This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.
First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.
Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their follow-up comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here, and have extended that ban to LLM-generated content of all kinds.
With that said, have at it!
Hello All,
One month until Adocentyn in Providence. Theme Past, Present & Future.
So far, few have signed up, so it may be just me, JMG, and Roger Williams. I need more people who want to present.
Friday, 6/19 Past
• 1:00 PM Meeting with Roger Williams, founder of Providence and the First Baptist Church in America
• 2:30 PM History tour of Providence, led by me, about 2 hours, hill climbing involved
• Dinner TBD
Saturday 6/20 Present in a rented space. Piano available
• 9:00 to noon time for talks/presentations
• 12:00 1:00ish lunch delivered
• 1:00 – 5:00 time for talks/presentations
• 6:00 dinner at Track 15
Sunday 6/21 Future
• from 9:00 on, open discussion.
This will cost me about $1,200.
I have a sign up link on Google forms at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdd6bPmi_cQ0svcPDdLfnEotjQChh–FjrwQjBcJtE5zTZqQA/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=116501315668463762438
There is an open discussion link at
https://peter-van-erp.dreamwidth.org/267.html#comments
Possible duplication ‘checking site security – page not working error’?
Dear JMG – The dragon guarding the posting window raised its fiery head before I’d got thoughts in some sort of order – hope we may continue here.
“I don’t recall anybody before using the metaphor of a sack of onions”
A cosmic womb for seed onions!
“Keep on going!”
Thank you.
TL:DR
I know you covered specific meditations for the cards in The Sacred Geometry Oracle, but have you (or any of the commentariat) ever come across any works that talk specifically about principles and use of drawing images as a meditative process?
Not complex mandalas but simple forms.
The Meat:
What we used to call meditation in motion but from a new angle for me.
Rather than sitting meditation or walking a physical labyrinth, the plan is for a callisthenic form to be a labyrinth for the mind with the callisthenics for the physical body.
My aim is to go from drawing on paper as a meditative process and convert the ‘concept map’ to a gentle callisthenic form (like tai chi form or dance).
I could just do the old forms I learnt, but, in my 66th year in this world, martial is giving way to mental, by necessity, inclination and choice. So, creating a personalised form that uses the body alongside mind feels like it could be beneficial – especially if I’ve embedded active meditation (ritual) in mind before developing and engaging in the physical bodily movement to express it. Think Pa Kua circles with arm/hand movements, but rather than mainly martial application the movements turns and circles are a physical representation of what might be called a mind-map or dance of life.
The one circle as the absolute
The two circles as the great polarities that give birth to the appearance of many things
The third circle as the divine spark
The three circles within as the vehicles of incarnation (or three cauldrons if inclined)
The eye at the centre of the three as a ‘moveable perspective’
The dot at the centre of the eye as a gateway, or bridge, if you will
The circles as spheres
The spheres in dynamic flow
https://postimg.cc/cK74drJp
The image acts as a clothes hanger for conceptions that might be used as a meditation.
The eight sentences are the skeleton to be unfolded and fleshed out.
The active drawing of the image takes the mind on a journey – By reproducing the image from the outside to the centre it is a process of ‘searching for the self’. It gets interesting once one reaches the gateway at the centre and then it occurred to me that the second eye in the image is also worth consideration.
I can see that each stage of the drawing might lend itself to particular mind-states in a developing process; for example, drawing ‘the first circle as the absolute’ could start the process using the states of gratitude, humility and awe, and moving on to drawing the two circles, where the great polarities/currents have obvious states to use etc etc
As for technical approach I was thinking in terms of using each sentence as a focus and prompt. So, the first line ‘The one circle as the absolute’ would be held in mind as the drawing is done, when complete, one shifts to active meditation by raising the states of gratitude, humility and awe/wonder, then completion of section and moving on to the next. ‘The two circles as the great polarities/currents’, is the prompt/skeleton that is then unfolded, drawing each of those with active meditation etc for each stage.
I’ve wondered if calligraphy might use principles that could be of use but at the moment I’m looking at it as combining:
The use of breath to trigger the vagus response
The physical drawing through pencil in hand
Focus to give the monkeymind something to keep it occupied
Active imagination / meditation to develop one’s areas of interest.
Basically I suppose it is just a variation on what you call a ritual and I refer to as active meditation (as opposed to contemplation and discursive meditation) that uses the physical activity of drawing an image as an anchor for the ego and a framework for the mind to explore. Once that nut is cracked, gather the pieces of fractal shell and develop into patterns of callisthenic movement.
Thoughts appreciated. Thank you.
Hi JMG,
I’ve recently finished reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces, and emerged decidedly unimpressed. Given your expertise with Jung, I was wondering if you had any opinions of Campbell and his work?
Possible duplication.
On post comment: ‘checking site security – page not working error’
then when I tried again: ‘You are posting comments too quickly – slow down’
– hopefully meaning the comment posted!
I observe that balance — the non-judgmental dynamics of the abstract positive and negative — is the common (dare I say ubiquitous?) criterion when we try to compare religions and belief systems. In the moment, in the most practical sense, we filter our perceptions through our emotions. We laud the positive and criticize the negative, and both are valid and often important. However, we also often stop there, and I’ve taken the challenge to set my emotions aside and ask the next question: what it the path to (the restoration of) balance?
In my practices, I’ve discovered what I call ego disengagement. For me, it is the temporary disabling of my emotions, setting aside my ego to attempt the most objective perception. Balance is not a destination or goal, it is a step along the path. It is temporary — our experiences are a series of steps, and the act of stepping is itself a temporary loss of balance — and my take on the concept of mindfulness is looking for the next balance point.
In our spiritual lives, we observe or confront imbalance: misogyny, distrust of or hostility toward non-believers, the ubiquitous conflicts of self-interest or safety or advancement. So, the question I ask is this: do we fight for ourselves, or do we look for that balance point at which we can share it with others?
JMG,
The Beta Marxists are on the rise. In our local primary elections, the socialists ( Democratic Socialists of America) or DSA backed candidates had great success in many local elections in my area ( outside Portland). The power behind these winning campaigns is the large public sector labor unions ( teachers, etc). Local elections tend to be ” low information” because there is few easy ways to advertise to small districts. So the power goes to the Socialists because they can field huge armies of volunteer canvasing teams consisting of public sector union members.
What do you think of these alliance between the socialists and the public sector labor unions?The chamber backed conservative democrats ( we don’t have actual republicans anymore) are getting beaten by the socialists even when they raise much more money because they have no good way to spend it.
It seems to me that in many places this trend will continue until the public sector is totally broke and the Beta Marxists Destroy themselves fighting over the scraps. We can of course see this playing out in NYC and in Seattle.
Hi John,
Any initial thoughts on the big geopolitical actions of 2026 e.g. Cuba, Iran and Venezuela?
My thesis is 2025 was the last year when the US at least appeared to be a global superpower.
2026 was the year that Iran exposed the limits of US conventional power in regard to keeping the Hormuz open to tankers but at the same time showcasing the enduring hard power of the US military when they effectively turned Venezuela into a US client state.
Refer to this article: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/05/27/ixwd-m27.html
Trump is now in the final stages of agreeing to a deal with Iran – details to be confirmed – but whatever the outcome I suspect historians will say that 2026 was the year America effectively pivoted to becoming, by and large, a regional rather than global superpower.
I thought I would share something that happened to me recently that seems to be a data point about the limits of electrical power.
Back in 2012 I participated in a community buying club that helped it’s members put PV panels on their roofs. The club had a committee that vetted installers and negotiated for the best price of the panels. We had to sign up and pay for our own installation, but it was a great way to do group buying.
Well a couple of weeks ago, as a solar panel owner, I was approached by another PV panel installer company trying to sell me a battery back-up setup. For a 5 figure amount, they would install the battery (lithium/iron like Tesla’s) install the appropriate inverters and bring the installation up to code and otherwise become my preferred maintenance provider. While this seemed like a very reasonable but very expensive offer, it also came with a request from our local electrical power company, Rocky Mountain Power, to be allowed to pull power (they would never drain the battery below 10%) to cover the general demand during peak demand. To say the least, I was shocked. To think this power company was asking consumers to subsidize their limits to generation of electricity by having said customers (and there are a lot of roof top solar installations in Salt Lake) install batteries for the power companies possible use during periods of high demand. Not so many years ago they were unwilling to credit you for the surplus power you gave them (mine is a grid tied system) that they could then sell off as they liked. Now they what you to pay upfront for a battery pack up system for them.
Naturally you could refuse to grant access to your battery to the power company at the loss of some of the cash and tax credits on offer with this deal, but I was stunned to realize that they were at the end of their rope. There are so many electric cars now days and the proposed build up of really huge data centers to satisfy AI (see the Stratos plan for Box Elder county) that they just can’t keep up with demand. They hit the wall. While I knew about the idea of the limits of our electric grid and other resources, I had no idea that I would get such a vivid, personal demonstration of limits. Something of a wake up call.
I don’t intend to participate in this program and I will find other ways to meet any power down situations that I might experience.
Hi JMG
I hope you are well! I recently saw a series of videos of you on Youtube called Psychic Salon. I believe it was at a restaurant or café in Brooklyn? It was very interesting and I really enjoyed the informal presentation– it felt like having an interesting conversation with friend around a table. You had mentioned the passing of Gordon White, which was a total shock. Im curious your thoughts about his work? I’ve seen podcasts you two have done together. I alway found his insights very valuable and it felt like he really had a grasp of the world’s dynamics, but curious to hear your what you think.
Good morning JMG and all,
I have been reading pretty much all comments the last month. What I have busied myself with the last few weeks:
I read, “Why Nations Fail” by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, ISBN 978-0307719225. My focus was on North America.
This book was a real eye-opener. I was looking for books on taxes and bumped into this. I am glad I came across it. It is not perfect, but the world-history parts are quite illuminating. However, its glaring weak point is that nowhere do the authors recognize “what ‘undeveloped countries’ had been doing right since World War II” (they had been a lot). The parts the authors got right, they got REALLY right. But the authors got some things wrong.
The book is dated 2012. One glaring inaccuracy is that they thought the future would bring left/liberalism. Nuh uh. What we are actually seeing happening is that countries/cities/towns/families/individuals are leaning to the right/conservativism/blue-collar micro-business/trades/tradition. (Yeah Hungary‼️).
What book is a good sequel? I am looking for a book that includes how white-collar Americans need to get with the program and slough off the “white-collar trap” and switch their goals/ways/means/investments to “blue-collar” and micro-business trades. The advocates of white-collar jobs need to dump the “white-collar” job goal which have dominated since WWII,— that is, if today’s younguns (young ones; teens) are to prosper. This actually includes career-changers in their 30s to 70s.
In the media these days, they reflect huge amounts of anguish-and-angst about how white-collar jobs are vanishing with,— they perceive/believe/think,— nothing good to replace “the white-collar work of yesteryear.” No mention of the virtues of blue-collar/micro-business’ ‘dirty jobs’) that are now going begging (and will only continue). The operative concept is “career-change one must if one wants cash to come in.” Get lost, arty-fish-al ill-telligence.
Back in 2003-2012m there was a terrific TV series called, wait for it, “Dirty Jobs” with Mike Rowe (whudda hunk). (Eminent and imminent.) One or another network streams the series. Rowe’s dirty jokes are not “dirty”; he respects women.
Is this one of the books you (JMG) authored? What is the title? Or name two or three titles? To the commentariat, what book(s) would you recommend?
Little do younguns (or their parents) (or anyone in their 20s to 70s who it dawns on the need to realign their occupations with “what the world needs now.” Little do they know that it is fairly simple for a plumber, for example, to gross $300,000/year, in the USA, even rural. Maybe especially rural. That is three with five zeros. Not exaggerating:
Find a master plumber to apprentice with. Apprentice for two-three years. Keep your word. Be honest. Return phone calls. Keep appointments. Call if you’re gonna be late. Keep chronological written notes who said and did what when. Add and subtract. Get used to fungus and slime. {Pick out your used white pickup truck today.}
There are SO MANY skilled, absolutely fantasmic micro-business trades to choose from‼️Dozens. Hundreds. I have listed them in a couple former notes here. (One) chooses a trade one gravitates to; don’t let it choose you.
By the way, the trades(wo)men’s camaraderie is an awesome perk. After-work beer. Thinkin’ not wine unless one originates wine as a thing.
As a 73-year old, I worry.✨I wish I were young✨. I believe in reincarnation so, I suspect, in my next life, I will become a trades(wo)man by age 12. If female, perhaps dressmaker or bookkeeper. No, no, no, NOT accountant. Bookkeeper. Just so you know, bookkeeping is rewarding and hard, and has the perk of being able to keep one’s hands clean. And you don’t need calculus and trigonometry.
————
Then I moved on to reading “Lies and Liars: How and Why Sociopaths Lie and How to Detect and Deal with Them” by Gini Graham Scott, PhD, but finished it.
I believe that all but ten (rounding off) of Congress-critters and Cenataurs are sociopathic liars. (I know it. We know it. You know it. They know it. The planet knows it.)
Sociopaths in power is an infinitely bigger news story than Whosit Epstein. It is the financial crimes that I loathe. Everybody and her idiot neighbor commits fraud; legislators, and other elites, think nothing of stealing from the middle-class and working class. The elites brazenly lie and steal, for all to see, as if their lies and thieving don’t matter. Well, their lies and thieving matters to me. It isn’t Trump I am talking about — it is everyone ELSE in power. The Trump family is somewhat different because they openly commit fraud; 99% of others/powerful do the same thing but secretly. If one is going to impoverish me, do it to my face and stick a knife in my gut.
I needed to know more about habitual liars and thieves. This was a good book to learn from. Young ones need to learn to recognize liars and thieves, thereby severing ties,— including ties with blood relatives. You can’t pick your relatives, and sociopaths have siblings, and your sibling may be a sociopath.
—————
On to my next book; Stoicism 101 by Eric Cloward. Pretty much Stoicism for Dummies, although there is a book by that name too.
What have you’all been thinking about?
💨📚👩🏼🦼➡️🤥🏛️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
I missed commenting on your 20th anniversary installment.
I discovered your blog via the Oil Drum about 2008 and have been reading much of it ever since. Your well-reasoned, eloquent writing style is what has kept me coming back. In particular, I have enjoyed your perspectives on society at large and how we are influenced unconsciously.
A particularly meaningful quote: “Any time you run into someone or something who’s trying to convince you to become more stupid, you’re better off walking away. Equally, whenever you encounter the claim that the way to become a better person is to amputate some part of normal human potential, you’re looking at something genuinely harmful; that’s as true of those ideologies that insist you should turn off your mind as it is of those that insist you should turn off your libido, say, or your imagination, or your capacities for spiritual perception. Wholeness, after all, is a better goal than mutilation.”
When I read this passage from entry 83 of Anthony De Mello’s “Awakening”, I thought of you: “Some people write to make a living; others to share their insights or raise questions that will haunt their readers; others yet to understand their very souls. None of these will last. That distinction belongs to those who write only because, if they did not, they would burst. These writers give expression to the divine – no matter WHAT they write about.”
As we say here in the south: ‘Preciate you!
On the hollowing out of empire along with building an army for the previous war.
https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/how-did-the-us-run-out-of-missiles-in-iran
“Heavy-duty munitions had long been an afterthought in the “global war on terror,” which prioritized close fighting, special forces, and weapons platforms such as the Predator and Reaper drones. “We adjust our industrial base to the kinds of wars that we are fighting,” Finer told me. “I think we got out of the mind-set where we were ever going to fight a very munitions-heavy war again. That was a bit of a failure of imagination.” At the same time, the nation’s weapons manufacturers—part of what is known inside the Beltway as the defense-industrial base, or DIB—have grown cautious after years of fast-shifting congressional priorities. “If you’re a defense prime, you have basically had to use a Ouija board and a divining rod to try to guess what number of munitions that the government will want to buy two years from now,”
This impacts me too, certain smokeless powders I use for reloading the ammunition I use for target shooting are in very short supply.
JMG,
Hi.
I am wondering about the cost of health insurance and how long it can continue to go up. My employer pays 20K a year toward my insurance. I pay 8K a year plus a 3 K deductible. It eats up a good amount of my take home pay. Unfortunately, I need to keep the plan because of my family situation.
1) who is benefitting from these exorbitant charges?
2) how long do you think such expensive premiums can/will continue or increase?
Wondering to what extent or on what timelines the whole health care system might implode so things could go back to more reasonable, published charges for medical procedures along with reasonable catastrophic insurance plans?
Thanks,
Jacques
Your friendly neighborhood Second Religiosity reporter checking in with two new stories. First, in addition to the account I relayed last week, Tucker Carlson had Fr. Chad on his show to talk about exorcism. When he was naming “demons”, Fr. Chad named Loki and Isis, which are of course gods from other cultures. Second, Joe Rogan was talking to another comedian, Tom Segura, on his podcast. Rogan mentioned his neighbor gave him a book on Kabbalah and also that Roseanne Barr tried to get him into it. They proceeded to discuss how it was “kooky” and the equivalent of snake charming to Protestants while clearly not knowing the first thing about, evidenced by asking their LLM sponsor, which mentioned it was mysticism. When discussing the results, Segura, said “mysticism” with an unnerved voice. And that’s the Second Religiosity news.
Back to my regular writing voice, I don’t understand why people can’t sit with uncertainty and say “I don’t know” when discussing things they are clueless about. Or maybe ask questions that get beyond the superficial.
It’s increasingly clear to me that how certain mechanisms drive and reinforce the long descent that were murky even a few shorts years back.
Easy access to resources increase wealth which leads to a population boom which leads to infrastructure to support that population boom which depletes resources which leads to a concentration of wealth as people horde it which leads to a population decrease (since the wealth hoarders don’t have enough children to compensate for normal people delaying or skipping childbirth) which leads to a lot of tough choices.
The touch choices from population decrease are importing foreigners and reducing social cohesion which puts downward pressure on the economy (the Western model), not importing foreigners and becoming unable to pay debts accrued during the infrastructure buildup / population boom leading your currency to fall in value and become poor and unable to maintain what you’ve built (the Asian model), or throwing large sums of money at a small group of your people and giving them special privileges to get them to breed (the Israeli model), again altering the fabric of your society but in a different way from immigration.
All of these choices put downward pressure on your economy, which further increases wealth hoarding, delays critical infrastructure build and maintenance, and furthers population decline.
Obviously, the end of this is the system slowly crumbles and unwinds until it’s weak enough to get pushed aside by a new, confident group of people ready to impose a new system on the population which uses aspects of the old system and values as boogeymen.
Do you believe that a tulpa is a real phenomenon? If so, what do you make of it? And what would you make of the people who claim to create them and their motives? I am guessing that this is something that you have never attempted yourself, and if you had you would not be admitting it. 😉
With JMG’s blessing, I’m thrilled to offer the community here the opportunity to purchase a hand crafted Blasting Trident of Paracelsus. These are handmade by myself (a blacksmith) and two other local craftsmen. They ship from Canada.
The design was created with JMG’s input and I am very happy with how they’ve turned out. The trident is 24″ long and set into a fire-blackened wooden handle. The whole assembly is kept in a slim wooden box.
You can follow the link to my website here for more details and pictures:
https://reforgedironworks.com/product/blasting-trident-of-paracelsus/
Please direct any questions about the trident to info-at-reforgedironworks-dot-com.
May these tridents help in positive magical workings!
Back towards the start of the month, I noted that Karl Denninger’s discovery of Microsoft’s antivirus removing root certificates from Windows machines might explain the weird issues some of us were having connecting to websites using HTTPS. I no longer think this is the underlying cause: I think it might have put some extra strain on the system, but the problem is that it looks like the certificate authority system is struggling to keep up with the scale of demand it faces.
A bit of background: when you connect to a website, there are two ways to connect: the first, HTTP, sends the information over clear channel, which means anyone in the line between you and the server you connect to can see everything going both ways. The other option is HTTPS, which uses the fact that there are certain mathematical functions which are really easy to do one way, but not the other, to encrypt the message so that it is impossible for anyone to read it without the private key, which only the website sees what your browser asked for, and only your browser can see what the server sent back. HTTP was the standard when the web was young, because most of it was supposed to be scientific papers and the like; in order for banking, anything with a login, secure conversations, etc., to work though, it has to be encrypted.
The biggest problem is that you need some way to verify that the person sending you the traffic really is who they say they are; and given the vast size of the web, it’s not really practical to store the necessary information on a device. This is where the certificate authorities come in. It’s their job to verify that the server claiming to be, say, Ecosophia.net really is Ecosophia.net and not an impostor. The root certificates are verified and loaded onto the machine in advance, and then when the browser goes to load a site, the site sends a certificate signed by a certificate authority. Once it is confirmed the certificate authority actually issued the certificate, its identity is verified by the same method, and so on until the chain reaches one of the roots, which are verified on the device already. Given the scale of the internet, it’s impossible for a single certificate authority to keep up, and so the chains can get pretty long. If one of these links goes down, then the browser cannot verify the identity of the website, and it is treated, justifiably, as if it is unknown, because the browser cannot verify the identity.
I set up my laptop to log how long each certificate authority took when I tried to connect to any website. Most of the time, everything went fine, but it was a little freaky seeing so many connections get extremely close to the point where there would be issues. I don’t know if it’ll be this, but right now I think one of the biggest stories of 2026 or 2027 is going to be some piece of web infrastructure most people have never heard of breaking under the strain of all the extra traffic and causing massive global disruptions. Keeping the web running was challenging enough before the tech companies decided that what the web really needed was a huge number of bots talking to other bots, but giving that rant would probably cross the line on the Technology Which Must Not Be Discussed and this comment is already pretty long.
Question for our host:
Have you had a chance to reflect on the US/Israel/Iran conflict? It currently seems to be deadlocked. Both sides are testing who can endure the hardship the longest.
My thoughts on this:
1) The US is attempting regime change in Iran (or alternatively, the dismantling of the Iranian state) to gain control over Iranian oil (just as they already control oil in Iraq).
2) Israel is using the conflict to weaken Iran so that it can maintain its dominance in the Middle East.
What are your predictions? Who will hold out longer and achieve their goals?
@Chauquin: …continuing from your last comment… I think a similar situation exists with Stockhausen as the scientist Zurcher you mentioned. Because Stockhausen was very open about all the different spiritual influences on his work, from his Catholic upbringing, to his exploration of the work of Sri Auribindo, and all manner of world traditions, and that he talked openly and matter of factly about memories that surfaced of his time before incarnation, the influence of dreams on his work, the use of astrology in his work… all of these things seemed to freak out the more materialist minded of the avantgarde at the time and a lot of people dismissed him as he got further into such things. Easy to label him as an elitist and move on.
I’ve been enjoying the CD, Sirius Respect: The Respect Sextet Plays the Music of Stockhausen and Sun Ra (in the jazz idiom). It has both of their birth charts on the cover. Interesting to compare the two charts, and hear their music from other planes of there woven together.
Sirius Respect here with a glimpse of their birth charts: https://moderecords.com/catalog/006_sirius_respect/
@JMG and anyone who is scraping up a few bucks in the “gray” economy. I remember you making a comment about in the future, we’d be grateful that our ancestors left a bunch of metal laying around. I’m already there. I’m currently cleaning up a farm, with all the junk appliances and worn out farm implements that are typical in that environment. I’ve been hauling off the scrap to the local junk yard/recycler, and usually for just a few hours work, the money is worth the effort to sell the scrap. As I’ve gotten older, I can’t run much for cardiovascular fitness, so I’ve taken to picking up cans along the side of the road for an hour every dry morning I get. It’s easy to pick up a few bucks worth of cans in an hour, so I get some exercise and a little money in the process.
This isn’t easy work, and it’s not going to make you rich, but I see a lot of people at the junk yard daily hauling off scrap metal and getting some cash for it. It ties in, I think, with the observations I’ve been making about the “second-hand economy” and the idea of lower social mobility giving you freedom. Hey, what could be lower-class than picking up trash from the side of the road? I’d also like to thank Monster energy drink and Natural Lite beer for all the cans everyone throws out the window!
Thanks every body, for last weeks discussion of toilets and art…….
I have not been able to stop thinking about how cool it would be for an art museum to make their bathrooms into participatory art works. I am seeing Art Deco Long John urinals in my mind’s eye, and i think they would actually really work. Maybe a cubist “Urine descending a staircase” urinal? What would a surrealist toilet look like? Maybe arrange the mirrors in the bathroom to do some kind of Esher effect? The sinks into renaissance fountains? Of course the tiles into mosaics. Emboss images onto the paper towels?
LOL Anyone else have preferences for their favorite artistic style to be turned into bathroom fixtures?
Hello Mr Greer and all the commentariat, peace and serenity be with you all I hope, and it’s nice to be back for another open post on this forum. Near the end of the last one I recall mentioning that I had been having some spiritual seismic activity under the surface of my limited and simple noggin and that I’d get into it next open post, and I would presently do so if I could remember what I was thinking of.
The reason I don’t is because since then something much more interesting has overtaken that whole train of thought, whatever it was. Briefly, what’s going on is this: I built, and I hasten to clarify that there is no AI involved here, I built an app for Linux to listen to my guitar and make up some music to fit with whatever I’m playing. Fit tonally, I mean. Timing is given by the user. But other than that it just listens to the guitar and plays with it.
The reason why I’m talking about that in the comments of a blog about spirituality is, and this is going to sound crazy, but I think someone who doesn’t (any longer?) reside on the material plane is playing music with me through the app I built. I think the music it (the app) plays is a little too good to be explained by just the structured randomness that I coded.
I think this same spirit has here and there nudged me towards the path that resulted in my building the app, and has provided some help skills-wise as well, both in terms of coding and in playing. I speculate that the same one was part of providing my name.
I include this video of us improvising something to show what I’m talking about. We’ve left about 7 or 8 similar ones on my channel, but that’s the only one with the new tinkly sounds we do now: https://youtu.be/Uj5f66XhUA0
So I’m curious about a couple of things, first is, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of others talking about having material plane art projects of various types in partnership with someone who doesn’t live here, so it’s actually not that unusual, is it? The other thing is, if anyone happens to know for a fact that there’s at least one other app that does what mine does, in the strictly material sense of listening to a guitar and live-accomanying it I mean, I’d love to know about it because then there’s a bunch of related stuff that I don’t have to worry about.
Hey JMG,
I missed Monday’s discussion on television but would like to add my own datapoint. Beyond the occasional movie on DVD, I haven’t intentionally watched anything on an actual TV in years; I assume, though, that the typical Zoomer replacement, watching YouTube or Netflix isn’t much different beyond the lack of social cohesion caused by everybody watching the same thing. This, I used to do a lot.
For a while now, though, I found myself mostly uninterested in doing so. I don’t know when it started, so I don’t know if it coincides with any change in my magical practice (which, admittedly, has been rather intermittent) but it started slowly and built up over time. At first, I had the release schedules of the YT channels I watched down and would, if time permitted, download¹ and watch them within minutes of release (at this point, usually three or four videos a week, all released in the evening, so this might sound worse than it was). Then, watching them got a lot less urgent and I just let them pile up to watch once per week or so. This then turned into periods where I let them pile up for weeks and those where I would catch up on what I’d missed.
Lately, the catching up phase doesn’t seem to be setting in. I gave it several shots but, for the most part, I’ve been unable to watch the videos for more than a few minutes without getting bored. It’s not a question of attention span; if I have an interesting enough book and nothing on my agenda, I can spend most of a day or two just reading. The same also applies to video games, on the rare occasions that I do play them these days. My best guess is that it’s the lack of activity: when reading or playing video games, I have to actively make the story continue. When watching a video (or listening to a podcast, which I also can’t do anymore), I just sit there. The most I do is rewind when I didn’t catch something or munch on a snack (it will be very interesting to see if this change will lessen my desire to snack over time or if it will have to be expressed through a different route). It’s taken me a while but I finally see how mind-numbing doing that regularly is.
I can’t definitely relate it to anything concrete like regular banishings (because those, too, have been rather intermittent), so make of that what you will.
—David P.
[1] I don’t understand how anybody can stand the YouTube website. For everybody who doesn’t reject visual media out of hand, I highly recommend https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp, which lets you download videos from YouTube and other websites, so that you can watch them with whatever media player you prefer. YouTube channels have RSS feeds, which means that you never have to actually visit the site to watch videos from channels you want to subscribe to.
I recently had an essay go viral on Substack called Demi Moore is No Longer Beautiful https://substack.com/home/post/p-198361882 that calls out the 2026 ultra-slim, anorexic beauty standard as a marketing ploy for GLP-1 drugs. Even though I posted the same essay at my blog https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/171954.html it got very few comments and not much traction. Bizarrely, on Substack, the essay recently surpassed 42,000 views, brought in 84 new subscribers, and over 300 comments (not including troll comments that I deleted) before I turned comments off for all but paid subscribers. People are still so desperate to comment on it that I have gotten dummies who literally repost it just to say “Stop spreading this message about Demi Moore and other celebrities!” There are good reasons why the word “retarded” will never fall out of fashion.
I have had posts go north of 15,000 views but this one takes the cake. The troll comments were almost all from cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs, rabid, Millennial white women who tried to shame me for noticing that Demi Moore is starving herself to death. As I deleted them, I thought of this blog and how the commentariat is only as fine as it is because of merciless moderation. I also thought of Dion Fortune and the Cosmic Doctrine and the maxim “resist not evil”. So thank you for helping me to sanely navigate the sea of comments I got on that thing.
Hello, JMG and commentariat:
Here we go again with the Open Post, and I can tell you there’s no shortage of topics ready to be written. So, I’ll try to choose the most interesting for me.
***********************************
First, there are some rumors in some fringe (and not so fringe) online sites here, about a possible spike in oil prices and its refined fuels if/when EU strategic oil reserves will be depleted in some months (how many?). In addition to Antonio Turiel (oilcrash blog) grim but serious predictions, this time, it’s said this summer, for example, not only oil prices would be skyrocketing in Europe, but it would happen some kind of shortage, for example in kerozen. You can guess how would affect this shortage to touristic powers like Italia, France and Spain, if/when air travel had trouble due to those hypothetical lack of enough fuel for planes…So Curt in special, please, pay attention to my comment.
**************************************************
I’d like to remember in last John post about Situs and another related topics, there was an interesting debate about current housing crisis (aka housing bubble) in the USA. It’s evident situations aren’t exactly the same in different countries, but this topic “rhymes”. Spain is living since some years ago an unending housing prices bubble, whose elephants in the room are mainly massive migration (which makes to grow housing demand) and middle class and investors greed (who are very interested in keep the housing offer low to keep prices high). There are more causes, but in the short form these are the main causes of this problem, especially dramatic for young couples who are incapable to find financiation for our very expensive flats (I also thank banks to be so sensitive with this problem, ahem, to give mortgages).
I think Mary Bennet pointed this problem could be fixed, or at least bettered, with several political measures. From my local view, I saw two of them realistic in theory but difficult to be done by Spanish politicians. First, restricting legal migration and fighting against irregular migration. Second, the government must order a limit to houses prices; oh, this idea could also work to limit nowadays rampant inflation in food prices.
However, I can say at least our brave current govt wouldn’t do anything to control massive migration nor limit prices. First measure is a “mortal sin” for the “Socialists”, who are very influenced by their political allies woke ideology, so migrants are “sacred cows”. Second one, it could be implemented even by a mild center-right govt, IMHO, because to limit high prices isn’t a “Communist” measure. It would be a relative and temporary limit to “free” market, not an absolute one. So a center-left govt would be able to do it…if they had the guts to do it; but they haven’t them. Oh, it’s so easy to attack soft targets in current cultural wars, but disturbing economical powers (even slightly) is another thing. Left here is fierce fighting against woke black beasts, but toothless against the old school Left enemies…
I don’t know exactly what’s the real situation and current US govt will, but I tend to think Trump, as an old school Conservative, wouldn’t have too many problems to do these politics (if he wants to do it).
********************************************
I’m going to tell you, maybe in my next comment I’ll mock this or that word of current and impoverished woke slang; but now I’m busy…
On Magic Monday, I suggested a set of rituals for the building trades to bless and protect construction projects.
I’d be interested in an extended discussion of what such rites might entail and how they could be developed.
Including rites or modifications for demolition, remodeling or just moving into a different house might be worthwhile, as would a discussion of magical maintenance. Also, building sites tend to be whatever is available rather than carefully selected. Compensation methods might be a good starting point…? Oh, and how to make the rites easy and portable so the trades can do them as they go rather than bringing in a parade of mages seems important.
This article from rt.com struck me, probably for reasons opposite the author’s intent.
https://www.rt.com/africa/640642-south-africa-traditional-healers-unregulated/
“South Africa warns thousands of traditional healers remain unregulated
Delays in enforcing the law have left communities exposed to unsafe practices and weak oversight, officials have said.”
The article is rather vague as to exactly what sort of traditional healing processes it refers to. The core assumption seems to be that if it is unregulated it must be unsafe.
I find the whole notion of putting all “traditional healers” under any sort of central regulatory board to be creepy. The lack of sufficient regulation and oversight the article complains of, is the exact opposite of my concern.
Ran across something I had never heard of the other day – the “Law of the Conservation of Violence”. Here’s what I clipped out of a web search
The “law of the conservation of violence” is an informal sociological and political concept. It states that violence cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred or transformed from one form to another. All violence—whether physical, structural, or symbolic—is paid for somewhere within a system.
Transformation: A reduction in physical violence (e.g., stopping a riot) often requires an increase in institutional or structural violence (e.g., stricter laws, systemic oppression, or financial penalties) to maintain order.
Transfer: When violent conflict is suppressed in one area, it frequently erupts or displaces to another, such as shifting from open warfare to covert operations, cyber-warfare, or escalated domestic policing.
… etc … etc
Have you ever heard of this theory? I would be interested in knowing your thoughts.
Here is an article from the “Ponerology” Substack, which just got posted today:
The Vice of Kings
Socialism, Occultism, Child Abuse, and the Sexual Revolution
https://ponerology.substack.com/p/the-vice-of-kings
The article is a review of Jasun Horsley’s book by the same name. The thrust of this article recalls JMG’s dismay at the breakdown in ethics of the “neo-pagan” scene. Horsley maintains that the problem goes much further back:
“Among the odd connections: [Aleister] Crowley himself pops up repeatedly in part one, in places where I, personally, didn’t expect to find him. For whatever reason, the worlds of socialism, occultism, and sexual boundarylessness closely overlap, and they all fed into the sexual revolution of feminism, gay rights, and free sex.
Jasun traces this trend back to sexologist Havelock Ellis, a founding member of Fabianism in the 1880s. (Other prominent members included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Bertrand Russell, Sidney and Beatrice Webb.) Ellis, an early feminist and forerunner to Kinsey, coined the word “homosexual” and wrote a six-volume work on the psychology of sex.”
What this article points out is a genuine problem, and it is well enough documented to take very seriously. There really is such a thing as an “Epstein class” and throwing around thought-stoppers such as “blood libel” and “Salem witch hunt” does not make this problem disappear or “go away.”
School board elections in my state are non-partisan. On the primary ballot, one of the political parties has an ‘advisory question’: “Should candidates for local school boards be able to run as a candidate of the political party of their choice, just like candidates for other elected offices?”
Currently, voters in my state do not have to register with a political party. You can only vote in one primary each election, but you can vote Republican one election and Democratic the next.
I have done some preliminary research online, to try to figure out the pros and cons of having a partisan school board. So far, what I have found seems to be more propaganda than actual research. (One exception being a pamphlet from the FL League of Women Voters, but their concern was based on the fact that their voters have to be registered with a party, so not currently relevant to my circumstance.)
I was curious if JMG or the commentariat had thoughts about the potential pros and cons of partisan school board elections that you would be willing to share. Thanks!
Hi JMG,
I’ve been meaning to move to the SOP from the LRP for a long time but got stuck f deciding on appropriate Hellenic deities for the many positions. I decided to use my natal chart as a guide and was hoping you can tell me how this looks regarding balance. My ascendant and chart depositor or both ruled by Saturn who is in mutual reception with Jupiter. I thought I had this worked out then happened to stumble on a book called The Black Cube, free on The Imternet Archive, which totally freaked me out because the author had some strange things to say about Saturn which I had never heard before. I’m wondering if maybe he summoned somebody that was pretending to be Saturn but after reading this I wanted to get your take on using Kronos in the opening part of the SOP.
Opening: Ouranos, Gaia, Kronos
East: Hermes (obvious though combust but I do ongoing planetary charity)
West: Aphrodite (well dignified)
South: Ares (my Sun sign)
North: Apollo (earth connection via the Delphic oracle) and to bring some lightness to an already Earth heavy natal chart.
Below: Artemis, connection to ley lines, animals, forests etc.
Above: Zeus (obvious, and in mutual reception with His progenitor Saturn)
Does this look reasonable and balanced or should I take a more conventional approach with the elemental gates? I’m definitely struggling right now, with the 0° Aries Saturn-Neptune conjunction steamrolling over various natal elements, so it seemed like the right time to just embrace Him rather than continuing to work around His influence.
I was feeling good about this potential SOP arrangement until I read that book wherein the author seems to consider Saturn a cthonic entity. The book is fascinating by the way, not leastly because it starts out with him blundering into a black magic ritual out of desperation with chronic pain due to an auto accident. It’s also an academic work covering many cultures’ view of Saturn including Islam and the obvious reference to the structure at Mecca.
I’m wondering if he’s been confused from the get-go about the identity of his relationship because it sounds more like one of your tentacle entities or something from the Picatrix. If anyone has read this book I would be most appreciative for an assessment of its plausibility to the extent that that is possible given that these types of experiences are personal.
Thank you in advance for this and everything else that you do for us.
Happy Wednesday everyone.
In a previous article I wrote, I had an idea for an educational “program” that I mentioned called HEM, or Humanities, Ecology, Memory. This is in contrast to the, so far, more popular STEM. I expanded upon this idea in a new article exploring this idea of HEM, and probing the past and influence of STEM ala Marshall McLuhan’s tetrad from his book the Laws of Media. What does a media, artifact, or educational protocol in this case enhance, obsolesce, retrieve and reverse. I look at STEM and HEM through this. It also gave me a chance to poke fun at math induced psychosis..
Here is part of my assessment:
“Back in the early 2000s after the Y2K fiasco and the dot com bubble collapse, educators still wanted to continue pushing a collective focus on what they then called SMET: science, math, engineering and technology. Perhaps SMET was too similar to the word “smeg” a catch all cuss word in Rob Grant and Doug Naylor’s humorous scifi series Red Dwarf. In the world of Red Dwarf space ships powered by AI with low IQ drift across the universe in hopeless disarray and talking toasters form the only potential hope for Lister, the last human left alive. SMET is kind of smeg, so in its place, the forward thinking president at Winona State University had a functional brainwave and rearranged the letters into STEM.
…
Over the past twenty odd years as STEM has been pushed inside of America’s collective educational systems, the continued effects of Scientism, Technocracy, (cultural) Engineering, and Mathology (arithmetic focused on cold calculation and numeric quantity over numeric quality) has led to some of the following outcomes in the U.S.A:
The Great Dopamine Drain: the ubiquitous use of various social media platforms among adolescents and their adults has rewired their brains, exploiting dopamine pathways for the addictive hit of getting “just one more like.” In person social skills have atrophied. Depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and issues with body image have all been amplified. Suicide rates have gone up, and loneliness is a national epidemic even while people are connecting endlessly over the always-on-internet.
Computer Aided Disintegration: Over-reliance on Computer Aided Design tools has created a generation of engineers and architects who lack the ability to draw with pen and pencil. The geometric proportions that give harmony to the world are all based on the human form. The geometric proportions of the hand get bypassed when the hand does not know how to draw a plan…”
You can read the rest in the following locations:
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/hem-humanities-ecology-memory
https://justinpatrickmoore.substack.com/p/hem-humanities-ecology-memory
Thanks also to everyone who has subscribed over the past few weeks. I really appreciate everyone who takes the time to read these words and receive them in their email.
Speaking of Derive (I know you were) two Swiss artists have launched a “Bus To Nowhere. No fixed destination, they don’t know where it will end up. Passengers sing, laugh and talk to strangers. Supposedly thousands from all over Europe have applied for tickets.
https://www.kiwikidsnews.co.nz/swiss-bus-takes-passengers-nowhere/
@Northwind Grandma (#10):
You might want to check out Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door (2006). She presents evidence that about 1 person out of 25 in the USA is a sociopath. (This from my older son, who read it in connection with my mother — his grandmother — who struck us both as a narcissistic sociopath while she was alive.) If she is right about 1 in 25, then it’s a triumph that there are any non-sociopaths in government.
Hi JMG,
Forgive me if you’re earlier post on the Metaphysics of Sex already addressed this question and I’ve missed it, but I’d like to ask: to what degree does sexual intercourse cause, for some period following the act, the feelings and moods between the lovers to flow more freely? It’s regularly accepted that individuals influence each others’ moods; where one is glum or depressed, it is easier for others around to also take upon themselves such feelings. But, does sexual intercourse, especially when it is regular between two individuals (as in a marriage) enhance that tendency? If it does, is there any way to guard against it? Say, for example, in a marriage where one partner is often prone to strong depressive spells or bouts of anger?
Thanks!
Dear Mr. John Michael Greer: Good afternoon, I am a (Seattle) Garfield High School, Brown University, Seattle University, Cal Berkeley and Columbia Law School educated Attorney of 35+ years and a N. Seattle (Shoreline) State Farm Agency Owner of eight years. Last Friday, a longtime State Farm Employee, “Ms. P. Culp” (out of TX) introduced me to your riel Moravec Occult Detective Series. I will be Providence, RI for my Brown 35th Reunion in May, 2028. If I purchase your hardcover books, can I meet you at a local E. Providence coffee shop so you can sign them (for Ms. Culp)? Yes, I know this communication is about two years out, but with so much fraud and impropriety out there, I hope you will conclude that this is a legitimate request. I welcome your thoughts and thanks!
It’s me, back from cybernetic limbo. I have been absent from this blog all weekend and more, thanks to a nasty computer problem that popped up over the 3-day weekend. My virus protection expired and a Murphy – as in Murphy’s Law- was running wild. It took a lot of work for our IT expert, who just left, to unscrew the formerly (to me) inscrutable, so expect a flood of comments from situationism – the situation’s post.
Meanwhile, our drought is being broken by a few thunderstorms. Insert the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (or the Navy one) singing a heartfelt “Now Thank We, All, Our God! (Or Gods)!!!
One comment in an online news story from my phone, I found delightful reading; I think, from The Guardian – heading “Catenomics in Japan.” The felines there are a big business, Japan being, as the author noted, great cat-lovers. So, I notice are the Islamic countries. But then, the best tranquilizer in the world is a purring cat on your lap. At any rate, money spent on cats has become a classic bubble in Japan.
@ Luke: re, second religiosity. Thanks for this…
I don’t know how anyone can sut through a three hour sermon from Rogan in the first place, but Im not surprised by either of these.
@Michael Martin: what a shame, from my pov, to hear about Horsley throwing Crowley in with all the other people he deems sexually immoral. I admit the guy was no saint when it came to interpersonal relationships, but he wasn’t any worse, than say, various members of the Beatles or Rolling Stones.
Thank the gods that occultism and socialism helped feed into sexual liberation, gay rights and feminism. What a person does with their genitals and those of consenting others is their own business. Meddlesome moralists always want to deny the pleasures of the body.
Cant have those tingling feelings, too much evidence of the life force!
I hate to see that tied in with a whipped up frenzy against practitioners of magic.
What would happen if they decided to get it on?
@Northwind Grandma #10. Just a warning, not a discouragement, about micro-businesses. A few years ago, I trained online to be a piano tuner. It’s actually a pretty dirty job, but I enjoyed the work. Problem is, I really have no head for business and couldn’t make it a sustainable business. Apprenticing seems like a fine idea, but once you get out, make sure you have a way to get enough work to keep it going. Probably my decades as an engineer made me good a solving technical problems, but not so great of a businessman. As for the disappearance of white collar workers, probably an inevitability, regardless of AI, but way too many people are removed from physical labor now. And for anyone who dreams of being an organic farmer, I grew up on a farm. It’s hard, thankless work and you’d better have a spouse and 3 kids ready to go to help you keep everything running!
Cynthia Christie #24. Need a bass player?
Kimberly #26. Just a data point for you. There have recently been a spate of actresses, who were popular in the late 90s/early 2000s who have begun, er “spicy social media accounts.” One in particular I noticed was Tricia Helfer, who was really talented and especially good on the show “Battlestar Galactica.” If your job is to get yourself in the spotlight and in front of the public, you’ll do just about anything to “keep your job” so to speak. It’s the nature of celebrity, and probably a social expectation that they don’t “train down” and do something like become a nurse.
Chaquin #27. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I had heard news stories that Spain and Italy were selling off decrepit or abandoned land and homes in the countryside for next to nothing to try to coax new residents (even foreigners) to come and live there. Seems like it was a bit of the result of depopulation and looks a bit like Japan stared to around 2010.
Zemi 16
> Do you believe that a tulpa is a real phenomenon?
This is part and parcel to Tibetan Buddhism. One cannot separate out one specific thing and have it makes sense. A person would have had to study and practice some branch of Tibetan Buddhism for a long time to be able to answer that question.
In my opinion, your question comes from out of left field with no context. Your question is like raising the question, “To non-Protestants, “what does ‘the rapture’ mean?” Unless one knows a heck of a lot about not only Christianity in general, but Protestantism in particular, plus know fundamental differences of belief between various sects of Protestantism, any stab at an answer would not make a bit of sense to non-Christians or to the general public.
As it is, I am somewhat versed in Tibetan Buddhism, and your question is more appropriately addressed to a lama of one or another sect of that religion. I would be surprised if JMG would venture an answer. A lama would likely respond something like, “meditate.”
💨☸️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@strda221, not JMG, but in case you want know: when I read Campbell years ago, I could best judge him on Biblical and related Near Eastern myths, and found his knowledge there decidedly unimpressive – shallow, outdated and sometimes simply wrong. I would be surprised if his knowledge of other mythologies was much better.
dobbs 23
> an art museum to make their bathrooms into participatory art works
Including see-through, full-length windows; see-through stalls and all… for the public to watch live-action. Gotta get the public involved.
Plus, wash the bathroom only once a week… smell-a-vision… it wouldn’t be authentic without smell. Also have toilet paper run out.
One thing the Long Descent will cause: everyone will be responsible for cleaning up their own messes,— as in, cleaning one’s own toilet. (Servants prohibited. Maids hard to come by.)
💨🚽🧻💩💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@dobbs #23
You might want to take a look for images from the Crossness Pumping sewage station on the outer eastern fringes of London. I visited a few years back in pursuit of another project and it really is as spectacular as it seems. It is open to the public although it is situated in a site that is still in use so anyone visiting has to put up with the smell.
There is a large exhibition of historical bathroom fittings in the outer halls. Those Victorians certainly had a taste for floridly decorated ceramics!
K 33
> SOP LRP
I don’t know what these agronyms mean, and I am at the point of intolerance where I am unwilling to look them up,— either online, in Wikipedia, or in a dictionary. Lazy-writer-syndrome. It is a burden on readers when writers assume too much.
Lazy writer begets care-less reader. I will skip reading the article.
💨😵💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@scotlyn, @chuaquin: You had a somewhat heated conversation about the question if eternal life is possible already in the here and now. I will contribute the following (which of course doesn’t have the power to convince anybody – how could it?):
Luke 18:29-30: “Truly I tell you: no one who has left home or wife or brothers or sisters or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive the life of the age to come many times more in this moment and in the age to come.” That is how I understood when reading the Greek text and immediately thought of your discussion. It seems to prove to me that the “life of the age” is given already in “this moment”. Only now when posting to you I saw that a usual translation would go
“…will fail to receive many times as much in this age, and in the age to come eternal life.”
But how would one receive many times as many wives or parents 🙂 ?
Ilaria Ramelli has argued exhaustively why “aionios” (of the age) should not be translated as “eternal” (Greek has a perfectly good word for eternal” “aïdios”).
Great Khan, thanks for this. I’m looking forward to it.
Earthworm, it’s an open post, so sure. As for works discussing the principles of drawing meditation, I’ve never seen anything on the subject, so you may be in new territory — or at least “new” in the sense that the people who’ve done it haven’t written books about it. It sounds like a fascinating project.
Strda221, I found his books superficial, tendentious, poorly researched, and full of sloppy generalizations. To my mind, he exemplifies the worst qualities of pop-culture Jungianism.
Earthworm, hmm! That’s a new one. Let me know if it keeps happening, and I’ll check with my IT guy.
Franklin, interesting. I don’t use balance as a sole criterion for assessing traditions, for what it’s worth; I’d note that too much balance is also a form of imbalance. I also note that each of the imbalances you describe in your last paragraph has its own equal and opposite imbalance — for every instance of misogyny, ofr example, there’s one of misandry. As I like to say, the opposite of one bad idea reliably turns out to be another bad idea!
Clay, I’ll be discussing this in an upcoming post. The big public unions are facing Armageddon as the gravy train from government borrowing goes away and the entire university-to-bureaucracy pipeline for the middle classes collapses. It’s not surprising that they’re doing everything in their power to hold onto as much as they can. As for an alliance between bureaucrats and socialists, what could be more natural? Socialism is all about bureaucracy; it pretends to be about working class empowerment, but it’s always actually a means for a faction of the intelligentsia to seize power from the capitalists and exploit the working class in their place, using vast bureaucratic nomenklaturas as its basic form of power.
Forecasting, the retreat of the US to regional-power status is an important part of what’s going on. Another is the twilight of the fracking bubble, which means that the sanctions on Venezuelan and Iranian oil have to go away — Russia, too, needs unimpeded access to global oil markets, if a disastrous energy price spike is to be avoided. Forcing pro forma changes in hostile governments that give Trump cover to end the embargoes is thus essential, while the reorientation to regional-power status requires Chinese footholds in the western hemisphere to be squeezed out. We’ll see if the Trump administration can get away with it, but that’s clearly their plan.
Kay, thank you for the heads up! I’m not surprised, but it’s very useful to know that things have already come this far.
Crj, yeah, I was invited to NYC to speak at an ongoing series of talks — they’re in Manhattan, at a pleasant vegan restaurant in the East Village. As for White, the kind of occultism he studied and practiced was just about as far from mine as it’s possible to get, so any critique I offered of his work would be a little like asking a mechanical engineer to comment on the professional expertise of a botanist, or vice versa! I certainly found him pleasant, intelligent, and interesting, but we had to work a little to find common subjects for conversation.
Northwind, if there’s a sequel to the book you’ve read, I don’t know it, and I certainly haven’t written it. Maybe you should consider writing it.
JIG, thank you for this!
Siliconguy, yep. I included some of this in my novel Twilight’s Last Gleaming; if I was writing it over again, I’d include much more.
Jacques, health insurance is one of the most blatant examples of what I call “lenocracy,” the form of political economy in which pimping is the dominant model for economic activity, and most of the money in society is made by treating productive work the way a pimp treats his hookers. A huge sector of the current US economy is kept afloat by absurdly overpriced health care, and will continue to do so until either legislation or economic forces crack down on it. In the meantime, learning how to treat illnesses at home is a really good idea.
Luke, yeah, I heard of both of these. Some people really, badly want them some witch hunts.
Dennis, it’s really interesting to watch, in a bleak sort of way.
Zemi, it really depends on what you mean by that much-abused term. The Tibetan tulpa tradition is rather different from the artificial elementals currently being marketed under that label in pop-culture occultism in the West. Both exist, but they aren’t the same. I haven’t done anything of the kind because that doesn’t interest me; from my perspective, the point of occultism is to develop one’s own latent powers, not to farm them out to some manufactured critter.
William, that’s fascinating, and not surprising. I would expect anti-bot legislation, and possibly less legal modes of crackdown by big corporate interests that would be hurt by major problems with the web — but of course quite a bit of chaos might happen first.
Grimmelshausen, my take is that both sides are looking for an offramp and dickering over who gets what slight advantage out of the mess. The US leadership realized some time ago that they’d been misled by the Israelis and Iranian expat groups into thinking that Iranians would rise against the mullahocracy, which mistaken assumption was what brought them into the war in the first place; the question now on both sides is how to find a formula to end hostilities that will allow both sides to claim victory and also permit Iranian oil to get out into the world market, which desperately needs it. It’ll be worked out sooner or later.
Tim PW # 17 .. Do said trident repellent chainmail?? I would imagine plate armor might be a problem .. but mail .. in it’s various permutations, boiled leather, or any combination thereof might be pierced adequately. Just thinking ahead ..
Hey JMG
I recently finished reading an interesting book titled “The Naked Neanderthal” by Ludovic Slimak, that attempts to understand how the Neanderthal mind may have differed from humanity’s.
To be honest, most of the book was more about the many ways modern human thought patterns and culture are most likely influencing and distorting our ability to actually comprehend how different the culture and consciousness of Neanderthals would have been, he only ventures a few guesses about how they differ from us at the end of the book.
This book really emphasises that there is not only very little to go on in regards to archaeological and palaeontological clues to understand Neanderthals, but that they are well and truly extinct due to competition with humans. But out of what little we have found of their artefacts, it’s apparent that unlike contemporary humans the Neanderthal never bothered with trying to mass produce and standardise their stone tools, they instead had a similar attitude to tool-making that makers of “Raku” pottery have to making their tea ware, making tools that are functional but wildly different and unique from each other. They also had very few weapons, none of which were projectile weapons. They are no Neanderthal bows and javelins, only spears designed for thrusting. There is much more I found in this book, but it would be overwhelming to talk about it all.
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-naked-neanderthal-9781802061819
Siliconguy # 12 .. I have an idea .. What we really need is – MUAD DIB! – (Munitions United Against senseless DWEEBS .. together, as one .. with the Defence Industrial Base).. I’m more than sure some enterprising rouge CRSPER enthusiast could create a GENETICALLY ALTERED enhanced sandworm of Yuggge proportions – from srcatch, no less! .. to do the bidding of whomever wishes to lord over the MiddleEast Ergs!
Clay Dennis # 6 ..the trend will be ‘NOBODY will be able to afford JACK! .. let alone funding pseudo-socialists and/or teacher’s onions – no matter the layers of union scales … With what’s coming down the pipe, what with petroleum becoming ‘unobtainium’ shortly … All there will be is SCRAPS! ( Socialist’s Craven Rapraciousness in Appropriation of the Public’s Sensiblities)
Kay Robison # 8 .. “They” want to $uck .. You .. DRY!! .. to a husk, as per Larry F.U. Fink!
Dobbs #23
The Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, CA has bathrooms that could meet your criteria. The whole Inn is the definition of over the top. Each guest room is themed, and the public restrooms follow: there’s a South Seas one that has large shells for the sinks and the Copper Shop has copper trough urinals. https://www.madonnainn.com/
The website doesn’t have pix of the restrooms, unfortunately.
Joseph Campbell – Bill Moyers – LBJ: Joseph Campbell has come up. I was unimpressed with his commentary on “Finnegans Wake,” and with his work in general. Bill Moyers did a TV series on Campbell called “The Power of Myth.” I remember a prof. at Cal State used one of those videos in a class. I was not the only one who walked out at the break commenting that we’d never seen so many platitudes strung together in one place. Moyers worked for LBJ after the JFK assassination. JMG, in a recent video from NYC, began by asking who was the most corrupt president in US history. Warren Harding? My answer would be LBJ, winning by a mile, at least up to the current Golden Golem of Architectural Garbage. My conclusion? Unimpressed times three.
JMG,
On the past Yeats post you said “recognizing the difference between abstract ideals and concrete reality is an important step toward maturity, and one not many people these days take.” What are the other steps?
Charlie Obert (no. 29), sangomas (“witch doctors”) in southern Africa typically prescribe repeated purgings (induced vomiting) as a basic practice, along with more magic-spell type stuff. They are regulated in neighboring Esawatini (formerly Swaziland), where the main concern is to prevent them from accusing random people of witchcraft. A “witch” is not the same thing as a sangoma–often it is more like a ghost or demon, but can take human form. Literal witch hunts are a very real danger across much of Africa. Journalist James Hall wrote a book about how he became a sangoma, called “Sangoma: My Odyssey into the Spirit World of Africa” (Touchstone, 1995).
David Icke got his idea for “lizard people” from sangoma Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa. This inspired the villains from the first Avengers movie, the Chitaurians. The casual viewer might assume them to be aliens from the star Chi Tauri, but the word is in fact chiShona for “Talkers,” a kind of malevolent supernatural being. (It was Mutwa’s idea that they came from another planet.)
Zemi (no. 16), a tulpa (Tib. sprul pa) is an emanation or magical projection (cf. tulku, sprul pa’i sku gzugs / nirmanakaya). The term was popularized by Alexandra David-Néel in her 1929 travel memoir Mystiques et magiciens du Tibet (translated as Magic and Mystery in Tibet), and blurred with the Theosophical concept of thought-forms, i.e. the belief that thoughts can take on a life of their own outside of the mind. In recent years, “tulpamancy” has been embraced by a number of pop-culture fandoms—especially My Little Pony devotees, who apply it to unspeakable acts of pastel-tinged degeneracy. See Natasha L. Mikles and Joseph P. Laycock, “Tracking the Tulpa: Exploring the ‘Tibetan’ Origins of a Contemporary Paranormal Idea” (Nova Religio vol. 19 no. 1 (2015), pp. 87-97; Ben Joffe, “Paranormalizing the Popular through the Tibetan Tulpa: Or What the Next Dalai Lama, the X-Files and Affect Theory (Might) Have in Common” (blogpost on Savage Minds, 13 Feb. 2016), https://savageminds.org/2016/02/13/paranormalizing-the-popular-through-the-tibetan-tulpa-or-what-the-next-dalai-lama-the-x-files-and-affect-theory-might-have-in-common/
Greetings Mr. Greer:
I was curious your thoughts on the heatwave that has made much of Western Europe look almost indistinguishable from much of West Africa on temperature charts this past week.
It make be an interesting foreshadow of events in the Long Descent for that part of the world
Hello Watchflinger. My father was a milkman who serviced businesses and homes. While on his route he collected thousands of aluminum cans. The kids’ task was to line ip those that weren’t already crushed so that Dad could smash them, one by one, with a sledgehammer. He’d then scoop up the lot, shovel them into bags , and load up his van floor to roof. Each trip amounted to hundreds of dollars and went into a savings account. He did this for a decade and saved a tidy sum to pass on to his progeny. We’d also make trips out to the dump—an unsanitary and magical open pit of refuse and treasures.
There was a brief discussion in the comments following the War in Heaven post in April, I have been waiting to bring it up because I believe the post 11 by one anonymous is surely oversimplified if not outright historically inaccurate, and another by another anonymous, An-1 and An-2 hereinafter, contains a quite serious fallacy. An-1 shared their version of early Christian history; if An-1 knows of a good, comprehensive account of the religious ferment, including the various Gnostic sects, Nestorianism, Manicheanism and so on, I would like to know of it.
An-2 then countered with a dismissive reference that “modern scholarship” has decided that something else happened. I take strong exception to being told that I must, of course, be guided by unnamed authorities about whose qualifications and writings I need not bother my pretty head. I am also a reader of the ACOUP blog where Prof. Deveroux is frequently at pains to explain the various theories, currents and countercurrents in the field of classical history. I very much doubt that the situation is much different among the scholars who study Late Antiquity, and I would be astonished to learn that there exists scholarly unanimity on just about any point pertaining to those times. IMO, anyone airily referring to so nebulous an authority as “modern scholarship” is trying to sell us on a made up myth.
Tim PW # 17 .. Ugh! .. substitute piercing for ‘repellent’, then my query makes sense. HellCheck strikes again.
I don’t usually do this, but I’d like to share a podcast that we just released with David Holmgren, co-originator of the Permaculture concept. He mentioned JMG a couple times in the interview, and seems to have a lot of thinking in common. I’m wondering if maybe we can get both on a call sometime?? What do you think JMG?
https://youtu.be/V5DJiww_2bU?si=nF6lOKDC5cIntR_Q
My working guess is that quite a lot of chaos would ensue, because a lot of the decisions will be made by people who have no idea what’s happening, and the people who do know what’s happening are unlikely to be able to get a proper hearing in time to avoid a major mess. I have a tech background and used to work in the industry, and until I started logging the data, I had no idea that there was such a large problem with the certificate authorities. Add to this that the major tech companies are the ones making most of this bot traffic and will be eager to blame something else, and I am not sure that a sane response will happen in time to avoid some pretty major disruptions.
The big question I have, and it is one that I don’t think it will be possible to answer until whatever breaks actually breaks, is whether or not the problem will be limited to the web, or if it’ll disrupt the entire internet. If it’s certificate authorities, then it’ll be a world class mess alright, but banking apps, SWIFT, email (for those who run separate programs for them), won’t be affected directly. If the problem is, say, that DNS (Domain Name System; the thing that allows for computers to keep track of addresses to communicate with each other) suffers a breakdown, oh boy, it’ll be a mess: everything on the internet gets disrupted if DNS runs into a problem. Since this includes everything from phone service to credit cards and other financial transactions to the data utilities use to synchronize power plant generation, this would be a major disaster; quite possible the defining moment of the entire Internet Age.
Watchflinger, delighted to hear it. Metal merchants were important figures in the imaginary future I used as the setting for my novel Star’s Reach, and all the metal they used was scrap from “the old world.” Welcome to the deindustrial future!
Dobbs, my concern is that a surrealist toilet would probably take a crap on you!
Cynthia, how odd. It’s fairly common for artists, writers, musicians, etc. to have help from the disembodied — “Hear me, O muse!” was originally an invocation of a spirit, after all — but I don’t know of anybody else who’s done it electronically.
David, makes sense to me. I find most visual media acutely boring.
Kimberly, thanks for this! I’m glad to hear that you’ve gotten some attention for this.
Charlie, oog. Yeah, I’d be happier if they left the sangomas alone.
Cynic, that makes a great deal of sense, but no, I hadn’t encountered it before. I’ll have to look into it.
Michael, it’s perfectly possible to recognize, at the same time, (1) that some people do horrible things to children and (2) that a lot of people want a witch hunt and don’t worry too much about mere facts if they can whip one up. It’s like the famous OJ Simpson trial, in which it was pretty clear that he was guilty as sin and the police framed him. (You can frame a guilty man!) The sort of frantic cherrypicking Horsley has used on occultists here could be used just as well — and indeed has been so used — to insist that the Catholic Church is a child-molesting cult. Be careful with such things; they have a tendency to spin out of control, and devour those who feed them.
Random, hmm. I haven’t given much thought to it. Anyone else?
K, relax. It doesn’t really matter that much what deities you put in which positions. You can use that set if you like, certainly.
Justin, thanks for this!
David, fun! That does sound entertaining — and the fact that it’s so popular is another, subtler indication that the age of reason is ending around us.
Vane, yes, intercourse attunes the etheric and astral bodies of the two participants to one another, and so yes, emotions flow more easily. You can’t prevent it; what you can do is learn to discharge the emotions into the earth. If you feel a rush of anger or depression from your spouse, sit down with your feet flat on the ground, imagine yourself breathing the emotion into you, and then breathe it out through the soles of your feet, sending it straight down deep into the earth, where it can be broken up and composted. Practice this regularly and you’ll find it easy not to be affected by the emotions; you’ll also find that your spouse will be less burdened by them.
Bruce, thank you! I’m sorry to say that I left Rhode Island in January of this year and am now living in Silver Spring, MD. If you ever get to the Washington DC area, though, I’d be happy to sign them.
Patricia, that sounds so Japanese. A culture that would make Stationmaster Tama into a deity is ripe for frantic cat speculation.
This is Stationmaster Tama on duty in the Kishi station…
…and this is the shrine raised to her as a Shinto goddess after her death. Her formal title is Tama Daimyojin Honorary Eternal Stationmaster. Her feast day is June 23. Offerings may be made to stray cats, or cat-related charities.
J.L.Mc12, ah, but Neanderthals aren’t quite extinct. People from northern and western Europe have on average 3-4% Neanderthal genetics. That said, thank you for the book reference!
Luke, I wish I had a list!
Gunstone, wild swings in weather patterns are a normal part of the kind of climate transition we’re moving through. I’ve discussed that in detail here:
https://ecosophia.net/riding-the-climate-toboggan/
Expect more of this, as the Sahara moves north. Yes, that’s what’s happening, and nothing any human being can do will stop it.
There is an article about how managers and executives (“business idiots” in the author’s terms) don’t do any work and just extract value out from its employees, and how LLMs are the perfect grift to fool managers and executives, as they are disconnected from the actual work, and LLMs tell the managers and executives everything that they want to here rather than the truth about reality conflicting with their ideas about the world:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/
Peter @ 54: The Madonna Inn had occurred to me also. The men’s room features a waterfall to help get you in the mood…. Been there, done that, so to speak.
Mary Bennet @ 61: I recently read and commented on a book about the ferment you mentioned: “Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds” by Donald Akenson. (I believe it was Ambrose who recommended it a while back.) I thought the first half was terrific, but I admit, I have gotten bogged down in the Mishnah and Talmud sections, roughly the last 1/4 of the book, not including the extensive notes.
JMG,
The next stage of collapse is happening now in Seattle. To stem the gun violence from running shootouts between prostitution and trafficking gangs. neighborhoods are putting up barriers on their streets to stop the mobile shootouts taking place nightly.
When the government no longer provides security. one of two things happen. Either Warbands ( gangs) take over and create some kind of order in a part of town , or the citizens cordon off their own areas and protect them with ad hoc militias.
I am guessing this one will get resolved in the short term by the Socialist government in Seattle, but it is a glimpse in to the future.
Heatwaves in Western Europe seem to be the new norm after 2020. RIP European Faustian Civilization, there’s no way Western Europe can survive if its climate becomes a northern extension of the Sahara Desert.
Perhaps Western Europeans should start emigrating from that region to other parts of the world before they get caught up in the inevitable wars, famines, mass death, etc that arise from their climate becoming desert like and inhospitable to agriculture as practiced in the past few millennia.
Polecat #62 – in this case said trident would likely not pierce chain maille or leather armour. It’s more of a “stab ethereal baddies” construction than that.
Maille is a fascinating armour (I’ve woven a few items) and it is actually quite resilient to piercing, especially when combined with a gambeson or similar padded armour. I think it’s a bit like bullet proof vests, where the surrounding material moves and absorbs some of the energy of the incoming pointy end.
I have always wanted to try making riveted maille but, my goodness, the time it would take to do that…
Since the last day of February when Iran was attacked and responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, dire consequences have been repeatedly predicted.
But in the US, except for an approximate 50% increase in the price of gasoline, not much has changed in the daily life of the average “consumer”. Many vehicles are still on the road (and in mall parking lots), restaurants seem to be doing well, big box stores are still busy, etc.
Have the “dire consequences” been exaggerated? Or are they still to come, and we simply have to be patient? Is “The Great Depression 2.0” on the horizon later this year or in 2027? Or what?
“J.L.Mc12, ah, but Neanderthals aren’t quite extinct. People from northern and western Europe have on average 3-4% Neanderthal genetics. That said, thank you for the book reference!”
And, once in a while, it shows up in the phenotype; there is a lawyer in a northern-tier state in the USA who, in his law firm advertising photos, looks like a Neanderthal in a suit and tie. I’ve remarked about it and have been met with absolute, withering silence.
Hey JMG
It’s funny you responded that way, because that exact point was a major pet peeve for Ludovic Slimak. Multiple times in the book he states that to saying Neanderthals aren’t really extinct since a fraction of their DNA still lives on in modern humans would be comparable to someone responding to a hypothetical extinction of wolves with the observation that since dogs are still around then the wolves that they are descended from aren’t truly gone regardless. Just as dogs and wolves aren’t really equivalent despite being genetically related to each other, so Neanderthals and humans aren’t equivalent either. In Ludovic’s opinion, when people say Neanderthals aren’t truly extinct if some of their DNA lives on in us, they are attempting to avoid grappling with the enormity and significance of their being an entire branch of humanity that is permanently gone forever, most likely due to competition with our ancient ancestors.
Ludovic is rather passionate about Neanderthals.
@Michael Martin (#31):
It goes back further than that, back to the days of spiritualism and first-wave feminism: Paschal Beverly Randolph, John Humphrey Noyes, Victoria Claflin Woodhull, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Alice Bunker Stockham, and others. Havelock Ellis was a late-comer. See Hal D. Sears, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in Victorian America (1977) and Taylor Stoehr, Free Love in America: A Documentary History (1979).
I would like to use this open post to announce two of my books published this year by Aeon Books.
The first, released in April, is my translation of _The Minor Arcana of the Tarot_ by G. O. Mebes, a major figure in early twentieth-century Russian esotericism.
The book focuses on the 56-card Minor Arcana, which Mebes approaches not as a system of fortune-telling, but as a structured initiatory framework rooted in Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, and Martinist occult philosophy.
It serves as a companion volume to Mebes’ better-known work, _The Encyclopedia of Occultism_, which deals with the Major Arcana and which I also happened to have translated.
You can find and order the book here: https://spirit.aeonbooks.co.uk/product/minor-arcana-of-the-tarot/95402
My second book will be published in October. It is my translation of _Superconsciousness and the Ways to Achieve It_ by Mitrofan Lodyzhensky, another early twentieth-century Russian author.
The book is a rare comparative study of Indian Raja Yoga and Eastern Christian asceticism, especially the tradition of the _Philokalia_. Lodyzhensky treats Christian ascetic literature as a kind of experiential archive. He argues that the _Philokalia_ preserves detailed accounts of what ascetics experienced along the spiritual path, and he reads saints and ascetics not only as moral or theological authorities, but also as witnesses to altered and expanded states of consciousness, or “superconsciousness.”
At the same time, Lodyzhensky uses discernment. He does not just claim that all mystical states are the same. Instead, he distinguishes astral, mental, and spiritual forms of superconsciousness, while contrasting the technical, mind-centered methods of Raja Yoga with the heart-centered and prayerful discipline of Christian asceticism.
JMG provided the following endorsement for the book: “This latest offering in Yury Pankratov’s fine series of translations of Russian occult classics does not disappoint. Mitrofan Lodyzhensky’s _Superconsciousness and the Ways to Achieve It_ successfully fuses Western esoteric philosophy, Raja Yoga, and Eastern Orthodox mysticism into a coherent whole that is both intellectually satisfying and practically useful. A bravura performance in a clear, readable translation.”
You can pre-order the book here: https://spirit.aeonbooks.co.uk/product/superconsciousness-and-the-ways-to-achieve-it/95434
Here’s a pre-order discount code (-20%): SCW20 – it should be valid until the end of October, 2026.
Ecosophian a.k.a Yury Pankratov
Hi Again, JMG
I’ve been watching astrology videos on YouTube. I guess I’m a slow study, because at first i believed that every month/ full moon/ transit is “SHOCKING!”, and that “THAT NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME!” , where as now I’m seeing it for the clickbate it is. With that being said, multiple different astrologers are suggesting that July 4 for year 250 has a lot of astrological potential for violence and terrorism. Does this seem true to you as well?
Phutatorius, thank you for the recommendation.
Watchfinger: My neurodivergent brain wonders a bit if that question is a bit of a ha ha that my autistic hindset doesn’t get, but I’ll answer the face value anyway: 🙂 I might collaborate here or there but for regular ongoing, probably not.
JMG: I hadn’t meant to do so; I was working on something somewhat different when it somehow turned into this. I do wonder how much of it is even my doing.
But then I remember I had this tendency when I tried Christianity on for fit, too – I tended to blame random fool notions that I had on God and thereby sanctify them. There’s a whole thing here about this that has to do with coding and whatnot, but it might be boring.
@David P. re: TV, DVD, YT, video formats.
First a caveat that affects everything I say or think on the subject: My particular flavor of migraine is triggered most often by visual overstimulation of the flash/flicker sort. Major QoL issues tied in here. Video is evil.
I did used to watch TV and movies. I was raised TV-free, and did the classic youth thing: moved out and spent two years watching everything. Results kind of like if you’d gorged on mentos until you puked… you’d never want to eat one again, right? TV makes me feel queasy almost instantly now. I have no idea how people live with it constantly for decades and don’t trigger that same response.
For YT: thanks for pointing out the RSS! That could be handy. I have the same problems with internet video as any other, but still sometimes have to extract info from that format, such as car repair how-tos. I can get a lot by listening to the audio by itself (but find anything with music added to the audio track nearly as awful as watching video I wish there was an option to turn that off), and then anything visual I missed I can often go back and mute the vid, pause it, and then sample still images at various points until I find what I need.
There are some browser addons I’ve found very helpful for dealing with YT: you can get them to block autoplay, block auto-loading, block “shorts”, and block all the “suggested videos”. This radically simplifies and improves the utility of YT and decreases the time-suckitude. You can adjust until the only things you see on YT are things you asked to see.
JMG,
Viewed another way, the Long Descent is the simple consequence of “Making Hay While the Sun Shines.”
While the sun is shining and you are happily piling hay, it’s easy to imagine the future as one of endless prosperity, fountains of flowing wine, and seas of lemonade. But that optimism has consequences.
As the sun dims, we have to run faster and faster just not to be thrown off the treadmill into poverty, and it’s why your advice to collapse now and avoid the rush was so wise at the time. And as each person collapses, that brings up one step closer to the rejuvenation that will happen once the system is a memory passed down through lore and legend and something new and fascination arises.
So yeah, it’s bleak, but it’s also beautiful, in the same way that is a single human life is both bleak and beautiful.
Fun little Astrology thing. I came across this reading of the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction and I found it really funny how it shows the biases of the Author. You don’t have to read it if you want to save some time. https://yatubook.com//great-conjunctions
The broad summary is that we are moving into a de-material age, I see that as being fairly sound, but their interpretation was this meant ‘AI this, and singularity that, computer everything!’. Don’t think they could have ever thought of de-materialization as being, you know, less material stuff due to decline.
Astrology is fun like that, it describes the foundations of a building and the materials it has but it is always fun to see what people build out of it.
Regarding the subject of toilets and art, I thought some might get a chuckle out of this – it was a couple of years ago, but those of you who don’t live in Tasmania may have missed it 😉
(Context: MONA is a private museum and art space in Hobart, Tasmania. Quite possibly influenced by the the Situationists!
https://mona.net.au/visit)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-24/mona-hangs-faked-picassos-in-female-toilet-after-court-ruling/104015216
Check out the editor’s note at the end of the article for another chuckle.
This explains more: https://mona.net.au/blog/art-is-not-truth
There are some infamous toilets at MONA that feature a mirror, aimed where you least expect it…. the image is then projected onto another mirror in front of you.
At this page is the full list of all of the non-faith-specific requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 5/21). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May William B find wise guidance in his quest to establish a new life in a new land far away and free from certain toxic individuals in his former country.
May Matthew U. from Marion, Indiana’s dog of 14 years, Holly, who is dying of cancer, be blessed and comforted; may she pass on peacefully and without pain, ideally in her sleep, while knowing she is most loved. May the two of them reunite happily in the next life or incarnation.
May cabaiste22’s relative Megan, who had a sudden surgery due to a lump on her ovaries, heal quickly and without incident; may she be blessed and healed of any problems related to both the surgery and the lump.
May Lisa C be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from breast cancer.
May 6 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Luke Dodson’s beloved uncle-in-law David C be blessed and make a peaceful transition to his next destination.
May a safe and happy home environment be enjoyed by Laurelmirror, her daughter, and her mother, as well as protection from evil influences. May their family situation be resolved in such a way that Laurelmirror’s mother will get a chance to recover physically and mentally from the stresses it has caused; may mother be blessed and invigorated.
May Bob W of Lake County, Ohio’s treatment for cancer go well so that he may heal and recover as quickly as possible.
May Open Space be filled with the strength he needs to heal quickly from his current bout of Chicken Pox; may his will remain strong, that he does not scratch; may he be healed completely, and suffer no scarring in its wake.
May Bob Ralston (aka Rasty Bob), who is in hospice care in Buckeye AZ, and who just lost his wife Leslie Fish, be blessed and find relief from his pain and discomfort; may Bob’s heart remain strong.
May Princess Cutekitten, who has made no comments on any of the Ecosophia blogs for a year now, and hasn’t responded to attempts at contact, be blessed wherever she is and in whatever form she may exist.
May Cathy N. of St. Marys, Ohio heal and recover from injuries caused by a fall.
May Dustin, a relative of Brenainn, be healed of a recently discovered heart condition.
May 1Wanderers’s partner Cathy, whose cancer has returned, be given the physical and mental strength to fight it, and tolerate the treatment, and may she enjoy a full and permanent recovery.
May Jule from Iserlohn, Germany, who is experiencing complications in her pregnancy due to an influenza infection, recover and have a pleasant pregnancy and birth.
May Larry Mulford, who has entered hospice after a year battling with pancreatic cancer, pass in the smoothest possible manner, and may his wife be enveloped in our love.
May Marko have the strength to seize the opportunities.
May Pierre’s young daughter, Athena, be healed from her fatigue and its root causes in ways that are easy, natural, and as holistic as possible.
May Lydia G. of Geauga County, Ohio heal and recover from prolonged health issues.
May both Monika and the child she is pregnant with both be blessed with good health and a safe delivery.
May Mary’s sister have her auto-immune conditions sent into remission, may her eyes remain healthy, and may she heal in body, mind, and spirit.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
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.
A very small book review and a comment. About once a year I pick up a book that I know is just going to rile me up. Always good to see how others see the world on topics I am interested in. This year it was “Slow Down : How Degrowth Communism can save the earth” by Kohei Saito. With a title like that, I knew I was in for a ride.
So the first third is actually pretty good. Identifies the main issues, the problems of “Green growth” and how things like the ‘Green new deal’ are terrible and that we cannot just substitute one technology for another in order to keep everything going. So far so good.
And then by about chapter 6 it completely flies off the rails as the communism angle comes in. Even that wouldn’t be so bad, I have some sympathy for the point of view even if it is far to utopian of a point of view. But this is the relentless reframing of Karl Marx words to fit their ideas, it gets pretty rough. It turns into an university level reading of Marx as some sort of unquestionable oracle, it reads in the same way fan fiction about Superman does. Marx words are infallible, apparently.
It is a shame, the author has a great understanding of the issues at hand but then proposes some fairly awful solutions that get lost in endless hypothesising about Marx writing. In that sense he is just like Marx, great analysis of the problem but cannot make the landing on the solution.
Give this one a miss.
@ Cynthia RE : Disembodied muse
“So you think you don’t have any prejudices. You are above it all. You accept all races, body types, religion, sexes and all of that. But as soon as you talk to someone that doesn’t have a body you have an issue with it?” – Ram Dass
Always liked that one. Yeah, he said a lot of nonsense but he had a good sense of humour about this stuff.
@earthworm #2 re: drawings as meditation; A couple of things–
There’s an interesting link on this topic that reviews Cornelius Agrippa’s ‘Three Books of Occult Philosophy’ on this topic. https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/agrippa-occult-philosophy/ . Looks like they were marking out Magic Squares (3×3, 4×4, 8×8, etc) on the floor and walking the numbers in order as invocations.
One way to start a Remote Viewing session is by drawing an ‘ideogram’ that may be a means to connect the viewer to the target.
Drawing Sigils would be another way to use drawings as meditation.
Something I’ve been experimenting with;
A 4×4 magic square contains 16 numbers, and Geomancy has 16 characters, each of which has a numeric value. It’s possible to substitute the numbers in a Magic Square with their corresponding Geomantic characters.
The Geomantic characters have natural pairings. After drawing the Geomantic Magic Square, draw the 8 lines between the matching pairs of Geomantic figures, and you will have a sigil. Meditate on the relationships between sets of pairs–Their placements, whether their lines cross or not.
If your experience of this is like mine, you will find that they have insights. There are IIRC 880 4×4 magic squares, so a lot of meditation possible.
Hello John Michael and Commentariat,
Sometimes I feel like Charlie Brown and the Football, but I was hoping people would use the internet for information and communication. You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Did you know that when they shot John Lennon the security guard standing next to him was a CIA operative. Imagine that.
I’m 70 years old and remember newspapers, big one and little ones. I did not believe everything I read, but I could pretty much figure out who was writing that stuff. And, they would pretty much come out on schedule and give me some news.
Now, in 2026, do we have anything like that? I liked Toby Rogers on Substack and hear The Duran. Caitlin Johnstone is legit. Anything else?
Thanks. I gotta go outside.
Greetings all,
About the nature of UFO’s, some of you may be interested to know that there is quite a lot of materials on the parallel between UFO’s and Djinns of the Islamic tradition.
Here’s a recent article on the matter: https://www.sapienceinstitute.org/jinn-hypothesis/?b=1779955276805
and a Youtube interview too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8tOFhW-Fas
Regards!
“It sounds like a fascinating project”
Thank you. I’m still exploring the matter for practicality – Having slept on the idea, I’m leaning towards keeping things separate initially as what I want to do with the body may not map to what needs to happen in the meditation. Since it is an experiment, that may well be a better approach in the first instance to reduce risk of errors creeping in, then consider matters after that.
Better to have things that function than end up with the esoteric equivalent of a flying lard bucket.
About the second religiosity, Rod Dreher recently linked to an article calling Bigfoot a demon: https://archive.ph/WvAPG
I find that story very saddening. The beings the guy encountered not only didn’t harm him, they actively helped him. The only reason he considers them demonic is that one of them communicated telepathically with him.
I get why that would freak somebody out. For me at least, the implication that someone roughly on the same soul-evolutionary stage as me can read my thoughts is somewhere between very uncomfortable and terrifying. If I encountered somebody like that and realised that this was going on, I can only assume that my mind would immediately jump to the very things I wouldn’t want them to see. My poor hypothetical communication partner probably wouldn’t want to see them either, for that matter. How do you prevent oversharing in such a situation?
But why would I immediately assume that that being was evil? Especially if, as in the case of the story in question, it seemed to go out of its way to demonstrate friendliness?
On another note, the involvement of the orb has me wondering if the beings the fella encountered really were, as you suggest, unknown hominids. Orbs, I was under the impression, generally are Faeries. Of course, there’s no reason that this particular Bigfoot couldn’t just be friends with the orb or something like that. Or the orb figured that people who are open to meeting Bigfoot might also be open to meeting orbs—logic that obviously worked out in the case of the guide.
—David P.
Hiya JMG,
I have a question for you.
The PC emerged out of the 1970’s west coast counter culture and The Whole Earth Catalogue is remembered today as one of the leading vanguards for its mass adoption but it’s forgotten that it was also part of the vanguard for the wider appropriate tech movement of the 1970’s. You’ve written at length about that movement, and your book Green Wizardry holds a place of honor on my bookshelf!
Appropriate technology, outside of some fringe communities and tinkerers like myself, largely went the way of the dinosaurs in the 1980’s, yet the PC, one tool of many from that technological menagerie, lived on and swallowed the world whole.
My question is, why did the PC stuff metastasize, while all the other elements of that originally small scale high tech world go whistling down the wind in the 1980’s?
Was it simply that governments and banks like software more than self reliant people owing small plots of land? I guess that answers my question but I’m curious, given that you lived through it, how did it happen rhetorically at the time?
Cheers,
JZ
That Shinto shrine is amazing as is Stationmaster Tama!
I hope some kind of Shinto like shrines migrate to the United States. Some of our kids, and my nieces and nephews (in their 30s), all love manga and anime… so here is hoping for some of that influence to come in and pseudomorph our culture a bit.
There is a Japanese inspired cat cafe across the river in Covington, Kentucky, but its kind of pricey. I thought of taking one of our elderly friends who can’t have animals anymore over there…
When we did a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Hawaii when my stepdaughter was living there (she is part Hawaiian and her ex was in the Navy) there was a wonderful Shinto shrine to an ocean goddess along one of the roads and rocks overlooking the pacific to the west. That and the replica of the Byodo-In Temple were some of my favorite spots there.
Speaking of manga, there are so many manga titles I see at work that are about reincarnation. I like that these are popular with the youth of today.
Some of my favorite recent titles are:
Reborn as a Vending Machine
Reincarnated in a mafia dating sim :a Yakuza heiress becomes the top-ranked villain’s romantic target
The princess I loved in my past life is now a middle-aged dad
The time I got reincarnated as slime
Reborn as a polar bear
I prefer not to come back as a vending machine myself… but the stories are kind of hilarious and I applaud the imagination that goes into these.
@Mary Bennet #61
I believe I am An-1. The purpose of my post was to point out Christianity’s history with hard dualism (the total separation between matter and the spiritual). In defense of An-2 scholarship on Christian history in the first two centuries is contentious to say the least. If you’re looking for a good comprehensive guide to the various Christian schools of thought prior to the 4th century I would recommend Found Christianites by M. David Litwa. It’s a relatively short read and represents the “mainstream” position among scholars on most of the early sects. While there are majority opinions in Christian scholarship even among the majority there is still disagreement. Anyone saying there’s a “consensus” that must be believed is likely trying to protect their income (the Shirky Principle).
If the universe feels out of balance it is because it is.
https://theconversation.com/the-universe-may-be-lopsided-new-research-265256
Another data point against The Cosmological Principle.
Closer to home the Psyche spacecraft flew by Mars.
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/psyche-mission/nasas-psyche-mission-aces-mars-flyby-targets-metal-rich-asteroid/
Kay R. # 8:
Your comment about solar PV has made me to remember a situation which it sin’t the same, but it shows PV hard and painful limits, from another point of view. Maybe you know Cuba is facing serious electric shortages, due mainly to its geopolítical changes, saying it softly. I don’t like especially Castrism nor Trump politics, I only point Cuba government tried to improve it’s current blackouts in the island, so it agreed with China to be supplied with huge amounts of Chinese solar PV pannels. According some not very biased sources, Cuba has managed yet to make work small scale familiar and local electric grids…But not big towns, nor regional, not the whole island electric grids, so PV is incapable to fix urgent power problems in Cuba. Blackouts go on nowadays. It could be very easy to blame Cuban govt or USA blockade according our favorite biases, but indeed it seems solar panels aren’t the silver bullet to fix Cuban lack of electric power, methink.
————————-
Luke Z. # 14:
I share your opinion about that people unable to simply say “I don’t know” when they don’t know anything about this or that topic. It’s a pity to see a lot of people (also here), debating about topics they pretend to know. It’s even worse when these “idiots savants” aren’t our typical bar/café commenters, but MSM infamous pundits. Some Spanish serious thinkers depict them with quite contempt as “todólogos”. I can’t find a good translation to English, I can only define this funny term like: “people who is pretending to know and think about everything, but indeed they know very little about the world”.
————————
(To be continued)
“Gunstone, wild swings in weather patterns are a normal part of the kind of climate transition we’re moving through. I’ve discussed that in detail here:
Expect more of this, as the Sahara moves north. Yes, that’s what’s happening, and nothing any human being can do will stop it.”
I suppose then that a Magian culture (to use Oswald Spengler’s term) would indeed be more suitable for much of Western Europe centuries from now as is the case in your book Star’s Reach. According to Spengler, the origin of the Magian prime symbol is desert caves, the prime symbol is an enclosed dome, and its architectural expression is a mosque!
What is this mysterious SOP? An acronym for Sphere of Protection. A daily ritual for life enhancement in the magical system taught by JMG. It was designed to be malleable to fit different views of reality. Here’s my version adjusted to fit my own particular Christian based perspective.
I begin by facing north instead of the usual east, based on appearances of the Lord coming from that direction in Job and Ezekiel and a reference in Isaiah concerning the location of the Lord being northwards. It feels right to me. Interestingly in early Chinese religion the heavenly deity was also located in that direction. Maybe there is something to that Santa Claus myth after all.
I settle myself in good relaxed upright posture. I pray the Our Father with my hands lowered at my sides and then do my version of the Elemental Cross. I sweep my hands up in a circle ending with my arms gently extended straight up with my palms close but not touching. I then draw my hands down, palms still close and facing each other. I pause them at my forehead and at my heart level. Then I do the open close movement of Sun Tai Chi, gently breathing in – hands part slightly, breathe out- hands part slightly. I then separate my hands, spread my arms out with palms facing upwards in and with my face slightly upwards, the classic worship position of many Christians.
What I feel is going on here is an alignment with and reception of the Viriditas of creation, spoken of by St. Hildegard of Bingen, what she called the greening power of God, rooting myself and anchoring in the earth and opening up to the heavens and the Lord.. Enough for now, need to go to work, will continue later.
Hat tip to Dave Childers this Thursday morning for this “heartwarming tale of American initiative, bureaucratic competence, and extremely heavy luggage.”
(Last section)
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/inconveniently-thursday-may-28-2026
If you prefer the NPR version;
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/28/nx-s1-5837160/ex-cia-official-stealing-gold-bars
This sort of thing needs a lot more sarcasm than NPR is willing to use on the Deep State.
@JMG
I just got around to listening to the talk you did in NYC a while back, and IIRC you said there’s only a few countries with current constitutions that are more than 200 years old. Well, I’m pleased to say we recently joined that exclusive club here in Norway, since ours dates to 1814, which is what we celebrate every May 17. Unless the five-year interruption during the WW2 occupation makes it invalid, anyway.
On the last Magic Monday there was also a thread about Luciferic and Ahrimanic evil following a north-south divide within countries. I’ve been thinking about whether that patterns shows up here. The clearest example is probably on the west coast, where we have the city of Bergen to the north, stereotypically known for their pride and arrogance. (There’s a common joke that they tend to say they’re “from Bergen, not from Norway” when asked about their country of origin.) The idea is that they’re the only real, cultured, truly European city in the country. Then we have the city of Stavanger to the south, which is the main nexus of the Norwegian oil industry and all its accompanying boom-town wealth and vices. I’ll admit I don’t know the region in any real depth as an Easterner, but it’s often presented as a place that’s almost American sometimes in how it celebrates new money, showing off your wealth and “getting ahead” compared to the more typically Scandinavian East. So I suppose that kind of hews to the pattern, even if it’s not as clear-cut as in California. (On the other hand, I don’t think there’s any doubt that the capital Oslo and immediate hinterland is the main center of PMC elitism, political correctness, Covidianism etc., so in that sense that has to be the Luciferic heartland of Norway.)
@The commentariat (especially those of Heathen inclinations)
This is a really long shot, but I figured I’d ask anyway. I plan on taking a little road trip into neighboring Sweden this summer, probably in July. One of my main goals with this is to finally visit the burial mounds at Gamla Uppsala, which is probably the closest we have to a still-existing Heathen holy site in this day and age. It feels too grand and pretentious to call it a full-on “pilgrimage”, but I guess it’s something of the sort. Again, I know it’s a long shot, but if any Ecosophian Heathens happen to be planning a trip to Sweden this year it’d be a lot of fun to meet up. Or any Swedish Ecosophians who belong to other traditions, of course. While we’re at it, I’m also curious if any American Heathens here would be interested in a brief write-up of the trip and my impressions of the site? For that matter, are places like Gamla Uppsala even of any relevance or interest to Heathens in the New World these days? Still, I figured some might be curious but unable or unwilling to commit to traveling all the way to Europe, and I don’t think there’s that much written about it from a more serious Heathen rather than touristic perspective. At least not in English, anyway. (I know the Swedish Heathens have a ceremony there around the Christian Easter.)
#90 I suppose it is because before the PC, computing consisted of the mainframe, where all the actual computing took place, accessed by a thin terminal, whereas the PC has the actual computer right there on your desk.
In the mainframe era the office might have just the one mainframe, with a number of terminals. In a way the cloud computing era is an attempt to take us back to the early days of mainframes.
Your Yoyo, in Germany it is the same. Gasoline gets subvented to prevent price increases, some things are getting somewhat more expensive, but otherwise, nothing has changed in everyday life. Even the Aries and Cancer ingress horoscopes don’t look apocalyptic at all.
Anon, I don’t usually let anything about LLMs through here, but I’m going to make an exception for this, partly because it’s raw material for an upcoming post and partly because the joke’s on the managers. Nearly everybody in cubicle jobs can be replaced by LLMs, since their jobs don’t actually generate value — and nearly everybody in those jobs will be replaced. More on this soon.
Clay, yep. I suspect it’s a short-term phenomenon, and not because the socialist government of Seattle will do anything about it. Once the grip of the vote-fraud machine is broken, I expect to see west coast cities swing hard toward law-and-order governments backed by federal law enforcement. That said, that it’s already happening shows how far down the slope we’ve already slid.
Anon, I’ve been suggesting emigration as the best option for western Europeans for quite some time now. Faustian civilization won’t have a long slow decline — it can’t tolerate anything but endless expansion without cracking — and being in the heartlands when the boom comes down strikes me as a bad idea.
Yoyo, the US doesn’t face dire consequences. That’s one of the reasons the Trump administration went ahead with it. Most of our rivals internationally, above all China and the EU, will be hit much, much harder than we will. We’re still facing serious economic crises but those have other causes.
Phutatorius, yes, and it’s passed down in subtler ways as well. Some people of northwestern European ancestry — I’m one of them — can’t tolerate a vegan diet because we don’t assimilate vegetable protein adequately. (I made myself tolerably sick trying it in my early 20s.) One of the things we know about Neanderthals is that they got well over 95% of their calories from meat, and large-mammal meat at that. Their digestions would have specialized for animal products, and the genetics for that will have been passed down to their hybrid descendants.
J.L.Mc12, if wolves had gone extinct in the wild, it would be reasonable to say that they weren’t completely extinct, because enough of their genetics survive in dogs that it would be possible to revive the species by relatively simple means such as systematic breeding. Every other branch of humanity — there were quite a few of them once — is gone forever as a separate species (though many of them contributed to the genetic heritage of modern humans), and it’s purely speculation to insist that competition from our species was the main cause. Equally, there are only two species of elephants left in the world, out of dozens that existed as little as half a million years ago — should we blame African and Indian elephants for the extinction of mammoths and mastodons? For that matter, there’s only one species of osprey left, the sole survivor out of an entire family, the Pandioniformes — should they blame themselves for outcompeting the others? All species go extinct sooner or later — ours is not exempt from that — and it’s normal for a period of evolutionary radiation, in which many competing species emerge, to be followed by a period of winnowing in which only the most successful variants survive. Turning that into a moralizing melodrama is a bit of theater I think we can all do without.
Ecosophian, delighted to hear it!
Crj, nope. I think that’s more clickbait.
Dennis, that’s a fair assessment.
Michael, oog. Yeah, that sounds like the sort of astroslop so widely spattered around these days.
Ecoprayer, thanks for this as always.
Michael, oog again. It would be nice if someday more people recognized Marxism as the pseudosecular apocalyptic mythology it is, and actually bothered to notice what happens when you apply it to the real world. I may read the book anyway, if only for the amusement value.
ModernMan, not in this country. I get better news coverage by reading a rolling selection of overseas newspapers, correcting for spin — if you want to have an eye on Ukraine, for example, read the BBC and then RT, and trianguate between them.
Karim, excellent. Thanks for this!
David, yeah, Dreher is increasingly falling into the trap of seeing demons under every bed; that’s usually projection, which suggests (as did his sudden divorce a few years back) that there’s stuff going on in his life that he really, truly doesn’t want to think about. As for Bigfoot, the challenge here is that there can be more than one thing lumped together under this category. I think a case can be made for the survival of small relict populations of Gigantopithecus in the Cascade Mountains as well as the Himalayas, but there are also other things that appear in similar forms, and some of them correlate weirdly with orbs, flying saucer sightings, and so on.
John, the PC started out as another aspect of self-reliance — have your own computer instead of letting the corporations have them all! — but it could be networked and made increasingly useless without a connection to the network. The internet was the vehicle through which the PC was dragged back into the corporate system. It was Stewart Brand, who was deep into appropriate tech in the 1970s but bailed out of it once it became politically convenient to do so, who kickstarted the rise of the modern internet with The Well, the most influential of the early dial-up BBSs. Software companies also had a lot to do with that — my first computer, a Sanyo MBC-550, had programs simple enough that even someone as untechnical as me could write their own — but that went away as big software firms, most particularly the one famously named after Bill Gates’ masculine endowment, did everything possible to block users from cutting their own code and make them dependent on corporate interests.
Justin, transplanting Shinto to the US has been tried a couple of times with mixed results. I still have hopes, as it’s a lovely religion with much to offer, but so far it doesn’t seem to have caught on. Maybe the new generation of weeaboos will take care of that.
Siliconguy, all I can say is “Hail Eris!”
Gunstone, that’s what I’ve been predicting for some time now.
Siliconguy, yeah, I read about that and chuckled. The CIA loves to pretend that it’s a bunch of James Bonds but the resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman is far more noticeable.
BorealBear, oh, granted — the US is ahead of the pack, but there are a few others close behind. As for the Luciferic-Ahrimanic geographical axis, it seems to show up in some countries and not in others. Odd.
Seeing Jasun Horsley’s Vice of Kings discussed here rather feels like a circle being closed, or at the very least a spiral completing another revolution. Jasun’s old website Auticulture was the vector by which I discovered Ecosophia, and many other interesting things. I discovered his work when what became the first part of Vice of Kings was published as a series of blog posts on the long-defunct Disinfo webzine, back in 2015. My strange and karmically front-loaded relationship I have with the Horsleys is too long to summarise here, but some of the context is described in a review of another of his books I wrote back in 2021 (things continued to evolve in the years following, but that’s a personal story best left for the pub): https://flintandsteel.substack.com/p/manifestation-of-the-anti-christ-review-of-16-maps-of-hell-by-jasun-horsley
It’s safe to say that I know Jasun’s work pretty well. VoK is interesting, but it’s not his most convincing thesis (he’s on much more solid ground with Prisoner of Infinity, which is speculative but very compelling). Two of his major shortcomings as a writer are his tendency to imply guilt-by-association, and his reflexive occult-phobia. He doesn’t seem to really know what he means by “occultism”; one minute he uses it to mean demonolatry and black-magic, the next minute it means any codified system of esoteric knowledge practice (any systematic approach to *anything* is automatically suspect in his worldview, even prayer).
However, in spite of its many weaknesses, I will make a qualified defence of VoK. Anyone seriously defending Crowley should read it; he makes a pretty convincing case that Ali C was far worse than even the derogatory biographies (like that of Colin Wilson) will acknowledge. Harrison Koehli’s review (which is genuinely worth reading) summarises the evidence; it’s far too horrific to repeat here. Even if Crowley was innocent of the disgusting acts he describes in his diary (and I see no reason to assume he was), he would still be a profoundly diseased individual who in my view does not deserve one microdot of the sympathy and respect he has been given by the occult community.
How this ties in with Horsley’s overarching thesis is where VoK gets a bit looser and more speculative (in an already highly speculative work), but the links between Crowley and the likes of Alfred Kinsey and Tom Driberg at least imply that there was a degree of interest from high-profile pederasts and paedophilia-advocates in Crowley and his “do what thou wilt” philosophy. As regards the sexual revolution and its consequences, while I am probably somewhat to the right of many commenters here regarding such matters, even those more liberal than I must surely acknowledge that paedophiles were and still are highly active in using the momentum of such movements to normalize child-abuse (e.g, the Paedophile Information Exchange, which was largely welcomed by the likes of Peter Tatchell and Harriet Harman).
Well, I took first steps of action in relation to my dream of a Federal Form number on the date its Notice of Proposed Rule-Making was published for public comment in the Federal Register.
https://open.substack.com/pub/aliceem2de3u/p/the-tale-of-1403
Emmanuel #85
Thank you for those references!
The cuurent image I am using consists of seven circles and a point but I realised today that starting from the outside and working in is like starting part way through – the human lifecycle is such that it would be better to start with drawing the dot/point becuse the personality of incarnation has to first realise that there is more going on than might initially be thought, so initially it feels better to begin from the inner eye and point as that is where perception starts with personality as self and then needs to expand out before looking within.
What particularly interests me are the techniques and mewthods of doing the drawing and using breath to set a state, holding a particular mind-state for the drawing and then active meditation at each stage before moving on.
“Looks like they were marking out Magic Squares (3×3, 4×4, 8×8, etc) on the floor and walking the numbers in order as invocations.”
Intriguing. I’m also thinking of ‘walking’ a pattern but haven’t even got the sequence of the drawing meditation yet, let alone the ‘dance’ that the drawing meditation will (hopefully!) become.
The idea sort of came in a flash and it has given me quite a bit to chew on.
Have got the Agrippa link open and will check that out shortly – thank you.
#1 Peter, is it possible just to come for one day, Saturday?
Emmanuel #85
PS
“Agrippa offered, in other words, both a grand, schematic plan of the cosmos, rather like that of the London Underground, which laid out its structure as a whole, and a clutch of minutely detailed local Ordinance Survey maps, which made it possible to navigate through any specific part of the cosmos.”
Uhm – the translation of the drawing meditation to a ‘form’ or ‘dance’ would, in some ways, be of a similar nature (hence dance of life), but from the circles I’d been thinking more Fibonacci sequence and fractals for spirals, but I wonder if there might be overlap/similarity in principles behind walking a labyrinth and walking magic squares… patterns in mindstate manifesting through the physical.
Good Day All!
May I propose, since there was an inquiry, that certain types of hatha yoga qualify as “meditation in motion”. Both elegant and efficient, the ashtanga vinyasa method, or a properly instructed vinyasa flow class using ujjayi breathing and bandhas, focus the mind to ruminate/meditate on breath patterns. It may even swing the ritual of a well constructed hatha class towards a type of personal “divination” where, like patterns of experience portrayed in tarot cards, the patterns of your breath can reveal much (with sustained attention there).
Granted, it may take some effort to discern the right yoga studio or online classes with these practices (especially suitable for us 60 plus yogis😉) but they do exist.
And congrats Ecosophian/Yury @75! Your new book sounds great, and looks to present many of the premises also tackled in my book out in November _Yoga, Magic and the Tarot_ from Aeon.
Jill C
> artistic style to be turned into bathroom fixtures?
Fit ur-inals with microphones and amps and create your own ur-sonics.
@ Aldarion # 47
Thank you for your link, which I shall take a look at.
“@scotlyn, @chuaquin: You had a somewhat heated conversation about the question if eternal life is possible already in the here and now.”
I think that the question I was raising was much simpler (although it is true that knowing what Greeks meant by these terms might be interesting).
Which is, whether it is possible for the here and now to be located anywhere other than in the midst of “eternal life”? In other words, what moment of time can be considered to be outside of the scope and range of eternity? If there is no such moment, then the here and now is ALREADY part of eternity, and any life being lived in the here and now is ALREADY fully within the scope and range of an eternal life.
I do hope that the exchange was not all that heated… but then I suppose it was what it was, and it came across the way it did. 🙂
I was wondering if JMG or anyone else has some good recommendations for old will training manuals?
I am going to restart my will training exercises and having some different books on that subject would help.
Thanks
Michael Gray: I’ll have to take your word for it. I never heard of Ram Dass before today. I do admit that when I found out that wasn’t his birth name, I suspected that someone’s sense of humour might have been involved in that and that one Dr. Richard Alpert was not among those who was in on the joke.
A Christianized SOP description continued. After the completion of the Elemental Cross I lower my left hand and at the same time bringing my right hand to to touch my forward and begin the traditional sign of the cross. When I touch my forehead I say “In the Name of the Father , then lower my hand saying “and of the Son” , finishing with a touch to the navel, then with my right hand touch my left shoulder looking in that direction saying “and of the Holy Spirit” as I move my right hand to touch my right shoulder. I then raise both hands palms up saying “in the name of Jesus. I then lower my hands back to palms facing each other in front of my heart do the breath in and out combined with the gentle hand movement as I step to the north and then lower my hands to the side. I repeat the previous sequence beginning with the Elemental Cross and the step to my left to face east, then south, then west. Then I step face north angsin and proceed to make the sign of the cross to the north instead of touching myself saying the “In the name of “ words. Then with hands raised slightly above shoulder and palms facing out say “In the name of Jesus all evil be gone” and then repeat immediately “In the name of Jesus” I then step to face east, south, west repeating this banishment of evil. I then step to face north. Enough for now. I will describe the closing later.
Hi JMG,
Which books or other resources would you recommend for learning the basics of how to treat illnesses at home?
Thank you,
Mirko
methylethyl #79:
I wonder if your parents had similar reactions to TV and raised you TV-free because of that? Migraines can be inherited, after all.
Re RSS, you’re welcome. I don’t know how comfortable you are with using CLI tools but yt-dlp can download just the audio of a video.
—David P.
“Forcing pro forma changes in hostile governments…”
There appears to be a Catch-22 in this statement, in that what makes governments hostile, evidently, is prior history of forcing regime changes. 😉
@ Mary Bennet #61
For a blog that consistently turns out deep dives into available scholarship on biblical sources, with copious references, as well as blog-hosted library of translated post-copyright scholarly works on the same theme that were originally written in other languages, you could check out vridar.org. The blog’s stated purpose is to apply generally recognised scholarly standards that are used to examine other literary sources – like the classical sources that ACOUP studies.
Best wishes… 🙂
I wanted to give a shout out to fellow JMG blog reader and dreamwidth-er Kimberly Steele. I ordered her new book, Sacred Homemaking, A Magical Approach to a Tidier Home, and it is wonderful. I am reading and re-reading — and also now cleaning my toilet every day 🙂
I ordered it here: https://spirit.aeonbooks.co.uk/product/sacred-homemaking/95403
Greetings JMG,
I have thought for some time that there will be a big drop in the world’s oil production in 5 to 10 years, especially in the USA.
The current drop of 13% because of Hormuz may be a blessing in disguise as it forces everyone to adapt to having less oil for a year or two, before the real big step down in the 2030s.
Any thought on that ?
Closing of my version of the SOP. I am now facing north I do the first Elemental cross, sequence I did in my first journey around north, east, south , west. I then step backwards in the center of the circle,. Here I stand in the light of the Presence emanating from within me in all directions as described in the following verses “so let your light shine” “in was life and that life was the light of men” “you are light in the Lord” “ you will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life” “God . . . made his light to shine in our hearts” This time is a time of free worship and expression , I may pray in tongues. I then finish with the beginning sequence of movements and words. I then read a chapter from the New Testament and select a verse from that chapter to think on and consider. I finish by asking what the day holds and listening for the response. Today the message for me was to take life as it comes.
This ritual or pattern was developed over time until I came to a place of peace and rightness in it.
Some thoughts on angels. In my understanding the Lord places angels around me for protection, they are termed ministering spirits sent to serve. Hebrews 1:14.. In the book of Revelation an angel states he is a fellow servant. I see them as fellow servants, friends albeit mightier than us in this world. At times I ask that angels be sent into situations.
@BorealBear
I’d be up for a road trip.
“Have the “dire consequences” been exaggerated? Or are they still to come, and we simply have to be patient? ”
In high-school I remember reading a book “The Crash of 1979.” It didn’t happen. Nor did it the Crash of ’83. The crash of 87 was not predicted and was over in a couple months. The Dot Com crash was sort of expected but there was too much money on the table and almost no one got out before it blew. “Subprime is Contained” should ring a bell. It was not.
The point being no one knows. It’s as bad as the second coming of Christ. Christ himself said He did not know, but a non-stop procession of “visionaries” (who really need to use fewer mushrooms) keep claiming the time is near and that this time they have calculated it out exactly.
Don’t obsess over it. Grow some popcorn and enjoy the show. Think of that meme with the antelope standing behind a bowl of popcorn watching out of screen.
Luke, you won’t find me defending Aleister Crowley — the guy was a world-class creep — but it’s worth noting that most people in the occult community in his day rejected him just as thoroughly as I do. You can find somebody with really nasty habits in any spiritual tradition or field of study you care to name, and if you want to play Horsley’s cherrypicking trick, you can use that to defame and denounce anything you choose. It would be trivially easy, for example, to tar any Christian denomination with the same brush, or for that matter the Girl Guides, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or the entire industry of fish and chip shops.
As for the sexual revolution, it’s one of the best examples in recent history of my dictum that the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea; Victorian sexual hypocrisy had a ghastly human toll, and so did the swing of the pendulum in the other direction. Predictably enough, we seem to be heading back toward the Victorian end of things, so we’ll get a bumper crop of lives ruined by toxic repression in place of the current equally oversized crop of lives ruined by toxic excess.
Will, one that I’ve used and found worth reading, despite some awkward attitudes, is Frank Channing Haddock’s Power of Will, free for the downloading here:
https://archive.org/details/powerofwill0000fran_a0e7
Others that might be worth a look are these, also free for the downloading:
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.510815/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/waytowillpower00hazl/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/bwb_S0-DNK-865/mode/2up\
https://archive.org/details/willpowerpersona00flow/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/b28110055
Mirko, under US law I can’t tell you that without running the risk of being imprisoned for practicing medicine without a license. The medical industry here is very jealous of its monopoly!
Scotlyn, well, of course. There are good reasons why Gore Vidal referred to this country as the United States of Amnesia!
Tony, any interruption in the flow of oil will be temporary — it’s just that, as with every previous crisis in oil production, the new supplies that come online to make up the deficit will yield less net energy and consume a larger share of the world’s available resources and energy supply than the one they replace. I really do need to circle back around and talk about the lessons of the peak oil movement, don’t I?
“Gunstone, that’s what I’ve been predicting for some time now.”
Indeed. Oswald Spengler predicted that a Slavic civilization would succeed Western Civilization. While that might be true in Eastern Europe (as is the case in Star’s Reach), Western Europe seems to be going back down the Magian route thanks to (especially Islamic) immigration.
“Every other branch of humanity — there were quite a few of them once — is gone forever as a separate species (though many of them contributed to the genetic heritage of modern humans), and it’s purely speculation to insist that competition from our species was the main cause. Equally, there are only two species of elephants left in the world, out of dozens that existed as little as half a million years ago — should we blame African and Indian elephants for the extinction of mammoths and mastodons? For that matter, there’s only one species of osprey left, the sole survivor out of an entire family, the Pandioniformes — should they blame themselves for outcompeting the others? ”
I’m not sure if you have read Future Evolution by Peter Ward (https://www.amazon.ca/Future-Evolution-Illuminated-History-Life/dp/0716734966). He believes that the current mass extinction began about 50000 years ago with the disappearance of the megamammals and that we are near the end not the beginning of it. He furthermore believes it will take 10 million years for life to completely recover, which is the average amount of time of mass extinction recovery. By your “Next 10 billion years” timeline, this would be not long before humans go extinct. I for one am curious as to the descendants of what creatures today will be most important and prominent in the civilizations of the racoon and crow descendants!
Hey JMG
I would not call Ludovic’s argument “moralising” but I admit he does compare both modern attempts to “understand” Neanderthals and their likely extinction due to competition with humans with colonialism. He maintains a temperate attitude about it all though, it’s never written as some moralising screed. He also makes a good case for humanity, rather than environmental change, being the cause of Neanderthal extinction. Though he doubts that it was a deliberate genocide on our ancestors part. He suggested that it’s possible that humans were better at hunting prey than the Neanderthals were, and so made it harder for the latter to access meat.
Justin P. # 20:
I had heard some criticism against Stockhausen due to his “eccentric” views, for example he often said he believed in aliens…Well, he was a “rara avis” within the predictable materialist world of avangarde music. I also know Nyman origin is Jewish, but of course I can’t justify his too rough criticism against Stockhausen. He attacked more than a time the another great European minimalist composer, Wim Mertens, saying how was too cheesy, so I bet Nyman motives for his tantrums against these two composers may be only envy…It’s a pity.
—————————————————————————————————————–
Cynic # 30:
“the “Law of the Conservation of Violence”.”
I’ve never heard about this “social law”, but I think it’s interesting as work hypothesis. I’m thinking now wether the following well known data can be explained by that law or not. Maybe you know Japan has a very low crime rate, including violent crimes like murders; but on the other hand, it’s shocking how many suicides are commited by Japanese citizens every year. OK, a part of this problem can be easily explained by a culture which doesn’t point suicide as a sin, but: Is this cultural cause explaining in a full way this hard fact? I’ve got my doubts.
I bet people who’s unable to express their violence/aggressivity against another people (well, I hope in a civilized way), ends turning their bad humor against themselves, in the best case suffering anxiety/depression, and in worst cases, commiting suicide.
————————————————————————–
Watchflinger # 41:
“Spain and Italy were selling off decrepit or abandoned land and homes in the countryside for next to nothing to try to coax new residents (even foreigners) to come and live there.”
You’re right, at least here some rural homes were offered to national and foreign young families to revive the very “void” countryside, with a mild success (to say it soflty) until today. Birth rates here are low, like in another European countries. It’s also worth to tell you most of migrants (legals and irregulars) end living…in the biggest towns or at least in middle size towns, so evidently they don’t fix the rural depopulation problem here.
——————————————————————————–
Aldarion # 47:
I respect your right to write your view, if you understand that biblical paragraph in that sense, but maybe you know the Bible can be used to support whatever purposes the reader has in its mind. I’m not an expert in biblical studies, but I can point easily that curious phenomenon.
——————————————————————————-
Gunstone # 59:
Yes, there’s also happening a heat wave here in Southern Europe. like we were now in July or August, ahem…
———————————————————————————
JMG # 65:
“The sort of frantic cherrypicking Horsley has used on occultists here could be used just as well — and indeed has been so used — to insist that the Catholic Church is a child-molesting cult.”
I agree. Indeed, general claims against occultists to blame them for every evily evil things which have happened during the last century, seem IMHO too similar to conspiracy theories against (cough) Jews…
——————————————————-
(To be continued)
Dear JMG. After reading posts on Yates wheel. I got to thinking about the wheel of life and using it in magic. I have been slowly working through your Druid magic handbook. I love the wheel of life and how it is different from the tree of life. I understand the principles of using it, as in invoking a station for a ritual. I am trying to understand the stations better. So Samhuinn would be for ending something or ancestral work. Alben Eller would be starting something new to gain something. So say I want a new career. If I do a ritual around now, I would invoke Alban Eller with an oak pentagram around 6am on a 1st quarter moon. I feel there is more to this, like I am missing something about the stations. Is there anything more I can read on the wheel of the year? Also would your book Merlin’s Wheel help me with the magic system of the handbook? Thank you for your time and any help you can give me.
I’ve noticed that the one idea that both the Victorian repression and sexual liberation have in common is that sex can’t just be something normal.
Both are equally obsessed with the depraved side of sexuality, and for basically the same reason: the excitement. The only difference is one pretends to faint in horror at what the other revels in.
Because these have been the dominant narratives for so long, we never developed any lasting wisdom on the matter. Every generation has had to reinvent the wheel, until now the wheel went flying off.
Michael G # 84:
“Slow Down : How Degrowth Communism can save the earth” by Kohei Saito.”
Yes, I sw weeks ago that books in my town public library, I read its table of contents and I guessed the climate change and another current ecological disasters were Saito MacGuffin to sell again the “infallible” Karl Marx, so I thought “Another b***t essay”. It’s interesting to notice the several branches of Ecologism nowadays, even the Ecosocialists, usually praise part of Marx work, but they’ve made some evident criticism against his worse ideas, not compatible with any green hypothetic society: for example, “dictatorship of proletariat” and “full development of productive powers”(aka full industrialization).We can see easily how good were these ideas in Eastern Europe Soviet Block for environment…Only a few hardcore Marxists within Ecosocialism, like Barry Commoner, tried (with no real success, IMHO) to save the whole Marxist ideology for the Ecologism. Activist and theoricist Ecologists usually are influenced by Gandhi, Thoreau, Tolstoi or a watered Anarchism, who evidently weren’t Marxists.
——————————————————————-
Boreal Bear # 98:
“The idea is that they’re the only real, cultured, truly European city in the country.”
Your phrase about Bergen could wotk perfectly to depict Barcelona here, well, at least until some Catalan people wanted to declare themselves Catalonia as an independent country, some years ago in a bizarre referendum. So this town lost partly its legendary “European level” within Spain main towns, to be a bit more parochial and self centered…However, even nowadays, sometimes you can heard some Barcelona people claims about their supposed “real Europeism” against another towns here.
—————————————————————–
Scotlyn # 109:
“If there is no such moment, then the here and now is ALREADY part of eternity, and any life being lived in the here and now is ALREADY fully within the scope and range of an eternal life.”
Well, if that thought comforts yourself, I understand it. However, you can’t deny we live (or we are) a non eternal body, which gets older and finally dies…
———————————————————-
A. Crowley topic:
I think nobody who want to appear as serious within real occultism/esoterism and scholar studies about these topics, want to defend Mr. Crowley life and works as a whole. In the best case, it could be said he was a fraud and a liar about his supposed powers; in the worst case, well, if everything he said about himself, and others said, was true, we could depict him as a very nasty and even criminal person.
So I think to point Mr. Crowley as the prototipe of real occultist is a malevolous, dishonest and a very biased trick against fringe philosophies like occultism.
———————————————————
Oops! It’s too late here, and I don’t find what I wrote about woke newspeak and another topic I had forgotten…Be patient, please, ha ha…
Thank you, John Michael and Ambrose, for your thoughts on the tulpa phenomenon. I wasn’t aware of any pop culture version. I suppose I am wondering whether it is possible for a human mind to create another mind, or indeed another being of whatever sort. I have also read that a group of humans can come together via say a séance or series of séances and create a spirit of sorts that communicates with them. How true this us, I do not know.
These concepts are also hard to describe or define. Author Anthony Peake has occasionally wondered or worried that AI could create an egregore – whatever he envisages by that.
@yogaandthetarot #107
Thank you! Yoga, Magic, and the Tarot – your book truly covers a lot of ground! I see it now on the Aeon Books website, it is even featured together with my Minor Arcana book – if you click on one, it says at the bottom of the page “You might also like…” and recommends the other. I hope your book becomes widely read and extremely popular!
I’ve been trying to find that old “Family Circus” cartoon set in a bathroom / sanitary ware showroom, where Thel (the mother) is running past a display of toilets while shouting to her child, “No, Jeffrey! It’s not connected!”
JMG, what climatic changes do you foresee for the Asia-Pacific region? Either for the next few decades, or the next few centuries?
Re magic squares:
I don’t think they originated in the Arab world. Some were certainly foundational in China — the I Ching includes the the 3×3 magic square (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luoshu_Square), and Daoists have a ritual or theurgic dance called the Paces of Yu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yubu) that involves walking the square .
I suppose the generalized magic squares derive from the mathematical culture of India (as did the “Arabic” numerals). But at least the 3×3 square appears in China early on.
Anonymous @ 92 thank you for your response and for the book recommendation. I am inclined to think that the supposed hard duality which is said to characterize the Christian religions is not infrequently exaggerated, but I admit I have not studied the matter in any depth. I do think there was more going on than The Shirky Effect in the response of An-2, the phrase “modern scholarship’ has a deliberate, IMHO, ambiguity it about I do find seriously off putting.
Chuaquin, about the todologo: in English we call such a person a know-it-all and highly annoying they are. Whatever you are doing, they, or their cousin, or somebody, can do it better.
Scotlyn @ 116 thank you as well for the reference. That blog might be just what I have been looking for.
Scotlyn
Hi John Michael,
The bald faced lies, bother me. 🙂 You read it here first!
The goobermint down here have been claiming that they’re tackling inter generational wealth disparity with changes to the tax system, so what do they do? They close off loop holes for newcomers, yet grandfather them so that those who are already in the rush to mad cash, continue to have their snouts in the feed trough of goodies presumably until they drop dead.
The joke is, if they really wanted to tackle inter generational wealth disparity, they do things the whole other way around and cut off the goodies for oldies, and leave the way open for younger folks. But that ain’t what they did. There are also some really basic changes which could have been made to unfair systems, which weren’t on the table – like refunding franking credits (i.e. company tax credits received with dividend income) in mad cash, for people who pay no taxes anyway just because of their age. Getting rid of that would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
I’m embarrassed for them. But maybe they’ve annoyed me too. Yes, I am. I’ve spent days this week trying to work out how to implement a new goobermint initiative which effects every employer. Watching a webinar from the authoritas, man, they kept saying this change will make things easier (although it was never specified for whom). Except how can taking a process which was done four times per year, and demanding it be done between fifty two and twenty six times per year, be easier? All in the name of improving cash flows from employers into equities, managed funds and bonds, I guess… Hmm.
We’re in a funny position down here with the oil dramas. Other countries have realised that in order to get access to stuff from here, they have to keep the energy taps flowing in this direction. The land of stuff was adamant that it would halt all jet fuel exports, except to down here. I guess they need the lithium, coal, gas, iron ore, you name it, we’ll dig and send it. Fertiliser is the big issue though. Unlike the rest of the planet, the land of stuff makes urea from coal. We should do that down here too.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not schilling for fossil fuels, it’s just that without them, the population is going to be a whole lot smaller, and not many folks have considered that aspect. Oh well, it’ll happen sooner or later due to declining resource availability. I’ll be interested to read your latest thoughts on the subject of Peak Oil. Why people thought it’d go away, is a matter beyond my understanding. Twenty one years ago I read about it, and have seen nothing since then to convince me that it is an invalid theory.
Cheers (am I ranting? 🙂 )
Chris
Greetings, JMG and friends:
On the “Companions on the Road” post, I said a chief theme I’ve gotten out of Ecosophia is something like, “time is bigger than we can imagine”. In the same vein, “spirituality has been practiced a lot longer than most people think about.”
I recently had the privilege of visiting Britainland (as my kids call it) and viewing Stonehenge, Salisbury Cathedral, and John Dee’s paraphernalia at the British Museum, which is all a way of saying that it all puts spirituality into perspective in a way that is harder for us in the New World to appreciate. You appreciate that spirituality is woven through the centuries.
Peace and best wishes,
B
With respect to calligraphy and talismanic forms: calligraphy underwent a loss of much of its inner energy when it collapsed into typography (to make a long story short). Letter forms were originally written (or painted); type design turned the fluid process of writing into a process of geometric construction — something unnecessary for calligraphy, in which letter forms arise from the nature and structure of the tools, and the body (arm, hand and breath) of the trained calligrapher.
Talismanic forms do not need to be built from the geometry, say, of magic squares, but can be written fluidly (once the forms have been internalized) by the calligrapher.
Resources: Gina Jonas, Calligraphy as Art and Meditation: A New Approach, which draws on several generations of work by calligraphers to recover calligraphy as writing, rather than as lettering. At the other end, see Geoffrey Tory’s Champ Fleury, which captures the shift from calligraphy to typography (and is visually stunning to boot).
@Earthworm,
Re:Meditative drawing – I got intot his a little a few years ago when I was going to weekly lifedrawing sessions – just trying to clear my head of everything beyond the drawing specifically (typically I’d let my mind wander). I’m no kind of expert on any of it, and I wasn’t really trying to judge the results on the outcome, but I found it did work. Or at least it was interesting to me at the time.
I imagine that it could be used also in the way that monks used monotonous tasks as part of meditation, where you draw semi-automatically, and then while some of your mind is bound up in the task a little you lock onto a specific idea you want to meditate on. That is probably what I would try if I were going to do this now – the above experiments were from my pre-JMG days, so I was jsut trying to muck about with mindful meditation because people I knew raved about it.
Thanks,
Johnny
I also don’t want to defend Crowley wholesale, but it’s worth noting that he got a kick out of describing the already scandalous things he did in wildly-hyperbolic terms. In the most famous example, he described the ritual use of semen produced by masturbation as child sacrifice.
So could he have committed some truly abhorrent crimes? Sure. But I’m skeptical: it would be 100% in character for him to keep up the melodrama even in his own diaries.
@JMG #101 re: writing your own programs
Software companies also had a lot to do with that — my first computer, a Sanyo MBC-550, had programs simple enough that even someone as untechnical as me could write their own — but that went away as big software firms, most particularly the one famously named after Bill Gates’ masculine endowment, did everything possible to block users from cutting their own code and make them dependent on corporate interests.
Almost certainly out of your realm of interest, but figured I’d bring it up just in case. Emacs is a “word-processing” program that has been in constant, open-source, development since the 70s. I put “word-processing” in scare quotes, because it is an insanely extensible program. You can run a web browser that will display videos through it, with the right plug-ins. Obviously, I know that particular example is of little interest to you, it’s given more to demonstrate the ridiculous lengths to which Emacs can be stretched with a bit of willingness to learn some code (Emacs also has absolutely wonderful documentation to teach you how to code it, if you want). And even as a largely non-technical person myself, I’ve learned a lot of code to make Emacs do what I want it to.
None of which is to say “learn this ridiculously high learning curve program!” Ironically enough, I began learning it out of a desire to automate something I’ve now found more valuable to do by hand (take notes and review them). I merely bring it up as an example of the kind of autonomy and customizability computers were promised to deliver, and occasionally actually did.
Cheers,
Jeff
Zemi (no. 129) ” I suppose I am wondering whether it is possible for a human mind to create another mind….”
I think you need at least two humans for that!
“I have also read that a group of humans can come together via say a séance or series of séances and create a spirit of sorts that communicates with them. How true this us, I do not know.”
You seem to be thinking of the 1972 Philip Experiment, in which Canadian parapsychologists created their own ghost.
PS. There is another fairly well-known pop-culture example of a tulpa. Alvin Schwartz, who wrote the Superman newspaper strip in the 1940s and early 1950s, wrote a book called “An Unlikely Prophet” (1997) in which he reports encountering Superman in real life. Another character (if you can call people in a nonfiction memoir “characters”) was a Tibetan monk, who revealed that he (the monk) was actually a tulpa created by Buddhist visualization exercises.
Gunstone, it would not surprise me at all if the next millennium or so of European history were to echo the history of the Iberian peninsula from 700 to 1500, with a Muslim conquest followed by a long slow Reconquista from surviving strongholds on the fringes of Muslim territory. As for Ward, no, I haven’t read him, and I think it’s a little early to decide whether the current extinction process is over yet! If the deep future follows the normal evolutionary pattern, the ancestors of the future’s wild beasts will be small, tough, and pervasive now — I’d expect the descendants of rats, for example, to do very well indeed.
J.L.Mc12, fair enough; what you cited sounded like one more dreary moral sermon about how we all ought to feel awful about our ancestors. The thing I’d point out is that human beings these days aren’t pure H. sapiens. The Neanderthals are among my ancestors; a lot of people in and around the Pacific basin have Denisovan ancestors. It’s not “us and them,” we’re descended from all these peoples.
Cedric, delighted to hear it. I’m sorry to say there’s nothing else written on the Wheel of Life; I created it in a series of meditations for that book, and haven’t done anything else with it yet. Merlin’s Wheel uses a different system. What this means is that you’re free to invent and innovate with the system, using your own meditations and magical experiences to develop it further. Have fun!
Slithy, that strikes me as a very good summary.
Zemi, glad to hear you’ve avoided the pop-culture babble about tulpas! The thing with séances certainly happens, btw.
Ambrose, that’s an exceedingly complex question. South and East Asia are returning to their historic roles as the center of gravity of our species, but which of the large nations in that region will become dominant in the near future, and how that will play out, is anyone’s guess. The rate of sea level rise is also a crucial determinant not yet known. Beyond that — well, we’re talking about half the planet, you know! I’ll consider a post on it down the road.
LeGrand, I recall reading somewhere that there’s a Mesopotamian connection, but I don’t recall where.
Chris, I know. I’ve begun gathering sources for another sustained plunge into discussing peak oil. It’s time, not least because next to nobody seems to remember little phrase such as “net energy” any more. As for government make-work, I’ll have a few things to say about that next week. 😉
Bofur, true enough, though there are places in this hemisphere where you can get that same sense. I once stood on the hill south of Seattle where the world was created, according to local Native American myth; those myths include details of postglacial floods that happened 14,000 years ago. The vertigo of time was very potent just then.
Slithy, granted, but even in terms of the things other people saw him do, the guy was a creep.
Jeff, it’s certainly out of my interest range, but still good to know.
Ambrose (if I may), here’s a third. The house once tenanted by Walter Gibson, after his death, was haunted by the phantom of a cloaked man with a broad-brimmed hat and burning eyes. You guessed it — the Shadow, the crime-fighting hero that Gibson turned into a pop culture superstar. Gibson was also an occultist, and it seems likely that his intense concentration on the imagery he was creating gave rise to the tulpa.
Aldarion 47
>But how would one receive many times as many wives or parents?
Between 2008 and 2017, my husband Jethro and I did a lot of domestic cat rescue, in our case, Persian longhair flatfaces. We gave to 40-odd elder female breeder-cats a comfy, permanent home,— cats who had been unceremoniously brought to animal shelters to get euthanized, after ”they had served many years of useful lives as breeding cats” to their breeder-masters, that is, Persian breeder companies. Our regional Persian rescue group would make rounds picking up any and all Persian cats, in this case, “elder discards,” and house them temporarily in their shelters and foster homes. Then they looked for permanent homes. They called me (I was in their network); they said they had fifteen such females who they had to place immediately. I drove to three different shelters in Northern California to pick up the fifteen Persian cats. The rest I retrieved later on.
We had a big, empty house, which the cats instantly loved. We sequestered them for a week or so, being they were traumatized at having been cruelly dumped by their breeders plus being temporarily housed in a noisy, chaotic place. We gave nourishing food and quiet, cushy environment, and they gradually calmed down and evened out. Flower essences helped immensely.
Among them were about three males “studs”, meaning unneutered. Ziggy arrived with six inches of mat encasing him. We gingerly cut away the horrific mat over several hours. He was in a lot of pain, but friendly.
We took in forty-seven such rescue Persians ove time. The top number we had at one time was twenty-seven. We had thirty assorted beds for them in nine rooms. The cats had won the lottery. Each cat got the rest, food, sanitation, companionship, veterinary care, haircuts, and love they needed, for whatever time each had left. One lasted a week, but another lasted the entire nine years. Each died in their own time of various ailments: a couple heart attacks; 3-4 kidney disease; many, non-specific causes—it was just their time.
Everything was secret because our home was not legitimized by any agency. We paid for everything privately, so the cats were none of anyone else’s business. We could have named our house, “Sly House” because I was not going to risk the cats being stolen from us. No-one could have possibly found the cats a better home.
And think of it. Twenty-five former mama breeder cats all under the same roof, at the same time,— essentially twenty-five purring cats loving their new-found, luxurious, permanent home. Imagine the vibes. It literally felt like we were inside a mothering-cloud; the vibes were heavenly. Each cat viewed humans as their children.
So, yes, there is a way to have massive mother energy all at once, at the same time, in the same place. I felt honored to have been able to have rescue pussins at one time. It was a lot of kitty-litter to clean. The livingroom: a cat on every cushion—5; a cat on every upper cushion—3; a cat on every hassock—3=11. In my office: cats on daybed—2; cat next to my computer—1; cat on back of chair—1; cats lounging at window—2=6. And rest of them dispersed themselves elsewhere in other rooms. All indoors.
I can talk about it after-the-fact because all the cats died 2016 or earlier, and no mean people can forcibly remove them now that the are dead. I was so worried we would be found out.
The maternal vibes were awesome. The house felt blessed with so much “madonna” beneficent energy. Think of the best motherly influence you had as a kid and multiply it by twenty. Mother-on-steroids. I think the good vibe will remain, as will their forty-seven happy-ghosts.
The punchline: Jethro and I received X times mothers… I remember those eight-nine years fondly: Kinzie, twins Bessie and Tessie, Mattie, Lollie, Sally, Ziggy, Dixie, Trixie, Katie K’nishka, Disney, Fanny, Flossie, Bonnie, Letisha, Georgie (fem), Mazie, Sophie, and more.
Tessie became blind in both eyes, yet sailed around the house where she knew every step, chair, rug, and stair. She could walk up the steps Jethro built so she could lounge in ‘her’ window.
Yes, it is possible to have twenty mothers at the same time,— in a concentrated way.
💨🐈⬛💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Despite the doomsaying I feel in my gut/intuition we will have at least another few years of relative prosperity, peace and plenty in the United States especially when compared to other parts of the world. Though I acknowledge looking at the record of history that sooner or later difficult to live during times happen. If things go bad before that feel free to tell me I was mistaken.
> if there’s a sequel to the book you’ve read, I don’t know it, and I certainly haven’t written it. Maybe you should consider writing it.
Nah, I am merely a passable writer. Besides, bookkeeping is keeping me REAL busy. I am learning all about depreciation.
GUSTAV STICKLEY
Plus in a year or two, I want to be constructing Gustav Stickley-inspired my-designs picture frames and selling them on our upcoming website. Building individual frames is a skill in itself.
💨🖼️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG & Everyone,
What is up with all the guilt? Where I am, everyone is prostrating themselves with this burden. Reparations for slavery. Killing the Earth with climate change. Not supporting immigrants enough.
My least favorite example is the local university with “Land Back” stenciled on some of the windows. I’m not even Native American, but that seems really offensive to me. Because of course they’re not giving the land back! They just want to go on record saying “We recognize that we took this land from you.” It just seems to me like rubbing their faces in it. But, I guess that’s cool? Virtue points?
But I’m here asking this, because it seems like it must be something much deeper in our collective psyche. Has our American culture become so affluent that we feel guilty, like we don’t deserve it? Do we sense the end of the huge extravagance of the last 50 years where energy was cheap, and feel guilty for burning through it so fast, leaving the future to clean up after the party? Or, what is it?
My step-mother used to try to take me on guilt trips. Eventually, I learned ways to just not go, like, if I didn’t do anything wrong.
So, I’m just trying to figure out why we all feel so guilty, especially about stuff that happened a long time before we were even born.
Some people here have commented the ME mess doesn’t seem to have any serious consequences yet in USA and EU economies. Well. I can say, from this corner of Europe, that apparently things ar OK here, if you see bars and cafes full of Spaniards, during this current heat wave. However, I also see this apparent “happiness” maybe hides some kind of deep desperation. For example, it’s usual to hear some people in those bars and cafeterias complaining about unending inflation in food prices. And of course, there are people who’s in trouble to reach to the end of every month with their family budget (you won’t see them at bars).
Oh, and I see in my town quite local businesses closed, because there aren’t enough small businesspeople to open them again, so our economy doesn’t go so fine as our loved government loves to say.
In addition to this, like I’ve written before, kerosene prices have grown very much since the Iran war began. Soon or later, this high prices will affect plane tickets prices, which it isn’t a joke for countries which depend of massive summer tourism, like Spain.
i think we’re living in Europe the calm before the storm, or according the Roman saying “post festum, pestum”. Maybe it won’t be the end of the world, but I smell problems in the near future.
——————————————————————–
I often see a disturbing tendence within a lot of self labelled as Western Buddhists, to not pay attention to their favorite religion/philosphy “politically incorrect” aspects. I think especially in their biased interpretation of Buddha teachings in a materialist and rationalist way, to make it to fit in their Western mindset. Everybody has the right to think and believe what they want, but not to fool themselves and fool others.
Main elephant in the room for this “Cartesian” Buddhism is when you point their usual Western believers how Asian Buddhists seem to worship many gods. Indeed, Buddhist temples are full of gods statues, among the Buddhas. It’s interesting to hear their easy answer to this “small” problem: gods are metaphorical ideas, not real. However, if you ask some Asian Buddhists, it isn’t strange they say gods are real and worshipped. Indeed, Buddha didn’t speak about a god who created Universe, but…he didn’t deny polytheist pantheons. He only said, if I remember well its words, if there are gods, they’re also under the karma law.
I know Buddhism hasn’t any orthodoxy, but I think many Western Buddhists aren’t honest enough to accept they’re less spiritual than they pretend. I think blunt materialist atheism has been outdated as social phenomenon, even in western secular societies, so some people want to be more spiritual, but without the troublesome aspects of spirituality.
J.L.Mc12 # 124:
“Though he doubts that it was a deliberate genocide on our ancestors part. He suggested that it’s possible that humans were better at hunting prey than the Neanderthals were, and so made it harder for the latter to access meat.”
I think no serious scientist suggest Homo Sapiens who arrived from Africa killed into extintction Neanderthal people in direct massacres, but I’ve read somewhere our direct ancestors were better at hunting, due to their better social cooperation than Neanderthals. Of course, it’s very difficult to grasp how worked prehistoric societies, but if you think our brain is mainly the same (in a biological sense) than Cromagnons brain, it seems a realist theory. Which, by the way, relativizes the usual Darwinian idea about “survival of the fittest”, thanks to competition. Our ancestors maybe competed with Neandethals to get food, but they were good cooperating in tribal societies. Cooperation within the same species doesn’t exclude (indirect) competence against another species.
William Golding wrote “The Inheritors”, about Neanderthals and Cromagnons, and I think it’s a good novel..so it’s fiction, not a real thing. It’s easy to idealize old Neanderthal guys as the Good People, against our direct ancestors (the Bad People), because they were extinct; but I bet this fake prehistoric view is reflecting our current usual woke pose toward Prehistory times (Neanderthals as poor “beings of light”). Indeed, Golding had a strong negative bias against mankind, being near to misantropy. I think it’s a very wrong attitude.
—————————————————————————
MAry B. # 133:
“Chuaquin, about the todologo: in English we call such a person a know-it-all and highly annoying they are. Whatever you are doing, they, or their cousin, or somebody, can do it better.”
Thank you for reminding me the most possible translation of “todólogo” to English language. By the way, I can also tell you we’ve got another word for these know-it-all people, “cuñadismo” (from “cuñado”, brother-in-law). It’s a commonplace and near a joke here that everybody has in his/her family a brother-in-law who pretends to know everything…
———————————————————————-
Ambrose # 141:
“Alvin Schwartz, who wrote the Superman newspaper strip in the 1940s and early 1950s, wrote a book called “An Unlikely Prophet” (1997) in which he reports encountering Superman in real life.”
IMHO, that situation if it really happened to him, seems funny and terrific alike…
Ogaandthetarot #107
“certain types of hatha yoga qualify as “meditation in motion”.”
Ha – interesting – one aspect of the callisthenics I was thinking of was taught to me under the label of Taoist Yoga.
John Michael Greer #122
“you won’t find me defending Aleister Crowley — the guy was a world-class creep — but it’s worth noting that most people in the occult community in his day rejected him just as thoroughly as I do.”
What did you make of the use of Crowley in the appendices of The Goat Foot God?
@JMG:
Agreed. This is where Horsley gets it so badly wrong, IMO; he takes Crowley (whose work he was mucking around with while high on drugs in Guatemala during his 20s and 30s) and props him up as the occultist par-excellence, the “prototype of a real occultist” as another commenter has put it. I have done my best to put Jasun on the right track, but unfortunately he has leant further into his phase of Abrahamic pearl-clutching (in our last conversation, he was trying to convince me that my daily SoP practice might be opening me up to malign spiritual entities. I responded by saying that’s equivalent to saying that showering in clean water every day might make you more dirty).
As regards the sexual revolution and its pushback, I very much agree. While I am tending somewhat conservative as I enter my middle age, I can’t really say I’d be delighted with repressed Victorian prudery either. To J’s credit, he does bring an interestingly nuanced take on this pendulum-swing, and speculates that it is being used quite deliberately as a tool of social-engineering; take all the boundaries away, and the people will clamour for authoritarianism. Is it quite as deliberate and conspiratorial as that? Who knows…
@ Chuaquin #128
“…you can’t deny we live (or we are) a non eternal body, which gets older and finally dies…”
Of course. I do not know any reason why I would want to deny this. Do you?
I get up in the morning and look at several things in my wardrobe that I can wear for the day. I put something on, and wear it all day. Whatever clothes I decide to wear will influence the kind and nature of the many interactions and experiences I will have during the day (eg. garden/farm clothes which can and will get very dirty vs clinic clothes which must remain sparklingly fresh and clean)… I do not feel a need to “deny” that my clothes will have to be taken off at the end of each day in order to feel properly alive.
Likewise, I do not feel a need to “deny” that my body, too, will be taken off at the end of this incarnation, in order to feel properly alive, already, as an eternal being.
Clothes are real, bodies are real, and both can strongly influence the kinds of interactions and experiences we can have in any given circumstances, but neither comprehends the entirety of a person’s life or being, even IN THAT MOMENT.
I hope I am explaining this perspective in a way that makes more sense to you. 🙂
LeGrand Cinq-Mars #132 and #136
Thank you – that is absolutely fascinating.
I had heard of Tai Chi Ball but not Yubu Tai Chi Ball
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KijO_qCy0hE
Just ordered the Gina Jonas book!
Johnny #137
I’m not entirely sure where the idea to take a ‘drawing meditation’ and convert it to a physical moving meditation form came from.
“then while some of your mind is bound up in the task a little you lock onto a specific idea you want to meditate on.”
The approach that popped into mind was to create stillness of state through the act of drawing, then use active meditation to develop the areas of interest that correspond with each part of the drawing – possibly the same kind of thing you’re describing just using different words for the idea. More to chew on – thank you!
Thanks for that, Ambrose. I was actually thinking of the Scole Experimental Group, a British parapsychology group that conducted séances between 1993 and 1998 in the village of Scole, Norfolk.
I’ve just found the writing in which I answered in paper to Anselmo, when he showed in one of his comment (a time ago) a link to a Spanish philologist, who told his audience his opinions about Jesus of Nazaret. I haven’t forgotten this topic.
Well, I can say claims about Jesus as a real (to some extent, historic) man, seem IMHO more reasonable than usual frantic denounciations by some hardcore materialist atheists, when they say Jesus never existed. So somebody in those ancient times made up him as a myth. With some wry amusement, I can point their claims about the imaginary Jesus are too similar with usual far right conspiracy theorists, who they often despise (cough). Oh the supposed hardcore rationalists…
Returning to this guy theory, he said Jesus of Nazaret was a real man, but Christ (or Jesuschrist) is another different topic. In the short form, it could be said that real Jesus was mythified by the new born Church (or maybe I’d say better “Churches”), and that mythification has arrived to the present.
I think this view is more reasonable and clever than the direct attack made by proposers of Jesus non existence. However, I can also tell you it isn’t really a new sensational idea. There was a writer during the XIX century, named Renan, who wrote a “Life of Jesus”, which was a real scandal in his times. Renan, a former Catholic seminarist who had lost his faith, thought Jesus was a real man, but only a man. So Christian dogma were fake, in the short form. This view is quite popular today within non religious scholars who study History of Religions, but nobody is really objective so everybody is biased, to more or less extent (you guess me too, as a fringe Christian).
By the way, Renan was, during his life, a very controverted man, not only by his opinion about Jesus, but also because he was an Antisemitic (cough) and he had another troublesome statements.
Of course, Renan was influenced by the XVIII thinkers from the Illustration, who began to point the Bible wasn’t real in this or that story, so the Gospels “main character”, Jesus, soon or later was going to be seen as a mythified person, though Renan was smart enough to not deny His reality in the past. To be honest, can we deny there was such a man living in Palestine 2,000 years ago, but to keep believing there was an Alexander the Great? (If we start doubting every written story which has arrived until the present, we would end in a self destructive cycle of “hyper-criticism” agains every historic event and people).
I can also say Tolstoy thought, after his disagreement against the Russian Orthodox Church, that Jesus was a mere man, not a Man-God. At least that’s what I understand about his heterodoxal Christianism.
I can’t forget the denial of the supernatural part of Jesus, as a God, is a very old idea, which of course was denounced as heresy by the Churches which supported the dual nature of Jesus. I’m speaking about Arianism. Arius was a preacher who said Jesus was only a man, not a Man-god, thought some people think Arius said Jesus was “less divine” than God the Father, so He wasn’t only a mere man, but not a real God, neither (?). Maybe the greatest man in History… There were a lot of Arianists during last centuries of Western Roman Empire, for example, Visigoths when they arrived to Hispania, were usually Arianists. Arianists kings reigning above Roman-Spanish people wasn’t a smart idea, so finally the King Recaredo agreed to be baptized as a Catholic in 589 A.D. But that’s another story…
You can guess, being a Christian, I’ve “jumped into the swimming pool” of faith, to believe Jesus was more than a man (indeed a great man); but this is a personal topic, methink.
I find the topic of demons hard to navigate. Dreher cites Jacques Vallée, so he must be aware of the connection between Faery legends and UFOs. If he did his due diligence, he would have found even Christian sources suggesting that not every non-human spirit is necessarily demonic—how could, for example, St. Brendan have baptised the mermaid if she was a demon? So those claims are discarded easily enough.
Then there’s claims that seem credible enough. Your hypothesis of demonic involvement in the digital sphere seems to be born out by phenomenons like LLM psychosis but also, I would argue, earlier than that, in the global mental health crisis that started, according to Jonathan Haidt, just when modern social media was opened to the public.
The difficulties arise in the middle. I still vividly remember the week when Charlie Kirk was murdered. At the time, I mentioned a couple of very disturbing videos of reactions to his death. You obviously didn’t watch them but some were genuinely shrieking with glee, not just at the murder itself but that his children had to witness it. The words, the voices, the movement, they all suggested that nothing human was currently piloting their bodies.
That’s a fair enough assessment, I hope. But to my innate paranoia, this then casts suspicion on those who maybe weren’t openly celebrating but were much more concerned with what a horrible person with horrible views he was than his murder, which, we were told, they condemn, but look what he was saying, so really, didn’t he kind of have it coming? And maybe they all really were demonically influenced, but it’s also rather possible that my moral (and political) disagreement colours my judgement.
Related only because in the same week, footage of one of them suddenly cutting a Ukranian refugee’s throat for no apparent reason in the Charlotte, NC subway, a certain segment of the homeless population seems to behave more like feral animals than humans. I have thankfully never witnessed one get violent over here; they mostly mutter to themselves, shout at no visible person, and relieve themselves in trains. I associate such behaviour with heavy drug use, which again makes demonic involvement plausible, but I don’t know if I’m not just looking at “ordinary” mental problems and going “that’s weird, they must not be fully human.”
Do you have any advice?
—David P.
Many of American national politicians today are Zionists. You can tell by the amount of speeches they give saying that Israel is America’s best and first-most ally, we stand with Israel, etc, by the fact that many of them fly Israeli flags in their offices and/or wear Israeli flag lapels on their suits, etc. (You saw American national politicians do similar things around 2022 with Ukraine and its national symbols.) So it really wouldn’t have mattered who got elected as president in 2024, they would have most likely still sided with Israel in their wars against Iran after 2024 and eventually get the United States itself sucked into the war.
Most of Congress are Zionists as well, so they would still have supported the president in giving Israel military and financial aid, and they would still have avoided an actual declaration of war so that the president can take all the blame for the war in the public square when the war inevitably goes bad for the United States, while Congress gets off scot free.
Anonimus #69
In Spain we are not suffering any specially severe heat wave, but our metereologic agencies are involved in a crusade for convince us about the suposed climatic emergence motivated for the emisions of CO2. Is true that , with the begining of the XX century, finished the last small ice age.
There was a discussion a few months ago, after Cesar Chavez got cancelled by the left, about the possibility of the left cancelling Martin Luther King Jr. I think right now it’s probably more likely that Martin Luther King Jr. and many of the other civil rights figures in the 1960s will be cancelled by the left for their support for Israel and Zionism, considering how much anti-Zionism has become a part of the left’s platform in recent years.
@Sven Eriksen #120
Thanks for replying, and glad to hear it. We can talk a bit more over DMs on Dreamwidth if you’d like (same username), or if you don’t use that platform, we’ll figure something out.
I have been re-reading book 6 of the Aeneid, where Aeneas descends to the underworld to take counsel with his father. Then yesterday I started reading Ilaria Ramelli’s The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis which I linked to above. I would never have suspected there to be contacts between the two, but Ramelli cites several 2nd century Christian works like the Apocalypse of Peter and the Sibylline Oracles, where repentant souls are washed in the Acherusian Lake, just as they are in Plato. Ramelli cites one passage:
And God, immortal and omnipotent, will grant another gift to these pious persons: when they will ask him, he will grant them to save the human beings from the fierce fire, and from the otherworldly gnashing of teeth, and will do so after pulling them out of the unquenchable flame and removing them, destining them, for the sake of his own elect, to the other life, that of the world to come, for immortals in the Elysian Fields, where there are the long waves of the Acherusian Lake, imperishable, which has a deep bed.
My commentaries on Aeneid 6 say that Vergil here reproduces platonic-pythagorean-stoic thought, which is a rather vague way to put it. Maybe somebody can tell more exactly what model of reincarnation he describes – or maybe, as a poet and not a philosopher, he was intentionally vague on the details.
Anyway, one line stayed with me. Those souls who have gone through a thousand years of cleansing in the afterlife and are ready to reincarnate for further development need to forget their past – at least for a while, if I am understanding Virgil correctly. Anchises explains:
…Lethaei ad fluminis undam
securos latices et longa oblivia potant.
Literally: At the waves of the Lethe river they drink safe waters and long periods of forgetfulness.
Dryden put it this way:
…The souls that throng the flood
Are those to whom, by fate, are other bodies ow’d:
In Lethe’s lake they long oblivion taste,
Of future life secure, forgetful of the past.
Anyway, Pagan and Christian thought have sometimes been more deeply intertwined than I thought.
Also, I see a lot of people on the internet talking about a “Zionist Occupied Government”. The thing is that Zionism was widely supported by the vast majority of American in the past 80 years, and Americans only stopped supporting ZIonism after Israel’s horrific actions in the Middle East after October 7, 2023. So maybe the fact that there are a lot of Zionists in power in America is a simple reflection of American democracy and the attitudes of the average America before 2023.
And it takes time for Americans to replace its politicians in a democracy, as each politician serves for a specific time before the next election (e.g. Presidents 4 years, senators 6 years, etc). So if Americans change their minds about an issue (such as Zionism), it’ll take some time before they can vote out the politicians who refuse to change their mind (which granted seems like the vast majority of American national politicians) and replace them with politicians they agree with on the subject (such as anti-Zionism). Meanwhile, you get this intense disagreement between the average American and the American politician, and the American politicians become very unpopular.
@Mirko
“Where there is no doctor” is the basic survival medicine book, official publication for people outside of civilized places so to say. It might be a start;
Otherwise, depending on where you are (Yugoslavia?), you might want to try and read traditional books from the historic past (Hildegard von Bingen), how people treated malaises back then.
Books on traditional medicine, herbology, and so forth, dating before the twentieth century.
This is just a guess, but as our host said, it is forbidden nowadays in the US the circumvent the monopoly of the bueraucratic complex. But it is still allowed to sell old books of all kinds, except for Van Hellsing who got banned and Hitler’s Mein Kampf in central Europe.
BorealBear (#98)
Thank you for your kind offer of a possible writeup of your upcoming journey for those of us of Heathen inclinations. If it is convenient for you yes, I’d very much enjoy reading such an account, along with any insights you may gain from your journey.
OtterGirl
JMG thanks for those titles, that is exactly what I was looking for. Several of them are in my library system and I will be getting them
Thanks
BeardTree, I think it depends on who you are and, more to the point, what class, profession, and age you belong to. A lot of cubicle employees are suddenly doing without prosperity, peace, and plenty right now, and all the indications are that many, many more will join them. I’ll be talking about that in detail next week.
Slink, have you ever heard of Friar Tetzel? He was a seller of indulgences in Germany just before the Reformation. He bought a license from the Vatican, standard practice in those days, and then roamed around Germany, promising to be able to spring souls from purgatory for so much per soul. Selling indulgences was a profitable racket, but it also played a noticeable role in kickstarting the Reformation, because so many serious Christians were so disgusted by the debasement of the faith and the way the Vatican was eagerly participating in it for a share of the profits. These “land acknowledgments” are our modern indulgences; they allow people to pretend to themselves that they’re Good People™ no matter how crass, corrupt, and disgusting their own behavior happens to be. That is to say, I don’t think the guilt is real; it’s just the proper hangdog look you put on your face while handing over cash to Friar Tetzel.
Earthworm, er, I just checked my copy of The Goat Foot God and it has no appendices. Must be something recent, as I have the 1980 Weiser edition.
Luke, agreed on both points. The notion that Crowley is “the prototype of a real occultist” is simply absurd; I’d call Crowley instead the archetype of the failed modern occultist. As for the conspiratorial take on the pendulum swings of attitudes toward to sex, well, maybe Horsley would like to explain why this has happened regularly over the last half dozen centuries. The wild sexual license of the Elizabethan period was followed by the Puritanism of the English Civil War era; that was followed by the sexual license of the Georgian and Regency periods, and that by the Victorian era’s prudery. Then we got another bout of sexual license in the 20th century, and are moving back into Puritan territory in the 21st. Like most such alternations, it doesn’t go anywhere — it just cycles back and forth between two unhelpful extremes.
David, well, you have a more optimistic notion of human nature than I do. The disgusting glee splashed around by people on the extremist left when Kirk was gunned down is a normal expression of the viler end of human behavior, the usual result when people have gotten so caught up in their rage and hatred that the last traces of compassion have fled from their souls. (To be fair, there are plenty of people on both sides of the current political battlefield who are in this condition.) Demonic obsession, while it happens, isn’t that common. You’re right, though, to point out that not all spirits fall on one of the two extremes of the moral spectrum — that sort of radical dualism, which insists that a spectrum can only consist of its two endpoints, is also endemic these days. Again, though, that’s a common enough human failing.
Anon, don’t confuse the habit of pandering to a politically influential pressure group for genuine Zionism. Plenty of politicians have rainbow flags despite not being gay, lesbian, or what have you. As for MLK, they may use that as the excuse; the real reason, of course, is that he urged that people be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin, and that’s utterly unacceptable to much of the left these days.
Aldarion, excellent. It’s amazing how much effort has gone into obscuring the fact that Christianity started out as an ordinary eastern Mediterranean mystery cult with strong Platonic elements, drawing from the same body of metaphors, symbols, and rituals as every other new religious movement of the same era.
Anon, good. That’s certainly part of it. It’s also the case, though, that the Jewish community in the US is relatively wealthy and very well organized in political terms, and can routinely swing a close race to whichever candidate supports its interests. Since politicians inevitably pander to any group that can do this, it may be a while before things swing the other way.
Will, you’re most welcome.
JMG, seems to me that one of the reasons we can’t construct anything anymore ( highways, buildings, planes) is that most engineers and construction experts are not good bureaucrats. In times of old, entire companies like Boeing Hewlet Packard were mostly engineers in management. The same is true of our highway and public works departments, when they were competent. As the college educated ( non engineer) PMC grew the engineers were outcompeted for position in the bureaucracy by new PMC of professional administrators.. Lawyers, MBA’s , auditors and equity managers. They were more suited ( and trained) for the scramble for power than engineers and scientists.
Thus slowly, all these institutions were hollowed out and filedl with the PMC and administrative office fauna and not those with the technical skills to get real work done.
In the next stage of collapse this PMC middle management will have to be sacrificed to the gods of financial austerity. Any given location or economies prospects will be determined by if they do this correctly by jettisoning the Bureauracrats or poorly by keeping them.
“Gunstone, it would not surprise me at all if the next millennium or so of European history were to echo the history of the Iberian peninsula from 700 to 1500, with a Muslim conquest followed by a long slow Reconquista from surviving strongholds on the fringes of Muslim territory.”
Interesting. Would you expect most of the “Reconquista” forces to speak Slavic languages though? I am curious as to where these forces would get support and resources from otherwise, especially in a de-industrial future.
Also, if the Islamic occupation lasts for centuries, wouldn’t the population of the Continent be entirely converted by then (akin to that of the Malaysia and Indonesia) and resist any such “Reconquista” ?
“Well, I can say claims about Jesus as a real (to some extent, historic) man, seem IMHO more reasonable than usual frantic denounciations by some hardcore materialist atheists, when they say Jesus never existed. So somebody in those ancient times made up him as a myth.”
Well considering the fact that the Druid deity Dalon ap Landu was made up by a bunch of Druids and nonetheless exists today as an actual Druid deity that you can pray to and get your prayers answered, I think it is very reasonable to hold the belief that Jesus was made up 2000 years ago and never existed as a real historic man, but nonetheless he exists today as a deity and has existed for around 2000 years.
@Chuaquin (#128):
Catalan independence from Spain is very old idea. My wife’s maternal ancestry is entirely Catalan, and for very many generations (as far back as the 18th century) her ancestors and relatives in Catalonia have been passionately and actively anti-Spanish, anti-Royalist, and anti-Church. Spain, for them, is just an ancient, alien and wholly foreign conqueror and colonizer of their land, with whom one must deal every day, but can only despise. Her maternal grandfather, the first to emigrate to the US, was also secretly a Freemason before arriving here, when it was illegal to be a Freemason in Spain. She has also visited some of her relatives in Barcelona, and those anti-Spanish sentiments are still very, very strong among them.
“It’s also the case, though, that the Jewish community in the US is relatively wealthy and very well organized in political terms, and can routinely swing a close race to whichever candidate supports its interests. Since politicians inevitably pander to any group that can do this, it may be a while before things swing the other way.”
I don’t think it’s going to take that long. Many American Jews largely get their wealth by being part of the bureaucratic managerial regime that took over America in the 1930s, and so they will lose their wealth when the bureaucratic managerial regime gets replaced with something else and they are forced back down into the working class again like American Jews in the 19th century. And I don’t think American Jews can be politically well organized if they don’t have the wealth to fund all the institutional structures and political organizations like they did in the 20th century up to today.
JMG
Dion Fortune’s The Goat Foot God… She told a good story and it looked like it was heading in a fascinating direction but abruptly stopped just before getting to what promised to be a fascinating discourse. Of course, if its purpose had been achieved at the abrupt stop (putting an initiatory process in form of a novel?), well, there it is; but it felt that there were hints of plenty more that might have been said.
We thought it was weird that the book has no publishing data and that there was no table of contents. Story finished with hekas, hekas, este bibeloi! followed by ‘A Magical Invocation of Pan’
It was like getting to the end of a book and finding someone had hacked it or replaced the last pages.
Appendix 1 Hymn to Pan – Crowley
Appendix 2 The Night of Pan – Crowley, Verses from Liber 333, The Book of Lies 1 KAOAANA and Prologue of the Unborn
I wasn’t in the mood to finish Fortune’s book reading Crowley, so skipped what seemed a crazy addition and wondered what happened to the story.
@Zemi (#129) and Ambrose (#140):
The Philip experiment was utterly fascinating. It also produced a book, Conjuring Up Philip: An Adventure in Psychokinesis (1977), as well as several short videos.
There were two aspects to the results of this years-long experiment: (1) the creation of an independent personality which could communicate with the experimenter in various ways, and (2) some physical phenomena, chiefly table-moving.
The table-movement seems to me to have been produced by unconscious applications of force by one of the sitters; or at least, that’s what I thought I could see in the videos.
The independent personality, able to communicate its own thoughts, that they created seemed to me to be quite another matter. Following Charles G. Leland and Frederic W. H. Myers, I hold with the multiple-self theory, which posits that each normal human being contains not just one unitary self, but multiple distinct selves which (normally) hand off control of the body smoothly from one self to another according to which self seems best able to address whatever the current situation is. (There are also abnormal unfortunate cases, where the selves don’t cooperate, or even try to exploit each other’s weaknesses. These unfortunate people exhibit what is, or used to be, called multiple-personality disorder.) Also, people who live closely and comfortably together–mothers and their young children, couples happily married for decades, for example–can and often do develop shared selves, different from any one of their individual selves., often with distinct personalities.
What seems to me to be the case in the Philip experiment is that the closely bonded, long-term group of experimenters created such a shared self, quite distinct in its personality and imagined history from each and every one of its creators.
This isn’t quite what they thought they were doing. They thought they were creating an independent disembodied being, a “ghost” of a person whom they had invented, who never had lived. (They didn’t know anything about this theory of shared selves.) However, it seems to me that this is what they actually managed to do–no small feat in and of itself.
@JMG and Slink #146 re. Western guilt
Something similar has been on my mind lately too, in that I’ve been wondering why so much of modern Western and/or European culture seems to have such a genuinely self-loathing, almost self-exterminatory streak these days. Having to deal with academia up and close and personal again, and especially topics like how they want Norwegian language and culture to be taught to children in schools, has made me realize how little many people in the elite class especially seem to care about preserving anything distinctive or unique about our own culture(s). Not that this comes a shock or anything, but seeing it on such clear display has been discomfiting.
Still, recognizing this as a fact is one thing, but like you asked, Slink, I’ve also been wondering why this historically very strange intellectual current has gained such a foothold. Is it guilt over all our unearned wealth, and/or letting the chance to transition to a sustainable future in the 70s slip past, like JMG has suggested before? That seems more applicable to the US, though. Is it just the well-deserved karmic blowback from the very real atrocities our ancestors have committed over the last 500 or so years? Is it the natural endpoint of postmodernism turned into an intellectual poison, Vico’s barbarism of reflection style? Sometimes it feels like these people desperately yearn for meaning and want with all their hearts to fight the battles of the 1968 revolution over and over again, just because the modern world leaves so little space for heroics. They seem so hungry for an enemy, but “real” conservatives of the kind they long to fight haven’t been around for a very long time now. Or is it simply Spengler again, in that European civilization is a spent force and can’t muster any will to survive? All of the above? Either way, it’s a strange experience to see your own culture saying it basically doesn’t care if it lives or dies.
@OtterGirl #164
Thank you in turn, appreciate it. I’ll make sure to write down some thoughts.
@William, #18, & JMG
The problem should be incredibly easy to fix for the certificate-granting authorities– they need only restrict themselves to serving those websites that can justify needing HTTPS, and traffic would decrease by orders of magnitude.. As far as I know, there’s no law on the books forcing them to give certificates to all-and-sundry.
You accurately described the need for HTTPS: e-commerce, banking and the like. You forgot to mention where it’s actually used: every single website.
Take ecosophia.net: my Firefox and Chromium, at least, load it via HTTPS by default. Why? There’s no reason for readers to require a secure connection to the site. When JMG logs into the WordPress back-end, that ought to be secured, but us readers can surely get by reading a publicly-accessible site ‘in the clear’. Nor do you need a secure connection to read propaganda from CNN, RT or Al-Jazeera (though depending where you are, you might need a VPN for one or more of those).
It’s a bummer,because there’s plenty of old hardware that could read plain-old-websites like Ecosophia, but cannot handle the encryption layer. That encryption is necessary on the modern web; if you go to, say, FrogFind.com– a search engine that also acts as an HTTP proxy to render websites for retro-computers–you’ll get an error on modern hardware. It’s not safe. It’s not secure. It’s plain old HTTP, no S! Quelle horreur!
Yet there’s no law saying Chrome or Firefox has to warn you away from such old-school websites. It’s technocratic policy, which is both much quicker to change and much less amenable to public pressure than mere legislation.
So I would humbly suggest that should such pressures put the infrastructure of the internet under threat as you suggest, the fur-suited sysadmins who run the place will quietly change the rules without consulting any mere users. You might have a day or two where most websites are tossing “Warning: unsecure” errors until your web browser updates, but other than that I’d bet that particular limit to growth will be met with a smooth stairstep down. If only all of our techological decline could be so easily handled!
For a while there it was looking like those land acknowledgements were going to result in some actual land reverting to native ownership. I hadn’t heard anything recently when I saw that subject come up here, so I went to check on it. Predictably, there was a Supreme Court (of Canada) ruling that aboriginal title can’t be asserted over private land.
The really galling thing about this is that the virtue signalling can carry on pretty much exactly as before since the court has ruled that saying they own it doesn’t mean, you know, that they *own* it. Hope Friar Tetzel brought a big purse.
Slink: That’s what I would have thought too: That land acknowledgements are adding insult to injury, if anything. I’ve never gotten an actual native opinion about that though.
Since I wrote an off the cuff volatile remark back to Michael Martin for the information he was posting about Horsley, and since I was a teenage Thelemite, and student of the books of Wilhelm Reich, I thought I’d just add a little more to this discussion.
Growing up in a repressive church there were a lot of feelings of guilt for normal childhood stuff. Then, I saw how much my parents struggled when my oldest sister, whom I adore, came out as a lesbian after her marriage fell apart. There was quite a bit of nasty sexual shenanigans going on with the elders in our church and towards the underage woman, so there was that hypocrisy I felt vindictive about. When I found Crowley it was the opposite of one bad thing. I went from the apocalypticist upbringing to the aeon of Horus and some libertine attitudes that were also part of the punk culture I was steeped in at the time, which also has its own nihilism, one of the worst things about punk, though I still love a lot of the things. Or maybe its just my inner puer who does. Anyway, I quickly realized as I got exposed to more occult stuff that the Thelema scene wasn’t exactly for me, after I had had an initiation, but fell in with another crowd who were Maatians and Kenneth Grant types. No training really, but participation. Anyway, I came to love the more traditional stuff when I found Josephine McCarthy whose lineage goes back through SOL and other British occult groups outside the Golden Dawn. The Quareia system was a bit too intense and didn’t fit practically with the realities of my life. GSF fit that much better. So I have been happy going through that slowly but surely. All that said, I learned a lot from Crowley et al, even if he wasn’t the best beast around. It started me out… that was what I found and thats where I went until I explored some more and found other things better suited. It took awhile.
As far as all this relates to sexual things, I really do fear for my gay and lesbian friends and the like and anyone who grows up that way. Those don’t automatically mean libertine. I think that there was quite a bit of damage that came out of the hippie and later scenes -re: loose behavior. At the same time the repression is its own damage as JMG expressed… so I hope these witch hunt fevers die down.
But I guess it is humanities nature to swing back and forth this way.
@Slink (#146):
If you can make someone else feel guilty, then you can exploit that feeling to gain power yourself. What you get can be as little as the power to feel yourself superior to the mob, or as much as to coerce others by appealing to their sense of guilt. It’s one of several truly nasty things going on right now. Power-play is generally nasty simply because “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
JMG
It feels like the US is on the brink of one final capitulation move downwards of chaos before things can start to stable out before the next major round of decline. I’m wondering at this point what happens first, the stock market crashing, WW3 (or more likely a prolonged series of proxy conflicts between the China and the US), or the loss of the US dollar as the global reserve currency? At this point I’m wondering if all three will happen around the same time.
“As for MLK, they may use that as the excuse; the real reason, of course, is that he urged that people be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin, and that’s utterly unacceptable to much of the left these days.”
King also said that, “If a city has a 30% Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30% of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas…”
And in a book “Why We Can’t Wait” published in 1964 MLK insisted that “compensatory and preferential treatment” were necessary to overcome past and present white racism, inspired largely by the “reservation policy” of India for certain castes and tribes.
“Among the many vital jobs to be done, the nation must not only radically readjust its attitude toward the Negro in the compelling present, but must incorporate in its planning some compensatory
consideration for the handicaps he has inherited from the past. It is impossible to create a formula for the future which does not take into account that our society has been doing something special
against the Negro for hundreds of years. How then can he be absorbed into American life if we do not do something special for him now, in order to balance the equation and equip him to compete on a just and equal basis?
Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask for
nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up
with his fellow runner.
Several years ago, Prime Minister Nehru was telling me how his nation is handling the difficult problem of the untouchables, a problem not unrelated to the American Negro dilemma …. The Indian government spends millions of rupees annually developing
housing and job opportunities in villages heavily inhabited by un-touchables. Moreover, the Prime Minister said, if two applicants
compete for entrance into a college or university, one of the applicants being an untouchable and the other of a high caste, the school is required to accept the untouchable.
Professor Lawrence Reddick, who was with me during the interview, asked: ‘But isn’t that discrimination?’ ‘Well it may be,’ the
Prime Minister answered. ‘But this is our way of atoning for the centuries of injustices we have inflicted upon these people.’ “
Quick followup to my note on calligraphy.
An important current in Gina Jonas’ calligraphic lineage, so to speak, goes back to Lloyd Reynolds (https://www.ginajonascalligrapher.com/publications.html), and of course back to the arts & crafts movement.
Her book and web site are at https://www.ginajonascalligrapher.com/publications.html . The examples there tend toward the free-form, but she is very skilled at making formal documents, as other examples on the Gallery will show.
The point, and challenge, of making calligraphic talismans is to write them, as though one were writing out a poem that one already knew, rather than assembling them, structural member by structural member, while referring to the Ikea instructions.
Robert Mathiesen #170 I think that is more correct to speak about the secession of Catalonia, because the term of independence is more apropiated for colonies or countries invaded , and the country of Catalonia in the civil spanish war of the XVIII century supported the candidate for king of Spain who finally lost (Charles of Austria). The Same hapened with several of the domains of the ancient crown of Aragón: Aragón and Valencia. This war was decided in the Battle of Almansa (1707) (Albacete) with the Víctory of the oposed candidate, Felipe of Borbón. And , in 1711, Charles of Austria was crowned Emperor of the Holy Germanic Imperium and King of Austria, thing that implied his renounce to the Spanish Crown. In 1714 was taken Barcelona for the Felipe’s troops.
With respect to human sacrifice, which came up in the Magic Monday conversation.
One important practice is what is often known as “immurement”, in which someone is walled up in a building, often but not always as a form of foundation sacrifice (it could also, for example, be a form of prolonged capital punishment, or of permanent house arrest).
The London Review of Books ran a very distressed book review (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n10/mary-wellesley/this-place-is-pryson) of a study of hermits and anchorites in England, which is unintentionally wryly amusing, since the reviewer could hardly manage to get Current Year issues out of the way of the subject.
The reviewer at one point remarks,
“Anchorholds were often situated in prominent places in medieval English towns – sometimes along the routes of liturgical processions. In London there were many cells along the old city walls. As Claire Dowding has noted, they formed a ‘ring of prayer’ encircling the capital.”
In other words, the immured anchorites were, among other things, like those ancient kings who “entered the land”, serving a protective and even tutelary function.
Interestingly, some practitioners of the Tibetan Buddhist dark retreat choose to make the retreat a lifelong practice. Again, this does not mean that they are cut off from various forms of community life (after all, they continue to be fed), but they provide counsel and so on from within their immurement.
In this connection, one might think of Merlin, after his immurement, continuing as a guide for at least some questing knights. An Arthurian tale could be written that had Merlin deliberately training Nimue to be able to perform the magic necessary for his own immurement — as anchorites were immured in a ritual setting. Later, this would be misunderstood as entrapment, when it was actually a service she was performing for her teacher.
I look forward to the return to peak oil. Because while we’ve been running around worrying about pandemics, economics, wars, creeping government authoritarianism, etc, etc… oil depletion never sleeps.
It would be good to have an update on where we are, and where we’re likely to find ourselves next, and how creeping resource depletion is likely to interact with all the obvious stuff going on on the surface.
War in the Middle East, Strait of Hormuz closure, oil and nat gas shortages in asia, high prices worldwide… and meanwhile drip drip drip goes the oil depletion underneath where nobody wants to think about it.
JMG ,
Re your recent podcast appearance when you made the distinction between Will and Desire in the context of modern advertising – would it be correct here to term Will as the spiritual impulse and Desire as a corruption of the spiritual impulse? Or perhaps Will as “destiny” and Desire as “fate”?
Will as “the One, the Divine Unity”, Desire as “the Multiplicity”?
This can get really abstract when considered metaphysically. Desire arises from Will, is in a sense a mirroring of Will, it allows the Will to manifest. It would seem that Desire is natural to the Will, so wouldn’t this be not so much a rejection of Desire, but of aligning Desire with the Divine Will?
Thanks.
JMG 65
> Neanderthals aren’t quite extinct
Nope, they are not extinct, indeedy. I spent years researching a couple lineages from Ireland.
One of my ancestor-sets in Ireland (eastern County Roscommon; western bank of Lough Ree), I believe were what Irish mythology called Firbolgs. When I review a couple photos I have of these eastern County Roscommon ancestors (one born 1863 likely of two Neanderthal branches born 1840s), they seriously LOOK Neanderthal-ish. Dead ringers. There is one school of thought that posits that Irish mythical Firbolgs were leftover Neanderthals who mixed in with nearby “whites.”
Search the Internet for Thomas Nast “simian” “monkey” drawings of stereotypical ethnic Irish in the late 1800s. See if you spot a being that looks like a monkey,— that would be my Firbolg line. I am rather proud of my Neanderthals.
💨🦍💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@LeGrand Cinq-Mars #138
I work with i Ching a lot and I can’t see that it’s a magic 3×3 square any way you cut it, unless I don’t understand magical squares, and I don’t see why wikipedia, your source, is conflating it with Luoshu. On the i ching page it says “see also Luoshu” and links back, but this is the only reference to the term, and on the Luoshu page it says it influenced i Ching but otherwise doesn’t reference the form. Seems like just a regular sloppy conflation but I haven’t dug into it further.
I ching is 3 either/or opportunities, ie 2 x 2 x 2 and then that is multiplied against another set of 2 x 2 x 2 trigrams so you get 8 x 8 = 64. I mean… there are three lines, twice, but nothing that could ever lead to a 3 x 3 matrix of possibilities.
@mirko The herbalist I’m training with spent a bunch of time I’m going to say in the 90s it must have been in Kazakstan and thereabouts and he keeps a copy of the Chinese Communist “Barefoot Doctor” manual as an apparently very helpful reference. He taught us moxibustion along with the herbal work we are doing and several of us have found it extremely useful already. I had an ear that wouldn’t drain for example and it put me quite right. Teach (who funnily has the same beard and hair style and kind of the same look as JMG and gets called An-druid rather than Andrew or Bentley by some set of his students) uses moxibustion on joints. Anyway, I trust him and he finds Barefoot Doctor to be useful.
@everyone. Thanks to folks who read my piece after my Federal Acquisitions Regulations form dream message. It makes me happy when I see you guys somewhere else. Also, this interview of Owen Benjamin on Tucker was exceptionally good, his sense of how the “bad wizards” are working and why being conscious and telling the truth are the hills to die on. https://youtu.be/sDJmvLrWcRc
I promised you to write about certain word from the usual woke impoverished slang, whose Orwellian words are a source of wry amusement for me. Well, I’ve got enough time to think and write about this topic now.
Maybe you remember (or maybe you don’t remember it) some JMG post ago, I wrote how ridiculous and fake sounds the wokesters term “racialized person” (to deny slight evident human differences in favor to a demented antiracism who denied every human difference).
Today, my term for my criticism against this “newspeak” will be “neurodivergent”. I hope not to open a can of worms. If somebody here identifies with this word, I’m sorry, but I don’t agree. I can say I’m a person who has had several “mild” mental disorders in my life, but I’ve never bitten the woke bait. Why? I’ve got my reasons.
At a first glance, this term seems “innocent” to some extent, as a woke euphemism to depict people with mental problems, without pointing them as inferior to “normal” people. However, it can be said a psychiatric diagnose can’t be “cleaned” by a politically correct term, with an fake equalitarian subterfuge. If you’ve got mental disorders (mild or more severe), it’s a scientific reality which mustn’t be challenged, in spite of “reasons” like equality and a neutral language (neutral?).
I suspect “neurodivergent” is linked, to some extent, with a weak form of the (in)famous antipsychiatry activism, which was very active during the ’70s and early ’80s, at least in my country. Although antipsychiatrists had some good ideas (for example, that not every “crazy” people are mad enough to be sent to a psychiatric center), in the short form my opinion is they were wrong. Indeed, they wrote a lot of b**t. The elephant in the room is the antipsychiatrist obsession for denying the reality of mental problems, and mocking psychiatry as a a fake science (ahem); in spite of the suspicious links between mental disorders and genetics and/or a bad education, and/or traumas. It isn’t casual some families have more tendence to these problems tan another ones, so…
Even worse, antipsychiatry nutties thought people who suffered mental problems were a kind of revolutionary vanguard against social conformism and blah blah blah. Well, those times was the swansong for Marxism, so you can guess these guys had an agenda in which old school proletariat was despised to imagine “mad people” were the new revolution engine (cough). Antipsychiatry was really as dogmatic as its enemy, methink.
Returning to present time, wokesters aren’t fool enough to deny directly the scientific idea of mental disease, but they erode it with the term “neurodivergent”. At least in my country, they’re frank to say people with mental disorders are “stigmatized”, which to some extent is true. However, not every problem for this human group comes from “normal” society. A half true is indeed a lie. Indeed, mental problems provoke a lot of bad consequences for this people…because mental disorders are real and more than a neutral “situation” to blame “normal people” for their supposed “apartheid” against the “crazy” people. Depending of the levels of these illnesses, people can loose part of their will and reason: there’s not any advantage in this.
I think woke use of this term isn’t honest, at least after seeing how it’s used by wokesters here.
I can point I’m glad to check not every woke leftist here uses it, only the most zealots and apparently radicals. Why? Ironically, the Left always has been very proud to respect the Science (because it’s fought against evil religions and superstitions), so main leftist seem to be afraid to deny the almighty Science if they attack directly Psychiatry as a science.
I mean, woke idea of “neurodivergency” serves to their political agenda to praise in a dishonest way “crazy” people to convince them to join the well known panoplia of “beings of light” (like gays, transgender, women or whatever they like) to use them as cannon fodder to their cultural wars against their black beasts. For example, they maybe think that everybody who supports mental problems are real beyond social stigma must be labelled as Conservative (ideally as Fascist). However, it seems this indoctrination seems to have arrived too late here in my country, when woke abuses and censorship attempts have upset a heck of people beyound usual right wing people, so it hadn’t a great success (oh).
In addition to this, the too positive view of mental disorders which is suggested by the “neurodivergent” term doesn’t match with real human suffering due to these problems. To be “crazy” isn’t really cool, because it doesn’t give you “special powers” against “normal” people, so…Even mixed with the old fake and romantic myth about “geniuses=mad people”, it’s not realistic beyond zealots ideology.
Well, next time (if there’s a next time) you should do it better, dear wokesters…
Clay, bingo. Certainly the winds seem to be blowing toward the mass firing of unproductive bureaucratic personnel, but we’ll see. More on this soon.
Gunstone, depends on where the Muslim conquest runs out of steam and how many people flee into the Christian-held territories. As for the conversion of the current residents, why, the same thing happened in Spain, you know — did it slow down the Reconquista?
Anon, granted, but to my mind the growth of Muslim minorities in the US is an even greater threat to the status quo. They also form a disciplined voting bloc, and what they lack in money they seem to be on track to making up in numbers.
Eartthworm, well, her writings are out of copyright now, so this doesn’t surprise me. Crowley’s babblings have no place in her work, though.
BorealBear, remember that the managerial classes generally don’t see themselves as citizens of a nation or as participants in a national culture. Their loyalty is to their own transnational class and its corporate and institutional structures. Many of them hate the nations they inhabit because those just won’t get with the program and cater to the managerial-class fantasy of themselves as history’s cutting edge.
Tyler, interesting. Thanks for this.
Justin, I share your fears. It’s quite common, when the pendulum swings toward repression, for gay men and lesbians to get it in the neck first and hardest. I wish I knew a way to forestall that, but I don’t.
Anon, we’ll probably see a good solid stock market crash after the midterms, as the AI bubble implodes, and the inevitable US default on its foreign debts (which will end the dollar’s status as a reserve currency) will likely follow that in fairly short order. That’s why the big push against government-expenditure fraud is under way right now — it’s going to be crucial to cut expenditures below income before the reserve-currency wealth pump shuts down. I don’t expect shooting wars to go much beyond the current playacting in the Persian Gulf, though.
Curious, so? We’ve already seen, over and over again, that a person can be cancelled for one remark taken out of context, even if everything else the person ever said supports whatever managerial class fashion statement he’s accused of violating. Thus it doesn’t matter how often MLK supported something like the current racial quota system; that his comment about the content of character, taken out of context, can be used to attack that will be enough to fuel the rage of the left. As we move further into the Circular Firing Squad stage of the current process, I expect to see more and more of this.
LeGrand, thanks for this! I’ll have to see if I can score the original book for a decent price. It bears very directly on some of my recent research.
Pygmycory, it’ll be a little while, as I have a few other things to discuss and also need to get up to speed on where we are. Still, you’re right that it’s time.
Will, no, I mean something rather less exalted. Desire is an emotional reaction; will is a conscious choice. You can will something that you don’t desire, just as you can desire something that you choose not to do.
Northwind, the equation of the Fir Bolg with relict Neanderthal populations, or possibly Neanderthal-human hybrids with a larger share of Neanderthal genetics, makes sense. More broadly, there’s a lot of material (though it’s unfashionable these days to discuss it) suggesting that some of the faery lore of northwestern Europe was shaped by folk memories of a more primitive hominin population living closer to the land. They were smaller than the more recent arrivals, but a decrease in average height and weight over time happens quite often with peoples who have to get by on limited food supplies for many generations.
Anonymous 171,
The real question is whether American Jews and other members of the professional managerial class can peacefully give up power to the next set of elites, or if America is in for another wave of violent civil wars to replace the professional managerial class. Cause if the professional managerial class refuses to give up their power, then we can see some pretty severe antisemitism arising in the next set of elites, since American Jews are currently over-represented in the professional managerial class compared to the general American population, and people have a habit of conflating class differences with ethnic differences. People might end up hating American Jews (as well as other ethnic groups over-represented in the professional managerial class) in the 21st century in the same way that people hated the WASPs in the mid 20th century, the Southerners in the late 19th century, and the British in the early 19th century.
Thanks for that story, Northwind Grandma! You have proven me wrong.
Earthworm #153
My method wasn’t as structured as what you are describing, also I didn’t have much to compare it to at the time, but I think what you are talking is roughly in the ballpark of what I was doing. I’d push out everything that wasn’t just the act of drawing itself – but just as a physical act, without inner commentary or things like that.
Because I was doing life drawing I think it did have that quality of “the areas of interest that correspond with each part of the drawing”, but that is because the whole goal is to try to make the drawing align with reality – it’s sort of baked into the cake. It seems like you want to use drawing in a more ritual/symbolic way which is where it gets pretty different. I’m curious what you find anyway.
Good luck, and report back!
Thanks,
Johnny
Scotlyn # 152:
I think I understand to some extent your “presentist” speech, but I’m not sure to understand it at a 100% even now. I’m too closed to your point of view, or you explain your view in a too cryptical way for me (or maybe 50/50 for the two). So I’ll be cautious enough, and I’m not going to “attack” your view by now, until I’m really sure of understanding clearly your writings. So…Can I ask you an question form my point of view?
Are you writing your ideas from a philosophy you like, from a belief you’ve got or from a mystic experience you’ve lived a time ago?(or a blend of these sources of knowledge). If you don’t mind and you clear up my doubt, I think we won’t have misunderstandings to debate in a clean way this topic. Thanks on advance.
———————————————————
Anselmo # 158:
Are we really living in the same country in this universe the two, or maybe are we living in different alternative universes?
I don’t want to reveal my exact location now, but I can tell you this heat wave isn’t very normal. We’ve suffering here temperatures like in July or August. Maybe you identifiy ecologist claims about climate change as part of leftists b**t, according your possible biases; or maybe you’ve been fooled by some ecologists unfortunate catastrophism (which I don’t like, in spite of respecting the good ecologism). Can you explain your reasons to deny the evident strange heat wave?(at least in some parts of Spain now).
——————————————————————————–
Curt # 163:
“Where there is no doctor” is the basic survival medicine book, official publication for people outside of civilized places so to say.”
Yes, indeed I’ve got a Spanish (Mexican) edition of that book, and it’s very interesting and useful to worse times to come, in near and/or not near future…Very good.
“But I guess it is humanities nature to swing back and forth this way.”
It’s really just the Anglosphere that swings back and forth this way. You don’t really see similar swings in puritanism vs debauchery in Latin America or in Africa or in Asia or in much of Europe.
“Gunstone, depends on where the Muslim conquest runs out of steam and how many people flee into the Christian-held territories. As for the conversion of the current residents, why, the same thing happened in Spain, you know — did it slow down the Reconquista?”
Muslims also conquered Anatolia and converted its residents over to Islam, but there hasn’t been a reconquest of Anatolia by Christians in the past few centuries. Why do you think that there will inevitably be another reconquest of Western Europe by Christians if it becomes Muslim?
@curt, @mirko: I can vouchsafe for Where there is no doctor. It was priceless for our family in West Africa, even though, ironically, my mother was a doctor.
@Anselmo (#182):
But wouldn’t “secession” imply that at one time in the past Catalonia was actually a true and natural part of Spain? If so, my wife’s relatives would vehemently object.
For them, Catalonia was always other than Spain, and had been since the days, more than a thousand years ago, when Latin first split into its various daughter languages. For them, Catalonia is an ancient colony, subjugated by force to Spain many, many centuries ago.
“Gunstone, depends on where the Muslim conquest runs out of steam and how many people flee into the Christian-held territories. As for the conversion of the current residents, why, the same thing happened in Spain, you know — did it slow down the Reconquista?”
Fair enough.
It will be interesting to see the extent to which centuries in the future, the forces of the Reconquista try reviving the name of old nations considering the foggy memories of them (many might be considered legends), differing climate and sea levels, and, especially, the significantly different demographic makeup of what we now call Europe by that time.
By the way, regarding paleontologist Peter Ward, he considers the Earth of 300 million years ago to be its “golden age” in terms of genetic variety of species. Since then, it has all been downhill as repeated mass extinctions leave small fractions of survivors that, although they ultimately diversify and re-populate the Earth, do so with a smaller and smaller proportion of ancestral lineages of what used to exist.
“”[H]istory,” write the two University of Washington professors, “will begin to run backward as Earth’s environment eventually slips toward the simple ecology of hundreds of millions of years ago. This decline, we assert, … has already started. Biologically, Earth has already peaked — perhaps as long as 300 million years ago.””
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/20030124/ward24/planet-earth-its-all-downhill-from-here
JMG, I would rather formulate that as “once followers of Jesus started to be drawn from the Greek-speaking population of the Mediterranean, they inevitably drew on the metaphors and thought systems around them and which they had grown up with when putting their beliefs in words”. But yes, it is striking how 2nd century and 3rd century Christian writings blend into the philosophical currents of the times. The New Testament does so much less, and then again after Christianity had become powerful, it tried to draw a stronger distinction from non-Christian thinkers.
Meanwhile Congress just signed another law that will increase the American military’s integration with Israel’s military, which includes among other things sharing the American military’s data with the Israeli military:
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-us-military/
@gunstone #168: It is remarkable how various countries conquered by Saracen/Muslim armies differed in their conversion rates to Islam. Syria was conquered first, and a majority converted within decades. Mesopotamia took a bit longer. Iran resisted for about 200 years, then slowly and messily converted. Egypt put up a strong resistance for about 400-600 years, but then a majority converted. The Iberian peninsula was never majority Moslem (though Moslems and Jews concentrated in the last Islamic territories at the end), which facilitated the reconquista. Greece remained majority Christian through almost 500 years of Ottoman rule, which enabled the war of independence. The various parts of the Indian subcontinent also had wildly different fates, though I know less about the details. I don’t know how anybody could make a prediction about the fate of future conquests.
@JMG
Re: Collapse of the dollar’s reserve currency status
Do you expect Twiloght’s Last Gleaming levels of inflation from it?
@anonymous #169: But why would you believe that, rather than believing that, say, Sappho or Socrates or Menander or Archimedes never lived? Jesus is mentioned in (hostile) sources about 30 years after his death, which is more than you can say for many historical figures.
Regarding Charlie Kirk’s death and other things: I watched one video of his death that, to me at the time, was both convincing and shocking. I feel pretty sure, now, that it was an AI deepfake. Stuff like that is making it even harder to know what is true. But it doesn’t mean that nothing is true. To me, this underlines the value of physical books that were printed before AI came along.
@ Cynthia (#24)
Something very much like that seems to have affected the now-popular fictional character Amelia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNyEYVb_NhQ
There has been so much – and such diverse – material created so quickly and so proficiently that it is obvious that some higher power must have been involved.
Hah! I was about to say that it’s been a while since anybody accused me of being optimistic about anything, much less human nature, but I suppose I might actually be. After all, if I find myself regularly disappointed in human nature, it seems to suggest that I haven’t yet learned to lower my expectations enough.
I will say that you haven’t seen the videos that I’ve seen and I find it rather difficult to lower my expectations that far. I can’t stomach digging them up again right now, so here’s one reconstructed from memory:
A man sits in a chair, rocking himself as he speaks slowly to the camera in a voice that suggests regular smoking (less wholesome substances than cigarettes, if his appearance is anything to go by): “If Iiiii could speeaakk to Charlie Kirk’s chiiildreeen tonight, you knooowww what I would saaayyy to them?”
He draws an unsteady breath. After a moment, he blurts out: “Did you see that?” Manic laughter, the rocking intensifies. “Did you see the blood?” With his hands, he mimes a fountain of blood pouring from his neck. “Booosh boosh booosh.” He collapses into laughter again as the recording ends.
It sounds like a caricature but this is how I remember the video. I can somewhat wrap my head around the news anchors paying lip service to condemning violence while also making very sure we all know just what a horrible human being Kirk allegedly was. This seems to go beyond ordinary human vileness, but perhaps I really am somewhat (happily) naïve.
(My apologies for trying to get fancy with that description. I know the dialogue would’ve sufficed but I have so few opportunities to play narrator that I couldn’t pass this one up.)
—David P.
Chuaquin #148:
I hope you won’t take any offence at a friendly correction but I assume you mean the encounter with Superman would be somewhat scary, in which case “terrific” is the wrong word. It’s not the same as “terrifying”, it’s closer to “great” or “excellent”. (Unlike horrific, which you can use like horrifying). As a fellow non-native speaker, I sure was confused what people were talking about until I figured that out!
(If you really did mean terrific, my apologies.)
—David P.
regarding reconquista and conversions in general, a fair number of people seem to do as the Vicar of Bray in the song:
In good King Charles’ golden days, when loyalty no harm meant,
A zealous high churchman was I, and so I gained preferment.
To teach my flock, I never missed
Kings are by God appointed
And damned be he who dare resist or touch the Lord’s annointed.
cho: And this be law, I shall maintain
Until my dying day, sir
That whatsoever king may reign,
Still I’ll be the Vicar of Bray, sir.
When royal James usurped the throne, and popery came in fashion,
The penal laws I hooted down, and read the Declaration.
The Church of Rome, I found, did fit
Full well my constitution
And I had been a Jesuit, but for the Revolution.
cho:
When William was our King declared, to ease the nation’s grievance,
With this new wind about I steered, and swore to him allegiance.
Old principles I did revoke
Set conscience at a distance,
Passive obedience was a joke, a jest was non-resistance.
cho:
When Royal Anne became our queen, the Church of England’s glory,
Another face of things was seen, and I became a Tory.
Occasional conformists base
I blamed their moderation;
And thought the Church in danger was from such prevarication.
cho:
When George in pudding time came o’er, and moderate men looked big, sir
My principles I changed once more, and I became a Whig, sir.
And thus preferment I procured
From our new Faith’s Defender,
And almost every day abjured the Pope and the Pretender.
cho:
The illustrious house of Hanover and Protestant succession
To these I do allegiance swear — while they can hold possession.
For in my faith and loyalty
I never more will falter,
And George my lawful king shall be — until the times do alter.
Not everyone, obviously, and I think a lot more people would balk at switching religions than switching denominations, but it is something some people will do to get by, and a factor to remember.
@81 Michael
The analysis of the Grand Mutation is also less rigorous than JMG’s. The analysis is based on it being the start of an air cycle, while JMG places more importance on aspects the conjunction and other planets made at that instant (like Uranus being retrograde in his fall suggesting a return to retro technologies before 2040).
2 very different subjects:
1) NeanderthaI ; had DNA testing done years ago, so I test out as having 2% Neaderthal DNA ( and 1% Native American) My ancestry is 72% England, Scotland, Ireland, then 26% French. and misc North/west European. I also have a rare genetic defect affecting the cellular energy cycle that makes it need alot more B12 than usual ( getting this health info is why I know the ancestry as an aside). They have not made any connection of the B12/energy cycle markers with Neaderthal DNA that I have heard of , but certainly B12 comes from animal products, and I should never have been vegan ( which I was for many years, not knowing I had that issue) Now I eat eggs and cheese and milk, multiple daily servings of animal products, and fish once a week.
2) Peak Oil ; I was walking by a “free book” shelf earlier in the week and a likely unused copy of the Book HEAT, 2007 George Monbiot, was there. I had never read it, it was free, so I brought it home. Some here know I was a Riot for Austerity person for years, but not because of this book or anything by him. So I thumbed thru it. Off hand, I would say that the Riot for Austerity people just practically working thru this came up with alot more ideas of what to do, not needing any government assistance, then he thinks could happen, which is interesting. He seems to have a blind spot on home heating, for one he thinks in England it would take all farmland, where as permaculture people would tell him – Rocket Stove – Coppicing – on the edges of all yards, he touches on roadway coppicing without running the numbers and only mentions willow. He does not mention traditional scandinavian mass heaters for burning wood either. Also, we have many examples from northern USA states of passive and active solar heating and storage, which he discounts in their climate. Alot of his “solutions” seem to take alot of money and government support, more infrastructure of electrical grid. he mentions some scheme of household electrolisis of hydrogen providing home heat as a by product, for example ! But, he basically does seem to say that England is … going to have a tough go of it. He thought their electricity would need to come from off shore wind and gas fired plants ( natural gas and methane) and household conservation. As far as I know, UK did not go big into methane as of yet. He didnt see the mini-split heat pumps coming in, although I wonder how long those units last. He does mention the thing that happens where appliances are more efficient, so we just use more, and I believe this happens with mini-splits, now all these homes that never ran AC before do as they are built into the mini-splits. He does agree that we need to move to slow or regular transit, not high speed. Basically, high speed ( trains/ships/planes) use ALOT more fuel per mile due to resistance and such, not to mention being noisy. Anyways, the USA people who actually ran the experiment to see how low they could go came up with lots of various solutions to have their needs met, so having lots of individual household solutions than top down one way to do this as per his book with government incentives and built infrastructure. Maybe a bit more like Muddling Towards Frugality, 1979, which I was re-reading when HEAT dropped on my lap. More to say on that book and how refreshing its stance vis freedom not only from HEAT but also from In Real Life at the moment, more on that if I get time
Your Yoyo 71
> But in the US
In my neck of the woods (near Madison, Dane County, Wisconsin), anecdotally, the last three months, people have been staying home to save money. Not going out as much. Disposable income lessening. I heard of two retiree-couples say they aren’t able to “get by” like they used to, and they are thinking of selling their house. I translate that to mean that they can’t afford to go out to eat at restaurants anymore. All they need to do is buy a couple cookbooks, buy raw ingredients, and, OMG, make meals from scratch.
Or maybe they will skip the saving on making one’s own meals, and go straight to sell the house. I get the distinct feeling that people feel it is beneath them to actually MAKE A MEAL AT HOME (and that means, many future meals)—oh, the horror. That if they are forced to actually “make a meal,” it means they are on poverty-row and are slumming it. Heaven forbid they make a hamburger or hot dog. Or macaroni and cheese. Or slightly more sophisticated meals as from “101 Things to Do with Grits” by Cottingham; “101 Things to Do with Ground Beef” by Ashcraft & Eyring; “101 Things to Do with Mac & Cheese” by Patrick; or even “101 Things to Do with a Jar” by Beery.” There is a whole slew of cookbooks called “101 Things to Do with [blank] .” My favorite is “101 Things to Do with a Potato” by Ashcraft.
There are zillions of things one can cook at home for cheap that tastes good, is nutritious, AND is fun, rewarding, liberating.
💨🤷🏽♀️🍔🌭🥔🍅🧀🍝🍳🧅🧄🥗🌽🥖🥦🫔💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
– Home heating/methane/HEAT book – ANother blind spot of his and a well known, old technology is to make bio-gas in people back gardens. Again, distributed, low tech. Poor household did ( maybe still do) in India and China. Lots of ways to do it, make it and use it on site.
The “NO KIngs” women who are very vocal, think the fiction novel handmaids tale is somehow real or connected to USA politicians, also have Muslim current culture on a pedestal and dont even know what they are talking about or accuracy….. as we know. Latest, I walked into our senior pop up coffee yesterday, for the first time in months, it was unseasonably raining. Into a conversation between 2 such women by the only empty seat. The one is offended and incredulous of her old high school friend out of state worried about the cultural differences. Woman here thinks that the Koran is based on the old testament. That they are basically the same, Christianity and Islam are basically the same. Obviously she has never read either, and of course is discounting the shift with the new testament which is Christianity. I told her it would not be an effective talking point to say that to her Christian friend. I did agree that of course they are monotheistic religions from that part of the word have some similarities, but not the same in major ways. She did concede that there is preferential treatment going on for accommodations for Islam compared to say Catholics who long ago had their accommodations at lets say schools taken away ( non-meat course on fridays, time off for various saint and festival days, use of empty classroom during breaks or after school for prayer or bible study ( protestant) ) to see all of these given to another religious group only. A full burka covering faces too is not the same as a Nuns habit, first of all Nuns are not everyone, no one is forced to be a nun, and traditional modest dress in times past may have covered heads more but not faces.
Anyways, these women would hate being under Muslim rule, it would be their whole Handmaids Tale world brought closer to reality — or is that the point, why they profess love and acceptance ? They yell at rallys for No Kings but secretly want to be subdued and forced to stay home and only leave accompanied by a male while fully covered to erase their individuality. Hmmm….. they loved COVID and doing their part to save us all and chided me for not getting vaccinated and not constantly wearing a mask. So, maybe they love no freedom and covering their faces. I thing is what it does.
Hi John Michael,
I look forward to reading your latest analysis of the predicament facing all of us. I’m also of the belief that your views on the geopolitical ructions sound about right to me, after all, people forget that the land of stuff lost confidence in the US around 2016 (a decade ago) and began slowly unwinding their treasury positions with your country. It wasn’t the first shot in the long Game Over movement, no. That began with Morning in America, sorry to say. We were all at such a turning point back then, and a flip of the coin could have gone either way, but probably didn’t because the message was unappealing! Oh well.
Thought you might enjoy some bureaucratic weirdness from the land of down under. And after the 2008 economic debacle, I moved to an area with few if any services other than roads. I don’t even get mail delivery here man. 🙂 Who knew there were such black holes? Anywhoo, despite providing all of my own water, drainage and wastewater treatment (a worm farm returning minerals to the soils) I still get a water bill from the local authority. Or more technically, I don’t get a bill, please hang with me. Part of their charging is for the ‘parks charge’, and the theory is that despite the financially ruinous expenditure (and risk) of providing my own services, we use the parks. So I get a bill, except they haven’t sent a bill for years, and it ain’t just me in this boat. Oh no! The authority spent $100m – you read that million number right – on upgrading their billing system, and heaps of people are accruing charges, and not receiving a bill. You can’t even call them up and offer to make a payment, we tried that. I was talking to a local yesterday caught in the same mess-up, and suggested that instead of them spending so much on computer software and tech nerds, they just hire 100 people to type up bills, enter them on a ledger, and send them out. It’s not hard, most organisations who want to survive seem to be able to do that trick. Crazy huh?
Victorian man slugged $2640 for water bill in direct debit bungle
I can’t make this stuff up, and for the record, have never been paid $100m+ for a complete stuff up, although I’d volunteer willingly for that job. 😉
Cheers
Chris
Anon, that’s a fair critique. Yes, it seems to be an Anglosphere issue. As for Anatolia, it has no land borders facing solidly Christian territories. Where the Ottoman holdings did border on Christian nations, in the Balkans, a classic Reconquista happened in much the same way as in Spain.
Gunstone, that will indeed be interesting. As for Ward’s thesis, it seems to me that he’s understating the power of ecological radiation — it doesn’t matter what ancestral lineages you have left, since speciation will fill as many available niches as possible one way or another. 300 million years from now, it’s quite possible that every land animal on earth will be descended from field mice, but their forms will be as wildly diverse as they were 300 million years ago.
Aldarion, that phrasing assumes an essential difference between Christianity and the other religious systems of the time. What I’m suggesting is that the difference was manufactured in retrospect.
Patrick, that’s one possibility, certainly. It’s by no means certain, but it’s possible.
David, yes, I’m familiar with that clip. I’ve personally encountered worse.
Pygmycory, ha! A fine old satiric song, and highly relevant.
Atmospheric, yeah, that sounds like Monbiot. Sigh. As for the weird fascination liberal American women have with Islam, I suspect it’s the return of the repressed.
Chris, these days it’s unwise to expect anything better. Bureaucracy in its decadence sucks up ever-increasing volumes of money, and the only result is that more bureaucrats get paid
David P, re the word “terrific”: True now all that of course, but might it be the case that in English writing around a century and more older, that terrific didn’t necessarily mean the thing was good? I seem to recall reading the word in contexts that suggets that, but the fossil between my ears is not forthcoming about details.
Chuaquin: I remember what I wanted to ask you last Open Post. So there’s a very common Spanish word: c, vowel, g, vowel, r, and it means “to catch”. My understanding, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is that in Spain that word is just as common and ordinary as anything, but that in other parts of the Spanish speaking world, it is profanity. Is that true? If so, any idea why that is?
Alice M (#187)
The I Ching is not itself a magic square, but the Luo Shu is a diagram or representation of the 3×3 square. The article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luoshu_Square has several diagrams, including one showing the arrangement of the 8 trigrams on the 3×3 square. (See also for example https://www.chinasage.info/magic-squares.htm .)
In the I Ching itself, see the Great Treatise, chapter 9.
See also Explorations in Early Chinese Cosmology (Henry Rosemont Jr), the last chapter by John S Major. A mathematician’s treatment is Legacy of the Luoshu: The 4,000 Year Search for the Meaning of the Magic Square of Order Three, by Frank Swetz. The first isn’t expensive; the second is outrageously priced, but may be available through a library.
My minisplit heat pump was installed in March 2011 and is still working. It’s good until -5 F before I have to kick in the baseboard heat.
It has required no maintenance but occasionally trips when a defrost cycle doesn’t complete properly. If I was going on a winter trip I really wouldn’t trust it alone.
It’s a Mitsubishi.
As for Northwind’s home cooking comment, I agree. You save huge piles of money and it’s not that hard. There is a risk though. Mother’s greatest mistake was teaching me too cook. So when I was out on my own I did not have to choose between getting married or going broke eating out all the time. That greatly delayed grandchild production. 😉
housing
So, luckily my youngest (28yo) visited Seatle and decided not to move there. But, thinks will move to Denver next spring. To me her current rural location is long term good, but the young want to do young people things in cool cities that have not hit their pull by date …yet. As usual, wisdom is wasted on the old. In fairness, her partners firm offered him the choice of Seatle, Denver or the Silicon Valley area and jobs dont come easy. Maybe Denver is the sane choice. I think he could look for other jobs maybe….. a whole different line of work ? She will have to find a job in the Denver area of course, but she is ready for a change.
She wonders what she will get for her house next year, we were discussing, and she is seeing that across the street did not sell recently for as high as she or her neighbor would like, of course it did sell, which she might not yet realize is a good thing. We will see what next spring brings.
And hour to the west of her is where my eldest lives, and she says houses are not moving very fast in her little Coos County Oregon coastal range town. I had seen one advertised and was surprised it hadnt sold, which is what brought up the conversation. Yes, it was small, dated interior, no garage, but also new roof, not a bad area at all, not far from stores and resources and very very affordable, less than I have seen in years in that town. People still cant find rental there, one would think new carpet a redone bathroom and a coat of paint and could be rented. Maybe that is feeling risky atm there.
The free weekly paper here in the local real estate agents weekly column was talking about correct pricing. So people are being unrealistic on what they can sell for in alot of cases. Drop the price a little and would sell. Well, prices cant keep going to the stratosphere indefinitely, they must realy have had unrealistic ideas of value, as there is not enough housing here, but people cannot pay more than they can physically pay.
Generally speaking, discussing Aleister Crowley in terms of pro and con is a fruitless activity. And I found Horsley’s Vice of Kings profoundly underwhelming. (I still have it somewhere, but can’t be troubled to dig it out to refresh my memory.) His discussion of his own problems was plausible enough, but his larger claims were typical of writers with an agenda, an interpretive scheme, and no critical sense or other stopping rule.
Basically, however, Crowley, no matter how annoying or creepy he may have been, has certainly been seriously misrepresented by people with little respect for truth, and even less critical capacity, and no interest at all in grounding their remarks in any recourse to facts or primary sources. But once a potential target of mass contempt has been identified, there are always people who are happy to hang any traits they take as disqualifying on that target, without any hesitation or pause for reflection.
Just because people may be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” does not mean they, or their works, are utterly useless, or without value. It does mean, on the other hand, that someone can be very interesting and skillful, and produce valuable work of some sort, and still be overall a very bad example.
The key is to develop an ability to differentiate between different aspects of life and work, and to avoid jumping to conclusions — and to avoid forming firm opinions without a solid basis for doing so. But where’s the fun in that?
Hey JMG
Moving on from Neanderthals, I’ve recently finished reading two novels of J. G. Ballard, “Concrete Island” and “High-Rise”. I personally like the former a bit more than the latter, probably because its theme is funnier. (Concrete island is essentially a retelling of “Robinson Crusoe” in which an architect crashes into a large traffic island in between 3 highways, and can’t escape because everyone is too busy and fast to notice or care about him, and because he keeps screwing up it escapes.)
I was wondering if you had read anything by Ballard, and if there was anything you liked about his works?
@JMG
“return of the oppressed” meaning …. they want to be oppressed ? AN easier life having to make no decisions ? Or, finally having something real to complain about ? ( Oh, you think Trump is oppressing you ? I’ll give you some oppression …? Said to the tune of the stereotypical parents ” I’ll Give you something to cry about? ” ) Or, Manifesting what you give attention to …
@ silicon guy
I wonder if a 2026 mitsubishi mini split is as good as a 2011 ? Maybe. That brand may still be building higher quality. But, that is also only 15 years so far. Will it do 30 ? I hope so. Are they easy to swap out compressors or fans ? It is good to know a data point as 15 years so far is a good sign.
A softheat oil filled electric baseboard heater with no fans or compressors lasts about…. 50 years ? more ? But uses more power. But no maintenance. A wood stove will oxidize out metal, so they do of course also wear out. Firebrick lined burn chambers help and fire bricks are easy to get.
Apparently China thinks the worst is over and has stopped worrying about the threat from the United States:
https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/chinas-spy-agency-thinks-the-worst
Perhaps Trump did everybody a favor by allying with the Zionists and neocons and focusing America’s attention on the Middle East. For if the realists in the Trump administration like Elbridge Colby and outside the Trump administration like John Mearsheimer or Douglas MacGregor had gotten their way, America would have ended up preparing for war against China, a war that America will no doubt have lost, which is a far worse outcome for America than whatever is currently happening in the Middle East. Now, it’s become clear to the entire world, including the people running the United States government, that America cannot maintain its empire for much longer and will soon retreat back to North America.
JMG (no. 142) “I’ll consider a post on [future Asia-Pacific climatic changes] down the road.”
I would be very interested to read that post! If only there were months with like, three extra Wednesdays…
On the Shadow, the character actually began as a radio character–not a crime-fighting hero, but a mysterious narrator–for “Detective Story Hour,” whose stories were taken from “Detective Story Magazine.” Of course he didn’t “look” like anything at that point, he was just a voice. When the narrator proved more popular than the stories themselves, Gibson was hired to write pulp novellas featuring him for the same publisher, and so invented a backstory and mission for him. It is debatable whether he or the illustrators had more influence over the Shadow’s visual appearance–the prose does describe most of the well-known features of his face and costume. (I looked into all this years ago, out of curiosity about whether Jung might have somehow encountered the character. )
Regarding your point on field mice, it makes me think of a 1981 book After Man: A Zoology of the Future, envisioning a world 50 million years in the future. A disproportionate share of the creatures then are descendants of small lifeforms now.
I am curious Mr. Greer as to what you speculate will be the most common languages in the world around the time of Star’s Reach.
Re: Peter Ward
His point seems to be that biologists of a future sapient species could sequence the DNA of those millions of species, and conclude they all descend from a common ancestor that lived a few hundred million years ago, despite fossils showing that multicelluar life existed long before mice. Also, he thinks that as the Sun brightens as it burns through its remaining hydrogen fuel quicker, the planet will become too hot for life. And the supercontinent geologists predict will form in a few hundred million years will leave less niches availiable for organisms living then– one supercontinent (mostly uninhabitable desert) surrounded by one ocean, (he thought it will likely be stagnant), after a series of extinction events during the creation of the supercontinent as shallow seas disappeared and the lands aridified as they got cut off from bodies of water. There would also be a Great American Interchamge on steroids where better adapted invasive species will wipe out species in the same ecological niches that cannot compete.
Chuaquin (no. 147), I agree that the effects of the Hormuz closure will soon be unmistakable. On Buddhism, there is a very ancient trend in Indic thought–not just Buddhist–that minimizes the role of gods, in favor of the power of ceremonies (which can bind even the gods). But of course gods (or godlike beings) are now well integrated into both religions, which is fine with me–we don’t necessarily have to go back to the original form of every religion. Western Buddhists have a more difficult time figuring out where they fit in the tradition, they’re best understood as part of a long tradition of liberal Western religiosity.
Zemi (no. 154) So–the results are replicable!
Curious Fellow (no. 180) And now we have the Manipur crisis.
I thought they’d be tearing down MLK statues over his involvement in rape, but no–they’re treating it the same way they’re dealing with Michael Jackson’s pedophilia.
JMG (no. 215) ” As for Anatolia, it has no land borders facing solidly Christian territories. ”
The Ottomans faced Russia, and the border did move back and forth (e.g. Kars oblast). There was almost a Reconquista!
Anonymous (no. 162) “Also, I see a lot of people on the internet talking about a ‘Zionist Occupied Government’ ”
Thus spake Wikipedia: “The specific term ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ was coined by the American neo-Nazi Eric Thomson in a 1976 article.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist_Occupation_Government_conspiracy_theory
a) Tyler (#175),
I suspect that your timing is right, but one issue I think will cause a ton of headaches if it turns out that the thing that breaks under the strain is the certificate authorities and thus HTTPS is that an awful lot of software updates are sent over HTTPS. It might take a day to sort that out, but there are plenty of ways to handle it (such as the certificate authorities configuring their servers to refuse all traffic unrelated to patching software to not need HTTPS where it’s not needed)
I also disagree that it is not necessary. There are at least three good reasons to want HTTPS for sites like ecosophia.net. The first is that it makes HTTPS more secure. There is no such thing as perfect encryption. There is only ever “Enough of a hassle to not be worth breaking”. The more sites like ecosophia.net, which does not provide much useful information, the less useful breaking it becomes, because you’d still need to sort through it. It’s akin to taking a stack of needles and covering it with hay: the more hay you can add, the less valuable a method to get part of the stack becomes.
The second problem is that HTTP can be tampered with. Say you send a request to ecosophia.net. Any telecom company between you and ecosophia.net can insert an advertisement if it is sent over HTTP; or remove part of it; or do any of a galaxy of nefarious things to the site, without you being able to see it. Since this sort of thing is becoming a lot easier thanks to The Technology Which Must Not Be Discussed, there is a very real issue with trusting any unencrypted traffic over the internet these days.
The third problem is the problem of data gathering. This is especially true of comments, and I’ll use myself as an example. I use an email with my last name, which plus certain biographical details I’ve shared (born in Canada, lived in Hawai’i, worked cyber security) will almost certainly allow any large organization who cares to do so to identify me. This is a problem when one of them is the telecom company that caused me a world class headache not long ago when I (very briefly) moved back to Canada by canceling my phone rather than put it on hold.
There are also people who I have cut out of my life who do not respect that decision, who would pay good money to find out my approximate location. So at the very least, comments should be HTTPS, and I’d say that given just how easy it is to make disturbingly accurate inferences from not much data, that making HTTPS the standard is a good call.
It is still really worth stressing as well that the problem is not even human traffic: it’s the bots enabled by the Technology Which Must Not Be Discussed which are straining the internet to the breaking point. I for one would much rather see policies put n place to bring that under control, but I am not optimistic.
b) On the topic of Neanderthals, I’ve sometimes wondered if they were nocturnal. It would explain why Europeans face issues with sunburns (which are rare to unheard of for other groups), and an unusually large percentage of us have pretty good night vision and suffer photo sensitivity during the day: our bodies are less well adapted to daytime life than most humans, but better adapted to nighttime life. It would also explain why Neanderthals possessed such large eyes, which is among the most distinctive aspect of their skulls.
c) On the topic of finances, I find it fascinating how few people seem to even factor in the cost of their cars. According to the AAA, cars cost people an average of 1,025 dollars a month*. This is a lot of money, and it helps explain why I am able to go out to local bars/restaurants several times a week, rent a relatively nice place, and still save money on an income most Americans consider woefully inadequate: I do not own a car.
I find it more than a little disturbing that so many people who are struggling to make ends meet do not seem to consider how much their car is costing them, and especially when it’s happening in an area like where I live, which has pretty good public transit.
*https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/breaking-down-the-cost-of-car-ownership
Anonymous 159
Oh man, could I ever get going about ubiquitous “Israel First” U.S. congress-critters + PrezTrump? but JMG wouldn’t approve, so I shall keep much of that unwritten.
However, I will ask a wee question: I don’t understand, AT ALL, why, U.S. congress-critters and PrezTrump refuse to be “America First,” but they aren’t. WTH?
Congress-critters and PrezTrump, definitely, without a doubt, clearly, no denying it, transparently, are “Israel First.” They are more than willing to throw the American people under the bus. What’s up with that?
There is no other subject that gets me more hot and bothered.
💨🤷🏽♀️🇺🇸💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Phutatorius 204
> Charlie Kirk’s … AI deepfake
For a few months prior to Charlie Kirk’s death, I researched him and judged him benign. I liked him; I supported him. I still support his organization.
Does this mean that you think Charlie Kirk did NOT GET ASSASSINATED (we have AI images of the act), and he is alive and well today, only in hiding?
🙋🏼♀️Ooh Ooh. I luvluv Charlie Kirk. I want him back. Can I see an arty-fish-el ill-telligence version of him giving a speech on-stage❓
💨🇺🇸💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Atmospheric River 219
————
Silicon Valley > Five years ago, I sold house and moved out of that pit of vipers. Conversation:
California: “How much you make?”
Me: “A hundred dollars.”
California: “Fine. I get ninety-nine. I leave you a dollar. You okay wid dat?”
Me: “Fine. As long as the sun is my friend.”
————
Seattle: No go.
————
Denver: It’s alright. I would vote for here. Benign. Get used to thin air.
💨🏔️🌄💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@earthworm re: drawing as meditation, dancing magic squares
It drives me crazy that I can’t find the reference, but I remember looking at a woodcut image at some point where a mage had drawn a 4×4 magic square on a floor, and was stepping on each of the 16 numbers in order, while other mages looked on — A sort of Medieval Twister, in a way!
My own meditations on Magic Squares that include Geomantic Figures (what I’ve gotten around to writing about, anyway) are here; https://emmanuelg.dreamwidth.org/tag/magic+diamond
under the search terms ‘geomantic + magic + diamonds.’ The written material is all on a single ‘pan-magic’ or ‘magic carpet’ square, #0105 in the Cafe64 numbering scheme and, to me, tells a story about the transition from being locked into a ‘fate’ to finding a ‘destiny.’ Other 4×4 magic squares have many, quite different patterns when you link the lines on them.
Why not experiment with dancing one? Lay out a magic square on the floor, and try stepping on the numbers in order, and see what you get–
Re LeGrand #220
“Just because people may be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” does not mean they, or their works, are utterly useless, or without value.”
Isn’t the mage the result of the magic they do?
If someone turns out to be a bad person, I don’t trust their teachings.
–bk
“Eartthworm, well, her writings are out of copyright now, so this doesn’t surprise me.”
It surprised me! Easily surprised I guess.
“Crowley’s babblings have no place in her work, though.”
Ceremonial magic is not my thing – it just struck me as weird to find someone else’s work at the end of Dion Fortune’s novel – like going up in an elevator and just before reaching the top floor someone lets off a massive fart that rattles the senses.
I was wrong about it not having any publishing info:
Copyright 2023 Bibliotech Press All rights reserved ISBN: 979-8-88830-384-9
Johnny #192
Yes, it sounds similar but with different areas of focus.
“It seems like you want to use drawing in a more ritual/symbolic way”
In some ways yes. The drawing is a mind-map but not the territory; just a very simplified representation that is a single whole – the elements of the drawing appear separate but are actually parts of a single ‘engine’ where, for example, working with virtues and vices is akin to adjusting the fuel mix and seeing how that affects performance.
It’s not that the drawing is an accurate representation – more like a climbing frame for the mind. Like it’s the process of climbing that is important, not what I am climbing or wearing to do it.
“I’m curious what you find anyway.”
Ha, me too!
“Good luck, and report back!”
It might take a while, I’m still in the early stages… and I should probably give JMG a break from having to post my ramblings – I’ve often wondered if his fielding all the questions and comments is an exercise in patience or penance!
Cheers, and good luck to you too, Johnny.
@ Pygmycory #208
Thank you for your poem. 🙂
And it is true that the priorities most people have will not align 100% with the priorities that their rulers have. But if one of those priorities is to “go along to get along” (which is often a useful stopgap until you are effectively pushed upon the hill you really WILL die on) then rulers will quickly gain an appearance of generally shared conviction among the ruled that is barely thicker than an onionskin.
Personally I always liked the Terry Pratchett quote that goes as follows:
“The people of Lancre wouldn’t dream of living in anything other than a monarchy. They’d done so for thousands of years and knew that it worked. But they’d also found that it didn’t do to pay too much attention to what the King wanted, because there was bound to be another king along in forty years or so and he’d be certain to want something different and so they’d have gone to all that trouble for nothing.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7864435-the-people-of-lancre-wouldn-t-dream-of-living-in-anything
Your poem demonstrates a perfectly “Lancrian” pragmatism, if you don’t mind me saying. 🙂
@ Atmostpheric River # 212
My impression of George Monbiot is that he is a tech geek, and whenever he casts his eye on matters such as farming or energy, what he “sees” is technology that governments should help disseminate, rather than possibilities available to local users to work with.
Since you also mentioned Rocket Stoves in a previous comment I’d like to mention a recent Rocket Stove purchase I’ve personally made. (And less this come across as a plug, I have no connection to this company, I simply appreciate well made products.)
The product is made by a German company called Petromax, and is very sturdy and well made, for a rather reasonable price. I certainly recommend it to any readers from the EU (no customs considerations) who are considering shoring up their own independence from fossil fuel shortages which are coming down the line.
It is actually currently onsale and includes a free fry pan accessory… https://petromax.com/products/rocket-stove-wrought-iron-pan-24cm
You are? My apologies, I was under the impression that you didn’t watch videos at all.
—David P.
Cynthia Christie #216
Huh. I seem to recall discovering what “terrific” really meant while reading Sherlock Holmes stories, which would have been between a century and a century and a half ago. On the other hand, Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary from 1913 says:
Awesome is similarly given under the original meaning. It seems that the two words shifted in meaning around the same time.
—David P.
Northwind Grandma @ 232: “Does this mean that you think Charlie Kirk did NOT GET ASSASSINATED (we have AI images of the act), and he is alive and well today, only in hiding?”
No, my comment didn’t mean any of those things. Just that I didn’t believe the particular video that I watched showed what really happened. My first clue was the sound track, which seemed deliberately manipulative. As to the CK assassination, I find it curious that the rifle bullet didn’t exit his body, and that we’ve never heard if a ballistics test was done on it to match it to the supposed murder weapon. Or, have those questions been answered and I’ve just not noticed? They do seem like obvious questions to ask. Remember the “magic bullet” from the JFK assassination? I think we have Arlen Specter to thank for that theory. Whatta guy, that Arlen!
Roberto Mathiesen#197
I am an awful but entusiastic student of the philosophic materialism (Gustavo Bueno; School of Oviedo). This philosophic system is aimed to the building of a map of the the reality based in materialisic premises by the mean of the aplication of a cycle of decomposition of complex ideas by analysis in simplest ideas which fit with the materialisic premises, and recomposition by synthesis of these simplest ideas with the aim of rebuilt the initial complex idea . If this process fails the initial idea will be considerated metaphisic and despised. Acording with this procedure most of the ideas which there are in our minds are metaphisic, including the standard ideas of Catalonia and Spain.
For to try a study of this question based in some notions of philosophical materialism that I hope to undestand, is necessary to resort to the concept of plotinian definition wich is aimed to thinks someted to evolution, like nations. And wich is constituited by a generator nucleus, a body and a path. Acording with this can be said that the nucleus generator of Catalonia is the military oposition to the Islam and the Frank Empire (C VIIII), this obliged to the County of Barcelona to be vassal sucessively of the Frank Emperor (801), The Emir of Cordoba (908) and , finally,the King of Aragón (1285) , kingdom wich eventually concerted an union with the kingdom of Castilla, whose leaders had a plan for his world expansion with the aim of to concert an alliance with the Chinese Empire for to envolve and destroy the Ottoman Empire.
So all the present speaking spanish countries and phylipines are the rest of the shipwrek of a castilian project of catolic and hispanic world’s supremacy. And the ancient Catalonia County is a part of the ancient Aragon Crown, being the rest: Kingdom of Aragon, Provence, Kingdom of Mallorca, Kingdom of Valencia, Kingdom of Naples and Sicily and Kingdom of Sardinia.
There is a novel about Catalonia in the year 1000, titled ” The Catedral of the Sea” (Ildefonso Falcones ) wich probably would dislike to your wife for its rawness.
JMG, yes, I do understand that we have a fundamentally different understanding of the origins of Christianity. Jesus lived in the place least given to a belief that God can have a son and that this son can die (as C.S. Lewis remarks somewhere). I am not saying that the various books of the New Testament (which I accept were written in the 1st century) are devoid of influences from the philosophies and other religions of the time (especially the Gospel of John), but that such influences are much less prominent than in the writings of prominent, Greek-speaking Christians of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. I know we certainly won’t come to an agreement on that point!
“However, I will ask a wee question: I don’t understand, AT ALL, why, U.S. congress-critters and PrezTrump refuse to be “America First,” but they aren’t. WTH?”
There were some America First congresspeople like Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene but Trump forced them to retire or backed Zionist opponents who then defeated them in the primaries.
“Meanwhile Congress just signed another law that will increase the American military’s integration with Israel’s military, which includes among other things sharing the American military’s data with the Israeli military:
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-us-military/”
This is why Congress is going to lose power in the near future like John Michael Greer’s astrological predictions say. Cause Americans don’t want a legislature that betrays American interests for foreign interests. If Congress remains Zionist and Israel first, it is likely easier for the American people to just bypass or overthrow Congress and replace it with new forms of government that actually work for the interests of the American people, than to try to kick every single Zionist politician out of Congress and replace it with non-ZIonist politicians.
Nice graph, or scary graph depending on you take it and how much you enjoy that sort of red.
https://isaiprofitable.com/
I wonder if the newer Uranian influences, which govern sexual minorities, might help mitigate some of that damage. I also wonder if a Uranian working of some kind might help in that manner.
I think here of a section from Moon Magic by Fortune where she talks about the mage being a yeast to add ferment to the culture.
The Zionism issue in the United States is largely a generational divide. Boomers are largely Zionist and generations younger than the Boomers are largely anti-Zionist. Since Boomers are currently a huge voting population in the United States it is not surprising to see American politicians (who are largely Boomers themselves) pander to Boomers rather than to the younger generations. We see this on other issues as well (see no property taxes for Boomers) that the current crop of American politicians support Boomers over younger generations.
“I wonder if the newer Uranian influences, which govern sexual minorities, might help mitigate some of that damage. I also wonder if a Uranian working of some kind might help in that manner.”
The problem is that the Grand Mutation in 2020 has Uranus retrograde and in its fall so very likely we will see growing intolerance of sexual minorities while the astrological chart for the Grand Mutation of 2020 is still active.
@Atmospheric River, re Split Systems
I have a ten year old one, it runs all the time, and still works fine. You are absolutely right about the AC issue. We never had air conditioning in this house (in Vermont) but now we do. That said, we rarely use it in the summer, except sometimes for dehumidifying.
I can’t say about the reliability of he new ones, but they are super efficient and make heat at very low temperatures. Also, for those so inclined, you can buy “pre-charged” systems and install them yourself. They are very inexpensive.
LeGrand, I certainly grant that Crowley has been misrepresented by quite a few people, though this has gone in both directions — many of his fans seem to have just as difficult a time with the facts of his life as the people who’ve turned him into a punching bag. That said, I think it’s important to remember that Crowley was not, let’s say, a novelist or a painter. He claimed to teach a system of training that would turn ordinary human beings into superhumanly wise, powerful, and self-actualizing beings. Thus I don’t think it’s at all irrelevant to a fair judgment of the value of his work to point out that it didn’t succeed in his case. Any such system stands or falls by the quality of its longtime practitioners, and Crowley’s life of self-inflicted failure and routine maltreatment of other people, it seems to me, casts serious doubt on the value of his entire body of work. Of course your mileage may vary, but that’s how I see it.
J.L.Mc12, I haven’t gotten to Ballard yet!
Atmospheric, er, please reread what I wrote. It’s “return of the repressed,” not “return of the oppressed.” The point is that many women, in embracing the feminist ideal of an independent career woman who dominates her surroundings, have clearly repressed a lot of emotions pulling them in the other direction. That’s why Fifty Shades of Grey became a bestseller among exactly that demographic, why romance novels involving abduction and rape are equally popular among that same demographic, and why the opposition to Trump has become so weirdly sexualized. Did you catch the news story a little while back about crowds of female protesters flinging their dildos en masse at various symbols of the Trump regime? It doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to figure out what that means. I’ve come to think that a great many women angrily protesting against Trump secretly want him to bend them over his knee and spank them to orgasm…
Ambrose, yes, I know. I wrote about the genesis of “The Shadow” in a post a while back:
https://ecosophia.net/what-evil-lurks/
Gunstone, I remember that book! Its predator rats and whale-sized penguins strike me as very plausible. As for languages, if history’s anything to go by, we’ll be in the middle of a period when dozens of new languages are coming into being, and which will become widespread won’t be sorted out for generations yet.
Patrick, sure, but that’s effectively true now. Most of the lineages of multicellular animals that thrived during the Cambrian explosion left no heirs at the end of that period, well before Ward’s putative golden age. All birds trace their origins back to a common ancestor in the Mesozoic, all mammals likewise, and you don’t have to go back that far before those two lineages blur together. Certainly, once the sun’s heat rises high enough, life will end, but we’ve got something like a billion years before that happens: that is to say, almost twice as long as the history of multicellular life forms so far on Earth. For the next half billion years or so, slowly rising average temperatures will simply make more of the planet a jungle — and jungles, as you’re doubtless aware, are full of complex niches and intricately interdependent species. Thus I think Ward is jumping the gun by a few hundred million years at least.
Ambrose, I well remember when talk about ZOG, the so-called “Zionist occupation government,” was purely an affectation of violent extremist groups such as the Bruders Schweigen. I find it very disquieting that it’s become so much more widespread now.
Earthworm, that’s perhaps the most fragrant metaphor I’ve ever encountered for Crowley’s work, and I don’t think it’s inappropriate. 😉 My late friend Corby Ingold once had quite a few of us clutching our sides by reading Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan” in the high-pitched, nasal, obviously titillated voice of an English curate; it’s the one presentation of that particular poem I’ve ever found moving.
David, I take in the very occasional video when no transcripts are available. I dislike them, but sometimes it’s necessary.
Aldarion, no, doubtless we won’t, but I can’t resist pointing out that Judea was heavily Hellenized long before the time of Jesus and the idea of a mystery cult centered on the mortal son of a god can be found wherever Hellenic culture spread. Are you forgetting that two of the original apostles, Luke and Philip, have Greek names? Furthermore, and crucially, Christianity caught on primarily among Gentiles, not among Jews. The people who turned the scattered first- and secondhand reports of the life of Jesus into a theology, constructed a ritual around them, and cherrypicked a few out of the many accounts of his life as the first proto-canon of Christian scripture, belonged to the same half-Hellenic, half-Aramaic polyglot culture that celebrated the mystery rites of Adonis and Attis.
Siliconguy, thanks for this.
Justin, it’s possible that something of the sort might help, but as Anon pointed out, we’ve got at least twenty years of movement the other way to get past first.
Robert M. # 197:
I won’t deny there’s a strong nationalist tendence in Catalonia to ask for their own state, but (ahem) after the bizarre and farcical referendum attemp in 2017, people support to nationalist/secessionist parties has falling to some extent, so nowadays there’s a slight but not despicable majority of Catalonian voters who don’t like secessionist parties. So do the math. Nationalists/secessionist won’t disappear next years, but I bet it will pass some time before they will start again to pretend they represent “all” the Catalonians (ahem).
——————————————————————
The possible new Reconquista topic:
It’s true Islamized Turks have lived in Anatolia until the present, but you mustn’t forget the ancient Ottoman Empire conquered Hungary and near managed to surrender Vienna two times…but finally, the Christian countries expelled Turks from East Europe, though they are even today some nominally Muslim ethnic people in Bosnia and Albania. So do the math.
Hi John,
Any thoughts on the claims that aliens have crashed on earth and the major powers are trying to “reverse engineer” alien technology – https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-15859413/UFO-confidential-CIA-China-aliens-JONATHAN-CAPLAN.html. Is there any possibility that these claims are true?
As for a Islamic takeover of much of Europe, I agree that its looking likely (and interestingly increasingly coming up in conversations with regular folk).
“In Vienna, for instance, 42 per cent of all pupils at state schools are now Muslim, while in Berlin, Hamburg, and other parts of Germany more than half of all school pupils are migrants or the children of migrants (like parts of the UK).”
Its looking like over the next generation a massive city versus countryside/small towns divide across most of western Europe (with only a few exceptions, Portugal being one as a place with very few Muslims).
After that, who knows, clearly a growing Muslim demographic across the cities risks a civil war or some type of Lebanese style balkanisation of states.
A question for you, do you think the specific demographics of the UK, where you see thanks to the Empire and EU, lots of non-Muslim minority groups (e.g. Hindu Indians, Chinese, eastern Europeans, South Africans, Latin Americans and non-Muslim Black populations) a anti-Islamist mass movement that joins the native population in expelling hard-core Muslims from the UK.
“For the next half billion years or so, slowly rising average temperatures will simply make more of the planet a jungle — and jungles, as you’re doubtless aware, are full of complex niches and intricately interdependent species. Thus I think Ward is jumping the gun by a few hundred million years at least.”
Unless a new supercontinent forms in which case much of the Earth’s surface will be dominated by hot, arid deserts that made the megadeserts of Pangaea in the Permian and Triassic look like an oasis (due to a combination of even more continental crust to get in the way of rain arriving combined with a hotter sun).
I have to admit though that I do find it rather stupid the common image among climate change alarmists of an Earth with thinned out continents that are all or mostly desert. For example, David Wallace-Wells in an infamous article “The Inhabitable Earth” predicted that New York City would have a climate like Bahrain by the end of the Century (ignoring the fact that deserts hardly ever form on the East Coasts of continents).
In reality, the Earth becomes dryer on average in a cold period due to more water being locked up in ice caps, not to mention more greenhouse gases. Europe, for example, had dust storms during the last Glacial Maximum.
Emmanuel #234
You are so far ahead of me in considering number patterns in magic squares that I think I just saw you disappear over the horizon!
This did stand out to me:
“Note that the paths all overlap, to some extent. Some paths are only touched by the end of another path. Others have a segment of overlap, and others cross entirely over another path. Because of their connections, it is possible to find a path from any box to any other box, traveling along the paths. Notice also that each single colored pathway crosses over three boxes. We can think of these as paths in space.”
I need to work out the drawing meditation as a separate thing first as I reckon that will give me the foundation to translate it to movement; but if I try to think of movement too soon, I’ll be ‘guessing’ and applying what I want rather than what the meditation calls for.
The Pheonix Diamond is nice imagery and I wonder if whatever square one finds oneself in, the next move is determined by the relationship one path has with others… but I’d need to spend some time trying to understand things and relationships… so many things!
In the drawing meditation it’s looking at energy states (emotional states of being) that mirrors the stages of consciousness trying to widen and deepen – a personal version of mastering the opposites because until that is done, it’s like getting blown about like a leaf in the wind.
Do you know if emotional states and flows have ever been mapped to numbers or figures? Could a number have two or more potential states or polarities or is that even conceivable? e.g. vices and virtues are not so much opposites but depend on ‘relationships of states’ and the point from which they are observed.
“Lay out a magic square on the floor, and try stepping on the numbers in order, and see what you get”
I may have to try that… but not yet 😉
@JMG
Maybe Ward wants life to go extinct (a few years after that article, he reacted against the Gaia Hypothesis by proposing the Medea Hypothesis that the activities of life make the planet less suitable for life) and is using the earliest hypothetical date for when the Earth becomes uninhabitable for complex life.
“Ambrose, I well remember when talk about ZOG, the so-called “Zionist occupation government,” was purely an affectation of violent extremist groups such as the Bruders Schweigen. I find it very disquieting that it’s become so much more widespread now.”
Probably shows as well how much legitimacy the American government has lost in the past few years that Americans are willing to say such things on social media. I wouldn’t be surprised if Americans decide to overthrow its government in the near future.
“Ambrose, I well remember when talk about ZOG, the so-called “Zionist occupation government,” was purely an affectation of violent extremist groups such as the Bruders Schweigen. I find it very disquieting that it’s become so much more widespread now.”
Yeah, it’s more widespread right now because you have a bunch of English speaking Lebanese, Palestinians, and Iranians on the Internet pissed off that Israel is currently committing war crimes against their people and that America is still helping the Israelis. They don’t give a f*** that the term was invented by Neo-Nazis since the Nazis never had the terrible connotations in the Middle East and much of the Global South that they did in America and Western Europe.
@scotlyn #238
I own a portable rocket stove just like the one you linked to, different brand. So they are avaiabe in the USA too. It is a back up cooking source, I have used it. During a summer power outage ( Utiity turned it off on purpose due to ” fire weather” they do this less now) I cooked a dal in my solar oven, which I use routinely often daily for half the year, then brought that portable rocket cooking stove out and made naan on a cast Iron pan on it to go with the Dal. Yes, I cooked outside with sticks during fire weather, it is well contained. I have also used it years ago a time or two to keep the large pot heated for dipping culled chickens to loosen the feathers, an aquantaince was over harvesting my excess. You could carefully waterbath can, but I wouldnt pressure can, maybe if I had a smaller pressure canner, but that is a long time and a good amount of sticks to sit there for an hour and a half keeping a steady heat !
It is good to have a few ways to meet essential needs, and a cooking rocket stove is nice. They are heavy. You can also just get a few cement blocks and build one in place in the yard, cheaper and easier to balance a large pot, but then not portable.
Monbiots book will go back onto a free book shelf in town now that I know what he is about of course
The left is going to rehabilitate Hitler and the Nazis and paint Hitler as an anticolonialist who tried to fight against the “Zionist ruled” imperialist colonial powers of Britain and America. This “Zionist Occupied Government” business is just yet another step down the line of the left becoming anti-Semitic Nazis.
The scary thing for American Jews is that anti-Semitic Nazi leftists actually have a chance at power in the United States because Trump failed to reform anything while in power. America might have a leftist Fred Halliot soon to persecute American Jews.
@ JMG
Thanks for the clarification. I had rather thought since I was super tired last night that I must have been missing something obvious. Yep, REpressed ! But now I have an image of these older women and Trump, yep, likely what hey secretly want, however, like Jean Carroll who obviously had a more out fantasy, they are not his type….. I did not hear about the dildo flinging. In no way other than RePression would that make any sense, because how could that be framed as protest ? Here, please Mr Trump, we want to give you sex toys ? Or are worshiping with objects signifying his masculinity and virility, they realy do not get symbolism at all. Very weird.
“Its looking like over the next generation a massive city versus countryside/small towns divide across most of western Europe (with only a few exceptions, Portugal being one as a place with very few Muslims).”
That’s pretty bad for any European who wants Europe to not become Islamic. Remember that the Roman Empire became Christian first by converting the cities to Christianity while the countryside / small towns remained pagan, and then the Christians gained political power and persecuted the pagans in the countryside / small towns.
A thought provoking article from an optimist;
https://www.thefp.com/p/tyler-cowen-seven-ways-to-avoid-losing?_sc=OTQzMjQwNSMyMTQwNDM%3D&utm_campaign=260347&utm_source=cross-post&r=y1ef&utm_medium=email
“That’s a messy job. The nature of what you do changes all the time, and it changes with circumstances. Much of the value you add comes from ideas and performance on the spot, rather than mastering a regularized task in advance. The opposite of a messy job is when you sit at a computer terminal and repeat the same action every day.”
Most of my career even in the navy consisted of “do whatever it takes to keep the plant running smoothly.” The civilian version is called Process Engineer. There is no degree for it in college. Like the article says it’s extremely difficult to even explain because what you do depends on what is happening. You have to understand the entire process and the ins and outs of everything. (That’s what getting your dolphins signifies in the submarine service.)
The other interesting point is testing. The AI generates shale at an incredible rate, but what is valid? Hallucinations are epic. So someone with a real world brain is going to have to go through the spewed output and search for the valid notions and test them.
This has been going on for a while in chemistry. Expert systems (as earlier form of AI that was all the buzz for awhile) could go through the large stack of Beilstein books and give you a hopefully optimal path from chemical inputs to desired output chemical. But you still have to test that it actually works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beilstein_database
This all assumes that the whole AI notion doesn’t implode of course.
It’s also worth noting that Google’s advertisers are annoyed with Google because many of the lookups are answered in the AI Summary and in that case your coveted eyeball does not look down to the text the advertiser paid for. Did Google not not realize that was going to happen or did Google not care they were going to shaft their advertisers?
I saw in passing that Facebook was going to start charging for their “products”, maybe the advertisers there are complaining too.
But for now the S&P 500 keeps screaming higher on less and less. Google ‘Dell stock price’ and hit the year to date (YTD) button if you need a chuckle.
Relevant to the discussion of Neanderthals, I ran across an article some years ago which suggested that Neanderthals may have been terrifying, and also that they may have used modern humans for food … something like Polyphemus in the Odyssey, but with two eyes and not just one.
You can find the article here: https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/when-orcs-were-real
I’m not qualified to judge the archaeological argument, but I pass it along for those who are interested. If this thesis were true, it would be plausible that modern humans might well have banded together to exterminate the Neanderthals, in the same way that we might try to defend against any other predator. Of course this idea is speculative.
@BorealBear #174,
I think you touch on the real explanation when you talk about heroics. I think the people we are discussing—the Americans who seem to hate America—dearly want to be heroes, fighting valiantly against evil, but they find that the world has too few credible enemies. In an earlier century, when the country was smaller and weaker, they could have joined the army or struck out to homestead the wilderness, and they would have found enemies aplenty. But for various reasons, none of those options appeals to them these days.
I wrote a short piece about this phenomenon a couple of years ago: https://hoseaspatio.blogspot.com/2023/10/taught-to-hate-america.html.
@Anselmo (#242):
Well, I am definitely not a philosophical materialist. As I view the matter, every one of us lives in two worlds, external (material) and internal (perceptual), simultaneously; and the internal world has a much greater input into our actions than the external one does.
The two distinct worlds arise because our multitude of senses–way more than just the traditional five–do not map the external world to us directly, but only send neurochemical input to our brains, which then create elaborate pseudo-maps of the external (material) world for us to use as we try to survive in the face of its very many means of killing us. These internal pseudo-maps are nothing more than tools of survival, and have evolved on Darwinian principles only to the extent that they give us sufficient means for our species’ continued survival.
In the external world, if I walk off the edge of a high cliff, I will fall to my death on sharp rocks below, whether or not I have perceived that cliff or am aware of it. Unawareness will not save me from death.
In my internal world, however, I will continue to walk forward,or change my path, depending not only on whether I have perceived the cliff, but also on a range of other factors which can be simplified down to whether of not I wish to keep on living, or (for whatever reason) I am ready to die. In this world, individual decisions are hardly ever just rational ones, but have other components as well. And this, I assert, is what it means to be fully human, and how it should always be for humans.
All this has strong consequences for history and geopolitics: people decide to fight and win, to fight and die, to resist passively, to surrender, to commit suicide, etc. etc., on the basis of their internal worlds–to them, in that moment, their external world is far less relevant than their internal one.
And people’s internal worlds are very often constructed, at least in part, by the stories they tell themselves, by the myths that give meaning to their lives. Internal stories, myths, etc., are the grounds on which people choose how to live and how to die: external, material factors hardly enter much into such decisions. Indeed, we are (IMHO) by evolution “hard-wired” to work this way.
So the case of Catalonia provides me with a simple example of all this: my wife’s Catalan relatives have internalized a story telling how Catalans are not, and never have been. Spaniards in any sense whatever. Their closest linguiostic relatives are thought to be, and–by the external-world “facts” of historical linguistics–are the speakers of Provençal in France, not the speakers of Castilian in Spain. And the Provençal speakers have been colonized and subjugated by France, just as the speakers of Catalan have been by Spain.
This insight that humans live simultaneously in two worlds, not simply in the material universe, is immensely important to understand world geopolitics, including its current form. People are not all alike, with the same set of motives and desires, acting on the same impulses in response to the same stimuli. It is our abject failure to understand this, to take differences in peoples’ internal worlds into account, that has landed us in the aeons-long awful mess that is world history, and in the present messes that governments are vainly trying to manage in Central Europe, in West Asia and in the Caribbean.
[rant on] We are such a stupid species! Aristotle may once have defined Man as the “rational animal.” I prefer to define Man as the “rationalizing animal”–“rational” just doesn’t cut it for me here! [rant off]
@ Cynthia – if I may
“c, vowel, g, vowel, r” if you do not specify the vowels can certainly cover quite different Spanish words.
If the vowels in question are O and E, then it can mean “grab” or “take” or “pick up” or “catch” (none of which are entirely unadjacent to “carry”)…
If the vowels in question are A and A, then it definitely means “to shale”, and references to defecation are commonly used as rude epithets in any language.
Perhaps there is a good reason to include vowels when writing a word. 😉
“Yeah, it’s more widespread right now because you have a bunch of English speaking Lebanese, Palestinians, and Iranians on the Internet pissed off that Israel is currently committing war crimes against their people and that America is still helping the Israelis. They don’t give a f*** that the term was invented by Neo-Nazis since the Nazis never had the terrible connotations in the Middle East and much of the Global South that they did in America and Western Europe.”
It’s even more widespread than that. There are anti-Zionist Jews who are using the term “Zionist occupied government” today.
David P: Interesting. I wonder what caused that. I wouldn’t be shocked to see “fantastic” join that list. At first glance, it would seem that some meaning was lost, but then we don’t lack for ways to express what terrific and awesome formerly meant.
Old Steve: Regarding this whole Amelia thing, I find that my general sympathy for the people who think their culture is worth preserving and defending to be at odds with my disdain and disgust towards all things AI, although it’s interesting to know about and I thank you for bringing it to my attention. I’m agnostic as to whether there are spirits involved with that.
Mr. Greer .. “flinging dildos” .. humm, sounds like good name for a neo-retro gurrrl punk band, complete with a chorus section made up of hunky, chunky muscle men, ALL donning Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban face masks. What’s Not to, um .. LOVE, right?
@ Chuaquin #193
“Are you writing your ideas from a philosophy you like, from a belief you’ve got or from a mystic experience you’ve lived a time ago?(or a blend of these sources of knowledge).”
Thank you! You ask an intriguing question with all seriousness, to which I would like to give the respect of a considered answer.
That said, the fullest and most complete answer will be “I don’t know.” I really don’t know! 🙂
However, I will make some educated guesses, and venture to take this question somewhere useful.
I am being very honest when I say that I have no idea how my mind works, or where its influences come from. Most of it happens in a deep place to which my conscious awareness has no way to view.
What I will say is that my “method” for trying to work things out is to notice when a thought or idea, whether it comes from somewhere unknown within myself, or somewhere unknown outside myself, strikes me as anomalous, or a “bad fit” with whatever else is already there. The challenge for me is then… how to reconcile these two sets of ideas which seem to conflict so that both can be made to be “at home” with each other within my mind. Sometimes, I cannot do this, and in that case I gently “invite” the thought or idea that I cannot [yet?] reconcile with all the others to go back outside of my mind and suggest that it visit me again another time.
I have no experience of alchemy, but based on some of JMG’s posts I gather that there is a “solve” phase and a “coagula” phase. In the first (I am guessing) we make distinctions between this and that, carefully comparing this to that – how do they complement each other, how do they clash? When you have understood each distinct idea, then you can begin to bring them together again, reconciling them in deeper ways, and gaining a fuller, deeper “thought field” that allows these different thoughts to contribute to a wider ecology in which they can all live.
While I have no idea at all of where different ideas come from (there are many Mysteries, after all), I do sometimes get a strong sense that a certain idea is “wrong” and (for me, at this time) unreconcilable with my current awareness and collected experience. I do not say that such an idea is “wrong” of itself, only that it is not for me, not at this time.
You may know that I was raised as a Christian, in the evangelical “born again” tradition. My parents are people I am very happy to have been raised by. I was loved and well treated.** And yet, their Christian teachings very often hit those “wrong notes” for me from a young age. For example when explaining to me the concept of this world, and this body, being so “lost” and so “tainted” by Adam’s sin, to the extent that it will have to [eventually] be destroyed and replaced with a better world and a better body.
This idea never “sat well” with my profound and unshakeable sense of being “at home” in this world and in this body. There is a great deal more I could say, but I will stop here and say, that most of my musings arise from this place of departure between my own world-domiciled sensibility and my parents’ world-estranged sensibility.
I feel profoundly “at home” in this world, and am basically busy figuring out, as best I can, what are the lessons of this time and this place which my eternal self is desirous to learn.
**I say this to emphasise that our disagreements, while real, are in no way personal
@Gunstone re: #228
Not JMG and JMG has already answered, but if usual trends hold and I’m not mistaken, the linguistic situation in America circa AD 2400 will likely resemble the linguistic situation in the Romance world circa AD 600 – dialects notably diverging, some having become mutually intelligible. Likely some more Hispanicisms will have entered the various Englishes, more of them the further south you go (and conversely more Anglicisms will have entered the various Spanishes.)
Hey JMG
Well, you may want to check out his short stories before his novels and autobiography, just to get a taste. I rather liked the first short stories of his that I read, “The voices of Time” and “Terminal Beach”. He apparently wrote a novel called “The Drowned World” which is about how global warming causes most of Earth to be inundated by the sea, and the world’s reptiles to revert to dinosaurian forms. I have not read it yet, at the moment I’m re-reading “Dune”.
Also, I have published a review and a selection from George Bernard Shaw’s collection of aphorisms titled “Maxims for revolutionists”, which I quoted from at some point in the comments a few weeks ago. I was using it as a source for meditation themes this month, and a few of his aphorisms worked well for that purpose so I imagine you and the commentariat would enjoy using it for that purpose as well.
https://jlmc12.substack.com/p/maxims-for-revolutionists-by-george
Forecasting, it’s impossible to prove a negative, but I have yet to see the least scrap of evidence that UFOs are alien spacecraft. Do people see strange things in the sky? Sure. Does that mean that strange things in the sky must come from Zeta Reticuli? All the way back in the ’70s, the smarter end of the UFO research scene had already shown the gaping problems with that claim. As for the Muslim conquest of Europe, it’s proceeding much more quickly than I expected; it’s painfully clear that most western European governments, having never heard of a guy named Vortigern, are eagerly copying his mistakes. Will England go a different route? Depends on what happens over the next decade at most — and if it does, it’ll simply become a colonial possession of India instead. I imagine some South Asian Rudyard Kipling of the 23rd century exhorting his countrymen to “take up the brown man’s burden” and get to work civilizing the savage, inscrutable, half-primitive people of Britain.
Gunstone, doubtless a new supercontinent will form sooner or later, but it’ll break apart thereafter. There have been something between four and ten supercontinents already in Earth’s history since the emergence of life, and there will doubtless be many more to come; Pangaea Proxima is expected to form in about 250 million years and then break up, and some evidence suggests another, Amasia, will rise some time after that. Life will go on. You’re right, of course, about warm periods — if climate change continues on its current course, New York City will have the climate of Florida, not Bahrain.
Patrick, it’s odd how people get stuck on that sort of prediction.
Anon, well, yes. I’ve written about that, of course.
Albert, yeah, that’s also an important point.
John, given the ongoing collapse of the left in opinion polls, I tend to doubt that we’ll get a Fred Halliot from that end of the political landscape. Here as always, it’s the totalitarian center we have to worry about most — those who will align themselves with the abandoned middle ground where most Americans actually are, and ride that straight into power.
Atmospheric, well, yes — it astounds me that anybody took “Operation Dildo Blitz” (ahem) as anything else.
Siliconguy, it’s shaping up to be a wild ride. If LLMs don’t find some way to make more money than they cost within the next year or two, it’s also going to be a world-class mess.
Michael_20, yes, I’ve read that. We simply don’t know.
Polecat, I could definitely see that. Once again, I pity the poor staff writers at the Babylon Bee — how can you keep writing parody when the people you’re trying to mock are even better than you are at parodying themselves?
J.L.Mc12, so noted!
I’m not much into the horror genre of literature or film (in my view, 90% of it is slop, 9% of it is barely tolerable, and 1% is damn good, but I don’t have the patience to find the needle in the haystack of utterly forgettable derivative drek), but there is one little, unnerving, corner of horror that is currently being turned into a feature film, courtesy of A24. It’s title? “Backrooms.” This would mean nothing to me were it not for my son who, when he was a teen, introduced me to a couple of genuinely creepy short films made by kids on the theme of these “backrooms.”
As far as I know, the origin story of this skin-crawling novelty is as follows:
In 2019, a post to 4chan sported an eerie picture of a series of connected corridors with yellowed carpet and wallpaper, accompanied by the text:
“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.
“God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”
Ordinarily I would find such a thing yawn-worthy. But when my son showed it to me, it not only disturbed me, but it also gave me a déjà vu feeling and a strong urge to “get out.” My son informed me that this is an extremely common feeling. How odd…
Anyway, I am not advertising for the film or anything, but I am wondering if JMG or others have looked into why the aesthetic of the “backrooms” environment gives off such a feeling of dread or have any other comments about it. And for those who have not had the “pleasure” of being in the “backrooms”, you need only click here (if you dare… mwahahaha!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4dGpz6cnHo
“I think you touch on the real explanation when you talk about heroics. I think the people we are discussing—the Americans who seem to hate America—dearly want to be heroes, fighting valiantly against evil, but they find that the world has too few credible enemies. In an earlier century, when the country was smaller and weaker, they could have joined the army or struck out to homestead the wilderness, and they would have found enemies aplenty. But for various reasons, none of those options appeals to them these days.
I wrote a short piece about this phenomenon a couple of years ago: https://hoseaspatio.blogspot.com/2023/10/taught-to-hate-america.html.”
That alone would explain why every empire will eventually collapse. Since eventually the empire runs out of enemies and will eventually turn against itself.
“As for the Muslim conquest of Europe, it’s proceeding much more quickly than I expected; it’s painfully clear that most western European governments, having never heard of a guy named Vortigern, are eagerly copying his mistakes. Will England go a different route? Depends on what happens over the next decade at most — and if it does, it’ll simply become a colonial possession of India instead. I imagine some South Asian Rudyard Kipling of the 23rd century exhorting his countrymen to “take up the brown man’s burden” and get to work civilizing the savage, inscrutable, half-primitive people of Britain.”
It does seem to be the case in history that the historic epicentres of human civilization (the Mediterranean, Near East, South Asia, Central America) seem to do best in warmer periods of Earth’s history. Meanwhile, during colder periods such as the Late Antique Little Ice Age and the Late Medieval/Early Modern Little Ice Age, these historic centres seem to do worse often with Northern barbarians taking over much. For example, the Late Antique Little Ice Age that began in 536 CE saw the breakdown of Roman domination of the Mediterranean world, the conquest of Persia by the Arabs, and the fragmentation of India following the Gupta Dynasty. Of course, the Late Medieval/Early Modern Little Ice Age saw the “Northern barbarians” take over pretty much all of the world (even Mediterranean European powers like Iberia and Italy declined in significance). Now that we are definitely in a warming period again, would you say things are very much going “back to normal”?
“John, given the ongoing collapse of the left in opinion polls, I tend to doubt that we’ll get a Fred Halliot from that end of the political landscape. Here as always, it’s the totalitarian center we have to worry about most — those who will align themselves with the abandoned middle ground where most Americans actually are, and ride that straight into power.”
Somebody actually recently made a speculative “alternate reality” of your “totalitarian center” concept relatively recently!:
https://www.deviantart.com/ablearcher1928/art/The-Totalitarian-Center-1326317128
@Scotlyn,
I’m actually reading the book that Lancre quote is from right now. Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett.
The ‘Vicar of Bray’ song is an observation of what many people will do. I have to assume there are spiritual costs to inconstance of that kind, and especially major costs in switching back and forth monotheistic religions that aren’t just denominations. Christianity and Islam… eek. I really really hope I never have to find out whether I have the courage to live out my ideals under major persecution. Let’s try not to get into that situation in the first place.
JMG wrote: Ambrose, I well remember when talk about ZOG, the so-called “Zionist occupation government,” was purely an affectation of violent extremist groups such as the Bruders Schweigen. I find it very disquieting that it’s become so much more widespread now.
and
John, given the ongoing collapse of the left in opinion polls, I tend to doubt that we’ll get a Fred Halliot from that end of the political landscape. Here as always, it’s the totalitarian center we have to worry about most — those who will align themselves with the abandoned middle ground where most Americans actually are, and ride that straight into power.
I agree that it’s concerning that violent rhetoric is becoming more widespread.
That said, I wonder if it’s like how in Europe when globalist politicians treat citizens’ concerns about immigration as inherently terrible and racist that more racist and terrible voices then get amplified.
I wonder if the fact that legitimate concerns about our government putting Israel’s interests above United States’ interests are being treated as anti-semitic and outrageous will result in more hateful rhetoric like the kind mentioned above.
Also, I wondering if it is considered treasonous for a United States citizen or leader to put the interests of another country above that of the United States.
Edward
Good evening Mr. Greer, I just wanted to post and get your thoughts as well as the thoughts of the community as a whole on what I guess for me more feeling than anything else in regards to Trump II.
I understand that as far as the direction it does not seem to surprise you but I’m more bugged by what from my perspective feels like a change in “the vibes” and what has begun to disturb me. Things which others have noted in the discourse as a whole.
To start I can’t help but feel the death of prominent MAGA supports over the last 5 years have been ill omens of sorts, beginning with Rush Limbaugh near the end of Trump one. Of course later you had the assassination of Charlie Kirk and iirc the death of Scott Adams who was one of the earliest supporters. It feels like things have been getting darker with each death raising the volume which, granted in Kirks case is understandable, but over all impossible to lay at that incident.
In my personal life all my friends of my age group who supported him are disgusted with some even voting blue in spite of hating everything they stand for but online it seems that many who were not influencers of any stripe who championed the things he ran for that others feel he has betrayed, seem to champion every act out of what can only be described as malice.
In terms of public discourse it feels more and more the public square is inching closer to becoming 4chans /pol/ which I must admit I always found amusing to read the sort of insanity a decade prior, is spreading far more than I’m comfortable with.
One of the biggest things I’ve felt in regards to the man himself, is that prior to the second term, regardless of how crass he could be and whether I agreed or not, there was something, and I apologize for how I come off using this knowing where I’m posting, was magical. Every tweet or statement was entertaining in a myriad of ways and he had this sort of ability that from my perspective has vanished. The “fun” of it if you will. It seems he’s become just another boomer using memes without any sort of skill or impact that he used to have and just comes off as another out of touch boomer for lack of a better term (I mean no offence to boomers I know there are many good ones and bad millenials) , posting on facebook, with all the cringe that comes with it.
Granted I’m not in my twenties anymore so maybe that has something to do with my perceptions but I can’t shake the feeling of something greater at work, and something greater that having moved Trump, has now left him to twist in a violent wind.
My apologies for how clumsy this all comes off or if I don’t make sense, it’s just something that’s been eating at me since Scott Adams passed and it’s difficult to grasp that feeling and much more so to articulate it.
Oddly, that edition of God Foot God seems to be the one at https://www.amazon.com/Goat-Foot-God-Dion-Fortune/dp/B0BP3VZ8R5/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8 ., available in paperback of hardcover. The Kindle version, which seems to be the Weiser edition, costs as much as the Bibliotech paperback.
It’s odd that someone seems to have decided to add Crowley material at the end, when Fortune had her own Rite of Pan.
According to one poll in Israel, five out of ten Israelis believe that Israel has lost or is going to lose the war against Iran and Hamas (note article is in Hebrew):
https://www.ynet.co.il/yedioth/article/yokra14784221
The relevant paragraph is the second paragraph in the article, which translated to English says
“The most serious issue is the security situation. According to the INSS poll, only 26% of the public say the security situation is good or very good—the lowest percentage in the past six months. More Israelis believe that Israel’s situation has worsened vis-à-vis Iran—compared to its situation on October 7, when Hamas invaded. In March, Netanyahu was at his personal peak since October 7: 38% said they had a great deal of confidence in him. Since then, it has only weakened, along with the mixed results in Iran. Four out of ten Israelis believe that Israel will defeat or has defeated Iran. Five out of ten believe it will lose or has lost. Four out of ten Israelis believe that Israel has defeated or will defeat Hamas. Five out of ten believe that Israel has lost or will lose to Hamas. No matter how much force Israel has used, or how many sacrifices it has made, this is the current situation: there are more Israelis who believe that Israel is losing to Hamas than those who think it is defeating it.”
Ron, no idea. I dislike horror fiction and so don’t have any notion of why it causes anything but revulsion.
Gunstone, more generally the center of gravity of human civilization has been in south and east Asia during the last five thousand years, and only shifted elsewhere during the brief interval of European global conquest. Now that the era in question is over, I expect east and south Asia to resume their historic role. Thanks for the map, btw — fascinating that someone took my post that seriously!
Edward, it’s possible that the Israel-first brigade will make at least some level of antisemitism fashionable again. As for treason, though, no — that’s strictly defined in the Constitution, Article III, section 3: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” As long as Israel and the US aren’t at war — as in genuine, declared war — supporting Israel isn’t treason for an American citizen or politician, though under some circumstances it can violate other laws.
Reveling, thanks for this. I’ve noticed the same thing; it seems to me that the Changer, the archetype that seized Trump’s image and gave him that magical quality for a time, has moved on. To some extent that was inevitable — a hierophany like the manifestation of Kek can only be sustained for a short time — and to some extent it reminds me that archetypal forces have their own agendas, which are not ours, and trusting them to do what we want is never a safe policy. That said, the changes he’s set in motion aren’t going away — quite the contrary, they’ll be playing out for a long time to come.
LeGrand, how odd.
JMG —
Yes; generally, as has been said, one knows a tree by its fruits. But fruits may be inedible (eg, horse chestnuts), but the shade or the lumber, or the fuel, may still be useful. I think people are often attracted to AC’s teaching because they admire him and want to be like him, and, in that sense, his training program seems to provide something like the desired effect!
You know Mr. Greer, I just had an epiphany! As it appears that many of these a.u. (artificial UNtelligence) ‘data centers’ will ‘cease to function’ .. due to lack of needed resources, funding, the incessant over-hyping by the financial ferengii, corrupt politcians, the utter intransigence of ‘the TechBros’/Bras’: the eventual result being low hanging ripe electronic fruit, not to mention everything else that goes into constructing these stranded behemoths, all for the Ruinman’s pickings .. at least once all the above are whittled down sufficiently, be it WAR, Destitution, FAMINE, or Death! or any combination thereof. So, there may be some upside to all this madness of modernity.
@JMG #142 re: Emacs
Fair enough! As I said, I didn’t expect it to be a pitch that you found much interest in. That said, I realized that I failed to mention the things I’ve actually found of most value in Emacs, which might be slightly closer to your interests. Less because I’m trying to convince you, and more because I realized I left out the best stuff before, so maybe someone else will be interested.
At any rate, the key feature of Emacs is its set of keyboard shortcuts. With a few movements of my fingers from the home keys not much more strenuous than standard touch typing, I can highlight text, copy it, paste it, save the changed file, switch over to another file, and more. Even cooler, you can map such shortcuts to whatever actions you want – at one point, I could convert a plaintext file to HTML, upload it to my blog, and update the Git that kept track of it with a combination of three keys or so. Which leads me to the next-best thing about Emacs. It’s default assumption is plaintext. Plaintext is the format that is most likely to remain useful and legible as long as computers are a thing. You can “fancy up” plaintext with things like markdown formatting (or the Emacs-native equivalent in “org mode”), and programs can take that and make it visible, but even if not, they remain visible. An example: in markdown formatting, if I type *italic text,* a program designed to make markdown formatting visible would show everything between the asterisks in italic, but a vanilla plaintext editor would just show the asterisks. It gives you a “fall back.” Emacs is fundamentally a plaintext editor that allows you to incorporate a lot of fancier display/processing options
Personally speaking, that means that I can compose writing that includes bold, italic, and more, but that is stored as plaintext (but displayed and easily converted into formatted text), which is a nice hedge on the survivability of my digital text files, while still being really easy to convert into whatever others might need. An example: I wrote the draft of my Heathen Rosary book in “org mode” syntax, a format pretty much only used in Emacs, but that is merely a set of conventions for plaintext files. Through a plug-in, I can convert that to HTML, .docx, or any of a variety of other formats with a few keystrokes. For now, that means I can put my file in whatever format publishers might want. If the long decline goes much farther, I can print out these files (or transcribe them if things get really dire, I guess), and it can be converted readily into something that would work on a printing press.
Anyhow, I’ve probably waxed overly long here, but everything I’ve ever loved about being able to tweak or customize something mechanical, Emacs delivers in spades, and for bonus points, it’s for the purpose of turning words into a format others can experience, which is what I care most about. Neal Stephenson had a fun essay about Emacs in In the Beginning was the Command Line, but actually fiddling around with it did far more to get me to appreciate it. Maybe not for you, JMG, but to the degree “DIY” is valuable in digital contexts, Emacs is one of the strongest examples.
Cheers,
Jeff
And now for something completely different —
people who don’t buy e-books lest they be stealth-revised will be delighted by this:
https://substack.com/@thelincoln/note/c-266540908
Any out-of-copyright book is open for “updating”. I’m looking forward to seeing, for example, Dion Fortune and VM Steele novels brought into Current Year.
Not Pride and Prejudice with Zombies but … (fill in the blanks!)
Earthworm —
Just checked my 1971 (Weiser) edition of Goat Foot God. It does in fact end with Hekas Hekas Este Bebeloi; the point is that what follows is a part of the Mysteries reserved for initiates. There is an excerpt from the Rite of Pan at the end, but it’s from Fortune’s Rite of Pan.
In our Brave New World of Current Year updates, probably there would at least by a very steamy final chapter describing in full romantasy detail just what went on in the rite that from which the uninitiated audience (reading the book ) were originally excluded.
Or maybe —
…how he kissed me under the monastery wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
@Anonymous #276,
You write: “That alone would explain why every empire will eventually collapse. Since eventually the empire runs out of enemies and will eventually turn against itself.”
That’s true, and I blush to admit I hadn’t thought of the generalization. I was thinking of this specifically in the American context, basing it on an earlier article (you can find it here) where I argue that there is something fundamentally aggressive in the American character. (I don’t argue that this is a sin, just a feature. And until, so to speak, the day before yesterday, it was a feature that most Americans recognized and many celebrated.)
But of course any society which cannot be characterized as fundamentally aggressive is also not going to found an empire! Therefore empires are made up—at least in the first instance—of those who revel in fighting enemies. And therefore when the empire succeeds, and defeats all its enemies, those same turbulent energies either (a) go to seed in some form of corruption, or (b) consume the empire itself by attacking it from within. Now I wonder if the Roman Senate ever had to establish a Senate Un-Roman Activities Committee? 😃
Thank you for pointing out this obvious extension.
Russia and NATO are getting close to going to war against each other:
https://www.thomasfazi.com/p/one-step-away-from-the-brink-natos
JMG,
It’s funny, I read your response to Reveling and was going to type the same thing he did regarding the very close deaths of Scott Adams, Charlie Kirk, and also Hulk Hogan. Also, the public defections of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Elon Musk, and others from the cause.
It seems to me that the MAGA movement is headed for an implosion or explosion, and the God / archetype behind Trump seems to be isolating him. My thought is that the Iran war deal should work out logically, like you said, both sides want a deal, but I don’t think the Changer may let that deal come to pass.
Trump is actually very pro-China compared to much of the Washington political establishment. To quote,
“The political consensus in Washington is to be tough on China and Trump’s relatively pragmatic China policy is not widely accepted. Many within the US government will try to undermine cooperation between the two countries. The US Congress will continue to introduce anti-China bills and resolutions.”
https://eastasiaforum.org/2026/05/30/the-xi-trump-summit-lived-up-to-modest-expectations/
@JMG
When it comes to why people like horror, remember that it’s a broad genre, spanning everything from campfire ghost stories to gory slashers, and a whole bunch of other directions.
The one common theme is the intensity of the thrills: the usual formulas pit a relatively weak protagonist against a danger he or she isn’t close to being able to face head-on. There’s also often an element of wonder or fantasy, with the monster or setting not following the usual laws of reality. Often enough, protagonist loses, which lends the genre an element of tension often lacking in other genres.
Unfortunately a lot of horror is just cheap thrills and as those wear off the genre has gone to great lengths to shock the desensitized horror buff, resulting in some truly awful or vile stuff. But on the other side you occasionally find some pretty clever dark fantasies.
There’s also very much a low-brow vs. high-brow distinction, with low-brow horror going for cheap scares and gross outs and high-brow horror trying to confront you with ideas or situations that are unsettling to think about.
As an example of the latter, several years ago I watched a movie in which a quiet, unpopular young woman discovered that her mirror image was alive. It offered to switch places with her and sort her life out for her. She took the deal and watched in horror as the new version of her did indeed become stronger and more popular, but also took bloody revenge on anyone who crossed her. By the end of the film it’s revealed that the woman had had an identical twin who her father, a doctor, had allowed to die during a complicated childbirth, with the implication that this was her vengeful spirit.
@Ron M #275
I haven’t seen the film yet (I think it just hit theaters?) but I’ve been familiar with the Backrooms concept for a while now. I think it’s of a piece with “Mallworld”: the rash of dreams of a vast, twisting, nearly-derelict mall. (Also of note is the Mallsoft musical genre, which seeks to evoke the feeling of being in an abandoned shopping center if the music suddenly started playing again.)
In both cases there is a sense of déjà vu and being trapped in a place that isn’t right. Honestly I suspect it reflects a primal sense many of us have that the world we live in isn’t right: this isn’t the future we were promised but there’s no way out for us but through.
Another meme I saw recently that’s related: a photo of Harambe with a screenshot of the dialog box from the video game Morrowind that says “With this character’s death, the threads of fate are severed. Reload a previous save or persist in the doomed world you have created.” This pops up if you kill an NPC who was still needed to advance the main story line. Harambe’s death has for one reason or another gained a kind of memetic status as the exact moment the comfortable pre-2016 certainties died for good and we plummeted straight into the current fraught timeline.
The Backrooms and Mallworld give us a kind of anchor to dredge up our subconscious fears and malaise and feel them consciously.
Scotlyn: Since I gave an English translation of the word, I think I identified it as well as I could, given that in parts of the world it is profanity and I am therefore barred from spelling it out here.
Also, that came off as quite condescending. I am not impressed.
Robert Mathiesen #266
Is a fact that there are strong cultural links between the traditional Catalans and the Provenzals, and It is not only because this french region belonged to the Kingdom of Aragón before his conquest by the Kingdom of France during the crusade against the Catars, else because ,during the Reconquista ,Catalonia experimented a strong inmigration from Provenze, wich I guess wich continued in a lower scale with the Reconquista of Balears islands and Valencia.
There is a map of Spain representing the ancestry of their population in base to certain genetic features, only perceived trough exhaustive cientifical procedures, and absolutely obsolete by the inmigration, This shows that ancestry in Spain is divided in three vertical stripes corresponding to the kindoms of Galicia, Castilla, Aragón and the country of Catalonia. If this study would be extended to France and Portugal I guess that well see that Portugal,during his Reconquista, were populated by Galicians and Catalonia by Provenzals.
Robert Mathiesen #266
“[rant on] We are such a stupid species! Aristotle may once have defined Man as the “rational animal.” I prefer to define Man as the “rationalizing animal”–“rational” just doesn’t cut it for me here! [rant off]”
If I may join your rant:
Back in 2019 I was very close to setting up an online presence based around developing resilience through perception in relation to self defense – i.e. that in any given situation, the ability to shift one’s perceptual point of view could help pick actions and paths – i.e. ‘rational moves’.
Then in 2020, it was revealed how little to no rational thinking took place once the animal substrate of fear had taken over – the relentless material propaganda of fear twisted people’s internal worlds all out of shape.
By 2022 I realised that it would have been a better idea to have used the domain name rationalmoves.co.uk as the name for a furniture removals company.
Putting humans and rationality together was an act of unbridled optimism.
Hey JMG
I don’t know if the other Australian commenters have already mentioned it, but the biggest thing in my country at the moment is the federal government’s budget. It has gotten a lot of middle class outrage because the have decided to not only increase taxes on trust funds, but only allow negative gearing for new housing. All of this seems designed to nudge Australia’s economy away from investing so much into finance and housing and in favour of productive businesses. It’s incredible how many people who rely on housing speculation and trust funds are screaming bloody murder about it.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/may/11/budget-2026-what-we-know-so-far-explained-australia-federal-treasurer-jim-chalmers
JMG and commenting folks…
In a little bit of a nostalgia moment… I first encountered Greer’s writing back in the peak-oil days.
I’ve ended up with a habit of thinking about the supply chain of what I’m buying or using, and trying to come up with alternatives that are less complicated or less dependent on whatever is going on globally. I have NOT been 100% successful at this, many others are much more mindful and successful.
So, my priorities have been somewhat driven by supply interruptions that have actually happened. For example, I was in the area that was affected by the widespread power outage in 2003. Result: a collection of candles, battery-powered lamps, a lot of candles, and some options for cooking over fire.
One of the inputs that I haven’t been worried about is water, because the supply to the local public water system is plentiful and relatively close.
I’ve been ignoring some of the infrastructure between that water supply and myself! A major main broke, and it took the local water authority about a week to dig to the affected pipe, replace it, and get everything cleaned out and certified to be drinkable again.
So, I’ve got to figure out what combination of camping equipment to stock in case another 50 yr old pipe fails. (because the existence of one section of pipe is part of a lot of connected pipes, most of which are ALSO 50 years old) Collecting rainwater? Buckets for carrying water from the river? Time for more research!
JMG there’s too much to cover in a blog post comment, but your reply is appreciated and well taken. The point on which I focus is that balance is temporary, a momentary (elapsed time and frequency a subjective perception) reality from which we move on in our journeys. In conversation with people on this notion, my go-to phrasing is: balance is not a goal or destination. In the mundane context, balance too often doesn’t seem to exist or persist. Our present social and political reality is a good example of how people see nothing but imbalance and find themselves descending into despair.
The “macro” context tells us that for every Hitler there was and shall be a Churchill or a Roosevelt, or even a M. Ghandi. Nature exhibits the ongoing imbalance/balance cycle in our weather and climate, our children face our caused imbalances and act to bring balance to them.
#13 Re: health insurance. As a former insurance professional, I can assert without hesitation that for-profit health care is the culprit. Capitalism is the primary obstacle to universal health care. The details of that argument are legion, so I’ll leave my fellow readers to do the research they are willing to do.
#3 Re: Jung and Campbell. Joseph Campbell is much easier to “consume” in the TV shows in which he is interviewed. I can agree that he was not a very entertaining writer, but then his works fall into my personal category of take the medicine though it tastes bad, there are positive outcomes to be had. 😀 Campbell and Jung were my lifelines early on my Pagan path. There was for me a distinct fear of incipient insanity after a couple of experiences, and the empathy of friends held me long enough to discover what those two scholars wrote and how it informed my experiences.
Another example of a difficult read well worth the effort is The Quest for Merlin by Nikolai Tolstoy.
Aldarion # 201:
“Greece remained majority Christian through almost 500 years of Ottoman rule, which enabled the war of independence.”
Yes, indeed Greeks always have been always very proud of their culture, beginning with their language, which has had many changes during the last 3,000 years, but it has some ancient Greek words yet in modern Greek. Well, I understand them (old Greek philosophers and Alexander the Great spoke in that language!). And ending with their Orthodox Christianism, in spite of modern Greece secular tendences. By the way, even today some Greeks prefer to call Istambul as “polis” (the city), remembering it was named Constantinople before to fall to the Ottomans…
—————————————————————–
David P. # 207:
Thank you for your comment…
Well, I wanted to write “terrifying”, but sometimes I must write in a hurry (when I’m too busy), so my not very excellent English level “degrades” to some extent.
——————————————————————
Cynthia C. # 216:
“So there’s a very common Spanish word: c, vowel, g, vowel, r, and it means “to catch”. My understanding, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is that in Spain that word is just as common and ordinary as anything, but that in other parts of the Spanish speaking world, it is profanity. Is that true? If so, any idea why that is?”
I guess easily you’re thinking in a Spanish verb which describes “to catch”. OK, I can tell you in Iberian Spanish it’s a very used and normal word, but I know it has a “dirty” and unpolite meaning in Argentina, Uruguay and Mexico, where it depicts sexual intercourse. Indeed, I know Argentinians who have been living during a heck of years here, who have told me they’re a bit embarrased yet with our “innocent” national use of the verb which begins with c…
Argentinians, Mexicans and Uruguayans prefer to say “agarrar” something as a surrogate word.
I hope I haven’t forgotten if there are more Spanish language countries where this word is near taboo, due to this “hard” meaning. I think Colombians and Ecuatorians use sometimes that word like we Spaniards do, and I know Cubans and Dominicans use it as a neutral world, like us.
I’m not a language expert, so I can’t explain you why this word has a different meaning depending of the countries, but I can guess before the Conquista some people here maybe gave it a sexual meaning in some contexts, and this sense travelled with the soldiers and sailors into South America; and finally was lost in Spain and the Caribbean Islands, but not in another parts of the Spanish Empire. Why? I don’t know.
By the way, it’s also funny that some Spanish women called “Concepción”, prefer to be named within their family and friends as “Concha” or “Conchita”, but for Argentinians this word (which originally depicts here the sea shells) describes in a metaphorical way, the women private parts (ahem). When I told to an Argentinian who met some time ago that my grandma’s name was that one, evidently he laughed for a minute or two…
———————————-
(To be continued)
Oops, it seems I’ve written in my last comment (asnwer to Cynthia) “world” instead of “word”, when evidently I was writing about language…I’m sorry.
Cynthia Christie #269:
My guess would be that it has something to do with the shift that turned angels from beings who need to introduce themselves with “be not afraid” to cutesy little children with wings. And, for that matter, how many people these days can be properly said to be “god-fearing”?
JMG #274, regarding your answer to Forecasting:
For what it’s worth, I’d like to add my own take on the Muslim future of Europe. I have mispredicted the results of all federal elections I’ve been allowed to vote in thus far, but third time’s the charm, eh?
I am reasonably certain that the AfD is going to win the next German federal election. I also thought that during the last election but then the general situation was a little different. While the CDU shared the blame for some of the messes our previous government failed to fix, they at least weren’t in charge when things blew up and could make the claim that they’d have handled things better (they wouldn’t have but I’m also convinced that a lot of these accusations were the same kind of cope the American parties also engage in: sure, maybe the other guys left you a mess, but are you going to do something or just whine about it?). Running Merz, unlikable though he may be, was a pretty good decision because his promises to do something about immigration probably captured quite a few voters who might otherwise have voted for the AfD. (I myself would not have picked the AfD regardless but this was one of the reasons I ended up voting for the guy.)
The CDU has completely blown their chance at turning things around under their own terms. Thus, AfD majorities are looking more and more likely in upcoming state elections. I myself know people who wouldn’t have voted for them last time but have become so utterly disillusioned by the general state of things that, if an election was called now, they’d do it just to shake things up. Others still nominally despise the AfD but are moving ever closer in their direction.
Assuming that the AfD gains a majority of seats in 2029, I’d guess that they will deport those criminals that they are able to, which will send a message to those still wanting to come here. I don’t know how hard it would be to cut foreigners off from social security; if so, that would clear out a good chunk of them. It seems that the road to citizenship is not defined in our constitution, so they could presumably just make double-citizenship illegal and increase the requirements, which would also cause people to leave.
(All of this assumes that they first dismantle the NGO complex organising protests and such. Given that they’re regularly asking the government for break-downs on which NGO gets what amount of funding, it seems that they’re aware of the problem.)
In other words, I think we might just be on the track to having fewer Muslims in Germany.
—David P.
Mme. @ 211, Did you consider that what is hurting your not able to get buy neighbors might be utility costs? Rent, or house payments, are a fixed expense for which a person can budget. Utilities, one never can be sure how much those are going to be except higher than last month. We may yet get to the place where cooking at home is actually more expensive than individual unhealthy meals “out”. It is easy to say, for example, bake your own bread, but what share of a person’s monthly disposable income is required to buy flour, yeast, etc. Then factor in the cost of driving to wherever the flour, etc. are sold and then add to that the cost of having an oven turned on for at least an hour.
I have to say that very little infuriates me more than this notion that the sacred cow “private enterprise” must not be criticized.
More signs of stress.
“The average college student expects to earn $80,000 after graduation, according to a new survey from Clever Real Estate. But the actual starting salary for college graduates is closer to $56,000.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2026/05/29/college-graduates-salary-unemployment-job-market-ai/90280770007/
For comparison my first civilian job in 1990 paid $40,000 a year. Granted mining paid above average due to both hazard and lack of permanence, at least as perceived at the time.
Washington state’s minimum wage is $17.13 or just over $34,000 per year. Seattle has its own minimum wage of $21.30 or $42,600. That’s not a lot of wage premium for college. Choose your major wisely.
Or not. The Augmented Idiot says, “Spokane & Eastern WA: Journeymen Electricians typically see base wages closer to $35 to $45 per hour (about $70,000 to $90,000 annually).” Seattle was somewhat higher.
Gunstone # 226:
“a 1981 book After Man: A Zoology of the Future, envisioning a world 50 million years in the future”
I know it, I saw it when I was a child in a bookshop which was in my town, translated to Spanish, like this site remembers…
https://fundacioncajasegovia.es/producto/despues-del-hombre-una-zoologia-del-futuro/
A very bizarre and interesting book about future after human zoology…I think it was good as a work hypothesis. I can remember its author proposed a lot of new animals would come from actual rats and rabbits.
———————————————————–
Ambrose # 228:
No argument here, about the Buddhism topic. I know Buddhists aren’t compelled to believe in an Orthodox “true” interpretation, like Catholics for example, so Western Buddhists can adapt their new favorite religion to their Procustus Bed of materialist deep philosophy. However, if they point their Buddhist view is the best or better than Asian Buddhists (polytheists), I think they’re not very honest…
——————————————————————-
David # 240 and Cynthia:
“Ter*rif”ic (?), a. [L. terrificus; fr. terrere to frighten + facere to make. See Terror, and Fact.] Causing terror; adapted to excite great fear or dread; terrible; as, a terrific form; a terrific sight.”
I can tell you Spanish world directly derived from Latin is “terrorífico”, which means (of course) to cause terror to someone…
————————————————————-
Anselmo # 242:
I’m not a big fan of Gustavo Bueno, but I accept he was one of the last century important philosophers here; although IMHO, the best of the XX century and maybe all Spain History is Ortega y Gasset.
I share in general terms your short depiction of the History of Catalonia and Spain alike. It seems History is a not very exact science, so for good and bad things, it can be understood (and manipulated?) by different nationalist biases.
However, in addition to the”historical” biased/more or less objective reasons, it’s interesting to point how this or that own language can be used as a political weapon, for example to boost a secessionist agenda. Of course, you can speak Catalan or identify yourself with Catalonia culture, and feeling yourself as an Spaniard and a Catalan alike. Indeed, famous dead people like the painter Dalí, the writer Josep Plá, or the philosopher Eugenio Trías, said they were Catalan and Spaniards alike, withour big problems (ahem).
I think the “democratic” reason for secessionism is the most challenging and interesting one, methink. In an ideal world, if there’s a big majority in favor of becoming a new independent country, they should be allowed to do it. In real world, I see two big elephants in the Catalonia secession room:
First, it’s possible as work hypothesis there would be a big minority of Catalano-Spaniards in a “free” Catalonia. What would be happen to them? (Cough) Would be they respected by the new Catalonian government? I’ve got some doubts about it (look at Russians minorities in the Baltic Republics, cough). Soon before the 2017 referendum, Catalan people who said they were Spaniards too, were insulted as “Fascists” (even some former Anti-Franquist famous people, cough).
Second, there’s a thing in our Constitution named “national sovereignty”, like in near every country of the world. According this principle, Madrid govt has its right and his duty to stop every attempt to break national unity. Indeed, this principle provoked the big police operation against the bizarre 2017 referendum attempt in Catalonia. I don’t say wether this principle is legal and ethically good or bad, but it’s our current law. So do the math.
—————————————————————-
JMG # 251:
“Did you catch the news story a little while back about crowds of female protesters flinging their dildos en masse at various symbols of the Trump regime? It doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to figure out what that means.”
Oops! It’s a very bizarre scene to imagine, John…If I’ve guessed it well, their symbolic exorcism against the Great Alpha Male (Trump) are their dildos, which I see as penises surrogates. So those female protesters (I bet feminists too) admit in a not very implicit way, the phallus has a lot of symbolic power (ahem). Am I right?
————————————————————————-
John # 270:
“The scary thing for American Jews is that anti-Semitic Nazi leftists actually have a chance at power in the United States”
I’m also worried for the leftists involution into an open Antisemitism in a near future (or even now), in the USA and Europe alike, due to the Palestinian subterfuge, but I think you’ve depicted a too scary picture of this dangerours tendence. One thing is Nazi-Fascism (which was the most radical form of Antisemitism) and another is the historical Antisemitism (before Hitler), which was sadly common, for example in Western Europe Middle Age and Russia until yesterday. However, this “Christian” or jingoistic Antisemitism isn’t in a real sense Fascism, though it killed Jews too. So I find your expression not very exact to blame American Left for its Antisemitic biases. Not every Antisemite means Nazi.
—————————————————————————-
(To be continued)
JMG, some years ago I would have rejected your claim that the centre of gravity of civilization has been in southern and Eastern Asia for 5000 years out of hand. Wouldn’t it have been somewhere between Akkad and Egypt in Sargon’s time? And somewhere between Baghdad, Cairo and Seville in Harun al-Rashid’s time?
The reason I don’t reject it out of hand anymore for the third and second millennium BC is because I read Dawn of Everything, which discusses early cities before and state in Shandong and Shaanxi, and then some of their references. I realize I know hardly anything about Indian prehistory south of the Indus delta.
Are you basing yourself on other sources? I think you said you didn’t read Dawn of Everything.
Mark @ 244 & 245 sheer speculation, but here is my take on some recent events:
I do not believe Netanyahoo has blackmail material on the president, well he probably does, but I doubt it amounts to anything more than Maga have already overlooked and forgiven. What I do suspect, again, merest speculation, is that Bibi said to Trump, I can deploy my American assets plus our best in the world Mossad experts in dirty tricks to save your hide in the upcoming elections, if, in return, you join us against Iran. So, if I am right, the recent pro Maga victories in Republican primaries are down payment.
The Democrats, meanwhile, are in full scale civil war, and not a minute too soon. Younger Democratic candidates and voter’s focus on “affordability”, i.e., the actual quality of people’s daily lives, would seem to be profoundly threatening to entrenched party functionaries and their financial backers. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Maine Senate election where establishment Dems are frantically combing through decades old twitter conversations to find something, anything, which might discredit their own very popular candidate. The outgoing governor was persuaded to put her hopes of honorable and comfortable retirement, probably involving a fairly nondemanding university post, aside “for the good of the party”, if not the nation. She finally came to her senses and told Chuckie Schemer; I am not doing this for you.
What I think we are going to see come November is a divided government, over which J.D. Vance, Trump being visibly not long for this world, will attempt to preside with his usual me first functional incompetence. Bibi would be well advised to take what he can get: a major military disaster in the Gulf will surely provoke endangered Republicans, hoping for a sympathy vote, to activate the 25th amendment and remove the president to some luxury facility where he can get the rest and intensive treatment he so badly needs. The likely result in the midterms is the Democrats take the House, Republicans retain the Senate, but just barely, and Chuckie is out as Minority Leader. Don’t let that door hit your backside on the way out. Jeff Merkley wants the job. Maybe it is time he made his move.
“Gunstone, more generally the center of gravity of human civilization has been in south and east Asia during the last five thousand years, and only shifted elsewhere during the brief interval of European global conquest. Now that the era in question is over, I expect east and south Asia to resume their historic role. Thanks for the map, btw — fascinating that someone took my post that seriously!”
Did you know that Arnold J Toynbee of all people predicted an “Indian ending” for “Western Civilization”?
“It is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in self-destruction of the human race. At this supremely dangerous moment in human history, the only way of salvation is the ancient Hindu way. Here we have the attitude and spirit that can make it possible for the human race to grow together into a single family.”
“So now we turn to India. This spiritual gift, that makes a man human, is still alive in Indian souls. Go on giving the world Indian examples of it. Nothing else can do so much to help mankind to save itself from destruction.”
In fifty years, the world would be under the hegemony of the USA, but in the 21st century, as religion captures the place of technology, it is possible that India, the conquered, will conquer its conquerors.”
https://www.savetemples.org/post/arnold-j-toynbee-1889-1975-says-india-will-conquer-the-conquerors-spiritually/2637
I was wondering what you think of these speculations.
“The Neanderthal DNA found in modern humans came predominantly from male Neanderthals mating with female modern humans.” — google
In addition, the male Neanderthal chromosome contains a mutation which ensures that male children conceived in such a union will miscarry due to immune rejection. So we get DNA from our Neanderthal fathers via their hybrid daughters, but not from purebred Neanderthal mothers.
So I was surprised at Gordon White’s death like many people. I listened to his podcast a decent amount. Anyway, an incongruence in my understanding formed when a highly upvoted reddit comment said he was aged 27, and I thought that made 0 sense because Gordon sounded way too mature to be that young. So I was listening to The Higher Side Chats podcast host appear on The Tinfoil Hat podcast, and he was apparently friends with Gordon. He said Gordon was 44. I also found an author page of Gordon’s that corroborates this https://scarletimprint.com/gordon-white. Anyway, I think that bad info on the reddit comment was giving me a modicum of subconscious anxiety and I’m glad it’s corrected. Also, the “THC” host I mentioned was providing a super based defense of magic on the show I mentioned despite not being a practitioner. It’s reassuring for someone in the conspiracy space to reject Paranoid Conspiratorial Christianity.
JMG,
I have a question that you would seem to be far more attuned and aware than myself. Before my wife retired last year, the woke women of her agency were agitating for several concessions for neurodiverse employees. These included special quiet rooms in all of the agencies facilities and special expensive training for all employees in understanding the neurodiverse.
I was recently watching a live stream of one of the recent conventions of the Democratic Socialists of American and they also seemed to be obsessed with this topic. Hand waving instead of clapping, special rooms with a live feed of the proceedings with no sound and other rooms with no live feed were promoted and in some cases demanded.
That people have a wide variety of brain functionality is obvious, but is it an actual important thing to begin adjusting nearly all societies institutions to cater to it? Or is this just another victim group for the privileged white women to adopt to show their own goodness , and support their climb for more power? Where does this end?
I haven’t read all the comments yet, but Daniel Davis on his Deep Dive podcast, interviewed Art Berman, a geologist whom most people familiar with peak oil would recognize. It’s an hour long but I would encourage anyone interested to watch (or listen to) it.
Basically Berman says that even if the Strait of Hormuz were to be opened tomorrow, there would be no going back to what it was before the war on Iran started. Those days are gone forever. He did say that the world runs on diesel (big transport trucks, farm machinery, construction, mining, etc machinery) which is refined from heavy, sour crude which the US doesn’t have and most producers outside of the Gulf don’t either. But Russia does (ha)
He brings up too many technical facts for me to mention here, which is why I recommend listening to him.
Chuaquin: Thank you very much for that, I found it quite fascinating! Also, if it ever comes up, I will use “agarrar” rather than the other thing, not that I’m called upon to speak Spanish much these days. Again, thank you, that’s a really neat bit of knowledge you just shared!
JMG
Since there has been a discussion about the future of Europe I’m curious as to if you consider the weakening or collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) system will play a role in the future of Europe? I don’t think it will be as simple as Europe becomes the new Middle East/North Africa.
And I want to give a different take on Islam and Europe. I honestly doubt the Islamitization of Europe narrative as its mostly based on propaganda from both sides. My guess is that as the welfare/managerial state, which largely subsidizes immigration and migrant communities collapses, a large number of those people will leave not because they’re being deported, but because its the path of least resistance. The mass migration that propped up Western Europe in the 2010s-2020s will likely be its undoing as most people if given the opportunity for a better life elsewhere will take it. For example why would a doctor stay in Europe when the economy has collapsed and the native population is growing more desperate and scapegoating minority groups when they could migrate to a different country and take their resources (and knowledge in this case) with them. Western Europe will be plundered of most of its resources as people with the means to flee do so and as that happens I’d assume that Africa and the Mmiddle East will rise up they gain that wealth and resources.
That’s not to say that most of the Islamic communities in the West will disappear, but rather I see their future as becoming isolated insular communities that represent holdouts of the old industrial world rather than the rising star of the deindustrial future. I think the real rising star of Europe will likely be from Eastern Europe and Islam in Western Europe will likely not tend up in a Reconquista scenario but will likely follow a similar trajectory to Manichaeism in China. The central power that propped it up collapses, they’re forced into insular communities or go underground due to xenophobic persecution, before eventually a hostile central power takes over and the remnants are unceremoniously purged.
But that’s just a different perspective time will tell.
@Luke Z: the being 27 thing with Gordon White was one of his in-jokes which you will hear occasionally on his youtube videos
@Ron M #275:
My reaction to the image of the Backrooms isn’t an urge to get out; instead, I find the idea of spending time there slightly comforting. But there are a few other things like that which I seem to be unlike normal people about, so that doesn’t mean a lot.
I associate spaces like the Backrooms—infrastructure you don’t normally visit in person other than for maintenance, transitional spaces you pass through without interacting with, and dream-like assemblages of locally realistic things that by default go unshaped by any influences of larger contexts that would make them coherently meaningful—with the sephirah of Yesod. So maybe it’s somehow tapping into the idea of the klipah of Yesod, or the harsh aspects of the sephirah where it’s easy to lose yourself? Or maybe it just has a strong egregor, where people had been entertained by being creeped out about it for some other mostly-consistent reason, and now it’s got momentum of its own.
The original photo comes from a home furnishing showroom emptied for renovations. Interestingly, once the location was tracked down, it had become a hobby shop that put a radio-controlled car racing track in the space. This was almost as close culturally as a commercial-zoned location can get to the social spaces in which tales about the Backrooms were circulated; the only closer thing that comes to mind is a tabletop gaming shop that hosted in-person gaming events.
“Noclip” refers to a video game cheat command used to deactivate the game physics simulation rules that limit the range of the player’s position to inside the walls of a stage; player viewpoints in the the out-of-bounds areas through the walls often produce rendering glitches or other uncanny visuals, and sometimes game logic glitches.
The Slenderman mythos is another horror fiction setting that came to prominence within more or less the same spaces, some years earlier. It included a lot of people creeping each other out with stories about investigators and victims, who were written as being originally in a position similar to people in the audience (borrowing conventions from the artistic genre of alternate-reality games), not being able to get away from Slenderman finding them once they’d seen him or been closely exposed to information about him, or having Slenderman get into their heads. The associated near-fatal stabbing masterminded by a psychotically impressionable 12-year-old girl could be read either way as an omen, depending on who you read as responsible for the victim’s narrow survival (the broader egregor ultimately asserting that real-world murders were not actually what it was about, or some circumstantial other force not otherwise in focus in the story, such as a praying relative’s deity). Interestingly, the perps after fleeing were apprehended near a furniture store.
@Slithy Toves #294:
The genre containing the Backrooms and Mallworld has acquired the name “liminal spaces“.
@ Syvia #299
You should store more water. I have seen a few ways for people in the city. A “suburban homesteader” I know locally has a maybe 1000gallon water tank, right next to teh house, connected to the rain gutters so it is harvesting rainwater. This first of all saves money as he gardens and water out of the city taps is very expensive. Then, he has water of his own in case of a disruption. Not sure of his tank size exactly, 1000gal is an estimate, certainly not 5,000, it is smaller than that. That is a house in a regular city neighborhood. A second way I have seen in photos was from the Granola SHotgun blog where he had a couple tanks out on the patio, maybe 100 gallons each. They even make smaller one like that that are square and can stack, but that is pricier. His were cylinders, tank shaped, and did not take up much room. If you have smaller tall tanks, use earthquake straps in California. You can also use a couple food grade 55 gallon barrels.
You should also have a way to carry water and to treat water if you dont have fuel to boil ( I have iodine crystals ( polar pure), and a life straw filter. I am allergic to bleach. There are also inexpensive chemical tablets and larger filters. YOu need more than one solution for water.
How long was you power out in 2003 ?
What is your backup for heating ?
Order of needs: (1) having air and not being squished or bleeding out (2) Shelter ( from sun or cold or rain, winds etc….) this includes clothing, could be in your car, includes a way to have heat when needed (3) water (4) Then food . THen, it is good to have some forms of communications so that you can reach out for help for the above issues, and know to go help others.
Always late to the party…. I have been trying to describe Revelation in terms that make sense. But also the relationship between the unmanifest and the manifest. And how manifestation forms. And now, most recently, I have been wondering how death occurs. Manifestation evidently occurs in octaves, 7 whole notes. For every plane in the octave, the next higher or more inward plane is unmanifest, and the plane below is manifest. The unmanifest is the source of the manifest, but the manifest is what gives form to the unmanifest. You can think of waves on the ocean as a physical analog. So when a mystic rises up to the astral plane, what happens is that the physical mind and body enter a sleep-like state, and the astral mind and body wake on that plane and continue conscious life. But when the mystic’s consciousness returns to the physical mind and body, only those astral ideas that can fit into metaphors built from the experiences of the physical mind and body can descend from the astral to the physical. Then, to convey those metaphors to another, the recipient again must fit those metaphors into metaphors of their own built from their own personal experience. If the experience is different and it always is, the metaphors may not fit well, or may even be understood by reflection, if the experience is of an opposite sort. Anyway, what I got from “The Cosmic Doctrine” is that every entity on every plane has a Ring Cosmos which starts the process, a Ring Chaos which acts as a stabilizer, and a Ring Pass Not which provides separation of one octave from another and one entity from another. Just as it is the first to form, I think it is likely to be the first to weaken and then die. The entity experiences ailments, as Chaos exerts against a decreasing Cosmos. As for the planet, systems that seemed steady would enter a more chaotic state. Institutions would begin to fail. and other failures to contain and constrain chaos.
Chuaquin #306
Continuing with the phylosophic materialism, there are two teories wich matches whit It and allow a non metaphisic response to the question if democracy is an admisible mean for a secession process. The first theory is the Antroplogic Space and the second the Canonic General Model for Political Societies. Acording with these theories, I , humble student (snif !),understand that the individuals are a product of the state , that democracy is a fraud and that every secession atemp of my state, exclusively, is a direct threat against my life.
“The Democrats, meanwhile, are in full scale civil war, and not a minute too soon. Younger Democratic candidates and voter’s focus on “affordability”, i.e., the actual quality of people’s daily lives, would seem to be profoundly threatening to entrenched party functionaries and their financial backers. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Maine Senate election where establishment Dems are frantically combing through decades old twitter conversations to find something, anything, which might discredit their own very popular candidate. The outgoing governor was persuaded to put her hopes of honorable and comfortable retirement, probably involving a fairly nondemanding university post, aside “for the good of the party”, if not the nation. She finally came to her senses and told Chuckie Schemer; I am not doing this for you.”
If the Democratic establishment loses the civil war to the populists, then that would open up for a lot of former MAGA people like Tucker Carlson etc, who were betrayed by MAGA in Trump’s second presidency, to go support the Democrats.
@Chuaquin (#306), answering Anselmo (#242):
In point of historical fact, “national sovereignty” is a fairly recent concept, and still new and untested in international law.. It wasn’t much of thing even in the 1800s, when there were still empires that contained many “nations.” It’s only now that empires have largely vanished that nations have become the major players on the world’s stage.
In the high Middle Ages, universities divided their students into “nations” (literally, “birthings”) according to where they were born and raised. And “nations” as political units belonged to their various sovereigns, rather than the reverse: that is, it was a world of “an individual sovereign’s various nations,” not “a individual nation’s sovereignty.” The Treaty of Westphalia, with its decision that it was the sovereign’s religion that determined his nations’ religion (“cuius regio, eius religio.”), reinforced this doctrine for the next several epochs: “sovereigns have nations.” It was, perhaps, only in the aftermath of the French Revolution that nations came to have their own sovereigns rather than sovereigns having their own nations.
So modern governments’ principle of “national sovereignty” rests on shaky grounds, historically speaking.
And, returning to an earlier thread, this is partly why national egregores matter for modern geopolitics, but also why they are not all equally strong, nor all cut to one and the same pattern from one and the same piece of historical cloth.
LeGrand, oh, granted, if somebody wants to end up like Crowley he’s probably the best available guide! Maybe the OTO should change its sales pitch accordingly. 😉
Polecat, if I’d had any idea, back when I was writing Star’s Reach, that the LLM craze would happen, I would have stuck it in. As it is, I called the revival of nuclear power that put so many half-completed nukes across the Merigan landscape in Trey sunna Gwen’s time.
Jeff, so noted.
LeGrand, the erasure of the past sinks to new lows. I’m almost tempted to see Beowulf or the Chanson de Roland subjected to this maltreatment. As for your suggested conclusion for The Goat Foot God, no birdie ever soar any wing to eagle it. O ye goatfathers and groanmothers and labor-saving devices!
Anon, that’s been proclaimed at least thirty-seven times since 2024, you know.
Dennis, nah, the Iran business is stepping down a little at a time. Neither side can allow itself to be seen as weak, so there’s plenty of chest-thumping and the occasional missile. Meanwhile oil is getting to markets in roundabout ways, the inevitable doom somehow seems to be indefinitely postponed. As for MAGA, no, it won’t implode; as such things do, it’ll trickle away, and then twenty years from now its sulking stalwarts may just notice that most of what they wanted ended up happening anyway. Again, this is normal in an elite replacement cycle; compromise and delay smooth out the transition from one regime to another.
Anonymous, I keep on pointing out to people that Trump really is a moderate…
Slithy, so noted. It’s simply not a kind of fiction I enjoy. (Yes, I enjoy Lovecraft, but that’s because none of the allegedly scary things he brandishes about scare me at all — I read him as a fantasy author.)
J.L.Mc12, good heavens. A pale ray of common sense trickles through the vast billowing clouds of smoke! I hope it stays in place.
Sylvia, delighted to hear that you’re being proactive about such things. They’ll be more and more common as we proceed.
Franklin, I certainly won’t argue about health care; I’m old enough to remember when health care here in the US wasn’t that expensive, and was generally pretty good. As for your book point, er, you found Tolstoy’s The Quest for Merlin difficult reading? Hmm. I gobbled it up the first time I read it like a good novel.
David, I hope you’re right. I also note that Rassemblement National is leading the polls in France. My concern is that the establishment is so obsessed with maintaining its current trajectory that dubiously legal or even extralegal methods will be used to stop both parties from what would otherwise be robust victories in the next elections.
Siliconguy, yep. Every reasonably smart teenager I know is planning on an apprenticeship or trade school instead of college. Most of their parents are delighted.
Chuaquin, that’s one way of seeing it. I’d also point out that when a woman gives a man one of her sex toys, it’s generally in the context of inviting him to use it on her.
Aldarion, I’m basing my comments on other sources. For years now I’ve been watching the rising tide of archeological discoveries shifting the centers of early civilization eastwards.
Gunstone, I do indeed. His notion that humanity would “grow together into a single family” is typical globalist codswallop, but he’s right that India will probably still be a center of English language literature when the majority language in England is some kind of pidgin assembled from a dozen immigrant languages.
Martin, interesting. Hybridization often involves oddities like that.
Luke, that’s good to hear.
Clay, that baffles me. I have yet to see anybody on either side of the cultural war zone offer any accommodation at all for people like me. I don’t think it’s a bad idea to have a quiet room somewhere for autists to go and destress, not least because there are so many more of us than there used to be, but I suspect you’re right and it’s just another attempt by the Karenocracy to feel good about themselves so they can justify abusive behavior toward store clerks and waitstaff, or something.
Annette, Art is a great guy, but he’s been predicting impending petroleum doom since I knew him in the Peak Oil days, and he’s been wrong pretty much every time. I don’t know that I’d put too much reliance on his latest predictions, either.
Anon, if the AMOC stops it’ll be because the whole deepwater current system has shut down, and that portends dramatic changes all over the world’s climate belts; to my knowledge, nobody’s yet modeled how that will play out in the light of paleoclimatic data, which is the only really reliable source of information we’ve got on such changes. As for the Islamization of Europe, well, we’ll see. The sheer scale of population movement into Europe makes me doubt your scenario.
Ben, nicely handled. Keep meditating!
@ cynthia
If I came across as condescending, I utterly and heartily apologise.
Regarding the dominant species that might emerge in the future, I think one of the most important characteristics that signal intelligence is curiosity.
From personal observation, the two most curious species I meet every day are cats and geckos. The curiosity of cats is legendary, but you wouldn’t know about geckos unless you have them in the garden and the house like I have. They are amazingly curious.
Interestingly, cats are major predators of geckos. This sets up the possibility of an intelligence arms race, the natural selection mechanism by which enhanced intelligence will become the preferred evolutionary direction for the two species.
“It’s only now that empires have largely vanished that nations have become the major players on the world’s stage.”
Well, no. The world still has a few empires around. Notably the United States of America and Russia, who ruled much of the world in the 20th century and early 21st century. Most of the “nations” you speak of, especially in Europe, were client states / vassal states of both empires throughout the same time.
“Gunstone, I do indeed. His notion that humanity would “grow together into a single family” is typical globalist codswallop, but he’s right that India will probably still be a center of English language literature when the majority language in England is some kind of pidgin assembled from a dozen immigrant languages.”
Do you think North America will be primarily hispanophone or at least speak some Creole of it?
Sylvia R 299
> figure out what combination of camping equipment to stock in case another 50 yr old pipe fails.
Immediately I thought of rain barrels collecting rainwater (using rain chains?). I know virtually nothing of what specifications make the water drinkable.
Can one collect snow too?
💨💦❄️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Is English in India going to end up like Latin in Europe after the Roman empire collapses?
I certainly hope that I’m right too! And, in the interest of fairness, it is possible that this hope has coloured my analysis (such as it is).
I don’t doubt that the establishment will try to do something. We’ve seen an early attempt at that in early 2024, where dubiously financed (i.e. partially government-funded) news agency, Correctiv, claimed that the AfD was planning to deport some 20 million people, meaning not just immigrants but also their transitive descendents (irrespective of how many German ancestors such a descendent has). This sparked big protests and a renewed push to ban the party. After the fact, a court determined that these claims were unsubstantiated. Correctiv defended themselves by claiming that they “decoded” the language used to hide such plans, i.e. their source was, to use my generation’s parlance, “trust me, bro”.
Our domestic intelligence agency later declared that they’d prepared a report proving that the AfD was an extremist party, which would’ve been a reason to ban them. For “security reasons”, the report could only be read by establishment-aligned journalists. It was later leaked to right-wing media; while I haven’t personally bothered to slog through thousands of pages, I’ve been told that, far from containing any genuine intelligence, it was just a list of public statements ranging from normal right-wing talking points to genuinely off-colour remarks that still don’t strike me as any worse than what we’ve been hearing from the left during the same time these remarks were made. A preliminary court ruling threw out the “far right extremist” classification and the push to ban them mostly fizzled out.
The way I see it, until that case has worked itself through all courts, they can’t really try to ban them. If they hadn’t given their “evidence” at all, the public might have accepted it; now that the evidence has been revealed to be shoddy, they’ll need to follow the process. There are two strategies that I can see working out: having the EU force a redo of the election like in Romania (IIRC, they already threatened to do that last time), or going to war with Russia and then using emergency powers against the opposition.
The problem with the second option is who will fight for them. The left-leaning youth is opposed to a draft as a matter of principle and I imagine few on the right will consider the country in its present state defending. They could try to force them, of course, but I question the wisdom of giving people who hate you weapons and telling them to go die for you. Should some sort of Caesar arise, I imagine he wouldn’t wait to return from Moscow to lead an army across the Spree.
—David P.
One gallon of regular chlorine bleach will make 3800 gallons of clear water safe to drink. 8 drops per gallon.
Michael # 264:
I can say depiction of Neanderthals as evil man-eaters seems IMHO too similar to colinialist empires depicting usually tribal people as cannibals, “casually” to justify the invasions and abused commited by Europeans across the world. As an hypothesis too…
—————————————————————————————–
Robert Mathiesen # 266:
” I am definitely not a philosophical materialist.”
I am not, neither. Indeed, I’m not a big fan of Mr. Bueno.
“So the case of Catalonia provides me with a simple example of all this: my wife’s Catalan relatives have internalized a story telling how Catalans are not, and never have been. Spaniards in any sense whatever. ”
I’m afraid I’m going to be the bad news messenger for them, but things in real world are complex and they’re beyond your favorite dreams.
Well, I wish them and the secessionist people in Catalonia good luck to convince the majority of Catalan people to accept their story, I hope by democratic means (ahem). I’ve got some family there and they know a lot of Catalans feel Spaniards and Catalan alike…
According recent polls, it seems there’s a slight majority of Catalans against independence. Did you know it? (well, my link is in Spanish).
https://www.ondacero.es/noticias/espana/encuesta-revela-que-52-catalanes-declaran-independencia_202507166877d1003c6d9a1f947b2447.html
Of course, this situation can change, but I think after 2017 fiasco, secessionist parties are weaker than before their failed attempt to run from the evily evil Spain. Maybe if a Conservative/far right Spanish government makes some rough stupid things against Catalan language in a near future, for example, Secessionists could use these hypothetical Madrid mistakes for a victimist campaign in favor of the same rehashed claims from 2017. I point it as work hypothesis.
In addition to this, Nationalist/Secessionist Catalans had a lot of time ago the unfortunate idea (IMHO) of saying wherever is spoken or wasw spoken Catalan, it’s part of Catalonia: “Paisos Catalans”(Catalan countries). This occurrence doesn’t please Aragonese, Valentians, Balear people and French, part of their territories are reclaimed by those guys. Contempt, when not open hatred, is provoked in those areas due to these claims.
I’m afraid not to offend your wife relatives, but are they ready for recovering (even by rough means, ahem) those “Catalonia” areas, against the will of Spaniards and French people alike? (after an hypothetic independence, Catalonia govt probably would ask for irredentism). Let me say I very much doubt it. Let’s be careful our dreams don’t become real nightmares.
———————————————
Scotlyn # 271:
“my “method” for trying to work things out is to notice when a thought or idea, whether it comes from somewhere unknown within myself, or somewhere unknown outside myself, strikes me as anomalous, or a “bad fit” with whatever else is already there.”
Your depiction of your “method” seems IMHO to come from your subconscious mind; I hope not having opened a can of worms thinking this about you. It’s also possible you’re influenced by something (let’s not definying it yet) outside your brain/mind.
Well, according Jung ideas, subconscious is deeper than Freud guessed, and I see the collective unconscious (and Archetypes) as work hypothesis, not like a “revealed truth”. So I think I’ve begun to understand better your views.
——————————————————–
Anselmo # 296:
It can be true what you’ve commented about ancestors to nowadays Iberian Peninsula people, but I think it’s more important the cultural personal nowadays choices. It isn’t strange some Nationalist in the Basque Country and Catalonia are ironically children of migrants from another parts of Spain…Personal will for belonging to this or that identity is to some extent a personal choice, methink (OKm propaganda in favor or against this or that option can be important, too).
————————————————————-
Clay D. # 312:
Oh, neurodiverse people, another group of sacred cows for woke agenda…Well, I’ve written yet my personal opinion about this Orwellian newspeak term, and it isn’t positive. As a “neurodivergent” man, I find wokesters paternalism disturbing, so I reject it. I’m glad this nonsense has failed to be followed by main Spanish left supporters, except some far left nutties.
——————————————————————
Cynthia # 314:
You’re welcome! By the way, I can tell you that “profanity” verb for some Spanish language countries comes directly from the Latin veb “colligere”, whose main meaning is “to harvest” and “to catch”.
—————————————————————-
Anselmo # 320:
“Acording with these theories, I , humble student (snif !),understand that the individuals are a product of the state , that democracy is a fraud and that every secession atemp of my state, exclusively, is a direct threat against my life.”
I’m afraid to tell you that short depiction of your political philosophy seems IMHO too similar with a totalitarian state and government (in the left of the right extremes of current political spectrum). Are you sure of these ideas? Are you aware you probably have going beyond usual Western countries democratic consensus? I’m not judging you, I’m only pointing my opinion in the most neutral tone I can…without bitterness.
———————————————————–
Robert M. # 322:
“So modern governments’ principle of “national sovereignty” rests on shaky grounds, historically speaking.”
I won’t argue against your reasoning, which to some extent seems to me quite bright. However, in the real world, I wouldn’t suggest you to debate it against the anti-riot police or even worse, the tanks and fighter jets military crews who believe in those “shaky” grounds. It’s another idea, but armed. National sovereignty isn’t a joke, like the Catalonia Secessionists realized in 2017 when police prevented them to be an independent country “representing” all the Catalan people (?). I mourn to be the bad news messenger…or a realist viewer of recent events here.
I can say you I believe in democracy, so not everything is right and ethical in a democracy; and I also think the opposite of a bad idea (secessionist nationalisms) is another bad idea (centralist far right nationalist). Can you understand my personal view?
——————————————-
JMG # 323:
“I’d also point out that when a woman gives a man one of her sex toys, it’s generally in the context of inviting him to use it on her.”
Ha, ha, very good, John. It’s another option to think about it. Who knows?
Hi John,
https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/2058839237441495297
According to this post,
“In many major German cities, a large share of young people under 16 now come from migrant families — including Turkish, Syrian, Chechen, Afghan, Ukrainian, and other backgrounds.
According to Destatis, around 42–43% of children and teenagers across Germany already have a migration background. In cities like Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Hamburg, the figure exceeds 50%, while in some districts it is already above 70%.”
For sceptics, refer to this – https://tuenews.de/en/25-2-million-people-in-germany-with-a-migrant-background/
These numbers are huge and quite staggering.
German cities will be unrecognisable in a generation.
As for the UK, agree, next decade is key and how a potential Reform government deals with immigration and Islamists in particular will probably decide the long-term future of the UK.
Hi David,
Referring to the AfD, whilst I agree that they will be the largest party at the next general election they would still need to form a coalition government. According to this, AfD is on 28% – https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/germany/ – a great result for them but not enough to form a majority.
I still doubt the CDU would form an agreement with them at the next ge, although at some point I consider that inevitable next decade, but as per my other post on German demographics, Germany really has only one decade at most to turn it around before it is taken over by Islamists by the 2040s.
The demographics of the under-20’s is already in the process of transforming Germany into a sharia state in a generation time.
I’d like to write that political spectrum, which it’s usually described as a static “photo”, changes more than we’d like to think, during time. Classical binary opposition between left and right mustn’t prevent us to check there are some people and ideologies who/which don’t fit exactly in these two political boxes without problem. In addition to this fact, I can say political views aren’t absolut, but a relative thing. John wrote a lot of time ago, for example, that Republican party in the USA in Abraham Lincoln era was in the left, to some extent, but Democrats were in the right wing.
I’m thinking now in Mahatma Gandhi, who’s usually depicted as a progressive nationalist, but I think this is a half truth. Some of his ideas seem to be “forgotten” to fit better in the Left Bed of Procust. For example, he was a very religious/spiritual man, and his respect for every life led him to oppose to the abortion, indeed he proposed every undesired child had to be born, and raised with its reckless father money…
Another uneasy example which doesn’t match exactly in the left side of politics is ecologism. It’s evident its criticism against capitalism has made ecologist scientists and activists, who began to thrive since the ’60s and ’70s, to be another part of Leftism. However, I found two elephants in the room. First, old school Marxism loves “maximizing the industrial development” as a necessary condition, before the legendary Communist society arrives, and this tendence has been usual in every country ruled by Commies (remember their awful effects in environment…). However, ecologists doesn’t love very much industrialism, evidently by its pollution downside. Second one, it seems some ecologists aren’t real materialists, even they see in a positive way spiritual tendences. Indeed, Gaia hypothesis, though is often depicted as a metaphor to understand natural world as a whole, it remembers to some extent a religious attitude (starting with its name). Of course, old school materialists ecologists don’t like this idea, and reject it…casually the ecosocialist Marxists who want to save their ideas from the trains crash between industrial Marxism and non-Marxist ecologism.
Vandana Shiva blends ecologism, feminism and a neo-Gandhian ideology, and it isn’t casual she usually praises in her books Eastern philosophies, tribal native beliefs and even some Christian saint like Saint Francis of Asis, to dismay of materialist leftists/ecologists.
Finally, I can say when somebody remember how ecologism began, at least here, the most leftist ecologists often get angry. Well, it’s true first shy attempts to take care of natural world began during last years of the XIX century and early XX century, partly due to naturism and hygienism within Anarchist circles in Spain. But it’s also true some fringe people in the right wing, were concerned about the bad side of industrialization…even a few aristocrats (ahem). Most Socialist and quite Anarchist believed blindly, in those times, in the need of a full industrialization to reach the heaven in earth, without noticing the Progress downsides…The few fringe Socialist who didn’t believe this narrative, like William Morris, were despised by mainstream leftists as wrong Socialist of even worse, shameful Conservatives, to say it softly. It seems ecologists and the Left in general terms haven’t much memory.
Sylvia R #299 (and Northwind Grandma #328),
A Waterbob may be worthy of consideration. The Big River carries them. It’s a food safe plastic bladder that fits in your bathtub and will hold up to 100 gallons of water. Of course ,you’d need some sort of warning that it’s time to fill it, or, just keep it full if you’ve a spare bathroom.
I don’t have one, but plan on ordering it: @$35.00 is cheap insurance IMHO.
OtterGirl
I’m working through the OPW and was meditating on the national group soul (NGS). This led me to wondering about differentiation between this and the national egregore (NE). I decided that the two are indeed different, but that the NGS would certainly want to influence or work through the NE. It occured to me that an old or dying NGS would have a weaker influence, and this seems to be the case in the United States now, but I also know from occult literature that other forces can work through the egregore. It seems to me to be the case that the U.S. NE is currently being bolstered by other forces besides the NGS.
JMG, IIRC you’ve said Trump is a “solar king,” and in addition to this, that a deity known in native american lore as the Changer is very active in the American sociopolitical scene. You apparently lay this out in your book The King in Orange. Do you suppose this is an indication the solar logos or other “higher powers” are working to bolster the NE while the NGS is in a weakened state? Can you comment on the ideas I’ve mentioned above, about the relationship between the NGS and NE?
Thank you,
David M.
Sylvia – I wrote a post for my blog on collecting and storing rain: https://livinglowinthelou.blogspot.com/2013/09/fun-with-rain-collection.html
It’s a long article, for which I apologize, but it tells you how to calculate how much water you can collect depending on how much rain you get and how many square feet of roof drains into a barrel, how we set up 55 gallon drums to collect water from the house roof, the set of barrels we have in the basement to store that water, the filter we use to filter it for drinking, and how we modified our garden shed to collect rain from its roof. It’s a cheap system to implement and the oldest plastic drums have been in service for close to 30 years with no leaking.
JMG or anyone, have you read the scifi novel The Three Body Problem? I’ve been pleasantly surprised, halfway through.
Hey JMG and Gunstone
On the subject of future languages derived from English, in Australia we have a little known English creole language spoken by various aboriginal people around Queensland and the Northern Territory called Kriol. It’s essentially a mix of English and a few aboriginal languages, with its own distinct grammar. I’ve long had the unique opinion that Kriol is a glimpse or foreshadowing of the kind of language people will be speaking in Australia a millennia from now, though I expect Indonesian and Chinese influences to be dominant rather than aboriginal.
https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-largest-language-spoken-exclusively-in-australia-kriol-56286
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Kriol
Civilization is ambiguous – population size, urbanization, writing… Chinese archaeologists have claimed for a long time that traces of writing can be found on older artefacts, but I am only aware of bona fide inscriptions from the Later Shang period. Do you think writing existed before 2000 BC in eastern or southern Asia?
“Will England go a different route? Depends on what happens over the next decade at most — and if it does, it’ll simply become a colonial possession of India instead. I imagine some South Asian Rudyard Kipling of the 23rd century exhorting his countrymen to “take up the brown man’s burden” and get to work civilizing the savage, inscrutable, half-primitive people of Britain.”
I don’t know if the British would like that option either. Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints is already widely praised amongst the ethnic nationalist right as a prophetic warning about non-Europeans coming into the Europe and taking over their countries, and that book would be even more prophetic if the people coming into Europe were Indians instead of Muslims.
@ celedon
I read the 3 body problem some years ago, so I dont remember details. I do remember that I did not like the writing ( wether I found hte premis interesting or not, I dont recall, I realy was not liking the writing style) I am an avid sci fi reader
In the future, Catalonia and the Basque Country might secede from Spain because Spain has been taken over by Muslims.
Mr. Greer, what’s your take on the U.S/Israeli clasping of mil-tech armored gauntlets … together-as-one, as it pertains to the re-upping of CONgrease’$ funding of the next NDAA iteration?
@forecasting intelligence #333: These numbers are certainly high. I have tried to get details from the page of the Federal Statistics Office, but they don’t seem to group people the way that seems logical to me. “People with a migrant background” includes those who were born in Germany to parents, at least one of whom was born with a different passport. I don’t think countries like the USA would consider an American citizen born in the USA to parents who are now both (native or naturalized) American citizens an immigrant!
A large number of these “people with a migration background” immigrated themselves, but most of these are now adults, even seniors. The (ex-)USSR, Poland and Romania are among the most strongly represented source countries – many of these were invited by a conservative government to immigrate due to their ethnic German heritage.
The very high number of children and teenagers in the larger cities “with an immigration background” are mostly not themselves immigrants, though I would like to see this broken down by numbers. I would also like to see how many of these children and teenagers speak German as their main language, how many of them have a parent who grew up speaking German, and how many of them have at least one German ancestor going back to the 1950s. My father’s best friend has an originally Polish family name, but the family would never consider themselves anything else than German. They probably moved within the borders of the then-German empire before WWI from a Polish-speaking part (Silesia or Pomerania) to the west.
So I think the real question is how many children and teenagers grow up today with preference for a different language than German and without any emotional connection to German history and heritage. Such numbers are of course more difficult to come by, and responses to questionnaires are always somewhat subjective.
My favourite metaphor for immigration is making a dough – you have to add flour slowly. If you add it slowly and gradually enough, a large quantity of flour can be incorporated into the dough.
Wouldn’t a better (“more descriptive”) name for “fascist” be “massacre-ist?” If I understand correctly, massacring is the favorite activity and best-loved hobby of fascists, is it not?
💨💣🔪💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
In regard to crude oil, there seems to be some disagreement.
“He did say that the world runs on diesel (big transport trucks, farm machinery, construction, mining, etc machinery) which is refined from heavy, sour crude which the US doesn’t have and most producers outside of the Gulf don’t either. ”
But, “Why does this matter? Refineries are engineered to process specific types of crude. Many modern facilities, especially in Europe and the United States, are optimized for light to medium sweet crudes, which yield a higher percentage of gasoline, diesel, and other valuable products with less processing. Guyana’s grades fit well into these systems, reducing the refiners’ need for complex processing units and lowering costs”
Guyana is the country Maduro was trash-talking about invading. Low sulfur oil with a decent cut to diesel.
The really light oil you get from fracking is not a good source of diesel, no argument there.
Refineries are optimized for a given input blend, that can changed with a couple years notice.
Aldarion @ 341, Perhaps I am misremembering, but has not an untranslated script been found at Mohenjo Daro, or another of the bronze age cities in the Indus Valley? I have also seen rumors or claims of early scripts in what is now Iran.
Anonymous 321
> would open up for a lot of former MAGA people like Tucker Carlson etc, who were betrayed by MAGA in Trump’s second presidency, to go support the Democrats.
Tucker Carlson support Democrats? Not a chance. Never happen. The idea is ludicrous. Perhaps others (you didn’t name them) but Tucker Carlson would NOT be among them.
Regarding Tucker Carlson, are you getting this via hearsay? I gather you don’t read his writings or watch his films firsthand a whole lot, much less know his bare-bones philosophy.
I espouse most of what comes out of Tucker Carlson. I don’t take his verbiage for granted; I mull and think on it. He doesn’t get “everything right,” only the vast majority.
💨📢📝🎥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG 323
> Polecat, if I’d had any idea, back when I was writing Star’s Reach, that the LLM craze would happen, I would have stuck it in.
Write a second edition, now that we know more.
💨📝💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@Chuaquin (#332, 345):
Of course, it’s not my wife and I who are personally passionate about Catalan independence, but her maternal relatives and ancestors in Barcelona, and from what we know about them, it seems the historical roots of their passion lay not so much their love for Catalonia, as in their generalized hatred of all kings and all clerics. I suspect that in the late 1700s their ancestors in Barcelona had been very ethusiastic for the original French Revolution with its tumbrils and guillotine, and had hoped to see something of that sort happen in Spain as well. — And of course we were paying attention to the events of 2017 in Spain, out of curiosity to learn whether her relatives would finally realize their dreams of independence or not.
O another subject, you said: “John wrote a lot of time ago, for example, that Republican party in the USA in Abraham Lincoln era was in the left, to some extent, but Democrats were in the right wing.”]
That was certainly true throughout the 1800s and early 1900s. One of my paternal great-grandfathers, an immigrant from Denmark, registered to vote (in California) in some years as a Republican, in other years as a Socialist, not seeing all that much difference between the two. (In his day California voter rolls were published every second year, and they showed each voter’s party affiliation, if any. They are now available online through various genealogy websites.)
Not really relevant to any of the current threads, and a little late to the discussion, apologies, but this happened just recently and I really wanted to get your opinion on it while the Open Post was still active, JMG.
I’ve gotten to Lesson 11 of the Order of Essenes material and had an interesting experience to go along with it yesterday. I have my own interpretations of it, but I wanted to run it by you and see if I’m on the right track.
So yesterday, I was coming off of a period of falling off of my practices for a little bit. I had spent a fair few days kind of listless, drifting, not making much progress towards my goals, when all at once I sort of got fed up with it.
I recognized that mentally, I was split between several competing projects and that dividing my attention like this was the reason I was getting stuck. It helped that I had been paying more attention to my thoughts and state of consciousness lately due to what I had been reading in the material.
I made a list of priorities and ruthlessly pared it down to just my spiritual practices and one primary change I would like to make in my life. I started planning the specific habits I would have to focus on each day to make it happen, and as I was doing this I felt something shift in my consciousness. Something welling up within me, like I was channeling a sense of inner power that I only ever experienced before in fits and starts. I suddenly found it extremely easy to focus, nothing that would usually distract me seemed to register at all, and there was a sense that everything I was doing, all of my movements felt purposeful.
Even as I had to stop and go fold laundry afterwards, I felt the difference acutely. Whereas my mind would usually wander whilst folding, I was able to focus entirely on the task in front of me, and I felt as if I made fewer mistakes than I usually do. All of my movements felt deliberate, and again there was this sense of power or purpose that I usually don’t experience at all.
So after experiencing this, it clicked. All of the writings in the first dozen or so lessons of the Order of Essenes material seemed to make sense.
They all seemed to be describing ways to enter this altered state of consciousness, which they named “concentration”. To shift in and out of it at will. I wondered if the ultimate goal of all of New Thought wasn’t simply to teach a person how to enter this exact state of mind and sustain it for as long as it is needed?
I then realized that meditation and other magical practices seem to also be meant to teach the practitioner to shift into and out of this (and other!) conscious states at-will. Like shifting gears on a vehicle. Am I on the right track?
If so, this sounds like an extremely powerful tool to have in one’s mental toolkit, and one that potentially takes a lifetime to really master.
Mental discipline. The ability to choose the appropriate state of consciousness for the situation at hand.
I feel as if I’ve just experienced the tip of a very, very deep iceberg.
The left was historically racist and antisemitic:
https://fascio.substack.com/p/why-marxism-is-racist
https://fascio.substack.com/p/early-anti-semitic-socialism-the
It wasn’t until after the United States defeated the Nazis in WWII that the left in the United States dropped its antisemitism and it wasn’t until after the civil rights movement that the left in the United States dropped its racism. Right now, the left in the United States becoming racist and antisemitic again just means that the left is reverting back to its historical norm.
“Tucker Carlson support Democrats? Not a chance. Never happen. The idea is ludicrous. Perhaps others (you didn’t name them) but Tucker Carlson would NOT be among them.”
The thing about political realignments is that all the political coalitions get scrambled up, and people who would have otherwise been enemies in the previous political party system (like blacks in the Republican Party and white Southerners in the Democratic Party before 1932) suddenly find themselves allied in the same political coalition in the next political system (like blacks and white Southerners in the Democratic Party after 1932). I’m sure that if you asked a person in 1929 whether blacks can ever support the Democrats, they’ll probably say that there is not a chance and it will never happen and the idea is ludicrous.
Trump had the opportunity to be the political realigner figure but he has destroyed that opportunity with his betrayal of the MAGA movement and America First in the past year and a half. So it’s now up to whether the anti-establishment populists can hijack the Democratic Party, bring in disaffected former MAGA people like your Tucker Carlsons, your Thomas Massies, your Marjorie Taylor Greenes, your Candace Owens, etc, and kick out the Democratic establishment, or whether the Democratic establishment stays in control of the Democratic Party and the anti-establishment populists go create a third party, letting the Democratic Party die like the Whigs did the the 1850s.
Untitled-1, I’m working through the Order of Essenes material as well and I have also experienced that shift of consciousness into concentration mode; it’s been especially helpful for work AND for slowly getting over my addiction to doomscrolling on the internet. Lately I’ve severely pared down the sites I visit and the frequency.
The concentration thing happens in fits and starts, but I’ve experienced it. I’d be interested to hear about more of your experiences with the OE lessons if you’re willing.
Continuing the updates on the novel writing, if this is allowed for posting; I do it as I vowed that I would do it. Halfway through chapter 19 at the end of an extraordinarily stressful and disastrous move. But… it is done, at least. Better progress next month I hope.
Celadon,
I read all three books of the Three Body Problem Trilogy.
I too read a lot of sci-fi and one of the ways I measure sci-fi books is how much I remember long afterwards. Three Body Problem had a number of plot twists that I found particularly striking. And I found that I cared about the characters.
I also enjoyed seeing what the world looks like through Chinese sci-fi eyes. There is much in the trilogy that gives a good sense of what recent history (last 200 years or so) looks like from a Chinese perspective. Not that that aspect gets in the way of the story or hits one over the head. It is just that if one knows a little of that history, some parts of the book clearly reflect Chinese history.
I first read Jasun Horsley many years ago when he wrote a book about a Canadian spiritual teacher that both he and I (at slightly different times) studied with. To me, that book seemed motivated by a desire for revenge against a teacher who had failed (in Jasun’s eyes) to put Jasun up on the throne with the teacher. That is a fairly common pattern, I think. A student arrives expecting a special relationship with the teacher (as in “the teacher and I and not everyone else) and is disappointed when that does not happen. I do have to give Jasun credit for being forthcoming enough about his relationship with that teacher to make it clear what had motivated the writing of the book.
Also, his logic or sense of need for evidence was quite minimal. Many of his assertions took the form of “The teacher did X, Jasun can imagine Y as being a possible cause, therefore Y is proven to be the cause”. It wasn’t even so much that he was cherry picking as cherry imagining.
Based on my experience with that one book of Jasun’s, I would be quite skeptical of anything else he wrote. That is just my opinion.
@ Cynthia–I do not know much Spanish, however if the word you allude to has a meaning “to receive” or “to catch” it may be that it serves a slur toward receptive or passive male homosexuals. Machismo devalues what is seen as a female role, just as in Classic Greece and Rome.
re: Trump–I think the loss of humor and sharpness in his recent pronouncements may be health related. I can’t back it up with facts, or divination, but I don’t really expect him to last his full term. Of course, the decline in health is probably exacerbated by stress–it can’t be healthy to have regular reminders that many people want you dead. I can’t begin to imagine what that would do to a person’s mental state.
re: MLK Jr and affirmative action–I wonder how well the Indian efforts to integrate untouchables into society have gone. It seems to me that the last 20 yrs or so have worked to undermine such efforts in the US as the public schools fail to actually prepare black students for rigorous academic work, meaning that for them to “succeed” the universities and professional schools must also lower standards. When the people thus “educated and credentialed” enter the workplace, their deficiencies will eventually be noted, and hostile observers will conclude that the deficiencies are the result of natural inferiority thus reinforcing rather than destroying racism. This past week the news in Calif. is that a several hundred professors in STEM fields have petitioned the University of Calif. system to restore SAT tests as a part of admissions. The tests were dropped in 2020 as part of COVID reaction. The professors complain that many incoming students lack the basic math skills necessary to learn sciences and technical field. Professors are trying to convey middle school level mathematics while teaching physics or engineering. It strikes me that this is outright robbery of these students–admit them to classes that they cannot succeed in, take their tuition money (probably student loans), allow them to become discouraged and dropout with no career and a staggering debt. I am ashamed of my alma mater. Nor is this a product of inadequate school funding. Calif. is among the highest in K-12 school funding. Yet recent tests show that a black 4th grader in Mississippi is more likely to be reading at grade level than a black 4th grader in Calif. Ashamed of my state too.
Wicca–in my experience traditional coven base Wicca is in decline. Many reasons, partly generational. Too much to go into here.
Hi,
Regarding German demographic numbers I’ve drilled down a bit more:
”In major western urban centers, local sociological estimates and school registrations for Islamic religious education suggest that between 20% and 35% of the under-20 population identify as Muslim or come from a Muslim family background.
By 2046, while major West German cities and the city-state of Berlin will see under-40 Muslim populations ranging from 30% to over 50%, cities in the former East Germany (such as Leipzig, Dresden, and Chemnitz) are projected to maintain much lower shares—likely remaining well under 10% even in the under-40 bracket, due to historic and ongoing settlement patterns.”
The 30 to 50% number depends upon a number of variables including whether you get a high or a medium migration flows into the 2040s.
My own view is as Muslim numbers start to hit the 40% of the under 40s population in the big urban cities of western Germany a successionist movement could emerge that sees a return of the old East Germany as a native German fortress backed by the might of Poland.
Poland, seeing the rise of sharia style islamist movements in western European cities will want a buffer state.
It makes logical sense to back a breaking up of Germany.
Martin B. # 325:
“The curiosity of cats is legendary”
Yes, indeed we’ve got here a saying about that: “La curiosidad mató al gato” (Curiosity killed the cat).
—————————————————–
David P. # 330:
I think AfD is a far right party which plays its politics game within the border of German democratic consensus (until today), though smartly near the “red lines”, according what I can grasp here. You must know AfD is heavily despised here, especially within the woke left, what a novelty…By the way, I read some time ago a good novel about a woke girl who moves to a Conservative small German town. One of the character she mets is a gay middle age man who votes AfD, ironically. It’s interesting this fiction character explains the (woke) girl why he votes far right, in spite of being gay…This book title in Spanish is “Sobre humanos” (Over Humans), written by the German July Zeh. “Úber Menschen” was the original title of that novel, methink. She doesn’t support far right agenda, but she’s clever enough to depict nowadays German (and Western) problems of polarization and tension, without sectarianism.
———————————–
Celadon # 339:
I’ve read that novel, and I find it very interesting, not for his “predictive” sci-fi elements, but because sci-fi books are always telling us more about our present than about our future. For example, it showed me a lot about Chinese actual mindset…
——————————————-
Anonymous # 344:
“In the future, Catalonia and the Basque Country might secede from Spain because Spain has been taken over by Muslims.”
Well see…Do you know young males here are going “in masse” voting and even joining the far right main party (Vox)? And Conservatives have been hardening their political views toward a more strident Spanish Nationalism…In addition to this, according recent polls young people is more interested in Catholicism than previous generations, which breaks tendence to seculatization. My personal opinion is we can witness the return of a fierce Spanish nationalism, who despises (or even hates) regional nationalism and muslim migrants alike. So do the math. A sign of times I see now is how many bullfighting spectacles are being broadcasted in my regional TV, which depends of the regional government (which is today a Conservative/Far Right alliance). And bullfighting is a typical part of the Spanish cultural “mythology”.
Of course, I think the opposite of one bad idea (woke left and secessionism) is another bad idea (far right Spanish nationalism).
————————————————————–
Aldarion # 346:
“My father’s best friend has an originally Polish family name, but the family would never consider themselves anything else than German.”
This view reminds me how Charles Bukowsky always thought he was born in a genuine German origin family, in spite of the evident Polish flavor of his surname…
——————————————
Robert M. # 352:
“it seems the historical roots of their passion lay not so much their love for Catalonia, as in their generalized hatred of all kings and all clerics.”
I’m sorry if you thought I was “attacking” you personally: I was thinking in your wife relatives.
I’ve seen the same radical attitude within some Catalonia Nationalists, it only means part of Catalan “patriots” tend to leftist ideas. I also know Secessionist evident idea of a new state for them is a Republic, against our current Spanish Monarchy.
There’s also a minority within Spaniards who define themselves as Republican in the European sense, but I can say until today the majority of my compatriots are more or less in favor of the King.
It’s also interesting to point the 2017 mess helped far right nationalist politicians to become more powerful in votes and popular support outside Catalonia. Acts have consequences, action-reaction.
———————————————————–
Anonymoud # 354:
“The left was historically racist and antisemitic”
I’d be more cautious before pointing a statement like that as an absolut truth.
Marx was born in a Jewish origin family, Trotsky was from Jewish origin too, for example. And at least in European leftism, there were usually a lot of Jews who thought their people would be respected in a Socialist future society…
It’s true some leftist thinkers have been Antisemitic, a dirty truth well hidden by nowadays left. For example, Proudhon, a French Socialist and proto-Anarchist, was a very Antisemitic man. However, I think it isn’t honest to cherry pick the rotten apples to make a straw man fallacy against the left as a whole.
By the way, I’ve seen the name of the sites you linked includes the term “fascio”…a curious term who reminds me old Mussolini times.
@ J.L.Mc12: I’m one of the people expecting to pay a lot more tax as a result of the Federal Government’s changes, and I’m very pleased. It’s high time the investors got a little competition in the property market.
Hi John Michael,
To chuck you another climate data point, in summer we’ve had some stalled high pressure systems over the Tasman Sea (the ocean between Australia and the twin islands of New Zealand). Now that we’re in winter, a week or so back, a low pressure system stalled in the same-ish spot, and nobody said anything about it, other than: That was weird! As I’m typing away a massive north west cloud band drawing moisture from the tropical Indian Ocean is dumping lots of rain on the roof, which in turn has been driven by a ‘Bomb Low’ sitting over the Southern Ocean. As you’d imagine, it’s wet out there… 🙂 Long ago, one third of this flattish continent was rainforest, just sayin’… I note many rainforest plants eeking out an existence in the surrounding forests waiting for their day in the sun, or more correctly, rain, to come again.
Man, my expectations of that lot we spoke about, are not all that great. But must they hassle me so with burdensome policies so that at times I do wonder if it would be easier to simply shake my head in dismay, and walk away? It would be beneficial for those with marxist leanings to recall that the soviet empire fell, rather spectacularly if I may say so. Why repeat the same mistakes, is an issue which bothers me. Do I expect too much?
Ah, I see and thanks for the explanation. Man, you had me wondering. Horror fiction is not your bag. All is now explained, and I had wondered. Respect for telling it, like it is. 🙂 I view that world differently, and the eeriness of say, the 1980 film Alien, bothered my dreams for weeks. I’ve zero visual memory recall, but dreams are different, those are especially vivid. The mice incursion a few weeks ago, rocked my otherwise restful slumber. Dreaming of the aroma of mouse with the sense the rodent was just about to sample my lips, or eyes, caused me to wake and cry out in fear. Let’s just say that I was motivated for three weeks of battle. Rats and mice are cunning critters, worthy of respect.
By the way, go the Neanderthal! I probably got more than the average of that heritage. Robert E Howard, here is a solid guide: “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” And man, when I finally cornered those two pesky mice a few weeks ago now, they experienced my extreme displeasure. That’ll learn ’em! 😉 But in the meantime I’ve sweated buckets on rodent proofing the house so that the situation does not occur again. Best to be prepared don’t you reckon?
Cheers
Chris
@343 Atmospheric River, thanks for this. Surprisingly I like the writing. But I could see how someone wouldn’t!
Chuaquin #332
All the men are product of our respective society wich in our case is a state, built by the fight made for our ancestors against another groups for to conquest the territory in wich we live and wich brings the outcome necessary for our lives, shared in an not equalitarian way acording with the power of the group to each individual belongs
Democracy is only a disguise for to cover the tirany of our oligarchs who hide behind the awful of kleptocrats who govern us.
The personal apetences of an individual about the secession of his state are not relevant. But if someone choose to to try this, the history is full sucesfull examples of secession., wich ussually required a civil war.
@Forecasting Intelligence #334 (if I may)
First off, I really don’t intend this to come across as confrontational, or as a “gotcha”. It’s a genuine question. And for the record, I’m far from an enthusiastic supporter of unrestricted immigration to Northern Europe. With that out of the way, you write:
“The demographics of the under-20’s is already in the process of transforming Germany into a sharia state in a generation time.”
What I’d like to know is, how many of them support full-on sharia? Are the under-20s actually that socially and religiously conservative, and how do we know their views? Again, these are genuine questions, not rhetorical ones. If there’s data on this, I’m obviously unaware as I’m not German, but I’m interested. I do think this is important because I suspect the future Islam we might end up with could be very strange and not at all the kind of fundamentalist nightmare we expect. Sure, they might not especially identify with liberal, decadent Europe, but do they identify that strong with fundamentalist Islam either? At least that’s one possible straw to grasp at…
As for the demographics themselves, IIRC it’s the same in Norway, with some school districts in Oslo having 80-90% students of immigrant backgrounds. Rural areas are a very different story.
Scotlyn: Well then I apologize in turn if I saw something that wasn’t there. Peace, friend!
Mirko, Franklin, others
Re: healthcare, coming from a clinicial background. The primary bureaucratic drain likely results from third party management, worsened by rising chronic conditions (repercussions from BigFood, substitution of online for community-focused living, pollution, and the remnants of public health.). Third parties insert themselves between patients and caregivers. Non-clinicians milk the system directly, influence care “guidelines”, and redirect funds and focus from care to middlemen.. Vested interests have led to widespread bias to frank corruption, whether done by insurance companies or government. In the US, both apply. IT, legal systems and monopoly/monopsony add more cost. Delays and shortages harm patients even more.
Preventative care typically is not profitable for any one but the patient, and maybe purveyors of decent food and clean water. Supplements, monthly testing, online trackers, and extensive screening imaging (for asymptomatic or those without substantial family history or risk factors) serve as another profit center in most cases.
A note to all: I’ve just had to delete two attempted comments about Israel, both of which were pretty obviously trying to pick a fight, from opposite directions. I have no idea why that little and relatively unimportant country gets such overblown reactions — why not stress out about Laos or Malawi instead? — but there it is. I am therefore declaring the rest of this open post off limits to comments about Israel, to remind everyone to keep it cool.
Martin, now you’ve got me imagining a future Earth where intelligent creatures descended from cats keep nearly-as-intelligent creatures descended from geckos the way we keep dogs…
Gunstone, it’s certainly one possibility.
Anon, as soon as I get a time machine and go check, I’ll certainly let you know. 😉
David, thanks for this. All over the Western industrial world, it’s the same situation — a ruling elite that can’t lead and won’t get out of the way is trying to cling to power by any means necessary in the teeth of rising populist dissent, and it never seems to occur to them that making a peaceful transition impossible just guarantees that the transition won’t be peaceful.
Forecasting, I know. As I said, things have gone much further than I expected to see this early on.
David, that seems quite plausible. The group soul can wane while the egregor, which has more inertia behind it, remains strong — consider the egregor of Rome, which remained potent centuries after the Roman empire was defunct. The thing I’d point out is that it’s not just spiritual entities that can seize, or attempt to seize, an egregor in that condition. Movements, groups, and even charismatic individuals can do the same thing — and it’s quite common to get a tug-of-war when more than one force tries to indwell an egregor at the same time.
Celadon, not I. I’ll take that as a recommendation, though.
Aldarion, urban centers existed long before writing in the Middle East. I consider the rise of urban centers to be the prime marker of civilization — the word itself comes from the Latin word civitas, “city” — and those seem to have existed a very long time ago indeed in south and east Asia.
Anon, er, were you under the impression that historical change cares about what people like or want?
Polecat, for reasons noted above, I’m going to let that one pass.
Northwind, nah, that story was the product of a particular moment in time and I can’t see rewriting it. If I write another deindustrial novel I’ll probably weave failed AIs into it, though.
Untitled-1, excellent! Yes, exactly — you’ve shaken off the manacles of distraction, if I may use a somewhat clunky metaphor, so that you can begin to use your own genuine strength of will. You’re right, too, that there’s much, much more where that came from. To channel Obi-Wan: “You’ve taken your first step into a larger world.”
Shinjuku, sorry to hear about the difficulties.
Jessica, oh dear gods. One of those. I get young men with that kind of attitude pushing themselves on me now and then; after some very bad experiences early on, I’ve gotten fairly good at repelling them, though some still go around yapping about how I used to be their honored mentor, blah blah blah. That is to say, it’s a type, and if Horsley’s that type, yeah, don’t rely on anything he claims.
Chris, one of the lessons of history is that next to nobody, especially in government, ever learns the lessons of history. 😉 As for mice, well, I once slew three groundhogs with a sword, so I know the feeling.
@ Chuaquin # 332
“Your depiction of your “method” seems IMHO to come from your subconscious mind; I hope not having opened a can of worms thinking this about you. It’s also possible you’re influenced by something (let’s not definying it yet) outside your brain/mind.”
Yes, exactly. What influences come to my mind, that I must find a way to make internally coherent, can only arise from the Mysteries that are either my subconscious mind, or the world’s subconscious mind…
Since, as I said, I do not know how to “see” in there, your guess will be as good as mine. Maybe better. 🙂
Ultimately, of course, all sources have One Source. But it is not ours to make direct contact that far up the line, as it were, not by a long shot… 😉
Flinging dildoes?? That gets my personal stuffed blouse award in the how dumb can you be category. What I wonder is who dreamed up that stunt and how much were the participants or at least the instigators paid, and by whom?
@Mary Bennet #341: Yes, you are remembering correctly! As an exchange student in Pakistan, I had the chance to walk over the still unexcavated parts of Mohendjo Daro – a mile walking over nothing but pottery shards. I brought home a reproduction of a tile from Mohendjo Daro with some characters from the undeciphered script.
My knowledge of the Indus civilization may be outdated – I am under the impression that it flourished, including writing, mainly in the 2nd millennium BC. That is why I was asking JMG if he has updates on earlier use of writing in southern Asia.
I’m considering getting How To Know Higher Worlds, by Rudolf Steiner, so I can learn more about concepts like spiritual sight. Is there anyone here who’s also read that book and can vouch for or against it, or recommend similar books in the same niche? I have recently been troubled by thoughts of the finality of my own death, even though I’m still a young adult and don’t have any illnesses that would lead to such a fate early in life, so I would like to find material that can allay these fears.
Thanks for clarifying! Yes, I would agree with that definition of civilization and will continue to watch out for archeological news.
JMG,
Here is one to file in the ” religion of progress” file drawer. Disneyland is updating its carousel of progress that was first installed in the 1960″s. The original one ( still in service) depicts several scenes with animatronic actors showing the March of progress from 1890 till the late 1960′.
They are updating it so it goes from the 1970’s until a possible future with robots.
I would guess that to add modern eras to the ones from the real era of progress would be kind of revealing to the public so they had to scrub them out so we would think that bigger tv’s and personal computers were huge leaps in progress.
@Forecasting Intelligence: Thanks for digging up some more numbers! I must say that again, I find the definition a bit curious: “20% and 35% of the under-20 population identify as Muslim or come from a Muslim family background”. There is a big difference between the two sides of that “or”.
Here in Québec, the heated public debate centres around two questions:
1. How many people prefer to speak French vs. English vs. some other language?
2. Is the laicity of state institutions in danger?
French-speaking immigrants from the Maghreb or sub-saharan Africa are mostly welcomed as a bulwark against the use of the English language – as long as school teachers and other public employees don’t use veils, require prayer rooms or in any other way intrude on the laicity of the public space. I had a co-worker, a recent computer science graduate who was winning programming competitions, who insisted on being called “Med” instead of “Mohammed”. He would be on the right hand side of that “or”, not the left hand side. The grocery store around the corner is called Al-Amanah in both Latin and Arab letters, the cashier uses a very fashionable head scarf, they collect donations for Eid – but they open on Fridays and the cashier has recently started to use Western clothing. So I don’t think it makes sense to lump people together as that definition does.
About languages, our daughter at age 4 stopped speaking German or Portuguese with us, preferring to use only French with a strong regional accent. Later on, she started speaking Portuguese again and still understands German, but French is certainly her preferred language, and her teachers think she should one day study French literature at university or become a writer (Heaven forbid! :-)). I have seen breakdowns of German children and adolescents into those who speak German “always”, “sometimes” or “never” at home. Well, our daughter would answer she speaks French “often” at home, or if forced to choose between the options, “sometimes”. That doesn’t change the fact that French is her preferred language.
So I think there is some unwarranted lumping going on in those statistics.
@ pygmycory #278
Carpe Jugulum is a wonderful story. I’ve always thought of Pratchett as being the most deft explorer in the realm of human moral intelligence that I’ve read. His characters are often working through quite serious moral dilemmas and each, in his or her own way, muddles through without heroism, without special equipment or wise advice, and yet… it is rivetting, every time. (he is, of course, also a master of humour and invents plot devices to beat the band, but it is the moral relatability of characters who are picking their way between good and less good choices or bad and slightly less bad choices, which keeps me most entertained. 🙂
We are all talking about an Islamic future for at least parts of Europe, and this eventuality seems plausible to me, but not startling, and not particularly fearful. After all, this has happened before, and people have lived through such times, just as much as through any other kinds of times. Well, or badly, but people do.
A book I recently finished is called “Hagia Sophia: Sanctum of Kronos; Spiritual Dissent in an Age of Tyranny.” The way he tells it, he is relating the architectural features of the Hagia Sophia, which he says was built in Constantinople in 532AD by Greek “mekanikoi” educated in schools of Hellenistic philosophy, like the Neoplatonic Athens School, at the order of the same Christian emperor Justinian, who had closed the Athens school in 529AD, and severely curtailed all other public expressions of Hellenistic and/or Neoplatonic philosophy and religion.
The author, Peter Mark Adams, argues that the Hagia Sophia itself was built by them in such a way as to embed the suppressed Hellenistic platonist ideas into the heart of a Christian worship space. The author also makes reference to writings of some of the Athens School’s disciples being issued under the pseudonym of Dionysius the Areopagite, again, to put a Christian face on Hellenistic philosophy and extend its influence.
As he says in the book, a tyranny will engender its own opposition, and people will find different ways to express it.
I have no doubt that Islam will take Europe through yet more years of religious war, but that inclination appears to be as much a European thing as a Muslim thing, since religious war has been endemic in Europe for centuries, if not millennia.
Ordinary people will not be the originators of such wars, but, as has always been, we will get caught up in them, take positions about them, muddle through them as best we can, get recruited to be its troops, find ways to escape recruitment, get martyred, survive, and hope (always hope) that when the knights fall to blows, they will do it somewhere other than in our fields.
The history of Europe does not lend itself to the idea that our future contains peace and security and respect for individual conscience. And so, for me it is about dialling away from the large abstract notions that we fear or desire without being able to pin anything on them – Christianity, Islam, Polytheism, Democracy, Monarchy, Tyranny and so on – and getting more into the concrete here and now – who do I know, who do I care about, what am I willing to shout about, what will I keep alive under the radar, and so on.
Because, ultimately its a crapshoot out there, and it will be what it will be, and I will (as Terry Pratchett’s characters do) muddle through, as I choose and as I act in response.
Be well, and enjoy the book!
@ David M (#337):
Generally speaking, egregores are created by people acting (usually unconsciously) in concert. Souls (assuming that they exist) are not traditionally thought to have been created by people.
National egregores are, in my view, a real thing for many, but not all, nations. Also, as I have remarked elsewhere, national egregores, where they exist, are not all equally ancient or equally strong. Since “nations” is a relatively recent geopolitical concept, there are still peoples who have no strong sense of belonging to any particular nation. And regions within nations also have their own egregores, weak or strong. These regional egregores may even be stronger than the national egregore (as seems to be the case in many parts of the USA).
As for national souls, I’m not at all sure they are real things, since nations themselves are not (IMHO) natural or enduring things either.
@ Cynthia
Peace! 🙂 🙂 🙂
@Michael_20, #264. There’s a… small problem with that theory, I think: The average Neanderthal height was just 1.50m (that’s 4’10” for those using English metrics). I have never read the Oddisey, but from the 70’s movie I recall one sole cyclops taking on the whole of Ulisses’ crew or warriors. Even accounting for Herodotus’ exageration, I don’t see how that could have happened unless the average height of homo sapiens would have been less than 3’2″ in those times: essenciatlly a Hobbits vs Goblins battle. And even that sounds unreasonable if you give the Sapiens the advantage of using ranged weapons. It is not like lions use buffalos as a stapple of their diet; sure, they will snatch an unattended calf, or the old geezer that falls behind the pack… but those are opportunistic strikes more than anything else.
What I think more likely, is that bands of Neanderthals and modern Sapiens did go through phases of no-quartell-given tribal warfare where canibalism (both ritual and… economic? ones) are more or less the norm. You take down two of ours, we take down three from you and gobble’m with ketchup, just for the lulz!!!
Hi,
I’ve done plenty of polling research on Muslim views:
A third are essentially hardcore fundamentalists who want sharia and impose a caliphate on the West. Some of them openly support terrorists.
A third aren’t but harbour some sympathy to certain islamist positions (e.g. they think criticism of the Prophet should be banned, are sympathetic towards Hamas and think Israel shouldn’t exist).
Its not clear whether this group would resist a fundamentalist push to takeover or would go along with it. I suspect many would not resist.
Around a third a secular and liberal Muslims who oppose islamists, against Hamas and think Israel has a right to exist.
These are from more UK based data but I have seen similar numbers in other European countries.
Key point is the younger demographics in the UK have higher numbers of fundamentalists and liberals.
@Polecat #285 and @JMG #323
For what’s worth, the connection between the current datacenter craze and the abandoned, never completed nuclear plants was automatic in my head, and for more than one reason. Back in 2024, an “Stargate Project” was anounced jointly by OpenAI and Microsoft, which would create 10 gigantic data centers. It’s been speculated by the press that a prerequisite to complete this project would require an equal number of nuclear power plants, since there’s no way the existing public electric infrastructure would provide the needed energy at any price point within the next decade.
While doing a quick&dirty fact check about this last paragraph, I came up with the wikipedia page of StargateLLC (now featuring Oracle, NVidia and SoftBank along with the original partners), the form this project materialized in the Legalosphere. The stuff is chilling, and very in-line with our host’s fiction and non-fiction regarding Dark Age America. Here’s an extract:
‘Larry Ellison contended that Stargate could lead to the AI-facilitated production of mRNA vaccines against cancer, and that such vaccines could be designed “robotically”, or by leveraging AI, “in about 48 hours”.’
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_LLC
Made this up today and googled it. May be an original – For many people Secular Material Is Om – I have OPD, Obsessive Pun Disorder
It’s late in the post, but to anyone who engaged with my musings about the present, the HERENOW where our bodies reside, being the place where we have the power to act, as opposed to FUTURETHENS or PASTTHENS… I have discovered a wordsmith who is putting this hunch of mine into better words.
Known as Nance, he and his partner recently interviewed JMG in a podcast, where (towards the very end) the terms “hyperstition” “hypostition” and “retrostition” – which link very interestingly to future, present and past, were advanced and explored. (Podcast link) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk4g1hFkDVw
The term is better explained here, at Nance’s substack… https://nanceee.substack.com/p/travels-along-the-fault-line-1-long, where he says about “hyperstition” that it “operates through a form of ‘neurotic ekstasis,’ functionally leaving the present behind to inhabit a future that is designed never to be reached. By framing the ‘now’ as a provisional waiting room, persisting in perpetual not-yetness, they transform every accomplishment into a mere stepping stone toward a receding horizon, ensuring that the present remains structurally insufficient. This temporal displacement allows them to endure significant current suffering, whether as a startup founder sleeping on an office floor, or a revolutionary or visionary subsisting on scraps, because they are never truly ‘here’…”
It is this sense of “temporal displacement” from THIS place, which IS actually here, that strikes me as being equally characteristic of the Christian idea of “eternal life” or “the world to come”, as of the communist “end of history”, or of other utopian (ie “temporally displaced”) visions. Perhaps also of some dystopian (also “temporally displaced”) visions.
Anyway, Nance has got this covered, and now I will go back and read some more of his post, and think some more of time and temporal displacement… 🙂
Hi JMG
After the Strait of Hormuz has remained closed for so long, and given the time it will still take to fully reopen it and repair all the damages done to the oil infrastructure in the Gulf region and Russia (by Ukrainian drones directed by the European elite, who seem oblivious to our dire situation in the near future), I believe a global economic crisis is looming (and, in the worst-case scenario, a full-blown economic depression), an US will not be isolated at all, so the American people will pay, also, a heavy price.
So my question is: do you think this might change the US foregin policy, especially the unconditional support of both political parties for Israel’s aggressive policy in the Middle East and the genocide in Gaza? Do you think American people/voters will maintain the status quo on this issue?
Cheers
David
What the America First nationalists and former MAGA people and antisemites etc don’t realize is that throughout history around the world, people were frequently content to be ruled over by foreign ethnicities and nationalities, so long as their needs were provided for. It is when their needs of the people are no longer provided for that the rulers get overthrown, but that would happen regardless if the rulers are of the same ethnicity and nationality or of different ethnicities or nationalities, you see a rise in hatred towards the ruling class.
Anselmo # 366:
Democracy, which evidently you don’t like, gives you the free speech right…(ironically) to write against it. Of course, if you don’t commit crimes according our Laws to achieve your antidemocratic goals.
However, intel services across the world (and Western world too) never sleep. When we’re online, everybody is located to some extent. I guess you only want to show your ideas outside democractic consensus and you’re clever enough to not go beyond words, at least in the short term.
You’ve caricaturized how democracies work (the straw man fallacy, methink); if you know recent History during past century, you must know how well worked totalitarian states for some people (Auschwitz, the Gulags…). It seems democracy is the worst government system, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time (Churchill said).
It seems you’ve learnt at least part of your political philosophy reading the relatively known philosopher (here) Gustavo Bueno. Well, I’m afraid I had heard that name somewhere during a chat with a friend, some years ago (more radical into the left wing than me, I’m a center-left man). And my friend didn’t like very much Mr. Bueno, but I didn’t remember why. Indeed, it seems part of the Spanish left dislikes Bueno.
Well, I’ve found this interesting article depicting him as a scholar with a puzzling origin (during Franco dictatorship), a strange ideological change, and finally supporting the Spanish Empire nostalgia…
https://ctxt.es/es/20230101/Firmas/41892/David-Teira-Gustavo-Bueno-Martinez-filosofo-ultraderecha-comunismo-personajes.htm
In the short form, if you don’t dare to read this criticism against this thinker, I’ll tell you it (and taking in account the Anglophone commentariat, because this essay is written in Spanish). Young Mr. Bueno was a Falangist guy (Falange was a fascist-like group who helped Franco to win the war, including prosecution and killings againt their enemies, and it has some influence during the first times of the Regime). Some years after that activism, Bueno became a Marxist, in a strange way, because he never joined the Communist Party here (who worked in secret due to dictatorship). Bueno won some fame in the Spanish left as a Marxist scholar, though his ideas never were shared by most of leftism. However, Mr. Bueno during his last years (he died 10 years ago), became the black beast for a lot of leftists. It isn’t very strange: he liked the Empire (avoiding its colonialist downside), supported death penalty, proposed the end of regional governments…Oh wait, this last measure is the same as far right party Vox loves to repeat endlessly in its electoral programs.
Now, I’d like to ask you wether you share Mr. Bueno political program in a 100% or you only like a part of it…Only to satisfy my curiosity. Are you a far left supporter or a far right one? Or a blend of them? (Because Mr. Bueno played during his life the two extremes game, methink).
“the history is full sucesfull examples of secession., wich ussually required a civil war.”
But not always. Have you read about Slovakia “divorce” from the Czech Republic? Maybe it wasn’t a very smart decision, but it was a peaceful mutual secession…
————————————————————————–
Boreal Bear # 367:
“What I’d like to know is, how many of them support full-on sharia?”
A good question, because thinking every migrants from muslim countries are Islamist zealots is more a biased belief than a hard fact, in absence of reliable statistic polls…I’ve been unable to find serious data about expressed level of belief and religious practice (prayers at mosques) within those migrants, and I also can say people can lie when is asked about their personal beliefs. My personal not scientific view is that children of those migrants seems less religious (for example, they respect less Ramadan than their parents, and some of them like alcoholic drinks), according what I see in my town neighborhoods when they tend to live. Of course, secularization, like another social tendences, maybe it’s not going to be always a linear tendence toward the ground.
John Michael, what do you make of Charles Fort, from whom we get the terms “Fortean” and “Forteana” ? With reference to the human race, he wrote, “We are property”. What do you think he meant by that?
Hey JMG and commentariat –
I had a pretty cool experience recently that I felt this community and JMG would appreciate: in scouring the Facebook Marketplace for various deals, I came across a listing for a literal landscaping trailer worth of books – for free. From the photos, I could see a number of titles I’d been wanting to add to my library. It was over an hour away from home (and gas has been pushing $5/gal) but when I realized I’d be out that way to visit a customer the next day, I asked them if they could hold them until the afternoon. Once I got out there, I was blown away – it was almost like a reading list suggested by you, John, over the years. Many titles on Appropriate Technology, Reich, Karl Hess, John Lamb Lash, the Harrowsmith reader, Mother Earth News (70s) biodynamic texts, deep ecology texts, multiple titles from Jung, Nietzsche, Gene Logdson – the count was over 200 books and my wife has spent the last several days adding shelves to the walls of our workshop and finding other creative storage solutions for our small living space. Several of the titles I had even been borrowing and reading via Internet Archive (Not in His Image, by John Lamb Lash, for one) but I just don’t recall/receive information all that well via a screen. I need the tactile interaction for it to really sink in.
We wound up with about 8 duplicate copies, which I gave to our neighbors who rent space on the farm and who I’m gently encouraging in the Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush methodology.
Best I can figure is that it was an estate sale clean out – from various page markers/receipts stashed in the books I even got a sense of the man who owned most of the books – a timber frame builder and home inspector. He certainly seemed to be the kind of man who would have been an interesting conversationalist.
I’m not sure if he has passed or what the situation is, but I’m very glad to be the next keeper of these books. My wife is working on a simple tracking and check out system, since trusted friends and community members know they can browse my shelves with a bit of advance notice. I expect a lot of “free book” listings to be popping up now, since McKay’s, which was the primary aggregator of used books in town, closed about a month back. Some small shops are trying to pick up the slack, but the amount of volume that one store handled was bonkers – and a lot of folks are going to just give stuff away instead. I’m going to try to keep valuable texts out of the landfill, that’s for certain!
@Tim PW #356
Unfortunately I don’t have much to report! This was the first experience I felt was notable enough to share. Other than some food for thought and further reflections, and a bit of practice building good habits, nothing much has changed for me yet. I am, of course, hoping that changes soon, especially now that I have this experience as a point of reference!
And thank you for sharing your experience, I’m glad to know this is a common result of studying this material, at least with our current sample size of two. If there’s anything in particular you’d like to know or something specific you’d like my thoughts on, feel free to ask and I’d be happy to elaborate, keeping in mind I’m only familiar with material up to lesson 11!
@JMG
I’m glad to know I have the right idea! I understand now why personal experience has been cited over and over as a critical element for the starting occultist. I’ve read about these things here and there on your blog and I’ve been on the fence about it for a while but this experience alone has provided me with far more motivation to pursue further practice than anything else could. I’m thinking maybe I’ll look into something like the Golden Section Fellowship in due time, but I want to make sure I well and truly understand this state of “concentration” first before trying anything more ambitious, so I’ll stick with the Essenes material for now until I get more comfortable with it. Many, many things to reflect on…
@David P. #330
You wrote:
“The problem with the second option is who will fight for them. The left-leaning youth is opposed to a draft as a matter of principle”
True, but on the other hand, aren’t these also the people who tend to really, really hate the Russians for their conservatism and rejection of Woke doctrine? And who might be in search of a worthy (in their own eyes) fight, as discussed upthread. Or: does their Woke religious fervor extend so far that they’d be willing to die for trans rights? Of course, picking a fight with Russia as you describe seems like such a monumentally stupid idea it seems like a stretch even for our current senile elite, but who knows these days.
@Forecasting intelligence #381
Thank you for the elaboration. Those are indeed some concerning numbers on the face of it, and of course makes it all the more ironic that certain leftists are so worried about those evilly evil Christian conservatives, while not at all caring about islamists. Maybe I should try to dig up some numbers from my own country as well, if they exist. I’m surprised they ask such candid questions in UK polls these days. Seems like the results could become all too politically incorrect.
Mary, I don’t think it’s just stupidity. As I noted, it reeks of suppressed sexual fantasies — the sort of thing with which Freud would have a field day. Very often, when people do something that makes no sense whatsoever in logical terms, treat it as a dream — it comes from the same unconscious roots as dreams — and you can interpret it very easily. I think that applies here.
Ethan, that’s one of Steiner’s best books and I certainly recommend it. You might also like to read Through the Gates of Death by Dion Fortune, which gives a good general summary of occult teaching about the after-death process.
Aldarion, my guess is that the decades immediately ahead will see some remarkable discoveries along those lines.
Clay, yep. It’s almost impossible to hide the fact any more that progress has stalled out.
CR, yes, I recall that. Oog.
Scotlyn, I’m going to be giving some serious thought to hyperstition, hypostition, and retrostition. It seems to me that all three of them are extremely useful concepts for scoping out the interface between the world of ideas and lived reality. More in due time!
David, probably not, for reasons I’ve discussed here many times.
Zemi, I’m a great fan of Fort, and have (and regularly read) all his books. As for “we are property,” he means to imply that some more intelligent species treats us the way we treat livestock.
Kerry, delighted to hear this!
Untitled-1, there’s plenty of meat in the Essenes course, so no need to rush on to other things.
@scotlyn #378: That sounds like a very interesting book! I am afraid I have been commenting a bit too much this week, but I hope you will forgive me one more comment, because it overlaps with Ilaria Ramelli’s book I have mentioned above. Justinian does seem to me have been a tyrant, but his tyranny was directed not only against “pagan”, i.e. non-Christian Platonists, but also against Christian ones. It was under Justinian that a rather confusing partial condemnation of Origen’s teachings was pronounced by a rather confused council of the church.
Up to that time, Origen was widely regarded as the greatest of all Christian theologians and was at the same time a Neoplatonic philosopher (Ramelli even cites evidence that Origen may have been a pupil of Plotinus). Origen agreed with Plato that evil acts are committed always out of ignorance of the true Good and that “evil” does not exist in itself, but he argued against Plato that after many aeons, all rational beings would finally understand what the Good is.
Anonymous says:
May 31, 2026 at 9:18 pm
“The left was historically racist and antisemitic:”
Not “historically” at least not in my country: Spain.
It may sound strange, but during Franco’s dictatorship, the left very was pro-Israel, since Franco never recognized the State of Israel and was pro-Arab and pro-Palestinian.
For the left, the kibbutzim and many of the policies implemented in Israel were considered Marxist and socialist, and aligned with their own ideology. In fact, it was Felipe González’s socialist government that recognized the State of Israel and established numerous political and commercial ties with Israel that had not existed before.
Interestingly, now the Spanish right has become rabidly pro-Israel, when its reactionary tradition, at least since the 15th century, has been profoundly anti-Semitic.
Cheers
David
ClayD/JMG: There is a useful (if verbose) series of posts discussing the failures of ‘neurodivergence’ starting here: The Failures of Neurodiversity are Not a Bug, They are a Feature (https://dispatchesfromtheautismwars.substack.com/p/the-failures-of-neurodiversity-are)
The author himself is ASD-1 and is painfully aware that conflating his own real challenges against a hundred other issues, let along against the monumental difficulties of ASD-2 and ASD-3 is unhelpful to say the least. And that the activists then push ‘celebration’ of the disability on top of all that to boot is just insulting.
The American federal government spies on innocent Americans without suspicion and without warrants.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/may/27/government-spying-turns-every-american-suspect/
Anonymous @ 387, 1. “throughout history around the world, people were frequently content to be ruled over by foreign ethnicities and nationalities, so long as their needs were provided for.” That is an assertion without supporting evidence, and I doubt it is true very often if at all. People who have no weapons nor the training to use same are not very well able to stand against an armed invasion. Furthermore, successful conquerors usually find they have to respect the religions, customs, and even legal structures of the conquered territories, and even then, there can be problems. The allegedly benign Persian Empire was plagued by revolts throughout its’ history.
2. I do not consider being a “nationalist” a bad thing, although I prefer the word ‘patriot’, a person who loves his or her country. And I strongly object to insertion of snarl phrase “America First”, although I do believe we need to be practicing the virtue of subsidiarity (take care of your own first).
3. I think “former MAGA” whomever they might be, can speak for themselves. I think some of these folks were told, you, the Real Americans, you get to be in charge now, only to find that the rest of us objected.
4. What does “antisemite” have to do with any other part of your post?
IDK what country you are typing from or about, but here in the USA our republic was founded as, among other things, an experiment in whether capable men (white men of property at the time), capable people now, of good will could govern themselves.
“It makes logical sense to back a breaking up of Germany.”
They had a hard enough time putting it together in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_Germany
Then the Allies dismantled it, partly reassembled it, then let it reassemble itself.
I would not be surprised if it disassembled again. Look how quick Yugoslavia came apart. Alberta is making secession noises again and there was some muttering about expanding the port at Churchill in Manitoba. Shipping seasons there are getting longer. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba would be a viable country.
“Prime Minister Mark Carney and Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew has signaled that renovations the Port of Churchill would be a priority for their governments. The Government of Canada committed $175 million over five years (starting in 2025-2026) for the Hudson Bay Railway and port expansion activities.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Churchill
If you have reliable ocean access you are a real country. If you are landlocked you need feuding neighbors you can play off against each other to keep transport open. (Austria)
Soil that has been sterilized to kill all life in the soil continue to take in oxygen and release carbon dioxide:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-dirt-that-refused-to-die-20260601/
Hi JMG and Everyone,
I mentioned Evan writes on X and Simon Dixon as two “follow the money” people to read/watch/ listen too a month or so back.
Heres is a re-post from Evan that he wrote about this time last year, actually in April.
Pretty prescient….
I believe he is Kurdish, who, in his words, “Doesn’t want a separate state”.
https://xcancel.com/EvanWritesOnX/status/2061602348519350474#m
Regards, Helen in Oz
An article from 2015 says that Asian carp are being eaten by native fish species in Indiana such as “channel catfish, flathead catfish, largemouth bass, white bass, black crappie, white crappie, and gar species”:
https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/asian_carp_being_eaten_by_native_fish_new_studies_find
Speaking of Asian carp, turns out that one species of Asian carp, grass carp, has already made it to the Great Lakes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XyNKgxX1Q8
Asian carp have also escaped past the barrier in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal in Illinois and have made their way into Lake Michigan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-xIMOF6NLk
@JMG “I’ve just had to delete two attempted comments about Israel, both of which were pretty obviously trying to pick a fight”
Here in Australia there was a comedy TV show in the early 90’s called Frontline. It was angled as a behind the scenes of a journalistic TV program but showing how petty and manipulative it all was but with jokes in there. It is probably the closer to reality than any dramatized version could be.
There was this episode where they had a debate between Palestinians and Israelis. The producers said “We need to ensure that conversation is lively, lets plant someone in the audience so that we get a little more action”.
So the debate is going on and it is all very civil and pleasant until their plant comes in. “I have been a journalist in the region for over a decade and have seen all sides of the issue and I say it is all Palestine’s fault” at which point it turns into a large fighting a shouting match between everyone in the room much to the joy of the producers behind the scenes.
It might have been a joke but it is such a good summary of how the media stokes on these fights amongst readers.
Another invasive species that has become a big problem for America’s waterways: goldfish
https://phys.org/news/2026-04-pet-pest-invasive-goldfish-reshaping.html
JMG 370
> I have no idea why that little and relatively unimportant country gets such overblown reactions
Not to beat a dead horse. The (“unmentionable”) nation that starts with an “I,” ends with an “L,” and contains an “S” and an “R” (hint hint😉wink wink):
Good question. Yeah, why? I will be looking WITHIN and try to figure out why “I” get so hot and bothered about that particular nation-state. I truly have not thought about why I go bonkers. I will meditate on what is really happening inside my psyche. I shall study the situation, INTROSPECTIVE-ly.
💨🤷🏽♀️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@Ethan L.
I am in the process of reading how to know higher worlds of Rudolf Steiner, about three quarters through. There is a lot of important basic advice for spiritual practice, though less so as a detailed script for practices.
That is only my current view and I may need to re-read it again.
@earthworm #255 re: Numbers or figures mapping onto emotions–
“Do you know if emotional states and flows have ever been mapped to numbers or figures? Could a number have two or more potential states or polarities or is that even conceivable? e.g. vices and virtues are not so much opposites but depend on ‘relationships of states’ and the point from which they are observed.”
Yes, there are a lot of examples of this sort of mapping to numbers and figures;
Numerology is a meditiation set that includes emotional meanings linked to numbers. Here’s a link to one discussion on that — https://jobcannon.io/blog/numerology-psychology-connection
With figures there are even more examples and different kinds–
Tarot (which I know very little about!) has images on each card that carry emotional and relational meanings, and these meanings change depending on other Tarot cards associated with them.
Geomancy’s 16 figures have names and emotions, and any figure could be considered favourable or unfavourable depending on the context in which it is found. For example, Laetitia (Joy, candle, tower, flame) and Tristitia (sorrow, planting) are related. The image of one is just the image of the other that has been inverted. Laetitia is generally thought of as a positive, upbeat symbol, but can be unfavourable. Tristitia is usually a downer, but can be positive in a meditation where (for example) stability or planting is desirable.
Our host, John Greer, has written an excellent introductory book on Geomancy, “The Art and Practice of Geomancy.” Here’s a link to the tropical river description; https://www.amazon.ca/Art-Practice-Geomancy-Divination-Renaissance/dp/1578634318
Astrology is another system that includes emotions linked to its images, with amazing depth and complexity.
There’s a lot of material out there– I haven’t even gotten to runes, I Ching, many more. Perhaps spend some time getting to know your way around one of them, and you will gain a tool kit that allows you to use that symbol system to map the emotions and explore their relationships.
A wider and final comment on the Muslim picture.
The middle third of Muslims are v conservative but not out and out fundamentalists. They tend to be more represented in the older demographics in the UK in particular.
One way of integrating Muslims into European society more generally is a very strong social conservative shift towards socially conservative Christianity.
Your average God fearing conservative Muslim would feel more comfortable in such a society.
That would help isolate the fundamentalist factions within Muslim communities (e.g. less Pride marches and more Christian celebrations and women nuns).
Chuaquin #388
I fear that you are a victim of an alteration of your capacity of analysis called by Gustavo Bueno ” Democratic Fundamentalism” wich is a kind of adoration of an ideal.
I’ll try to explain my point of view with a metaphora : imagine a bus in wich people choose by democratic vote the route and destination, but in certain moment a group of passengers vote for to dismantling the bus. It will be correct for you ? Democracy is a form of goverment, wich hides the real govern of power groups. And thanks this blog we have learnt about Joan Culiano an his book about magic in the Renaissance. In which Culiano describes the states in wich we live like magician, because submision of people is obtained by he mean of indoctrination begining in the kindergarten
and propagandistic bainwashing during the rest of the life. I’ll add too a bit of Shock Doctrine to the Culiano receipt.
Is it necesary to say that in Spain there is not separation of powers, democratic representation, nor transparent count of the votes ?
When I review an idea I don’t give importance to the vital path of the person who had this idea .You missed that Profesor Bueno fought in the civil war in an anarchist troop. And what matters ?
Checoslovaquia was an artificial creation of the winners of WWI, gifted by them to Hitler in e Munich agreement (Mr. Chamberlain claiming “I Bring peace ! ” )with the purpose of to start a war between Germany and the Soviet Unión .
@ Aldarion #395
Well, I too have commented rather a lot this post… 😉
Still what you say is very interesting.
I do think that there were many ChristianitIES in contention with one another at that time, as well as other persistently non-Christian strains of religious thought – of which the most influential would have been the Hellenistic and the Judaistic. Some of the Christianities which “lost” influence in subsequent centuries acquired the label “heresy” – such as pelagianism, or marcionism.
All of them as devoted to Christ as each other, but also pitted against one another in public contention over which type of devotion the state would uphold as official doctrine. Certainly, hellenistic or platonic philosophy would be no better if allowed to be the ONLY permissible state doctrine (see what would result from an attempt to put Plato’s Republic into practice, for example).
Still, an argument between one philosopher and another over what God will do Aeons hence, is obviously an argument over straws in the wind, since none of us could pretend to any such knowledge. So, I would drill such arguments down to the question of what does each position imply for the arguers at the present time – what do they think are the present day stakes that make such an argument matter.
@ JMG – I will look forward to that post.
I was very interested in the way Nance showed that it is possible (hypostition) to “stand beside onself in temporal displacement” EVEN in the Present – a possibility I had not considered, when I was thinking about the matter, but which does make sense of a great deal that I see in the clinic (which is where my personal musings on the matter originally come from).
If I may, I might add that the clinical issue, as I see it is the “what” that “temporal displacement” is displacing. It is displacing or setting aside the access a person has to their own centre/core/place of power, which result in the person dwelling in a place of powerlessness. The body recognises this deliberate choice to dwell in powerlessness and can sicken of it. (in my humble opinion).
Chuaquin#366 Excuse me for to not answer to your question about my political alignement.
The philosophic materialism is only a procedure for to built a map of ideas. This map varies acording the knowledges and capicities wich will be the inputs of a process of analysis and synhesis based in the philosophical system wich I am refering. Throught a process of dialectical confrontation is possible to merge diferent maps if ideas for the obtention of a new map more adapted to the reality, in a not ending circular path.
So, if I say that individuals are a product of their respective society, I should back that they are expendable for the preservation of their society, so that death penalty in certain cases will count with my aprobation.
The party Vox is not extreme right, but liberal conservative and zionist( Bueno too could be) But , in Spain, and in my humble opinión, there are not political parties but gangs of parasites who spoil the country like amazonic piranhas.
My political view is that the confrontation of right against left is a theatrical play for to keep divided the ordinary people. The real fight is of the powerful and rich men against the rest, group to wich unfortunately I belong…… Damn It !. This real fight is framed in a socioeconomic phenomena described in the Theory of Catabolic Collapse , formulated by our admired John Michael. Phenomena wich brings another social and economics changes, like the chaotic massive inmigration , described. In the post called ” The Cauldron of the Nations” (Archdruid Report). And my political view is that the goal wich should be pursued is the recurrence of our society in the curse of time considering that every society is subdued to change. In the short time I find necesary to make nuclear weapons and exit from the NATO and EU.
John Michael wrote:
“I’m a great fan of Fort. As for “we are property,” he means to imply that some more intelligent species treats us the way we treat livestock.”
Yes, I point my finger at the ultra-terrestrials. See the books of Ivan T. Sanderson and Trevor Constable, as well as the numerous anomalous events recorded around the world and the experiences of people like Travis Walton. And yet you say that you do not believe in alien life, JMG. But just because you do not believe in aliens does not mean that they do not exist. So I think you should go on YouTube and apologise to all the aliens of the multiverse. Agreed?
About the left becoming antisemites, John Michael Greer predicted this a decade ago when he pointed out the left’s obsession with the Nazis and their inability to think of anything else / anything positive. What you contemplate you imitate and all that stuff. And so the left has eventually come to imitate the Nazis.
We also see the same thing with the right wing as well, they were obsessed with the woke in the past five years and they’ve recently become very much like right wing versions of the wokescolds as well, complete with their own versions of cancel culture and the circular firing squad; the topics that right wingers cancel each other for are different than those on the left, but the phenomenon is still very much the same. That’s how you end up with all these former MAGA people who feel betrayed by Trump and the MAGA movement.
Okay, I have to ask about this – just read:
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/grain-feeds-half-world-just-posted-biggest-monthly-surge-2008
which said, “Rice farming is already highly fertilizer-intensive…” I always had the impression rice-farming, was fairly organic/sustainable (from reading this site and others). So what changed? Was there a species-level change, similar to the modern “hybrid dwarf-wheat” developed by Normal Borlag, that’s both “high-yield”, and “high-fertilizer”? Or a technique-change?
Scotlyn # 371:
“Ultimately, of course, all sources have One Source”
Jung idea of “collective subconscious” challenges current Psychology “conventional wisdom”, about mental isolation between people individual brains/minds, beyond our skull. If you think there are shared human ideas beyond individual subconscious (like usual Freudian psychoanalist and “clinic” Psychologist go on rejecting alike nowadays), you must admit there’s a kind of communication between people in addition to words spoken and heard by the rational mind.
Even “worse”, someone can point maybe some images and ideas from the “low mind” come from outside the human world…
——————————————————
Forecasting I # 382:
That statistic poll you’ve depicted seems realiable and reasonable, and to some extent it could be true for another European countries. It seems there’s a large Islamist minority in the EU, but until today is a minority, not a majority. However, secular trends can change in near future.
What I see more as a belief than a hard data is the idea of Islam religion like a “nature/mystical” unstoppable power, so soon we Europeans will become muslim, because it’s our fate…Ironically, this narrative is shared between the two apparente opposites, the Islamist zealots (eager to convert unfaithful people) and some European people against their countries Islamization. I think to say something is possible isn’t the same as pointing it at a fate.
——————————————————————–
DFC # 386:
“After the Strait of Hormuz has remained closed for so long, and given the time it will still take to fully reopen it and repair all the damages done to the oil infrastructure in the Gulf region and Russia (by Ukrainian drones directed by the European elite, who seem oblivious to our dire situation in the near future), I believe a global economic crisis is looming”
I’m thinking, in favor of that near future situation, in a possible “canary in the mine”: In addition to the evident rise in kerosene prices (which I pointed a time ago in this blog), yesterday I’ve known German airline Lufthansa has reduced/suppressed some flight routes. I bet these suppressed routes means to save some kerosene, so some costs, due to a too expensive kerosene.
https://simpleflying.com/lufthansa-cuts-23-international-routes-see-all-flight-changes-here/
——————————————-
Boreal Bear # 393:
“does their Woke religious fervor extend so far that they’d be willing to die for trans rights?”
I’m skeptic enough about wokesters real fanatism in front of fighting a real war, so I doub it. In addition to this, part of EU young males are children of migrants, and I bet not only men from muslim countries ancestors wouldn’te be pleased to show their “patriotism” (?) against the evil Russians; but another young males from another “ethnicities” would think twice before to become cannon fodder for EU elites. We’re not in the ’30s, so multicultural societies may have their downsides, especially in war times…
————————————-
JMG # 394:
“Very often, when people do something that makes no sense whatsoever in logical terms, treat it as a dream”
A very good phrase to be used in real everyday world. It seems more people than we think dream awake…
——————————————-
(To be continued)
DFC # 396:
I agree, there are some hard historical facts which have been forgotten by left and right wing actual people, about political views changes. I knew Franco fondness to Arabs/muslims, for example, and how old school leftists praised and admired the “kibbutz” Israeli organization, after the Second World War.
Beyoind our borders, I can say love for Palestinians and Arabs/muslims in general, and “Antisemitism” (?) due to Zionist politics in ME, are more recent in the left side of politics than we usually tend to know. I’ve written before European Marxist were happy sharing their fights and debates with Jewish origin comrades, without any problem in general terms, during XIX and XX Century…Maybe until the ’60s-’70s?(when old Left began to become into the “New” postmodern Left, to point it in a rough way).
——————————————————————
Daniel # 397:
“the activists then push ‘celebration’ of the disability on top of all that to boot is just insulting.”
I understand how offensive can be the wokesters views about their orwellian term “neurodivergence”, especially when they look at their first “poster boys” in their ideological manipulation, the autist people…
“The scary thing for American Jews is that anti-Semitic Nazi leftists actually have a chance at power in the United States because Trump failed to reform anything while in power. America might have a leftist Fred Halliot soon to persecute American Jews.”
The Nazis were socialists who also happened to be racist, antisemitic, and German nationalist. The same Germans who supported the Nazis before and during World War 2 ended up supporting the SDP in West Germany and the KDP in East Germany after World War 2. The Nazis also built up a giant managerial bureaucracy in Germany.
Whoever takes over in America in the future might be racist, antisemitic, and white nationalist, but they won’t be Nazis because they will be interested in dismantling the managerial bureaucracy in America instead of creating a managerial bureaucracy in America.
JMG
I know this story is well out of your wheelhouse, but have you heard of the “Lego situation” that’s been blowing up online the past few days? It’s pretty much a perfect example of how bloated and corrupt the bureaucratic state has become. The general gist of the story goes like this for those interested.
There’s an old man with a collection of lego sets (mostly old/vintage Star Wars valued around $200k) he takes his collection to a franchise of the Lego reseller company called Bricks & Minifigs and they sign a contract that the store would sell his collection on his behalf and they would split the profit. However shortly after the corporate office would take over the local franchise due to the franchisee’s debt. When corporate placed new management at the store they decided that since the contract was signed by the previous franchisee then the current management was under no obligation to honor the contract and basically stole the collection.
The whole situation exposed a massive number of people to how corruption works on smaller scales. By basically laundering fault/responsibility no one in the chain of command can be legally held responsible without spending an excessive amount in a lawsuit (which in this case would be more than the collection is worth) and thus can get away with pretty much anything.
As of now the situation has gone viral online as it looks like multiple police departments across state lines are actively involved in the corruption.
Hello, JMG!
I completed the Dolmen Arch in 2020. It was a ton of work (as you know), and finishing it was particularly difficult, both on its own and that it happened during lockdown. The work brought much of my inner conflict into consciousness, and I ended up taking a hiatus from spiritual practice.
In the last six years, I’ve been navigating my past trauma and realizing that it’s far more extensive than I had previously known. I’ve become aware of some very serious very early childhood trauma. My work under the Dolmen Arch helped prepare me to navigate this trauma, but I haven’t been actively practicing spirituality.
It’s easy for me to beat myself up for not practicing. Once upon a time the only certain truth I knew was that I was in this life to pursue spirituality.
Part of why I took my hiatus was that it felt like spiritual practice was putting pressure on a hot, infected wound. The healing was too painful. I’m not sure if my hiatus has been needed rest, or cowardice.
I bring all this up because lately I’ve been feeling the draw to take up some practice again, but am feeling some hesitation. I’m not sure if the hesitation is just the watcher at the threshold.
I have two questions:
1. You’ve mentioned that past a certain point, one can’t/shouldn’t stop spiritual practice. I’m certain that I passed that point in completing the Dolmen Arch. What are the “symptoms” of stopping practice after this point? I’m asking so that I can do something of a differential diagnosis of my experience during my hiatus.
2. What advice do you have regarding taking up some practice now that I’m feeling the call again, but am scared?
Thanks.
Forecasting Intelligence #334:
Oh, you’re right, I was mixing up state-level polls with federal polls. Still, 2029 is a long way to go. Suppose that the AfD wins majorities in Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. Suppose further that they manage to run the states well enough that it sounds believable when they say that they’d have done an even better job without the federal meddling that will undoubtedly happen. The former looks quite likely according to the last polls I’ve seen; we can only hope for the latter.
Your 28% works out to 32% of seats¹. The CDU will keep bleeding voters either way, the above scenario would just increase the rate. Based on current polls, the CDU and SPD together will be 69 seats shy of a majority, so would already have to take the Greens on board. According to my calculation, the CDU would have to lose five percentage points of votes to the AfD so that a majority can only be achieved with all four relevant non-AfD parties (the same, obviously, applies to the SPD or the Greens, though I wonder how many votes they would really lose towards the right).
I doubt such a government would last long. The government after that will be AfD-CDU or maybe even just the AfD. I know I’m starting to sound like I just desperately want it to happen but I’d bet a modest sum on the AfD being part of the government at the start of 2032.
As for the demographics, you don’t need to tell me. I commute by train. I wonder, though, what the newly minted German citizens will do when their parents can no longer live off of social security and decide to return to wherever they come from.
[1] Numbers from https://www.eugyppius.com/p/the-german-political-establishment-c30 (the Forsa poll)
Aldarion #346:
Regarding Polish surnames, don’t forget that parts of Poland used to be German.
Chuaquin #362:
Well, I think it depends on your definition of far right. They’re definitely beyond the far end of the political spectrum tolerated by the establishment. By sensible standards, I’m not so sure. They’re in the unenviable position of being the catch-all party for those on the right of the establishment, meaning that they span an incredibly broad spectrum, which includes the dissident right but also opinions which would’ve been normal for conservatives to hold twenty years ago or so.
Does the Spanish title convey the pun in the German title? “Über Menschen” means “about humans” if translated literally (“On Humans” would be a more likely English title meaning the same thing) but it’s clearly based on the Nitzschean Übermensch (“overman” or “beyond-man”), an idea adopted by the Nazis, who equated the Aryan race with it.
You might be interested to know that Juli Zeh seems to be considered problematic by the German left. She opposed COVID lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and giving weapons to Ukraine.
BorealBear #367, if I may, and #393:
Well, a study of 308 people isn’t necessarily representative of course, but consider that 67.8% of surveyed Muslim students think that the Quran outranks our laws and 45.6% want an Islamic theocracy. 18% think violence is a legitimate means of converting people, 35.3% would use violence to defend Allah and Muhammad against insults. Not particularly encouraging, if you ask me.
https://www.atheistrepublic.com/news/alarming-german-muslim-students-favor-sharia-over-countrys-own-laws
Regarding the left fighting the Russians, I don’t see it happening. The government has… not even really reinstated mandatory military service but prepared the way towards doing so. I personally disagree with this, because they’re transparently gearing up for war with Russia and it ain’t going to be Russia who initiates, but that’s nothing compared to the left, who tried to start regular protests like Fridays For Future. No idea if people actually ran with it or if it fizzled out after the first time but either way, I think my point stands.
Pragmatically, I’d prefer if these people weren’t given access to arms. At least based on my subjective impressions, they’re not the most stable, mentally speaking. (This is coming from somebody who considers himself stable based on suffering depressive episodes very rarely these days, so my standards are quite low). Though I suppose at least ADHD isn’t really a problem; giving soldiers amphetamines is a good old German tradition.
You might find the occasional lunatic being willing to die for trans rights at home, though. I expect “protest” to get very ugly once the AfD has won the next few state elections.
Scotlyn #378:
No offence but “liv[ing] through such times” is a low standard. I don’t want to just live through it, I have no desire to be converted by force or become a second-class citizen in my own country.
For that matter, surviving these changes isn’t guaranteed either. Sure, the Muslim civilisation won’t just decide one day to go kill all the Germans but there will still be violence and I’d prefer if nobody I care about got murdered.
—David P.
“Microsoft revoked Office 2019 perpetual licenses”
There is a bit of an uproar over that. Search on that phrase for more information. Apparently you can still read your documents and the files are intact, buy you can’t edit them anymore.
LibreOffice and some other alternatives can read the files. LibreOffice also has windows and Mac versions so you are covered regardless.
FYI to all
Interesting article about the religious aspects of tech/ai transcendance fantasies of the tech elite
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/31/transhuman-silicon-valley-ai
Been reading a lot more graphic novels this past year… although I do tend to try to mix in a few every year anyway. I get to see some neat ones at my workplace, which has kept me interested in them over the years, since my days as a shy lurker at the comic book store. Maybe it was the weird experiences connecting with the widower of Harvey Pekar’s widow last summer when we were in Cleveland that set it off…
Anyway, this one looked interesting, and reminded me of our old peak-oil buddy Dmitry Orlov. It’s called Soviet Land, but its by a Frenchmen, Pierre-Henry Gomont. I have read a couple French noir comics that were pretty fun. This seems to be in a similar vein…Might be something for those who like graphic novels but are sick to death of superheroes.
“1990s. Russia. The USSR has ceased to exist. Its dimly remembered promises of utopia have dried up, and amongst the rubble, scavengers and looters abound. Amongst the vast Russian tundra and decaying Soviet buildings, two such scavengers engage in a rather dubious pastime — getting their hands on all sorts of trinkets that might interest wealthy investors. Slava, once a promising young painter, has abandoned his career and ideals to scrounge around with a pal from his school days, the consummate conman Lavrin. The future is up for grabs, and in this anything-goes, dog-eat-dog new world order, Lavrin assures Slava anything and everything can be bought and sold. In this tragicomic thriller, author Pierre-Henry Gomont tells a gripping tale of average people caught up in the turmoil of history in the making. His deeply human characters fumble through a disorienting world — one where the promise of tomorrow has evaporated. They aspire to nothing more than to continue: to continue living, loving, and maybe someday even painting again.”
I might read this one… even while the USA is still a thing there are plenty of abandoned buildings already and the markets for relic hunters might go up… I am reminded of the pawn shop / antique store in PKD’s The Man in the High Castle where the Japanese come to buy stuff from America’s past. Anyway, could be an interesting way to fill up your flea market table or ebay site, if you have a taste for urban exploration.
I have a taste for it, but prefer to mostly read about it rather go inside dangerous buildings. I will leave that to the younger ones… I’ll explore outside.
Muslims taking over Western Europe may not have anything to do with the current crop of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe. We might have a situation where European economies collapse and the Muslim immigrants go back to their home countries. Then a century later, Muslims from North Africa start invading and plundering Europe en masse like how the Germanics started invading and plundering the Roman Empire.
Daniel, thanks for this. I’ll put it in the to-read stack.
Anon, er, did you think this was any kind of news? It’s been public knowledge since the 1960s that this goes on all the time in the US. As for the carp, why, it’s so tasty that everything’s got it on the menu — well, everything but the local human beings, who are clearly not as smart as a largemouth bass. (Insert joke here about “bass ackwards”…)
Michael, funny. Yeah, it’s really odd how consistently people wig out about the squabbles between what are, after all, just two more small Middle Eastern ethnoreligious groups convinced that God promised them somebody else’s real estate.
Northwind, glad to hear it!
Scotlyn, hmm! That’s an intriguing analysis, and one more thing for me to brood over.
Zemi, I’ve never denied the existence of ultraterrestrials, though I tend to call them by their more traditional name, “spirits.” I simply don’t see any evidence that we’re being visited by spaceships coming from distant star systems. As for Ivan T. Sanderson and Trevor Constable, I was reading those when Richard Nixon was in the White House, you know…
Robert, correct on both accounts. What you contemplate, you imitate, and the extreme right and the extreme left are both hard at work turning themselves into what they hate. Oog.
JPC, it’s quite possible to grow rice in a sustainable way, but a vast amount of rice cultivation these days uses chemical fertilizers and pesticides in place of more traditional methods.
Anon, no, I managed to miss that. It’s exactly the kind of odd event that could set off cascading changes in our society.
Alexander, (1) stopping spiritual practice when you’ve done a great deal of it leaves you vulnerable to negative energies and entities. (2) If nothing else, why not at least start doing a daily Sphere of Protection? You don’t have to go whole hog into the work again, but the basic protective practice will do you a lot of good. More generally, it’s quite common for people to need to scale down their practices at times; if you do, keep the protective daily ritual even if you suspend everything else, and you’ll still be safe.
Siliconguy, it’s reached the point that if Microsoft appears in the news, you don’t even have to read the story to know that it’s for something stupid and venal. Fortunately there are plenty of good freeware suits out there, and LibreOffice (the one I use) is at least as good as any.
Edward, thanks for this.
Justin, hmm! Sounds good.
Andrew, also a possible future.
“Regarding the left fighting the Russians, I don’t see it happening. The government has… not even really reinstated mandatory military service but prepared the way towards doing so. I personally disagree with this, because they’re transparently gearing up for war with Russia and it ain’t going to be Russia who initiates, but that’s nothing compared to the left, who tried to start regular protests like Fridays For Future. No idea if people actually ran with it or if it fizzled out after the first time but either way, I think my point stands.”
So the European governments are planning on forcing their citizens, including the Muslims, into military service vs Russia. Sounds like a recipe for battle scarred Muslims to come back from war and then overthrow the European governments to install Islamic republics instead.
@scotlyn, I completely agree about the impossibility to know what will happen aeons hence. I have tried to understand why some theologians, and particularly the emperor Justinian, tried to suppress Origen and the doctrine of apokatastasis (final restoration of all rational beings including all humans). I can’t say I really understand all the reasons (there seems to have been a lot of petty squabbling involved), but one that stands out is that all philosophers involved (including Origen) thought that telling “common” believers that there was no eternal hell would make them “lazy” about fulfilling their ethical obligations. Quite probably Plato thought the same – it is clear that tales of eternal punishment in the otherworld were just as much a part of other religions in Greece and the wider Mediterranean as they were of certain strains of Christianity, from Sisyphos and Tantalos all the way to Plato’s and Vergil’s description of Tartarus. They were clearly a form of crowd control – and there is your relevance for the here and now.
So at bottom the fight was between those, like Origen, who thought that a milder doctrine of temporary, corrective punishment (similar to Karma) could be circulated at least internally among the “educated”, and those who wanted to suppress it entirely. The latter existed both in the “pagan” and the Christian camp, but the Christian camp won out. The book you cited seems interesting, but the flap text makes it sound as if it commits the all too common error of painting polytheistic religion as uniformly more gentle than monotheism.
@423 Michael
Why would they be white nationalist? They might be antisemetic and biased against some groups like transgenders or Somalians, but the vast, vast majority of White Americans would not support a white nationalist movement.
Emmanuel #410
Thank you for all of that; very much appreciated.
Yes, I’ve dipped into JMG’s geomancy and The Sacred Geometry Oracle and came to the (possibly erroneous) conclusion that methods of divination are methods to increase communication between lower and higher self, and interpretations of questions are one way of doing that (e.g. meditating on tarot cards), but questions/ and answers are actually secondary to the main aim.
“and you will gain a tool kit that allows you to use that symbol system to map the emotions and explore their relationships.”
Yes indeed.
The way I was taught to do it (work with emotions and thoughts) was via mind/body and the 5 elemental processes as a way of looking within and changing states. Kind of like using one’s own body as a tool of divination to work out ‘what am I feeling and what is the answer to that?’ – how to change a disagreeable state to something more agreeable in terms of creative movement vs destructive movement.
Rather than meditating on cards one meditated on internal states to find patterns. The exercises focus the mind and open up potential intuition, maybe in a similar way to divination as meditation.
Tarot and astrology have always left me cold but The Sacred Geometry Oracle resonates. I dabbled with some divination from JMG’s geomancy book a while back and got some good results; but since then a gut feeling has turned me in other directions.
There are so many interesting rabbit holes I sometimes wonder if it’s the watcher at work trying to distract.
While it’s still open post – Steve Stirling, in one of his alternate future novels, has a brief segment set during the last battle of the Genpei Wars. Steve has rendered the term “Shogun” as
“Generalissimos.”
@Michael #423: I’m going to call you out on this one, because it is very easy to verify that most of the former NSDAP members in West Germany after the war migrated into the CDU/CSU (conservative) and FDP (liberal) parties. Look up chancellor Kiesinger for one, and chancellor Brandt as the counter-example. Many Americans seem to make this facile equation “national socialistic” = “socialistic” and don’t look at what Nazis did after the war in real life.
@ David P
” I don’t want to just live through it, I have no desire to be converted by force or become a second-class citizen in my own country.”
I do not think that “what we want” factors into most of the things that happen around us.
Perhaps your experience is different? Perhaps you have always been able to apply and use “what you want” as a lever that gets a result?
The question in any time is never “what do I want”, but “what do I propose to DO about whatever I get?”
The second question has this advantage. Whatever answer you give to it WILL be actionable by YOU. You won’t have to wait for the universe, or some other external power, to provide you with what you want.
This is why I stick to asking mySELF the second question, and give short shrift to the first.
“Trump had the opportunity to be the political realigner figure but he has destroyed that opportunity with his betrayal of the MAGA movement and America First in the past year and a half. So it’s now up to whether the anti-establishment populists can hijack the Democratic Party, bring in disaffected former MAGA people like your Tucker Carlsons, your Thomas Massies, your Marjorie Taylor Greenes, your Candace Owens, etc, and kick out the Democratic establishment, or whether the Democratic establishment stays in control of the Democratic Party and the anti-establishment populists go create a third party, letting the Democratic Party die like the Whigs did the the 1850s.”
You do know that a third option here is simply that there is no successor to Trump in American national politics and that the United States simply balkanizes into multiple different countries? Not what John Michael Greer necessarily wants but quite plausible in my eyes, especially since the United States has Saturn in the 10th house on its foundation chart.
Robert 419
> former MAGA people who feel betrayed by Trump and the MAGA movement
I am Make America Great Again (MAGA). I still am.
When Trump lost me is when he, along with the (“unmentionable”) nation that starts with an “I,” ends with an “L,” and contains an “S” and an “R,”
attacked the sovereign state of Iran🇮🇷,
lately,
for no good reason☹️
other than to make trouble😈
by upsetting the apple cart🍎🛒.
Why did he go and do THAT for?
💨🤷🏽♀️☹️—>🤬💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@ Aldarion
“but the flap text makes it sound as if it commits the all too common error of painting polytheistic religion as uniformly more gentle than monotheism.”
Indeed it may do. 🙂 However that only means that (should you choose to read it) you are already forewarned about its bias and can adjust accordingly.
I did find it interesting on a number of levels, but am not necessarily urging others to go out and buy what is, in fact, an expensive, photograph heavy book. What I find personally encouraging is the message that not everything that is actively suppressed actually goes away. The way that suppression can drive things underground, without necessarily killing them makes for a very useful (to me) data point.
Regarding your recurring point on East and South Asia being the default centres of human civilization, do you think this will generally be true when the next Glacial Maximum comes about (for example, the “Ice Age” you predict a million years from now)?
Speaking of hauntology and psychogeography, here is a review I made of an album in the “hauntronica” genre… it’s from the Heartwood Institute, out on Folk Police Recordings, and is inspired by the novel Plague Dogs by Richard Adams.
https://igloomag.com/reviews/the-heartwood-institute-plague-dogs-folk-police
“@Michael #423: I’m going to call you out on this one, because it is very easy to verify that most of the former NSDAP members in West Germany after the war migrated into the CDU/CSU (conservative) and FDP (liberal) parties. Look up chancellor Kiesinger for one, and chancellor Brandt as the counter-example. Many Americans seem to make this facile equation “national socialistic” = “socialistic” and don’t look at what Nazis did after the war in real life.”
You can go look yourself at which regions of Germany voted for Adolf Hitler vs Paul von Hindenburg in the 1932 German presidential election, then which regions voted for the SDP vs the CDU/CSU after World War II. Spoiler alert: the regions of Germany that voted for Adolf Hitler in 1932 tend to vote for the SDP after World War II, while the regions that voted for Paul von Hindenburg against Adolf Hitler tend to vote for the CDU/CSU after World War II.
There’s even a correlation in modern German elections of those parts of Germany that used to vote for the SDP in the past and those parts of the Germany that now vote for the AfD.
Something is brewing on the astral plane:
https://imgflip.com/i/atczq0
Readers here may find interesting the last two posts over at Surplus Energy Economics:
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
“Post-growth derangement syndrome” has a nice ring to it.
And:
“Money, then, is claim, and has no value in the absence of substance, and a severe loss of substance is now nailed on within a very short time. This, in the bluntest terms, will dis-anchor money. What this necessarily entails is a materially-triggered wholesale destruction of the excess claims created by the reckless financialisation of the Western economies. “
Anonymous #432:
True, but that’s assuming that they’ll even go. For one, only citizens can be drafted, so that’d exclude a bunch of them. And why should they fight for us when they can just go home instead?
Don’t get me wrong, I can totally see some of them using this opportunity but they’d be stupid to go to Russia first. Once they’ve got the training and arms, they’re ready to make their move. No need to risk dying in Russia. (This is, if you’ve read my earlier comment, pretty much the same risk as with drafting people from the more desperate end of the right, just with different demographics).
Scotlyn #438:
Sure, I’m not claiming that what I want has any (direct) effect on reality. With respect, though, “what do I want” is a perfectly sensible question in response to a part of your comment that I suppose I should’ve quoted in my original response:
> We are all talking about an Islamic future for at least parts of Europe, and this eventuality seems plausible to me, but not startling, and not particularly fearful. After all, this has happened before, and people have lived through such times, just as much as through any other kinds of times. Well, or badly, but people do.
(My emphasis).
So let me rephrase my point. I understand that people have lived through such things. I also understand that not everybody does and those that do might find themselves oppressed in their own homelands. I do not desire such an outcome. Thus, I consider myself justified in feeling apprehension or even fear at the increasing likelihood of being subjected to it.
For what it’s worth, “what do I propse to do about whatever I get” strikes me as the wrong question in this case because I haven’t gotten it yet. Two questions that might be more appropriate are “what do I propose to do to avoid getting what I don’t want” and “what do I propose to do should I get it regardless?” And the first question clearly requires knowing what I do and do not want. (I know, an even better question would be a positive framing, “what do I propose to do to get what I want?”)
“What do I propose about whatever I get” makes sense in situations where the outcome is entirely out of my control. In a situation where the desired outcome can be made more likely by the simple act of ticking a box on a ballot, I consider it too fatalistic.
—David P.
@ Northwind Grandma #408
“I will be looking WITHIN and try to figure out why “I” get so hot and bothered about that particular nation-state.”
If it is any help, I can tell you why (after looking within) I figure that “I” get so hot and bothered about a particular nation-state.
And this is because, as I have worked out, nation-states like Laos and Malawi (say) do not FEEL like they are progeny. The other nation-state, not to be named, IS a progeny, a child, if you will, of “my” people – those people including a long line of my American ancestors, who have largely originated from Britain, and arrived in America before 1776. Also including a long line of my American ancestors who have participated in developing the ideological framework of Christian zionism. To “my” ancestrally-bred and conceived self, this nation-state is a nation-baby that belongs to us, is part of our family, and therefore its actions and expressions reflect on us, in ways that children often do, and mirror ourselves to ourselves, very often unflatteringly, and tolerably often showing us exactly where our Shadow lives…
Please do with this as you will.
My blessings if you will have them. May your meditations be fruitful.
Robert Mathiessen #322 the idea of national sovereignity is not only metaphisic acording with filosophical materialism, but is contradictory by Itshef because sovereign means individual who is sat in the principal chair or throne of an assembly, is necesary to be an individual (for anatomic reasons). And a nation is a group of people. It was a trick necesary for the continuation of an absolutist state after the beheading of its king and abolish the monarchy. In the Battle of Valmy a soldier invented this innovation , I fear unwillingly, when he southed ” Vive le Ro…..le Nation !! Bad times for to make mistakes. Madam Gillotine was watching.
Dear JMG and commentariat:
I am flabbergasted about the news of Nicola Sturgeon’s husband (and Nicola Sturgeon herself , by the way). He embezzled 400,000 pounds of Scottish Nationalist Party funds, blew it on luxury goods, and she didn’t notice!!
I saw a quote in which she indicated that both made good salaries. I’m sure!
And our betters wonder why we think they are crooks and don’t respect them!
Oh well, it’s the primary election today in NJ. I suppose I need a drink before I cast my ballet!
Cugel
The future is so bright you gotta wear shades. 😎
“Dow jumps more than 200 points, S&P 500 posts first close above 7,600:”
It’s more fun than watching people from Portland (Oregon) attempting to drive on ice and it’s going to end the same way. I hope the airbags work.
Untitled-1 #391,
I’d be happy to check in with you, too, about my experience with the OE course. I find, looking back over the past months, that there have been subtle changes in my behaviour and outlook. Perhaps one that really stands out is the statement, “as you give, so shall you receive.” I find it pops up in my mind almost daily when considering my interactions with others and what I choose to do with my time.
Powerful stuff.
@ David P #448
Thank you for coming back to me. 🙂
“I consider myself justified in feeling apprehension or even fear at the increasing likelihood of being subjected to it.”
I think that feelings do not need to be justified, cannot be justified, because they happen, regardless. It IS what you feel, and you feel it. That is what it is.
That I do not feel what you feel is simply what is. Again, it does not need to be justified, it cannot be justified, because it happens, regardless. A feeling is not something you, or I, choose. It happens, and we feel it.
” In a situation where the desired outcome can be made more likely by the simple act of ticking a box on a ballot, I consider it too fatalistic.”
Well, at base, I am a peasant, with the sensibility of a (perennially unconsulted) peasant, who has learned a thing or two about the futility of box-ticking exercises, and I am told that this is, by its nature, a sensibility that is fatalistic.
We know that we can do everything right, and still our crops may be devastated. Sometimes by the hand of man, sometimes by the hand of nature. It is what it is, and yet, we do what we do. After the devastation, if such should happen, those left of us will get up and do what we do again.
We do not ask the wave to stop, we do not ask the wind to stop, we do not ask people to stop being people. We grow our crops in the face of the storm. In the face of all storms of any kind. That is what we do. If it is fatalism, then that is what it is.
Many blessings, if you will have them. And may all the storms you encounter spare you. 🙂
What happens to the United Kingdom when the British government in Westminster loses legitimacy amongst most of its citizens and British Muslims turn towards the Islamic Sharia Council for an alternate source of legitimacy?
“Why would they be white nationalist? They might be antisemetic and biased against some groups like transgenders or Somalians, but the vast, vast majority of White Americans would not support a white nationalist movement.”
Also the white nationalist movement today is dominated by ethnic Jews, non-whites, federal informants, foreign spies, and the mentally ill, and funded by groups like the ADL and the SPLC, so it all looks a bit silly to everybody else on the outside.
SiliconGuy: (#246) “Is XX Profitable?” is only half of the question. We should be asking “For whom is XX profitable?” Whether XX is college sports, armed conflict, sports betting, winning political office, or The Great Unmentionable, it can be profitable for those who get paid to write about it, for those who get paid to build infrastructure, for those who take their cut when a deal gets made, etc. I heard Ed Zitron interviewed on Bloomberg today, and his opinion is that “going public” is the exit strategy for the private capital that got us to this point, leaving it to the equity investors to discover real (lack of) value. (Thanks for the link.)
@Tim PW #453
Indeed it is! That particular adage is near and dear to my heart. I had to learn it the hard way growing up, as a child who was relentlessly teased and bullied throughout elementary and middle school. It didn’t help at all that for reasons out of my control, I ended up transferring schools multiple times as well.
Eventually, I realized that me ending up in this situation over and over again, across different schools and different classes, meant that it must have been something I was doing wrong. My fear and mistrust of others caused them to mistrust me, and the result was the bullying I was experiencing. It didn’t happen all at once, but the exercise in lesson 8, to smile at everyone you meet, was more or less what I ended up trying, and it made a huge difference. It would be many years before I could approach most social situations with anything approaching grace, but I learned at that time the value of treating others as you wanted to be treated.
That this principle also applies to your thoughts, your expectations, your attitudes, and really life at large was not something I had considered at the time, but it’s something I am working on every day now. Like before, it probably won’t happen overnight, but I am trusting that so long as I continue to push in this direction, I will get to where I need to be.
While we are sharing thought gems, I found the demonstration of the principle that “all things are present here and now” with the example of the seed to be really eye-opening. It changed my perspective on the universe and the way I think about the hidden potentials of life. That a humble seed could produce so much is one of nature’s quiet miracles, one I had not adequately considered prior to taking this course.
Scotlyn #454:
Thank you and fair enough. I read your original comment as “I’m not afraid so why are you?” In my defence, that attitude is way to common, but I should remember that people here generally operate on higher standards than that. 🙂
Regarding being a peasant, sure, but even peasants have occasionally managed to remind the powers that be that their wishes matter too. I don’t believe in the idea of democracy that is being sold to us, the notion that “the people” are the ones governing is frankly laughable when looking back at the last few decades, but it’s still an effective way to say “look, we’ve got the numbers to get you to do what we want or to step aside” without bringing out the torches and pitchforks.
—David P.