There is also a shortage of bus drivers. Apparently, they have up to 4 hours gaps during their service which are unpaid, sitting around somewhere.
Today I was at market, talking to a small farming enterprise man. He puts his high hopes in “science” and nuclear power, then complains about politics and the conditions in nursing and care. A man steps in insultingly, revealing himself as working “for the city” – he says the farming man has no idea and complains incompetently, the city does a lot for this sector and “have you looked at our demographic pyramid” anytime recently? He is quite unfriendly and cuts into every attempt of any reply given. “A true politican!” the farming man says to me afterwards.
Well it is true the city has improved some standards, but a friend of mine is in the middle of his nursing school training. Conditions are getting horrible in the hospitals, a shortage of capacity everywhere, official standards cannot be met anymore in practice.
Yes the city threw a dime, but it won’t save the situation.
Come to think of it, the guy was truly a real politican (or more likely functionary in the bureaucracy) – arrogant, all knowing, knows all about numbers, but nothing about the situation on the ground. Apart from these things, there are again growing reports of youth crime in the city of Vienna, which still is by global as well as European standards a very safe and tame city.
Has there been youth crime before? Well yes, with me as a victim back in the day for example. I think in every young generation, problems may arise. But I think through the past decades, our wealthy economy made state intervention there possible and effective. Is it still the case? I’ve picked up creepy vibes in public transport recently, crazy people hitting on women who leave the train, arabs blaring music loudly in the train and nobody dares to say anything, everyone staring. Not a nice atmosphere.
My cousin now in his mid thirties used to be a youth delinquent, two times on the record for heavy assault back then, beating people to the hospital. Now, an established middle class existence as a software developer, no doubt also because he had our PMC family supporting him. “We were rascals as well back in the day” he says. Yes, but would you have molested young women and stabbed someone stepping in for the defense? I asked. “No….that we would not have done….”.
Another article in “Kurier” deals with the grand idea of “capturing CO2” in cement factories, so everythings great and there is no environmental pollution! After all, only CO2 hurts. Since, as I said, “Kurier” sides more with our domestic industry, it quotes a man from the industry, who says “Yes but for that we would need enourmously expensive installments and a pipeline infrastructure that simply is not there”. Also, the newspaper says, it is unclear where to put the stuff then. Maybe make use as chemicals for the industry?
In Austria, as elsewhere, immigration is a big topic.
The ultra-liberal, progressive whathaveyou outlets are starting to debate problems with immigration and cultural differences they would only denied or ignored before. The less trans-atlantic outlets comment on the topic cooly, showing vested diesbelef in the success of our policies between the lines.
Hello Mr. Greer,
I live along the path of totality for the eclipse. I apologize if this is a silly question, but do you have any advice for me and others like me? Half of me doesn’t know what to do, and the other half wants to just shrug and look up at the sky using protective glasses.
Thank you!
John–
Harkening back to some of the discussion last week of psychohistorians and illusory heros, what do you see as the role of the heroic in mythologies of an era of contraction and decline? Is there a place for such a thing? It seems difficult for the construct of Marduk slaying Tiamat to be meaningful when chaos is on the increase rather than being brought under control, however temporary that sense of control may have been.
@ J.L.Mc12, JMG…
I know the feeling (of beining intetested in fringeworthy topics), but I am also interested in Solresol fwiw! I came across it apart from you mentioning it here in the past months, and havent followed up. Now is a good time to revisit things. I will plan on looking into it again. Perhaps we can all compare notes. It seems like it might have intetesting applications. More generally the idea of univerdal languages I find fascinating.
@deathcap #214
re: RSS feed of comments
at the end of the page under
“Meta” / comments
it says:
https://www.ecosophia.net/comments/feed/
works in any rss feed reader I know.
I’m using it myself to read the comments on my phone.
they’re not threaded though.
Hi John,
I had an odd thought this morning, (1) If there is such a thing as “karma” and (2) there is such a thing as an “egregore”, then . . . (3) could that explain why the “Western” countries (US, Canada, Australia, NZ, and the EU) are so enthralled by going through another totalitarian dictatorship, now? I mean, if our egregore didn’t learn from the last horror show . . . ?
It was kind of weird how the thought rose in the back of my head. I was making breakfast, musing about my big move South, and the adventure of Spanish immersion for the next few years. And Viktor Frankl’s “So live as if you were living already for the second time, and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” arose. And I paused for a second. And then came this strange thought, in the back of my head. And my hair stood on end.
How could “Western civilization” have apparently learned NOTHING from the horror show of the twentieth century, despite all the dystopian books and films, all the recent history, and all the spilled blood? I confess: I am so ashamed to be human.
Oops, the UFO sighting yesterday over Barcelona was “only” and “possibly” a (French?) ICBM missile. Am I the only one becoming paranoid here?
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/spain-reports-possible-ballistic-missile-32476176
Well, the missile came from France, maybe Macron is getting cocky…
Hi JMG,
I’ve heard some folks claim that the American wars up until the Civil War were England trying to regain their lost colony and they succeeded with the outcome of the Civil War. Do you have an opinion to share about it? I’m inclined to see it as a claim of a “grand conspiracy” and hardly likely to be true.
Thanks,
Matt
Curt, good heavens. I did that back in the late 1970s. I found it acutely uncomfortable; I didn’t know why then, because nobody was talking about Aspergers syndrome yet.
Mary, there’s that!
Ennobled, get out there and watch it through protective glasses. It’s a perfectly natural process, and unless you’re trying to work magic during the eclipse, you should be fine.
David BTL, er, I think you’re missing about half of heroic literature. The entire Arthurian legend is about heroism in an age of chaos and decline — it’s one of several important legendary cycles that came out of the fall of the Roman world. The entire body of Germanic and Norse legend is shaped by the same thing; no matter how great a hero Beowulf might be, eventually the dragon comes. Here’s a Saxon poet on a similar theme:
“Bright were the halls then, many the bath-houses,
High the gables, loud the joyful clamor,
Many the meadhalls full of delights
Until mighty Fate overthrew it all.
Wide was the slaughter, the plague-time came,
Death took away all those brave men.
Broken their ramparts, fallen their halls,
The city decayed; those who built it
Fell to the earth. Thus these courts crumble,
And roof-tiles fall from this arch of stone.”
I had some more to say about that here:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2014/04/the-time-of-seedbearers.html
Justin, somehow that doesn’t surprise me at all. 😉
Gnat, it’s not despite all the books and films, it’s because of them. What you contemplate, you imitate…
Chuaquin, too funny. They’re even admitting it now.
Matt, it shows impressive historical ignorance. The Union victory in the Civil War was a disaster for Britain, because one of the core issues in the Civil War was whether the US would use tariffs to close its market to British industrial imports and build its own domestic industries, or whether the US would remain an economic colony of Britain, providing raw materials such as cotton and tobacco for British corporations and importing finished goods. The North favored the first of these, the South the second. Once the Union won, the British empire faced a competitor in industrial markets that outstripped it completely in sixty years.
American Mariner damaged after collision with light tower, St. Mary’s River remains closed
“It’s still unclear when the waterway will re-open. Approximately 90% of the iron ore used to make steel in the US travels through the channel each year. Roughly 7,000 vessels pass through this area each shipping season.
“The accident comes just days after an early start for the Great Lakes shipping season. Steel companies requested the Soo Locks open a few days ahead of schedule following a mild winter and delayed deliveries in January.”
I gather they are afraid to move the fully-laden bulk carrier in case it sinks when they pull it off the light tower it collided with.
A classic example of cascading failure. Steel bridge fails. Steel ore to make replacement gets stuck in transit. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;” What next?
I listened to a podcast in which you discussed your book, The King in Orange. Might it be possible and advisable (for improvement of our current political situation) to develop a meme that would (with participation of interested members), load the dice toward a Kennedy win, similar to how the Frog was used for Trump’s win? What say you?
JMG,
On several occasions you have remarked that one of the causes of the Woke/DEI movement was a power play to gain certain groups economic and social advantages on the cheap/ or quick. It seems that this dynamic is also at the heart of this movements unraveling.
Whatever your view of the old “patriarchy” it did come with some boundaries and behavioral norms that helped keep society running smoothly ( while not necessarily fair.) What we seem to be seeing now is many new “leaders” who have come to power on the coattails of the woke movement are getting themselves in trouble by grabbing too much too quickly , or ignoring some of the guardrails in the societal or legal order. From Ivy League presidents, to prominent district attorneys to leaders of powerful NGO’s the implosion seems to be ongoing.
A good example is our new LGBTQ governor here in Oregon. Recently she has moved her “wife” in to a prominent position in her administration despite the wife’s history of problems with alcoholism and mental illness ( you can’t make this stuff up). All of her close staff ( I assume to be pretty woke to be there in the first place) have now resigned and the the governor has hired a special administrator to explore the possibility of creating a position of ” first spouse”.
These moves have even raised the hackles of the Ultra Liberal Weekly Portland Arts and Entertainment Newspaper that helped her rise to power. I expect if pursued to its conclusion this behavior will lead to her downfall, and a return of the republicans to power in the State after a 30 year absence.
Gnat, I’m not sure why you would say that NZ or Australia is going through a totalitarian dictatorship right now. Some people saw the last left wing government as a totalitarian dictatorship, on account of its covid policies and all, but it was fairly and resoundingly voted out in elections last year by a right wing coalition. The new right wing coalition is a barely cobbled together thing with mutual distrust between the leaders, facing a financial crisis caused by overspending during the pandemic. As usual, the bureaucracy tries to capture the government by giving them a little bit of what they want and none of the real stuff.
It’s the usual chaos you’d expect from a country and west in decline, and about as far from a dictatorship as you’d imagine. People are arguably a bit happier for the change in government.
Australia is much the same, except with a federal-state dynamic that NZ doesn’t get (as we don’t have sovereign local government.
Canada may be a different story, but it has distributed government too, much the same as the US and Australia.
NZ just does its usual thing and muddles on, on some pathway down to frugality, with a mixture of grumbling and continued hard work (kiwis work long hours)
So maybe I misunderstand what you are saying, but living here and being extensively involved in politics, I don’t see it.
>I expect if pursued to its conclusion this behavior will lead to her downfall, and a return of the republicans to power in the State after a 30 year absence
Isn’t there a movement in eastern OR to leave and join ID? I think they call it Greater Idaho? They have a website, lemme see if I can dredge it up – https://www.greateridaho.org/faq
Greetings JMG,
I am wondering if there is a path forward for the managerial class to stay in power in the next ten to twenty years
by continually ejecting people from the system and leaving them to fend off for themselves (or reducing their real income), while continuing to monopolize energy and metal resources for the system?
I think a revolution is unavoidable at some point after that . The outcome post-revolution for the average person may not be better may not be better though. I am just looking at likely scenaris and next steps in the long descent .
@JMG #76,
You mentioned fringe areas of the world as seedbeds of the next major religion and when mentioning that it is also possible in Europe as it is also becoming a fringe area the prophet for that new religion would most likely be an immigrant. Why is this more likely to occur in a fringe area or a “fringe person” in a fringe area becoming a prophet?
I may be misremembering Spengler and / or one of your future civilizational posts but I think the emergence of new powers usually occur in areas of civilizational friction. If you discussed fringe areas and new religions before, do you mind posting a link?
@Martin Back 292. It’s unusual for the St Mary’s river and the Sault Locks to open this early in the season, so I wouldn’t worry too much about the shipping that is backed up; at least not yet. It’s only because of the scant ice cover last winter in the Great Lakes that the locks opened this early.
Hi JMG,
I’m listening to Randall Carlson’s recent podcasts on the earth mounds in the US. He mentioned that one would be hard pressed to find an ancient earthen mound complex monument not oriented and built around water.
This has an eerie similarity to what you discussed in your book, The Secret of the Temple. Other than the orientation to the sun and stars, I wonder how else those mounds were used.
Martin, it’ll be interesting if a series of other similar maritime mishaps follows…
Sarah, you’ll need quite a few people to support you in that, because it’s not just the meme — it’s a lot of people willing to use it as a focus for will and imagination. If you have such a group already, look for something funny, with at least some degree of self-mockery involved — the slogan “the left can’t meme” was earned because very few people on the left can laugh at themselves, while Pepe started as a mocking self-description on the chans. (If you can’t laugh at yourself, you can’t make others laugh with you.) A goofy, parodic image that allows RFK Jr.’s supporters to poke fun at themselves is what you want. Once you have that — well, look at the early Pepe memes: Pepe with Trump’s hair, Pepe as Trump’s running mate, Pepe with a censored-out “freedom boner,” and so on. They were silly, and that gave them their power to slip past the defenses of the mind. There — I’ve told you much more than I usually do. Now it’s up to you to make use of it.
Clay, yep. Do you recall the way Black Lives Matter imploded once its leadership started plundering its bank accounts for personal gain? I’m not sure why that should be such a pervasive weakness of the woke left, but there it is.
Tony, I don’t think so, because the current leadership is so incompetent at managing the system. I think a lot of what’s happening now is that those within the system who see its survival threatened by the fecklessness of the current regime are allying with the populist rebels in the hope of replacing a failed elite in time. Watch people in the center shifting toward Trump and you can watch that in real time.
Scotty, I don’t claim to know why it happens, but it generally does. Christianity came out of one of the least prosperous fringe areas of the Roman world, Islam out of an area just outside the Byzantine world, Buddhism from the Himalayan fringes of ancient India, and so on.
Jon, almost certainly to enhance soil fertility. The mounds in the Mississippi basin were offshoots of the same technology that was used in Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, and China — not the same one I talked about in The Secret of the Temple, but a related system I mention there.
Has anyone here ever read Michael Crichton’s Travels or is familiar with Brugh Joy? In the Cactus Teachings essay Mr. Crichton recounts his experience at a two week Brugh Joy conference at the Institute of Mentalphysics on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains from LA.
Such a two-week conference seems to me to be the right thing to recalibrate. Unfortunately, Mr. Joy passed away a while ago and looking at the Institute of Mentalphysics events, I don’t see anything similar. Posting about this here for those that may know and recommend anything similar?
Gnat, backing up what Peter stated, the current coalition government in New Zealand spent its first 100 days dismantling many of the policies of the previous government. Of note (taken from the NZ First parties summary with my totally biased comments added):
– Disestablished the Māori Health Authority (ie stopped a move towards race-based provision)
– Repealed the Water Services Entities Act 2022 (Three Waters) (ie stopped a move towards both privatisation of the public water supply and race-based control of it)
– Started work to repeal the Therapeutics Products Act 2023 (ie removed regulations which would have placed severe restrictions on the sale of natural/homeopathic remedies)
– Began work on a National Infrastructure Agency (ie started addressing energy independence)
– Legislated to make gang membership an aggravating factor at sentencing
– Introduced first stages of work to crack down on serious youth offending
– Ensured a renewed focus on doing the basics better in schools, emphasising daily reading, writing and maths in the classroom
– Reserved against proposed amendments to the World Health Organisation (WHO) health regulations within days of the new government being established (ie stopped loss of sovereignty to the WHO)
– Repealed the Spatial Planning and Natural Built Environment Act (ie kicking the Greens for their “I know better than you” attitude)
So it seems to me that NZ may be one of the first to show signs of reversing away from ‘totalitarianism’.
>How could “Western civilization” have apparently learned NOTHING from the horror show of the twentieth century
Look at the world from the perspective of someone living on Three Week Island. Then a lot of things start making sense.
TB cases in the USA are up, especially in children.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/deadly-lung-disease-cases-surge-10-year-high-children-most-affected-cdc
Aldarion, fascinating, I didn’t know that discussions regarding German reunification also involved the future of the DMark. I just looked online and found an article in Spiegel International on that very issue. You may be interested:
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-price-of-unity-was-the-deutsche-mark-sacrificed-for-reunification-a-719940.html
@disc_writes,
Would you be interested in an offline discussion of technical writing? It’s something I think I’d like to try breaking into as a freelancer or something. I think I have the relevant skills after about a decade in the related field of “science communication,” including writing for popular audiences, but I don’t have the foggiest idea where to start.
You can reach me at tm {underscore} august {at} protonmail {dot} com if you are willing to provide me with any advice. Thanks!
Vlad, that was a really interesting article.
Several years ago I had time on my hands so I read ‘The World Crisis’ by Churchill, that being his account of WW1. It was several volumes thick and a few thousand pages deep if I recall correctly so not an easy read but a real page turner nonetheless.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure it was in this book that Churchill took issue with conventional military wisdom of the age that required soldiers to ‘chew barbed wire’ in front of the enemy’s entrenched and fortified positions, which is pretty much what happened in the Great War.
Churchill wrote that the history of successful warfare is a history of flanking manoeuvre so why not strike where the enemy is weak, which, in his opinion, was Ottoman Turkey. Thus the Dardanelles campaign which unfortunately ended with ignominious retreat.
The concept was good as Enver Pasha admitted after the war. He supposedly said that if British warships had appeared off the coast of Constantinople, Turkey would have called it quits.
But, as your article indicates, execution is everything. Britain was slow and halting, 30 days late and 30 dollars short with everything, the Royal Navy reluctant to risk its ships, which allowed the Turks to mount a stout defense.
Regardless of the failure at Gallipoli, the time tested route to victory is to hit the adversary hard and fast where they don’t expect and where they are weak, so I wonder where such vulnerable places are in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. I wonder if either side intends to take advantage. Better the flanking approach than the grinding war of attrition don’t you think?
As far as intel goes, Stalin refused to believe reports about the German buildup prior to June 22, 1941. He supposedly refused to believe reports of a massive German assault and it apparently took him a week to some to his senses by which time the Germans were half-way to Moscow. Sometimes Blitzkrieg works even with full foreknowledge by the intended target.
Or maybe you defeat the enemy by shutting down his banking system and utilities ie another way to outflank the enemy. Did you notice the frequency of cyber attacks lately? I wonder, are criminal gangs or foreign governments behind them?
HI JMG,
‘ Tony, I don’t think so, because the current leadership is so incompetent at managing the system. I think a lot of what’s happening now is that those within the system who see its survival threatened by the fecklessness of the current regime are allying with the populist rebels in the hope of replacing a failed elite in time. Watch people in the center shifting toward Trump and you can watch that in real time. ‘
I am not clear what you mean. I do not see how if Trump is elected and if people in the center shift towards him it changes the system? Maybe it will be more presidential and more in favor of Americans than the elite , yet it will be the same unsustainable economic system that needs to break down in local and state parts at some point, no?
@all, re: Islam and Europe,
Thinking of the reverse case– Europeans in Dar-al-Islam–the pieds noirs were over 10% of Algeria’s population at independance. The vast majority of them were induced to leave. Are the migrant populations anywhere at 10% yet? When people say “it’s impossible for Europe to ever be rid of its migrants”– to me it sounds like they are saying “I don’t want to think of the conditions that would lead to large scale population movements.”
The population of Konigsburg was once 99% German. Now its Kaliningrad, and the German population is approximately 0%. That was an even less voluntary transfer than the pied-noirs. Also see the Turks and the Greeks betwixt the world wars, Yugoslavia in the 90s…
If you think it impossible in the modern day, then look to Nagorno-Karabakh; I understand there are far fewer Armenians in Azerbaijan today than there were a few years ago.
None of this is to say that Europe could find the will, in what is its Spenglarian Winter, to perform ethnic cleansing. It certainly isn’t saying they should, or in any way endorsing the concept of ethnic cleansing. (To do so would violate Canada’s criminal code, I think, so to the nice Mountie stalking me online: ethnic cleansing is bad, eh?) OTH if Europe goes mad and descends into one of the periodic bouts of bloodshed that subcontinent has been known for the past 1600 years or so, why, the migrant populations aren’t inferior in intelligence to indigenous Euros. Those who have passports to other lands will head for them in a big screaming hurry, in that case. You could see demographics swing back in a hurry.
@JMG,
“What you contemplate you imitate” — an example I’m watching with some shadenfreuder is the Daily Wire right descending into the sort of circular firing squad that is classic on the left. The Daily Wire is a right-wing media outlet that mostly puts out “look at those nasty leftists” outrage bait. Since you don’t do video you’ll have escaped exposure, and good for you. Their imitation of the “SJWs” they “pwn” is to the point of apparently having a mug inscribed with “Leftist Tears” as a subscription bonus– which is such an obvious riff on the 2010-era “Male Tears” mugs seen on the desks of radical feminists that it i’s even more cringey the second time around. The firing squad of course started loading its guns after the latest phase of the Israel-Gaza conflict. It’s almost hilarious to see people who used to pontificate at extreme, nauseating length about free speech on campus debate amongst themselves if the phrase “Christ is King” counts as antisemetic hate speech.
I’m trying not to contemplate it too hard while I munch popcorn.
@Smith, thanks for your link, it was interesting to see Schäuble disputing the link. I was 13 when the wall came down, and it was very clear even to me that reunification and the common currency were linked. I don’t quite remember how I came to know about this, but probably through some high-profile declaration of Mitterrand’s. Mitterrand and Thatcher were not at all amused by talk of a single Germany – more than once, Mauriac was cited: “J’aime tellement l’Allemagne que je suis ravi qu’il y en ait deux”, and who could really blame them? It was only after the timetable for the common currency was agreed upon that Mitterrand gave up his blockage.
You will note that the Spiegel article is from 2010, at the most impopular point in the history of the Euro, that the only persons denying the link are the German negotiators themselves, and that the argument some of them use is that the Euro would have come anyway.
Four Sided Circle – I have a few ideas for your summer comfort without air-conditioning. First, bear in mind that a fan motor gives off heat, so it’s often better for a fan to pull warm air out of a room, than to have it blow cool air into the room. The warm air pulled out will be replenished somehow without being warmed by the fan. On the other hand, the air pushed by a fan creates a plume that extends for some distance, while the air drawn into a fan is drawn from all directions. (Think of how close your fingers need to be to a vacuum-cleaner hose to feel the air being drawn in.) So, it would make sense to pull warm air out of one window, and open another window, far from the exhaust window, so the current flows through as much of the space as possible. Ideally, you’d draw air in from the shaded side (North, for North America and Europe, or East), rather than sunny sides. It may take a few minutes for the flow to be established.
When I was young, I would tuck a spare bedsheet around a fan in the window by my bed, so the cool air that it drew in would be semi-trapped in the bubble over my bed.
This seems obvious to me, but I’ve had to explain it to people at my church (with broken A/C): running a fan in a closed, unoccupied room just makes it warmer. With people in the room, those who feel the breeze may be more comfortable, but at the expense of those who can’t feel it.
Portable air-cooling machines often simply cool warm, dry air by adding humidity (evaporative cooling). If you’re plagued by high humidity to begin with, they won’t do much good. Conversely, a dehumidifier can make a space more comfortable, even if the air temperature ends up being higher, because your perspiration will have more cooling effect. Lower humidity also suppresses mold and mildew. (Chemical dehumidifiers can absorb moisture from small, closed spaces, but my home dehumidifier pulls about a gallon a day, which would be absurd to do with a chemical desiccant.)
The Baltimore bridge collapse has been on my radar, like so many others, and so I would like to make a few observations. Full confession: I spent much of my childhood and youth in and around boats of various sizes but nothing close to the scale of the mammoth container ships! I agree with JP (#103) on most points but having watched the video multiple times the thing that puzzled me was the ship turning to starboard after losing power. Given the phenomenal inertia of the vessel going at about 8 knots I could not imagine that currents or tides could cause such a sudden turn. And then I watched a video made by a very ordinary-looking English bloke who just so happens to be a chief engineer with 40 years of experience on vessels like the MV Dali (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEzDh4RwpaM). He thinks that a tractor beam from an alien spaceship is responsible! Just kidding. After breaking down the incident timing, event by event, and noting the ship’s speed, he thinks that after the lights went out the first time, the engine was put in full reverse. When a propellor goes in reverse, it spins counter-clockwise (looking forward) and this causes the stern to move to port (left, looking forward) and the bow to move to starboard (right, looking forward); the exact opposite directional forces occur when the propellor is pushing the vessel forward. The rudder would have been inoperable at this stage and therefore unable to correct for this change in angular momentum. Hence the ship turned starboard. The ship was slowing down by the time it hit the bridge, but its forward thrusters would have been inoperable (and are useless at speeds above 3 knots anyway).
So, long story short, the marine chief engineer in the video attributes the accident to boring old physics and mechanics. Before watching the video, I was having fun imagining a phone call between ‘Putler’ and ‘Dementia Joe’ following the state-sponsored terrorist attack on the Kerch bridge in which the former says to the latter, “some nice bridges you’ve got there in America, Joe… it’d be a pity if something untoward happened to them…”
Regardless of the reason for the accident, at least six persons lost their lives, which is no laughing matter. They all had family, friends and workmates who will be grieving their losses. May they be blessed.
Unrelated, but something popped back into my mind today. A few years ago, I read some book on the early years of the Druid Revival and the author claimed that William Blake was a Druid and speculated that he might even have been the Archdruid in whatever Druid organization there was in London at the turn of the 19th century (OBOD?). I found the claim to be interesting but not all that likely. (Sorry, I can’t provide any more specificity off the top of my head) Do you happen to recall coming across such a claim and, if so, do you think that there is any substance to the claim?
@ The Other Owen,
Yes there is the greater Idaho movement, as well as the older ” State of Jefferson’ which would be a proposed new state consisting of JMG’s old stomping grounds in Southern Oregon, Combined with the Northernmost counties of Northern Californa.
The Greater Idaho movement is pretty unlikely to happen as the population and voting power of this area ( Eastern Oregon minus the Bend Area) is incredibly small. Most of this part of the state is BLM and Forest Service land with a sprinkling of ranchers and a few small towns in between. The disconnect is obvious as having Eastern Oregonians ruled by Portland would be the same as having San Francisco as the capital of Wyoming.
What’s ironic is that most of the actual policies disliked by Eastern Oregonians, which involve limitations on grazing, logging, mining, and land use are actually set by the big Federal Agencies that control most of the land in this area.
Other than taxes and the general annoyance that Easter Oregonians have for the antics of Portland based politicians there are not many state policies that adversely effect these folks.
I think we will see central and upsate New York split off from the NYC metro area before we see greater Idaho.
Grover-Protip on paw paw pollination. putting chicken bones on the plants during pollination really works! Drives our dogs bonkers though….
John–
Re the heroic in an age of decline
That is fair. I had a particular sense of the heroic in mind, I suppose, which excludes the examples you cited from that definition. I see heroic as triumphant rather than doomed to failure, the later being fatalistic and tragic (like the Germanic lore you described). One has “tragic heroes,” of course, but they are objects of pity rather than emulation (Hamlet, for example, or Oedipus). Then again, I am viewing the issue from a particular cultural (**cough** Faustian) perspective, and that has a lot to do with my puzzlement. I will have to spend more time reflecting on this.
John–
To follow on my last comment, what I’m understanding you to say is that the tragic type of heroic is what one gets during a time of decline.
I wonder if I could get you to weigh in on a debate that’s been (re)opened by the new Dune movies: was Paul Atreides a tragic hero or a villain?
The case for the latter is that he willingly unleashes a pogrom that murders billions of innocent people in order to get revenge. According to this view, the novel was a warning against embracing charismatic leaders.
The case for the former is that while his motives may have included revenge, he still chose the lesser evil in order to avoid a far worse fate for humanity.
My own interpretation — which granted is based on my reading the first book decades ago — leans toward the latter: it seems to me that the real point of the novel is that fate in not really in any one person’s hands, not even the so-called great men of history. Paul was as caught up in his destiny as everyone else.
Sorry, by saying I lean toward “the latter” I meant I favor the tragic hero view, which I covered second, not the villain view which I listed second. Gah.
I wonder about the nature of trauma –
Healing trauma is a major topic, all the while trauma is a natural reaction obviously beneficial in our human evolution.
Why the mismatch of this natural reaction and our reception of it?
Is it because it makes sense but not in our civilizational context?
Also it is said the whole nervous system is concerned, so the process of healing needs to be on many levels, physically, mentally, emotionally, socially.
I could only imagine it was often like this in our evolution: child meets an angry animal in the bush, is inured. Trauma – the panic of going to the bushes. The tribe comes together, comforts, reassures safety in its middle.
The elders inform the child about the dealings with this. Next time the child together with others slews the animal (another animal there) and henceforth learns 1) when and where the danger lurks 2) how to respond.
All I could contribute is when I was beaten unconscious by a gang at age 20. Two years or so of absolute panic going out, great problem. Then, kickboxing. Then, fighting off junkies with an intend of mugging in the park and a few other episodes of successfull reproach. Then, visit many dark and dirty places with a friend, learn to discern the dangerous from the harmless, learn to interpret the moods and intentions of people.
Then, a general assessment of mine led by example of others, where and when do they move around, where is it more or less safe, where is the chance of danger?
Then, also an attitude of I’d rather die fighting for myself than giving in, a risk taking attitude. Well I was younger.
So I successfully made the utter panic of going out at all subside.
It does not mean of course the danger is gone or anything, just my way of dealing with it has normalized, making a productive social life possible again.
Is this a model case…?
What are the known ways of dealing with trauma? Like the OCtagon Society Spiritual Alchemy I suppose, which I guess helps to mind the ancient greek imperative of know thyself and helps to heave the unconscious into the conscious, am I right?
Hey JMG
I don’t think I’ve heard anyone suggest that being able to discover odd bits of information is a talent, let alone a talent that can and should be cultivated. Nonetheless I will accept it, since there are many things that I’ve come across that aren’t well known, but certainly should be.
One website I’ve discovered which has a similar talent for finding obscure facts is “Futility Closet”, which I lurk on quite a bit. It also posts various problems of a mathematical or philosophical nature for readers to try and solve, I occasionally try solving their Geometry and Chess problems.
https://www.futilitycloset.com/
Well, scientists say now that the supposed missile flying over Barcelona was indeed…a satellital reentry.
https://www.outono.net/elentir/2024/03/30/what-we-know-about-the-two-objects-that-flew-over-eastern-spain-on-march-29/
Maybe it’s not Macron fault, after all…
Sarah and JMG,
Out on my walk in the cool fresh air this morning I had an idea about your meme for RFK, Jr. You know what they say about walking.
In the illustration we borrow Pepe and add his two Budweiser-swilling brothers, who are sitting on their usual lily pads listening to RFK, Jr. speak. Frog 1 says, “I like him,” Frog 2 says, “yeah, he sings like us,” and Frog 3 adds, “seems to know the score too.”
You get the double meaning of “knowing the score,” in reference to singing and politics, a little self-parody regarding Mr. Kennedy’s voice, and hopefully commandeer some of Pepe’s magic, but this time he’s brought friends. The younger generations might not get the reference, but they already seem to like RFK; the Gen-Xers out there will clearly remember the string of Budweiser ads with the 3 frogs.
I have two questions about this idea though (beyond whether anyone else likes it!): A) is it too harsh on Bobby Jr.’s voice issues? and B) does coopting Pepe simply reinforce Trump?
Just tossing around an idea.
Cheers.
Fey: Looking for more info, I dug up a book from 1895: Among the Gnomes by Franz Hartmann. It seems quite good so far, and I was bemused to see that it parodies the rationalist/fedora/lovin the science attitude which apparently was already in currency way back then. Now that I know about Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, I’ll have to look into it, but I’d be interested to know if JMG has any thoughts on the aforementioned book by Hartmann.
Narnia: I’m surprised JMG doesn’t care for Narnia, but I guess we all have our differences. It’s one of my favorite series of all time, amazing stuff. Yes, the Christian influence is a bit heavy at times, but that’s okay. There’s plenty more to the Narniad, including pagan and medievalist influences; the Voyage of the Dawn Treader seems to be drawn from Irish folktales about sea voyages, for example. More than that, the whole series has astrological correspondences! Without going into too much detail, each of the seven books aligns thematically with one of the classical planets:
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: Jupiter, of kingship
Prince Caspian: Mars, bringer of war
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: the Sun, bringer of light
The Silver Chair: the Moon, of subconscious tides (for lack of a better title)
The Horse and his Boy: Mercury, the messenger
The Magician’s Nephew: Venus, bringer of fertility
The Last Battle: Saturn, bringer of senescence
Really, this is a testament of CS Lewis’ mastery. Going by the astrology code provided by JMG, then the Narnian sequence would be 4569873 — interesting pattern, I wonder if there’s any significance. And to answer Aldarion #188, the Hermit of the Southern March is in fact St. Anthony the Great of the Desert! It may be a theory, and not stated directly by the author, but it lines up perfectly. Also, I strongly recommend you read the Narniad in publication order, as I listed above, that’s by far the best way to approach the books. Magician’s Nephew in particular is much more effective as a flashback.
Russia/Ukraine: I believe the original strategy was for Russia to attempt a rapid takeover with blitzkrieg tactics, and then NATO would bog them down, first with strong defense, and then with a funded/armed insurgency. It might’ve even worked, had Russia blundered into the bear trap. Instead, Putin pulled off a strategic reversal in the spirit of Judo, capturing key areas (Donbass, land bridge to Crimea), and then letting the AFU & NATO break themselves trying to dislodge them, as the Russians rely on WWI tactics combined with drones/electronic warfare, as well as their decisive air/artillery advantage. The heat seems to be turning up there, with a recent volley of missile strikes on key Ukrainian infrastructure. Stay tuned!
A new estimate has come out for the Francis Scott Key bridge rebuild: 10 years for a bridge for took 5 years to construct. This is 52 years of progress after the original construction began. We’re pretty far along the path of decline.
Scotty, no, I never did. Sorry. Anyone else?
Pygmycory, yep.The US is rapidly becoming a third world nation.
Tony, the people around Trump have made no secret of the fact that they’re planning on having him use executive orders to fire most of the upper echelons of the Federal bureaucracy, replacing them with people who have been vetted by conservative organizations who will use their positions to shut down whole swathes of the current system. There’s also a lot of talk about transferring power back to the states, with constitutional amendments being actively proposed and supported by state legislatures. So the current economic system may not be long for this world if Trump wins.
Tyler, you’ve made me glad that I’ve never followed the Daily Wire! It sounds like a fine example, though.
Ron, thanks for this. Yes, I’ve heard the claim; it was made by Ross Nichols, among others, and you may have encountered it in Nichol’s book The Book of Druidry. Unfortunately, it’s entirely incorrect. If you read Blake’s prophetic poems, Druids are for him a symbol of natural religion, which was one of his bugbears — he wrote a polemic essay titled “There Is No Natural Religion” directed against the very ideas that were central to the Druid Revival at the time.
David BTL, exactly. There are triumphant heroes and there are tragic heroes, and the heroes in ages of decline are by and large the tragic sort. If you can find a copy, you might find it interesting to read The Nobility of Failure by Ivan Morris; it’s a study of hero legends in Japan, where the tragic hero is practically the only kind of hero there is — in Japanese legend, heroes by definition lose and perish, and that’s what makes them heroic.
Slithy, my take is that he’s neither one, because Frank Herbert was too good a writer to allow the central character in his best book to be defined by either of those clichés. Paul Atreides, like most important historical figures, bridges the gap between hero and villain; he embodies both roles, and is both an active figure shaping history and a passive figure swept up in the current of events. It’s precisely that complexity and breadth of vision that makes Dune such a brilliant book.
Curt, I’d argue that the current response to trauma in the industrial world is a good sign of just how fragile and decadent we’ve become. Human beings in earlier times — outside of those in other decadent societies, of course — faced traumatic events routinely, picked themselves up, brushed themselves off, and went on with life. I don’t claim to be some kind of exception — I’ve had some traumatic experiences in life, and have had to wrestle with them, but in the process I’ve come to see modern culture as a major source of weakness here. We could be so much stronger and more resilient than we are!
J.L.Mc12, it’s an essential talent these days, because the collective mind has become so narrow in its vision of what’s real and what’s important. Keep at it!
Chuaquin, nah, it was Icarus and his father Daedalus, making a new test flight with those wax and feather wings. 😉
Grover, it might work.
Xcalibur/djs, I haven’t read that book by Hartmann; I’ll pick it up one of these days. As for Narnia, it wasn’t the heavyhanded Christianity that annoyed me as a child, it was feeling talked down to. It shows that Lewis never had any children of his own. Tolkien knew how to tell stories to children; he was constantly telling tales to his own kids, and it shows — The Hobbit is such a great work of children’s literature in part because Tolkien never talks down, never patronizes, never spreads a thick coating of canned morality over his story, he talks to the child as an equal and lets the moral dimension of the tale evolve naturally from the events. Lewis had no idea how to do that. For what it’s worth, Tolkien also hated the Narnia stories!
Dennis, yep. I’ll have something to say about that this coming Wednesday.
I had a talk with my step father about astrology, energetics and spirituality, to which he is averse.
He says: before statistics calculation was invented, humans were unable to discern pure coincidence from significant correlation.
How did humans invent anything before that, then, I asked. Well evolution took us that far with the “three strikes is a connection” intuition.
He claimed a millionaire payed for a study of horoskopes about 15 years ago and they all turned out to be random noise. I have no overview over all those studies, and he does not remember where to find said study.
I’d be interested whether they really investigated into the very complex works of Astrology, as there’s no standard to this either which does not make assessments easier.
Practically all our written history could be analysed in those terms. Did anybody do so “scientifically”?
There is the general response to anything outside of the established scientific complex, that what people see and is beyond measured and papered study must be “randomness confused with significant correlation” or just “illusion”.
Online podcaster and declared Shaman Benjamin Maier replied to the question “how do I separate illusion from real entitities” with: if the entity responds in a way you could not make up yourself and moreover, if the advice turns out beneficial in real life (in the best case).
My step father revealed he had visions he did not want to disclose, but what they told him was all bogus. He did not respond well to the angle that messages may be symbolic hence for meditating about them – a concept foreign to him.
Furthermore he complained about all the bogus on youtube about near death experiences. Admittedly, these recounted visions often seem like a symbolic thing the people in question like to take as literal.
It is an art to bring precise arguments and formulate them accordingly, our host as a learned writer is good at that.
For a real discussion, there needs to be an epistemology of participants first, declaring which statements about the world each participant holds true and what definitions there are for certain terms.
I also argued that the basic level of occultism – feeling energy flow – is something people all around the world at all times describe identically and independently of each other.
My stepfather was more at ease with the explanantion: our mental focus within our body makes our fluids and nerves follow and may brng upon changes within the body.
When I mentioned working on glands he exclaimed “that’s dangerous!” and I agreed, bringing the example of kundalini Yoga.
It is always interesting to see how non-spiritual people respond and what kind of concepts they can take. The limitations of human language and much more the limitations in actual experience are most of the time in the way.
I think the most dissatisfying thing for materialistic rationalists is this: humans can discern coincidence from certain relationship well enough, hence obviously our civilizations, yet not at a 100% rate.
So absolute certainty is impossible. I think ambiguity is unpalatable for adherents to a civilization in its rationalistic phase.
My step father btw liked our hosts definition of rationality (something that is an established experience of reality for a society since some time, that however may change with time too).
WIth the good description of spirits and entitites in our hosts qabalistic work that “it is just a model, but one independently found by many, and form learned experience the best approximation” was something he had trouble with.
If political magic requires a common vision that could move the USA toward needed change could be one of how our children deserve protection. Kennedy’s running mate in particular has a personally motivated desire to look honestly at what has happened to the health of our children in our society not only recently but in the last 5 decades. The statistics are available and painful to study but we must be willing to go beyond mass indoctrination to look honestly at how our society in general and our children especially have been harmed by our medical system. If enough people see the truth and envision a changed society in which our children are protected, Kennedy could win.
Frequently folks on this blog ( or elsewhere) ponder the best locations to ride out he decline of the empire ( or industrial civilization in general). This is a very tricky topic and seems like nobody really has a satisfactory answer. I think the cause of this is that when it comes to location the time scale matters a lot. I would break this down to the short the. medium and the long term. These are only approximate but I would define them as the next 10 years, 10-40 years and over 40 years.
There are places that might be good for the next 10 years but horrible for the period from 10-40 years out. An vice-versa with places horrible in the short term but good in the long term.
For instance many semi-rural areas might be the best refuge from the craziness for the. next few years but they will be the first places to lose electric service and have the worst transportation problems when fuel becomes unavailable, but may be good again when local economic networks have been established and animal based transportation has been redeveloped.
Places like San Francisco will be bad for both the short and medium term but because of an excellent harbor, and climate will be centers of population, trade and economics in the long run.
The same kind of time tradeoffs can be said of most places with a few exceptions. Phoenix and Miami are probably doomed in the short medium and long term while folks living on the lakes and working canals of central NY might ride out all three periods with less hardship and disturbance than most places.
Curt #320 and JMG #326 regarding trauma:
It depends what kind of trauma we’re discussing. A child frightened by encountering a dangerous animal, then being comforted by the tribe: I get that. Sexual, physical, and/or emotional abuse by trusted family members, family friends, or spiritual leaders: that warps a person’s whole worldview, since the very people who are supposed to protect you are preying on you.
@Curt (#320) and JMG (#326):
I’d like to echo what the two of you are saying about trauma. The best response, and the sole healthy response, to trauma is to learn from it, to grow from it, and to be changed thereby. To my mind, this is not at all the same thing as being “healed” from trauma, which word implies a return to one’s former state of innocent and happy “wellness.”
But I’m an old man, born in 1942, a member of the so-called Silent Generation; and I came of age when hardly anyone ever went to a psychotherapist for anything. People experienced traumas, of course, back then, just as they do now, but (as out host says) they just “picked themselves up, brushed themselves off, and went on with life.”
And they made useful stories out of what had happened to them. As my favorite coffee mug says, “Scars are just tattoos with better stories.” Like out host, I think that that “the current response to trauma in the industrial world is a good sign of just how fragile and decadent we’ve become.”
Here’s a story from my own past that illustrates how things have changed. In the early 1950s, in eighth grade of my junior high school, a highly respected teacher had an end-of-the-school-year party for his classes at his and his wife’s house, and we all went. He had a brand new swimming pool that year, and its water was still very murky. We were told that there would be a time for swimming later in the party. We were also told emphatically to wait for that time, and especially not to go in the pool alone. However, one of my classmates, Doug, disregarded the order: he drowned in the swimming pool that afternoon, and the murky water kept anyone from seeing his dead body. A few hours later it was time for us all to use the pool, and another of my classmates, Fred, bumped into Doug’s dead body underwater. That ended the party, of course, and we all went home much earlier than expected. And there was no counseling offered to any of us at school, nor any thought that counseling at school might be needed.
I had occasion several times, decades later, to tell that story to some of my own students. Their universal response was to ask, “What did they do to the teacher?” My answer was, “Nothing! It wasn’t seen as the teacher’s that Doug drowned. It was Doug’s fault, since he had disobeyed the instruction not to go into the pool alone.. Kids who don’t pay attention to warnings quite often die; it’s their fault, and their deaths are a lesson to the other kids.”
During my college years in the 1960s I and my peers regarded ourselves as young adults with adult responsibilities; and I thought of my students at my university (where I began teaching in 1967) in the same way. So I was astonished when, in the early 1990s,. the then Dean of the College admonished us at a faculty meeting never to forget that the college students in our classes were mere children, incapable of taking care of themselves and greatly in need of our consant protection! I thought, “Well, that marks the end of our nation!”
It took me a decade to come into a position where I could retire from mu university, but retire I did, as soon as I could. That faculty meeting was decisive for me.
Gerard o’Neil,
That makes sense. I admit, the whole ”pollinated by flies and beetles” aspect of pawpaw reproduction concerns me slightly about the bloom-time aroma…
RIP Marian Zazeela…
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/marian-zazeela-artist-dead-1234701465/amp/
Her illuminated calligraphy I found inspiring, as was the spiritualdrone music she made with her husband La Monte Young, both disciples of the Indian kirala singer Pandit Pran Nath, influencing a generation of musicians, most notably in popular music, several of those associated and involved with the Velvet Underground.
Om Shanti Om
“I go to the sun, your life to the wind, by the meritorious acts that you have done, go to heaven and then to the earth again; or, resort to the waters, if you feel at home there; remain in the herbs with the bodies you propose to take.”
A bit late in the cycle, but I just got to this interesting, but fairly long, post on some of the technological/organizational factors that drive eras of centralization versus decentralization, predicting lots of decentralization in our future (surprising no one here):
https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/after-the-state-the-coming-of-neo
Cheers,
Jeff
Thanks, JMG,
A follow up question re:English involvement / outcome of the Civil War – what about the claim that the English used the 14th amendment to get their colony back peacefully by turning all of us into “citizens of the United States”?
Sometimes I come across people whose ideas make sense on some topics, then they share an idea that is almost but not quite “2 +2 = petunia”…
Thanks,
Matt
Apparantly the somali pirates saw how well the the Houthis were doing and changes in global shipping patterns, and have now decided to return to piracy off the somali coast. I’m a bit ashamed to admit I laughed when I heard. It’s awful, but I remember saying months ago that all we needed was the somali pirates to go back into business to really create massive shipping problems in that area of the world and I wondered if they would.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI1DskIlnjs&rco=1
Section on somali pirates starts around minute 21
I keep wondering if dressing up as pirates and joking around will become less common as piracy becomes a significant real-life threat again. Fictional pirates may be fun, but in real life they’re pretty nasty.
Wishing everyone who partakes a pleasant and joyful Easter… those mendacious WhiteHaus idiots and their klinger-ons excepting.
@Smith
“I wonder where such vulnerable places are in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. I wonder if either side intends to take advantage. Better the flanking approach than the grinding war of attrition don’t you think?”
You might find this article interesting
https://warontherocks.com/2022/03/the-wargame-before-the-war-russia-attacks-ukraine/
– two weeks before the war in Ukraine started US Marine Corps University ran a wargame to simulate how the war would play out. The team playing for Russians planned an overwhelming first strike to quickly envelop and destroy the Ukrainian forces. The team playing for Ukraine planned, amongst other things, to turn Kharkiv into “a second Stalingrad”.
This wargame illustrates that blitzkrieg is not be-all end-all. Some things you just can’t blitz. Big cities for example. Kharkiv population is 1.4 million. Kiev is 3.5 million. Storming Kiev alone is going to be a grind fest akin to Berlin operation in 1945 where Red Army suffered 80K dead and 280K wounded.
And then there is Lviv with 700K. And after that there are Carpathian Mountains. There is no blitzing those either.
“Stalin refused to believe reports about the German buildup prior to June 22, 1941. He supposedly refused to believe reports of a massive German assault and it apparently took him a week to some to his senses by which time the Germans were half-way to Moscow. Sometimes Blitzkrieg works even with full foreknowledge by the intended target”
That is not entirely accurate. It is not that Stalin refused to believe all the reports he was getting. He refused to believe some of them.
You have to give it to the Germans: prior to German attack on 22nd June their counterintelligence has run an extremely successfully disinformation campaign. They were feeding lots of conflicting reports through Soviet intelligence: that the German forces were amassing for the invasion of Middle East (that’s the version Stalin believed); that they were about to be rotated back to the West; that it was all part a massive disinformation campaign to cover the preparation for the invasion of Britain; that Germany was about to issue territorial demands to Soviet Union like it did with Poland and troops were there to back the subsequent political negotiations etc etc.
It was of course impossible to completely hide 3.8 million troops amassing on Soviet borders. But because Soviet leadership was getting so many conflicting reports about German intentions they did not know what to believe. Basically German counterintelligence has successfully created fog of war where there wasn’t one.
Besides Soviet intelligence has failed to obtain the key documents related to Operation Barbarossa, so they never had a conclusive proof they could present to Stalin.
“Or maybe you defeat the enemy by shutting down his banking system and utilities ie another way to outflank the enemy. Did you notice the frequency of cyber attacks lately? I wonder, are criminal gangs or foreign governments behind them?”
Funny you should say that. One of things military analysts have noticed in relation to war in Ukraine was noticeable lack of cyber warfare. Everyone expected cyber attacks to play a much bigger role in the war than they did in reality. One theory is that cyber warfare turned out to be a lot less effective than its proponents would want you to believe.
JMG,
Joe Biden declared today ( march 31) to be Transgender Visibility Day. This falls on Easter Sunday this year ( but not every year). Do you think the democrats and the crew running ” Joe Biden” want to lose the election? This seems to be the icing on the cake of tone-deaf boneheaded moves. They could have picked any other day, but the Easter before elections?
Could this just be an in you face power move to say to half of America ” we can do whatever we want and you can’t stop us” ? Or maybe at this point they want to make Joe Biden look so bad that when they pull a last minute substitution at the convention even someone like Hillary will look reasonable?
@Pygmycory & JMG: The latest New Scientist, a British publication, had an article about syphilis coming back, apparently in a volume far more than the health care system can handle, having thought they conquered the disease long ago.
@JMG: But will the new conservative bureaucrats be enacting economic measures for the good of the nation? Or will they simply be pushing the Moral Majority cultural issues?
@Tyler and the Daily Wire: Our local grocery story carries the New York Post, a tabloid whose headlines have a sourly triumphant “told you so, you blankety-blank libtards.” No Basement Boys playfulness and sense of humor there, either. Or, as much as was in Ebenezer Scrooge’s watered-down porridge at the beginning of his story.
Cans of the Walgreen’s house brand of ginger ale are now 7.5 ounces. And an article from Pocket claims that the Dollar Stores are the worst offenders for shrinkflation. As Leslie Fish once sang, “…but there’s more profit in robbing the poor.”
The Village used to have an ATM on one wall in the Lake House common area. Ameris Bank took it out Thursday, and Village Maintenance plastered over the hole as if to say we’re not getting another one. Mentioning that to my daughter this morning, she treated me to a mildly patronizing lecture about nobody using cash any more, and if you need it, you can always get it at the grocery store. (Yes. Up to $50 per purchase.) And that this was rapidly becoming a cashless society, which she seemed to think was inevitable progress. I did ask, mildly, “what about yard sales?” which left her at a standstill, but a very small potatoes one.
Curt, this is such a standard response by a rationalist it makes me chuckle. “Well, there was a study!” “Okay, show me the study.” “Er, I can’t remember where I saw it.” A believer in astrology who used that rhetorical gimmick would be flayed alive by the rationalists. Of course the rest of your father’s argument also rests, in the usual way, on circular logic. How do we know astrology doesn’t work? Because people in ancient times couldn’t think clearly. How do we know that they couldn’t think clearly? Because they invented astrology, and astrology doesn’t work. As I noted quite some time ago in this post —
https://www.ecosophia.net/blogs-and-essays/the-well-of-galabes/three-fallacious-arguments-an-interlude/
— it’s astonishing how much of modern rationalism, or rather pseudorationalism, is propped up with faith-based arguments and logical fallacies so old they have names in Latin.
Sarah, it’s always a losing bet in politics to insist that everyone ought to take up your particular issue, when most people already have issues in mind concern them profoundly — for example, the challenge of getting enough food on the table for their families in an environment of high (and officially unadmitted) inflation and downward pressure on wages. If you want to rally people to your candidate, you need to address their concerns, not tell them they have to adopt yours!
Clay, granted. I’ve tended to focus on small to midsized cities on trade routes with decently sized agricultural hinterlands close by, but of course that’s only one of the many available gambles.
Yavanna, that happened to children in earlier times just as often as it happens now, and many of them came through it more or less intact. For that matter, I’m a survivor of childhood abuse from several sources; I’ve got some emotional scars from that, but no, it didn’t warp my whole worldview — though it did teach me the useful and frankly necessary lesson that not everyone who says they’re on your side is going to follow through.
Robert, thanks for this. Yes, that’s exactly the sort of response I was thinking of.
Justin, I’m sorry to hear this!
Jeff, interesting. Thanks for this.
Matt, yes, I’ve encountered that claim too, and you’re right that it approaches petunia logic. How on earth did it benefit the British by making the United States a more unified and powerful nation, which could then take the British empire away from them? That’s what happened, of course. When we rescued Britain from the Germans in 1918, the price was that we got free rein in all of Latin America, much of which had previously been exploited by Britain; when we did the same thing in 1942, the price went up, and we took the whole British empire and imposed a US army of occupation on their own island. They haven’t forgiven us for that yet.
Pygmycory, no doubt! It’ll certainly boost the economy of East Africa, though — half the reason the colonies that became the United States thrived the way they did is that they provided the Carribean pirates with places to sell their stolen goods, buy supplies, and get roaring drunk
Polecat, thanks for the reminder. I’d like to wish a blessed Easter to all who celebrate it.
Clay, I saw that and literally dropped my face into my hands. I’m no fan of Biden (or, more precisely, of the circle of political hacks who are using that senile old man as their front), but that was one of the most embarrassing missteps in modern political history. I honestly think that at this point the Democrats have fallen so deep into Stormtrooper Syndrome that it’s literally never occurred to them that virtue signaling won’t inevitably bring them victory.
Patricia M, the thing that matters is that they’ll be slashing the federal bureaucracy. Entire departments are slated for the chopping block. Doubtless there will be some Oral Majority policies enacted, but at this point reducing the bureaucratic burden on the country is crucial for economic survival.
Last week you wrote: ‘For decades now, doing something about climate change has been one of the central projects of the Davos set’
Wanting to make a problem go away is not the same thing as doing something about it. Doing something about it demands social change your ‘managers of the world’ are unwilling to accept. They prefer existing conditions. Cui bono from existing conditions? They do.
Does anyone remember the Doomstead Diner? You can get to it through my website. It actually never died. State actors make it hard to find. Long story. But there should be a link on this post somewhere!
K-Dog, long time no see! I’m glad to hear that the Diner is still open for business. If you’d like to post the HTML link here, by all means.
To all: Russia has just issued an ultimatum to Ukraine:
https://www.rt.com/russia/595190-ukraine-terrorism-suspects-demand/
Very likely this is the immediate prelude to Russia declaring war. Up to now, the fighting has been a “special military operation” in Russian legal terms, and the Russian constitution imposes hard limits on what the government is allowed to do with the armed forces unless a war is formally declared by the Duma (Russia’s national legislature). Once war is declared, those limits are off. I would encourage all my readers to brace themselves for the possibility of very traumatic events in the near future.
Dr Mr Druid
Couple of ideas for you. Aurelien recently made an interesting comment over at Naked Capitalism (NC) concerned about blogger creep, where many of the Ukraine War Bloggers on the Russian Side have made a businesses reporting the war but are branching out into other areas they have no idea about. Since you are a generalist how do you keep from commenting on areas you don’t have any expertise on?
I understand why there tends to be mission creep and I do not have any problems with this as I tend to look at the information. I mean if I want March Madness commentary I go to a basketball site. If a geopolitics blog wants to comment on basketball I will make a judgement about how useful it is and continue reading (listening unfortunately these days) or not. No hard feelings. People can be really good in one area but not another. Take NC and pandemics for example.
Second, Mr. Niccolo Soldo is on the RWAPodcast for a free half hour. I realize you don’t do podcasts, so this is information for your audience that is interested in geopolitics especially Ukraine and Europe. What I find interesting is Mr. Soldo writes very provocatively but is quite measured while talking. He has some interesting ideas and presents them in person very respectfully, more so than his X feed. In my opinion your podcasts and writing tend to have the same tone. Do you do this on purpose or does this just happen?
A1
I was much cheered by last week’s post. I completed a biology degree in the seventies but the more I see of the natural world the more I realise how wonderful it is.
We had a byelection in England in Rochdale a few weeks ago which was won by maverick politician George Galloway with 40 per cent of the vote. Second was a local independent candidate David Tully who owns a vehicle body repair workshop with 21 per cent. This prompted an extraordinary unscheduled speech by our diminutive prime minister in which he described Galloway’s victory as “beyond alarming”, supposedly because of Galloway’s support for Palestinians. I suspect the real reason for the air of scarcely concealed panic was that the four main parties in England received just 28 per cent of the vote between them. All parroted the WEF “Build Back Better” slogan after the covid lockdowns.
It is dawning on the established parties that none are very popular. A Labour activist was quoted in the Guardian a while ago as saying “The message on the doorstep was the same everywhere I went. The voters hate all of us.”
Hey JMG
That is true, I have definitely experienced pushback and derision from people when I offer them some obscure fact that challenges the current world view. It’s sometimes quite pathetic to be honest.
Btw, have you heard that Vernor Vinge, famous sci-fi writer and co-inventor of the singularity, has died this week?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/29/vernor-vinge-obituary
Thanks, xcalibur! St. Anthony is a nice suggestion, though I don’t know if the saint was given to scrying…
My daughter actually cares much more about animal characters in all books she reads and movies she watches than about human characters, that is why we started with The Horse and His Boy. She has a very definite and articulated preference for Egyptian and North American indigenous religion over the Christianity that I practice, and I am watching how she deals with Lewis’ translation of Christianity into an allegorical animal mode. I do note Aslan says “Be divine waters” and the narrator uses the words “gods and goddesses of the wood” and “river god”, which probably don’t go down too well with many Christian readers.
One final note: I think the Cabby’s words on hearing the stars being sung into existence sum up a lot of Lewis’ thinking: “Glory be! I’d ha’ been a better man all my life if I had known there were things like this.”
@Patricia Matthews,
there’s been major rises in syphilis in Canada, too.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/syphilis-canada-skyrocketing-1.7123968
@JMG
The war in Ukraine starting to look more and more like WWI
Vienna, sorry!, Moscow demands Kiev to hands over the responsibles of the terrorist attack in Moscow:
https://tass.com/politics/1768381
It sounds like the ultimatum of the Autro-Hungarian Empire to Serbia on 23 July 1914, supported by Germany that brought WWI
Cheers
David
“Basically German counterintelligence has successfully created fog of war where there wasn’t one.”
A few years later the Russians proved they had learned the same trick at Operation Bagration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_deception
Speaking of Russian-Ukrainian events, F-16 jets are supposed to arrive in Ukraine in July. Russia says that is a trip wire event because those planes are nuclear capable. I seriously doubt those planes are the ones set up for tactical nuclear weapons. A Piper Cub can carry a nuclear weapon, but does it have the control electronics for arming it? No.
What an F-16 can do is make a long distance dash to attack a target far from the front. The Russians take that as a serious escalation. So it does look like things are going to escalate.
In more immediate news, the below zero cold snap with no snow on the ground took out half my strawberries. Very few blossoms on the apricot as well.
A1, I don’t post about things I haven’t studied. For example, I routinely get people insisting that I ought to comment on the domestic politics of various countries, and I always tell them no — I don’t live there and don’t have any experience with their politics, and the last thing anyone needs is another clueless American telling other people how to live their lives. As a longtime student of history, however, I feel comfortable talking about US politics and global political and military affairs, as well as the fall of civilizations and such unrelated issues as occultism (which I’ve also studied, of course). As for Soldo’s podcast, I have no idea — I don’t listen to him (and I’m not on X). Unless he’s a reader here, it’s quite possible that the similarity of tone is pure accident.
Michael, that’s excellent news. If the establishment parties realize that, in fact, most voters hate, fear, and despise them, and would gladly vote for Vladimir Putin in place of any of them if he was on the ballot, that might cause them to rethink the hateful and idiotic policies that have caused the voters to embrace this attitude.
J.L.Mc12, no, I hadn’t heard that! I wasn’t especially a fan of his but I enjoyed some of his novels. Thanks for letting me know.
DFC, yes, that was one of the examples I was thinking of. It used to be absolutely standard in the runup to a war for one nation to accuse the other of violating international law, and demand some kind of recompense that the other nation was not willing to provide. Once the other country refused, the first country was within its legal rights, under international law, to go to war. My best guess is that this is exactly what we’re seeing: the Russians are making a point of following the laws of war to the letter, so that when they declare war and unload everything they’ve got on Ukraine, they can point to their actions and, in the eyes of the global South, claim to be justified.
Siliconguy, it’s quite possible that the Russian government has decided not to wait for July.
Curt, you might look into a method called “Neurogenes Zittern” (kind of trauma-informed grandchild of Wilhelm Reichs work). And EMDR (there are good audio tracks for self-treatment). And the work of Peter Levine. All of these are based on a very quick, instinctive response, even more primal than what you describe from human communities: animal gets hurt, animal goes into hiding and deliberately lets trembling happen until it feels better, done.
A fun new example of the negative returns of Progress and the ongoing crappification of everything:
The Major League Baseball season has just begun, and the league has debuted new-and-improved uniforms, after an apparently years-long design process in collaboration with Nike and the huge sportwear apparel company Fanatics. The official hype has it that: “… the Nike Vapor Premier jersey was engineered to improve mobility, moisture management and fit, while keeping sustainability in mind — bringing inspiration and innovation to athletes. Its breathable, lightweight, high-performance fabric was made from at least 90% recycled polyester yarns. It also provides 25% more stretch and allows the jersey to dry 28% faster, with moisture-wicking Dri-Fit ADV technology to help ensure athletes stay cool all game long. Using the latest in digital technology, Nike body-scanned more than 300 baseball players to dial in the ideal fit — more athletic and form-fitting than the previous chassis.”
At this point I’m sure anyone familiar with this blog, baseball fan or not, sees where this is going.
As soon as the players got their uniforms in spring training, comments and images started circulating. The pants are so see-through that the players have to wear black underwear. There are some very awkward photos. Further, the colors of the shirts and the pants don’t match; some jerseys have the numbers and lettering affixed crooked; and rather than being able to have their pants custom-sized, the players can now choose from just four sizes (generated by Nike’s advanced body-scanning technology), resulting in some really poorly fitting fits. The consensus overall is that the unforms look and feel cheap and unprofessional, “like replicas.” The players and fans hate them. And as for the “breathability” to which all other considerations which sacrificed, on Opening Night in Houston all the players visibly sweat right through their shirts!
A number have players have said the league has gaslit them about the problems and figure the bigshots think they’re too dumb to know what they’re talking about. Indeed, the Commissioner recently said that the new jerseys “have been tested more extensively than any jersey in any sport.” A/k/a, the experts have spoken, the science is settled, etc.
It calls to mind the bioplastic of JMG’s Retrotopia, doesn’t it? Not important in the least, but funny, and, well, here we are.
re recent discussions on fertility rates: there’s been a lot of cases in Canada recently of people being denied rental housing because they have kids. Since a large segment of the population can’t afford to buy housing until the women are nearly out of their childbearing years, if they can afford to buy housing ever, being denied rental housing means people are risking their ability to keep a basic roof over their head by having children. And if they lose their housing, they may well lose custody of their kids.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/complaint-process-parents-denied-rentals-1.7159916
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/single-mothers-rental-housing-kids-discrimination-1.7142297
And they wonder why birth rates have fallen through the floor! Head-desk.
Reasons I’ve seen or heard to be denied rental housing:
-having kids
-not being over 55
-too many people in family unit for the size of the apartment in the landlord’s opinion
-having pets
-having a guide dog (person was blind)
-being dependent on disability for your income
-being male (though when this is for room in a shared apartment with a woman who doesn’t know you I can understand that one)
-having mental health issues of any kind
-being an entrepreneur (person was successful and had money stored in the bank, but nobody wanted to rent to them because it wasn’t a ‘job’)
Some of these are illegal, but they happen anyway and you don’t really have any recourse as a renter. And when you’re getting denied over and over you can’t just ‘go rent somewhere else’.
And then of course there’s the whole smoking, drinking, drugs, lack of references, lack of ability to put up a damage deposit, lack of sufficient income which are more understandable to for landlords to be upset about but does put people on the street fast in this market.
>A Piper Cub can carry a nuclear weapon
Care to do the weight and balance on that one? Remember, fuel is also considered cargo that you have to carry as well.
In the Solar Eclipse chart you mentioned that the only planet in aspect with the eclipse is a Mercury conjunction, and I was wondering if Mercury retrograde would have an effect on things.
JMG,
According to Wikipedia, which I know needs to be taken with a couple tablespoons of salt regarding issues like this, Biden first officially declared March 31 to be the Transgender Day of Visibility in 2021. The whole thing first started in 2009. There is also the issue that I heard about regarding a White House Easter egg contest where eggs painted with a religious theme were not allowed. If true, that is even more tone-deaf than the Transgender thing.
>Russia has just issued an ultimatum to Ukraine
More interesting is the reason why. So according to them, it wasn’t ISIS-K after all. Or maybe it was and they’re just using this as an excuse to do something they always wanted to do. Like someone else did with oh, say, Iraq? Who knows. Although they’re not talking about generalities that have plausible deniability (what exactly does WMD mean anyway), they’re naming names and making specific demands related to those names.
2024: The Year of the Greatest Dumpster Fire Ever
Unholy Shale! This Russia/Ukraine thing is not good! Our erstwhile leadership who I call the Atlanticist/Globalist/Davos Cabal may go into a hissy fit and may take us further into useless war land venting their Putin frustration. Frustrated that Russia has shown them they are not the Lords of the Universe. Since the Cabal typically doesn’t reap the fruit of their decisions they will probably continue to carry on in the wrong direction. My father had a saying “We will continue to have wars as long as we have young men to fight them and old men to declare them.”
To top it off my country, the USA, has a president with a vacant upstairs and who knows who is really in charge. I remember as a little boy my parent’s anxious watching of the news during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I am concerned! Well, from my study of history I have seen that if enough time passes eventually those who predict bad times are correct.
Grover – paw paw flowers have no discernible scent, so you need to attract the flies. My wife refused to do this, but once we did the results were obvious. Two chicken leg bones (with the meat mostly consumed by us) per tree will suffice.
@Michaelz regarding money lending, jumping off JMG’s comment “In times of expansion, that can be allowed; in times of contraction, it’s lethal, and that’s why societies in dark ages stop using money altogether and shift their economic activities into forms that don’t allow debt-based exploitation.”
There is also the intermediate periods where money lending is usually punished by death. Societies learn about the terrible outcome of interest based loans and then try to make sure it never happens again. But alas, society on the back of energy surplus is acting like a gambler with a new credit card and “this time it will be different, we cannot lose!” Until we do, and the lesson is learned again.
Thus the concept of Usury. Here is your first 7,000 words on the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury
https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/relationships/sanitized-easter-sunday-invitations-have-megachurch-facing-hard-questions-from-christians/ar-BB1kPUY8?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=73dd05acf4be40649e8e8ad706b3da02&ei=27
“Let’s not turn off our churchgoers by getting into that God stuff….”
Close your doors, boys, you’ve had it.
A brief thought. Today/Tomorrow is April Fools Day. It used to be good advice to question every outrageous head line on this day. But nowadays we have to do this every single day on almost all subjects. For as amazing as the internet is, many folks really do treat it like a free-for-all sewer casino that might just pay out a dollar or two here and there at the cost of our sanity!
Jonathan, you know, I keep on trying to stay ahead of the world with my fictional predictions, and the world just keeps on running after me faster and faster. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Pygmycory, good gods.
KVD, Mercury retrogrades are drastically overrated in today’s pop astrology. It’s just an ordinary debility, and not the worst one that Mercury can have; the fact that Mercury is combust is actually more important.
John, so noted. It still would have been smart of him (or his handlers) to be quiet about it this year.
Other Owen, oh, it was ISIS-K all right, but ISIS-K has been oddly subservient to British and US intelligence from the get-go, and the shooters didn’t act like Daesh fanatics — they didn’t embrace martyrs’ deaths, they ran for the Ukraine border. It’s been quite common for a very long time for intelligence agencies to infiltrate and take over terrorist groups, and then use them for their own purposes.
BeardTree, yep. It just stuns me that anybody failed to realize how Russia would respond to the Crocus atrocity. They have one response to large-scale terrorism: everyone involved, including top-level leadership, gets hunted down and killed. I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for Victoria Nuland’s chances of survival right now, and the same thing goes for the top Ukrainian leadership. As for the people you’re calling the Cabal, it’s not impossible that the Russians will make a very messy example of one or two of them, just to make sure everyone in the world is reminded why it’s a bad idea to poke a bear with a stick.
Patricia M, that’s just sad.
Michael, maybe so, but I doubt the Russian government is interested in pranks just now. The Crocus killings seem to have catalyzed a shift in Russian public opinion to a harsher attitude toward the West. Important Russian politicians are calling for the death penalty to be revived and for everyone involved in the attack, at whatever level, to be killed with or without benefit of trial. I don’t think the bozos in charge of the Western nations have any idea what they’ve unleashed.
Sol from SNAFU, a black man from the deep South who is a Christian, a military veteran and a deputy sheriff, on the sad state of institutional Christianity in present-day America:
https://www.snafu-solomon.com/2024/03/christianity-has-been-bastardized-and.html?m=1
Hi John Michael,
Some outrages galvanise public opinion, that’s for sure. That’s historically happened down here as well, and that’s when the unthinkable, becomes thinkable, and people are suddenly willing to pay for and support the unthinkable. The Port Arthur Massacre had that effect. It’s a dangerous card to use, and change is implemented swiftly. Thanks for the link to the article, and I tend to agree with your observations.
Just had some decent rain, (it usually rains here most weeks, even just the tiniest of amounts) but this rain was the first notable fall in two months. It’s been quite warm and dry, and also dusty. Elsewhere on the continent, the year has been very wet, and Lake Eyre (which is 50ft below sea level) is rapidly filling. That lake recharges the Great Artesian Basin I believe, but also increases the humidity for those living far to the SE of it, like say, here.
We’ve previously discussed the vibe of this year. I’m encountering a certain sort of brittleness in conversations, and that’s a worrying sign. Are you seeing that? The old timers used to quip that: It isn’t paranoia, if it’s true! I quite like that saying.
Cheers
Chris
Mercury retrogrades might not be a big deal for some people but I seem to experience more disruptions. I’m wondering if an interpretation would be that the media is going to put out a lot of bad information regarding the crisis. Yeah I know. Big shocker there.
On a completely different note, for those who are interested in the role of the alphabet in magic and mysticism, the foreword and first (very short) chapter of my translation of Franz Dornseiff’s Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie (1922) [The Alphabet in Magic and Mysticism] is now up here. Expect subsequent chapters (many are much longer) on the first of the month (currently I have them stacked up until November). Topics covered later include an extensive look at the use of vowel sequences in the magical papyri.
Some info on the author and a contemporary review of the original book can be found here.
And on yet another note, I’ve also posted a short review of a recent translation from the Czech (not by me) of Karel Weinfurter’s Mysticism for All: Especially for Parents.
JMG,
Regarding the transgender thing, you are quite right, but I think they are in a trap of their own making since who do you risk offending – your core base or largely everyone else? I don’t think they realized that the issue would be the one that keeps on giving (to their opponents), especially because of the flamboyance of the transgender left (bare breasts/chests in front of the White House anyone?). I’m sure the transgender right has much better sense.
Gerard o’Neil,
Thanks for that! I’m actually pretty relieved to know that I didn’t just plant some rotten meat perfume in the side yard… I can certainly do the chicken bone thing when the time comes. Appreciate that info.
Which is a weird turn for me, since I’m not opposed to letting bald-faced hornets build a nest near the house for their superb fly control! And now I’m asking the flies to come on in. Make yourselves comfortable. How bizarre.
With regards to Victoria Nuland, until very recently, she was the third highest ranking official in the US State Department. Then, a few weeks ago, Nuland suddenly announced she was resigning. Now she is technically a private citizen.
Here’s where things get really weird: Nuland’s last official day on the job was March 22, 2024. That was the same day the Crocus City Hall attack occurred. Coincidence?
Ariel, thanks for this.
Chris, yes, I’m seeing a lot of brittleness just now. Worth watching…
KVD, oh, it’s a debility, no question. If you take the time to learn some astrology you’ll notice that Mercury things also tend to go wrong when he’s in Sagittarius or Pisces, and especially when he makes a negative aspect to something in your birth chart.
Kerry, many thanks for this!
John, oh, no doubt. The thing is, Biden’s core voters are going to hold their noses and vote for him no matter what. It’s the undecided voters who matter, and he’s losing them — no, throwing them away.
Ariel, you’re not the only person who’s noticed that — nor that she did a lot of public gloating about how ordinary Russians were going to suffer.
On not completely unrelated news, I’ve just posted something on my two mundane astrology venues, on SubscribeStar and Patreon, on the impending Mars-Saturn conjunction, which happens just two days after the upcoming solar eclipse, and which promises trouble. Most of my posts are for subscribers only, but I’ve made this one an open post that anyone can read. By all means check it out:
https://www.subscribestar.com/john-michael-greer
https://www.patreon.com/posts/mars-saturn-2024-101456453
Vlad, this is fascinating stuff.
I don’t recall ever reading about the German disinformation campaign but given that Germany was a hotbed of military entrepreneurship and innovation it doesn’t surprise me. They appear to have understood Stalin perfectly well, playing him like a fiddle, telling him exactly what he wanted to hear anyway.
The angle that I read was that Stalin was disbelieving that Hitler would order an attack any time soon despite the abundance of evidence right under Stalin’s nose that Hitler intended exactly that. It likely didn’t help that Stalin had conducted purges of his military staff, getting rid of a lot of experience and talent. I read that a lot of fairly senior officers that were left after the cull had no more than an eighth grade education.
I read that the Germans timed the attack beautifully, with a large number of Soviet front line commanders on leave, with Soviet forces in a state of unpreparedness. Some tanks that had ammunition had no fuel, tanks that had fuel had no ammo, that kind of thing.
In sum, with the benefit of hindsight and distance, it sounds to me like a ludicrous and colossal failure of common sense on the part of Stalin and the guys around him, choosing to believe sweet nothings whispered in their ears by German propagandists. It sounds incredible, how do you reasonably read (or misread?) the buildup of millions of troops and thousands of tanks on a front hundreds of miles long, right on your doorstep?
West of Toninka, the Russian army has launched the biggest armoured attack of the war with 36 (!) tanks and 12 personnel carriers, while the power supply is being attacked throughout the country.
Seems like the Russian bear is taking off the bandages.
Hi JMG,
Thank you for your warning regarding Russia declaring war on Ukraine and the West after the Crocus attack. You have mentioned a rough future for the elites after poking the bear. Would you be able to suggest potential repercussions on the ordinary western citizens? I live in Europe and wish to prepare for my family a mitigation plan if you could help visualize the contour of future troubles.
Kind regards,
Hey JMG
I am not surprised that you had not heard about Vernor, since I also have heard little of him in general. He seems to be one of those people that used to be famous but fell out of sight as far as mainstream media is concerned. I had not heard anything about him in a very long time.
Something that occurred to me recently during an argument about the effects of pollution on nature that I had with my family was the ways that nature could adapt to plastic exposure. It has already been found that some bacteria species have recently evolved the ability to breakdown certain plastics, and I wondered if it was possible that in response to the presence of microplastics in food gut bacteria could evolve that same ability? Is it possible that many animals in the future could acquire plastivore gut-bacteria that would breakdown microplastics into more harmless byproducts? I also wondered about other ways animals could adapt to plastic, like the way many birds have learned to build and decorate their nests with plastic string and rubbish?
@Yavanna
“It depends what kind of trauma we’re discussing…”
Very true; childhood abuse in the near social environments means an unhealthy dichotomy in our survival instincts; A we need the group to survive B the group (or members) abuse i.e. the survival instinct commands a constant alarm where we should feel safe.
This leads, as I was told, among other things to phenomena like women keeping to men who beat and abuse them – they have learned it is normal and a necessary condition to accept for survival.
Our nature seemingly cannot differentiate when things change and this adaptation for mere survival becomes an impediment because circumstances have changed or can be changed easily.
@Robert Mathiesen
Thank you for your story! A young woman from the US once told me about her grandfather who lost an eye when playing with other children, yet was a thoroughly happy man always.
My own grand father, son of a pioneers corporal in the imperial Austrian army, seems to have taken some damage in WWII though, not that I ever got to know him consciously (I did meet him, but was very small). He drank and smoked heavily and died prematurely, he cared little for his own son my father whom he did not love and took no responsibility for his family. My grandmother, deceased this year in January and born in 1926 put up with it all, yet she was a happy and optimistic, energetic woman, just until three years ago when dementia hit her and she lost her self sufficiency, not an easy fate for someone so strong and self determined. Still I’m happy she could go peacefully this year amidst us, her family.
My father says, there were two types of WWII veterans, those who would recount stories ceaselessly and those who would not want to ever speak about it, my grandfather being the latter. Whether it was really trauma that made him coldhearted and irresponsible is a different question, he came from a wealthy family and held a government position in the well off middle ranks, maybe he wasn’t ever very empathic to begin with.
My grandmother, to stay with our examples here, indeed saw a lot and experienced enough bad things, but stayed always in a mild manner, never vengeful, never tainted in her mood. She did not grow up wealthy, though with very loving parents (esp my great grandfather) – who by the way objected to her marriage with my grandfather.
In my case – we need maybe not talk about trauma as such, but much more, during my life, a sense of hopelessness, purposelessness, general enmity against my own peer society, fatalistic feeling about where my society is going, resulting rage, destructiveness and failure to cope with my social environment.
That, in turn, fits our description of life in a decadent and cynical society well again, I think.
@JMG
“Curt, this is such a standard response by a rationalist it makes me chuckle…”
And thanks for the link to your article too, because funny enough I forgot one response by my step father you describe so well in this article.
I say “it so seems mundane events are guided by the planes” – “and why then should it be so, by what mechanism?” “Nobody knows” “Then it must surely be bogus!”
Out of the script book I guess.
It has to be said my stepfather and mother are highly intellectual and the certainly have intellectual prowess. These years when I mentioned spiritual topics, however, I think to have noticed something: the belief that things are possible out of the rational, measurable, most of all: controllable!
It instills great fear in them.
Something that is not under control and out of their intellectual framework of how the world is supposed to work instills manic rage in them I have seen often.
I myself have been taught in the same way, “get out of your head already!” is what I have been told numerous times in this life. My final portal to spirituality was, after all, physical problems with my body and its joints, and the discovery that *feeling” is important, communication with my biological body in no intellectual terms. This discovery lead me to scale back my intellectual interests and give sentience and energetics a great portion of devoted time in my everyday life.
About trauma – well whether it is trauma or not, I think your offered Spiritual Alchemy programme is still a great key to hold in our hands in this life, self knowledge, consciousness about all our emotions, beliefs and habits, and finally the concept that is thoroughly spiritual: acceptance of this world, our experiences in it, our place in it, to let go of unnecessary want of total control (very difficult for me), to treat the universe around us not as an “it” but as a “you” (I have started some time ago to actively see it that way).
@Njura
Curt, you might look into a method called “Neurogenes Zittern […] EMDR”
Thank you very much Njura!
Whether we call it trauma therapy or not, I think these are all good tools for personality building.
I heard of Emotional Freedom Techniques as well, their effectveness is disputed.
It’s all worth trying though.
I have ordered the book The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame from Pete Walker and the accompanying workbooks. It is much praised, apparently many people suffering for years and decades have found their answer there.
To conclude our discussion of “trauma” – whether or not this is the subject, but given we do live in a decadent and decaying society, given that I moreover am the notorious third generation after those who built everything, it isn’t wrong to give attention to our own wiring and imprint we got growing up in such a society.
As a child I was narcisstic and materialistic, for a time. I got rid of that, but still, I think many learned patterns we receive are absolutely not helpful.
May we call what we want it to call – to seize one’s self responsibility of emotion and personality is a great remedy to the spiritual disease of our time, and such there is, and such I know.
Having had many conflicts during my life, my dealings with people have greatly improved, throughout all the years and this year was another great and helpful boost and I am proud enough.
Still there’s habits I want to get rid of, like wanting to actually eliminate every person that gives me minor inconvenience, an archaic instinct of fighting dangers to survival, only what I talk about is not a danger to survival, because this human “group” is virtual, and as long as the nuisance of a contemporary does not hire contract killers on me or frames my real identitiy on the internet, the inconvenience is not what my inner animal believes it to be.
Fragile, yes, in a way. Stress hormones are higher in big city kids is proven, a misfiring pattern of alertness as one possible consequence.
John #358 said…
“Biden first officially declared March 31 to be the Transgender Day of Visibility in 2021. The whole thing first started in 2009.”
It’s not surprising for me; IMHO transgender people are for the post-modern/woke “left” the new angels or “beings of light”, of course full of virtues and without faults…So Biden pundits say: OK let’s declare Transgender Day on Easter days, so we hit two targets with a single shot: “we” enthrone the new gods-angels and provoke these nasty old-style Christians…(it’s unfortunate because Trump is going to fish a lot of believers vote, in facto, he’s selling Bibles in public if I’m not wrong).
I have read that Stalin knew an attack was coming. He just didn’t think that it was coming so soon. He thought the Nazis would first try to intimidate the Soviets into an imbalanced peace treaty.
I have to admit that my sense of the world rebels at the notion of someone who was clearly skillful at seizing and holding so much power for so long making that huge a mistake. To this day, there are still many different theories about how that happened.
Just before starting the Special Military Operation, Putin gave a speech in which he referenced Stalin’s mistake and basically said that he would not make the same mistake.
By the way, arguably the Nazis made an even bigger mistake. They thought that once they took care of all the Soviet troops massed near the front line, that would be pretty much the end of the fighting. Until they reached Moscow near the end of the year, they defeated one Soviet army after another. Their problem was that after they wiped out the front line of troops, none of those other Soviet armies or their equipment were supposed to exist. There are records from German officers who already knew that the war was lost in those first months while they were still winning every battle and had not even reached Moscow.
Thank you for making those astrological predictions available for free.
Someone in this thread mentioned Torquay. I’d suggest this if you have a passing interest in Christie. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/devon/greenway
Book parkign before visiting, though.
As a soccer fan who fumes with impatience while the video assistant referee views the same clip over and over to rule on a foul or offside with millimetric precision, I’m not sure if the following academic paper dated April 1 is legit or not; it does after all make some valid points:
From Sport Psychology to Action Philosophy: Immanuel Kant and the Case of Video Assistant Referees
“The ongoing debate surrounding the VAR system brings to light the intricate balance between preserving the authenticity of football (soccer) and harnessing technology to improve accuracy. It is crucial to strike the right equilibrium in order to uphold football’s metaphorical power and sustain the timeless joy it has brought to fans throughout generations. In this context, Immanuel Kant’s philosophy can offer valuable insights into the utilization of VARs in soccer. According to Kantian ethics, using VARs can be justified if it serves to enhance fairness and accuracy, aligning with the moral duties of referees. Nevertheless, it is important to consider the potential dehumanizing effects and the necessity of preserving the value of human judgment in the game.”
“Football undeniably mirrors life, as argued by George Orwell [2]. It allows for a refined conflict, reminiscent of war, within a protected framework and without bloodshed. If we aim to instill in football fans a model from which they can emerge with an optimistic outlook, it becomes crucial to provide them with the best means to test the quality of both teams and minimize cases where games are decided by incorrect referee decisions. Improving the quality and accuracy of refereeing in football could also have an impact on our expectations of referees presiding over real-life courts.”
@Quin,
I realize I owe you– and the larger Ecosophia group–an update about my wife, Monika, for whom we have been praying. My apologies it did not come sooner. So! She’s doing well overall, though still with considerable but transient pain. Apparently her rib cage is too tight, and stretching(?), which is not uncommon when it’s the first time the process has gotten this far… but it can be very painful. Luckily when she’s not being sent to remote worksites she has a laptop job, so the fact that she gets bedridden for part of every day hasn’t required us to jump the gun on maternity leave. As for the babe, their early genetic screening came back normal and they have a strong heartbeat, so everything is looking okay so far, knock on wood. We’d appreciate staying on the list if possible.
Thank you, JMG, for providing us with a venue for these side conversations.
Narnia related:
JMG #326: I’ve come across that criticism before (of Narnia being patronizing) but somehow it never bothered me. The moralizing can be a bit much at times, but even that was something I could overlook for the most part. I regard Lord of the Rings as the modern epic of our times (with Star Wars OT as the runner-up), and Narnia as the modern fairy-tale.
Aldarion #348: There really are way too many parallels between the Hermit of the Southern March and St Anthony of the Desert for it to be coincidence. There’s a youtube channel delving into Narnian lore that covers this. I don’t want to shill for things here, so I won’t link it, but you’ll find it under “Into the Wardrobe”.
Russia/Ukraine related:
This conflict is fascinating in a number of ways. One of the resurgence of WWI tactics alongside drones & electronic warfare, as I mentioned. Another is the wave of propaganda from the West, fabricating an entire war that is nearly an inversion of the real war. The propaganda war, or fantasy war, seems to have many otherwise intelligent people deluded, with false hopes. They’ll get a collapse alright, but not the one they’re expecting! I think this fantasy war ties well into Stormtrooper Syndrome (as our host terms it), which could be described as using cliche fantasy tropes as a lens through which to see the world. Of course, reality doesn’t work that way, and there is no “poor performance” or “failure” (although the Russians have had to iron out issues here & there), there are no “human wave attacks”, no “poorly-trained conscripts with rusty mosin-nagants”, none of that exists. This is the best documented war in human history, and actual front-line footage blatantly disproves the gaslighting, yet it still works.
I wonder if there are occult dimensions to this weaving of illusions?
In any case, Russian victory is going to smash through the fantasy bubble, and leave many with serious cognitive dissonance.
Fae related:
Hartmann’s Among the Gnomes would benefit from a JMG review. It starts off with a story of a man striking a deal with fae creatures for gold, which they give to him at a certain price, and it eventually leads him to ruin. It seems like exactly the sort of thing they would get up to. It also has references to the Fae aligning with certain classical elements (earth, wind, fire, water), which was first stated by Paracelsus I believe. I wonder if you could confirm that, or whether that’s better suited to Magic Monday? Anyway, thanks again for all that you do.
@Other owen 356: To answer that you’d have to know how large and how heavy the smallest nuclear weapons are. Who, among us civilians can do that? I sure can’t. One of the better books on nuclear weapons, although now way out of date, is John McPhee’s “The Curve of Binding Energy,” from back in the 1970s. It revolves around talks with weapons designer Ted Taylor, who worked on designing small nukes like the “Davy Crocket”. It’s a really good read too. McPhee is always interesting.
@Tyler A #307,
I would rather not connect with strangers from comment sections. I have had bad experiences in the past. But if you are looking for information about techcomm, you can visit the STC website (www.stc.org) and look under their Resources section. They also have a certification scheme, and the first tier does not require any work experience. That, plus whatever experience you have in science communication, is almost guaranteed to get you a job.
STC also has chapters outside of the US: I believe that they are also in France and India, but I am not sure.
Look up their conference: it is worth attending if you do not live too far. A great opportunity to leave your resume to potential employers. And they always have sessions for beginners.
Similarly, the ISTC (the Brits) https://istc.org.uk/ have lots of useful information and a mentorship scheme. Their quarterly magazine is really good. They dropped their distance courses years ago, which is a shame, since they were really good. They still endorse 3rd-party courses and have a mentorship scheme.
Then you have the Tekom (tekom.eu), i.e. the Europeans (the Germans really, but they did win the war in the parallel reality of techcomm). Again, lots of information for beginners, including a map of all university courses in Europe. Tekom is also very well connected to the officialdom, and their specialist publications are very useful. I am not so keen on their magazine though.
Standard IEC/IEEE 82079-1:2019 tells you literally everything you need to know about documenting machinery, and is a good starting point for everything else. Besides, you get 100 bonus points just by mentioning it during an interview.
@Smith
“It sounds incredible, how do you reasonably read (or misread?) the buildup of millions of troops and thousands of tanks on a front hundreds of miles long, right on your doorstep?”
You are not the first person to ask this question. The official Soviet version that USSR was caught with its pants down has always made little sense. There was quite a lively discussion amongst Russian historians starting from late 1980s all the way through 1990s as to what actually happened. Unfortunately, at the time the key documents related to Soviet military planning were still classified (they remain classified to this day as far as I am aware) so historians had to rely on secondary documents and, well, hearsay evidence. Naturally all sorts of (conspiracy) theories appeared. Some maintained that even if USSR was planning for a war with Germany it was only a defensive one (essentially supporting the official version). Others believed that USSR was planning to attack Germany in 1941 and Germany just happened to pre-empt it by a few weeks or months (depending on who you listen to). Some say that USSR was planning to attack Germany but no earlier than 1942 etc etc
Whatever the case may be most historians believe that as of June 1941 Soviet military was not ready for whatever war USSR was planning to wage. They differ in what constitutes “not ready” and what the reasons for unpreparedness were but that seems to be the majority consensus. Naturally if Soviet military was not ready, June 1941 was going to be a disaster no matter what they did.
One of the major factors in misreading German intentions was a fatal mistake that Soviet military did in vastly overestimating German forces required to attack Soviet Union. As of 15th May 1941 they estimated that Germany would need at least 180 divisions to launch an attack on Soviet Union. So when Soviet intelligence reported on 31st May 1941 that the Germans had 120 to 122 divisions on Soviet borders even those in Soviet leadership who believed that Germany was going to attack USSR thought that the attack was by no means imminent since Germany was only 67% there in terms of troop build-up. And therefore the Soviets had more time to prepare.
Nonetheless even though Soviet leadership did not believe the attack was imminent they were getting more and more uneasy about German troops amassing on the borders. By mid-June they were starting to get cold feet. On June 14th 1941 “Izvestia” has published an editorial that was essentially a long “can we talk about this” letter addressed to the Germans. Soviets were hoping that the Germans would respond by issuing political demands (like they did with Poland) and that the subsequent negotiations would allow them to stall the war for a few more months. When Germany refused to respond, Soviet leadership finally realised that the proverbial is about to hit the fan and started moving troops close to the border in preparation for German attack. But by that time it was already too late.
>the impending Mars-Saturn conjunction
I’ve maintained that Kamala is not the president this country wants.
But she may be the president this country deserves.
Not that it matters. My cat could be president for all that it matters at this point.
@JMG – one question that keeps coming up on this blog is why the Left has been mindlessly repeating itself “as if under a spell” since 2015 instead of asking what went wrong and how to fix it.
It came to me this morning that the question was answered in The King in Orange, in the story of The Changer’s journey and treatment of those who tried to stop him. The beaver by his dam, the deer on the hill…. changed into a lesser form and doomed to repeat their actions mindlessly. So –
“The Changer took the protester’s sign and put the pole between her feet, and her bright-colored hat on her head, saying “Your name is Parrot, and when the people come, they will keep you in a cage for their amusement.” And there she sits to this day, endlessly repeating everything she hears, while the people laugh and offer her stale crackers for her food.”
Insight courtesy of a passing reference to “Hosteen Coyote” in a Tony Hillerman novel, a Changer most of the Southwest knows well.
@JMG
If I remember correctly, you pointed out that in one or two centuries, human population will be 5-10% of what it is now, which is between 400-800 million, or in other words, back to the pre-industrial numbers. Someone posted here a link to the Energy Skeptic blog, so I checked it out and I’ve been reading a bunch of articles that shed light on the many ways we destroy the planet. From the destruction of fertile soil, water pollution, aquifer depletion, environmental damage, nuclear contamination, biodiversity loss to mineral depletion and more, it looks like after we lose access to oil, gas and coal we’ll return to a world much more inhospitable than the one from 400 years ago. Wouldn’t it be safe to say human population will drop way bellow 400 million? Or did you proposed this number according to the future loss of habitat?
JMG, I agree with your reply about the western ‘game-plan’ in regards to Russia and Ukraine. That’s why BoJo went there in March 2022 (to tell them to fight) and that’s why he denies it vehemently now (because thay are losing). I’m also positive that there will be a big shift toward the alt-right in the June elections, but the way it stands now (yet that can change dramatically in a whim), it will be because the immigration issue rather than the war.
Most people I speak about the threat of war state that we have to because “Putin will not stop with Ukraine”. Me pointing out that Ukraine is not part of NATO and that we really have no need to be there doesn’t make any difference. Same goes to pointing out that Putin is a legal autist who is likely to take NATO commitments serious. When I mention Minsk II people don’t even know what I’m talking about.
I’m taking two things from those frustrating interactions: first it is obvious that most people in the west are dangerously uninformed and second we are used to not suffering direct hits in war. It is easy to attack countries that cannot hit us on our own ground and it seems people expect that now to be the case again. I usually don’t even start about hybrid warfare and the fact that Russia is very much able to hit us where it hurts, even without using their nukes. When I do mention such things, I get immediately hushed like I’m spoiling the party.
Since it’s open post week, I thought I’d expand on my comment on the other blog on the chances of the UK getting involved in the Ukrainian/Russian war and on why it seems possible, and why that isn’t a terribly good thing for the UK.
I’ve used no esoteric techniques in reaching my conclusion so at best I’m only describing one of perhaps many plausible routes to the cliff edge.
In 1982 after years of negotiation between Argentina and Britain, the Argentinians invaded the Falklands (or Malvinas if you prefer) in the belief that Britain was unlikely to respond in any meaningful way. The Brits had published plans to withdraw its ingle patrol vessel, HMS Endurance, from regular patrols of the area, and the spectre of the Suez Canal disaster hung over the British establishment.
The Falkland islands are over 2000 miles from London and home to a small population of descendants of the original British settlers and a great many sheep. There are potential resources in the South Atlantic but they are essentially a windswept, cold, and unlovely place. If the UK had simply shrugged and walked away it would have surprised no one and such a response would have made little difference to the lives of most living in Britain.
As it happens, that’s not what happened. A taskforce was dispatched from London and after a ten week shooting war, the Argentinians were evicted to general rejoicing at home. The newish Conservative Government had been engaged in extensive cost cutting and it’s popularity was in the doldrums with the UK population. After the Falklands war the popularity of the government went through the roof. Although there were dips in the following decade that particular set of events sealed Margaret Thatcher in place until the 90s. Politically, the whole adventure was a huge success.
Winding forward to the present day, we have an deeply unpopular Conservative government looking at a set of polls that suggest it is certain that it will lose power at the election. The polls are so bad that they may not even be able to form the opposition. Many in the current cabinet are within a whisker of losing their own seats. Something like that happened to the UK Liberal party in the 1920s and in the Conservatives in Canada in the 1990s so it’s infrequent but far from impossible. On top of this, an election must be called before January 2025 which under normal circumstances would mean there is simply not enough time to turn the situation around.
In this situation, any event that could plausibly be assigned to Russian activity would make a tempting excuse to go to war either alone or more likely as part of some kind of Nato intervention. Politics would be far from business as usual, and there would be opportunities to delay elections and invite members of the existing opposition into a war cabinet which effectively defangs the opposition for the duration.
The natural assumption behind that political decision would be that Britain could in some sense win a war of this nature. However its not at all clear that the underfunded Army/Navy have much capability at the moment; certainly the little news that has drifted out of the Ukraine about British equipment doesn’t seem encouraging. Will they admit to that when questioned by the politicians? Who knows . Even if they raise doubts will they be listened to?.
I’m expecting the next few weeks to go down in the history books.
Scotty and JMG, a great book that goes into detail about the proces of spiritual renewal happening in the fringe is the book ” The Zen Experience” by Thomas Hoover. The book can be downloaded for free at the website of the author https://www.thomashoover.info/works.htm The book didn’t have this as a stated theme but goes through the history of Zen from it’s earliest beginnings. What happened time after time is that some genuine spiritual master would start something in a remote area, and over time the movement became more popular and widespread. The spiritual power declined though, and the kiss of death was always when (many generations later) the emperor invited or summoned the leader of the movement into the capital and nobility started to convert. Then spiritual decline really set in until a true spiritual master started something new in a remote area, etc. I was surprised to read that there is nothing like a linear line from the founder to current day practice. What happened was that invariably over time the practice was perverted and then a new spiritual master basically started over from scratch.
I know it is late in the week for this, but i wanted to confirm the sentiment that the crapification of on-line world is going exponential.
I joined a dating site last week and all i can say is that is a cesspool of scammers and i am pretty sure that at least one AI is being trained on the dating sites to learn how to emotionally manipulate people.
Uggg be careful out there.
@Sarah Menchin, @Grover:
Here are some sketches for ideas of things to use for an RFK Jr. meme campaign. I have opted to use a hawk in these images as it is a mythically potent symbol. It still needs a humorous element… though the second is kind of funny to me… so that is why they are sketches. Feel free to use these as basis for further memes to inject into the mediasphere.
https://ibb.co/bB0fVMc
https://ibb.co/prd9rQX
So, yeah, these could use some help, but potentially a direction to go…
About the Baltimore Crash, there is this from the Lever, a leftist reporting site.
https://www.levernews.com/hogan-pressed-for-bigger-ships-despite-safety-warnings/
Granted a leftist site, but does actual reporting, not opinionating. It is worth reading for its reporting. Editorials, when they appear, can be ignored.
Judging by what we have read and heard, the “jobs” the big dredging and building project promised benefitted few Baltimoreans, and quite a lot of folks from outside our country.
The Republican, pro-business governor, now running for Senate, who promoted the harbor enhancement is now demanding the feds, that would be you and me, pay for his folly.
>A Piper Cub can carry a nuclear weapon
How much does a nuclear warhead weigh?
“Modern nuclear warheads can be either single stage or two stage. With some simplification; single stage weapons are your classic WW2 atomic fission bomb. Two stage weapons have a first or primary stage fission bomb trigger which detonates a secondary fusion stage – a “hydrogen” bomb. Two stage weapons are potentially much more powerful.
“Modern warheads are almost all between 50kg and 1000kg, with few being less than 50kg. … there is an absolute lower limit to the weight of a nuclear warhead of about 25kg. But such weapons “only just” make it. They explode with a power or “yield” of as little as 10 tons of TNT. … With no more fissile material, just better packaging, single stage devices as small as 50kg can yield 10,000 to 15,000 tons of TNT (10kt to 15kt), similar to the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. … Most US nuclear weapons in service are two stage warheads from a little over 100kg to a little under 400kg.”
A Piper Cub could carry a smallish nuclear bomb, but would it be fast enough to escape the blast?
This reminds me of one of the few wartime stories my stepfather told me. He was a navigator in the SAAF (South African Air Force) in North Africa. One day they spotted a previously unknown German camp in the desert and decided to bomb it. But he was in a transport outfit and they didn’t have any bombs or a bomber aircraft to drop them. What they did was pack all the explosive and shrapnel they could scrounge into an old oil drum to make an improvised bomb. Then they flew over the German camp, lit the fuse, and rolled the drum out the side door of the aircraft.
The slipstream rolled the bomb back on board. They rolled it out again. Back on board it rolled. With the fuse burning ever shorter they gathered everyone on the aircraft except the pilot, leaned their backs against the opposite wall, and pushed the drum with their feet as hard as they could, and finally gave it enough momentum to roll out against the slipstream.
He said they circled the camp and saw they’d managed to flatten a couple of tents, but that was their first and last impromptu bombing run.
My personal belief is that when the right got into power in 2016, they got too serious — like the Daily Wire, like the New York Post, Patricia Matthews mentions, and other such outlets. The seriousness was always there of course, but sometime around 2017 it became triumphant and stifling. Without all those merry pranksters of the Meme Wars, Trump’s 2020 campaign did not have Kek’s favour, so he lost. It’s only gotten worse since, so whatever happens this year I maintain a different mechanism will be at play than the favour of a frog god.
@The Other Owen,
There are probably some W54 warheads kicking around in spec ops wearhouses, and those only weighed 50.9lbs. With a full fuel load of 70lbs and a useful weight of 450, you could haul a few of those in an unmodified Piper Cub if the pilot isn’t too heavy. Mount a couple Davy Crockett’s under the wings and you almost have a strike profile if you don’t think about it too hard.
If you insist on a weapon that we admit to currently having in the arsenal, the W80 warhead fitted to the Tomahawk cruise missile can get you 150kT yield in just 290lbs, which is still easily doable for a Cub with a skinny pilot. Strap it into the passenger seat and you have no issues with weight and balance. As Siliconguy says though, arming and deploying it becomes an issue, thankfully.
If you allow Super Cubs and the various modifications flying in Alaska I’m pretty sure Bubba Bush Pilot would have no trouble rigging to lift, drop– and quite possibly ARM a B61 gravity bomb. The Brits were able to regularly defeat safety interlocks in American weapons during the cold war. Do you really think a bunch of british officers have better tinkering ability than Bubba Bush Pilot?
It’s obvious then that F-16s are a red herring; if we see American bush planes in Ukraine, that’s when we know the balloon is going up. 😉
“Societies learn about the terrible outcome of interest based loans and then try to make sure it never happens again.”
But what’s the alternative? Forming a corporation and selling stock to raise capital to build something that will generate a steady return (dividends) is also unpopular with the same people who don’t like interest.
Should a person who happens to have an economic surplus not expect to receive rent for the temporary use of their money? After all, they are losing the use of it for the duration of the loan as well as taking a risk that something will go wrong and they won’t get it back.
The mine I worked at was financed with a gold loan. X ounces of gold were loaned to the mining company who sold them to get the cash to build and startup the mine. Once it was running X + Y ounces of gold were sent back to the lender. Does the Y count as interest? I count it that way. By the way, gold prices generally dropped between construction and payback, so in cash terms the lender lost money.
Islam had to come up with convoluted methods of making loans without quite crossing the lines into charging interest. I think they involve co-ownership arraignments, but I’m not certain. You still have the basic problem, you need the money to build something that will generate an income that can pay off the debt.
The old homesteading law gave away the land and gave the hopeful farmer X years to have a taxable crop coming out of it. That sort of thing only works if the government has a large amount of some sort of unused asset sitting about. Those days are gone. Note that mining patents (you can have the land if you open a mine) and water rights (you can have the water if you put it to a beneficial use) are the same idea.
JMG,
I’ve really enjoyed the podcasts and interviews you’ve been part of and expect one with either Chris or Nate would be great! Here’s hoping.
The anecdotes above might also support the idea that the Second Religiosity may stirring.
Now for something completely different: https://notthebee.com/article/heres-a-compelling-case-for-the-positive-influence-christianity-on-culture-from-richard-dawkins
_grey_
@Teresa Peschel: you could visit Plants For A Future, when you are in Cornwall:
pfaf.org/user/cmspage.aspx?pageid=29
>A Piper Cub could carry a smallish nuclear bomb, but would it be fast enough to escape the blast?
The answer to that is NO. They can barely get out of their own way. But they can take off and land in places other planes can’t. Like one guy said they are the favorite plane of “Bubba Bush Pilot”.
The idea of 50lb nukes, the ability to carry multiple of those before reaching gross, now that’s both amusing and disturbing. I suppose the only more amusing scenario would be one 50lb nuke on an ultralight gyrocopter.
@Siliconguy
In the Old Testament, God’s solution to messed up economical situations was the Year of Jubilee, a year where everyone is relieved of their debt, if you own land that historically and genealogically belonged to another family, you give it back without charging them for it. It’s basically a Great Economical Reset where everybody starts over.
Good news for the indebted and the poor, bad news for the monopolist. Also it’s a year where the land rests, you don’t plant, you trust that God will provide.
Part of the biblical view is that when an empire/civilization collapses it’s seen as a Year of Jubilee forced by God. To release the poor from bondage and to overthrow the rich, who often are also the wicked.
I feel a global Year of Jubilee incoming.
The discussion of Piper cub delivery of a nuclear devise is darkly amusing. Me, I’d prefer using a Citabria. 🙂 You’d hardly need to carry more than one device, because you’d only get to use one anyway. It would be a suicide mission. (Even the F-101 Voodoo interceptor, which carried two Genie air to air nukes) would have been challenged to get far enough away by the time the nuke’s shock wave caught up with it to avoid shooting itself down. Anyhow, the W-54, which is a 1960s era nuke could be carried by one man, at 28″ by 18″ and punishing the scales at 30 lbs (?) unless that is just the container. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W54#/media/File:SADM_case.jpg
That was more than half a century ago. The progress that has been made since then in further miniaturization is something I can only speculate about.
Siliconguy #401
“Should a person who happens to have an economic surplus not expect to receive rent for the temporary use of their money? After all, they are losing the use of it for the duration of the loan as well as taking a risk that something will go wrong and they won’t get it back.”
May I respectfully point out that your question contains assumptions that make it difficult to answer…
1) the first sentence contains the assumption that “economic surplus” is identical to “money”. This does not actually seem be the case, except under very specific circumstances, where creators of money are those who control the arenas (markets) where economic trading takes place.
2) the second sentence contains the assumption that the extender of a loan loses the use of it for the duration of the loan. This is not at all the case, when the lender is also a money creator – ie a bank.
In our economies, bank extends a loan it actually creates money de novo, and therefore does not in any way “lose the use of it”. And that means that anyone who spends money in our economies is dependent on *someone* going into debt to a money creating bank, even if that *someone* is not themselves.
Have any of you seen this story coming out of Texas? That’s going to add even more fuel to an already combustible situation. What was this idiot judge thinking?
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/judge-orders-release-border-riot-migrants-who-overwhelmed-national-guard
And check out Biden’s pathetic attempt at damage control in the wake of the transgender Easter debacle at the White House.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/i-didnt-do-biden-reportedly-has-no-idea-he-issued-trans-day-visibility-proclamation
More and more, it seems as though our decadent corporate liberal aristocracy has found itself caught up in a classic Freudian “death drive”…
Patricia Matthews, the American self styled New Left was primarily composed of 2nd and 3rd generation refugees from Central Europe. Among other attitudes, they brought with them an atavistic hatred of Russia. I am convinced that this faction still, to this day, believes that the USA is part of Europe, and that us colonists will of course be only too happy to help them achieve their revenge on the hated hegemon, i.e. Russia. This crowd never got over the fall of Communism, which was, remember, a leftist project. Revelations of the truly shocking extent of environmental degradation which had taken place behind the Iron Curtain further compromised the leftist brand. Disappearance of whole inland seas? Is that what these bozos want for us?, wondered ordinary Americans. Another attitude which characterizes the lefty bozos is disdain for farmers and farming. To this day, I doubt this pack of high urbanites has realized that in the USA, farming is considered an honorable profession and that American agriculturalists are not “peasants”.
As our host has pointed out, the current gender bending obsession was ginned up in response to the Occupy movement. Remember that those protests, and the Wisconsin teacher’s protests which proceeded them, took place without permission or leadership from the now old New Left, and when some of those figures tried to intervene, they made themselves ridiculous. The gender bending obsession is a useful distraction from neo-con and so-called humanitarian intervention war plans, in Europe and the Middle East.
@JMG
Speaking of immigration into the U.S. at least one large segment (Latin Americans and Caribeans) is in a state of freefall post Covid Lockdowns. I watch a channel called Based Camp. A husband and wife team who are hardcore pro-natalist and very alarmed at the worldwide collapse in birthrates. They did a video dated Jan 23, 2024 titled
Hispanics are Going Extinct: The Catholic Fertility Problem
A rather click-baity title to get a boost from the Youtube algorithm but here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqhHhoQYZRw
Here’s the same as a podcast with transcript for those whom don’t like video:
https://basedcamppodcast.substack.com/p/hispanics-are-going-extinct-due-to
One of the news reports they were reading from:
https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/latin-americas-fertility-decline-is-accelerating-no-ones-sure-why/
Some highlights:
1. Wanda Sela and 3 Uruguayan demographers say in 7 years Uruguayan TFR dropped from 2 to 1.27
2. In a TED Talk given in 2023 Argentine economist and demographer Rafael Rothman said that his country’s fertility had declined more in the previous six years than in the previous six decades. In 2024, there will be roughly 30 percent fewer four year olds entering Argentinian preschools than there were in 2020, a 30 percent drop in four years.
3. These new ‘ultra low’ (their term, not mine) TFR rates were previously only seen in far east Asian countries like China and Japan.
4. The birthrate collapse means for every 100 retirees there will be only 27 working age adults to support them all by 2075.
6. One really weird fact they tossed out is that Muslim TFR (presumably Muslim populations in Latin America) is collapsing even faster than Catholic TFR. Catholic TFR is almost as bad as Muslim TFR. Not quite but close.
7. Latin American births in the 15 – 24 age group has dropped by 70%.
8. A quote from the podcast/Youtube couple, “The people who are going to be affected by this are the people who are planning on their pensions, supporting them in their retirement, and they don’t realize that these are unfunded government pensions or who are planning on social security. It’s going to be a bunch of starving elderly people.”
9. Halfway through this video/podcast they briefly diverge and talk about the latest TFR info coming out of Africa by ethnicity. TFR in many African ethnicities is apparently seeing a similar, surprising drop as in Latin America. So all these overdeveloped countries like the U.S. and EU thinking African migrants will save their economies and pay for N. American and European retirees may need to re-calibrate on that.
p.s. Based Camp had another video recently where they talked about the latest TFR info coming out of France. Peter Zeihan has made much about how the French are one of the very few European countries that matched the U.S. in having a relatively high birthrate compared to other European countries, especially compared to other Western European and Nordic countries. In particular he’s always made much of how France was in much better shape births-wise than Germany. That is no longer the case. Latest stats from France say births have dropped to 1.3 per woman – the same demographic decline as seen in China, Japan and all of Latin America.
This is already late for this week and hopelessly out of season, but anyway. I just stumbled upon one medieval-style Christmas carol featuring somebody who already got some attention and enthusiasm in this forum. It’s called “Krampusnacht – A Cautionary Carol Inspired by John Williams”. There are no visuals except a static depiction of the song’s protagonist and the lyrics and it can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpCiqYz02XE
Have fun!
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
Chuaquin: Re: Transgender Day on Easter. The conjunction of those two events was not under Biden’s control. Trans-day was always at the end of March, and date of Easter is calculated from the Lunar Calendar. So, we can’t say that he picked Easter for TransDay. However, he could have let both go by without a public proclamation. And I suppose that someone had to put it on his calendar. (I heard nothing about it in advance.)
Personally, I celebrated Easter in the (virtual) presence of a trans-gender person who logged into my live-stream, who had formerly been a valued member of our church congregation (until a career move). I don’t see any incompatibility with Christianity and the current gender issues.
Re the last two independent Jewish states you mention in history, is there a book that you can recommend on this that also covers the Romans destruction of Jerusalem?
The Scottish government has introduced draconian hate speech laws starting today. Lot of people have reported Asian Scottish politicians for making anti-white remarks. People are also reporting First Minister Humza Yousaf for ‘Hate Crime’ after he previously suggested Isla Bryson wasn’t a ‘genuine’ trans woman (he raped 2 women) in a public debate on the 14th of March 2023. They are saying that Yousaf’s comments could be considered insulting and could potentially stigmatise transgender individuals by suggesting that Bryson is not a “genuine” trans woman, and is instead “seeking to exploit her gender identity for personal gain.”
This is a great way to destroy these authoritarians. Overload the system by reporting the authoritarians. People are said to be complaining about this ‘hate’ by dialling 101 and using the form http://scotland.police.uk/secureforms/c3/
I don’t know how to quote someone, but thank you Peter #30:
“Peter Van Erp (aka Peter Khan) says:
March 27, 2024 at 1:40 pm
Small error in my previous post: Only 87 days to go!”
I was kind of losing my mind with the initial 173 days!
Having grown up and still having family in New England, I’ve been wishing I could make one of these potlucks since the beginning (we’re up there from New Orleans often enough, but never around the potluck!) Maybe when my youngest gets out of high school…
Slight correction to my earlier post (#410).
I thought the Muslim TFR referred to by Based Camp was to Latin American Muslim populations. I just rewatched that video and realized they were saying that Muslims as a whole worldwide(!) category – are having a faster and steeper TFR collapse than Catholics as a worldwide category.
I admit I find that surprising since I assumed a. Muslim populations tended to be more religious than their fellow Abrahamaic faiths and I’ve always heard that high religiosity correlates with higher birthrates
and
b. I assumed the Middle East would be a bit more immune to falling EROEI and thus their populations would be somewhat more birthrate stable vis-a-vis to N. America, Asia and Europe. Looks like that’s not the case.
Second amendment to my #410 post:
I forgot Germany and Italy are already among the Ultra Low TFR countries. So the UL-TFR list is something like: S. Korea, China, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, possibly most of the Middle East (Muslims), All of the Caribbean and all of Latin America.
Mass migration may still be a thing in the 2040s or so due to climate change and rising sea levels but as a strategy by and of NGO-sponsored mass caravans I think that specific part of it will be a thing of the past.
Eagle Fang Warrior 5000,
You do know RFK Jr. is into the sport of falconry, yes? You make it sound like a coincidence that you picked a hawk.
“1) the first sentence contains the assumption that “economic surplus” is identical to “money”. ”
No, a surplus of potato’s can be traded for wheat, or something that stores better. Money is an abstraction of something of value that is easier to trade. Gold and silver not only make good money for that reason but can also be made into other things in the meantime.
The second argument is a better one. Someone needs to have a surplus available to loan. The way it was supposed to work was that a bank would accumulate a lot of small savings and loan them out retaining enough for the usual day to day turnover. As you pointed out, that’s not how they do it now. When it was all gold they couldn’t loan out too much more than they had on hand or, for example, the home builder would need gold to pay for the lumber, and the stone mason who did the foundation had better have already deposited the gold he got for that work.
With paper bills of course this problem doesn’t occur, the bank just prints them as they need them and as long as everyone doesn’t show up at the same time wanting actual gold all is swell. The bills will eventually all come home.
With electronic money things get even more abstract which is why there is an overnight rate at the Fed. The accounts are in surplus today? Make an overnight loan to the Fed. Ran a deficit today? Get an overnight loan from the Fed.
Yikes.
Retraction Update.
I said that video on Hispanic FTR diverged into African FTR. Apologies. I got it mixed up with another video so I’m now retracting that statement unless/until I can find the video I got that info from. I think I got that info on FTR African stats from Based Camp as well but until I can find it I’d advise people ignore it since I can’t provide the source yet.
The Israelis just upped the noise level. They shot up the Iranian embassy in Damascus.
And then CNN has this;
“Foreigners among World Central Kitchen staff killed in Israeli strike, Gaza authorities and aid group says”
They have a picture of someone holding a British, Polish and Australian passports. Way to get more support for your cause guys.
RE: Piper Cubs and A-bombs,
Of course, suicide missions ARE a thing.
But if they can land and take off almost anywhere, it seems like they could land on the beach, or a road at night, throw the bomb out and get away. I know they’re slow, but what? 5 minutes, 10 minutes? Is someone really going to get there that fast and “defuse” the thing? I don’t think so.
@ Bridge
I heard they are coming after J.K. Rowling (Born in England but lived most of her life in Scotland) because she used the wrong pronoun or something. To paraphrase, she said something like, “Bring it!”
> the chances of the UK getting involved in the Ukrainian/Russian war
12 April 2012
“The Army has shrunk to its smallest size for more than 200 years, official figures have revealed. The number of soldiers has slipped below 100,000 for the first time since the start of the Napoleonic Wars. Some 2,500 posts are unfilled.”
https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/britain-has-smallest-army-for-200-years-6585191.html
17 February 2024
“It’s generally accepted that by next year numbers will have dropped to 72,500. That’s a generous estimate: there are credible reports the army could soon number just 67,800. … More importantly, it’s far too small and too badly equipped to deliver everything we’re promised it can do.”
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/britain-can-no-longer-defend-itself/
I doubt that Putin’s losing much sleep at the prospect of facing the British army.
@ Warren “On the subject of collapse, I recently looked at Tom Murphy’s blog ” … “he seems to be a full blown Primitivist. He’s certain that humanity will revert to a hunter gatherer state within something like 10,000 years from now, and views that as a happy thing.”
When Ted Kaczynski passed I wrote a sizable article about the problems that his legacy may leave. Nobody would touch it because it warned of where that kind of thinking can go if left to fester unchecked for decades. A summary of his works would be, he was right on a lot of his criticisms of technology but was completely clueless on how to make any real or meaningful change. And looking at his writing in the 27 years he was locked up, he started to figure that out for himself but it was far too little, too late.
Your example of Tom Murphy is a good one. The ‘Anti-Tech collective’ is another. People have this knee jerk reaction to the issue of technology it tends to lead some folks down the path of being destructive Luddites and a lusting for a total destruction of all society. Like the folks hoping for Y2K to reset the work and escape their drudgery (See : Dark Age America). I do fear the kind of destructive behavior’s that may come about from folks that want to bring about their vision of the future by breaking things down to their level rather than building people up to where they want to go.
Folks like Tom Murphy and Ted K ambitions and writings make me fear they will bring the same kind of destruction that Karl Marx did in the 20th century only in the late 21st-22nd century. In a world of environmental blow back brought by our technological ambitions, I could see that kind of thinking getting more traction than we would hope. Hopefully we are more wise by then and don’t repeat history.
As for Luddites, I usually use the term Neo-Luddite as a means of communicating my ideal of appreciating their ideas but with a bit more nuance and a lot less wooden clogs in the gears. Like JMG, we can pick and choose the technology I engage with. Use the internet sometimes, but not use the subject that shall not be mentioned. Buses and trains are great. I do not have a car. Encourage others to do the same by example instead of belittling folks into submission.
@ Mary Bennett #409 ” in the USA, farming is considered an honorable profession and that American agriculturalists are not “peasants”.”
As a peasant, I resemble that remark! 😉
@ Siliconguy #419
Speaking as a peasant, I can tell you what we peasants have traditionally done with our surplusses of (say) potatoes. Firstly, we tend to be wary of producing them, since tax gatherers, and other such bandits, like to wait until we’ve gathered our harvests in and then circle round to take as much of a slice of us as they think they can get off with. Secondly, when, despite our best efforts (!!) we do manage to produce a surplus, we tend to store it as quickly as possible in the stomachs (and hopefully hearts) of our friends and neighbours, by holding feasts and feeding lots of people that we know, who might have our interests closer to heart that the average tax gatherer, and other such bandits.
Our ways are strangely strange to those who think in money, gold, and markets, but there you are. 🙂
B
Happy Panda,
Thanks for the TFR stats. Most illuminating. I’ll track down Based Camp so I can get a good clear sense of what they’re reporting. Sounds fascinating.
Siliconguy,
This is why I lean gold instead of crypto. The former is a return to the concrete while the latter is a move into even further abstraction. Ultimately, all assets lose value, as our host has pointed out, as global population contracts, but in the meantime I think fiat currencies will return to their original value and send gold and silver to places we’ve never even imagined. IOW, yes, I’m attempting to inflate my way quickly through my mortgage! (And I haven’t been disappointed with that strategy so far…)
@Slink: I sure do know that RFK Jr. is into falconry. There is a mythic resonance there, I feel. Still need some help on the humor part… just kicking out some ideas
Here are some slogans and possible words to use, these are more on the inspirational, mythic end, so witty and funny would also be good. … any who are called, use the image and words as a template to spread.
—
RFK Jr., swooping in on the election like an unleashed hawk.
—
Standing on the mountain top, we can Heal the Great Divide.
We can bridge the left and right if we just decide.
When I see the young Hawk free and flying
The spires in the sunset will began to rise.
—
“We must have government, but we must watch them like a hawk.”–Millicent Fenwick
—
Like the hawk with blood in its feathers, America will lick its wounds and clean them dry.
And all those who see us and all who believe in us, will share in our freedoms when we fly.
>Me, I’d prefer using a Citabria
Because you want to get in some aerobatics first, I’m guessing?
Sorry, I’m late to the discussion. With regard to Rafael‘s topic, there is one thing that doesn’t make sense to me. Why is it that the Third Worlders are only invading Europe, the US/ Canada, and Australia/NZ. (i.e., the West)?
Why are none going to China, Japan, Korea, India, etc.? Sure those countries are crowded, but their birthdates are dropping like a rock, so there should be plenty of room. Plus their economies are arguably stronger than those in the crumbling Faustian civilization.
@Augusto #255
It’s interesting to hear you say how much better Amtrak is than Mexico’s rail system, because a lot of people in the US feel the same way about Amtrak compared to European and Japanese rail! Just goes to show there’s always someone worse off than you are, I guess. I will say that Tren Maya is more impressive than anything I’m aware Amtrak has built – most/all US rail was built by private railways and what Amtrak has it got when those railways went bankrupt – so I’d say the future of Mexican rail is bright.
Here is another version…
https://ibb.co/jZ636V0
From a very long and rambling interview which wandered over to deaths of despair.
“01:22:28 [Speaker Changed] Well, I think that the Deindustrialization is much more serious than
economists have had it to be. And they said, you know, lowering tariffs is a good thing. You know, it, it, we can always compensate the losers, the gainers get more, but that’s all done in terms of money. Right.
And there’s no accounting for the community destruction and all the rest of it.”
https://ritholtz.com/2024/04/transcript-angus-deaton/
It’s a lot harder to changer careers than economists think it is. And no, not everyone can “code.” I’ve done just enough of it to realize I’m not good at it.
What is the karmic result of a powerful country supporting with bombs, money, and diplomatic support another genocidal country that is intent on starving over 200,000 civilians, bombing multiple countries, and pleading victimhood?
Ok JMG – this is so random but I would be so grateful to hear your opinion on it.
I have this old photo, taken in 1956. It is of 2 men and a boy, randomly standing around in a yard, taken using the family’s brand new Brownie Hawkeye camera. The little boy, who is my father-in-law, wanted to take the picture but was told he was too small to play with the camera. He had a temper tantrum and hid behind a tree so no one would see him crying. The 2 men leaned against the trees, smoking cigars, and the picture was taken. A few months later it was developed and the family was confronted with an impossible image:
The trees are not in the photo.
The men would fall over at the angles at which they are standing.
And the hiding boy is visible.
So how did it happen? A camera glitch? Or something more magical than that? I would really like to know what you think about it. I can get you a copy of the photo if you would like to see it.
I’m making a documentary short film about the phenomena of this picture and would love to include anything you would like to say about it. This is a film that my husband Jaimz wanted to make, however he suddenly died in January. So now I’m making it. It is helping me cope. Jaimz was really hoping to include a Druidic perspective on it considering the trees, and also he practiced Ceremonial Magic himself (and was a fan of yours) so it would be really meaningful to hear what you specifically would have to say about it. Thanks for everything that you do; your blog brings me a lot of joy.
Eagle Fang Warrior 5000,
Love the John Denver hat-tip!
“Because you want to get in some aerobatics first, I’m guessing?” Nah… because a Citabria can get out of its own way. The aerobatics come later when the shock wave catches up; and I think a Citabria tumbles better.
Mr. Greer (and the rest of the commentariat), I have a question to ask about a phenomenon I had heard about a while ago. Apparently, the levels of nutrients in a wide range of fruits and vegetables have been declining from year to year — as an example, a study conducted by scientists at the University of Texas (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15637215/) found decreased levels of calcium in green beans, vitamin A in asparagus, and iron in broccoli stems. Part of this is likely due to the unsustainable farming methods used in factory farms, but climate likely also plays a significant role.
My question is: how important of a factor do you see this as being in the shape of future agriculture? It’s common for dark ages to have depleted topsoils as a reason why their carrying capacity for human life is much lower than that of the civilization which preceded them, and I’m curious if this phenomenon is going to be a modern equivalent to that. I’ve seen it described as a form of “stealth hunger” — the food looks the same on the surface, but doesn’t give your body the same nutrients you’d expect.
re: RFK Jr memes, do we really need a(nother) hawk in the White House?
@Martin Back #423
> I doubt that Putin’s losing much sleep at the prospect of facing the British army.
The question that looms large in my mind is whether or not the UK government and military have the insight and honesty to reach the same conclusion?
>And no, not everyone can “code.” I’ve done just enough of it to realize I’m not good at it.
Even if you can, I’d advise younguns to stay away from it, unless they were the kind of kid who was playing with Arduinos in their free time when nobody was telling them what to do. Even then, I’d leave them with this warning.
I’ll put it this way. The local aircraft mechanic just celebrated his 70th birthday and nobody thinks it’s odd he’s still working on airplanes. The chief pilot of the local flight school is over 70 and nobody thinks twice that he’s still teaching people how to fly. Perfectly normal, perfectly logical.
I can guarantee you, nobody and I mean nobody is still writing code for money at the age of 70. Picture a 70 year old in a cube still tapping on a keyboard with his IDE fired up and his headphones on. I’ll wait.
Executed, that many tanks in a single attack means that they no longer think they have to fear Ukrainian drones. Now we’ll see if they’re right.
Foxhands, it depends entirely on whether your country’s government decides to get actively involved in the war. If not, you can simply expect your country’s economic position to worsen sharply over the next few years. If it does — well, at that point it could conceivably be anything up to mushroom clouds. I hope it doesn’t come to that.
J.L.Mc12, it’s quite possible that gut bacteria could learn that trick, not least because bacteria of different species love to swap genetic material, and of course the mutation rate is also fairly high. Plastivory would be a very useful thing for species to evolve just now, though it could be a world-class disaster for human technology — imagine for a moment what would happen if plastics everywhere started rotting…
Curt, that’s the heart of the myth of progress — the notion that the world is, or at least should be, passive and controllable by human beings. Nothing scares people in the mainstream as much as discovering that humanity isn’t the almighty power our culture likes to pretend it is.
Xcalibur/djs, oh, I’m sure the Narnia thing is a matter of taste. I know plenty of people, not all of them Christian, who love the Narnia books.
Other Owen, if your cat runs for the office it might just get my vote!
Patricia M, I’m sorry to say you may be right.
Rafael, I’m already taking those things into account in my estimate of something around 400 million. It could be anything in that order of magnitude or close to it, of course.
Boccaccio, I’ve seen the same thing. Next to nobody in America realizes that we could end up paying very dearly for this silliness, and not just if the bombs go up and the boom comes down. Most Americans are living in a dreamworld in which their lives can never really be affected by global politics — it’s just those people over there that have to pay the price. At this point I expect that to continue until they learn otherwise the hard way.
Andy, that makes a good deal of sense to me.
Boccaccio, hmm! Thanks for this; that sounds worth reading.
Dobbs, not only have I heard that from others, I’ve never heard anything else about dating sites. If, in due time, I decide to start dating, it won’t be that way.
Tyler, I could see that.
Grey, yep. That’s absolutely classic Second Religiosity logic: “I don’t believe in our traditional religion but it’s absolutely necessary to stave off chaos.” Dawkins will be quietly welcomed into the Anglican Church within a few years, as the New Atheism finishes giving way to the New Religiosity.
Ariel, it’s astonishing to watch. It’s as though nobody in power has the capacity to realize that actions have consequences.
Panda, yep. I talked about the population bust in a post a little while back:
https://www.ecosophia.net/an-unfamiliar-world/
Nachtgurke, thanks for this. (Btw, I almost typoed your name as Nacktgurke — I think I know what that means in German…)
Bridge, I’m sure there is, but I don’t recall one off hand. Anyone else?
Siliconguy, yep. See my comment to Ariel above.
Blue Sun, because the countries in your second category enforce their immigration laws, of course. Our governments don’t.
Siliconguy, maybe it’ll sink in one of these days.
Friar, many of history’s empires have done that — the others didn’t bother with client states, and just did the atrocities themselves. The karmic consequences? The phrase “decline and fall” comes to mind.
Karen, I know very little about photography and even less about trick photography, so I’m not prepared to offer an opinion on the subject. I would encourage you to check with somebody who does know about these things, if you haven’t done so already; it’s possible that something very strange happened, but it’s equally possible that one or both of those elderly guys was a prankster. (You might look up the Cottingley Fairies and the Gulf Breeze UFO photos as examples of what can be done by a clever faker.)
Ethan, that’s a result of massive overuse of fertilizers — they bring about rapid growth of plant tissue, but they don’t make the plant increase its uptake of nutrients. Since fertilizer production depends entirely on fossil fuels — nitrogen fertilizers are made from natural gas via the Haber-Bosch process, and all others are excavated, processed, and shipped using fossil fuels — that will correct itself promptly as fossil fuel depletion continues to tighten its grip.
@TemporaryReality: I share your concerns about the type of hawk you mention. Yet, I share the sentiment of @kashtan #259, who wrote about being enthusiastic about the campaign and most of the things RFK Jr. is for, and while the parts that I don’t like, “neither Biden or Trump would be any better”. I also think he may have the ability to change his mind on things like Israel & Palestine situation, as Charles Eisenstein also hopes. Like others, I can support him and still disagree on that issue with him, because the other options would be more of the same anyway. No one is perfect, but as far as I know, I think it is good he has kept to his word and not trash talked his opponents. Even just elevating the level of discourse is enough to make me give him a vote…
Besides, I think more of the Hawk of May in Druidry and its other qualities across cultures, not this low status as a “war hawk” it has been given in political discourse.
Ethan #437, a lot of the problem is due to selective breeding to enhance profitability and consumer appeal. You get more tons of wheat per acre because the individual wheat berries are bred to be bigger, but that extra size is all carbohydrate which only needs air and water, not soil minerals. Similarly, fruit is sweeter because that’s what the consumer wants. Again, only air and water are needed to manufacture the sugar. Effectively we are creating obese crops which have fewer nutrients per pound of edible weight.
Then the farmer tries to help the plant by spraying for insects, watering on a regular basis, etc, so the plants get lazy. They don’t have to develop so many specialist molecules to deter insects or fight droughts. Again, this decreases their food value, and probably makes them less bitter and more palatable.
Incidentally, I read somewhere that stone age man ate around 150 different varieties of plants, whereas modern man only eats around 50 varieties. Maybe we should forage more in the forest and less in the supermarket.
Hmmm. I didn’t expect an answer that straightforward!
Do either Toynbee or Spengler (or Vico) delve into an explanation why said declining governments don’t enforce their immigration laws? Is it inevitable? I don’t recall your theory of Catabolic Collapse mentioning it.
The Other Owen #440
How do you feel about 62 year olds spending their working days in front of an IDE? Still do side projects for fun too.
(Yes, I was one of those kids back in the day, although it was Heathkits back then…)
JMG, and Dobbs, I have found more or less the same to be true with dating sites, especially the last time around. So, since quite a few years, I don’t bother with them anymore. So I can spend less time at the computer and more elsewhere, and I don’t have to pay a monthly fee for a dating site.
Wow! in just ONE day Israel:
+ Bomb a convoy full of aid workers in Gaza, killing americans, british, polish and australians, with the silence of their “friendly” (to Israel) governments. The crime they were commiting was to feed hungry palestinians.
+ Flattened the Al Shifa hospital in the Gaza Strip with dozens or hundreds of patients and health workers murdered.
* Approve the censorhip of Al Jazeera in Israel for “supporting terrorism” (aka showing the crimes against humanity of the IDF)
+ Destroy a building inside the Iranian embassy in Damascus full of high ranking Iranian officials, including a prestigious general of the IRGC.
Of course the West, specially US, continue with the unconditional support of the Israeli actions = genocide, and then they want the Global South support the western countries in their “crusades” for “freedom”, “liberty”, “human rights”, and all that shale they cinically say they promote.
The blow-back against Israel and the West will be monumental.
Cheers
David
Karen, if I may – are you sure about your source person’s memory and earnestness? This sounds a lot like a cunning piece of visual joke that was quite fashionable in the mid 20th century. Reminds me of many photos taken among surrealist artists. The people in your photo may have used sticks or other props to lean on them. – just my 2c!
Hey JMG
The only thing that makes me have doubts about plastivore gut bacteria is whether said bacteria would break down micro plastics into chemical byproducts more harmful than than the plastic itself. I should look into what has been learned about current plastivore bacteria to figure that out.
JMG,
I missed my chance to ask this question on Magic Monday and hope I can ask it here. Regarding reincarnation, when the human population begins its contraction, does this mean that more and more human souls will graduate to the next plane, or does it mean that they will have to wait longer to reincarnate on earth?
Blue Sun, it’s not an inevitable part of civilizational decline. As I noted two weeks ago, though, it makes perfect sense as a last-ditch measure on the part of Western elites to try to prevent the otherwise unstoppable impact of population contraction on the entire house of cards that our economies have become.
Booklover, thanks for this. I’ll keep it in mind.
DFC, they’re hoping to provoke a massive retaliation against Israel, in the hope that this will allow them to drag the United States into the war on their side. It’s the only way they can see out of the quagmire in which they’ve landed themselves. You’re right that it’s shaping up to be yet another disaster for the United States and the West generally, but I don’t think Netanyahu and his inner circle could care less about that.
J.L.Mc12, granted. That could get ugly.
Lacking, they’ll wait longer. We’re really rushing from one incarnation to another these days, with scarcely any time to begin processing the experiences of one life before we’re flung into another; under healthier conditions a soul can expect to be out of incarnation for something like three times as long as it spends in it — longer if it was an unusually intense life. I suspect a lot of us will be glad to have a long peaceful break from incarnation in which we can take our time making sense of the dizzying intensity of lives spent in the industrial age.
“Blue Sun, because the countries in your second category enforce their immigration laws, of course. Our governments don’t.”
In addition to enforcing their immigration laws, their immigration laws are different. The prosperous East Asian nations not only prevent illegal immigration, they do not allow much legal immigration either.
It probably helps that culturally, their sense of us and them is much stronger.
Eagle Fang Warrior 5000,
it doesn’t matter that you and I like hawks. The first (off the cuff, here) rule of magical memeing is to attend to what the symbols mean, not what you want them to mean and “hawks and doves” outweigh the “hawk of May” for most Americans.
But I’m not trying to dissuade you from your memeing; I just think the true test of a meme is whether it flies, which implies that it conveys a little bit of “liftoff” for its viewers, by not taking itself or its subject too seriously.
The Other Owen: believe it or not I work with a few in their late sixties who are still coding – though mostly in quite specialised roles
>How do you feel about 62 year olds spending their working days in front of an IDE?
I feel nothing. But I do congratulate you for beating the odds. I’d like to quote _In Search Of Stupidity_, Chapter 13, paragraph “Don’t Trust (Or Hire) Anyone Over 30”. Definitely this is something I would want a youngun to read before going into this line of work, especially if they fall into the “Development” category. The rest of that book is also fun to read, although most of what it talks about is history at this point.
—
After this encounter (I wasn’t hired by the way; the company founder
thought my fees were too expensive), I decided to conduct an impromptu
poll of ten small- to medium-sized high-tech companies and asked them
to estimate over the last six months how many new hires were 20+, 40+,
and 50+ years old, respectively. (This was something of a guerilla poll,
since the HR departments at these companies would never have cooper-
ated with me.) The smallest company had $1 million in revenue, the
largest more than $70 million. The numbers broke down as shown in
Table 12-1. Ages of New Hires
Age Range : Sales / Marketing / Development
20+: 80% / 95% / 80%
40+: 20% / 5% / 10%
50+: 10% / 0% / 0%
These numbers were striking. Based on them, if you’re older than 50,
the chances of being hired by a high-tech firm are almost nil (there’s
some hope in sales, perhaps a reflection of the value of a salesperson’s
track record and contact list). And even if you’re just in your 40s, the
numbers are almost as grim, especially in marketing.
@ethan #437, I wonder if the decrease in nutrients could also be due to the destruction over time of the fungi and bacteria in the soil by chemical herbicides, fertilizers and pesticides. This life in the soil assists with nutrient uptake in plants especially the fungi which receive carbon compounds in exchange from plants.
@Temporaryreality: I thought of that as well. (“Attend to what the symbols mean, not what you want them to mean.”)
Some of the other symbolism of hawks, besides and perhaps even more than this war image, is: intelligence, far sight, long term relationships (Red Tailed Hawks and others mate for life), taking the higher view, looking at the big picture.
I suppose my personal resonance with hawks has always been on the positive end, which might be a blur to the way people think of them with regards to politics, for sure. Yet, I think the deeper symbolism, below the surface of level of the way these words are used in politics, can be even more powerful, if you take the existence of such things as the collective unconscious as a given.
Hawks are associated with a number of myths and deities, not all of them relating to war by any means… “In Polynesian stories, the hawk appears as a prophetic bird, with healing powers. In Celtic mythology, hawks were very often malevolent birds. In many mythologies, the hawk is a solar bird, associated with sun gods. In Ancient Egypt, the hawk, was a royal bird. Gods depicted as being hawk-headed, or accompanied by hawks, were Ra (the sun god), Horus, Khensu, Ptah, Mentu, Rehu, Sokar & Keghsenuf. The hawk was also associated with the Great Mother Amenti. In Greek myth, the goddess Circe was associated with hawks. Apollo had hawks as messengers.”
I think that these meanings, while maybe not on the surface of the average American mind are readily tapped into below the surface of the American mind. So I think these symbolisms count just as much.
It is strange the way symbols can mean so many different things, above and below the surface. I guess that is what makes them symbols and not signs. I wonder if this meme will achieve flight, and this certainly isn’t the only option for RFK Jr. symbolism to use for others who are interested in trying their hand at a bit of magic memeing on the behalf of his campaign.
What a relief to know I’m not the only one watching every news anchor wax eloquent over AI for no reason whatsoever. Christ, the things can barely string a sentence together.
Then again, Chatbots write a Hell of a lot better than the NYT staff, so I shouldn’t be so cruel.
Martin,
If modern Americans eat 50 plant species I’m a monkey’s uncle…
Five would probably be much closer for the majority!
Let’s see…wheat, corn, rice, oats, soybeans, oh, plus a wide (and by wide I mean more than two) selection of seed crops that we can wring PUFAs out of to fry the other shale in.
Not all of us, but a lot..
@Blue Sun
Spengler spoke about regarding this period we are in being a period in which money rules. The only values allowed are economic and more immigration helps the economic elites, so it is encouraged. It’s the Caesars job to bring the values of the blood back.
@Eagle Fang Warrior 5000 and Slink,
#427:
Standing on the mountain top, we can Heal the Great Divide.
We can bridge the left and right if we just decide.
When I see the young Hawk free and flying
The spires in the sunset will began to rise.
Bob Seger, “Roll Me Away”
Stood alone on a mountaintop
Starin’ out at the Great Divide
I could go east, I could go west
It was all up to me to decide
Just then I saw a young hawk flyin’
And my soul began to rise
More than a “hat-tip” there, I’d say. You may need to range farther afield for your imagery.
I have to say, though, “Roll Me Away” has long been one of my very favorite songs. “Next time…. we’ll get it right!” might as well be our species’ motto, because it’s always next time, it’ll always be next time, that’s what’s best and worst about us. Gotta keep rolling…
Dobbs @396. I’ve commented on that topic several times over the last few months. I’ve already bailed on dating websites. Since, I’ve learned that all major apps and websites except for Bumble are owned by Match Group (i.e. a closet monopoly), and that the apps/sites are basically designed to be pay-for-play games that make it hard for people to actually meet. After all, if two people actually pair up, the dating service just lost two customers.
The stock value of both Match Group and Bumble are plummeting, and they are laying off 30% of staff, as singles are realizing there is no return for the time and money spent on their “services”; so ‘Bye’.
–Lunar Apprentice.
Grover #459, Americans also eat onions and tomato in their ketchup, celery in their Bloody Mary, olive in their martini, mustard on their hot dog, pineapple on their pizza, lettuce and pickles on their burger, potato in their fries… it all mounts up.
Re meme: You could have something like two little birdies, Biden and Trump, fighting over a White House nest, while a hawk RFK Jr glares down at them, but that’s more of a political cartoon.
A meme is, well, I’m not sure, but more like a new spin on an old situation, something quick and dirty that clicks instantly. For instance, same idea as above, if you could find a picture of a fish eagle pouncing on two fish, and label them Trump, Biden, and RFK Jr (your pick as to which is which).
@Other Owen
Well I should think it varies from culture to culture of course. In my own case I’m not even the oldest working on our systems. There’s also the point that my own cohort was amongst the very first to be exposed to personal computers in the mid to late 70s. There were not too many of us at that time. That and natural wastage pretty much ensures that working developers of my age are relatively rarely available. In a wide circle of acquaintances I know 4 older than myself.
On the plus side, there’s a point in the process that the singular fact of that we exist at all attracts further investigation by potential employers. Like discovering a coelacanth in a garden pond.
@Patricia Matthews #391 “one question that keeps coming up on this blog is why the Left has been mindlessly repeating itself “as if under a spell” since 2015…”
Prof. Olle Johansson sent out a link to an interview of Dr. Oleg Grigoriev, who heads the Russian Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, that was dubbed into English, hard to follow, but saying things relevant that question. Apparently, there’s been quite a bit of research going on on how to “educate masses” to achieve desired reactions and perceptions, using LLMs and AI process feedback. I’ve written an article on this interview and posted it here: https://sinners4diseasecontrol.dreamwidth.org/1160.html My article has the link to the interview.
It dwells on the topic of AI, so I won’t discuss it here. But it is germane from the point of view of last week’s topic, of technocratic hubris. Grigoriev also brings up the health impacts from his viewpoint. Of course, during the time frame involved, much of the world underwent a massive health experiment in a completely different fashion, which he does not mention. I have not heard anything from the Russians on the Sputnik vaccine that they were urged to take, and many did. My impression at a huge distance is the effects were not great, but not quite the fiasco ours were.
Ethan – Whatever the reason for declining calcium levels in foods, I save every egg shell to go into MY garden, either crushed and scattered, or through the compost bin. And I’m growing calcium-intense crops: kales and brussels sprouts.
@JMG, Thank you for that warning about Russia going to war. I would expect something fairly measured from them, but with the Israeli attack on Iran’s embassy in Syria and various signs of desperation among the neocons, such as forgetting decades of denial and suddenly up and accusing Russia of using microwave weaponry to cause Havana Syndrome, I’ve had a very bad feeling the past several days that something, somewhere is about to go horribly wrong.
@Boccaccio,
I too have friends who keep up with the latest news and have every reason to believe themselves well-informed, who have not the first clue what is really going on in Russia and just look puzzled when you try to clue them in.
@Walt F: I don’t want to go farther afield. I’d rather repurpose something that a person may already be familiar with subconsciously.
@Martin Black: I like your ideas for cartoons and memes! I think quick and dirty is the key in a lot of meme making.
Making meme-ory’s…
#465 Although this is technically after the period of comments on this post, I’ll let you know about this podcast, entitled “How the Economy Mistreats STEM Workers” by cosmologist Sean Carroll interviewing John Skrentny who has written a book Wasted Education where he explains that employers continually complain they don’t have enough STEM graduates, but at the same time there are a huge number of STEM graduates in non-STEM jobs.
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/02/05/265-john-skrentny-on-how-the-economy-mistreats-stem-workers
@Patricia Ormsby (#468):
I have felt this, too, for about the same number of days as you. Never in all my 81 years has the Doomsday Clock seemed as close to midnight as now.
Lathechuck (#467), that’s smart thinking on your part. I’m suspecting that more and more Americans are going to follow suit in the not-too-distant future, producing more food and other goods at home as the store-bought versions experience a steady decline in quality. I remember the first time I tasted home-baked bread, and the difference between it and the packaged stuff was night and day.
Patricia (#468), I’ve felt similarly for a while. It’s hard for me to put into words, but the closest I can come is “something terrible is coming”. Have you read The Fourth Turning? That feeling might be a product of the United States’s unraveling, as conditions slowly decline and leaders lose their ability to inspire, giving way to a crisis state.
Tying up a few loose ends:
First, regarding the land of Narnia…
JMG #441: It’s definitely a matter of taste. Naturally, I can’t expect my personal favorite things to appeal to others the same way. However, you can respect a work even if it doesn’t strike a chord with you, that’s my attitude towards certain other things.
Aldarion #348: Although St. Anthony of the Desert wasn’t into scrying, it’s said he did have visions, so that could be a parallel. And yes, the creation narrative is magnificent — the only scene that rivals the majesty of Narnia’s birth is its death, but I don’t want to spoil too much.
Secondly, JMG’s response to Stephen in #278 is really good stuff, that fills in a number of points I was meaning to ask about reincarnation/afterlife.
Finally, regarding politics, it’s safe to say we’re in for a wild ride. Or as a popular meme goes: the ride never ends.