Open Post

November 2022 Open Post

John Michael Greer360 Comments

This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly (well, more or less!) open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply — no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank — but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic. (Well, with one exception: there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the current virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.)

Oh, and a heads up to readers who enjoyed my epic fantasy with tentacles, The Weird of Hali: the new edition is coming along nicely, and there’s a contest over at my Dreamwidth journal that will determine what goes on the covers of the new edition. Nyarlathotep says check it out. 😉

With that said, have at it!

(And a happy Thanksgiving, btw, to all my American readers.)

360 Comments

  1. I just asked on your other site. But what is your take on Graham Hancock? My son just introduced me. At first I was skeptical, I suppose that I still am skeptical. I want to “like” what he is saying but he is a smidge too “Erich von Däniken” for me to make a judgement right now.

  2. Archdruid,

    First off, thank you for letting me post this in Magic Monday as well.

    With the last few posts about writing, I’ve taken the advice to do more writing seriously. I’ve started a substack and named it The Long Descent ( thelongdescent.substack.com ). I’ve been trying to write there every Friday about my attempts to collapse now and the struggles and successes I have had doing so. The articles are short (I cannot seem to get the hang of writing anything of length yet) and cover a bunch of topics. As daunting as preparing for the Long Descent can seem to be, I feel I’m making good progress.

    I thought the topics discussed there might be of interest to those who read Ecosophia. This is my attempt to help create another space where we can share ideas about what collapsing now actually means and how someone is going about it, and since your commentariat are the best around, I’d love to get their eyes and comments on it! Hopefully we can all learn from each other and soften the landing.

    Thank you for all you do.

    Trubrujah – David

  3. Hello everybody,

    I would like to improve my divination skills with the Sacred Geometry Oracle, and thus would love to do some more readings for people here.

    If you have any question you’d like to get a reading for, please send it to me either via email at sacredgeometry@gmx.net, or via my dreamwidth account (milkyway1). Feel free to include a few sentences with background info, so I can ask follow-up questions during the reading where appropriate.

    In a comment to the last Open Post, I wrote a few sentences about what the Oracle is well suited for, and what not, so you can decide whether it will fit your question (especially if anybody else should offer practice readings with another kind of oracle this month):

    https://www.ecosophia.net/october-2022-open-post/#comment-90140

    Thanks! 🙂

    ….

    @Murmuration (and everybody else who’d like to chime in!):

    Thanks a lot, again, for the link to that paper on the peppering process:

    https://considera.org/downloads/peppers.pdf

    You’re right, that’s the full woo indeed! 😉

    Anyway, that paper contains so much information and so many details that I’m still re-reading it and mulling it over. It seems that there is no “The One Solution”(TM), and also no one-size-fits all, but that different paths will lead to Rome.

    I know embarassingly little about Steiner’s philosophy, so maybe I’m totally misled here, but there is something I found odd: In the second half, the paper touches on ethics, and also on viewing “weeds and pests” as an expression of underlying issues, and on the mindset of treating these underlying issues rather than combatting the weeds and pests. That’s also what I would have expected from Steiner.

    However, from the Steiner quotes earlier in the paper, it seems that Steiner was in a different mindset there, viewing the pests and weeds as something like enemies to be fought against (by keeping them from reproducing). Maybe I got this wrong, but it struck me as odd – I’d have expected some less war-like view from him, something more “harmonious”.

    Oh, and against the backdrop of JMG’s “Secret of the Temple” which I’ve just read, the following Steiner quote is particularly striking:

    “What would happen in that case, as I have already indicated, is that agriculture in the civilised regions of the world would become worse and worse, and near-famine and high prices would cease to be isolated phenomena and become the general rule. This will happen in the not-too-distant future, so our only options are either to let civilisation go to ruin, or to try and do things in such as [sic] way that a new fertility can come about.” (footnote 20)

    “That case” refers to the consideration that the peppering method might not be employed due to ethical reasons. Insert “losing the temple tradition” instead, and this could well be part of a discussion about JMG’s book. Funny that…

    Milkyway

  5. @JMG: Thanks for hosting another Open Post! 🙂

    I’ve just finished “The Secred of the Temple” today – very interesting stuff!

    Hm, a tale of people in power crushing alternative techniques and unwanted viewpoints, even if that means a lot of people might starve or otherwise die, just for them to stay in power… I wonder where I’ve heard that story before… maybe in a Hollywood movie? 😉

    Seriously, though, about the foodstuffs: Not only the beverages, but also at least some of the foods you mention in the book were fermented, sourdough bread being the most obvious one. I’d presume that some food in other cultures might also have been fermented, especially if it was left out on the altar for several days (in warm or wet climate, it would have been either fermentation or mould).

    Have you considered that maybe the food offering part wasn’t just about grains (as a sign of fertility), but potentially at least as much about fermentation? Would that fit in with the information you have found?

    In addition, I’ve been thinking about what might happen to that food during the time it is laid out. I.e. is the food an important aspect for the functioning of the temple technology, or is it a secondary (add-on) technique – something like, for example, the food and beverages being “charged” with “good” energy at the same time as the building is charged? I found it quite interesting that in a lot of cases, the food is then consumed by the clergy/priests and sometimes by influential members of the congregation, instead of e.g. being distributed among the poor, or being ritually fed to important livestock.

    I’m wondering if that custom was just a status issue, or if there was more to the food (e.g. health- or fertility-enhancing effects due to charging it up). If so, it’s no wonder certain classes would keep that food to themselves – this is just a speculation, though… 😉

    (Interestingly enough, in his book “Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers”, Stephen Harrod Buhner describes customs of tribes who’d chant/sing for several days next to their fermentation vessels when fermenting “sacred” or magical brews, so maybe there is something about “charging” food/beverages?)

    Also, have you happened to come across any information about general effects of the temple technology on the people living close by? Maybe something like “priests living in the temple all year regularly had shorter or longer lives” or the like?

    If one thinks about reviving a powerful technique through experimentation, it seems smart and ethical to consider such questions beforehand (again, I’m kinda reminded of something else… 😉 ).

    Another thing I found quite interesting is the triad of location/place, building/construction and the ongoing human contribution (ritual and behaviour), i.e. how much of the effect is due to each of the factors, or to their respective interactions – and what exactly each one contributes. E.g. is the building just an amplifier, or does it store “charges” which are generated during rituals and then distribute them to the surrounding land over time? Or does the construction/building maybe even “transform” the earth energies or human effects in some way? (I’m kinda back to the fermentation image there.)

    In any case, the location is the hardest to control or “standardize” in any experimental approach. Have you, by chance, come across any information on how much of the effect is due to the right location, or how much could be achieved even in “bland” locations, with the right techniques? Or any accounts of how to choose a good location, e.g. in the Hindu manuals for temple construction?

    If, for example, the location would be absolutely crucial for the system to work, there’d be no point in lots of people doing experiments in their respective gardens, if none of them had the proper location in said garden.

    Finally, the experiment which is proposed in the book… It felt like a waste to buy growing lights just for that (and besides, I don’t enjoy fiddly handicraft projects 😉 ). So I went outside today, plopped a small sandstone as “standing stone” in the middle of a small round garden bed, and got some seeds in. On paper, it’s a bit late for them, but we’ve had an unseasonably warm autumn so far, and if only some of them germinate by spring, I might be able to report back on how the respective sides of the bed develop. We shall see.

    Milkyway

    PS: Sorry, this has gotten a bit long, but the book really got me going off in various directions, which, I suppose, is a compliment to the author. 🙂

  6. JMG – what are your general thoughts on the (somewhat, depending on your level of cynicism) surprising results of the 2022 US Midterms (i.e., no “red tsunami”) and the (completely unrelated, of course) collapse of FTX? I know you could write several quality books about those questions, so I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for – likely my regular sanity check.

    Local grocery store currently looks 3rd world, and it won’t get better. Professional life is the job equivalent of vaporware. Winter means the garden has moved inside, prayers and journaling proceed apace. Reading Gogol. Feeling like Wile E. Coyote running in space, waiting for the gravity to kick in.

  8. For both JMG and the commentariat, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on Curtis Yarvin/Mencius Moldbug, and specifically how his critiques of and recommendations for government mesh (or don’t) with your understanding of the Long Decline and JMG’s thoughts on such matters.

    For my part, I think that many of Yarvin’s critiques/analyses of where problems come from are very good, but that his recommendations fall prey to three main flaws: 1) over-reliance on abstraction, 2) “the opposite of one bad idea. . .”, and 3) faith in the technological flavor of the myth of progress. I’ve left off that list my instinctive distaste for monarchy and sympathy for democracy precisely because I think confronting those assumptions is one of the most valuable services he offers, and I’m still thinking through them more rigorously.

    At any rate, I’d love to hear from anyone else who has thought about this, and I’m happy to expand/discuss if anyone’s interested.

    Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it!
    Jeff

  9. Greetings, fellow Ecosophians! I am delighted to report that my review of The Flesh of Your Future Sticks Between My Teeth has now been published and can be found on Mud City Press, a small electronic press run by a writer friend of mine out of Eugene, Oregon: https://mudcitypress.com/fleshofyourfuture.php. Usually, I publish my reviews both on his site and on Resilience.org. It didn’t work out with Resilience this time around: Grist is a friend of Resilience; and Resilience’s higher profile means it’s more susceptible to cancellation should it decide to run an especially controversial review such as this one.

    Anyway, I loved the book and I think my review of it is one of my better reviews. Everyone, please feel free to repost/reprint the review (with credit and the original link, of course), and to quote from it as you wish. I want it to be as helpful as possible in terms of publicity for the book and for everyone who contributed to it. (In an email to me, publisher Nathanael Bonnell said the review will definitely be very helpful to him in promoting the book.)

  11. A PC game called Pathologic first came out 2004, and with a recent retranslation and new version with one-third available to play, it’s been getting a lot of critical attention. I’ve never played it and none of the reviews directly reference this, but I think it was clearly designed with an understanding of Ahrimanic and Luciferic evil.

    It’s set in a remote town on the Russian steppe early in the 20th century that’s being ravaged by a plague. There are two major structures in the town. One is an underground cave that was used for ritual bull sacrifice by the Steppe natives for a thousand years. It has more recently become a capitalist Slaughterhouse. It is tradition, meat, blood, and greed. The other is the Polyhedron, an impossible towering structure built by utopian intellectuals. It is the future, dreams, vision, and pride. Having recently been take over by the town’s children it also has a youth republic / children’s crusade vibe.

    The three playable characters have different takes on what is causing the plague. The big-city doctor thinks centuries pouring Slaughterhouse waste into the earth in ill-advised blood magic has poisoned the land. The local healer thinks the huge spike that allows the Polyhedron stand up has penetrated too deep into the earth and introduced the infection. The messianic figure thinks the blood from the Slaughterhouse can be drawn back up by the Polyhedron and used for something positive. The only problem is that to bring them into balance requires human sacrifice. Predictably for a Russian game, this last one is the ‘good’ ending.

  12. A feral cat had a nest of five kittens in our yard. She took three with her, and left two behind. We are taking care of them. One is healthy; one is about to start her third round of antibiotics for an upper respiratory infection. Prayers and positive energy for her healing would be most appreciated. Her name is Binx.

    And a Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it!

  13. @ JMG – this is a broad topic, which could literally fill multiple books, but it’s a topic that’s come up on this blog more than once.

    Last Saturday, I met up with a friend, and after a few beers the topic of conversation moved from personal struggles (he just got divorced), to the broader struggles of our time. Short version of the story; I asked him how he thought society should be organized, and he gave me the response I suspected he would, which was basically communism but with a democratic system of governance. After a little bit of questioning, his theory of the case boils down to this: corporations have all the power in our society, and use the government to enforce that power. He argued that this arraignment has produced, shall we say, less than desirable results, so reversing the arraignment should produce an opposite result that would, by virtue of being the opposite, be 100% better than the situation we find ourselves in today.

    He then asked what I thought. I started with a ‘big brain’ answer, that societies are far too complex, and the ideal societal unit, based both on psychology and anthropology, would be a hunter gatherer group of about 150 individuals, all working together for survival. BUT I acknowledged that humanity is not (in all likelihood) going to switch from agriculture ‘back’ to a hunter-gatherer arraignment. In that context, I suggested that finding some system of linking tribal/clan/extended family units of 150 together into some kind of confederation that allows both resilience in the face of disaster, and, shall we say, the exchange of genetic diversity.

    In that light, I cited the number biologists say is needed to avoid genetic bottlenecks in human populations: 10,000 to 40,000 people. He said that was a pretty small number of people as the principal organizing unit. I replied that 20k was probably ideal, as it lies between the numbers needed for genetic diversity AND is the rough number cited as the point beyond which humans start to feel anonymous. Call it the agoraphobia limit.

    So, I said, there’s my final answer: a broader community of about 20,000 people organized into self-governing family units of 150 or so. Most people would be involved in agriculture, but there would of course need to be specialists clustered together in some specific location, who support the farmers with specific skills. So, a city state. All that over thinking and late night drinking led me to conclude the city-state is my final answer. Given that my personal ideology is basically anarcho-syndicalist, the answer “city-state” makes sense, especially given that Mikhail Bakunin’s ideal blueprint for society was a federation of self-governing city-states.

    Do you think this was all an exercise in finding the conclusion I want?

  14. Do you think that there is such a thing as a higher self?

    Do we have one, and if so, how does it operate?

  15. John–

    I find myself going through something of a dismantling period at the moment as I wrestle with accepting certain realities about reality and my interaction therewith. There’s a whole chain of thought here, so please bear with me.

    I have commented previously how my spiritual path has stripped me of certain supports, namely the fact that I’m called to a relationship with a goddess outside the Axial Age framework and as such have no structural elements for guidance such as a scripture or ceremonial traditions or the like. This has been compounded of late as I have sought to develop an esoteric course of study–a reading curriculum, if you will–and lack a clear ordering and structure for doing so.

    “Making it up as I go along,” while the apparent answer, is intellectually unsettling. While I am nowhere near the scholar that I’d like to be (or at least, that part of me would like to be), I tend to gravitate toward that framework. Or *some* framework of some kind, as opposed to this vast openness without markers or boundaries. Something that gives the terrain of experience definition so that one can orient oneself.

    On the other hand, I realize that all of this scholarly knowledge is simply someone else’s translation of their experience into written form. Even sacred scripture is such–an attempt to capture a prophet’s experience in an objective form that can be studied and analyzed and turned into actionable tradition by the priesthood. So, in the end, scholastic studies are simply secondhand (or thirdhand) translations of the raw data of someone else’s experience. And the collective knowledge is simply a social construct of the group-mind’s accepted understanding of the raw data of experience. None of this is reality.

    Even my own raw experience, which itself loses something in the translation as I attempt to capture and analyze it, is itself filtered through the lens of my own psyche (a representation of will, as you’ve noted Schopenhauer as saying) and is not the “thing in itself” (to which I do not have access). I’ve also realized that fighting this limitation, seeing the lens as something separate from myself and imposed on me from the outside, parallels Jungian shadow-formation, as I am rejecting a part of me and fracturing the whole Self (which only sets up more work to do in the re-integration of that rejected part, time that could be spent on more worthwhile things than cleaning up self-created issues).

    So I’m left with a certain sense of futility, as none of the knowledge I’ve treasured and sought after all these years is actually worth much of anything, my own experience cannot be translated into actionable form without loss of information, and I have a suspicion that if one were to actually tap into the raw reality that there would be nothing actionable about it as there is actually “nothing to do.”

    Which brings me back to what She told me those years ago: “The point of the dance is itself.” Which leaves me with nothing but looking at the mess that is my own psyche and a lifetime trying to straighten out what shouldn’t have been screwed up in the first place.

  16. Historically, for large endeavours such as the building of cathedrals, the Pyramids, perhaps the products of medieval guilds, and so on, do you know if there were the equivalent of project managers, analysts, specialized engineers, etc?

    I know that Henry Ford’s analysis of every aspect of a worker’s activity was used to ‘optimize’ that activity, and this led to the very specialized roles we have today and in turn greater bureaucracy. I’m curious whether there were similar managerial bureaucracies before that point in history.

  17. First, I just wanted to say “happy Thanksgiving y’all” to all my fellow Americans. Hope everyone gets to spend time with friends, family and people they love, and good eatin’ too.
    —

    Second, in the spirit of poetry, and the fact that yesterday was 11/22, the 59th anniverary of JFK’s assassination, here is a late masterpiece from a few years ago by Bob Dylan, Murder Most Foul. Someone mentioned in the writing posts how most would be poets turned to music and such. Dylan is the classic example. Now, I’ve never been a huge Dylan fan, though recognize his genius. When this song came out a few years ago however, it really touched me.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NbQkyvbw18

    Twas a dark day in Dallas, November ’63
    A day that will live on in infamy
    President Kennedy was a-ridin’ high
    Good day to be livin’ and a good day to die
    Being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb
    He said, “Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am?”
    “Of course we do, we know who you are”
    Then they blew off his head while he was still in the car
    Shot down like a dog in broad daylight
    Was a matter of timing and the timing was right
    You got unpaid debts, we’ve come to collect
    We’re gonna kill you with hatred, without any respect
    We’ll mock you and shock you and we’ll put it in your face
    We’ve already got someone here to take your place
    The day they blew out the brains of the king
    Thousands were watchin’, no one saw a thing
    It happened so quickly, so quick, by surprise
    Right there in front of everyone’s eyes
    Greatest magic trick ever under the sun
    Perfectly executed, skillfully done
    Wolfman, oh Wolfman, oh Wolfman, howl
    Rub-a-dub-dub, it’s a murder most foul

    Hush, little children, you’ll understand
    The Beatles are comin’, they’re gonna hold your hand
    Slide down the banister, go get your coat
    Ferry ‘cross the Mersey and go for the throat
    There’s three bums comin’ all dressed in rags
    Pick up the pieces and lower the flags
    I’m goin’ to Woodstock, it’s the Aquarian Age
    Then I’ll go to Altamont and sit near the stage
    Put your head out the window, let the good times roll
    There’s a party goin’ on behind the Grassy Knoll
    Stack up the bricks, pour the cement
    Don’t say Dallas don’t love you, Mr. President
    Put your foot in the tank and step on the gas
    Try to make it to the triple underpass
    Blackface singer, whiteface clown
    Better not show your faces after the sun goes down
    I’m in the red-light district, like a cop on the beat
    Livin’ in a nightmare on Elm Street
    When you’re down in Deep Ellum, put your money in your shoe
    Don’t ask what your country can do for you
    Cash on the barrelhead, money to burn
    Dealey Plaza, make a left-hand turn
    I’m goin’ down to the crossroads, gonna flag a ride
    The place where faith, hope, and charity died
    Shoot him while he runs, boy, shoot him while you can
    See if you can shoot the invisible man
    Goodbye, Charlie, goodbye, Uncle Sam
    Frankly, Miss Scarlet, I don’t give a damn
    What is the truth, and where did it go?
    Ask Oswald and Ruby, they oughta know
    “Shut your mouth, ” said the wise old owl
    Business is business, and it’s a murder most foul

    Tommy, can you hear me? I’m the Acid Queen
    I’m riding in a long, black Lincoln limousine
    Riding in the backseat next to my wife
    Heading straight on in to the afterlife
    I’m leaning to the left, I got my head in her lap
    Hold on, I’ve been led into some kind of a trap
    Where we ask no quarter, and no quarter do we give
    We’re right down the street from the street where you live
    They mutilated his body and they took out his brain
    What more could they do? They piled on the pain
    But his soul’s not there where it was supposed to be at
    For the last fifty years they’ve been searchin’ for that
    Freedom, oh freedom, freedom over me
    I hate to tell you, mister, but only dead men are free
    Send me some lovin’, tell me no lies
    Throw the gun in the gutter and walk on by
    Wake up, little Suzie, let’s go for a drive
    Cross the Trinity River, let’s keep hope alive
    Turn the radio on, don’t touch the dials
    Parkland hospital, only six more miles
    You got me dizzy, Miss Lizzy, you filled me with lead
    That magic bullet of yours has gone to my head
    I’m just a patsy like Patsy Cline
    Never shot anyone from in front or behind
    Got blood in my eye, got blood in my ear
    I’m never gonna make it to the new frontier
    Zapruder’s film, I’ve seen that before
    Seen it thirty-three times, maybe more
    It’s vile and deceitful, it’s cruel and it’s mean
    Ugliest thing that you ever have seen
    They killed him once and they killed him twice
    Killed him like a human sacrifice
    The day that they killed him, someone said to me, “Son
    The age of the Antichrist has just only begun”
    Air Force One comin’ in through the gate
    Johnson sworn in at 2:38
    Let me know when you decide to throw in the towel
    It is what it is, and it’s murder most foul
    What’s new, pussycat? What’d I say?
    I said the soul of a nation been torn away
    And it’s beginning to go into a slow decay
    And that it’s thirty-six hours past Judgment Day
    Wolfman Jack, he’s speaking in tongues
    He’s going on and on at the top of his lungs
    Play me a song, Mr. Wolfman Jack
    Play it for me in my long Cadillac
    Play me that, “Only The Good Die Young”
    Take me to the place Tom Dooley was hung
    Play, “St. James Infirmary” and, “The Port of King James”
    If you want to remember, you better write down the names
    Play Etta James, too, play “I’d Rather Go Blind”
    Play it for the man with the telepathic mind
    Play John Lee Hooker, play “Scratch My Back”
    Play it for that strip club owner named Jack
    Guitar Slim going down slow
    Play it for me and for Marilyn Monroe
    Play, “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”
    Play it for the First Lady, she ain’t feeling any good
    Play Don Henley, play Glenn Frey
    Take it to the limit and let it go by
    Play it for Carl Wilson, too
    Looking far, far away down Gower Avenue
    Play, “Tragedy” play, “Twilight Time”
    Take me back to Tulsa to the scene of the crime
    Play another one and, “Another One Bites the Dust”
    Play, “The Old Rugged Cross” and, “In God We Trust”
    Ride the pink horse down that long, lonesome road
    Stand there and wait for his head to explode
    Play, “Mystery Train” for Mr. Mystery
    The man who fell down dead like a rootless tree
    Play it for the Reverend, play it for the Pastor
    Play it for the dog that got no master
    Play Oscar Peterson, play Stan Getz
    Play, “Blue Sky”, play Dickey Betts
    Play Hot Pepper, Thelonious Monk
    Charlie Parker and all that junk
    All that junk and, “All That Jazz”
    Play something for the Birdman of Alcatraz
    Play Buster Keaton, play Harold Lloyd
    Play Bugsy Siegel, play Pretty Boy Floyd
    Play the numbers , play the odds
    Play, “Cry Me A River” for the Lord of the gods
    Play Number Nine, play Number Six
    Play it for Lindsey and Stevie Nicks
    Play Nat King Cole, play, “Nature Boy”
    Play, “Down In The Boondocks” for Terry Malloy
    Play, “It Happened One Night” and, “One Night of Sin”
    There’s twelve million souls that are listening in
    Play, “Merchant to Venice” play, “Merchants of Death”
    Play, “Stella by Starlight” for Lady Macbeth
    Don’t worry, Mr. President, help’s on the way
    Your brothers are coming, there’ll be hell to pay
    Brothers? What brothers? What’s this about hell?
    Tell them, “We’re waiting, keep coming”
    We’ll get them as well
    Love Field is where his plane touched down
    But it never did get back up off the ground
    Was a hard act to follow, second to none
    They killed him on the altar of the rising sun
    Play, “Misty” for me and, “That Old Devil Moon”
    Play, “Anything Goes” and, “Memphis in June”
    Play, “Lonely At the Top” and, “Lonely Are the Brave”
    Play it for Houdini spinning around his grave
    Play Jelly Roll Morton, play, “Lucille”
    Play, “Deep In a Dream” and play “Driving Wheel”
    Play, “Moonlight Sonata” in F-sharp
    And, “A Key To The Highway” for the king of the harp
    Play, “Marching Through Georgia” and, “Dumbaroton’s Drums”
    Play, “Darkness” and death will come when it comes
    Play, “Love Me Or Leave Me” by the great Bud Powell
    Play, “The Blood-stained Banner” play, “Murder Most Foul” “

  18. Hi everyone. Happy thanksgiving

    My question this month is what the heck happened in the midterm elections? Has not any one in the United States changed their mind about at all about anything in the last few years? I was expecting a small red wave but there wasn’t any wave at all either way. Here in Minnesota the democrats gain a small amount of ground.

    Thanks everyone

  19. This is a very particular question but I would like to hear your take on it. I’ve been looking into life insurance policies lately, particularly the kind that after a certain number of years begin paying you dividends and turn into a form of passive income. Assuming we stay in the sort of stagflation/deep recession that you have been predicting (the kind of economy that does not do the armegeddon thing but also has no real growth) would you be interested in those kinds of dollar denominated investments? They are super stable but also inflation is a real concern.

    And for the record, no, I am not asking for financial advice, I am just trying to understand how a person who expects long term stagflation and general decline thinks about these more traditional investment modes.

  20. Good day,

    I have been reading the Emerald tablet. It is a profound work of philosophy and art.
    Any idea where the actual tablet(s) exist at?

    Thanks again
    Travis

  21. Solar power update for the Bonneville Power Administration.

    A tale of 2 days, Nov 21, reasonably sunny, and Nov 22, definitely not sunny and light snow in the afternoon.

    On Nov 21 power was available for 10.7 hours, The average was 41.9 MW, or 30.3% of nameplate rating. (Nameplate is 138 MW)

    On Nov 22 power was available for 10.6 hours, The average was 27.0 MW, or 19.5% of nameplate rating.

    This is at about 47 degrees North with a month to go until the solstice.

    I also worked out the data for wind power in 2021. (There is no solar power data in the 2021 reports.)

    The annual average was 29.1% of nameplate power, The median was 19.6%. and the wind turbines produced nothing at all 10.5% of the time.

    The worst month was January, average of 16.2%, median of 5.9%, and nothing 22.1% of the time.

    The best month was February, average of 42.6%, median of 35.3%, and nothing 8.9% of the time.

    The month with the most consistent winds was July, average of 35.9%, median of 31.8%, and nothing 4.1% of the time.

    I drove down to Lind (Washington) to look over the solar array there. The panels are on single axis trackers at a site that is fairly flat. Winter time efficiency is not going to be very good because of the low angle of the sun. But they are getting something.

  22. Hi JMG,

    Why do you think the predicted red tsunami at the mid-terms fail to materialise? Do you think it bodes well for the Democrats’ chances in 2024?

    Cheers,

  24. Greetings JMG, @All interested as well,

    I have read that the European Union, and the states of California and New York will forbid the sales of gas vehicles, and trucks by 2035. The entire US will ban them by 2040.
    Some people say that this will start reducing the sales of gas cars and trucks already within a few years because people will think that they cannot resell a vehicle second-hand later because of the ban.

    I see some interesting drastic consequences with that:
    *A good part of the fleet (half? ) will be electric by the early 2030s and 2040 at the latest
    *This means that travel and transport in Western countries will become local and close-regional at most because EVs cannot go as far without a recharge (I read the average is 250 miles which is barely the distance between New York and Washington, and not enough for Berlin to Frankfurt)
    *Going on trips for business or leisure farther than the recharge distance will
    become a rarity
    *Trains and buses and river boats will be used more again though there won’t be enough and they will be expensive
    *Practically this will take us back how life was in the 1950s , or the 1960s at most.
    *Life will be much more simple in terms of the things we own as local industry
    cannot produce as much as global industry
    *Global transport with ships may remain because it is not energy intensive
    compared to trucks , though only coastal cities may be able to access the products

    *I thought we’d have until 2040 more or less, but that is much sooner for life to become local!
    Within 10 years .

    Am I missing some things or making errors here? Do you have comments?

  25. Hello everybody, and thank you JMG for hosting this space.

    Many of your readers are writers or researchers of some kind, so I thought I should ask for suggestions on note-taking strategies for writing nonfiction. I’m about to graduate from university and I still struggle with collecting and organizing notes for research projects both academic and personal. I’m interested in implementing something like Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, but I don’t know where to get started with it. Any tips or resources will be greatly appreciated!

  26. Hey hey JMG,

    I’m curious about your contract breaker book. Was it a chore to write something that had to hit certain targets? Or was it fun to write like the Grist competition?

    And, I’m curious about wars in the autumn of previous civilizations. It looks to me like a victory for Russia in Ukraine would signal to most of the world that the USA can no longer enforce compliance. What can you say about the likelyhood of major conflicts in the world if that happens? More frequent? Larger? Etc?

    Thanks,
    Tim

  27. I would just like to say that back when you said that urban professional-managerial class progressivism was “a wave of the future” that had broken and was washing out back to sea, I thought perhaps you were being a little melodramatic. But now that I see that it involves rigging elections, censoring mainstream and social media, propagandizing the news to an extent that would have put the editors of Pravda fifty years ago to shame, and keeping their acolytes in a constant state of abject panic and bilious rage, just to name the most obvious things, I now realize that was a very kind and gentle way to describe what is going on with PMC progressivism! It certainly doesn’t seem like a very utopian vision anymore.

  28. Pretty interesting that the 1000 year old Kiev Lavra monastery complex gets raided by Ukrainian security forces–and also curious that said forces don’t seem to believe the sincerity of the Ukrainian church that pertains(ed) to Moscow when they too condemned the invasion some 6 months ago. Is this just the age-old religion and politics is a dirty biz or is something else going on?

  29. @Cristina #25 re: Zettelkasten/Note-Taking

    I’ve found Scott Scheper’s entirely analog “Antinet” approach by far the most helpful take on Zettelkasten that I’ve encountered. There’s a pretty active community on the sub-reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/ and he has a lot of youtube videos explaining his way of going about things. He’ll be launching his book on the subject (written using his own analog Zettelkasten, of course!) a week from Friday (December 9th). One further selling point in its favor: Ecosophia commenter temporaryreality edited the book.

    Hope this helps!
    Jeff

  30. A question about the publishing game finally occurred to me: What is your take on the blurbs and quotes that every book seems to come festooned with? It seems like the publishers try to convince a reader that any given book will deliver them physically to Oz, guarantee sex with college coeds, and cure cancer on top of that.

    Is it all just something that authors have to put up with?

  31. @RandomActsofKarma
    I prayed for your kitten. It strikes me that has already been blessed, by being adopted by someone who cares enough to get her treatment for the infection.

  32. Re: ideal social units

    At this point I don’t think any such thing exists. Social structure is maintained by shared narrative, and there are an infinite number of possible narratives and therefore an infinite number of possible social structures. The trick is in structuring the narrative such that it disincentivizes greed/usury/slavery/exploitation (which is ultimately destabilizing) and in having it be sufficiently convincing/compelling that people follow by choice rather than by coercion. Even then, it may be impossible to achieve any sort of long-term stasis rather than cycles of rise and fall with shifting narratives over time.

    Re: election results

    From my perspective, the red team did a terrible job of capitalizing on present discontent. The complete and draconian abortion bans enacted in some states frightened many voters on the fence, and the ongoing focus on social issues like gender ideology, CRT, etc. is not a winning platform. Even if most people agree that the woke agenda has gone too far, they also don’t think legislative action in opposition is the right answer. Independent voters are also tired of Trump and wish he would go away already.

    Re: electric cars

    I’m pretty sure those deadlines will be indefinitely pushed back and then quietly abandoned once the limitations of electric cars become clear and rolling blackouts become a reality. We will see a re-localization of life and transportation eventually, but not by virtue of legislative fiat.

  34. For anybody who is considering it, I just wanted to say that Andrew Skeen #7 does excellent horary readings! 🙂

    ….

    @TonyC #24,

    Random thought: How many families have two cars and might exchange their “mom drives the kids around town and goes shopping” car (i.e. short range) with an electric one if the conditions favour that, but keep the other one as a gas car (i.e. longe-range ability for holidays etc)?

    Milkyway

  35. @ Stephen DeRose (#3)

    Traditional long-term dividend investments depend heavily on sustained continuous growth, which isn’t going to happen anymore now that we’ve entered an era of decline. Not having a full-blown zombie apocalypse does not guarantee smooth sailing – in fact, I believe we hit the end of the pavement back in 2008 and it only gets rougher from here – we can expect lots of lumps and bumps on the way down. And the further down the ‘curve’ we fall, the less of a bump is needed to fatally disrupt an investment. And even if we don’t have too many really big disruptions, a slow gentle squeeze will still dry up profits. After all, a noose tightened slowly enough around the neck is still a noose tightened around the neck.

    If I had any money, I would be putting it into buying real commodities that I would have real personal use for and may not be readily available as conditions worsen. Food. Clothing. Heating fuel. Paid-off debts, especially the secured type like a mortgage. The trouble with saving up money – either as currency, or precious metals, or financial investments – as a buffer against hard times is that money is only worth what someone else will give you in exchange for it – and to exchange it for something, not only does the said someone else have to have something to offer in exchange, you also have to reveal to them that you have the money. Not a wise strategy for when theft and piracy proliferate as rule of law begins to unravel.

  36. Okay, so here’s an odd point I often thinking of raising here just to see if I’m alone in this. The number one piece of advice given here for anyone who wants time to write (or whatever else) is to first and foremost throw your TV out the window. No doubt good advice for a great many people; but is there anyone else like me who found the TV was a vital component to productivity?

    I don’t write anymore and haven’t for some time, but I did for most of my life, produced thousands of pages of utter tripe. When I wanted to work, I found something on TV or put a movie on. Or it was video games, my preference was for older rpgs with turn based battle systems that freed up a hand and didn’t require all of my immediate attention. Random battles and level grinding were great for getting writing done (maybe that’s why I seem alone in not complaining about either of those features). Put me in a quiet room with none of what most would call distractions, I get lost in my own head and nothing gets done; having something in the background that I’m glancing at every now and then, it focuses the rest of my attention and thousands of pages (of tripe) happens.

    It also seems it was the writing that allowed me to enjoy TV, movies and games as well. Now that I’ve stopped, I watch very little, and struggle to get through games that I do want to play. The two appear to go together for me, and I can’t do one without the other.

    I have no idea why this is, just thought I’d throw it out there to see if anyone else can relate.

  37. Degringolade, Hancock’s a mixed bag, but worth reading. Yes, he’s got a bit of a von Däniken streak, but some of the things he’s written about deserve much more attention than they’ve been given by the academic mainstream; in particular, he’s done a good job of directing attention to ruins of cities under seawater in various places, showing that there were urban civilizations during the last ice age.

    Trubrujah, you’re most welcome.

    Yorkshire, many thanks for these resources!

    Milkyway, that’s a fascinating supposition. The food items placed on the altar in temples is definitely intended to become “charged” or sacred in some sense; you can see a version of that in traditional Christian churches, where the reserved sacrament — that is, the bread that has been consecrated in the Mass but not distributed to the faithful to be consumed — is considered to be a center of holy influences, and occupies a special place in the building. The barley cakes placed as offerings before the statues of Greek gods likewise took on a special holiness. It’s quite possible that fermentation was involved in some cases, though it doesn’t seem to have been part of the basic toolkit. Your other questions — well, those are among the many things that have to be learned by experiment. Every indication I’ve found, however, is that temples built to work with the old temple technology were considered wholly beneficial to have right there in town; the only suggestion that they could cause harm is if someone goes inside without paying close attention to the rules for purification.

    Rage Monster, to my mind it’s quite simple. Very clearly, most Americans aren’t satisfied with what they’re being offered by either party. I’ve written about this before, of course — the abandoned center of American politics, the place that represents what most people want out of the political system but nobody in power is willing to give them. Whoever succeeds in occupying that center, abandoning the extremes embraced by both parties, will define US politics for the next century or so.

    Andrew, thanks for this!

    Jeff, we’re pretty much in the same boat here. Yarvin is like most intellectual radicals — his critiques of the current system are well worth close attention, his proposals for what to do about it are batshale crazy. (Marx is another good example of the type.) I’d encourage anyone interested in alternative political thought to read him, think through what he has to say, and remember that a good diagnosis does not guarantee a successful treatment.

    Frank, delighted to hear this. Thank you!

    Mark, thanks for this.

    Yorkshire, that does sound as though whoever wrote it knew their Steiner.

    Random, positive energy en route for little Binx!

    Ben, it was certainly an exercise in finding the conclusion that your beliefs and outlook on the world predispose you to find. That’s true of every political opinion, of course, so there’s nothing wrong with it.

    Dreckid, of course there is. Each person has one. Your higher self is the part of you that continues from one incarnation to the next, that was around long before you were born and will still be aroung long after your current body dies. While you’re alive, unless you’re engaged in very intensive spiritual practices, your higher self is basically asleep and dreaming, and your life is its dream. The great secret of the higher self is that it’s you — the real you — and the personality you think you are right now is like the personalities you sometimes have in your dreams at night. When your current body dies, you’ll wake up out of the dream and say, “Wow, that was interesting,” and then go on to other things.

    David BTL, nope. The mess that is your psyche is exactly what it should be: the raw materials you have to work with, the pieces of the kit you need to assemble. It just looks screwed up because you’re beginning to glimpse what it can become once you fit all the pieces together where they belong.

    Jbucks, nope. As a Freemason, I happen to know a fair amount about how the cathedrals were built — we’ve still got the basic structure. Your building crew in those days consisted of a mob of apprentices, who were learning the basics of building by doing all the necessary unskilled or semi-skilled labor; a smaller mob of journeymen, who knew enough to direct the apprentices and to do skilled work; and one or more master masons, who had expert knowledge of designing and building and also did the really demanding work themselves. Every master mason started out as an apprentice hauling mortar and pulling on ropes to get blocks of stone into place, graduated to the status of journeyman (or, as we now say, fellow craft), and after developing skill on dozens of job sites, finally reached the position of master mason. Nobody got to tell the workers what to do unless they’d come up through the ranks that way. If it was a really big project, you’d have a bunch of master masons, each with his own assortment of fellow crafts and apprentices, and they’d choose the most experienced of their number to haver overall direction of the work and then divide things up — “Giles, you take the north transept; Fulk, you take the south transept; Martin, Joris, you two divide the nave between your teams; Conrad, the apse and the chapels are yours. We’ll meet daily at vespers to settle any details. Now get to it!”

    Justin, thanks for this.

    Will O, see my response to Rage Monster further up the thread. Both parties have gone to extremes, and most Americans are reduced to choosing the one they dislike a little less than the other.

    Stephen, I don’t recommend any dollar-denominated investment at this point. The US dollar is losing its status as a reserve currency, and high inflation is just one of the problems that’ll likely follow from that; it’s also by no means sure that insurance companies will be able to stay afloat now that the oceans of cheap credit they’ve depended on are gurgling down the drain.

    Travis, that I know of, they haven’t been seen since the early Middle Ages. If I had to guess, they’re in the tomb of some long-dead king in the Middle East somewhere.

    Siliconguy, ouch. Not what their proponents claimed!

    Sam, see my comments above to Rage Monster and Will O — or for that matter my old posts about the abandoned center of American politics.

    Raymond, thanks for this.

    Tony, we’ll see if they actually go through with this. There isn’t enough lithium in the world to supply more than a small fraction of the necessary batteries.

    Cristina, I’m sorry to say my practice probably won’t help you. I start out a nonfiction project by filling a spiral notebook with random jottings, references, and quotes. Then I start work by writing short passages referencing this or that source. I keep going, reading more sources and writing more sections, building the bibliography as I go. Finally I have an idea of what else I need to fill in the last chapters, and I go looking for books and other sources with the relevant information. Yes, this often means I have to rewrite whole sections when I discover I’ve been wrong about this or that detail; it’s part of the exploratory process.

    Team10tim, oh, I had great fun with the contract breaker. As for the wars of autumn, once an imperial power loses its grip, there are typically a flurry of wars as other nations move to fill in the abandoned strategic space. That’s what’s happening in Ukraine right now — the US displayed its weakness for all to see in Afghanistan, and wars are following. There will be others.

    Mister N, yep. That’s what an elite on the way down looks like.

    Mark, remember that truth is the first casualty in wartime. Neither you nor I nor anyone else outside of the combat zone actually knows what, if anything, happened there.

    Cliff, if you’re an author and have any kind of a reputation, you can expect to field requests to read manuscripts and write blurbs for them. Most authors I know, however, make a point of writing fairly honest blurbs — if the author’s babbling enthusiastically about a book, odds are that they really did like it. This goes to show that authors are no more infallible than anyone else…

    Clever Name, not me, obviously!

  39. @JMG about the Secret of the Temple,

    Thanks for the reply. I’ve been thinking for the past couple of days now that it should be possible to build a “garden-sized” structure as a test ground – small enough to not alert the neighbours or violate any building permits.

    Worst case, even a birdcage size would be big enough to burn incense inside and (hopefully) positively influence the adjoining garden beds.

    Although I guess if I would regularly lie flat on my stomach in front of what looks like a small brick house for hamsters, and then chant inside, the neighbours might get a tad alerted… 😉

    Maybe a portable structure so one could try various places in the garden. Or finding a good place with the help of a seasoned dowser. Hm…

    If (a big if, I know) the religious worship should turn out to not be essential to the technique, i.e. if the right construction at the right place in combination with regular chanting would suffice for the basic effect, then even a small structure which could double as a smoking hut to cure fish or meat would do, or a small wood-fired bread oven built from clay. Imagine the possibilities! 😀

    Milkyway

  40. I just wanted to chime in and say Milkyway and Andrew Skeen are both excellent. I am really appreciative for their help.

    Also, with regards to the dangers of Vipassana, Yuval Noah Harari, the intellectual of the World Economic Forum bragged that he does Vipassana two hours a day. I wonder if that might have something to do with his current opinions of your average human?

  42. Heard on the news/sports/weather radio station in the Washington DC area: a deep, confident male voice proclaims (in an ad for a defense contractor): “Doing the impossible, because the American way of life depends on it.”

    Well. If they’re doing it, then it cannot be “impossible”, as I understand the meaning of the word!

    And if your Way of Life depends on impossible things being done, perhaps it’s time to reconsider your way of life.

  43. Hi JMG,

    I have been revisiting the Ecotechnic Future recently, and I wanted to get your take on the path forward from here. I have been intensely interested in how Scarcity Industrialism would actually start to manifest itself.

    What has surprised me about the recent past was how we seem to have doubled down on commercial jet travel, e-commerce, and suburbia–all very energy intensive aspects of society that I was expecting to see entering their winding down phase. Instead, airlines have received massive bailouts, Amazon and other e-commerce companies are still growing, and the suburbs have taken in all sorts of people from urban areas.

    I really liked the passage in the Ecotechnic Future where you wrote about the inevitability of sacrificing tourism and casual jet travel, just as we did during the second world war. However, now I am coming to a view that really extravagant energy uses like those might be preserved and subsidized at the expense of other things. This will preserve the status quo for a little longer, or just appear to do so, but it will make the postponed transition to a lower-energy future more abrupt and disorderly. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

  44. @JMG regarding EVs , I am hearing various people in Europe say that a revolution is likely in France within a year, and in other European countries within 2 or 3 years, so all those EV mandates might go out the window there. I’m not sure in the US.
    About the amount of Lithium and other resources for batteries, I have seen data that there is enough for 20 years for half of the vehicles sold in the world, but who knows …

    @Milkyway, I would be surprised if most families have enough money to buy and maintain
    two cars in ten years.

  45. David by the Lake #15

    In my experience, Vajrayogini laughs at me (fondly on her part, terrifyingly on my side), and the Great Goddess nurtures me unconditionally, and neither one opens a path I can actively follow. But remember that the Feminine is the active function, spiritually, and we of the male persuasion are left with a more passive function than is entirely comfortable. The polarities reverse as one goes through the Worlds from Assiah to Yetzirah to Beriah to Atziluth. Or as a great yogi (they really do exist) once counseled me about something I brought to him: “Try it!” with overtones of “Good luck, kiddo!” I suspect that the real work begins and maybe ends with often terrifying uncertainty.

  47. @ Clever Name #36

    Re televisions and creativity

    My wife and I let our TV go about six years ago now and, yes, we are far, far more productive with our various creative outlets as a result.

  48. About the midterms and the not-so-red-wave: The Gainesville Sun published a long front-page-headline article, “Dive into how Florida turned red.” They cited “shifting demographics, a dysfunctional Democratic Party, and Gov. Ron DeSantis.” The article also cited some of the elephants in the room.

    Item: “400,000 new voters” in from other states, drawn, at least partly by Gov. DeSantis’ hands-off policy toward COVID-19.”

    Demographics: older voters, Cuban-American voters, and ‘voters without a college degree.’ But then, after using that conventional-liberal economics-obscuring phrase, it goes on to note Trump’s appeal to ‘working-class voters,’ and continues honestly talking about working-class, and the Democratic Party’s problems with them. And then, of course, the “golf course community” Republicans (a.k.a. “country-club Republicans,” who’ve always been around.) And “Hispanics bailing out on Democrats,” meaning non-Cubans, of course.

    And finally, the Democrats played a weak hand badly.

    I’m keeping this article, and despite a post-midterms vow not to inflict any more lengthy political articles on Our Moderator, intend to send this one, because it talks plain nuts and bolts instead of the usual whimpering about not being able to sell Our Democracy to Those Ignorant Yokels, no matter how many times we reiterate our message! Snivel, sucks thumb, looks to the sly for answers. (Okay. Pass the Nine Lives and let me lick my whiskers some.”

    Anyway, for what that’s worth.

    While I’m at it, a reread of Twilight’s Last Gleaming tells me that, while the basic message is still valid, the days of the presidential mediocrities shown within are numbered: I truly expect 2024 to Feature at least one strong candidate. Who – surprise! – will come out of a state office, for once, instead of the Beltway.

  49. I have been working my way through The Way of the Golden Section for the last couple of weeks. I have been performing the daily divination reading using the Sacred Geometry Oracle and I was wondering if you had any suggestions for general introductory books on divination. Also any suggestions on introductory books on mundane astrology. Thank you.

  50. @Tony C – you might find value in looking up Simon Michaux’s work. The world is running out of lots of minerals, including lithium as JMG noted. There are not enough mineral ores to build an entirely new vehicle fleet or even half of it. I think these leaders are dreaming or trying to make peak oil policies without saying they are making peak oil policies.

    To everyone, do you think it’s worth continuing to try and raise awareness of peak oil and our energy predicament. I’m just so disappointed in the leadership in my country (NZ). It feels like most people are under an energy blindness spell.

    @JMG as events progress, I often think of your writings and “predications” and see things playing out very much as you described. I regularly feel very grateful for you for sharing your wisdom and perspective with us. You’ve had a profound and positive effect on my life, thank you!

  51. Book offer: I’ve gotten all I can out of Hamlet’s Mill. If anybody wants it, please email me your address to me at mathews55 at msn dot com, and I’ll send it Media Mail.

  52. @Cristina #25 re: zettelkasten

    This came up in the March open post, and at this point I’d still make the same suggestions, which I copied below so folks don’t have to hunt down the comment. One additional clarification that’s maybe not directly relevant for you but might be to others is that daily routine items, such as my divination results, go in a separate journal, so my zettelkasten contains lists, tables, quotes, and things like that.

    Here are some of the things I’ve found that work for me personally: 1) paper, not digital; 2) tag and link the notes to each other; 3) nothing’s carved in stone, so edit, revise, correct as needed, and just re-do a note if it gets messy; 4) let the order unfold organically — most of my cards are just numbered sequentially and I navigate using the links and tags.

    Or, in essence, think a paper Wiki.

  53. Hello everyone,

    Many years ago in the ADR days, a science fiction short story from the 1940s-50s was mentioned in the comments. I read part of the story, but I lost the name of both author and story, but as follows is what I recall of the plot.

    The protagonist of this story emerges from the hermetically sealed city to go to the supposedly irradiated hinterlands as a saleman for the failing industrial concerns of the city. He went out with a suitcase of gadgets in the expectation that with his high tech goods he could secure his fortune selling to the presumably primitive peoples. What he found instead was a technic culture that bred and used mutated fauna to provide for their needs, which rendered the salesman’s gadgets superfluous. Meanwhile, conflict builds as his bosses in the city become paranoid over the salesman’s extending absence, and ready the city for war.

    If someone knows of this tale, I’ll deeply appreciate it.

  54. Justin, “Steppendoom”??? Funny.

    Milkyway, it should indeed be possible to do small-scale tests. Shinto in particular has a long tradition of locating very small shrines where they can do the most good —

    The chanting can be done outside the shrine, and doesn’t have to be loud enough to alert the neighbors!

    Jon, you know, that would make a lot of sense.

    Travis, thanks for this.

    Lathechuck, ha! Yes, I think so.

    Samurai_47, oh, over the short term, I expect to see people cling to those things. When I wrote The Ecotechnic Future I hadn’t yet grasped that faith in progress functions as a surrogate religion for many people in the industrial nations; that makes wasteful habits like these religious icons — we can’t give them up, that will show a lack of faith! So we go plodding ahead until the bottom drops out.

    Tony, well, we’ll see, won’t we?

    Patricia M, interesting. Thank you for this.

    Gavin, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a good general introductory book on divination, and you’re right — that would be worth having. Anyone else have a recommendation?

    Monk, you’re welcome and thank you.

    Ighy, hmm! I”m quite sure I never read that; I’ll be interested if anyone can identify it.

  55. I’m finding that the music thing I’m doing at the moment that’s got me the most excited and seems to have the most potential is the youtube and hopefully using it to sell sheet music.https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK9jXTAdBH0XKXcT_DZhISQ I posted a couple of pieces with links to free sheet music written by my former harp teacher (with her permission, obviously!), and am getting an uptick in views. Doesn’t mean they will buy mine if I ask money, but still a really good sign that this has potential.

    Any youtube channel is, of course, completely dependent on having a functioning internet with enough bandwidth for video streaming. So I probably shouldn’t put all my eggs in that basket, even if I start having more success than is likely. But it is so tempting.

    And it is so easy to overextend myself. I had to cancel a bunch of stuff this week due to a fibroflare aggravated by too much playing musical instruments, garden stuff and excessive cooking, stress, and the weather.

  56. Good Afternoon JMG,

    I took your advice to put insulator sheets over the windows in our leaky rental house. It made a difference immediately, so thank you. Our coldest rooms feel several degrees warmer now – we’ll see any effect on our heating bill next month.

    I’ve been enjoying your posts about writing. I have a comic in progress (26 pages complete so far) based mostly around the things I’ve learned here and on the Dreamwidth journal. Would it be alright to post links to it here when it’s ready to release (in several months)?

    (To the other folks here, would that be of interest?)

  57. I would like to ask your opinion on the average occultist. Because you have worked your way through different organizations, which is something I would also like do. In organizations like the Masons or Celtic groups what is their grasp on the teachings they teach. Is it that most are there for the ride and the funny hats?

  59. A shoutout to Milkyway!!!
    Your divination has been tremendously helpful. I’m not out of the woods yet, but I’ve found my compass. Thank you!

  61. Hi John Michael,

    Thanks again for providing this forum and access to your sprightly intellect. I’ve learned many an interesting thing over the years, and had some fun discussions too. 🙂

    Getting back to our recent conversation of last week. Hmm. You know I reckon that lot we spoke of, are weakest on the economic front, and I’ve been consistently hammering on the: ‘return on investment’ message for years – to anyone and everyone who speaks with me about it. It is the single story which can puncture the tightly held belief system that the path they’re offering is worthy of treading upon. What is interesting about that message, is that that part of the story was discussed very recently in the youth news national radio program which I listen to some days. Interesting huh?

    And whilst discussing the economy, my best working guess is that we’re in a sort of strip mining of asset phase in order to prop up the existing debt arrangements. Debt, I note, is very sticky down under. For example, older parents are probably propping up their adult kids and their families – thus reducing consumption across the board. It’s complicated and there are a lot of moving parts. My understanding of history (and personal experience of the early 1990’s) is that sell off’s begin slowly and gain momentum before eventually running out of suckers willing to take on the assets. Immigration is however being used to provide new suckers, but sooner or later news gets out that maybe things at home aren’t so bad after all, relatively speaking. Dunno. What do you reckon about that theory? It’s a work in progress. 🙂

    Cheers

    Chris

  62. Hi all. Just a few points to contribute!

    1. Is there much overlap between the Occult systems of Madame Blavatsky and Dion Fortune?

    2. I recently took up the banjo, partly inspired by a memory of JMG saying in an old Open Post that he doesn’t have time for board games, as he had many hobbies, including a few instruments. So thanks for that!

    3. However, does anyone have recommendations for good board games? I find they can be good for family get-togethers to encourage a jovial mood.

    Best wishes.

  63. Cristina (and Jeff), I did edit the book but please don’t judge me for not being able to convince the author to reduce it to half it’s current length! Authors don’t always take their copyeditors’ suggestions. 😀 Also, fair warning, he’s a firm believer in progress, though you can still extract a useful method from his work if you gloss over his insistence that writing notecards in a particular way will help humans “evolve” mentally.

    The method is still very interesting and looks to be quite useful (I have my own nascent Zettlekasten in the works though am not yet far enough along to have produced anything from it).

  64. @Ighy, #53.

    I do not recall what that story was or who wrote it; but if you liked the premise you probably might enjoy John, Wildbow, McCrae’s Twig.

    This is Wildbow’s third novel (published in the form of a web serial), and it explores a world where Dr. Frankenstein was real and his investigation hijacked the Industrial Revolution. It takes place in the 1920s, in what would be an alternate America that was long ago swallowed back into the British Empire (European nations have managed to control Dr. F’s creations well enough so that every human soldier now has a rank of at least sergeant). It features a sort of steampunk vibe, but with advances in biology that fit better in fantasy horror than science fiction.

    The protagonist, Sly, is a young orphan who displays the ability to acquire any skill he sets his mind to in record time. These Martin Stu’s qualities get nerffed by the fact that he losses just as easily any skills he do not constantly practice. His extreme neuroplasticity is the result of mad science he has been subject to since early childhood. As a matter of fact, he’s just one in a team of child-soldier experiments known simply as The Lambs.

  65. @Lathechuck (#42):

    That reminds me of the old WW2 slogan current in my youth: “The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer.”

  66. From all the research and reading I have completed, it seems that spirits (or whatever word you want to use) often come to help people make the transition from death to the ‘other side’ (lots of cases of people in terminal care seeing their deceased loved ones for instance). I haven’t been able to locate any research or stories about it, but do those on the ‘other side’ also come to help people make the transition ‘into life’ – particularly around the time of birth?

  67. I have also watched a bit of Graham Hancock. Since the discovery of Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe, I have no longer any opinion on what may or may not have been possible in 9000 BCE, so I am not opposed in principle to any of Hancock’s suggestions about Ice Age civilizations. The positive evidence seems to be rather meagre though so far, through no fault of Hancock’s. Actually, I found a freely downloadable, bread-and-butter overview of the currently accepted evidence of submerged prehistory, which I skimmed through. The key phrase for me is on p. 284-5: “We see no reason why other settlements of comparable age and preservation quality should not exist in shallow waters elsewhere along the Levantine coast. What may be found in deeper parts of the Levantine continental shelf can only be guessed at since these areas have not yet been subject to systematic archaeological surveys and testing.” And this is of course even more true in other parts of the world.

    Where Hancock does not convince me is when he draws direct connections between an Ice Age civilization and constructions dated to (e.g.) 1500 BCE in Mexico. That’s a gap of more than 7000 years, and the coastline was already rather near the current one for most of those 7000 years, so it is much harder to argue that the missing links have been submerged. There is not the slightest evidence for even fixed villages in Mesoamerica before 3000 BCE, as far as I know.

    JMG, I haven’t read your Atlantis book, and maybe you discuss this gap in that book. In particular, the Atlantis – Egypt connection stemming from Plato’s dialogues is hard for me to understand. The archaeological evidence is quite clear that the Nile valley, and Northeastern Africa in general, were inhabited by nomads for most of the 5th and 4th millennia BCE. The sequence of development from dug-out tombs through simple mastabas through stacked mastabas (“step pyramids”) to the Grand Pyramids is quite clear. Egypt is the worst place in the world to hide any archaeological remains – everything is perfectly preserved in the dry desert air. How could any cultural continuity have been preserved over more than 6 millennia between the end of the Ice Age and the appearance of writing in Egypt? Would the transmission have happened through other parts of the Mediterranean or Persian Gulf that are now submerged? Plato assumes that Athens and Sais have existed since the time of Atlantis, but this is clearly rejected by archaeological evidence.

  68. JMG,

    That is a pretty grim scenario, because it means without changes at the spiritual level, we are going to keep digging ourselves into a deeper and deeper hole. That could go on for quite some time to come. I can’t really fault your logic, though. As above, so below, right?

    The electric car is serving as a pretty powerful religious amulet to cling onto right now. There is a mantra that goes with it: “electrification is the key to transitioning to renewables”.

  69. Ben (no. 13) “: a broader community of about 20,000 people organized into self-governing family units of 150 or so.”

    Do you mean, a total human population of about 20,000? Or 20,000 within some sort of territorial borders (to the extent that multiple breeding populations can be kept separate)? I’m thinking of the various islands of Vanuatu.

    ————

    Travis (no. 20), this is a textual tradition, not an actual tablet (at least not that anybody knows about). It’s like the (19th. c.) “tablets” of Baha’u’llah (just a fancy name for his treatises or epistles), or the vault of Christian Rosenkreuz.

    ————-

    JMG (no. 37) “When your current body dies, you’ll wake up out of the dream and say, ‘Wow, that was interesting,’ and then go on to other things.”

    So…does my wife really exist, or is she just part of the dream? (Wait–why am I asking you this? You could be illustory as well! Maybe it’s solus ipse.)

    ————–

    Patricia Mathews (no. 48) ” I truly expect 2024 to Feature at least one strong candidate. Who – surprise! – will come out of a state office, for once, instead of the Beltway.”

    Gee, I wonder what Florida official you could have in mind…

  70. @Ighy #53
    Robert Heinlein wrote a story that sounds very similar. I have since several times pondered the irony that while the mutated biology sounded great at the time, the implementation is GMO everything.

  71. Mark (no. 28), before the war, Ukrainian Orthodox churches were broadly divided into those which commemorated the Patriarch of Moscow (thus situating the Ukrainian church under the omphorion of Russia, which irritated Ukrainian nationalists), and those which preferred autocephaly under the (CIA-backed) Ecumenical Patriarch. (It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, since there were more than two factions, which recombined due to hierarchs switching sides.) Anyway, the Lavra of the Caves was pro-Russian until the war, but cut ties (supposedly) after the war started. You have to realize that before independence, all the hierarchs were KBG, and a lot of them are still around. So yeah, it’s definitely plausible that they did this.

  72. @temporaryreality #63 re: Don’t Blame the copyeditor

    Fair enough! Scott definitely strikes me as. . . enthusiastic and opinionated, so I’m not shocked to hear he wouldn’t take all the advice given. I hadn’t put together how all his talk about the “analog revolution” implied the myth of progress, but that makes sense as well.

    Also, my wife does copywriting and editing for a living, so I’m very familiar with how often writers do *not* take good advice, but I should have conveyed that for Cristina and anyone else following along.

  73. Pygmycory, congrats — I’m glad to hear things are going so well. The internet is what there is for the moment; trust me, I know how much of a problem will be if it goes away too fast.

    Sirustalcelion, you can certainly post links to your webcomic in any open post here. Glad to hear it’s coming along.

    James, well, to begin with, Masonry isn’t an occult organization and doesn’t have occult teachings. You meet some occultists (like me) who are also Masons, but most Masons go to church on Sunday and have no clue about occultism. As for other occult groups, it really varies a lot. I’ve interacted with some groups where most of the members seem very well educated on occult topics, and others that are nearly as clueless on the subject as your average Mason.

    Chris, debt addiction’s a complicated thing. Most of the world’s countries are hooked on it to one extent or another, and then there’s the US — our entire system depends on the mass production of unpayable debt, which until recently could be shoved off on the rest of the world. Now that’s breaking down, inflation is picking up speed, and the kleptocrats in politics and business are frantically laundering huge amounts of money and trying to convert it into something that will be worth more than pocket change once the crunch hits. Return on investment is for the rest of us; with them, it’s return on corruption — billions of dollars flooding into this or that supposed cause, but most of it is funneled straight back into the pockets of politicians and corporate moguls. How much any of it will be worth twenty years from now is a fascinating question.

    Russell, 1) Fortune got into occultism by way of Theosophy, the system Blavatsky founded, but she then went her own way and drew on many other sources. There’s still some overlap, but there’s also a lot of differences. 2) Glad to hear it!

    Sam, it’s not usually the same spirits, but there are spirits who help souls go into incarnation, yes.

    Aldarion, remember that Plato is by his own testimony copying down a story he received via a long chain of conversations: he got it from Socrates, who got it from Critias, who got it from his grandfather, who got it from Solon, who got it from an Egyptian priest, who had learned it in his training. A lot of details doubtless got scrambled. The Nile valley went through many changes between 9600 BC (the approximate time of Atlantis) and Solon’s day; so did the entire North African region — until 4000 BC, the Sahara was grassland with watercourses and a substantial human population, for example. The best way to treat Plato’s account is as a folktale that contains jumbled memories of a very distant time; whatever accurate information it contains was probably passed on in communities along the pre-sea level rise shores of the Mediterranean, now far underwater.

    Samurai_47, if only they had the renewables to power the cars! Or, for that matter, enough lithium, rare earth elements, etc. to make them. I expect the well-off to cling to the fantasy of progress long after it’s obviously pushing up daisies in the graveyard of dead ideologies — but it’ll be a narrowing circle of people who do the clinging, Outside that circle is where new possibilities can happen.

    Bei, what a fine theme for meditation!

  74. So … here I sit, in an increasingly empty – soon to be sold – house – with the ‘significant’ .. soon to be less so ‘other’ having requested we file big D. Facing a ‘thanksgiving’ alone for the first time in decades, and having given up.. given away.. donated.. unloaded.. to new homes the hens, the bees, and a sundry of other things, I find myself downsizing considerably from a paid-off abode + surrounds, to a rental less than a quarter the space – sans fruit trees, garden beds, etc.. having by circumstance to give up the things/pursuits that I cherish.

    The ol’ adage “one door closes, whilst another one opens” may in fact be true .. however, WHICH door swings open .. and by extention what realm I enter into, remains to be seen.

    polecat, over and out – literally!

    ps. For those who imbibe in musical tradition – Happy Turkey Day!

    (I’m choosing not to fuss.. having preparing a simple stir-fry instead, in lieu of a big ag neo-dino. ‘;]

  76. I have a new comeback when conversing with the ” EV’s are the future and will save the world” crowd. I ran in to such a guy yesterday, and when he was done with his grandiose predictions I replied with, ” I bet you heard that from the same analysts and news sources that proclaimed FTX and its wunderkind founder to be the cats meow and the future of finance and money. Kind of a blank look on his face after that.

  78. Just wondering if anyone can speculate any occult or non-occult reasons that would explain why these sheep have been walking in a near-perfect circle for 12 days:

    https://nypost.com/2022/11/17/sheep-filmed-walking-in-circle-for-12-days-straight-in-china/

    I highly recommend Andrew Skeen’s horary astrology readings.

    I will be praying to the appropriate goddesses for Binx. My ex-feral kitty Shadow had a bad upper respiratory infection as a kitten. He is approximately 2.5 years old, very healthy now, and extremely smart. I recently trained him how to fetch his little toy fish. Next up is leash/harness training for him and his brother, Ash.

    In other news, I recently did a folk cover of Colors of the Wind.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjaXd77xEuU

    Happy Thanksgiving!

  79. @Russell #62 re: Board Game Recommendations

    Depending on how much complexity you and your family enjoy, you have quite a few options, as board games have had a bit of an explosion in popularity in recent years. Here’s a few that I’ve enjoyed as a board game nerd but that non-nerdy friends and family have also enjoyed.

    1. Quarto: 2 Players. This is like Connect4 with even more dimensions. Pieces are square or round, short or tall, dark or light, and flat-topped or divot-topped. You try to get four in a row of *any* category, but you have to place a piece your opponent gives you.
    2. Push Fight: 2 Players. A clever little game where you move pieces around and then can “push” your pieces and your opponent’s one space. The goal is to push one of your opponent’s pieces off the edge of the board. Quick and easy to learn, fast and fun to play, but with some surprising depth as you learn it.
    3. Settlers of Catan: 3-6 players. Super popular and at the upper end of the complexity scale for these recommendations. You gather resources, trade them with other players, and build villages and roads and such like. Interesting because it has no direct conflict, but can still get pretty competitive.
    4. Coup: 2-6 players. A game of memory and bluffing. You have two cards that represent members of the royal court. Each member gives you certain abilities, but they’re face down, so you can lie about what abilities you try to use, and the other players can call your bluff.
    5. Secret Hitler. 5-10 players. A “social deduction” game – think “mafia” or “werewolf”, but with a few more rules. One of the players is secretly, well, Hitler, and some of the other players are on his team, but everyone is acting like they’re good liberals.

    If those are a bit too out there, some of my favorite mass market classics are Jenga, Stratego, and Connect4.

    Hope these help, and I wish you and your family many fun times!
    Jeff

  80. FWIW, here is my take on the recent mid-terms, posted on my Facebook page. I have had no responses, so far.

    ==========================================================
    Notes on the U.S. 2022 Mid-Term Elections

    Now that these elections are effectively over (except for a few disputed seats), I have a few observations to make. These are mostly for the benefit of my American connections, although I think some of this is of interest to my connections here in Australia and New Zealand as well.

    First of all, I think it is more or less universally recognized that the U.S. election system is broken. There are Third World countries whose elections are more honest than those in the U.S.

    I should point out electoral shenanigans have been a part of the political landscape in the U.S for as long as I have been alive, and I am now in my mid-sixties. The Republican/Democrat duopoly regularly rigs elections. Back in the mid-20th Century, Chicago was notorious for dead people “voting” for Democratic Party “machine” candidates, and voting machines occasionally were dumped in Lake Michigan to make sure that the “right” people got elected.

    In my lifetime, I have observed that both Democrats and Republicans rigged elections, but they did so in different ways. Republicans rigged elections by gerrymandering and voter suppression laws, while Democrats did so via ballot box stuffing. However, in the past, this only affected close elections. If voters turned out en masse to vote a candidate in or out, then the effects of cheating were erased.

    That began to change in the 1990’s. In 1992, the brothers James and Kenneth Collier published a sensational expose, “Votescam,” in which they exposed institutional corruption in the electoral process nationwide. Both the Clinton and Bush Administrations contributed to this problem by the rolling out of Diebold voting machines, followed by other electronic voting systems, all of them easily “hackable.” The problem with electronically based voting systems, is that they are not auditable in any meaningful sense. This means that no one can really trust if an election was fair or not.

    Starting in 2016, more and more people have questioned the legitimacy of the Presidents in power. That is, “were these people actually elected to the highest office in the land?” This matters immensely. It is on thing to say “I don’t like the person who got elected, but that person really did get elected, and is, in fact, the President.” Nowadays, we have people saying that “Joe Biden was not validly elected, and therefore, is not the legitimate President of the United States.” Big, big difference. I have seen polls which suggest that not only Republicans, but also many Independents and even some Democrats (who actually voted for Biden), do not believe that he really won. How long can this state of affairs continue, before we see a Soviet-style implosion of the U.S. altogether?

    As long as electronic voting machines are used, these doubts will never go away. As I see it, the ONLY solution is to eliminate ALL voting machines, and return to paper ballots, marked by hand.

    In New Zealand, before every election, you are sent voting papers in the mail. You are asked to confirm your contact details and where you live, to make sure you are assigned to the correct electoral district. Postage paid envelopes are provided if you wish to mail in your vote. If you go to a voting booth instead, an election official inspects your voting papers and ID, and checks you off against a list of voters in your electoral district. If your name is not on the list, you don’t get to vote.

    Once the polls close, the votes are counted by hand. In each electoral district, representatives of different registered political parties participate in the vote count, and cross-check each others results, to make sure the counts match up.

    These procedural safeguards give me and most others assurance that elections are actually fair and that they are not rigged.

    For my Aussie and Kiwi friends, the take-away lesson is “Do not allow voting machines in your country!” If anyone tries to introduce them, raise Cain about it!

    For the Americans within earshot, I am not sure what to say. I suspect that this particular evil genie is not going to be put back into the bottle. I will leave the late George Carlin with the last word on Voting (WARNING: Not safe for work or family friendly!):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxsQ7jJJcEA&ab_channel=PeterS

  81. Hello dear JMG and commentariat,

    I’ve just finished a book called The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow, which I found more interesting than much I’ve read recently. With backgrounds of anthropology and archeology, the authors investigate all of human history/geography and explode numerous myths on the way, including the false Rousseau v Hobbes dichotomy, the notion that our “progress” stepped inevitably from bands to tribes to feudal systems to “civilisation”, and even that money must needs confer power, or that kings have kingship for life (sometimes they’ve had it for six months of the year but not for the rest of the time).

    The authors disclose the concept of schismogenesis, that is, when two societies living in close proximity exhibit entirely antithetical social structures (ie one cannibalistic and cruel, in contrast to the one next door being basically vegetarian and peace-loving, as happened in California way back when, eg; clearly, they’re defining themselves as much as what they are as what they are *not*) and show that humans aren’ hapless victims of fate when it comes to their modes of living; they can, consciously or not, create anything they want to create; and they have done. The sheer breadth and range of societies discussed within the book is exhilarating.

    This notion that somehow we are going to end up in one system, and that it’s been inevitable all along, is for the birds. We can be whatever we want to be. It’s an exciting and hopeful book, because it shows, with data, how resourceful, creative, and playful we are. It overturns tropes that have been shibboleths for many years (thanks to books like Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel). Nothing is inevitable. We are ceaselessly inventive. History is broader and deeper and more crazy than we’ve been told; our future is not narrow, it’s wide open. The world’s our oyster, actually (within reason).

    Recommended!

  82. To Monk,
    Re: To everyone, do you think it’s worth continuing to try and raise awareness of peak oil and our energy predicament. I’m just so disappointed in the leadership in my country (NZ). It feels like most people are under an energy blindness spell.

    I’m also a Kiwi,and I wonder if you could be more specific. I have no political axe to grind.
    So given that peak oil is real, what in your view is our “energy predicament”, and how is the current NZ leadership failing to address it?

    I completely agree that most people are blind when it comes to energy, what it is (for example, hydrogen is NOT an energy source), how its harvested (solar energy is diffuse and needs a large area for collection, losses in transformation from one energy type to another, storage of energy, etc.
    I’ve lived for years on and land and sea (on a yacht for 17 years) with “alternative” energy (solar, water power, and batteries), and it is nothing like what most people imagine. Unless you are very wealthy, it involves a major downsizing of your lifestyle. Most people in the 1st world (not sure NZ is a 1st world country any more) are too addicted to their extravagant energy usage lifestyle to live on alternative energy (what ever that actually means).
    IMHO, no NZ political party is going to advocate “collapse now and avoid the rush”. They are all clueless.

  83. @Ben no 13 — that above post was originally written in response to yours re *the* ideal organising unit. I think you would find the book (The Dawn of Everything) fascinating. There was certainly an awful lot more than I’d dreamt of in my philosophy … @Mark L also you might find it worth a read re our loss of three basic forms of social freedom, which the authors argue were once common: “the freedom to escape one’s surroundings and move away, the freedom to disobey arbitrary authority, and the freedom to reimagine and reconstruct one’s society in a different form”.

    @Dreckid no 14 re higher self, @JMG no 37 re dreaming this life and everybody in general — this is a four-minute film which is well worth your time — beautiful and profound and surprising about what Richard Hammond experienced in his NDE coma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BYQLDU9xhI . It’s about the importance of place, and why shouting & swearing can be helpful! Very moving.

    @Russell no 62 –may I enthusiastically recommend this family game: Codenames. It’s incredibly simple but deep and so much fun – real, proper, old-fashioned, brain-expanding fun. I can’t really say more, except that now we are dragging random passers-by in to play it, such is our level of interest and enjoyment.

  84. This is kind of minor and weird, but I keep thinking of it….Has anyone else noticed the current fixation with “hydration”?

    There are so many people these days who think that if you’re not chugging a liter per hour of (usually imported) water, then you are somehow not “optimizing your performance.”

    They of course have “scientific studies” to back it up, but I keep on thinking that it’s a civic religion of sorts based on the concepts of purity (water is common as a purifying force in folk religions, no?) and superiority (people old-fashioned enough to only drink when thirsty are clearly simply ignorant).

  85. JMG and others, a number of you are kind enough to read, and even subscribe to, my Substack on international political issues from an informed perspective. (aurelien2022.substack.com). I’m just taking the liberty of referring you to a post of a coupe of weeks ago on the extraordinary, apparently suicidal, nature of the European and US response to the invasion of Ukraine, inexplicable in its violence and hysteria by any historical precedent. I argue that we have to look at a (secularised) version of eschatological religion to explain this, and specifically the cultural influence of the Book of Revelation. I didn’t overdo the esoteric dimension, because it’s not that kind of essay … but see what you think. Comments welcome as usual.
    https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/onward-post-christian-soldiers

  86. Since you are all in literature mode, I’ll try to share an experience, with a little bit of prose…

    It was three o’clock and, as usual, he hurried to the bike after a not excessively hard day’s work. He was not particularily hungry, but his family was waiting for him to share diner. Idle thoughts on how to fix the leaking kitchen’s faucet were plaguing his mind. The Town Hall’s bell was dinging some Tchaikovsky’s melody as he rode the bike for the commute back home.

    Da ra da da dah da dah… Why was he singing out loud? While on the road, outside of the contagious melody range, the tunes were still reverbering inside his mind emerging from his mouth. All the most unnerving, it was the fact that it was an involuntary reaction. He didn’t want to let himself go, not now that he was practicing the ways of the will. If anything, he felt good about having noticed that he was conducting himself under the influence of others; a couple of years ago, this fact would have passed unnoticed.
    He tried to let the music go, just as in ‘letting things go’ meditation. He knew that brute style suppressing thoughts do not usually work, but this time not even ‘letting go’ was enough. The music, like a metastatic cancer, resurfaced again and again.

    It was the Nutcraker, a Christmas piece. Every Christmas season, in an effort to increase sales, the cities were decket out in lights, tinkling music and gay decoration. Be it the fading of the spell, be it people’s greed, christmas season seemed to begin earlier every passing year. As early as the black friday is today the signaling point of the white sales season. But this is not what our commuter was thinking about. He was wondering why he could not manifest his will, why he was being defeated by that irritating sound.

    Then, like a thunderstrike, he understood. The will can only be manifested in a real action, which suppressing thoughts were not. He knew the answer: he had to fight fire with fire, music against music. A concern was that the Nutcraker’s a powerful tune, not any tune would be fit for the task. He dove deep into his memories and there it was, eager to surface, another powerful tune. He smiled at the tought that the hard day’s night song was just perfect for commuting back home.

    It worked like a charm. Singing out loud the Beatles’ tunes was enough to break the spell. It was as if a parasitic entity just lost its grip and fell to the ground. Just to make sure he hadn’t changed one evil for another, he switched the tune again to some local folk music. To his delight the change was effortless. ‘I am not a slave of the tunes that I invoked myself’, was a surprising revelation. He felt weightless as he arrived home for diner.

    It was only then, freed from the influence of the salesman mood, of the annoying music, that he could think about how all this stuff was designed to convert people into consumer zombies, all in the name of the sacred profits!

  87. Hello JMG and kommentariat.
    I have a douct on the reincarnation topic. What happens to plants when they die?Do they reincarnate too? Do they reincarnate the same way as animals? or, do they reincarnate in other way?

  88. This is for everyone, no necessarily our host. It’s about spiritual bread baking.

    I took up JMG’s advice, and started baking Challa bread every Friday. Being Jewish I am seeing a spiritual dimension to this, so I started experimenting with symbolic knots in the bread. My latest project is a 7 knot, to symbolize the week.

    Unfortunately, I do not know any Jews with a tradition of spiritual baking, and I want to resurrect this tradition. My question is not only for Jews of course: Could people please share anything they do to make baking bread a spiritual practice? I’d love to hear any traditions and practices.

  89. Hello Mr Greer,

    Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. I greatly appreciated the privilege of having personal access to your thoughts and opinions. Two items are currently forefront on my mind.

    1. I am quite concerned about the ramifications of Central Bank Digital Currencies currently being espoused by certain western governments and the potential for yet more control of the populace. It has been my experience that when a government makes such public announcements they invariably materialize whether we want them or not. What do you see is the trajectory for the introduction of these currencies in the coming months/years?
    2. I have followed your sage advice for some time about collapsing now to avoid the rush and have managed fairly well so far. If my wife and I are refused further government pension payments because we are not following the government narrative/program I was wondering what you think of the idea of stocking up on salt (Himilayan in particular) as a universally acceptable item to barter with?

    Thanks, Eric

  90. >electrification is the key to

    hiding the problems from our immediate awareness. Where does the electricity come from? Stop asking questions! It comes from the electric fairy, that’s where it comes from.

  91. My question is, 2023 will be the 10th anniversary of the publication of “Green Wizardry”. Have you (or your publisher) considered doing an updated edition with perhaps a new forward of how the last decade has modified your thoughts and ideas about collapse?

  93. I’ve read The Occult Philosophy Workbook. In the section about the after-death experience, you process life experiences out of chronological order – with all lower astral experiences first, then working upward. Did anyone else read that and think ‘oil refinery fractioning column’? 🙂

    It also makes it sound like most people develop etheric, astral, and mental levels roughly sequentially, with each providing a base for the next. Predictably, I have combined and uneven development. Typical – I’ve been telling Marxist jokes for so long I’ve become one. 🙂

  94. Has anyone who volunteers for or receives from a food bank in the USA noticed the major reduction in fats, proteins, and overall calories distributed.
    Official sources have not been forthcoming.

  97. David by the Lake, how I love that name, “The point of the dance is itself.”
    Thanks for this. This is the answer I always come back to, but also always forget. And start to think the world is supposed to make sense, and then in trying to figure the sense, write something like the following:

    I am 70.
    I have never before in my lifetime seen a time where all the countries locked down and had curfew at the same time simultaneously.
    For two years people walked about wearing masks, and it was horrendous for me. When they approached from a distance, my eye was damaged when my son’s wife died, many of them looked like demons.
    I have never seen a time where all the first and so called third world countries all simultaneously, within a few days or weeks, did the same things at the same times: lockdowns, hand sanitizer, masks, curfew, everyone go to the store in the same shortened hours, can’t go out at night, vaccines (that they said would take 3-5 years to develop), and vaccine passports for a vaccine that does not seem to work, for an infection that does not seem that dangerous.
    My son’s mother was living in Wuhan at the time the pandemic began, I saw it coming, and still did not act fast enough, the whole world locked down, and stayed locked down.
    The worst I have previously seen occur in the so called first world, in my lifetime, was the draft for, and the war in Viet Nam. I was 18 in 1970 but I lived in Canada.
    There are numerous atrocities I have heard about that have been perpetrated in third world countries but they were not in my proximity.
    My son has asked me how has this current craziness come to be?
    I do not know.
    But I answer, in the span of twenty five to thirty years there was the first world war, the second world war, the Nazi horrors, the roaring twenties, prohibition, the great Depression. Humankind has definitely been very crazy previously! But the world today doesn’t quite seem believable.

    My step-grandfather (paternal, I never met my real one) was born in a sod house in Saskatchewan. He showed me a picture of him, about 1 year old, the house and his mother and father, in the middle of an immense endless grassy emptiness.

    Before the depression he had a bookstore in Vancouver. It had been mostly a cash business, but he also built up stock with, bring in two or three books and get one free. He told me, “Once the Depression started everyone brought in books, but no one paid money. It put me out of business.”

    During the depression he road the rails. Vancouver and other cities wouldn’t allow single men in town after dark. He found work and food where he could. I asked him why he didn’t get drafted in the second world war. He said, “This country let us starve for ten years. We weren’t about to go fight a war overseas, we knew nothing about.”
    But how did you avoid being drafted?”
    “When they were looking for us in Canada we crossed the border to the USA. And when they were looking for us in the USA we went back to Canada.”
    After the war he worked as a lumberjack, and then a cook for lumberjacks for many years, and then had several variety stores. He was small, looked a lot like Humphrery Bogart, and had his sense of humor too, but he also had a Scottish accent, as his father had sent him to Scotland, at ten when his mother died.

    My grandmother, maternal, lived in an orphanage, in the big city 50 miles from her home, from the age of 7. She kept running away back home. She lived in the orphanage not because her parents were dead, but because after her father returned from the Great war, his wife left him with the children. He said he couldn’t look after them, and to the orphanages they did go.

    Her father always said, his wife, my grandmother’s mother, left because he gave her an ultimatum, either stay home and be a housewife/mother, and look after the children, (she had been working making bombs), or she had to go. She left for Montreal.

    And my grandmother and everyone in the family believed and told this sad and tragic story of what was necessary as an example of a woman in 1919 seeking liberation. But later my grandmother said she found my great grandfather’s letters after he died. He had still been in contact with his wife all those years. And in the letters my grandmother read her mother had still visited her husband regularly, whenever her daughter was not around.
    My grandmother, when she found these letters was destroyed. She could not understand why her mother never came to see her, even when she was in the hospital for a year. My grandmother could not understand why her mother had left in the middle of the night, and why she never ever returned to see her again, when her mother was often nearby and always knew exactly where she was.

    I don’t know the answer to this, but I now think her father deliberately took the blame upon himself, to spare his daughter the hurt of a mother who for one reason or another left.

    My grandmother blamed her father for making her mother leave until she died. But her father had continued to assist her through the twenties, and thirties, and in the forties gave her his house, her birth place home. That was also my first home.

    My mother always said the thirties were the worst time of her life, and she told all sorts of horror stories, and I thought that was the absolute reality of the thirties. But in later years I asked my grandmother about the Depression and she said it was the best time of her life. I asked, “The best time of your life? Why?”
    She said, “We went to the race track every day, and it was fun.”
    “Eventually you would lose,” I said.
    “We never lost.”

    It took me many years to put it together.
    My mother had always complained they always had to move in the middle of the night “because we could not pay our rent.”
    She also said they lived off relief. But relief did not start till 1935, the depression started six years before that.
    I had heard it said by my mother when I was a child my great grandfather was a bookie, and she was a runner for him. I later heard it from my uncles at my grandmother’s funeral in the 90’s. They all bragged they had also been runners for him.

    Then it clicked my great grandfather was the bookie, the calculator. The children sometimes acted as runners. My grandmother and grandfather were the front, they went to the track every day and made bets. When the police came looking, there was only two roads up the Hamilton escarpment at the time, my grandparents got advance warning, and fled. My great grandfather, even though everyone knew where he lived (there were only a couple of blocks of houses on the escarpment), never moved. He didn’t have to, there was nothing at his home. It was all in his head. And was always safe.

    My grandmother until she died could out calculate anyone younger.

    My mother, who was not a good mother, but would have made a great character in “Lord of the Flies” nevertheless always had great exaggerated fears of her children being taken by the police and social services. I never understood. Why would her fears be so exaggeratedly great, until it occurred to me, maybe it had happened to her!

    This would have been a family secret no one would even hint at except at funerals, where they bragged their grandfather had been a bookie, and other things.

    My own grandfather was, my grandmother had hinted, a very active part of the bookie business, when there was no work. He had left home at 14 to work in the steel mills and was very proud of it. And as soon as there were jobs in the steel mills again, he took one, and got out. I believe he had enjoyed but never really liked the risks of the bookie life. He never exactly said this but he was always very proud of being a hard working man, a union man, striking, fighting for workers rights.

    My grandmother on the other hand had loved the partying (she was only 28 when it ended) and did not take to being stuck home with children. For a while she became depressed and agoraphobic, and would not leave her home.

    She was a very good mother for the first two years after I was born.

    My own teenaged mother who eventually took me, was “Lord of the Flies again” a terrible mother. I did not understand why she took me. To me it was abduction. She was still a teenager, and beat me multiple times every day. But did keep me alive. I thought of myself as her victim and prisoner. I knew what a good mother was. My new mother beat me for so many things, but primarily in the beginning for calling her Mary, her first name, and still crying for and calling my grandmother and grandfather ma ma and da da. And saying, “I want to go home. Why won’t you take me home?”

    It has been my perhaps erroneous perception that women born in the Great Depression turn out wrong. Not just in Canada. I have aunts from England. My wife is black and from Philadelphia. Yet her much older sister, and aunts, the same age as my mother, and other female relatives of the same age, suffer from the exact same brutal self centered personality affliction.

    Strangely it does not seem to affect the men, so severely. My father lived in London during the war as a 5 year old while the Germans were dropping bombs.

    How did I ever turn out alright, or semi alright? I am not sure, but I suspect the arts. Acting, I got to act out. Writing, since the age of 16. And it has also taken years. And I always thought I was a much older spirit than my mother. I used to ask God, “How could you let me be born to such an immature mother?” God never answered that question and I don’t know.
    Why have I written this? To reveal, that for me, this is the worst era in my life of many troubles and tragedies. Though day to day, for me, right now it is not too bad, I hate the ominous cloud overhanging.

    Then again, Happy Thanksgiving.

  98. Tony C.,
    What exactly lets the people you know think that a revolution would be likely in France? Sure the French like rioting but it’s often used as a cathartic form of outdoor exercise. Who would be behind a revolution? You need armed forces (then. It’s called a putsch) or else a massive popular movement. And an actual agenda for government, with ideas about how to govern.
    Do you have any available source on the web?
    Iife here seems to be going on normally, jist with more. Poverty and inflation causing slight changes (usually for worse, but rathher minor changes). Like a shop closing at 19:30 instead of 8pm. Or a bit less warm setup for air-conditioning the shopping mall. Real estate is still the best investment you can buy, more and more new buildings being constructed. No doubt more energy efficient too. I don’t like the new buildings and prefer the old ones, but I am unfortunately a minority among my countrymen.
    The digital technology sector is still a major economic driver, even though it feels like those systems are getting mire expensive, stressful and brittle each passing month. More and more ransomware attacks both institutions and private actors..
    Manual labor like plumber or electrician paying well for juniors.
    Overall a slight decline and a lot of uncertainty about the future, which I think is more psychological than anything else. People here don’t know how good they have it! Compared to life in the 1950, there is still some abundance left to cull.
    How exactly is how that, going to lead to a revolution so soon?
    Not that it wouldn’t be neededin order to destroy an economy based on overdeveloped (digital…) complexity, where the number of people who are left out of the regular (legal) economy is probably rising without people noticing.
    And a revolution would be led by which power factions? It could be some with dominantly Muslim background, not least because it would have a betrer capacity to handle doing informal business, dealing with humans and manual labor. Also having been better prepared for poverty.
    Not rebuking what you’ve said, just being inquiring here.

  99. @Polecat,
    I’m sorry to hear about the divorce and the need to move. I hope that the path you find yourself on leads to better places.

  100. Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends. Let us all be thankful for everything we got, regardless of how much or how little it is. I am grateful for our ecosophian community and our host’s insightful writings, which he graciously provides us free of charge.

  101. @the other owen,
    I like the ‘electric fairy’ coinage. That’s a keeper – though I might shift it to the electricity fairy.

  102. @Castle,
    that sounds pretty horrible. Thank you for trusting us with such heartwrenching family history.

    Just for a datapoint, my grandmother who was born in England during the depression seems okay. There are sometimes family skeletons one doesn’t know about and that grandkids have no idea of, but we get along well, and I like her.

  103. As far as Atlantis goes, there are some surprisingly worthwhile new takes.
    This is a link to a great short synopsis by Johanna James of Randall Carlson’s more in-depth Atlantis research:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waZ-n3ULybk&t=32s

    For anybody looking to delve deeper into the issue of ancient history, I also recommend looking into Ben of UnchartedX.com ‘s YouTube channel. Ben does a great job really getting into the weeds of the evolving conversation that is happening in and around archeology. This evolution is happening largely because of the contributions of expert stone masons, machinists and engineers weighing in on the topic.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMPChWRtCeU&t=4s

    Of course, Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock’s contributions to the overall field are great at providing the big picture of our evolving understanding. If you’re not familiar with them, I’d actually recommend beginning with their podcast interviews with Joe Rogan. (Although their most recent one earlier this month – November 10th, 2022 – is not actually their best).

    Take care

  105. I saw some jokes today and realized I don’t know any collapse/long descent/coping jokes, besides the easy targets of dumb politicians, previously written as dumb blond jokes. Collapse humor could be a series of posts, blog, site, book, etc. Laugh now and avoid the despair.

  106. Re: hydration

    My physiology professor was strongly of the opinion that as long as the kidneys could work comfortably within their tolerances (which range from producing urine half as concentrated as blood to six times more concentrated) there was no benefit to added hydration. That made good sense to me.

  107. @Russell #62 two games we love are Ticket to Ride – construct train routes across the continent, several different boards and expansions available – and Wingspan – populate habitats with different birds, all about resource constraints. Both are for 2-5 players, probably for a smart 6-year-old and up. Both are pricey – $50 or $60 – so read up on them to see if they sound intriguing before you invest.

  108. Polecat,

    I had Thanksgiving alone too…and I made stir fry!

    It’s peaceful though. My losses aren’t fresh and raw, like maybe yours are. When that next door opens for you I hope it’s so beautiful it takes your breath away. Until then, peace be with you. Hold onto something good.

    Chris in VT

  109. Happy Thanksgiving to all!

    JMG, love to hear your thoughts on the whole FTX thing which is far from over.
    —
    BTW, notice how so many front-page stories disappear immediately after facts arise that are inconvenient to the overriding narrative?
    —
    The Washington Posts finally admits it’s a “Pandemic of the Vaccinated”. In that vein, everyone should watch “Died Suddenly”.

  110. I agree that Plato’s account has characteristics of an orally transmitted tale. In fact, at the time the first stumbling steps toward writing appear in Sumer and Egypt, around 3200 BCE, the coastline had been rather stable for at least a thousand years (see this very interesting paper on coastal prehistory that can be read online for free). So even if we suppose Atlantean technologies and writings had been maintained for some time after the drowning of Atlantis in communities that are now submerged in the Mediterranean or Red Sea or Persian Gulf, then nevertheless, by the time writing shows up in Sumer and Egypt, those communities had already been submerged for a long while. I find it hard to believe that any technologies or any concepts more complex than can be transmitted orally in small villages or nomadic tribes could have ben transmitted from a hypothetical Ice Age civilization to the usually recognized civilizations.

    It is curious though that Plato’s indication of time and place agree so closely with our modern knowledge of Bahamas shelf submersion. You have mentioned orally transmitted accounts of a similarly ancient volcanic explosion in Oregon, but I think those accounts don’t contain an exact time, and since they were locally transmitted, they didn’t have to transmit geographical information.

  111. @Jean-Vivien, glad that you are doing well in France.

    Philippe Fabry is one on youtube who has given detailed explanations about the next revolution. There is something that is dysfunctional in the current political system.

    The degree of violence is unknown. Much less than 1789 is likely.

  112. I recently tried to order a printed version of Stars Reach through Bookshop. I already own it as an ebook, and wanted a dead tree version that I could loan out. The problem is that Bookshop says that it was on backorder. I ordered a copy anyway, only to have my money refunded a few weeks ago. Now, the book cannot even be found on Bookshop. Do you know if the book is going to be available again?

  113. To pygmycory and Chris in VT,

    Thank you both for the encouraging words. Yes, I’ll get through this upheaval. Once I get resettled into new digs, I can then take a breather before bounding through whatever event horizons await.

    Cheers ‘:]

  114. Polecat, ouch. My dad used to tell me stories about his first few holidays after my mother dumped him, and they were pretty harrowing. Doors did open for him, for what it’s worth, and he ended up much better off than he was with his first wife (of whom the less said the better). May the same be true for you!

    Clay, I like it!

    Filmalone3, that is to say, a company is busy promoting an untested long-shot technology with the same sort of gosh-wow rhetoric we’ve seen so many times already, insisting that of course everything will go wonderfully well and (where have we heard this before?) limitless power will be ours at last. I bet they get lots of funding; let’s see what happens then.

    Kimberly, that’s really weird. My immediate thought is that somebody needs to check the terrestrial magnetism there — strong magnetic pulses from the earth’s magnetic field can cause strange effects on human and animal nervous systems.

    Michael, thanks for this.

    Larkrise, I think it was the open post two months ago where a couple of people brought up that book. I found it interesting but very tendentious. Still, if it encourages you to think outside the myth of progress, I’m glad to hear that. As for the four minute film, thanks, but I’ll pass — I don’t enjoy video.

    Zak, hmm! No, I stay too far away from popular culture to notice such things, but that’s a data point worth noting. Yes, it sounds like a frantic quest for purity on the part of those who’ve embraced materialism and so have no way to think about spiritual issues.

    Aurelien, yes, I saw that, and I think you’ve made an extremely important point. The crusade against Russia does indeed have all the overtones of a civil religion far gone into eschatological frenzy. There is a very real extent to which I’m wondering if Europe these days is subject to a fairly widespread death wish — and this is one of them.

    Abraham, many thanks for this. Yes, exactly.

    Chuaquin, of course plants reincarnate. According to the occult teachings I study, the souls of plants are more or less younger siblings of ours — part of the same swarm of souls, but they got a later start than you and I did — and they’re learning certain lessons we’ve already learned. They deserve all the kindness and care we’d direct at children. Eventually, they’ll proceed to the animal kingdom, and then — via human incarnation, or some other equivalent life form that has the capacity for abstract consciousness — on toward the same destination we’re headed toward.

    FourSidedCircle, I’m delighted to hear this. I don’t have any traditions to offer, just encouragement.

    Nochoice2021, I expect those to be deployed, and to cause cascading economic problems that nobody saw coming. My guess, since illegal income makes up so large a part of the global economy these days, that if they don’t simply collapse via hyperinflation or some other short-term crisis, CBDCs will become the upper rung of a two-tier economy, in which the lower rung consists of various nondigital means of exchange. As for stockpiling salt, anything you have can be taken from you. What you can do — your skills and abilities — can’t be taken from you, and guarantee that you will be a valued participant in economic exchanges no matter what happens. Why not put the time and money into learning skills rather than stockpiling stuff?

    David, I’ll suggest that to the publisher. Thanks for the idea!

    Phil, most of the time, when the same allegedly hot new technology suddenly gets pushed on this blog by two people who’ve never posted here before, they’re paid corporate shills — excuse me, “internet influencers.” Is that true of you and Filmalone3, by any chance?

    Yorkshire, ha! No, I didn’t think of that, but it makes sense. Yes, most souls do integrate the levels one at a time, starting from the bottom.

    Valiant, ouch. Thanks for the heads up.

    Waffles, and likewise!

    Luke, thanks for this.

    Castle, many thanks for this. What a harrowing story.

    Clueless, do you happen to know if any of this is in print? I really dislike videos.

    Lunchbox, that’s an excellent point, I’m no good at jokes, but doubtless some of the other participants here can come up with a few!

    Troy, I’m still waiting to see what happens to Bankman-Fried. If he was actually just a Madoff-style con artist, he’ll be landing in jail soon. If FTX was a money laundering scheme, he won’t. Once we see which way that particular ball bounces, I’ll be more able to offer an analysis.

    Aldarion, I’m quite sure that very little technology was preserved from the Atlantean age. Occult tradition has it that the advanced technologies of that era were kept as a monopoly by elite classes, mostly via priesthoods, and ordinary people rarely saw any of the technologies except as occasional “miracles.” Since the destruction of elite classes is a normal part of the fall of civilizations, very little would have been preserved, and what did survive — again, according to occult tradition — remained the preserve of very small groups, until those gradually dropped out of existence. Since writing can be lost quite readily if it’s purely an elite pastime — consider the fate of writing in post-Mycenean Greece as one example of many — the rediscovery of writing in Sumer and Egypt will have taken place independently of any more ancient use of writing. (I can’t read the paper you linked to, btw — even when I trim off the double quote that makes it go to a 404 page, it’s restricted to those who can access it through an institution.)

    Antony, it’s been removed from one publisher and will be reprinted by another, probably late next year. That’s happened to all but one of my novel-length fiction pieces (the one exception, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, was with the other publisher all along). Stay tuned and I’ll post when it’s available for advance ordering.

  115. Polecat

    I’m also alone this Thanksgiving. Also the big D. Reading about the Higher Self here and on Mondays helps. Prayers help. Yet life is beautiful and a curious miracle. Be well and I send you blessings and Happy Thanksgiving to everyone here!

  116. I misread ‘of course plants reincarnate’ as ‘of course planets reincarnate’. But now I’m wondering – would they?

  117. Mr.Greer,
    Thanks for the comparison. My wife and I are keeping things on an amicable level, and will remain friends after the legal knot is officially severed – no long, nasty, drawn-out drama.. we’re going the no-fault way, with assets to be split down the middle.
    I will sorely miss being a bee’s attendant though.. not so much for any honey incurred, but mainly for the communion that comes from such interaction between such disparate species – even with the occasional stinging rebuke. The immediate living arrangements I’ve (hopefully) acquired will not allow it.

  119. I was wondering why the cabalistic cross, LBRP, rose cross and middle pillar rituals were removed from the most recent edition of your book Monsters? They were in the first 2 editions.

  120. @Castle #97:

    What a harrowing tale!

    In re: your comment

    “It has been my perhaps erroneous perception that women born in the Great Depression turn out wrong. Not just in Canada. I have aunts from England. My wife is black and from Philadelphia. Yet her much older sister, and aunts, the same age as my mother, and other female relatives of the same age, suffer from the exact same brutal self centered personality affliction.”

    My own mother (+2009) was born in 1935. She, too, grew up during the Great Depression. Now, my mother did not physically beat us children, nor did she divorce my father. (My father died at the age of 55 of cancer. He was a heavy smoker, and that undoubtedly shortened his life.)

    However, I would say that my mother was subject to extreme emotional lability. She “flew off the handle” at everyone in the household at the slightest provocation. She would freely curse us when she was upset, and would frequently say to me “God help any children you ever have!!”

    I never married and never had a family of my own, and my mother’s curses may have been at least part of the reason. Many recent Orthodox saints, such as St. Paisios of the Holy Mountain (+1994) has stated that a parent’s curse is a terrible thing for a child. He writes:

    “I remember one mother who had four children. None of them got married.

    The mother cried, saying that she’d die of grief because none of her children got married. She asked me to pray for them. She was a widow and her children were orphans. I was in pain for them. I prayed and prayed, but to no avail. “Something is not right,” I thought. “Maybe your mother cursed you? – “That’s right, Father,” they answered, “We were very naughty when we were children, and she constantly told us, “You’ll be stumps!” – “Go,” I say, “to your mother and tell her the real reason for your misfortune, so that she could come to her senses. Tell her to repent, confess, and bless you from today on.” Within one and a half years, all four of them got married! Apparently, this unfortunate woman was not only a widow, but also easily fell into a state of irritation and despair. Naughty children made her mad, and she cursed them for it. Keep in mind that curse and even [just] parental resentment are very powerful. Even if parents did not curse their children, but just went angry because of them, then the latter do not have a single bright day later: their whole life is a torment. “

    I wonder just how many of us Boomers went off the rails or lived dysfunctionally because of this? Something to ponder ……

  121. @pygmycory
    I don’t think the Depression was as bad in England, as in North America. Canada i have read had it the worst but I have no way to know if that is really true. And I am sure you are right about women from England in the 30’s. I probably over generalized from my own experiences, trying to see if anyone else had observed the same thing, and obviously you had not, and the women i knew that were severely messed up, were primarily north American women. I had inlaws born in the 20’s or perhaps a little earlier, in Guyana, The Depression did not even touch them at all, at least that is what they said. It also seemed the wars did not have that much effect either.

    On the other hand my dad used to tell stories about losing part of his toe to shrapnel in England and his sister stabbing him in the back. I didn’t really believe either of them, but I mentioned them to my grandmother when she was over 80. She said, “The shrapnel is untrue. It was a large concrete block, used to make sidewalks, that was on its side, that fell on his toe and crushed it.” She said,”The doctors all wanted to amputate: at the foot, at the knee, his whole leg. My grandmother said, “I was all alone and didn’t know what to do, So I went to stay with my sister in New-Biggins-by-the-Sea, and cry for a week. I didn’t pay much attention to your father and let him go down to the seashore, where he played all day. I thought I might as well let him, as soon he won’t have a leg at all. The end of his toe fell off, the remaining nail was shattered (like glass, he had to cut each piece individually), and he was healed by the salt water,”
    I have no doubt there were a great many prayers as well.
    On the other hand my grandmother said, ” The story about Janet (my father’s sister), that’s true. Though she didn’t really stab him in the back! She threw the knife at him and it stuck in his back.”

  122. @JMG #37,

    About the Secret of the Temple again:

    I realise you have done your level best to keep the book’s theories within the limits of respected science, especially physics – masterfully done… 😉

    But I’m having a really hard time squaring that blood thingy/the purification rules with any laws or effects that I know from physics or the other established sciences. Realising that this could simply mean we don’t know the relevant effects yet, but still…

    If you’d turn away from “science” for a moment and don your wizard’s robe instead, do you have any speculations about the potential effects/causes which could lead to such a rule?

    Milkyway

  123. #85 Its troubling to note how different the reaction to the war in Ukraine has been to other wars in other parts of the world in recent years.
    A war leading to a similar level of loss of life and destruction somewhere in the Global South would probably lead to the occasional article in the middle pages of broadsheet newspapers, and nothing more.
    From here in the UK, I agree the outright enthusiasm for military support of Ukraine mostly comes from the PMC, there are two other groups that buy into it, either aspirant PMC who do it to see themselves as upwardly mobile, or people just swept up into it by the media.
    There’s a difficulty here because this is mostly just the symbolic identification with it, at the level of displaying a Ukraine flag either in the real world or on a social media profile picture, in a fairly content-free manner, as a broad but shallow mass-mobilisation. By doing so, I’m not sure whether someone is signalling they want peace in Ukraine, or they want to send them more missiles to use on those ‘evil’ Russians.
    There is an element of identification of the conflict with civil religion, you see this every time someone draws the identification Putin = Hitler, so it becomes a re-fight of World War 2. Not the actual historical war but the War in popular imagination based on war movies etc., but this time Putin is the Evil Baddy no. 1 who must be destroyed. Those opposing him are the Goodies, who by definition nothing they do can be bad. Alternatively he can be Lord Sauron, and Russia = Mordor. This means they can call Russians ‘orcs’, even though if you were to do this with any other nationality you would immediately get reported on social media for hate speech.

  124. @ Clever Name (#36)

    Many of my classmates in high school made this exact same claim, and all of those who did had to work like dogs to pass – usually with lousy grades. The stimulation sure enough got them motivated for doing their homework assignments, but that stimulation wasn’t there when they had to sit down and write their finals. So they usually flunked all their exams, but managed to squeak a 50%+1 pass on their overall grade solely on the strength of having turned in all their term assignments.

    What the TV is doing for you is exactly what the mainstream media wants it to do to you: inspire you to think the thoughts they tell you to think, and to think that those thoughts are your own. Notice – in your own words even – that the thousands of pages you wrote with the TV on were thousands of pages of utter tripe. Writing something meaningful and beautiful and truly creative is work and, as such, requires effort and discipline. Remember: the mind is an organ of the body just like any other, so if you want it in top shape you have to exercise it, train it, discipline it, have it take you where you want to go – not off on some corporate-sponsored tangent.

    If you want to write, and not write utter tripe, you have to work your own mind with your own thoughts – which also means going to where your thoughts can be your own. No TV. No radio. No internet. No video games. No traffic or machinery noises. No busy people around you. No unfulfilled obligations hanging over you. No ‘stimulating substances’ inside you. That’s not easy at first, but only because it’s an unfamiliar environment. Get familiar with that environment of quiet peace, get comfortable with being at peace with yourself by yourself – then (but only once you’ve recovered from the stimulation hangover) the creativity will begin to flow, and at a pace you can manage. And then what you write won’t be utter tripe anymore.

    Yes, the TV really is incompatible with creativity. Please go at once and throw it out the window.

  125. Is the Rose Cross ritual effective at a distance, under conditions of informed consent, for helping someone else acquire needed mental states?

  126. Aldarion says:
    #67 November 23, 2022 at 7:51 pm

    Thank you for your post. It gives me the opportunity to start to get some long-held concerns off my chest! Please forgive my rather heated tone…I trust I’m arguing to the point and not to the person. If not, please delete the doggoned thing.

    I appreciate your critical reasoning about prehistory up to a point. I believe you are far too trusting of the standard development model for Egyptian buildings, and there is a good deal of evidence that puts that standard sequence into doubt. Robert Schock and others as well as the rather obvious concerns those with knowledge of simple things like the relative hardnesses of pink granite vis-a-vis copper and even bronze tools such that things supposedly made by dint of hard labor using primitive tools simply could not have been made in such a manner. That to my mind throws the whole standard sequence into question. Then there is the evidence (“hard” evidence) of paleoclimatology for the whole of North Africa, which to my mind raises even more questions. But yes, Hancock is prone to make a good many unwarranted leaps. “Could it be that…” is not a case of reasoning from evidence.

    As for Amazonia, even PBS is finding it difficult to ignore the evidence of widespread relatively cultured civilizations found throughout what we write off as merely swamp and jungle territory. No, I doubt if they had computers, typewriters, or even writing, but there is enough evidence of advanced horticultural methods to (again) doubt some of the standard dating for things.

    And as concerns the cultures of the Andes, there are strange outcrops of buildings high up on what we could call mountains (if not on the very peaks of mountains) made with monolithic stonework, using stone that could not readily have been hauled up there even in modern times. There are a great many unsolved mysteries scattered about all over the world and even if Mr. Hancock has not been able to sketch a credible story out of the bits and pieces he has gathered, it is reasonably clear that there’s an awful lot we don’t know, if we had the wits to admit that fact and not swallow everything coming from the Egyptian Ministry for Antiquities and the Smithsonian uncritically. Not that they both haven’t done some sterling work, but they themselves are, in my view, guilty of the very same intellectual crimes as Mr. Hancock, which is making up stories to fit a preconceived narrative of primitive man, whether that he spent 12,000 years evolving civilizationally step by step from a hunter-gatherer primitivity until our own wonderful present, or that he devolved from some high point, only to re-evolve afterwards. I see no reason to accept either narrative without evidence.

    A great deal of received knowledge about who was where, when, even as relates to North America, has come into some revision, with evidence of inhabitants now suggestive of people wandering about at least 30,000 years ago, up to the Clovis people, who disappear rather tellingly at approximately the time suggested by the Younger Dryas theory, with later evidence of possibly later migrations.

    I’m much happier with our late Renaissance map-makers’ designation of “here there be dragons” than with the received wisdom. Especially as concerns the great Egyptian monuments supposedly made by Khafre and Khufu, et al. The most powerful words a scientist of any description can utter about a subject are “I don’t know.”

  127. JMG wrote: “do you happen to know if any of this is in print? I really dislike videos.”
    I’m the same way. I much prefer reading over videos or even audio podcasts. But alas, on Randall Carlson’s summary of Atlantis evidence, I don’t know of written-only material. You may want to check his webpage (but unfortunately, it is mostly videos to be sure).
    https://randallcarlson.com/

  128. Hi JMG,

    I was wondering if you’d ever heard of the theory that the Newport Tower in Newport Rhode Island was designed by John Dee?

    Possibly you had come across this in your research of early American occultism, but just thought I’d mention it just in case it hadn’t come across your attention. I was listening to a presentation on the topic, and when it mentioned Rhode Island several times, I thought I remembered that you live in or close to Rhode Island, you’d be well situated to go check out the structure!

    (Actually, in the presentation I was listening to, the case was made that the name of the state Rhode Island was chosen by its first governor in reference to some of Dee’s playful symbolism about his ideas and projects.)

    The presentation was by James Alan Egan, I thought it was fairly persuasive, though I haven’t looked too closely into it yet. He claims that the design of the tower was influenced by the rediscovery of Vitruvius, and displays in its construction elements of Dee’s understanding of philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, perspective (especially of the camera obscura), etc.

    For those who are interested in the presentation, the one I’ve listened to (several times!) is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQaSzLtrgGg

    I know you prefer text to a/v presentations, if you’re interested Egan does have a pdf primer for his theories about the Newport Tower: http://newporttowermuseum.com/resources/1-The-History-of-the-John-Dee-Tower.pdf

    I actually came to this study of Dee by way of the Shakespeare authorship question, which lead to a broader study of Tudor England and the Renaissance as a whole. And I was actually only open to looking into the authorship question because of a comment you had made in response to Justin Patrick Moore a number of years back, where you gave your opinion on the topic and recommended John Michell’s “Who Wrote Shakespeare?” That prompted me to give the inquiry some level of credence, and I got a used copy of Michell’s book, it was a great introduction to the subject.

    I’d been interested in Shakespeare’s plays since I was young, but I was then doing some research into the idea that the author of the plays had employed the art of memory as a key part of his creative process. I had read the theory put forth by the British poet Ted Hughes in his “Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being,” was intrigued and wanted to look further into the possibility.

    I started reading about Giordano Bruno and especially his years in London. Once I got into the authorship question, I read biographies of many of the main candidates, as those of the Tudor monarchs, and related figures like John Florio, Walter Raleigh, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and especially John Dee, I’ve done close readings of several biographies of his, and read through some of his writings.

    I did write an essay on the idea of the author(s) of the Shakespeare plays using the art of memory for an Oxfordian zine that was released this last summer, if anyone is interested, it’s titled “Hermetic Shakespeare” it’s the last essay in the collection:

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OxA2hLTV6ltnyCGiC8pBjKrbxLtDRIaQ/view?fbclid=IwAR3HSxdbKcV6GHKyxK4lQ6MmJQ-uEPCUC1MbA57GFmsHCFkWJj9tklchaX8

    (The zine also includes a piece by Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug) on the authorship question, as well as a piece by his daughter. Though, to be sure, I’m not sure I agree with a lot of Yarvin’s overall conception of the author of the Shakespeare plays & poems, but it’s always interesting to hear from various points of view.)

    Anyway, just wanted to alert you to the John Dee hypothesis about the Newport Tower, and give thanks for opening up my mind to authorship question, not sure it would’ve got on my radar if I hadn’t seen that you’d taken it seriously.

    All the best,

    Daniel

  129. Hey hey JMG,

    This is an interesting analysis of the PMC’s reaction to the war in Ukraine. He uses the term PMC and talks about Christian symbolism as it applies to the notion of progress, although he does not use the phrase “with the serial numbers filed off.” He does cite several references, but not you. I don’t know if that’s because he got them secondhand or if he decided it would hurt his credibility to cite an Archdruid.

    https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/onward-post-christian-soldiers

    It definitely fits the notion that politics are downstream from culture, but I would have included the fear of losing wealth and status from the USA’s fall global hegemon.

    Still, I think it’s worth a look.

  130. @Pygmycory, thank you for the prayers and kind words.

    @Kimberly Steele, thank you for the prayers. And thank you for letting me know that Shadow recovered from his infection. I’ve never raised a kitten this young and she seems so tiny.

    @JMG and everyone else who send prayers and positive energy: Binx slept on my chest last night and she would randomly start to vibrate with purrs with no obvious external stimuli. I credit the incoming positive energy. Thank you all so very much.

  131. OT: Phil Mathews, my former husband and father of my daughters, is on his deathbed. His kidneys have shut down, so the doctors at the hospital have stopped the treatment for his infection and sent him back to the care home he’s lived in for the past several years. His memory has been long gone, except for recognizing Sarah, his guardian all those years.

    My reasons to be angry with him have vanished one by one, and I was glad to be able to tell my daughters I haven’t been angry with him for a long time, and was glad when I learned he was happy. [Memory loss having dislodged the grip of the voice of a very toxic father from his mind, I think,] and have wished all the was best for him for some time now. He had a tough road to travel, starting with a number of silent handicaps from prematurity and a serious illness in infancy.

    My daughter Carol said “He was a good man,” and looking back, leaving out a bad marriage, yes, he was, honest, fair, and behind them all the way.

    May his next incarnation be a lot happier.

  132. Then I think we agree on cultural transmission from possible ancient civilizations. I was unsure because your post on ancient technologies (Portolan maps, aluminum etc.) seemed to suggest they had come down from very ancient civilizations.

    By the way, the paper on JSTOR about Red Sea underwater archaeology can be read online by clicking on the link for “independent researchers”, that is for everybody: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41224054. That is how I read it. One just has to sign up for free. JSTOR is a great resource!

    In fact, what convinced me most of all that Plato had some kernel of true ancient knowledge was simply reading his own words on another great free online resource: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0179%3Atext%3DTim.%3Asection%3D25a. It is a pity that Perseus doesn’t seem to contain the Orphic Hymns discussed a few weeks ago, since their long lists of attributes can be explored by clicking on the words even without any knowledge of Greek grammar. Perseus does have the Homeric Hymn to Selene: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0137%3Ahymn%3D32

  133. Yorkshire, yes, planetary spirits also reincarnate. They have very long lifespans, of course — the planetary spirit of the Earth is some four billion years old and has a couple of billion years left to go — but when her body is dissolved in the fires of the Sun during his red-giant phase, she’ll go on to another life on the same grand scale.

    Polecat, I’m glad to hear that. May you have the chance to spend time with bees again soon!

    Robert, because I’m much more aware of alternative magical traditions than I was when I first wrote that book!

    Milkyway, the same prohibitions are part of temple lore wherever the tradition is found; the ancient Egyptians had the same requirements as modern Shinto shrines in Japan. That being the case, I think it’s wise to assume that there’s some reality behind them.

    Anonymous, yes. The way that I’ve used it with best effect is to imagine the person I want to bless standing in the middle of the space, visualize his or her presence there as strongly as possible, move through the ritual as though moving around him or her, and when I call down the Divine White Brilliance, call it down on the image of the person, with a strong intention that the light is actually descending on the person. The effects of doing that have always been good, and sometimes I’ve gotten spectacular results.

    Chris F, thanks for this.

    Daniel, I have indeed, and in fact I’ve downloaded and studied many of Egan’s papers on the subject. I live in East Providence, Rhode Island, less than an hour by bus from the Tower, and of course I’ve been there. Delighted to hear you’re looking into the Shakespeare authorship issue, and equally delighted that you liked Michell’s book on the subject.

    You might be interested to know about a problem with the conventional view of the Shakespeare plays that I encountered in a very specialized context, and that (as far as I know) has not been discussed elsewhere. Do you recall the bit in Romeo and Juliet about Tybalt, who “fences by arithmetic”? That was a topical reference, like many in the Shakespeare plays; there was a very famous Tybalt, or rather Gerard Thibault, who did indeed fence by arithmetic; I translated his rapier manual The Academy of the Sword. Now here’s the problem. Nobody knew about him until 1610, when he returned from southern Spain (where he was a student of the leading fencers of the time) to Antwerp and began teaching. But Romeo and Juliet was officially published in 1597. So something is very wrong…

    Team10tim, Aurelien posted a link to it further up this comment thread! I agree, it’s worth reading.

    Random, delighted to hear it.

    Patricia M, please accept my condolences. Do you know if he or his caretakers are willing to accept prayer?

    Aldarion, maps are so valuable to mariners that it’s entirely possible that a set of maps, repeatedly copied, could have been preserved for a very long time. Other fragments of older technologies could also have been preserved, perhaps by surviving priesthoods in central Asia (where occult tradition holds there was a major post-Atlantean presence until climate change dried out the pluvial lakes and turned the region into desert). Imagine a post-Atlantean age in which scattered centers of survivors in certain isolated areas clung to remnant technologies as long as they could, without necessarily understanding the principles any more, and eventually losing the ability to make it work or simply being overrun by invaders or looters. That would match the facts on the ground as I know them.

  134. “Return on investment is for the rest of us; with them, it’s return on corruption — billions of dollars flooding into this or that supposed cause, but most of it is funneled straight back into the pockets of politicians and corporate moguls.”

    That’s FTX alright. Tax money to Ukraine, they buy FTX tokens, FTX takes the money, buys real estate for themselves and sends campaign contributions to the politicians in favor of sending more to Ukraine.

    But someone miscalculated. Or deliberately kicked the legs out of the operation hoping the evidence would get lost.

  135. As to millimeter wave drilling, here is a summary of what the research project found.

    This project successfully demonstrated:
    1) Full borehole guided energy propagation;
    2) Reflected power (focused and scattered) isolation;
    3) Collinear gas insertion and flow;
    4) Collinear real time diagnostics (multiplexed signals);
    5) Full bore melting and displacement (rock melt flow) in granite, basalt, sandstone and limestone samples;
    6) Vaporization of limestone and possible partial vaporization of basalt, even at this low power level;
    7) Full-bore Direct Energy ‘drilling’ using only MMW beams was demonstrated through basalt and granite rock slabs. Note that a small predrilled hole was used to simulate natural or created flow paths in the surrounding rocks in the expected drilling methods;
    8) MMW transmission losses in high pressure nitrogen were found low, but the results were not definitive nor quantitative;
    9) Initial thermal weakening of rocks started at 600 C, but returned to near virgin rock strengths by 1650 C, with no rock strength data above that temperature, yet;
    10) New understandings of the rock melting and vaporization process under intense MMW beams were found for the drilling and lining processes; and.
    11) Additives will be needed for drilling some zones- possibly limestones (due to high vaporization and low melt volumes) and water filled, highly fractured/ vugular zones (due to cooling). Those additives can then also form the wellbore lining across those zones.

    https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1169951

    Something the left out was the operating at 5000 psi. The gas is going to bleed out through all the cracks they just made. Thermal fracking if you will.

    The usual problem with geothermal power is the brine that comes out of the hole. As it cools it scales the pipes and heat exchangers, then you have to pump the corrosive slurry of salt crystals back into a different hole to get rid of it.

    Some wells are sulfur saturated too, that makes it even more fun. Hydrogen sulfide is much more toxic than people think it is.

    The Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health Level for HCN is 50 ppm, for H2S is 100 ppm. The unpleasant trick H2S has is numbing your nose just at the level it becomes deadly. ” Oh it away.” A few minutes later, plop.

  136. Hello Mr. Greer,
    I am the guy who mistakenly posted the same link twice. The one on the geothermal project. I had never posted before, and figured I messed up the first time. Didn’t realize posts don’t appear right away. So I’m no shill, just someone who found the idea interesting. My apologies. I find your work of great interest and terribly logical. I’ve read a couple of your books. Depressing to realize what the future likely holds for my children and grandchildren. If something along the lines of massive geothermal were possible, it could be of some help at least energy-wise. Thanks for listening.

    Phil Malone

  137. Re: Romeo and Juliet, Tybalt, and Thibault

    That is extremely fascinating! I should’ve pieced that together myself, I had known of your translation of Thibault for a long time (I haven’t read it yet, but now I need to study this soon!)

    (In my defense, I have read Romeo and Juliet twice, but hadn’t returned to it since delving into the authorship question or being aware of your translation of the Academy of the Sword.)

    Do you have any ideas as to how a reference to Thibault and his arithmetical fencing methods could’ve made it into a 1597 publication? Was his art developed enough at that point to have been known in England by way of letter from Spain?

    I’m finding so many connections between the Shakespeare authorship question and secret societies like the Rosicrucians and Freemasonry.

    For instance, Midsummer’s Day, June 24th, the Feast Day of St. John the Baptist. Of course, Shakespeare has a play centered on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There’s a documentary film being released next year arguing that MSND includes many references to John the Baptist (as the “pointer” to Christ, as the beheaded prophet, much like Orpheus, who is referenced in the play)

    Edward de Vere was supposed to have died on June 24, 1604, St. John the Baptist day, under somewhat obscure circumstances (some think he secretly retired to an estate in Waltham Forest, and died after several years retreat in 1608/09, the year the sonnets were first published.)

    Twenty two years later, Francis Bacon was said to have died on Easter Sunday, 1626, under very questionable circumstances. (I remember questioning this myself, when reading that Francis Bacon died after having caught cold after a sudden fit of inspiration testing out whether cold weather could help preserve meat. I’m pretty sure England had experienced cold weather before, and people were well aware of cold cellars / freezing temperatures ability to preserve meat.)

    The researcher Alan Green claims to have decoded the two inscriptions at the Holy Trinity Church and the odd dedication to the Sonnets, which add up to 624 characters, by placing them on the reformed Enochican tablets of John Dee’s, which have 624 squares.

    I haven’t verified this in Dee’s diaries yet, but Alan Green said that this reformed table was received by Dee and Kelly in a multi-day session that began on June 24, 1584.

    Many Oxfordian researchers think that the number 1740 was something of a symbol and code word for Edward de Vere, and that it’s incorporated into his verse and in references to him many times. There was a Shakespeare monument in Westminster Abbey erected in 1740, on the spot in “Poet’s Corner” where Alexander Waugh thinks Edward de Vere was actually buried, in secret. The monument and its inscriptions were designed by figures like Alexnder Pope, a prominent freemason, who, for many reasons, I think might’ve known about the true author of the Shakespeare plays and poems.

    I also happen to notice that the Grand Lodge of London was founded on 24 June 1717, and I wonder about the significance of that date.

    I haven’t done an in-depth study of the origins of Freemasonry (though I have read your book on “The Secret of the Temple,” it was excellent,) and I can’t help but wonder if Elizabethan era politics and culture helped shape the inception of the society.

  138. @Aurelien

    Well done on the analysis! I found your substack through a link to this piece:

    https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/its-war-josep-but-not-as-we-know

    That was quoted at Moon of Alabama:

    https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/11/ukraine-running-on-empty.html#more

    And I was impressed. The post that we both linked was the next piece that I read.

    Since you asked for comments here is what I thought.

    I think that the progressive, liberal, democratic, PMCs are also afraid of the loss of wealth, privilege, and status that will come to the west if Russia wins. I remember the left in 2003 talking about petrodollars and the “glittering prize” of Iraqi oil fields. It is possible that they no longer consciously consider the dynamics of the imperial wealth pump, but I doubt that they have actually forgotten it.

    I realize that you were exploring a symbolic explanation for the PMC’s reaction, and so that might be outside the scope of your post, but I don’t think that any full treatment of the issue is complete without that.

    But otherwise I thought it was great. Well researched and explained with good insights. Nice work.

    @Aldarion and JMG,

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/41224054

    Will open the article on Red Sea archeology.

    Thanks,
    Tim

  139. @Aurelian, I enjoyed your blog post very much. You tie together a lot of loose strands, and the whole starts to make sense. I’ve read before about the origins of Russophobia, but it never really accounted very well for what I am seeing among my relatives in the US, where the intellectual liberals are frothing at the mouth over the new Hitler over yonder, while the long-term conservatives who still hate communism think we ought to leave Russia alone.
    I also note that Japan’s elite at the beginning of World War II had cultivated a very similar belief in their own cultural superiority, with the gods self-evidently on their side, and the will to win being all that was needed, even against an enemy with overwhelming technological superiority and resource abundance. This sort of pride that goeth before a fall must be something baked into human nature.

  140. I’ll add Binx to my morning prayers.

    I was going to ask everyone what you all thought could or should be done about the globalist push for total surveillance and control over the world’s population, as we have seen at the G20 summit and the WHO. A couple of decades back I thought failure of our system would occur before things got as bad as they have now, but I also realize that if I had stayed the course and kept hollering and protesting it probably would have been almost as effective as doing nothing. Instead, I prepared for collapse, and do not regret that.
    I anticipate the control freaks will control even more than they do now before the wheels really come off the go-kart, but several of you have written about signs of failure of the current system, and our host suggests there will be a two-tier society. I’m likely to be happy as a mudlark in a mud bath in the not-so-technological tier.
    I have my own observation along these lines, too. I proofread for an Asian environmental journal and have been receiving papers for the next issue, which is various Asian countries plan to achieve Carbon Neutrality 2050. The studies’ authors are using computer modeling to tweak their plans until they give the desired output by 2050, and they present their results. Only one so far has acknowledged that the technology assumed in the model hasn’t even been developed yet and furthermore, in the best case the result will be economic hardship. Otherwise, they all blithely propose to put up solar panels wherever they can fit and force the poor to rely on electricity for cooking.
    What do you suppose could go wrong? (sarc)

  141. I’m not sure if this is a joke or it actually happened. The notion of a contract breaker made me think of it, for some reason.

    This guy goes on a tour of a nuclear weapons facility. At one point he asks the guide, “Do you develop low-yield devices?”

    “Oh yes,” comes the reply. “But we call them failures.”

  142. Dear folks,

    A branch of my ancestors came from Greene County, New York State, USA (near Ulster County).

    book “The History of Greene County, New York, with Biographical Sketches of its Prominent Men,” with no author listed. First printed 1884, J. B. Beers & Co., New York; printed by George MacNamara, 36 Vesey Street, New York…

    …I have just been reading, in particular, about one of the county’s towns in the 1880s, a place in the middle of nowhere. The descriptions of the town’s industries sound so bustling and vital compared to the decrepitude of now. Industries of the USA had been gutted in the 1970s by multi-national companies that didn’t (and don’t) give a cr_p about North America. The businesses are just gone. Multi-national companies shut down companies in the USA, and relocated them to Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, India, China, &c. There is nothing vital about the USA’s industries these days.

    I feel profoundly sad😩. Overall, North Americans had things much better then (a hundred and forty years ago) than now. It acutely feels like “Life After People” (an innovative TV show of a few years ago):

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_After_People

    There are 8 billion humans on earth now. There were 1.4 billion people in 1880. That is an increase of 570% (1.4 ÷ 8). As much as mainstream media tries to spin it that 8 billion is just fine (even saying, ‘why not more?’), I will never buy it. For example, a person alive today has access to 17% (8 ÷ 1.4) of the world’s air compared to then — how is that better? It isn’t.

    I am letting this sense of loss percolate through me.

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  143. @Lunchbox Bike #105

    I don’t know if this counts as a joke. A few days ago a woman came to our shop asking for an appliance. In the conversation, she brought the idea that she was fancying about purchasing a caravan, and she wanted LPG gas for a new invention she’d love to install. It’s a feces incinerator, sweden technology, but currently its price is exhorbitant, ranging 4000€.
    The lady saw this technology as a great ecological advance, burning feces into ashes instead of having to deal with a muddy and stinky deposit you can only send to specialized treatment points and needs precious water to run. So now, instead of using scarce water, it would just need LPG gas for running, much cleaner and easier to deal with. A pity it is so expensive, but surely its price will go down in the future.
    She was so enthusiastic that she foresaw this technology to be employed in every appartment block. No more wasting drinking water for such a dirty job: burn gas instead.

    I could have told her that water is renewable, while LPG is not, so it is not so clear to me that incinerating feces is a more ecological answer. I could have told her that we were currently fighting Russia for the gas, not for the water. And also that she was losing an excellent fertilizer which, by the way, fertilizers are on low supply due to the war against Russia and the high price of gas. But she was a potential customer so I didn’t want to upset her. Instead, I said that in the past, feces were given to chickens and no water or gas was wasted, before we invented so many regulations. “Who has chickens nowadays?”, she replied.

    I find it a joke, that she could not figure how to use the human waste on chickens, but could fathom to pay 4k bucks for a sanitizer that runs on gas, and still call this the most ecological option.

  144. Morning John,
    I’ve re-read the whole Weird of Hali series, and it was just as enjoyable as the first time. How are you getting on with your new series of novels involving more accurate magic? I’m very enthusiastic to read it!
    Regards Averagejoe

  146. @ Aldarion
    “I find it hard to believe that any technologies or any concepts more complex than can be transmitted orally in small villages or nomadic tribes could have ben transmitted from a hypothetical Ice Age civilization to the usually recognized civilizations.”

    Possibly not to “civilizations” as you say (civilisations are not generally known for listening to what barbarians have to say)…

    …but people who remain “oral” being capable of transmitting complex concepts and technologies *among themselves* across huge numbers of generations? There is an argument to be made for that.

    Here is a wee taster piece… https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/

    Also, anything by Lynne Kelly (Australian) on the subject of “orality” is worth looking into.

  147. Hi John,

    https://www.politico.eu/article/joe-biden-ira-inflation-reduction-us-ignores-eu/?utm_source=POLITICO.EU&utm_campaign=5ed6ef150f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_11_25_03_38&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_10959edeb5-5ed6ef150f-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

    This politico article goes into why Europeans increasingly feel played by a de facto America First foreign policy by the Biden team.

    The US is using the Ukraine war to suck investment and capital out of a de-industrialising Europe into America.

    This is why I’m actually much more optimistic than you about the prospects for America this decade.

    For the foreseeable future America is relatively plentiful energy and other resources (or can easily import them from Canada, Australia or South America), has vast oceans from the most troubled parts of the world and has relatively better demographics than most of the Old World.

    Yes, America has challenges, but for the next 5 years or so, its still the best looking house in a bad neighbourhood.

  148. @JMG,

    I might not have made myself clear, sorry. The working hypothesis from your studies clearly is that there is some reality behind the blood/purification rules, and I wasn’t questioning that. But I am trying to figure out how or through what mechanisms this might take effect.

    I haven’t been able to come up with any effects from physics etc, or any mechanisms on the material plane which would require such a rule.

    The rules around women having given birth might be explained away with the desire to protect these mothers from getting up and around too early, even though it seems silly to focus such rules just on the temple setting in this case. But everything else… there has to be some other stuff behind it.

    Hence I was wondering if you had any speculations (clearly labelled as speculations…) about what could be causing any such effects, or on what “level” they would work.

    E.g. if not material, could this be something etheric or astral? Or other (spiritual?) channels altogether? And through which mechanism on these other levels could some of the temple stuff work to be affected (or to affect) anything blood-related?

    I was hoping you had some ideas about that… 🙂

    Milkyway

    PS: As a sidenote, last I checked, there were old mud pools in New Zealand which had been open to “bathing”, and where the Maori owners asked that women don’t take any mud baths during menstruation because the places are sacred etc etc. Of course, the same owners had no qualms about selling access to these places on a touristic level, including huge parking lots and gift shops with every mud-related item under the sun being sold for home-consumption (none of them “natural” in any way). So, well. 😉

  149. Ben says:
    November 23, 2022 at 11:28 am

    @ JMG – this is a broad topic, which could literally fill multiple books, but it’s a topic that’s come up on this blog more than once.

    Last Saturday, I met up with a friend, and after a few beers the topic of conversation moved from personal struggles (he just got divorced), to the broader struggles of our time. …

    ****

    Some people may like to read David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s 2021 book ‘The Dawn of Everything’ on the organisation of past human societies. Many were equal but free, a combination that we’ve been repeatedly told in the 20th. and 21st.C is impossible.

    It’s fascinating and it’s 526 pp. The only downside is that they used ultra-thin paper; I’ve got thicker 200 pp books on my shelves. Turning the page tends to go from p.130 to p. 134.

    Sadly Graeber died in 2020. His co-author had to finish the process of getting it published.

    He was anti-globalisation. He must be one of the individuals that the establishment is most pleased to be rid of … like Kary Mullis, etc, etc.

  150. @Michael Martin #120 wow that has given me so much to think about. I’m doing the OSA journalling exercises and it’s opening a vipers’ nest I had buried very deep for my entire adult life. Long story short, as a child my mother was emotionally abusive to me, there was a large part of my childhood where she actively disliked me. I forgave her many times over as I realised she was also damaged and at the same time could be loving, the usual paradox. However, I think she is/was also unwittingly a witch. One example: Once when I was in primary school, we were travelling to see my grandparents, my mother’s mother. We were very poor at the time and it was a long journey. Dad scraped together his last pennies to make it happen, we were all desperate to see our beloved gran. En route we got pulled over for my dad was speeding, albeit not by much. My mother cried, begged the cop not to fine us, told him how desperately broke we were, how long she hasn’t seen her mum. No dice. Cop was getting off on his power trip and fined the bwjesus out of my poor dad. My mum then cursed the cop, telling him to his face ‘may you die’. And guess what, not long after, we heard he’d been killed in a crash.
    This was but one example, the worst, but one out of many. Nobody, but nobody, messed with my mum, she was that strong-willed. My mum was devastated with guilt after the cop’s death, in her mind there was no doubt about the cause of his death being her curse. She also *always* got a visit in her dreams from a cousin who’d committed suicide just before anyone in the family died. She wasn’t a practising witch, in fact, she would be very angry if anyone said she was. Come to think of it, a guaranteed way to trigger a massive meltdown would be whenever my dad would joke that she was a witch…which he did whenever one of her casually flung curses hit its target. Quelle surprise!
    Looking back now, while I am in the process of shedding some of my ignorance, the effect of her very strong will, combined with focused searing anger means that, if I understand how magic works, she actually practised it even though she did not fully know/acknowledge what she was doing? (FWIW: yes, she is covered in strawberry jam. Epic blowback.)

    Which comes to the question I want to ask now. Is it possible my own mother inadvertently cursed me? It would explain so much. And if so, does she need to acknowledge it for the curse to be lifted? I have no doubt at all her feelings toward me now are purely love. I am also wondering whether the usual basic protective rituals and advice in this blog’s FAQ are enough to rid me of something I now think may have clouded my entire adult life? If Kimberly is reading this, I would be very interested in your advice specifically.

    (JMG if this is best asked in MM please delete. )

  151. Zak, weird as that trend is, it also has it’s opposite: the claim that you should not drink any water as such, but get hydrated via eating lots of (exotic) fruit… Whild it is true that old people don’t drink enough water in order to avoid certain inconveniences, water uptake seems as much a topic of strange trends as diet!

  152. Tony C., I’ve looked at Fabrys YouTube channel and don’t see Revolution among the titles. Can you specify which video? My first thought would be that revolutions in Europe and in the US have been announced for many years now…how can he put a precis date on it

  153. Interesting article in the Guardian about “fermented protein” as a green technology. At first, I was total “yuck” but on further thought, I might consider it. I’ve considered adding a bug farm for added protein to my diet, so a tank-grown protein powder that I could add to soups or meals would be helpful, especially if it was cheap and green. The big question is the energy input needed, of course. And I’m not ready to abandon my backyard garden either.

    “Embrace what may be the most important green technology ever. It could save us all” by George Monbiot

  154. Hi John Michael,

    I believe that an Arthur like person could arise again during a future dark age. In some ways it is my belief that our culture is predisposed to produce such a force. It is hard wired in. What’s your perspective on that?

    And if I may dare to be so bold, wouldn’t the topic of failure viewed through the lens of the Arthurian tradition, make for an awesome essay? The contrast to the elites of today would not look all that great. 🙂 Yes, I am cheeky. And yes, it’s a personal failing, but then, sometimes I disappoint even myself! Hehe!

    Cheers

    Chris

  155. @Stephen #19:

    “particularly the kind that after a certain number of years begin paying you dividends and turn into a form of passive income”

    I have something similar to this; it’s a long story but in essence at the time that I subscribed to it it came with certain tax benefits, so I did it thinking to myself, “Hey, I make good money and it’s not like that will ever change.” (Heh.) I did it basically on the financial-diversification principle.

    I’m no longer very sanguine about it, partly out of concern that the economy literally isn’t going to be there in the way that we know it, and partly because with the excess death rates from the experimental medicine I don’t know how solvent the life insurance companies are (speaking of things that no one could possibly have foreseen…).

    On the other hand, big companies and industries have a way of being bailed out.

    @Jeff #79

    Thanks for that. Like Russell, I’ve also been interested in board games, for the same reasons. Currently my kids enjoy the old standbys like Monopoly.

    I actually, being on a rare trip to The City not long ago, was in the bookstore, a place I enjoy getting to once or twice a year. And anyway when I was there I purchased a board game for my kids, thinking it looked neat.

    The problem I have, with the board game “scene”, is that it seems to me that as it has gotten more popular, it has been flooded with a large quantity of games that – well, I’m sure they were great fun for the designers to create, but sometimes they seem to substitute complexity for actual enjoyability.

    @JMG #114

    “expect those to be deployed, and to cause cascading economic problems that nobody saw coming”

    Agree, that’s my opinion as well.

    I was thinking about this actually, with respect to the f0xxes, and other things. Fact is, they didn’t get what they wanted, with the f0xxes. I know many people will probably disagree with me here, but to me it’s a bit like the old “being pregnant” – you either are or you aren’t, there’s no “mostly”. It’s the same with these governments and their plans – it either works or it doesn’t. “Mostly”, “kinda” working, is a fail, for them.

    A lot of people will probably get hurt along the way, but it’s not going to work, the way they think.

    On a different note, with the arrival of cold weather I’ve finally gotten a chance to test my new wood stove. It’s not REALLY cold yet so verdict isn’t totally in, but so far it’s working great! Really it’s exactly as expected: pretty chilly when you get up (house was 12.8 C when I got up this morning), takes a good hour to properly warm up, and of course heat is a bit unevenly distributed, but it works, with the shape and size of the house.

    I rented a wood chipper yesterday, and I broke it (or jammed it, or something, I hope it’s not really broken), and the point of this story is, my old gripe that everything mechanical breaks. There are things I’ll never go back to.

  156. I’m wondering if the mask has slipped finally on UK Government policy on Net Zero and the unending pursuit of growth ?

    First we had briefly tenured PM Liz Truss talking about an “anti-growth coalition” that fought against her ideas, and ultimately helped bring her down. Now Chancellor Hunt unveils a “national goal” to reduce energy demand by 15% at the level of every household – flimsily disguised as a means for the public to save money on bills and to stand up against Russia. “For most people, we need you to play your part in reducing our energy dependency on what Putin chooses to do in Ukraine”

    https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/jeremy-hunt-shares-how-millions-25597551

    And dear old Grant Shapps (currently at least, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) appearing to push “de-growth”.

    https://dailysceptic.org/2022/11/23/is-degrowth-now-government-policy/

    Looks a lot like Peak Oil/Managed Decline/Collapse Now (AATR) style thinking to me, and presumably aimed at softening us up to expect less etc. before the inevitable bites. Does anyone elsewhere recognise the same trend?

  157. Do you know why Oswald Spengler named our civilization Faustian? I know the story of Dr. Faust and Mephistopheles, but it seems rather exotic to name our civilization after it. I started reading Decline of the West once but haven’t gotten through it.

    I heard somewhere that there was a historical Dr. Faust. His name was Georg I think and he wrote a grimoire. Are you familiar with him? Did he deserve the reputation he got? How did the magic he taught differ from, for example, Eliphas Levi or yourself?

  158. JMG#114:
    Thank you for your explanation on plants reincarnation! I’ll keep taking care of my ficus with love…knowing that it’s also an incarnated soul.

  162. Frank Kaminski #9, I just read your review of Snowpiercer – https://mudcitypress.com/snowpiercer.php. I have a habit of taking something different from books, films and games than other reviewers, and likely from what the creators intended. Watching Youtube reviews I thought they got some things right – the black-clad, axe-wielding goon squad were absoutely middle class fascists.

    But then they said Nam was a visionary because he could look out the window and see a future while the others saw only death. I was thinking no, they see only death because there is only death.

    I saw the message of the film as ‘don’t let the mystic weirdo screw up your revolution’. All he had to do was open one last door, they could have stopped the train under control, and anyone who wanted to get off could have. Instead he derailed the train, destroying the only functioning infrastructure to support human life and killing nearly everyone on board. Nice job reducing humanity to a grand total of two people you freak.

  163. Castle,

    This is just my one small data point. My grandmother was born at the start of the Depression and she was the kindest, warmest, most gentle person in the family. She was also very anxious and kind of panic-y. The rest of the family did their best to shelter her as she got older. My grandfather, a couple of years older, was more steady and very reserved. They both had to shoulder heavy burdens quite young. The people I’ve known from this generation tended to be devoted to their families. They also seemed to be rather heavy social drinkers. I think they carried a lot of sadness from having to grow up so fast. None of that “follow your bliss” for the ones I knew.

    It sounds like there was an awful lot of pain passed down in your family. But they sound like real survivors too.

    Chris in VT

  164. @JMG #37

    This statement surprised me: “the abandoned center of American politics”. It seems to me that we are well past the point where the idea of “the center” is meaningful. To make an admittedly rough analogy, what would the center mean during the collapse of the Soviet Union? Also, abandoned implies that it could be un-abandoned. Do you see a realistic path where that is possible? I can’t but wish I could.

    @Tony C. #44, @Jean-Vivien #98

    The age of revolutions is over. There is no ideology on the horizon to motivate a revolution. Look around and all you will see is a rehash of the same old ideologies (all the ‘isms’) of the past few hundred years but with added “This time but harder!” Ideologies are clearly exhausted.

    Instead, we are entering the age of collapse where the dynamic is entirely different. The debate is now about whether the collapse will occur over a long period or will happen soon and suddenly. The complexity and fragility of modern societies suggests the latter. “Gradually, then suddenly” to quote Hemingway. If the collapse is sudden then, sadly, Yugoslavia is the recent example to study. If you want to predict how it might unfold, look to the natural fault lines in your country.

  165. I think the pushing of electric cars (again) is just a backdoor way of getting unwilling Americans into public transportation, thereby reducing our energy use per capita. The marketing of cars as “freedom” is firmly ingrained in us Americans. I’m not sure what this “freedom” is if it means a 7-year car loan, an insurance bill, a yearly car tag, gasoline bill, maintenance and repair bills. …There will be electric cars, but they will be too expensive for most people to buy. BTW Ford sold electric cars until 1920, Henry’s wife drove one.

  166. Clever Name #36, I read your comment with great interest. I come from a family of four children and my husband’s family has seven children. Both of us can write or study or basically do anything when there’s lots of noise and chaos whirling around. One of our daughters is a librarian and one of her fellow librarians came from a family of 12 kids! She told me the building could be burning down and everyone running around like chickens with their heads cut off and he would be sitting there, quietly working, nor bothered at all! So maybe you come from a large or fairly large family? And we all grew up in small houses, sharing bedrooms with several siblings. Makes a difference, I think! I basically work best when there’s noise and a certain level of chaos. Just some thoughts on your very interesting comment!

  167. I’m particularly interested in our host’s opinion but also the commentariat’s in general: How would you describe the opposite of Progress?

  168. @Njura , the best is to join his Telegram channel. He talks about it in different videos in the past few months.
    This one may be a good one to start with: ‘ The downfall of the European empire ‘
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQlkFNVKQcc

    He also wrote a book ‘ Le President Absolu ‘ that talks about the problem at the root of the next revolution.

    All this can be debated of course, and there can be some variations in the timeline, but I have not found major errors in his reasoning and research so far.

  169. @JMG , Good day,

    I have been studying Integral Spirituality by Ken Wilber.
    He talks about states of consciousness, and also importantly of stages of consciousness.

    There are stages of development and growth in human consciousness, for example,
    for conceptual intelligence, for morality, sports , child development , emotional awareness , etc.
    It is a vast field of study .

    One important point is the level of social care, for instance an infant cares about only herself, a teenager about the group of friends, an adult about family various groups , sometimes the nation.

    More and more adults genuinely care about the whole of humanity which is a new development that did not exist 70 years ago, or very rarely.
    He thinks this is a new growth in human consciousness, which will continue to grow in the future this century and next.

    What is a druid, a green wizard’s point of view on the evolution of consciousness?
    Does it keep moving forward in spite of the material difficulties or will it regress
    along with civilization?

  170. Hello JMG and fellow commenters,

    one of the aspects of collapse that is often overlooked is the free time. What do you do, when many of the avenues of entertainment are not available anymore? Since we have children, this topic became more urgent. Here is what I discovered in the process. Board games are great for spending time together, however not all are equally suited for all.

    Chess is great for older children. To teach kids (or yourself) pattern recognition, get “The Woodpecker Method”. A great book with examples of varying difficulty level that help you to improve your chess play a lot.

    Gobang is a great for all ages, little kids to seniors. Few rules, makes a lot of fun to play.

    Abalone is a great game for all ages, few rules but just as complex as chess.

    Backgammon is a great game too, I suppose. However, I have no luck with the dice, so I avoid it completely. My wife likes it a lot though.

  171. @Clarke #126: I take this as an incentive to discuss some very interesting issues! I am not actually basing what I wrote above on any announcements from the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities nor the Smithsonian, but mostly on David Wengrow’s “The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East Africa, C.10,000 to 2,650 BC”. This is actually quite revolutionary in its own way, since he stands the usual sequence nomads -> agriculture -> state building on its head.

    I made one error above: the “primary pastoral community”, according to Wengrow, dominated the Nile valley from Middle Egypt to Khartoum over the 6th and 5th millennia BCE, but not the Delta, and not over the 4th millennium BCE.

  172. Four Sided Circle#88, I think it’s wonderful you’ve started baking challah on Fridays! I am a Roman Catholic with four kids and now six grandkids and I started baking all our bread decades ago. I have done a lot of research into different Catholic baking traditions for various holidays and saints feast days and believe me there is a lot of information!! The kids, now all grown, loved it and have continued many traditions with their own families. I often pray as I knead the bread and do little things ( which probably many people would see as superstitious, but which I enjoy and help to focus my attention on the Creator), such as three pinches of salt, or three cloves of garlic, or whatever, for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I have a little altar in my kitchen and sometimes will focus my attention on my statue of Our Lady of the Lake of San Juan as I knead also. Just little things like that, but it helps to focus my attention on the sacredness of life, and of food, and of the people around me whom I am tasked with nourishing.
    I know you come from a different tradition, but these are little things that I have done for years to try and bring the sacred down into my kitchen. I hope it is helpful.

  173. Here’s a good analogy to use on those insisting that the best way to ride out the collapse of industrial society is to find some valuable commodity to stockpile and sell for high prices during hard times vs building personal skills and connections. Imagine that today you lived in the Western Ukraine ( far from the front lines) and you got a visit to your house from members of the Azov brigade looking for supplies. What is going to happen when you offer up your stockpile of ammo and c-rations for premium prices? But how different would the outcome be if you admitted to your visitors that you had no supplies but you were an expert at fixing damaged high voltage electrical equipment.

  174. Clarke #45, Castle #97, JMG #37

    I keep (making the mistake of) trying to turn my path into an object of study and keep getting redirected to the fact that it is rather a experience to be lived. It is not the output, but the process that matters (touching on the point John has made thought his alchemical discussions). It is easy to lose sight of this and focus on the things produced rather than the process. It isn’t the journal entries that matter or the conclusions of one’s self-examination, but rather the process of journaling and the process of self-examination. This is where I keep going astray.

  175. Polecat, I’m very sorry to hear about your divorce and hope the future can start to look up for you. How terrible indeed to be away from your animals and plants and land. I hope things start to look up for you soon.

    Castle, thank you for sharing with us your fascinating family story! My father spent time in an orphanage too, in Seattle, in the 1920s. His mother, who was from England, deserted the family after being beaten and raped repeatedly by her extremely alcoholic husband, who eventually died choking on his own vomit after drinking Sterno. So the three boys, my dad was the oldest, lived on the streets of Seattle for a year or so until social workers from the Washington Children’s Home finally caught up with them and put them in their orphanage. That’s why he told us he always liked cops, they would feed him and his brothers when they were homeless. Finally, when he was 8 years old, he was adopted by my grandparents, truly wonderful people who loved him, and his also adopted sister, and us! when us grandkids came along. I’m one year younger than you, Castle, and I totally agree with you, this is definitely the craziest time I have lived through, makes the 1960s look tame. I have been reading John Michael Greer (another Washingtonian, yay!) since 2010, back in the old ADR days, and believe me, he and this wonderful commentariat have helped keep me sane!

  176. @patriciaormsby
    it occurs to me that the hubris that goes before a fall is part of the cause of the fall, therefore you will consistantly find hubris before falls…

  177. I used to be rather insistent that BC real estate was way too expensive and would definitely not crash soon. But the bubble kept expanding, so I ended up shifting to ‘this is a bubble, but I don’t know how long it can/will last, I though it would already have popped’ which is where it remained for years.

    Now, however, that pop seems to be in motion:
    https://wolfstreet.com/2022/11/19/the-most-splendid-housing-bubbles-in-canada-november-update-fastest-5-month-plunge-on-record/

    Doesn’t seem to be slowing, either. I think there’s still quite a drop ahead of us, all else being equal. Though if stagflation and a drop in interest rates combine, that could mean that things don’t drop quite that much in nominal terms.

  178. Re: geothermal power

    The average geothermal upward flux is 0.09 kilowatts per square meter. That’s 10,000 times smaller than the energy flux arriving from the Sun, and even solar power suffers from borderline power output per unit area.

    By and large deep geothermal is not tapping a flux, it’s tapping a battery – unless it is applied in a limited number of volcanically-active sites that have heat near the surface and circulating superheated water below.

    How long before one of these deep wells is “depleted” – i.e. the rock adjacent to the well is cooled and so the operating temperature gradually declines to some equilibrium?

    What effect will altering the subsurface temperature profile have on groundwater hydrology, earthquakes, volcanic activity, etc.?

    Re: abandoned center of politics

    My sense is that a lot of people are getting tired of the culture war outrage and just want to live their lives. Witness the increasingly tepid reception Trump is getting on the right, and the dissipation of BLM/social justice riots on the left. I’m not hearing much about how Thanksgiving is all about genocide this year either. That ought to leave plenty of space for candidates who do their best to ignore the former hot buttons and focus on economics, small business, affordable healthcare, infrastructure, etc.

    Re: opposite of Progress

    The opposite of progress is decline, and the opposite of the religion of Progress should be the religion of Decline. JMG offers some good historical examples of what this could look like in “After Progress”, and it seems to me that it is also one of the standard worldviews in the fantasy genre: a world full of mysterious relics and ruins from a prior age of magic and greatness whose makers are lost to the depths of legend, and in which life can be expected to become simpler and more difficult as the old roads and bridges and aqueducts and cities fall apart.

  179. Phil, fair enough. It’s an interesting idea, but the press release you posted — well, let’s just say there have been hundreds of similar press releases waxing enthusiastic about hundreds of different energy technologies since I started blogging about peak oil, and the number of those technologies that turned out to be viable can be counted on the fingers of one foot. Will this one be different? We’ll have to wait and see.

    Daniel, no, and that’s just the point. In 1597 Gerard Thibault was just one more student at a fencing school in Sanlucar de Barrameda in southern Spain. What this shows is that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the dating of the first publication of Romeo and Juliet — it’s as though somebody claimed to have a play published in 1960 that named Neil Armstrong as the first man on the Moon. To judge from what I’ve read, there are a lot of uncertainties in the early history of the Shakespeare plays, and this adds another — a detail that may be useful to researchers exploring the authorship question. As for the date, the Masonic significance is that it’s the feast of St. John the Baptist, who’s one of the two patron saints of the old stonemasons’ guild; yes, there were a lot of Elizabethan ideas flowing into the genesis of modern Freemasonry, but the English Civil War and the Jacobite rebellions played crucial roles in making the Craft what it is — more on this in my about-to-be-released book The Ceremony of the Grail.

    Team10tim, thanks for this.

    Martin, ha! Thanks for this.

    Northwind, it’s worth reflecting on. The next step, as I see it, is to figure out how best to move in the direction we abandoned.

    Averagejoe, the first volume of the new series, The Witch of Criswell, will be published in the spring of 2023; the second volume, The Book of Haatan, is about half finished. I’m having a lot of fun with it. Stay tuned for announcements!

    J.L.Mc12, a fascinating attempt to use botanical symbolism for magical purposes. I haven’t studied them in detail yet.

    Forecasting, I see the abandonment of Europe as a desperation move on the part of the US. Once the dollar loses its reserve currency status, it’s an open question whether the US can even function. Mind you, Europe’s in even worse shape, so your final comment seems sensible to me — but don’t underestimate the level of collective trauma the US will face when it has to get by on its own economic activity, rather than propping up its economy with tribute from half the world.

    Milkyway, the question “does x happen?” is logically distinct from the question “why does x happen?” It’s possible to have a very accurate answer to the first and no answer at all to the second — Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation is a great example. I don’t pretend to know why the traditional rules are there, but they’re consistent wherever the temple tradition is in use, and the reasons are the same — if you violate them, bad things happen to you and to the community. I think it’s reasonable to take that seriously. No, I don’t have any speculations as to why; like Newton, “I feign no hypotheses.”

    Norman, okay; was there a question in there?

    David, if Monbiot thinks it’s a good idea, I tend to run the other way. Your mileage may vary, of course.

    Chris, it’s quite possible, and in fact very likely. Dark ages tend to breed heroes. As for the essay, why, since you’re feeling enthused about it, why not give it a try yourself?

    Bofur, one of the things that never gets enough attention in efforts to foresee the future is the implications of blind faith in progress. These days there’s almost always a catastrophic gap between what a new technology is supposed to do and what it actually does, and it seems to me that the gap is increasing over time — the predictions get more and more unrealistically rosy as the quality of the new technologies plummets. It would not surprise me, for example, if CBDCs caused entire economies to clutch their chests and fall over dead — followed, of course, by frantic attempts by the cheerleaders of the establishment to insist that that wasn’t what happened…

    Marsh, good heavens. Actual, honest to goodness common sense seeping into the British political system at last!

  180. George Monbiot really hates farming. Anything he thinks will allow less of it, he seems to be in favor of. Possibly including increased world hunger or even mass starvation, though I think this is because he doesn’t understand the knock-on effects of some of the things he champions and he takes vaporware claims from start-ups at face value. Does not do the research or maintain healthy skepticism towards people trying to sell stuff.

    I take anything he says about the subject with a giant tablespoon of salt at this point. I used to take him seriously, but then I read more of his work. Also, he seems to have gotten further from reality on the subject of farming than he used to be. And I watched what happened in Sri Lanka and the whole WEF Great Reset Agenda kind of freaked me out and made me mistrust things that support their agenda while ostensibly being green and friendly to the poor. George Monbiot falls solidly in that category these days.

  182. @scotlyn #146: My concept of what can be orally transmitted in small villages or tribes is quite wide! It includes the memory of volcanic eruptions, sea level rise or tsunamis, even changing constellations. Your reference was very interesting, though it leaves me in doubt if the Klamath people actually summed up the time since the Mt. Mazama event. If true, such timekeeping would provide a parallel for Plato’s 9000 year time span and show Plato’s account could also have been transmitted orally, as JMG suggested. This seems the most plausible sequence of events to me. By the way, it would suggest that the ancient Egyptian civilization did pay attention to oral accounts, because it was their own pre-literate ancestors who had transmitted them!

    My concept of what can be transmitted in small villages or tribes does not include detailed maps or advanced metallurgy. That is why JMG mentions hypothetical civilizations in Central Asia as transmitters.I am not sure who could possibly have transmitted the sea maps after the coast line stabilized near its current position.

  183. @Chicory Omnibus #157: Goethe’s Faust is just about the most famous work in German literature, so would have easily occurred to Spengler, who admired Goethe. The sprawling second part of Faust (“Faust II”), published near the end of Goethe’s life, is particularly well suited for Spengler’s metaphor, more so than the more well-known first part, because it narrates Faust’s megalomaniacal projects to improve the world.

  184. Chicory, Spengler borrowed the concept of Faustian civilization from Goethe’s Faust, which differs quite a bit from the older versions of the story. Goethe’s Faust is obsessed with change and novelty, and the bargain he cuts with Mephistopheles is that the devil can haul him away to Hell if he ever says aloud that he wants things to stay just the way they are, instead of wanting to fling himself forward into the next adventure. It’s a very Western industrial attitude! As for the historical Faust, yes, he was a real person, but he didn’t write the grimoires that were credited to him — those were ghostwritten later on by people trying to cash in on his reputation. His magic was entirely focused on spirit-summoning, where the kind of magic Eliphas Lévi and I are into focuses on developing the ability to do things yourself rather than having to get spirits to do things for you.

    Chuaquin, that’s a very wise idea. Compassion and love directed toward those in your care — be they human, animal, vegetable, or mineral — is a great way to generate positive karma and accelerate your own spiritual development.

    George, that’s two signs of common sense breaking through! Good heavens. I’m delighted.

    Patricia M, positive energy en route.

    Starfish, as it happens, the abandoned center of American politics is very easy to describe. What most Americans want is for the shrieking bullies of left and right to leave them alone, so they can live their lives unpestered by ideological zealots. Whether it’s the left screaming about the evils of racism and transphobia, or the right screaming about the evils of homosexuality and abortion, people are tired of being screamed at; they want a government that will do the things we have a government for, without trying to shove some ideology or other down everyone’s throats. As for the abandoned center of late Soviet Russia, that’s easy enough — that’s what Putin’s reforms were about: letting go of the failed socialist economic system while maintaining a strong government that could defend Russian interests at home and in the near abroad. That’s what most Russians wanted, and you’ll notice that they got it.

    Dashui, then why are public transit systems not being expanded?

    Chris, that’s like saying “how would you describe the opposite of Nashville?” Progress is one of many possible conditions for a society. There is no one opposite — what there is instead is a gallimaufry of other possible conditions, including stability, stagnation, decline, and collapse.

    Tony C, Wilber’s work is based on a whole series of fundamental mistakes, and this is one of them. It is simply not true that concern for the whole of humanity was rarer in the past as it is today; you might want to look into the huge pacifist and humanitarian movements of the early 20th century, just for starters. When Wilber says “evolution,” what he means is “progress,” and these are emphatically not the same thing; evolution does not move in linear patterns, nor does it have stages. (I recommend reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species followed by any of Stephen Jay Gould’s fine books on evolution if you doubt this.) My point of view is that Wilber is repackaging the myth of progress using shiny new labels, but underneath, it’s the same old crock.

    Collapse aware, I’m not a great fan of board games, but I grant that free time takes on a very different shape once you’re not depending on the mass media to stuff your mind with noise!

    Clay, another very good one.

    Pygmycory, thanks for the data point!

    Mark, thanks for a nice cold bucket of common sense. Can you point me to a website that gives that figure for geothermal flux? I’d like to be able to cite that.

    Pygmycory, I think Monbiot should stand by his ideals and refuse to eat anything that’s been farmed. It would be a good object lesson.

    Cliff, that’s the advantage of going with small to midsized publishers!

  185. @ David #153

    Re Precision Proteins ™ – everything I have read about this (still mostly theoretical) technology – pits it *directly* against farming. Some of its cheerleaders are confidently predicting that “precision proteins” will put livestock farmers (ie – me) “out of business” by 2030. Naturally, I am not inclined to feel charitable towards sales pitches for “precision protein” technologies.

    In addition I find something off-putting about this new techno-lab-food which promises to lock up large portions of food behind intellectual property paywalls, where large portions of seed already languishes.

    In *exactly* the same way as GMO technology has been sold as a natural outgrowth of traditional animal and plant breeding technologies (while being exactly NOTHING like animal and plant breeding), Precision Protein technology is being sold as a natural outgrowth of traditional fermentation (yet is exactly NOTHING like fermentation).

    Whereas breeding technologies and fermentation technologies arose from partnerships between human and plant/animal, or human and microbe… certainly unequal in many important ways, but ALWAYS premised on the autonomy, agency and creativity of all partners, GMO tech and PP tech involve previously unheard of levels of violence against plants, animals and microbes. These technologies propose to rip our earthly plant, animal and microbial companions apart to the very innards of their innermost genomes, and then to reassemble their dismembered parts with lab-tech style “precision” to sell back to us as “food”.

    That very peculiar HuMachine love affair with standardisation and replicability, every unit exactly the same as the next, necessitates the complete eradication of the least thread of autonomy, agency, and creativity in any micro- or macro-organism unlucky enough to find itself subjected to “modification” by this kind of tech.

    Count me troubled and unimpressed.

  186. @JMG

    Well I’m going to go out on a limb and say I think Disney is going to be one of the FTX’s severely walking wounded. Kameron Pasha on Midnight’s Edge gave an amazing timeline explanation filled with smoking guns that line up to Disney’s sacking of Bob Chapek as the chosen sacrificial lamb as well as things said and done – to the day and date – by the Disney CFO and various board members that strongly implicate Disney having sunk tons of corporate money into FTX.

    Chapek was likely threatened into signing an NDA upon ouster. Another point is that returned CEO Bob Iger quickly went into emergency talks with Apple to see if it will buy Disney. Rumor on the street is that Disney is so close to bankruptcy now they won’t be able to meet payroll soon (!) and if you can’t even meet basic payroll then forget about any contractors or suppliers getting paid. There are very few companies large enough with deep enough pockets to take on Disney but Apple could be one.

    Kameron says that one strong reason Apple might take on Disney’s hot mess is that Wall Street darling (and itself a mega-FTX investor) Blackrock sits on the boards of both companies. Blackrock itself has lost mega-millions, possibly a billion from their investments in FTX but Kameron pointed out they’re also one of the biggest Democratic Party funders on Wall Street. This isn’t some big secret. Blackrock has long been known to be a huge sweetheart funder for D.C. Dem Party politicians and the Dem Party machine overall. Pasha says there’s also some smoking guns that Democratic Party big-wig money laundering was going on with FTX so there’s a lot of powerful people in D.C. who likely have strong incentive to see the whole FTX debacle swept under the rug and memory-holed. He even said there’s some circumstantial evidence that powerful people in D.C. intervened to “convince” the assigned judge to a FTX related lawsuit to keep the names of all the big investors – especially big corporate investors in FTX a secret.

    Blackrock has publicly pimped FTX as an ESG and Effective Altruism investment for years. It’s speculated that’s why the whole debacle of Chapek’s midnight emergency-weird-non-standard firing and his strange silence to the point of not defending himself is going to spiral out of Disney’s control. All these nasty smoking guns are already getting out on the web that big D.C. players – both corporate and professional politicians – are embedded in the FTX debacle too.

    I suspect there will be some surprises coming down the pike for German and French multinational corporations cratering close to the abyss too for the same reasons Disney did – they invested because it looks good and sends the right kind of “we care” message to the world. I suspect the cratering will arrive just at a time for the EU when it can least afford large corporate collapses but just like for Far East Asia in 1998 somebody – probably a lot of somebodies are not going to care and will go sport hunting for the EU dinosaur behemoths anyway. Cook the books all you like but you can only hide vaporware wealth for so long.

    It made me think back to the 12 month 2023 Tarot spread I’d made for the U.S. I interpreted it as primarily financial and something big did seem to be indicated as starting in November that upspirals in December-January. Especially karma-wise strongly for January. Armstrong’s Socrates program that analyzes over 150,000 separate categories of economic data around the world kept indicating bad economic (and war) problems kickstarting in November/December with January being particularly of note for being problematic.

    I did a separate spread on Bob Iger’s reign as returned CEO for Disney for 2023-2024 the day after his re-appointment was announced. My admittedly still amateur skills read seems to indicate everything going great for Iger up until the month of April 2023. Then the cards get wishy-washy and murky. Like the universe itself can’t quite decide what it wants to do about Disney. Then in October 2023 things turn decidedly negative for him (and presumably for Disney since the spread’s about him as the CEO – not him at a personal level) and they just keep getting more so. In February 2024 The Tower card turned over for Iger. By August 2024 3 of Cups R turned over – celebrations cancelled. The whole trajectory of the spread for Disney shouted ‘desperate, panic-attack-inducing struggles’ from just eye-balling the later cards.

    Then it ends poorly. I got the impression from the spread that Apple will at first be intrigued at the idea of getting ownership of all of Disney’s iconic IPs but get cold feet and back out after surveying just how badly damaged Disney is by its disastrous losses in FTX. I suspect Blackrock is going to lose political power itself since it too is damaged by its own losses from the collapse of FTX. In fact, Pasha says he thinks Blackrock is the one who likely sold Disney on the safety and great returns Disney would get from investing in FTX in the first place. They were a big pimp for FTX apparently to anyone in Corporate America and Europe who would listen. I think they’re the largest institutional investor in Disney stock and likely the first or second largest such investor in Apple.

    I finally did a 1 card draw for Disney on whether they will be forced to file for bankruptcy protection. Upright = yes, R = no.

    I turned over 6 of Cups upright. So I read that as yes, Disney will be forced to file for bankruptcy protection but that ultimately it will go well for them and Disney will survive. How it turns out after that I don’t know but it’s just one more straw in the wind of large, iconic corporations everywhere shrinking from lion down to bobcat if they manage to survive 2023-2024.

  187. Thanks to whoever suggested the Japanese hot water bottle “yutanpo” (used to preheat the bed on cold nights) – I have thoroughly enjoyed using the one I got (the galvanized steel type; sadly the only place I could find new ones was Amazon Japan). As temperatures drop and heating costs rise, I can recommend them heartily.

  188. Yikes. I just remembered 6 of cups is the card of nostalgia. Hmm…now I wonder if Disney will “survive” only as it’s various partitioned out IPs by a bankruptcy court. That is…the cards read that the IPs will survive but that Disney as an ongoing corporation will take a permanent dirt nap.

    Ouch. That thought just occurred to me that is an equally legit way to read 6 of cups upright.

    Ouch. I feel bad for all the Disney employees, suppliers and contractors who will likely be burned by Disney being one of the iconic dinosaurs that meets its extinction event in 2023-2024. yikes

  189. For those not adverse to video ColdFusion gives an excellent historical analysis/timeline of the whole FTX debacle. If multi-national corporations from both North America and Europe invested in FTX I understand better why I turned over the card that Sri Arya is the card of “the experts expert. The professionals professional.” The Socrates program keeps saying economic scarcities are going to sweep the world in 2023 and the collapse of FTX might be the final straw that gets the deflation going.

    Anyway…if you aren’t adverse to video here’s links to ColdFusion’s excellent historical timeline analysis of FTX and it’s shady dealings with the GovCorp Technocratic Elites.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20BEJouWBgY

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJn6IiYid6A

  190. Hi JMG,

    For a couple of years now I have been seeing trucks on the road displaying DISCORDIA in red on yellow on their sides. You can look up this Bulgarian freight company under discordia.eu and see their trucks there. It looks like a regular business – nothing unusual about it except for the name. I keep wondering if they are just trying to stand out or if there is some sort of magic at work here. I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on this.

  191. @ Chris Hemington #167:
    Answer #1 (the oldest): The opposite of Pro is Con, so take it from there.
    #2: The opposite of Progress is Regress.
    #3: Progress is moving forward, and you can’t move forward in a traffic jam, hence….
    #4: (from the Serpent People) “ssergrop.”

  192. Panda, I’ve been waiting for the first few shoes to drop on the FTX debacle. If Disney’s one of them, I won’t mourn. Maybe they’ll simply go broke, and then their baleful influence on copyright law will come to an end! (I fixed the typo, btw.)

    Uwelo, hmm! I have no idea.

    Patricia M, ha! Shouldn’t that be “ssergorp,” though? That’s what Ss’mei said. 😉

  193. JMG,
    re: the abandoned center… I hear you on wanting to avoid the people screaming on both sides. My red line for people I wouldn’t vote for as school trustees in the last municipal election was if they mentioned gender identity/orientation or aboriginal issues in more than passing, on either side of the culture war.

    My family was split down the middle on the gender issues when I was a teenager and I got caught in the middle, as well as entangled in arguments about it in the wider society. Having that extra stress on the two halves of my family and myself stank, and I don’t want kids at school to have to deal with what I did, especially young kids.

    This choice got rid of nearly a third of the excessively large group of candidates I was trying to pick from. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like most other people were picking by the same criteria.

  194. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone (I’ve been out of area so I’m late).
    And thank you, Mr. Greer, for hosting us week after week for decades.

  195. @ Milkyway # 39

    Garden activities that the neighbors might look askance at are yet another reason to surround your property with a ten-foot tall yew hedge.

    Yew is a marvelous shrub. If you select the right kind, you can grow meatballs, pillars, or cones of various sizes. Line up pillars and you’ll get a dense, green wall. Yew’s okay with regular shearing but again, if you chose a variety that grows like what you need, you won’t have to do it that often.

    As long as you select yews that will stay below any powerlines (i.e., they top out at 10 feet), you can enclose your garden and get privacy for a small temple and prayer.

  196. Re: Romeo and Juliet, Gerard Thibault, St. John the Baptist Day

    Fascinating again about Gerard Thibault.

    I did a little research on the idea. I found that that line from Act 3 Scene 1, “a braggart, a rogue, a villaine, that fights by the booke of arithmatick” is actually not in the 1597 Quarto One of the play, but it was added to the 1599 Quarto Two of the play.

    The author Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia of 1598 makes reference to twelve Shakespeare plays, and Romeo and Juliet is included in this list, it does make me think that the dating of the publication of the play is probably correct.

    But if 1599 is too early for anyone to have known about Thibault’s arithmetical fencing system (maybe it was only a nascent idea at that point?) was he writing to certain Englishmen about his plans?

    Anyways, I’ll definitely mention this idea in authorship circles & give you credit for raising the issue, hopefully people will be interested to pursue Thibault’s fencing manual.

    Great to hear about The Ceremony of the Grail, I’m definitely going to pre-order that. Your knowledge of freemasonry absolutely dwarfs my own slim understanding, but as I get deeper into Elizabethan history, I keep having the sense that proto-masonic elements are being established in this era. I also ordered Fabio Venzi’s recent “Freemasonry – Theory of the Origins” – I had heard that it was good – but unfortunately due to labor strikes in Britain, it hasn’t reached me yet!

    Thanks again for your responses.

  197. Chris Henningsen – Note that “PRO” and “CON” are opposites, so the opposite of “Progress” is “Congress” (not original with me). More seriously, you could use “Regress”, or “Decline”. But these are still movements (forward or back) on a single axis. If history is not so linear, you could say that the opposite of Progress is Chaos, or the Multidimensional Random Walk.

  198. Milkyway says:
    #148 November 25, 2022 at 5:46 am

    I don’t know if you remember in one of the earliest talkie Dracula films, where Bela Lugosi as Dracula says closeup to the camera: “ze blood iz zee life.” Well, he was actually quoting from numerous places in the Old Testament, especially in Deuteronomy and Leviticus where we are reminded that “blood is the life.” And the blood of the murdered victim cries out to heaven, it is said. Blood as life is in part an explanation for some of the quirkier aspects of kosher rules, which require that any animal killed for consumption for the observant Jew be drained of its blood. The blood may not be used for making sausage or otherwise consumed with the flesh or otherwise. Which is why observant orthodox Jews find the Christian sacrament of consuming the body and blood of Christ quite repulsive. It’s a visceral thing with them.

    That aside, all the teachings I have run across indicate that all deaths involve an etheric component, and killings do so even more so, and ritual killings involve a whole plethora of energies including (often powered by) the etheric. The blood of a sacrifice contains etheric elements that are thus USED ritually, whether the priest or operator knows it consciously or not. Some believe the sacrificed animal has their karma improved by this sort of sacrifice, if it is properly done. Bringing any other etheric element of much strength (e.g., the blood of menstruation) into the ritual zone opens it up to other than the acceptable spiritual forces. It’s like having two orchestras playing two separate symphonies in different keys at full blast just feet apart from one another. Not the best situation, therefore some ritual purity is required.

    Etheric energies are just upstream from tangibly or measurably physical ones. A huge focus of Asian religious practice works with this. Taoist in particular. Chi Kung, Tai Chi, all sorts of massage and more (acupuncture, anyone?) relates to, it is said, aspects of etheric force. There is so much to be said about the topic. Try Colonel A.E. Powell’s book “The Etheric Body” for one take on what the etheric is. Any good book on Western Kabbalah will give you an amplification of ideas on the topic. There’s an awful lot of material out there on the subject. You could also start with the likelier works of Dion Fortune and circle outward from there. Her book “The Secrets of Dr. Taverner” is an easily digested fictional series that involves this topic in several stories, based on solidly established esoteric principles.

    It is believed that the gods who receive the offering of ritual sacrifices actually come to partake of them in some fashion and gain added potency therefrom. I’m assuming that the etheric energy gets taken up and in most cases transmuted to a higher level if the proper ritual is observed. Those participating in doing the sacrifice also get a transmuted energy from the deity in return. Or so I understand.

    The same thing applies, although more gently, with grain and vegetable offerings. Prayers and incantations can raise energy as well, but the whole thing is directed by will and intention in either case. Okay?

  199. Northwind Grandma – I don’t hold US corporations as responsible for the offshoring of their industries as much as I do their customers. When buyers only look for the “everyday lowest price”, instead of the price that can pay a living wage to their neighbor, the US corporation has only two choices: use cheap foreign labor, or surrender the market to the foreign company with cheap foreign labor.

    But, if you want to support US labor, there are web sites that track the remnants of US manufacturing. I’m wearing US-made shoes (“Footskins”) that I love. (And I have two other pairs of shoes/boots, made in USA.) I have a US-grown & sewn fleece vest for these cold days of lowered thermostats (Sickafus Sheepskins). My son wears fleece-lined slippers, made to order from tracings of his enormous feet (Shepherd’s Flock, VT). My canning jars and lids are made in USA, too. Every purchase that we make is a vote more powerful than in any political election.

  200. Lunchbox Bike 105
    Abraham 143

    > feces

    I guess the woman in Abraham’s story who requested an odd appliance apparently had never camped, boated, hunted, hiked, or traveled. Her device: US$4,100 (€4,000).

    The following is a solution,— so much cheaper, environmentally-friendly, easier, safer, takes up less space — for humans. I will mention specific products here, but alternatives are readily available. Acquire the following:

    •  Reliance Products Hassock Portable Lightweight Self-Contained Toilet, Brown, 14.7 inch x 14.7 inch x 14.0 inch. Portable hassock.
    Cost? US$50 (€48).

    • A second inner bucket, duplicate, same dimensions.
    Cost? $10 (€9.60).

    • Kitty litter, clay, non-clumping, Fresh Step-brand, 7 lbs.
    Cost? $16 (€15.40).

    • Kitty litter scoop.
    Cost? $3 (€2.88) tops. (if want, get two)

    • Sandwich sized baggies, box.
    Cost? $10 (€9.60) tops.

    • Put the inner bucket into the hassock.

    • Put in 5-inches of kitty litter in inner bucket.

    • Put the contoured lid (“toilet seat”) onto the hassock.

    • Put toilet paper within reach.

    • Sit. Take a sh_t and/or pee. When finished, stand up. Pull on underwear.

    • Use kitty litter scoop to cover sh_t. Stir and cover.

    • Repeat as necessary over two days.

    • Either immediately, or two days later, stir and scoop-out (desiccated) sh_t and put in baggie. Throw baggie in garbage. Pee gets stirred in.

    • Keep using the kitty litter until it gets too low or starts smelling bad.

    • After a few weeks, throw out what is left in inner bucket. Disinfect bucket with whatever disinfectant one chooses. Products are endless. Let bucket air dry for a few days. Use the second inner bucket while first is disinfecting.

    • One never touches pee or sh_t.

    • Repeat as necessary.

    —————
    Tried and true. Based on 30 years of domestic feline rescue efforts.

    The hassock route costs under US$100 (under €100).

    100 ÷ 4000 = 1 ÷ 40 = 0.025 = 2.5%.

    100% less 2.5% = 97.5%.

    One gets 97.5% discount. Which one is the sane decision?

    The woman was either insane, independently wealthy, or had nothing better to do than bother others.👎🏼Her device: Fail.👎🏼

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  201. Re: Fermented protein. I see a couple of yellow, if not red, flags in my skimming of the article. It claims that hydrogen and methanol are among the feedstocks for the process, and that they can be produced “with renewable electricity”. The hydrogen, sure, just by electrolyzing water (currently, almost all hydrogen comes from reforming natural gas). But the methanol? There’s another feedstock behind that component. And it’s not as if we have Gigawatt-hours of excess electrical production just looking for a load. However, there are in fact times when the wind blows and the sun shines more than consumer demand can absorb, so if these processes can run intermittently (IF), maybe that could work.

    Another claim dismisses potential pollution, since the process is “contained”. If it’s anything like beer, well, have you ever lived near a brewery? I have. Maybe it’s better contained now than it was in the 1960s, but we could smell the brewery from two miles away.

    Any process that relies on bacteria will also rely on sterility of the facilities, and risk genetic drift of the productive organisms. I’m not saying that they’ll become pathogenic, but some degree of continuous monitoring and “weeding” will be needed just to preserve their productivity. Biological systems are messy.

    Insulin is produced by GM fermentation? Ah, so THAT’s why it’s cheaper than dirt. /sarc.

  203. The sacredness and “scariness” of women’s monthly blood is of interest to me. I read a native american prophecy somewhere that when women start to give their monthly blood to the trees, the land will start to heal. This resonated with me so i’ve been doing it, and it feels important and sacred. OTOH the native americans have a lot of prohibitions about women’s times of the month including that it’s basically a sin to eat food cooked by a woman on her period. It’s deeply “wrong” in the traditional beliefs. I’ve always felt that there’s something about protecting a woman’s time to rest, rather than it being negative, and that got sort of twisted for some traditions on the way to male domination. On a purely physical level my period is absolutely horrible and I still haven’t found the natural solutions that allow me to feel OK and not suffer during it. I don’t think it has to be that way…

    The subject of blood and land is something that came up once in a rather horrible “vision” or message from the land. It is possible I got something mixed up and misunderstood, or was simply mistaken. But it was horrifying and impossible to forget. I was driving past a naked field and the land there was completely disgusted with modern human practices and disregard towards it – completely disengaged and angry with mankind about its treatment and lack of respect or reasonable agrarian practices.

    And the land said that it was waiting for human blood. To soak up the blood of the dead. It was just…a horrible feeling. Because I felt for the land but certainly didn’t wish a bunch of people to die there either. I’ve had to revisit this several times and the closest I was able to comprehend and be shown was in a vision of previous times when a steer might be raised on a piece of land, living peacefully, be killed and butchered there appropriately, and the blood would return to the soil, sealing the circle of life, the life that was nurtured, then returned the blood / nutrients / life force in death. And all was well. But now life and death are removed from the actual land, where cattle are taken away and killed (often badly) away from where they lived, and don’t give back their blood to the land that nourished them. This creates terrible imbalance that has built up to a huge degree.

    In nature a hawk kills a rodent in a field and this is natural and part of the circle (if not very fun for the rodent) and the balance is maintained by the animal living and dying and its blood spilling where it had its life. So there is no imbalance. But human farming and animal practices (etc??) have created these big big imbalances and now the land is crying out for blood.

    Imbalances can’t keep getting worse, at some point something breaks. Anyway, scary stuff. But it helped me make sense of that prophecy about period blood and the land. This is the sacred blood that doesn’t come from death, that can be gifted to the land to bring back balance and life / creativity to the land, through free will and without harm to any.

  204. I wanted to point out one more thing about the FTX and cryptocurrency debacle. ColdFusion points out Sam Bankman-Fried was busy lobbying Congress to implement a licensing scheme for any person involved in cryptocurrency. Like needing to have a medical license from an approved medical school in order to hang out your hat to be a physician. In other words…by licensing the person you make an end-run around the problem of blockchain cryptocurrency itself being free from regulation and laws. Regulate the person, not the crypto. A rather clever way to get back door control of wealth again.

    Anyway…Bankman-Fried – by lobbying Congress in favor of regulating the person, not the crypto, thus triggered the ire of Chinese-owned Binance who then black-swanned the downfall of FTX. Bankman-Fried and co (including Dem Party GovCorp elites) forgot to account for the fact Chinese nationals loyal to Chinese laws might not be so willing to play according to U.S. and European business rule-of-law. Especially if doing so would disadvantage China as the proposed regulations were supposedly going to do.

  205. The Shakespeare Authorship Question: I know nothing about it really, except I have heard rumors and rudimentarily investigated the subject many many years ago and found it much too complicated for me. But one day about six months ago the idea popped into my head apropos of nothing that Shakespeare was a woman. And then to me everything seemed to make sense. Most of the men in Shakespeare seem to me to be dunderheads, or fatally flawed, only the women, and certainly not Lady MacBeth, seem to be intelligent. If Shakespeare was the right woman she might have access to everything in various courts and languages, but not want to acknowledge her sex.

    Goethe’s Faust: I read this many years ago and always thought the angels cheated in saving Faust’s soul. A bargains a bargain and Faust lost. But again one day recently it came to me that it was not Faust who cheated but the devil in the way he set up the bargain. As I understood it Faust said that if he ever wanted to live, continue living, if he ever said he was happy, if he ever wanted to continue to be, (it’s in German after all) he was the Devil’s. This is very similar to JMG’s, if he ever wanted things to continue as they are. I don’t think you would want them to continue as they are unless there was something you liked or found good about them.

    But from my new perspective if Faust had continued to hold existence and all God’s creation in contempt and disdain then by definition he was bound for Hell, deal or no deal. Anyone who hated god’s creation by definition could not be saved or go to Heaven. (I’ve been there.) (And that was the trick in the deal.)

    On the other had if Faust found reverence in God’s creation and wanted to live, then he was by definition saved, and the deal meant nothing.
    In my perception of it nowadays the very deal was a con, a trick a deception. The deal was framed as an if/then, but the reality was an IS. And the IS is Faust suddenly revered God’s creation, and thus he went to heaven or was at the last minute saved as in the bible.
    Not saying my view is correct, that is just how I take it. Both of these thoughts about Shakespeare and Goethe came to me unbiddden, when I had not thought about either one of them for years.
    This however is why I have trouble with Spengler calling our age Faustian. Our age wants and expects to continue like it is, with improvements forever.
    Faust, although brilliant had contempt for what was. And I don’t think he wanted it to continue at all. It was only when he as it were found God that he wanted to continue, and then at that point I think it is a moot issue, God wins.

  206. Pygmycory, I get that. I’m not sure if Canadians are as sick of the screaming yet as many people on this side of the border.

    Teresa, you’re most welcome.

    Daniel, in 1599 Thibault was still in Sanlucar de Barrameda. He didn’t come back to Antwerp until 1510, and as far as anyone knows that’s when he started teaching. The basic concept of arithmetical fencing wasn’t original to him — the Spanish style of rapier fencing was all about that, though he took it further than anyone else did. But the combination of the name and the method makes me wonder if all those dates are as secure as they look. Forgery happens…

    A, I don’t know if this will do you any good at all, but before my wife got through menopause she used to have bad periods fairly often; we found that deep massage working with the muscles of the lower back relieved the pain and gradually broke down the tension that made the periods so painful. I think you’re partly right that the point of having women take time off during their periods is to rest and take care of themselves during a challenging but also sacred time, but there’s another factor. I knew a lot of elderly women in the Grange, and in some of the lodges I belonged to; they insisted that it was never a good idea for a woman to can things, put up pickles, make jam, or do a range of other food-related activities during her period, that the items never came out right. So there may be subtle factors involved as well.

    As for your vision — yes, I’ve sensed the same thing. The land will have its blood one way or another; your way is probably the best option, but I don’t know how many women will be willing to do that.

    Panda, fascinating. I wonder what the next round in the struggle will be.

  207. Darkest Yorkshire #162, thank you for taking the time to check out and comment on some of my other work. And I can’t argue with your assessment of that film’s message!

  208. Hey jmg

    As you know, I am currently learning Vietnamese, at least to read it if not speak it, and intend to translate Vietnamese works if I have the chance.

    Can you tell me how long it took you to read French to the point that you could adequately translate it, and how you studied for it?

  209. I was thinking of the blood on the soil, animals hunting animals.

    I have a cat who hunts alot, so I see how this is in the “wild” so to speak. It is way less bloody than I would have thought, given humans killing chickens as my point of reference.

    But, I think the point is valid as it is likely not the amount of material plane blood.

    On occaision the cat sneaks the rodent into the house. she eats it whole, leaving just a couple pieces of internal, I think bile producing and a short piece of large intestine maybe. Maybe the smallest smear of blood, but sometimes none seen, just a couple pieces of internal there on the ground. Fur, skull, tail, all the rest she has eaten. It is overall a very clean process.

  210. @Aldarion #182

    RE: oral history – the oldest story

    The Pleiades is known as the seven sisters in numerous different cultures, but only six are visible with the naked eye. In the various myths one sister hides, gets lost or falls in love, or is too young, too old or too sick to go along with the other six.

    Today, two of the stars are too close together to distinguish them as individual stars. But we can tell from the propper motion of the stars that all seven would have been visible to the naked eye 100,000 years ago.

    https://theconversation.com/amp/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronomers-say-global-myths-about-seven-sisters-stars-may-reach-back-100-000-years-151568

    I don’t know if this is actually the oldest story or if is just the oldest story shared by many cultures that can be vindicated by a modern scientific method, but 100,000 years is a pretty good run for keeping track of a detail.

  211. Hello John, hope you’re doing well.

    I’ve been trying to avoid news lately, but sometimes I cannot help to have a look at what’s going on in general. It’s striking what’s happening with the mass shootings in the US, has it always been like this? I checked a chart tracking these incidents through the recent 30 years and it seems to have been rising, especially around 2017. On the other hand, some say most of these are staged for political reasons, what should we make of this?

    I’m asking as well because I might visit the US in the coming years, and as a foreigner I’m concerned with these issues. On a brighter side, what essential places do you recommend visiting there? I mean, the places where I can experience the spirit of the land.

    Aziz

  212. @JMG

    Here’s an attempt to create a global map of geothermal heat flux using a combination of measured data points and modeling, which arrives at a global average of 86 milliwatts per square meter:
    https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ggge.20271

    I should have said 0.09 *watts* (not kilowatts) per square meter, although the roughly 10,000 fold difference vs. solar irradiation was correct. (After accounting for the fact that the Earth is effectively a flat circle from the perspective of intercepting solar radiation but a sphere from the perspective of geothermal heat flux, that difference drops by a factor of four to be merely 2500 times smaller than solar irradiance when averaged across time and space.)

  213. @Pygmycory, thank you for your observation–so true! Painful to watch the same old story unfold once again.

    To the commentariat, I am now collecting observations worldwide on the disappearance of birds, of the Silent Spring sort, having just heard out of the blue from a long-term friend in Caspar, Wyoming, who reported a remarkable loss. I am making a table of location, when it was noticed, who is reporting it (link if possible, anonymous okay too), and considered causes. I’ll read the comments of any open post, and the Dreamwidth COVID posts, and I think it is possible to contact me via my account in either case. I’ve heard from Nagano, Japan and Guam in addition to what I or others have brought up here before.
    Thanking everyone in advance.

  214. Re disposal of “feces”
    Follow Grandma Northwind’s advice (#200) to the letter EXCEPT use sawdust instead of kitty litter and dispose in a compost pile.

    Disclaimer: I used this kind of bio-litter toilet for several years and it made beautiful compost. I followed the instructions on humanurehandbook.com, and the cost involved getting my carpenter friend to make a frame to exactly fit several same-sized 20kg buckets I got from a local chippie, and cover the whole thing with a toilet seat. The toilet seat arrangement + a bucket of sawdust to “flush” with, stayed indoors, to ensure bums stay warm while doing their thing. The bucket was not difficult to transfer, when full, to the compost heap outdoors, also exactly where it was wanted. Keeping everything covered with sawdust was the essential thing, it kept all smells away.

  215. Mr. Greer,

    I’m a long time reader, both of this site, ADR, and your books (both “Collapsitarian” and religious). I’ve found a great deal of comfort in much of your work, as it parallels many of my own observations over the last three decades of adulthood (to be fair, as much on the blindness and hubris of humanity as re: collapse specifically).

    So, I offer the following question, in light of a frequent topic of conversation in our “neighborhood.”

    In “Decline and Fall,” writing of the Commons, you wrote, “The research for which economist Elinor Ostrom won her Nobel Prize showed that, by and large, effective management of a commons is a grassroots affair; those who will be most directly affected by the way the commons is managed are also its best managers . 6 The more distance between the managers and the commons they manage, the more likely failure becomes, because two factors essential to successful management simply aren’t there. The first is immediate access to information about how management policies are working, or not working, so that those policies can be changed if they go wrong; the second is a personal stake in the outcome, so that the managers have the motivation to recognize when a mistake has been made, rather than allowing the psychology of previous investment to seduce them into pursuing a failed policy right into the ground.”

    We live in a very remote portion of Wyoming, backed up to the Wind River Mountains. The Bridger-Teton Wilderness is less than two miles from my back door, as the crow flies, and a mere 3 miles on horseback (it’s slightly shorter on foot, because there’s still places I can traverse that I wouldn’t have the nerve to ride….).

    Not speaking of the wildlife management issues (unlike ANY of my neighbors–that I know of–I actually like having wolves and grizzly on the ‘hood. Of course, they haven’t gotten into the corral with my horses yet either, so…), my question is on the above statement in light of the Wilderness Areas specifically, and USFS/BLM generally, as The Commons.

    I don’t know how much familiarity you have with the issues in the Intermountain West in that regard, but would you still agree with your above that the management thereof would be best left in local hands?

    For my part (And, I’m sincerely not looking for affirmation or rebuttal. I’m just curious on your perspective), my suspicion is, if the “Sagebrush Rebellion” succeeded, and management was turned over to the states in which those areas existed, the Wilderness Areas as such would be crisscrossed with two tracks for UTVs, inside of a week, and the logging trucks would be maybe a month behind.

    Certainly, federal management has been more than ham handed at times, but despite my glowing antipathy for the federal hegemon, I simply cannot come up with a viable alternative that wouldn’t see my neighbors’ “love” for the “outdoors” turn these mountains into a giant off-road park.

  216. I’ve read the Aurelien post on Russophobia and Ukraine-philia, as pseudo-religious “crussade”; yeah, I agree with him. It’as only a PMC “crusade”, so there aren’t big russophobic demonstrations nor Putin isn’t burnt “in efigie” every day in European streets. No attacks on Russian citizens, by luck.
    It’s the same thing in my town here in Spain. There is a huge Ukie flag on the main square, and one EU blue flag with stars next to it, put over the wall, since the invasion started.
    However, there aren’t Russian flags burnt in the streets. There is only a case of antiRussian actions, that I know, in my town.
    We are a town big enough to have small Russian and Ukrainian communities, so we have a little Russian Orthodox Church. Some weeks ago, somebody wrote with spray in the front door a word: “Murders”.
    This actions hasn’t been recorded in the 2 newspapers of the town, it’s strange…or not so strange. Local PMC doesn’t want to be too Russophobic. Russophobia, but “inside an order”. Only ugly words against Russkies.

  217. After getting into a spat with him on Twitter which led to him blocking me, I wrote a piece on Monbiot’s fermented-bacteria back in 2020: https://flintandsteel.substack.com/p/soylent-greenwash-george-monbiots-problem-with-sustainable-farming

    To summarise, Monbiot was hyping a company called Solar Foods, who were claiming to be ‘100% renewable’ due to their partnership with energy company Fortum. Even stretching the term ‘renewable’ to include nuclear and biomass, Fortum were still unable to actually produce enough energy, and acquired Uniper’s fleet of coal and gas power plants to ‘supplement’ their ‘renewable’ energy sources!

    One of the things I found striking in researching the article was how unhinged he seems these days. E.g., his appearance at the 2020 Oxford Real Farming Conference. If the hypothesis is correct, that the progressive-left have been under increasing levels of demonic influence since 2016, then it seems quite apparent in him.

    As an aside, sometime in 2020 I had an amusing but quite genuinely freaky dream in which George Monbiot transformed into a baying hellhound and was swimming across a swimming pool towards me, eyes glinting with infernal hatred… I managed to exorcise him, luckily.

  218. A MM themed question for you and if I should ask it there, please let me know.

    I’m watching the Elon Musk Twitter takeover and am wondering to what extent he was prepared. I’m assuming the magical resistance was doing workings to defeat the evil new owner, since everyone who doesn’t hold their views is a Nazi Fascist Racist Supremacist and must be battled to the death. So I expected there to be the battle-lines drawn like when Trump was on there with people racking up their points.

    But I haven’t observed that at all. Elon took ownership and then after about two weeks, they started scattering. First they went to Mastodon, now they are looking towards other services. Of course some are still on Twitter talking about how they are elsewhere and you can find them there. It’s really amusing.

    Anyway, I know from living in South Africa for a few years that magical practices were pretty openly discussed there and I can’t help but wonder if he was prepared in some way himself, or someone did it for him. It’s too early to tell what could happen, but I found the crumbling of the resistance to him over the last week to be fascinating. For a group of people that should be strutting around triumphant with their recent mid-term electoral victory, it was unexpected.

  220. @Tony C re #24 [electric vehicles can’t go very far…]

    The range _per charge_ you quote (250 miles) is a good number for the average, but the impression you give is that’s all one can get in a day. Let me educate you about EV charging, in particular Direct Current Fast Charging (DCFC).
    I’ve owned a Tesla Model 3 AWD (all wheel drive, aka “Dual Motor”) since 2018, and have done several long trips in the 500 – 1000 mile range.

    For long trips, the strategy is to fully charge to 100% overnight before starting out, then drive to 10-20% state of charge (remaining range). So, say going down to 15% of a 250 mile total range means driving 212 miles. At 70 miles per hour, that’s 3 hours. I can’t speak for anybody else, but after 3 hours I’m probably ready for a bathroom break.

    EV batteries will charge faster when they’re nearly empty, and it takes a long time to fill that last 20% or so – up to twice as long as say going from 20% to 80%.

    Tesla’s navigation will pick intermediate charging stations with this strategy in mind, and when the car knows you’re about to go to a Supercharger (Tesla’s brand of DCFC), will condition the battery (heat it up) so it will accept charge even faster. V2 superchargers go to 150 kW max, and V3 to 250 kW max power. There are some DCFC out there at 350 kW now, though few cars that will accept that much power. (The slower Level 1 and 2 AC charging is in the range from 1.4 to 12 kW).

    When one gets to the Supercharger, one pulls in, gets out of the car, takes the charging cable off the pedestal, points it at the charge port, pushes the membrane button on top (opens the charge port door), plugs the cable in, and if one isn’t too jaded, waits a few seconds to see that the light on the charge port turns green, indicating charging is happening. (Payment is via the credit card on file with one’s Tesla account).

    With a 80 kWh battery, charging from 15 to 80 percent, I’m taking on 50 kWh (plus some loss). The naive, rough calc is 50 kWh at 250 kW means 1/5 hour or 12 minutes. While one won’t see the full 250 kW for the whole duration of charging, and it varies with outside temperature, how many other vehicles are charging, etc., I’d expect to see this charge happen in a range of 15 to 25 minutes.

    Next stop will go from 80% to 15%, around 160 miles further down the road, 2 hours 20 minutes or so. Repeat a time or two, and you’re 500 – 600 miles down the road, a pretty normal daily length.
    So each stop will add an extra bit of time, but it only adds up to an hour or so extra (depending on what kind/length of break one would be taking as an ICE driver) over a daily leg. And I find more/a bit longer breaks make for a nicer driving experience, though some of that is the quieter car and the autopilot out on the open road.

    So, bottom line, it’s pretty easy to do 500+ miles/day in an EV with decent range and good charging infrastructure. So I don’t think EVs per-say will change travel – poverty will.

    If you do Youtube: some gas vs. EV real world comparisons:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXzuFprlyrw
    Driving 1000 Miles in 3 Cars: Gas vs Electric! test in New York State, Audi ICE vs. Tesla vs. Mustang Mach-E

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSlZMikqvXQ
    How much SLOWER is it? (EV vs Petrol Long Distance Race 2022) Hyundai Ioniq 5 EV vs
    Hyundai Tucson petrol SUV from Sydney to Melbourne about 900km.
    tldr/spoiler: took 40 minutes longer with the EV.

    Now I know people will say, “but I can fill my gas tank in 2 minutes”, which is probably a bit optimistic, though it’s true that refilling a liquid fuel tank is faster. But it only took me about 10 seconds to get charging started, and now I’m on the way to my break. The ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) driver has to move their car from the fuel island, park it, then start their break. And the ICE driver is probably going to have a few biobreak stops without fueling. But I care about peak oil and climate change, and oil keeps depleting and the grid keeps getting greener and (hopefully sooner rather than later) I’ll have a PV system to charge my EV.

    Another thing is that a lot of hotels, museums, etc. offer Level 2 (medium speed AC charging), often free to guests, so if one is staying at a hotel, most Level 2 chargers will fill a Model 3 overnight.
    Tesla calls them “Destination chargers”, see them (and Superchargers) on this map:
    https://www.tesla.com/findus

  221. J.L.Mc12, it took me about six months, but I started with a solid knowledge of Latin, and French and the other Romance languages are basically medieval Latin slang with the corners rubbed off. I worked through a programmed French-for-reading volume, and then went directly to pieces of French text where I had the same text available in English. (I’m preparing to do the same thing with Portuguese, which is spoken as much as English here in East Providence; a copy of O Senhor dos Anéis by J.R.R. Tolkien will make that easy, though I’m looking for some classic French occult literature in Portuguese to put things in overdrive.)

    Atmospheric, oh, it’s probably far more a matter of etheric energy than physical blood, though the blood also has a place.

    Aziz, I’ve lived in the US all my life and I’ve never been at risk from a mass shooting; in fact, I’ve never been within 50 miles of one when it happened. We have them, of course, but the US media loves to splash around stories about them and make them look more common than they are. In terms of places to visit to catch the spirit of the land, that’s a difficult question, because there are so many choices — it’s a huge and very diverse country. Two places that come to mind immediately are rural New England — western Massachusetts in particular — and anywhere you like in the Great Plains, where the horizon seems infinitely far away.

    Mark, many thanks for this.

    Horseman, that’s the standard argument that imperial powers use for maintaining central control over their colonies — “if we leave, everything will turn into a steaming mess!” What’s more, imperial powers go out of their way to guarantee that that’s exactly what will happen. The British Empire did it by fomenting ethnic strife — that’s why, from Ireland to India, former British colonies got divided into ethnic and religious rival states — and the US government does it by imposing lots of irritating regulations that guarantee the kind of blowback you’ve described. The result is that a local commons can’t be formed — and of course that’s the goal of the whole operation, since the first thing that a local commons would do would be to push back against the control of the distant overlord. I wish I had a simple solution, but I don’t.

    Chuaquin, thanks for these data points.

    Luke, too funny. Did you know that he waded onto my comments page once? I referred to him as “an erstwhile environmentalist,” with reference to I forget which of his stances, and he showed up to berate me. I responded to him, but he didn’t come back. I don’t know that demonic influence is necessary to explain his increasingly erratic behavior; it’s got to be a huge amount of mental strain on anyone to keep on shoveling the, ahem, manure that the corporate establishment demands that he and other media flacks spread so freely. I suspect a lot of people in his position are in equally difficult straits; many of them genuinely care for the environment, but they’ve been sucked into roles as controlled opposition, where the job they’re assigned is to protest ineffectually, and then lose.

    Denis, it’s a fascinating question. I don’t know enough about Musk’s background to know whether he has a sangoma on staff, or whether it’s simply that the Magical Resistance has shot its bolt and the blowback is building. You’re right that it’s been fascinating to watch the wokesters crumple; it’ll be even more interesting to see where things go from here.

  222. @teamtentim: yes, I was alluding to the Pleiades story when I referred to constellations in my comment! If it holds up, it is really remarkable and shows, like JMG has often said, that the way to preserve knowledge orally is by stories.

    I do think from my own experience that some knowledge needs hands-on experience with suitable equipment and cannot be taught just by words. Projection map-making requires the production of a durable writing material and long training, though the Polynesians took a different successful approach. Advanced Metallurgy, like smelting aluminum, requires a whole set of techniques, more than a small group of humans can afford to maintain over generations. See for example how native Tasmanians lost boat-making.

  223. JMG et all,

    Happy Belated Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrated it yesterday.

    The Shakespearean authorship discussion is a fascinating one that I was unaware of. Its not surprising that different possibilities exist given the level of accepted dogma/rigorous supression of ideas at our universities for the past 100 years.
    My question is that if the accepted facts are 100% accurate (impossible in any universe), is it possible that the fencing by arithmetic reference is an example of Cliff High’s predictive linguistics in history? For those who are unaware of this idea, the theory is that major future events leak into the present through language. Do any of your occult teachings acknowledge that this is even possible? Of course, its entirely possible this could be another example the “Simpsons predicting the future” where past gag lines become reality.

    Regarding 2024 and the Don, here’s a view from the right side of things. Trump was able to succeed in 2016 by essentially being the Bronx Salute to both R and D establishments and moving the Overton window back to 1996 (jobs, jobs, low crime, prosperity at home, no foreign adventures and jobs)with minor updates like the border wall. However, it should be noted that his personnel decisions were frequently disastrous, as were his reluctance to say his signature TV line to corrupt fools such as Dr F@#$^&. For me, the last straw was his lack of providing legal assistance funding to the J6 protesters, some of who are still in solitary confinement in DC almost 3 years later for what was essentially a failure of crowd control. Unlike in 2016, there is a much better option for 2024. The leadership in Florida was obviously once considered a protégé, but has surpassed the master in actions and perhaps words. Revolutions have a habit of eating their own and you can’t neuter militant and corrupt bearucracies just by using sarcasm… There is plenty of love for Don himself on the right side but most of his policies and accomplishments were easily reversed, so they are “full of sound and fury signifying nothing”. 🙂

    In 2016, it was enough not to be a Clinton or a Bush, but expectations have changed. Almost everyone I know on the right is ready to upgrade to 2.0 who has proved himself the most capable and competent elected official at the state level in the last 40 years. Those I know on the moderate left are beginning to realize that anarchy is not for them unless they have warlord potential, which very few do.

    Bring on the militant normalcy….
    BobInOk

  224. JMG 179

    > it’s worth reflecting on. The next step, as I see it, is to figure out how best to move in the direction we abandoned.

    JMG, “abandoned” is a great word‼️

    With the years I have left (70), I would like my contribution to be the well-being of women during the years of decline (goal, not a definite) in regard to their clothes. I feel women will be returning to making their own clothes as well as their family’s. Woven fabrics only. My focus is on abandoned “looks” of previous eras.

    As I mentioned in a previous comment, I am thinking of the “pirate shirt” (aka smock) of the 18th century as a basic garment. Yokes (front and back, horizontal, at shoulders), two front pieces falling below the yokes using gathering, sleeves gathered at shoulders, and sleeves gathered at wrists. This garment/silhouette is flattering on 95% of women. Like Grumpy Cat, it is “Pleasant Blouse,” as in pleasing to the eye, comely, bonnie, seemly. Due to its voluminous gathers, the pirate shirt is eminently useful to wear while working. There are endless variations of the pirate shirt as template.

    I am old enough to remember that during the 1950s, elderly women wore, I don’t know what to call it, a simple house-dress, which (I believe) was leftover from the 1930s Great Depression. It made 95% of women look frumpy. It was “Dumpy Dress.” One had to have a perfect figure to look alright in it. The house-dress showed EVERYTHING. While comfortable, I doubt many women would want that style to return.

    My contribution “to the decline” (I hope) will be answering the question of what garment(s) can the individual woman create for herself which has a high chance of flattering her figure.

    By 1990, the “fashion industry” had abandoned any semblance of creating decent garments for women. If not a pirate shirt template, there are a handful of other silhouettes from previous eras nearly as good-looking, all of which use gathering (woven) instead of “stretch” (knits). The last thirty years, the fashion industry has wreaked havoc on working women’s garments, leaving us today with the poverty of big-W-store’s racks of hideous cringe-worthy sweatshop offerings.

    The upshot is there are actually many possibilities of silhouettes of women’s clothing moving forward into decline. When I get going, I will be developing garments which are “Comfortable, Simple Fabrics, Easy to Make, and Cheap.” If left to the “fashion industry,” women will (literally) be in rags in the cold, and I don’t like ‘them’ odds.

    I enjoy investigating abandoned clothes, physically, historically, and in theory. During this gap-time, we do actually have opportunities. Seeing abandoned clothes as a resource is my microscopic corner of how to make life better for women during descent, if only for women in my town. In 2020, I purposefully migrated to a folksy, real-life rural farming community where women still have an old sewing machine (or two) in a back closet.

    JMG, speaking for myself, your posts help me transit to a positive work ethic where (once I set up my studio), I produce a beautiful and valuable thing with my hands, such as a tunic-for-any-woman.

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  225. Tony C., I hear Fabry say that Russia and China will be defeated by the US in the coming wars, which I’m finding quite surprising (not to mention opposite to the views published on the blog we are commenting). Does not convince me personally…

  226. @Aziz #211

    Perhaps this would be instructive.

    The US has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, but if you remove 5 major Dem-controlled cities with strict gun control then the US is 189th out of 193. So, if you visit, stay out of those and you’ll be fine.

  227. Happy Panda 186

    If Disney goes under, I won’t miss them at all. Each decade, the content of Disney’s storytelling gets more and more atrocious. Disney’s stories are horror stories dolled up by too-perfect-animation. I can’t watch Disney’s childrens’ animated shows/movies/whatever because they (1) are incredibly violent, (2) give me nightmares, (3) are boring, and (4) have no moral to the story.

    Give me 1960s claymation Davey and Goliath, and Gumby and Pokey, any day — those were stories that made sense of the world (back then, if I remember correctly, either or both were financed by the Lutheran church).

    On Wiki, it says that Davey and Gumby are now owned by Rupert Murdoch — we can kiss those films goodbye.

    We need stories that don’t insult kids’ intelligence. Ones we tell around a campfire.

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  228. J.L.Mc12: I started learning German seriously in 2006, read my first novel in 2008, read Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (German equivalent of War and Peace) the following year, and became reasonably fluent in reading and translating in 2012 (by which stage I had read about 50 books). Since then I have translated over 30 and read over 200 according to my records. In my experience, most courses are focused on speaking the language (especially as a tourist – emphasis seems to always be on ordering food), which is a quite different skill to reading. You can be a fluent reader and barely functional as a speaker. With the first few novels I read I kept a little notebook for each novel, split it up alphabetically and recorded unfamiliar words and their meanings in it as I went. You will generally find that each book (and sometimes author) has a specific vocabulary that tends to repeat, so early on such a notebook can become very useful very quick. Something also to be aware of is that teaching materials tend to favour an ideal language and often don’t teach about common ‘non-standard’ usages – if you can get hold of a usage grammar it is very worthwhile (that is a grammar reference based on actual usage – for anyone wanting to work with German into English: Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage). Also, a comprehensive dictionary – especially one which has archaic words and meanings if you are working with older texts (languages are not fixed in stone!).

  229. @Just a Horseman, #215 – and if federal lands in the West were turned over to the States, any of the tribes could kiss their lands, homes, resources, and anything else, goodbye. Not an outcome this former Southwesterner would like to see! Or part of why New Mexico generally votes Blue consistently. I don’t have the county-by-county map of the state, but I’ll bet you a plate of huevos rancheros with a pitcher of modelo negro (beer) on the side, that all the Pueblos and the Navajo Nation voted down-the-line Democratic Party.

  230. I decided to go visit Monbiot’s blog to assess where he is at the moment. I read two articles, Silence of the Lambs and Fermenting a revolution. His dislike of farming is heavily focused on livestock farming, which he wanted reduced, and even more so on ungulate farming, which he wants reduced more, by any means he thinks will remotely work. He seems determined to ignore/undermine/dismiss any use of animals in regenerative agriculture. From previous reading, I remember that he tends to use the most unfriendly-to-animal-agriculture numbers he can find, and I was not impressed by the study he was using, as it didn’t appear to consider that methane has a lifespan measured in decades, and that cow farts and breathing, manure and grass form a cycle, and so long as the number of animals doesn’t increase, maintaining the herd at the same size doesn’t actually increase the methane put into the atmosphere.

    Any issues with malnutrition, world hunger etc were not mentioned in Silence of the Lambs, though a need for dietary change was. Meanwhile, Fermenting a Revolution was highly over-optimistic about unproven technology and waxed enthusiastic about the potential for replacing animal agriculture entirely and reducing food imports to places that can’t currently grow enough food for whatever reason. The only potential downside he took truly seriously is for a few corporations to monopolize the market for these microbial fake-meat products, with a nod given to GMO worries. He considers the biggest barrier to be fear of the new.

    A while ago, I read a very detailed article on the economics of producing meat by growing cells, I think it was meat cells and not precision fermentation like here, but it went into great detail on how the pilot projects in that area are being done, and the technical barriers to scaling up while still producing food that is food-quality. It also went into detail on the economics involved. The thoroughness of it really impressed me. Unfortunately, I don’t know what it is called to point people at it.

    But the biggest takeaway from it was that competing on price with beef is likely to be very, very difficult, and even fully scaled up it would likely cost as much as high quality cuts, and would never be able to compete with ground beef and the like, unless it used ingredients stocks that are not fit for purpose and accepted unsafe purity of microbial cultures. Also, it might not be possible to get the microbes to grow properly on that scale anyway, as the cells involved are fussy.

    That analysis makes me wonder if this precision fermentation will ever be financially viable for growing food as opposed to very expensive medicinals like insulin, and if the results will be safe to eat if they are grown at scale under cheap conditions. If the products are substantially more expensive than most meat, they aren’t going to displace it from the market unless meat is banned. I can’t see any attempt to do that going well. I suppose a combination of massive hidden subsidies for precision fermentation and regulating meat production to death could do it. Assuming the population doesn’t overthrow you first, and energy supplies hold out, since microbes need to be heated to the correct temperature and their conditions carefully controlled in a way cows don’t. Neither are safe assumptions.

    I think Monbiot’s statement that

    “I believe this is the most important environmental technology ever developed. It might be all that now stands between us and Earth systems collapse.”

    is vastly premature and will almost certainly prove unjustified.

    This sort of thing is why I stopped reading Monbiot’s work.

  231. @Clarke aka Gwydion #198

    Thanks – lots to mull over there. Something on the etheric level makes sense. I don’t know if you’ve read „Secret of the Temple“? I recently read it, and I was somehow hoping that a few ideas why there were these consistent rules about blood and purifiying, in all these cultures, might give more insights into how that temple technology worked. Not sure if I‘ve gotten any further with that (or maybe it was a dead end to begin with… 😉 ), but you are raising some very interesting points. I’ll need to think about this some more. Thanks for that!

    @A #203

    Thanks, both for the blood ritual and for that frightening story.

    @teresa from hershey #195

    Thanks for the recommendation. I didn‘t know there are yew varieties which will grow into different forms all on their own. That might come in handy at some point. But yew is very slow-growing, isn‘t it? Hm… We shall see.

    Milkyway

  232. Hey JMG

    I’m going to be honest, if you already knew Latin before starting French it seems a bit like cheating. : )

    If you included the time it took you to learn Latin, how long did it take you?

  234. Dear JMG,

    I just want to express the joy I find reading your blog. The Open Posts can be amazing where they take us.

    “You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! You’ll contemplate your existence and relationship with the universe! You’ll learn about energy, economics, politics, current events, food recipes, gardening tips, book recommendations, and more!”

    It’s truly amazing what you have created here, and I am grateful to have found this place.

    Best Wishes,
    -Slink

  235. Thanks JMG for your reply about how cathedral-building was handled, it sounds like a much more sensible way of doing things.

    @Daniel (@alacrates):
    Thanks a lot for the link to the Hermetic Shakespeare essay you wrote, it was a very interesting read and has given me a few leads to follow.

  236. @ Jean-Vivian #98

    I think it’s important to remember that unrest is not a matter of absolute conditions, but expected conditions. If you’re expecting to eat dirt for dinner and someone gives you beans, you’re thrilled. If you’re expecting to eat lobster and someone gives you beans, your unhappy.

    A 1950’s lifestyle would be pretty good for most of the people that have ever lived (or alive today), but if you’re raised expecting more… you can get very upset indeed when you don’t get it.

  237. regarding feces, following on #200 and #214:

    We poop in a bucket and throw chainsaw shavings over it. When the bucket’s full we compost it and then us it to fertilize fruit trees, figuring that’s gotta be safe even if the composting is less than perfect.

    Here’s the trick to keep it from getting smelly: Pee elsewhere first. Keeping the pee separate from the poop reduces stink to almost nothing.

    We pee on the uphill edge of the garden.

  238. JMG – “they insisted that it was never a good idea for a woman to can things, put up pickles, make jam, or do a range of other food-related activities during her period, that the items never came out right. So there may be subtle factors involved as well.”

    That’s interesting. Just as a small data point: My mother (born in the late 40ies in Germany) still had cooking classes in school once a week. She told me the same thing, she and her class-mates (it was a girls’ school) wouldn’t be allowed to take part in anything that involved anything to preserve food.

    But just imagine that from a modern perspective – a school where you learn to cook and – the horror! – to grow and harvest vegetables…

    In our little village, there’s a lot of farmland and grassland around. Most of it is still owned by the descendants of the last farmers that were still active a generation ago or two. The ownership is very scattered, the land is usually leased to a few remaining farmers. Now many of the landowners have received a letter from an investment company that wants to build a large solar power plant on the land. At least it seems they don’t want to purchase the land but lease it. They are offering something around 3500€/2.5 acres/year (but do not mention taxes and the share of money that the local government might claim). Of course, all the (mostly old) villagers now have dollar signs in their eyes. The farmer where we get our milk from is not really amused. He asked my wife what those people think they need the money for? They all live in their own house, no mortgage, life’s rather cheap here. You know, maybe we just HAVE to run into that brick wall and there’s little I can do to hinder them. Maybe I just have to sit and wait and see our environment deteriorating and try to make the best out of it for me and my family. A friend once said “if you want peace, you must leave the battlefield” which accidentally happened on the very same day you posted the comic where the Japanese swordsman cut himself out of the panel… Maybe it’s just this, maybe all I can do is train myself in equanimity?

    Oh, I got carried away 😉

    Greetings,
    Nachtgurke

  242. Heather @ 175,

    Yeah, I’ll shake things off. Frankly, I’m kinda tired of all the effort/maintenence in the soon to be jettisoned polecat domicile.. ’bout time I took a break, and regroup. I just might eventually relocate from the confines of WokeBlu Western WA.. and move to more ‘reddish’ environs’..

  243. I’d love it if he did have a sangoma on staff! The only time there were people significantly spun up was over the selling of the blue-checks for $8 a month. How dare he allow people to verify their identity and show it??!!! Waaaahhh! I’m the special one!

    I just saw Sam Harris and Clare Lehmann deleted their accounts. I’m looking forward to a few more notable people who were clearly very protected by thousands of employees of Twitter following along. Perhaps I’m With Her will go too unless she is planning another run? (I still can’t stop laughing over that campaign slogan).

    Nick Land started tweeting again too. Which reminds me, you mentioned a possible essay on what he gets right and wrong. Perhaps for the 5th Wednesday?

  244. “Clerisy” spotted in the wild:

    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/anti-lockdown-stanford-professor-academic-freedom-dead

    Denis (no. 218), do white people often patronize sangomas? I’m aware of one white guy who *became* a sangoma (in Swaziland / Eswatini):

    https://www.amazon.com/Sangoma-Odyssey-Spirit-World-Africa/dp/0788162500

    Chuaquin (no. 216), the Russian priest here has been demonstrating against the war. (Few expatriate Russians support it.) The church has its problems but is not the enemy.

    A. (no. 203), the idea of feeding menses to trees turns up in a (brilliant) comic book:

    https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Man-Eaters-The-Cursed/Issue-3?id=188350

    (This is issue 3)

  245. @Russell #62 re: board games

    I’d be remiss if I didn’t suggest my favorite game: Zendo. It’s not a board game per se, but it is a table top game. There are commercial sets available. You can also play it with a set of Looney pyramids if you happen to have them — a few gamers do, and that’s how I learned to play — or failing that you can just use a set of Lego bricks or whatever you have handy, plus a few tokens/coins.

    Briefly summarized, it’s an induction game. One player creates a secret rule, and other players are trying to gather evidence to discover that rule.

    The original creator has an explanation at http://www.koryheath.com/zendo/ and for folks who do video you can find some games posted online on Youtube. (Depending on who’s playing, the terminology can vary slightly.)

  246. Is it possible that Tybalt and arithmetic fencing were a later textual revision and the earliest copies used a different name and omitted mention of arithmetic fencing?
    One would have to look into the manuscript evidence behind the quartos and folios to figure that out I guess.

  248. BobinOK, before considering the possibility that the author of the Shakespeare corpus was prophetic, or otherwise foretold the future, I think a good hard look needs to be taken at the early history of the plays. That was long before copyright, at a time when modifying plays to make topical references and jokes was standard practice, and I suspect the history has been cleaned up and reorganized considerably to make it fit a nice neat scholarly belief system.

    Northwind, excellent. That strikes me as a very worthwhile project.

    Pygmycory, Monbiot’s a vegan, isn’t he? I’ve often thought that, just as the fundamentalist ministers who spend every Sunday ranting about the evils of homosexuality pretty reliably have boyfriends on the side, the vegans who spend their time ranting about the evils of animal raising are trying not to deal with the number of times each month they sneak away and down a nice juicy cheeseburger. I know people who’ve worked late night shifts in fast food places with drive-up windows who have stories to tell.

    J.L.Mc12, my Latin came from two years of university Latin class, so I’m not sure that really makes a good measure!

    Pygmycory, it’s not impossible he read it here. 😉

    Slink, thank you for this!

    Jbucks, it was indeed. The buildings they put up also didn’t suck, the way modern ones do.

    Nachtgurke, ouch. You may have to leave the battlefield, depending on how that plays out.

    Patricia M, thanks for both of these.

    Denis, I hope he has one too. As for Nick Land, I’ll put that on the list for a future possibility, but William Butler Yeats won this month’s contest hands down, and the post is about half written.

    Bei, good. It’s a fine and useful word.

    DT, yes, very probably so. But it’s something that needs research.

  249. @Northwind Grandma – I own a pirate shirt which is much too big for me, and whose buttonholes are a disaster. I would pay you whatever you asked if you could either alter it for me, or make me one in that off-white, and would send you a complete set of my measurements, Richard III back contours and all.

    One item of clothing seen in at least one catalog is comfortable and attractive and practical is a 3-tiered denim skirt – I call it my Cowgirl Skirt – elastic waist, all 3 tiers flared, about midcalf – to – ankle length. I have 2, one midcalf (above knee-length on the catalog model) and one just above the ankle (knee-length on the model.)

    Yes, housedresses were incredibly dumpy, but they were work wear, like ratty old jeans. My mother also wore smocks with pockets over the housedresses. I think she made them herself.

    And of course, one standard bit of headgear was the headscarf, an oversized bandanna. I find a that a long scarf works better (place over head, throw the ends over the opposite shoulder, stylish and good with many other outfits.

    Medieval headgear means you never have to worry about a bad hair day, and also keeps your head warm at night; and long skirts are actually more practical than jeans when doing what bears do in the woods – or the little house in the national forest.

  250. Jmg

    Are you saying that learning Latin in University helped you learn it faster, or slower? either option seems likely.

    It occurred to me that on project Gutenberg that have quite a few Latin texts, as well as learning material such as the famous Latin primer for children, the Orbis Pictus.

  251. @pygmycory 230: My own hands-on experience producing purified protein from yeasts and bacteria makes me doubt very strongly that the process can be scaled up to the kg and ton scale at all, and certainly not at a price comparable to meat.

  252. J.L.Mc12 says:
    November 26, 2022 at 3:44 pm
    Hey JMG

    I’m going to be honest, if you already knew Latin before starting French it seems a bit like cheating. : )

    J.L.Mc12, thank you for saying what I was thinking. It made me laugh.

    Given that English is basically German with all the fancy vocabulary replaced with French or Latin, the time for an English-language speaker to learn French or German figures to be far less than the time for an English-language speaker to learn Vietnamese. It might be possible that a certain amount of facility with spoken Vietnamese would help out in a way that would not be true for French or German. But I have not learned to read a language without learning to speak it since high school Latin, so I am just guessing about that.

  253. Aziz – Re: gun safety in the US. In addition to the prior comments, I’ve lived the last 40 years within a few miles of Washington DC, and never felt unsafe. The “tourist” areas of this Democrat-run city are safe, but if you go just a mile or two to the east, you’re much more likely to be aware of violence. But it’s still a big city, and only a very small fraction of the population senses danger. You might hear that there have been over 600 “mass shootings” so far this year in the US. First, consider the definition: mass shooting doesn’t necessarily mean anyone got killed, just that many people were wounded. Second: most mass shootings are drug, gang, or house-party-related. Violence isn’t random. Third, use a globe, not just a map, to compare the land area of the US to Europe. The US is a big place, with lots of people (mostly good, but a few bad).

  255. Re the period taboo, interesting tale from the ladies at the grange! Period taboo is a big deal in my culture too. I have personally experienced a feeling of “ickiness” when visiting some houses. I did not know why at that time, and then later learned that the women in that house did not follow the taboos associated with periods. I would describe it as a sort of a mental fog, where you feel mildly lethargic, and want to leave the place as soon as possible.

  256. Have you been watching what’s happening in China in the past day or two?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPRDLqggwQU
    https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/covid-lockdown-protests-erupt-beijing-xinjiang-after-deadly-fire

    Some very interesting protest footage coming out. Looks like something major just broke in people’s willingness to put up with things the way they are, in multiple cities in multiple areas of the country. Not really surprising, given everything China’s people have put up with in the past few years. I think this was a matter of when and how, not if. Watch this space, this could get very big indeed. Or maybe be crushed messily, while some policy changes are rushed through to persuade everyone to calm down. Don’t know what the ending will be.

    But definitely a situation worth keeping an eye on.

  258. polecat 74

    Dear Pole,

    I started this comment last Thursday and am resuming nearly Sunday.

    Thank you for sharing what it feels like being you right now. It sounds like a sandpaper-rough time. Your note moved me.

    No-one is willing to say that “Hitting Bottom” and “Feeling Down” are two different things and are independent. No-one. Hitting Bottom doesn’t cause Feeling Down; Feeling Down doesn’t cause Hitting Bottom. Both arise from some outside external event, or events. Sometimes they happen together, but ofttimes they happen apart.

    Hitting Bottom, in my opinion, is a neutral experience (not a downer). It is a healing place. Picture Bottom as a hole. Instinctively, one doesn’t like it and starts clawing up trying to get out, but then look around. Bottom translates to being part of the mantel of planet earth — womb — quiet — cooling — cold. Maybe too cold for humans to like. But there is nothing wrong there. The vast majority of humans have no idea that that hole is a place where rest and healing happens — sensory stimuli and fears reduce. It is worth hanging out awhile.

    On the other hand, Feeling Down, to me, means one needs rest. Drop into its soothingness. Sleep. Sleep whenever you can, for as long as you can. Eat soup. (Grandma says so.💬🤒🛌🥣)

    Anything alive is fire — its own hearth. In the cold earth, head to what warms you.

    Hens, bees, and sundry things — things you love — will be able to return. It won’t be THOSE hens, or THOSE bees, or those exact sundries, but other of those things will come.

    By the way, I ate my traditional highfalutin turkey-and-dressing Hungry Man TV dinner for Thanksgiving, very much like my mother used to cook in the 1960s, which means it is probably a Better Crocker recipe.

    Good tidings. Peace be with you.✨

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  259. Castle 97

    I related a lot to what you wrote in your comment. So much sorrow.❤️‍🩹Thank you.

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  260. patriciaormsby 213

    BIRDS

    After my husband and I moved to Wisconsin in 2020, I started watching birds out my backdoor, putting out delectable food for them and critters. Typical birds — some by the flock — were:

    Cardinal
    Chicadee, Black-capped
    Dove, Mourning
    Grackle, Common
    Jay, Blue
    Junco, Dark-eyed
    Nuthatch
    Robin
    Sparrow, various
    Titmouse, Tufted
    Woodpecker, various

    with the occasional crow, finch, grosbeak, hummingbird, starling, hawk, eagle, owl, and vulture.

    I put food out consistently (daily) until June 2022. (I had a real twitter following.) Starting that month, we had a lot of noisy heavy machinery outdoors, which scared off the birds, but also meant I stopped putting out food.

    When it got too cold/snowy to continue construction (late October), I resumed feeding birds and critters.

    Cardinal, chicadee, bluejay, junco, robin, and sparrow have come back in droves daily. Junco and sparrow have returned by the flock. Cardinals, bluejays, and robins seem to come in pairs. If anything, I have seen an increase of junco and sparrow, 50-60 birds arrive at a time, taking turns feeding and resting in nearby shrubs. Over time, the bird-word (bird network) got out that my house puts out a bucket of SEEDS‼️

    Mourning dove, grackle, starling, titmice, and woodpecker have not shown up this autumn, but being a new birdwatcher, I don’t have a sense why.

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  261. Hi John Michael and A,

    The land here is different. Being older, it says ‘I am’, and our civilisation spends an inordinate amount of energy pretending that things are otherwise.

    Please spare a moments compassion for Mr Monbiot. I recall the excitement when he did poke his head up here, and for all you know, he may still be reading? Seriously though, to stare into the abyss and comprehend hard limits, then make a decision to promote technology with such long term toxic waste, possibly in order to minimise short term pain. Mate, that must have been very challenging. My brain is not up for that paradox, but then I can look out the window at the setting sun filtered through the drizzle whilst the shadows of the trees in the lower valley lengthen. What does Mr Monbiot see?

    You’re on! 😉

    Cheers

    Chris

  262. Milkyway, there is quite a bit to find about taboos around blood in shamanic traditions, see these two German-speaking authors: https://www.amazon.de/Drachenzeit-Die-verborgene-Kraft-Menstruation/dp/3881041656/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=drachenzeit+luisa+francia&link_code=qs&qid=1669542469&sourceid=Mozilla-search&sr=8-1 and https://www.amazon.de/Frauenheilkraft-vergessene-Geb%C3%A4rmutter-Selbstheilung-Frauenbeschwerden/dp/3778775545/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2H7QERE99PJNZ&keywords=sonia+emilia+rainbow+frauenheilkraft&qid=1669542527&sprefix=sonia+emilia+%2Caps%2C598&sr=8-1

  263. @Bei Dawei I have no idea what it’s like now. I was there in the 1990’s and I think the book you linked me to hints at what I said – that magic is much more a normal part of culture there. A man gets told he has a spiritual gift and needs to go train it, and he does? If someone in America said that, people would assume they were brainwashed by a cult.

    Fwiw, I’m white and I went to a sangoma and spent a couple hours in her hut. I didn’t know squat about magic at the time and even I could sense she was operating on a completely different plane of existence. I left with a feeling that I was trapped by my own rationality and thoughts and that how I was explaining the world was extremely limiting – if that makes any sense. And I barely speak siZulu!

    It’s my impression that no matter the skin color, people respected sangomas and their abilities. The newspaper would regularly do stories on people who said they were cursed by one or who revealed things like cheating spouses or thieves. I don’t think the Dutch and English descendants had an effective magical parallel they used, so I could see those services coming in handy!

  264. To JMG and the commentariat at large, what do you think of spending your life with a spouse who isn’t interested in spirituality in the same way you are?

    I have been dating a girl for almost 2 years now. She is compassionate, creative, intelligent, and strong. However, she doesn’t have much interest in esotericism at all. I have my Buddhist practices, and read esoteric philosophy and books in general. I have tried bringing up related topics with her a few times but I don’t think she is that interested. Her “spirituality” so to speak very much based on action in the world, and she is very keen on education and design.

    I feel a bit disappointed, I love her, but this is a big part of my life that we won’t share, and I don’t know if it will affect things down the line. Of course, there are thing she also does that I don’t share too.

    Would like to get your opinion on whether such a relationship is sustainable long term.

    Semi-regular poster but going anon for this post.

  265. Hi John Michael,

    That Arthur is a very slippery fellow indeed! The essay didn’t go in any of the directions I thought it would. Beats me how that happened. I’m sure you know the feeling?

    Cheers

    Chris

  266. Hello JMG

    You’ve said that you foresee China going through some serious fundamental crises soon but becoming the world hegemon after that. Could you elaborate on how that will unfold? I’d have thought the crises will prevent it from getting very far, unless you also foresee even greater upheaval in its rivals?

    SMJ

  267. @Northwind Grandma and @Patricia Mathews,

    I look forward to more ideas re: women’s fashion during the decline. It might be worthwhile to look at some costuming ideas for your fashion. My husband took a costuming class and taught me how to make a waistband for a skirt that isn’t a wrap-around skirt, but can easily be adjusted a few inches. (For costuming, they do this so they don’t have to remake every outfit every time they need it to fit someone new.) (I’m talking ‘little theater’ plays, not Broadway and such.) I used that style when I made my outfit for Ren Faire… I’ve used it for years and years and if my weight goes up or down a bit, it still fits. I’ve recently come across the idea of a two-layer wrap skirt than can be worn lots of different ways. (example here: https://imgs.search.brave.com/8v2s10aWDZY0YnbAAPLj_ybq68rQOxKAPLoaEy_ssy0/rs:fit:1024:694:1/g:ce/aHR0cHM6Ly9pLnBp/bmltZy5jb20vb3Jp/Z2luYWxzLzFiL2Q3/LzJiLzFiZDcyYjA1/YWQzNmVkZmM1Yzdi/MDY1MDM1YmI0NTA3/LmpwZw) Definitely something I am going to try next time I break out the sewing machine.

    @JMG, you’ve used this metaphor before when explaining why it is useful to study several traditions. I’ve never seen it done as a graphic before; thought you might like it: https://miro.medium.com/max/640/1*-fXKvfupJw6OUDLTo3CzhA.jpeg.

  268. Sometimes these days I feel old, by which I mean, I was having fun looking at my electrical bills for patterns. (Whee!)

    People who are au courant with this stuff probably already know about this, but it does seem that late spring and early fall are my lowest electricity use times of year. It had gone up again, by a fair amount, in the winter, I guess owing to the furnace fan. I had no idea it used so much power.

  269. The climate science models used in the IPCC do not assume that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation will shut down, but it is increasingly likely that the AMOC will actually shut down. This means that in Europe and parts of eastern North America, the average regional temperature will actually decrease instead of increase, contrary to what the climate doomers have been telling everybody in the media. Nevertheless, such a drastic change in climate will still cause agriculture to collapse in those regions

  270. @JMG

    Funny! Poor Monbiot. If only he could admit how much he loves those tasty burgers…

    @ Nachtgurke

    Sorry to hear that. Same thing is happening where I am, in the South-West of England. The village is being inundated with planning proposals for solar farms and – much worse – lithium battery storage facilities.

  271. @Anon123 (#264):

    It worked out just fine for us. We’ve been happily married for 55 years now, and it gets better every year.

    We each have interests the other doesn’t share. I’m a retired medieval philologist with very strong esoteric and occult interests. She’s a scientist (animal behavior) and retired assistant editor of a scientific journal on primatology.

    The key is always being ready to listen unselfishly, with genuine interest, when the other goes on about things that don’t much matter to oneself. That’s part of always being there for one another, always having one another’s back.

    We achieve this, too, by having always been fundamentally interested in everything about each other, including each other’s disparate interests and intellectual passions. (It may even be fair to say that each of us cares about the other as much, and perhaps more, than about one’s own self — what can we give to one another, not what can we get from one another. That may be the key to a good marriage, so long as each partner does that equally.)

  272. @SMJ (#266):

    As to China, for the last few days we have been seeing news items in the USA about riots, ostensibly over the zero-COVID policy, calling for President Xi Jinping’s resignation or ouster. By themselves, these sort of news items mean little.

    However, coincidentally, just today our rinky-dink local newspaper (The Providence Journal) ran an expensive full-page advertisement from the “Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Boston,” subtlely arguing that the independence of Taiwan from China is essential to a healthy economy in the USA, and that any threat to its independence is a threat to the prosperity and comfort of the American people. I have never seen any advertisement of this kind in our paper until today.

    I take this odd coincidence as significant. It suggests to me that the gobalists in Washington have now decided to try to destabilize China, just as they are currently trying to destabilize Russia, and that they are trying to soften public opinion in favor of that policy. (Thus Taiwan would become the Asian equivalent of Ukraine.)

    This seems to me to be the height of folly–an example of “pride that goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall”–a desperate last-ditch effort to maintain the current unipolar world under American hegemony. IMHO, hard limits to growth are going inevitably to yield a multipolar world in the relatively near future, most lilely within the next decade, no matter what the US might do to avoid that.

  273. @Anon123

    I don’t think it is necessary to share the same spirituality or the same level of interest in spirituality, but it is important to have an interest in *understanding* the other person which necessarily *includes* their spirituality.

    At some point both of you will be facing the possibility of death or other existential crises, and you will want to be able to lean on your respective narratives about the nature of reality with support from your partner, which means that both of you need to be willing to put in the effort to understand each other in that regard.

  275. “A” 203

    THROMBOPHILIA; DEHYDRATION

    > On a purely physical level my period is absolutely horrible and I still haven’t found the natural solutions that allow me to feel OK and not suffer during it. I don’t think it has to be that way…

    For thirty-odd years, I suffered terrible pains (roughly) every second month, bad enough to be bedridden a couple days each time. I took only Pamprin for the pain. A heating pad helped. I just laid down and tried to rest, and gladly fell asleep.

    In my early 40s, an MD found that I had thrombophilia, which is the opposite of hemophilia. Thrombophilia is a genetic disorder whereby the clotting of blood happens TOO readily. During menstruation, blood clots form and have difficulty shedding. Blood clots “clog the system,” so to speak. It was a “I could have had a V-8” moment, smacking the side of my head.

    My mother, a nurse, when I was a kid, would say that I had weird blood because upon hitting air, it clotted immediately, where there was virtually no bleeding. I thought everyone’s blood was like that.

    So there was thrombophilia. Decades later, I noted a second thing likely had happened during much of my adult life: I was habitually dehydrated. Prior to around 1980, no-one carried around a water bottle (we didn’t know to) — I drank water tops one cup a day. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t drinking enough water, and no-one mentioned it. Over decades, I had gone to a number of physicians, and none had asked the important question, “Are you drinking enough water? I suspect you are dehydrated.”

    Looking back, I believe that either thrombophilia, or dehydration, or both, caused my truly excruciating menstrual pains six or seven times a year, days at a stretch. Heaven help women who endure such agony. Menopause was a blessing for me.

    I hope this helps.

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  276. @Ian Duncombe

    Thanks so much for doing that; the quote looks good. And thank you for your interest in my other work!

  277. @Robert Mathieson,
    I’ve been thinking about the possibility of color revolution type activity in China. The thing is, this is mainland China, not Hong Kong or Ukraine. I’m sure many in the USA would love to topple the CCP, but I am not convinced the USA’s reach is good enough inside mainland China to produce this many protests in this many different places. China tends to crack down really hard on dissent, and they’ve been succeeding at it for a long time.

    The never-ending zero covid policies, and the recent deaths by fire of people locked in their apartments while the firefighters couldn’t get in is less than has started many revolutions. I think there’s a fairly high likelihood that this is organic. I can’t be sure, though, and I won’t rule out a foreign component. They’re certainly going to have some foreign cheerleaders from the sidelines, if nothing else.

    I think we’re going to have to watch and see how this turns out.

  278. Anonymous, it’s a very widespread tradition, and like most widespread traditions, there are likely good reasons behind it.

    Pygmycory, I have indeed. It’ll be very interesting to see where it goes from here.

    Chris, I don’t imagine I’ll ever have the chance to visit Australia, but everything I’ve heard about the land is fascinating. As for Monbiot, oh, granted. As I noted in an earlier comment, it’s got to be really difficult for environmental journalists who thought they were doing the right thing in accepting positions as corporate media shills, only to realize that their dream of making a difference is just raw material for the machine, and that their job is to protest ineffectually and fail. That would be horribly painful, and the likelihood that it would drive someone into blind faith in this or that dubious technology is not small — it’s the same sort of mental double bind that leads religious people to commit everything to some dubious prophecy of the Second Coming or what have you.

    Anon123, it’s a challenge a lot of occultists have to deal with. As long as you have enough other interests in common, it’s just a matter of you having a hobby that she doesn’t share, and most marriages get by very well on that basis — in fact, it can be a source of strength in a relationship if each of you has some activity of your own, so you can get away for a while when that’s necessary.

    Chris, I do indeed!

    SMJ, look at what happened to the US between 1925 and 1945 sometime. That’s the sort of convulsions that can hit a big nation on its way to global hegemony. Imagine China having to cope with a major depression, a drastic change in political leadership and ideology, a long period of social unrest, and a big war — that’s the sort of thing I have in mind.

    Random, thanks for this.

    Electrode113, that’s why it’s crucial to use historical and paleoclimatic evidence as a corrective to the abstract models the IPCC uses. As the AMOC shuts down, Western Europe will end up with a climate like the equivalent countries on the far side of the Atlantic (hint: England is the same latitude as Labrador), while the southeastern US will cool somewhat as the Gulf Stream stops pushing warm tropical water at it. The northeastern US and the maritime provinces of Canada will be much more stable, since the Gulf Stream (the branch of the AMOC on this side of the water) pulls away from the coast off North Carolina and doesn’t affect the climate much north of that. So northern Europe’s capacity to grow much of anything will decline sharply due to a drastically shortened growing season. To judge from paleoclimatic evidence, again, other parts of the world will have longer growing seasons — Russia just had its biggest grain harvest ever due to warming temperatures, for example.

    Luke, I know. It really is sad.

  279. @Northwind Grandma,

    I have horrible periods. After some 21 years of symptoms, they finally took a look and decided I have mild endometriosis. I’m pretty sure there isn’t thrombophilia in my case, given the number of nosebleeds I get in the winter, and nothing unusual happening when I get minor cuts and scrapes.

    Taking birth control pills helps enormously – as in, I can make commitments and keep them, even if they’re on a period day. I’ve done recitals, played at church, attended and given recorder lessons… it’s life-changing. I will note that the bc pills have to not be variable amounts, they need to be steady over the course of the month or I get really bad pms symptoms in the form of my anxiety and depression issues spiralling out of control just before my period. With the one I’m on now, my pain levels during my period dropped drastically, I get a lot less in the way of night sweats and general malfunctioning thermostat symptoms, and my energy levels are substantially more normal. I also don’t get noticeable emotional pms symptoms.

    I do still have to take anti-inflammatories on top of the bc pills, but it sure beats lying in bed wrapped round a hot rice pack going ow ow ow while taking as many inflammatories and tylenol as I can safely take and breaking promises about stuff I said I’d do.

    This is why I get a bit annoyed with people treating birth control pills as something you should never take, and that should never be covered by public health insurance, and that doctors can deny you on grounds of their own religious beliefs (this happened to me). I’m not taking it for birth control. It’s just as much medication as the anti-inflammatories or any of the other meds I’ve been on over the years – and it’s been more effective than a lot of them.

  280. An update on the solar power data from BPA. In the interests of fairness I went back to July to find a really good day. After dodging afternoon clouds on July 1rst I found a good day.

    That day had power available for 16.4 hours. The average was 90.8 MW, and total power produced was 1491 MW-hr. Averaging over 24 hours comes out to 62.1 MW-hr.

    Total installed capacity is 138 MW. There was a sustained run of 133 MW, so that is reasonable close to nameplate capacity.

    By comparison Nov. 22nd had 10.6 hours of daylight, a 27 MW average over that time, and produced 286 MW-hr of energy, which over 24 hours comes out to 12 MW-hr. The best sustained run was 15 minutes of over 60 MW.

    Yesterday may have been worse, I’ll have to wait and see.

  281. Update on Phil.
    Now Carol says it may be weeks, not days. His spark of spirit was burning very low in the hospital, away from everything that said “Home,” with no idea where he was or why. Once back in the care home where he’s lived as long as he can remember, he rallied quite a bit and was more responsive.

    He’s still terminal. His urine is quite dark, and he’s not drinking very much water, but he’s back home and that counts for a lot. The Hospice people are coming in to see him every day, sometimes a nurse, sometimes the chaplain, etc…

    Carol will be catching a plane to New Mexico plane tomorrow, to say her last Goodbyes, and staying through Thursday. I’ve openly (and sincerely) asked blessings on him, which I think pleased her.

    Thanks for the prayers and positive energy.

  282. JMG 221

    It is comforting to know that some people, such as yourself, who know that “demonic influence” is a thing (having nothing to do with Christianity). During 2022, I have been scratching my head asking, “What has come over people? People are simply crazy. Things aren’t jiving.” and there was no explanation that made sense.” Well, yeah, it finally dawned on me there *IS* a logical explanation. It took a long time to soak in.

    Demonic forces do indeed exist. Demons are afoot.

    One thing I am curious about: Is there some crack in the woodwork, or wormhole, where they are getting through at this time moreso than at other times—, or are demons always this brazen?

    Are there a lot more demons around (proportionately) than typically? If so, what are they feeding on? Are humans, already, in a particularly wretched state?

    “Progressive” Americans (the “love and light” crowd) deny demons’ existence; they say, “If I don’t talk about demons, they can’t/don’t exist.” Duh. They are ripe for the picking. I really cannot relate to people who see only the bright side — they are so imbalanced.

    Demons have to live somewhere, so they are next-door neighbors to somebody. A family of demons lived next door to us for 23 years. They were in human casings (like a sausage has a casing). They had a mob vibe. The ma-and-pa-demons passed the culture-of-demonhood to their children. In that same neighborhood, there were several borderline-demon families. There should be a formal “borderline demon-personality disorder.”

    When I come across a demon-in-human-casing, I feel it in my bones. I am no longer in the dark about them. We have a demon nearby now, and thank goodness, we don’t cross paths much; I doubt he realizes it, but he is a mage, an unsorted one — one who is haphazard.

    As he and I were having a congenial conversation, we looked at each other, where I asked myself, “Can he tell that I know he is a demon?” I wonder if he asked himself, “She seems ‘different.’ What is she?” Or “Is she a demon?” Of course, I would never ask, “Are you a demon?” to his face — that would be gauche. It doesn’t help that this particular demon-in-human-casing is drop-dead gorgeous, could charm the roof off a building (wheedler; slick in speech), and is super-highly educated (he has something like three B.S.s; two M.S.s, and two Doctorates) — a deadly triad with which to reel in unsuspecting, temporarily-weak, people.

    Demons are around. They can sense an “in.” One can’t entirely avoid them. Keep your distance. Never invite them into your home. Lay under their radar. Flatter them, but subtly. Put oaths of protection around youself, yours, friends, and relatives. If they mind their own business, leave them be.

    But what if a demon turns politician (sticking their noses where they don’t belong)? — we can’t just let them have their way. I would rather not have a demon representing me in Congress.

    One dead giveaway: demons demand unearned-respect, which includes Old Wack Donald.

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  283. yves vetter 237

    > Here’s the trick to keep it from getting smelly: Pee elsewhere first. Keeping the pee separate from the poop reduces stink to almost nothing.

    🤣How true. I have scooped thousands of kitty litter pans, and observed exactly this. It is pee that stinks up the place. If covered, poop just dries out, and is easy to remove to another location. The problem with domestic cats is that they ignore signage over a kitty litter pan saying, “Pee only,” and a second kitty litter pan with a sign saying “Poop only.” In feline rescue, I really wish I could have kept pee and poop separate, but nope, cats don’t cooperate. If cats knew humans needed them to separate pee and poop, they would give us the🖕🏼sign to ridiculous humans. But humans, we can separate the two.

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  284. Polecat 242

    Consider south-central Wisconsin. I recommend it. I have been here two+ years. People seem to be politically-sane, have a heritage of working with their hands, have thousands of small proprietors making and selling, the land, water, and air are a quantum leap less polluted than New England, and real estate and rents are still affordable.

    Winters are no worse than Western Massachusetts. I grew up in eastern New York, Albany area, where one year snow drifts reached our second floor. The two Wisconsin winters we have experienced have been a stroll in the woods. (I love snow, making me biased.)

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  286. Denis 243

    > I just saw Sam Harris and Clare Lehmann deleted their accounts

    In 2016, I had several Twitter accounts. I permanently deleted all of them. I can tell you, as least then, Twitter made it VERY HARD to delete an account. They held on for dear life. Twitter had something like five levels of, “Are you sure you want to delete this account?” They did just about every legal thing to keep a person from deleting an account, including threats. The threat I liked most was, “You do understand that you will permanently lose all data, right?” (as if I gave a cr_p) but then added a month where the deletion could be reversed. There were several, “We need to verify your password” and “We need to verify it is really you.” It took a week to delete just one account. They were anal about it, and the process was arduous.

    Twitter‼️REALLY‼️REALLY‼️REALLY‼️hates it when people insist on saying, “Goodbye,” and meaning it.

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  288. I want to continue your work following the chain of mental dominos you were moving along right before you got into Druidry, and be the one who helps forge that synthesis for the future. I am referring to the vision you describe in the introduction to the City of Hermes.

  289. JMG

    Ok, we’ll I feel a lot more confident about learning vietnamese if it may only take less than 3 years to get good enough to translate it.

    On to another topic, “the new dawn of everything.”

    I agree with you on it being tendentious, strongly in favour of an anarchist world-view, which frankly is one of its charms when so much of history is based on the dreary inevitability of our current malfunctioning ideology and society. I may not agree with the realism of anarchist aims, but I admire its bold striving for freedom and its ability to inspire oneself to try and achieve it.

    What exactly did you find interesting about the book though? I have a strong suspicion that the Natchez sun-king, having absolute power confined to a little village that few willingly visited, and whose “subjects” completely ignored in favour of governing themselves, must have a strong resonance with anyone sick of “our soi-distant betters” controlling society to our detriment.

  290. Northwind Grandma and RandomActsofKarma, my husband and I decided that we would dress full-on 1972 for his 50th high school reunion last month. I found a maxiskirt that probably dates from the late 1960s to the early 1970s in a local vintage clothing shop and wore it and a 1970s era polyester blouse to the event. The maxiskirt is wool with a fitted waist and side zipper plus two belt loops for a coordinating cloth belt. Not having worn a maxiskirt back in the 1970s – I was a miniskirt gal then – I was quite pleasantly surprised by how comfortable and warm the maxiskirt is. If such a skirt becomes readily available I will buy and wear it around the house instead of the blue jeans I have been wearing for years as the best combination of comfort, value, and durability. I think the maxiskirt, in summer and winter versions, could exceed jeans on all counts.

    Anon123, count me in as another occultist in a long term, happy marriage with a non-occultist. Neither my husband or I had any spiritual practice when we first married. About 9 years into the marriage, we both started practicing Zen. About 14 years later, I began practicing Druidry and becoming interested in occultism while my husband continued practicing Zen. None of these shifts caused us any difficulty, because we don’t need to be doing or believing the same things or thinking the same thoughts. We simply love and support each other in whatever either of us chooses to do. Plus, learning and doing different things gives us more to talk about and learn from each other.

  291. Bei Dawei @247

    “Moral Orel” was always one of my favorites. The sincerity of Orel in trying to pursue religion (yet always slipping into becoming authoritarian about it) contrasted with the hypocrisy of the adults struck a true note with me.

    JMG:

    I agree that the people here in the US are getting sick of the non-stop moralizing by the loudest of our politicians. I took the popular referendums on abortion in Kentucky and Kansas as a sign that the issue is effectively neutralized for the populous, i.e. conservatives don’t want crazy restrictions on abortions to come back. I remember hearing some commentator on NPR after the Kansas referendum saying he could not figure out how the state voted to preserve abortion but still voted for conservative politicians. I guess it never occurred to him that the winds could have shifted on the one issue.

  292. JMG, when you have learned enough Portuguese, do try Guimarães Rosa. What he writes is not really the same language as what anybody else has ever written, but it’s worth it to learn Portuguese just to read his version of it. You can start with very short stories of his such as “A terceira margem do rio” (The Third Margin of the River). If you like him, you can try his magnum opus “Grande Sertão: Veredas”. The most common attribute used to describe Guimarães Rosa is “bruxo”, and I would love to read your opinion of him!

  293. Siliconguy, thanks for this! It’s worth having real-world data like this, as a good counterbalance to the abstract cheerleading so common in the solar field.

    Patricia M, thanks for this. How are you doing with all this?

    Northwind, I have a very specific theory as to why there’s so much demonic activity. It’s unpopular, but it fits the facts. After Trump’s election in 2016, a great many people on the leftward end of the pagan and occult scenes decided to use magic to overthrow him — the so-called Magic Resistance. Many of the rituals they used included invocations of demons. My theory is that that’s what did it. Demons can’t have much influence on the human world unless they’re invited in — and tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people invited them in, just because they couldn’t stand the fact that a thin majority of voters put someone they hated into the White House. There had been some demon-summoning going on in the sleazy end of the occult scene before that, but nothing on that scale…and afterwards, the derangement set in.

    Anonymous, I’m glad to hear this. You should be able to pick up the pieces from that book of essays and published material on Hermeticism, including (but not limited to) the books I wrote during my Hermetic period. My work has shifted in focus, but that’s still a worthwhile project.

    J.L.Mc12, the thing I found interesting was precisely that the authors dredged up a lot of data that doesn’t often get included in historical narratives, and in the process showed just how easily you can construct a historical narrative to suit any ideology you like.

    Chris S, exactly. Most Americans pick and choose between what the parties offer, because neither party offers a package most people will accept as a package deal.

    Aldarion, I’ll certainly keep him in mind. Right now I’m having fun with A Primiera Prelecao de Conhecimento da Aurora Dourada, aka the first Golden Dawn knowledge lecture; since I know it practically by heart in the English version, it’s very easy to pick up grammar and vocabulary in Portuguese, and the vocabulary is of particular interest to this old-school occultist!

  294. @Miow I think it is highly likely your mother cursed you and most likely anyone who had the misfortune of knowing her during that phase of her life. A curse (which comes from the Latin root “cursus” or course, such as a daily liturgy) is a cycle or feedback loop imposed on the target as a way of punishing them every time they engage in a specific behavior. Most people’s curses don’t work and immediately get recycled as blowback, like one wannabe witch I used to be friends with who tried to hex a public figure and apparently ended up giving her husband bone cancer. Your mom, for better or for worse, did a public service by stopping the power-tripping cop from giving out frivolous, trumped up tickets to people of modest means. As long as she truly has done a thorough “I don’t do that anymore” as far as her own cursing habits, she should not feel bad that she assisted the Universe in taking him out. Her karma will avenge that man’s death properly and in due time, just as my karma will bring my horrific misdeeds back to me, but how and when is not for any human to know, including your mom.

    As far as you are concerned, your mother’s curses cannot go back into Pandora’s box. They are what they are. For you, I think the trick is to look at your life and only amplify the blessings instead of the curses. You can do this by not complaining. Meaning, no excessive whining about lack of money, health ailments, how bad someone was to you, etc. Go ahead and acknowledge those struggles, especially in private, but don’t dwell unless it is in serious, silent discursive meditation. Every day, and nearly at every moment, if you find something or someone to be grateful for, your compulsive gratitude will go a long way in defeating and repelling curses laid upon you by your mom or anyone else.

  296. Re: demons. I watched this yesterday even though I’m not quite buying the Biblical angle stuff (had more than my fill of that for years and don’t vibe with it anymore). But there’s definitely something dark or ‘off’ about those rituals, and I’ve had a bad feeling about CERN for quite some time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsaoXuJ8kLQ I really don’t buy the Cernunnos-is-evil idea or the Bible apologistics anymore. I try to listen to things and take them in without passing too much judgment, even though I’ve got some real knee jerk feelings about some things. But I neither buy this video completely nor do I think CERN is something harmless or free from evil intent and evil consequences.

    Thank you for the input about periods. I have had massages in the past but i mostly don’t get them now, because they often make my pain worse. I have fibro, so managing pain is a life exercise. Being confined to bed for several days a month is an added difficulty though and I would like to get free from both of these issues! I don’t have very clotty blood and I’m not dehydrated. (I’m usually the one telling other people to hydrate). I do think there is something off about my hormone balance, though.

    I’ve never tried birth control pills. I’ve tried many natural & herbal remedies and they’ve all helped a bit, or some of the time, but nothing has actually made me functional for those days of the month, and i’ve had to accept bed rest as my life during that time. I don’t mind having time to rest, I just hate suffering and being so incapacitated. My mindset helps somewhat, but there’s no denying this takes a far bigger toll on my life than I’d like, and part of me looks forward to being too old for periods. Though it could be decades from now, and that’s not a real solution – “just wait for it to end.”

    I don’t have health insurance and my fear of doctors is such that it would be very difficult to allow any of them to get me on any pills at this point in my life. I’ve been actively harmed, invalidated and gaslit by the medical profession enough not to trust them even when fairly desperate, but I recognize there can be value in doctors and that my fear is a phobia at this point. That doesn’t mean I’m willing to take any of their pills right now. Even if I could find someone who would work with me and take into account my highly sensitive-to-medication physiology and the entire framework of my health challenges, which I by no means think would be easy.

    I somewhat think this is something I would do well to overcome, so that at least I can enter a doctor’s office without fear. I don’t know though. You haven’t lived my life so please don’t tell me it would be easy to let them experiment on me anymore. That sounds aggressive and I don’t mean it to be. People just don’t seem to realize how terrifying the medical profession can be if you’ve suffered from it. The absolute despair of realizing you may have been harmed for life by supposedly safe medication, after having a strange reaction to the first dose and being told that’s funny, well, try another dose and see what happens. ETC.

  297. In response to Castle #97 – mental health problems in women who suffered through the Great Depression or other times of scarcity could easily be related to malnutrition, especially as it was considered normal for women to have less to eat if there were men or children who needed food. Obviously there was sense in having the one who could go out and work eat enough so they could function, and for children to eat so they were more likely to survive, but there’s a toll to not having adequate nutrition that can reverberate through a life and there’s no denying there wasn’t an adequate diet for a lot of people in the depression (with refined foods and little to no vitamins or natural sources of vitamins in a healthy varied diet unless you were on a farm and grew your own). Trauma and malnutrition can do a real number on mental ability to function and that tends to create more trauma and havoc reverberating through the generations.

    Last year I read a book about food in the Depression and remember one story of a family who were down to their last money, no income for quite some time, the husband going out to ask once again for relief (you could only get food relief if you had sold everything so you weren’t sponging off the government, at the time), and the mother was in despair enough to decide to off herself and the kids with the gas oven. They were found in time, and there was enough shock about it that they got some help, but the time before any real safety net was a horrifying time we’ve none of us experienced and I hope never will. (I think they’re experiencing it in China now.)

    As well, in that book* I learned that the bread lines were considered a male-only affair and women were on their own, without even that somewhat inadequate backup for life’s hungry times. It’s shocking to me that women would rather starve than go anyway and shame people into letting them eat, but apparently there was a great deal of internalized shame about being hungry as a woman, you would rather starve than let anyone know you (as a single woman) didn’t have enough, or as a daughter or wife, that your husband or father couldn’t or wouldn’t provide for you. There have been studies about the genetic affects hunger has on the generations down the line, especially increasing obesity (bodies genetically primed to survive hungry times by packing on weight whenever possible).

    The studying I’ve done on nutrition (especially B vitamins) leads me to believe there’s a very strong mental health clarification. People with deficiencies short of, say, pellagra could still suffer intensely and not be able to function well. Add to that stress can actually increase the way we burn through nutrients, so we need better nutrition during hard times, and I can easily see a lot of wrecking balls going through a lot of family trees.

    I know very little about my own family tree during those dark days (there’s one inspiring “great grandmother who had a small dairy” story, and a grandmother who was very, very good at gathering wild foods, but otherwise little details have reached me), but there’s severe mental illness on both sides, all from around that time, and I suspect it’s related to hunger, malnutrition, and the trauma of those days. That doesn’t mean it’s stayed in that time, though. The way the colonists finally crippled the indian tribes was by starving them, and giving them “provisions” that were not nutritionally adequate. Nutritional requirements are simply not met by nutritionally stripped grain products and dodgy oils. And remember that flour wasn’t even “enriched” by putting back a few basic nutrients in those days, so most people, especially if they didn’t get a lot to eat or much variety, were probably malnourished by definition. If you didn’t live somewhere you could grow/forage/glean/hunt, and didn’t have money, it must have been a nightmare nutritionally.

    On a lighter note, in response to Grandma Northwinds re: cats elimination habits, my cat has two litter pans next to one another (her preference) and she absolutely uses one for pee and one for poo, and gets annoyed if I don’t clean them enough for her to stick with that! I’ve always thought it was rather odd, but it’s her preference. Cats seem to do better with multiple litter pans so they can be a bit fussy and tidy about it. Anything that helps avoid accidents is for the best, I say!

    *The book in question was A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, by Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe. A “good” read in the educational sense, though not exactly cheering.

  298. @JMG: I’m hanging in there; thanks. It is like waiting for the other shoe to drop, but on the other hand, I;m not on the front lines like my daughters. And the path he’s chosen to take (remind me to write up my own such documents from Florida and get them witnessed) is the most merciful one.

    Long, long ago. when I was working a number of temporary jobs. I worked for a family business in which the uncle, an old Holocaust survivor, went into the hospital for bladder cancer. Six painful, lonely, and expensive months later, he finally passed, in that sterile atmosphere. My sister, when her pancreatic cancer proved resistant to treatment, went into hospice care in her own home, surrounded by friends and family. Carol and Sarah and I flew in from Albuquerque to say our last Goodbyes and checked into a local hotel; and later attended her memorial (attended by her 800 best friends; the church she was secretary of, and heavens know who else), overflowed the church, the social hall, and the entire street. We stayed to see her ashes sent into the sea, as she requested. The first case felt appallingly wrong; my sister’s felt good and right and as they should be. Just my $0.02.

    BTW. Jean in Oregon, who has been a nurse’s aide in a nursing home, said what Phil just experiences is called “Terminal flare,” one last rally before going on. Carol is doing the right thing by flying out this week for this.

    Thanks for asking.

  299. @JMG re #73 reply to Samurai_47, if only enough renewables and lithium
    @Samurai_47 #68

    John – first thanks for doing so much promoting alternative religion and spirituality, it seems to me to be a major key to human happiness in the future, and currently the old-time religions have failed, but dogmatically don’t want to admit it; and the consensus materialistic response (“religion is all superstition”) is failing too, and those folks also doesn’t want to come clean. Thus the shrill absolutism going on at the expense of actual competence and balance, even in the best of the press, and the farthest reaches of the internet a teeming mess of alarmist/denialist misinformation. And even when one is trying, the complexity of the situations we’re faced with mean it can be hard to get to the truth.

    re lithium – Simon Michaux seems to be a reasonable source, I’ve cross checked his work in this area.
    On page 665 of
    https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf
    he shows there’s enough lithium, it’s cobalt that’s the issue.
    Thus the world’s EV makers (also the makers of stationary storage) are switching to LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate – F as in Fe) which requires no nickel or cobalt for their lower end vehicles.

    A quick check of the latest USGS lithium report
    https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-lithium.pdf
    shows 22 million (metric) tons of lithium reserves, and a total of 89 million tons of resources.
    It takes 8 kg of lithium per car battery:
    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02222-1
    22,000,000 tons of lithium / 0.008 tons/battery = 2,750,000,000 batteries (2.75 billion)
    There’s only 1.4 billion cars in the world.

    So, it doesn’t seem that saying _cannot_ because “not enough lithium” is a valid argument.
    _Will_ they be built is another issue – topsoil loss/depletion, the depredations of the ruling classes, climate change impacts, etc. leading to a general impoverishment, etc. leave me with ummm – an uncertain feeling. 😉

    re enough renewables – I don’t think you’re up to date on the rapid rollout of renewables.
    The IEA pv report:
    https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv
    says: “Solar PV generation increased by a record 179 TWh (up 22%) in 2021 to exceed 1 000 TWh.”

    As of Dec. 2021, there were 16 million electric vehicles on the world’s roads.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car

    If one assumes 15,000 miles/year (in excess of the typical quoted U.S. average), and
    500 Wh/mile (this is like a Ford F-150 Lighting electric pickup, not a 250 Wh/mile of a Tesla Model 3).
    one gets
    16,000,000 EVs x 15,000 miles/year/EV x 500 Wh/mile = 120,000,000,000,000 Wh
    or 120 TWh.

    That’s less than the _increase_ of 179 TWh that PV posted in 2021.
    Are you aware that PV has been growing at more than 20% a year for the past decade and more?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

    Even at just 20% growth, that’s doubling in 4 years:
    2022 1 TWp
    2023 1.2 TWp
    2024 1.44 TWp
    2025 1.728 TWp
    2026 2.07 TWp

    (Wp is “watt peak”, the rated output under the standard testing conditions for PV).

    Two more resources about PV and electricity sources:
    The Fraunhofer institute updates their PV report yearly. They have a lot to say about Germany of course, PV supplied 9.9% of Germany’s electricity in 2021, all renewables was 45.9%.
    There’s a lot in here about performance ratio, energy pay-back time, etc.
    https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/publications/studies/Photovoltaics-Report.pdf

    This site displays (an attempt) at realtime data for many countries electricity generation.
    https://www.electricitymaps.com/
    Look on the top for “Looking for the live map? It now lives here” and click “here”.
    It comes up with a list of the greenest regions in the left hand panel. Or one can scroll around.
    After clicking on a region or list item, the left hand panel shows consumption, carbon intensity, origin (and prices if available). One usually has to scroll down to see the last two.

    So for example: today South Australia at the moment has seen as much as 72% of their electricity coming from solar, most of the rest from wind, then gas.
    Even coal heavy Queensland saw almost half their daytime electricity coming from solar.

    California has seen up to 53% solar today, note that batteries are now (as the sun goes down) supplying about 5%.

    Other regions may say “estimated” at the header, not every grid operator has real-time info available. Some of the “estimated” are wrong, for instance Oahu has closed their coal plant but it still shows here.

  300. Anon123 @ 264

    > To JMG and the commentariat at large, what do you think of spending your life with a spouse who isn’t interested in spirituality in the same way you are?

    I have been in a relationship like you describe for 40+ years with my husband, call him “Ben,” the first B I can think of. I am the spiritual one, loving things like Buddhism and meditation. Ben is the material one, liking things like software and metalworking. He does not recognize his own spiritual side. I have had to accept that he has no awareness that he has an inner core, as hard as that has been for me to acknowledge and respect.

    You didn’t mention your girlfriend’s name, so I will call her “Ann,” the first A I thought of.

    From one to ten, ten being the most, one being the least, rate how much you care about Ann. This number will not change throughout your relationship. I will throw out a number for illustration’s sake. Say your rating is seven.

    Ask her how much she rates the strength in how much she cares about you? This number will stay the same throughout your relationship. I will throw out a number for illustration’s sake. Say it is a six.

    When you feel weak, her six will need to pick you up. How much do you trust her six to not buckle under your weight?

    When she feels weak, your seven will need to pick her up. How much will she trust your seven to not buckle under her weight?

    The difference between one of you being a seven and the other a six also does matter. One cares more.

    I have had to submerge the interests I have that Ben doesn’t share. Ben has had to submerge his interests that I don’t have. We have had to stretch, A LOT. A hell of a lot. Neither of us realized how much we would have to stretch. Stretching when UNready is painful.

    By age 25, each human has acquired a handful of interests. Those interests are idiosyncratic and are tantamount to soul-level interests (dreams). Those interests won’t change. No-one has the right to EVEN THINK they can change another’s soul, and that includes trying to change another’s interests. Trying to change the other results in the total wreck of the relationship. Don’t even think about it.

    Let’s return to the ratings. With your seven, do you feel you can “be happy for Ann” when she succeeds in one of HER dreams? Remember, you have no say whatsoever as to WHAT HER DREAM is. Do you WANT to be happy for Ann when she fulfills a dream of hers, even though you may not understand her dream, except at face-value?

    With her six, does she feel she can “be happy for you” when you succeed in one of your dreams? Remember, she has no say whatsoever as to WHAT YOUR DREAM is. Does she WANT to be happy for you when you fulfill a dream of yours, even though she may not understand your dream, except at face-value?

    In this sort of relationship, you both will have to stretch, a lot. If you have little desire or ability to stretch, then see it for what it is. In order for your souls not to shrink over time, you both will have to make other friends who understand part of you better. Are you open to these other friends? Is she? You will have to find people who share your interest in Buddhism, or else that part of your soul will shrink — if that shrinking is not to your liking, you will have to figure out the discrepancy, now or kick the can to a future time.

    Living with Ben, part of my soul shrank. It was not his fault. He was not responsible.

    It was vice versa also. Him being with me, part of Ben’s soul shrank. It was not my fault. I was not responsible.

    Decide what in your life you want to expand, from day-one. Let’s say you want Buddhism to expand in your life, but Ann can’t relate to Buddhism — the end result would be that the relationship won’t work. YOU decide what interests you have that you cannot live without, so do not add people to your life who don’t share that interest. No-one has the right to try to make you believe that you will have to “make-do without Buddhism” — that means another person is trying to change your soul, and that is never a good idea. Unless you and Ann are both a level-8 (fairly strong), the whole relationship will likely blow up in a few years, because of broken dreams and broken interests.

    I can speak from experience that one party being of a spiritual bent, and the other not, is rough and uncomfortable. Because no-one has a crystal ball, one works with probabilities.

    As for me, I have had to contend with Ben not supporting my interest in Buddhism and meditation. That is not quite true, because when I insist, he supports me. I think he just doesn’t think of it. When I fall down regarding Buddhism or meditation, he is not there to pick me up. He lets me fall. He has not reinforced my interest in Buddhism and meditation. My drive regarding Buddhism and meditation has to be very strong, and then I can bypass Ben’s prejudices. But Ben never prompts me to do anything Buddhist or meditation. He is not interested, where he doesn’t even know intelligent questions. He has known since day-one that I am very interested in Buddhism and meditation. He doesn’t stop me pursuing these interests but also never encourages me either. I feel sad sometimes because he does not see a bug hunk of me. Buddhism and meditation are so much a part of me, yet he is incapable of understanding that side of me. I don’t think he is unwilling, it is just that he doesn’t care about Buddhism and meditation. I make OTHER friends who help me in my pursuit of things Buddhist and meditation.

    They same thing regarding Ben’s interest in metalworking. I have difficulty relating. Also, I need space from him, which translates to my need to honor my own interests.

    To our credit, we never got into shaming and blaming. From the beginning, we were mature enough to have held our tongues. Once shaming or blaming enter, there is no way to recover the innocence that is gone. Shaming and blaming are fatal to a relationship.

    Holding one’s tongue is VERY important. With Ben, I speak out loud maybe half of what comes to mind. It is part of my being “care”ful.

    So, that has been my long-term. I think Ben and I both started out as eights, and remained so. Eight means that we have been able to weather the storms, which have been aplenty. The eight was the glue.

    If I had to do it over again, would I? One can only choose a spouse from the limited number of people we meet personally. I remember Ben’s and my first months. We met by happenstance. We stayed together by happenstance. He had his emotional baggage, and I had mine. All we had was our eights. A-wing-and-a-prayer of being eights. Past meets current meets future. None of us has a crystal ball. We work with probabilities. There is no chance I could have foreseen Ben’s and my state of affairs in 1980 in upstate New York to how we got to Wisconsin forty years later, and how we felt about what happened in the meantime.

    Go back to the ratings. If you both are an eight-nine-or-ten, the relationship very well may work. If you are both a six-or-seven, I would be doubtful that the relationship can survive — it probably would entail angst. Five or below would probably mean active suffering. If you come up with an honest eight, and she too, well, it has a good chance of being a success over time.

    I think an eight would be a bare minimum both of you would have to rate your desire to support each other’s non-shared interests.

    It seems to be a Western thing that one person has to jive 100% with a spouse. It pretty much never works that way. No-one has a duplicate. Also, if one lived in 1830 in frontier country where one lived in a log cabin and there were bears outside the door, whether one’s spouse is spiritual or not wouldn’t particularly matter — then it would be how much you two work together on a material plane.

    As civilization-decline happens, in my opinion, the material sphere will become more important — I don’t know — JMG, is this the case?

    Anyway, this is just me. Stuff to think about. Assume I know nothing.😐

    Good luck.☘️May you live long and prosper.

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  301. RandomActsOfKarma 267

    Thank you‼️I love things like expandability in garments. Is there a webpage that explains the concept. I would love to know details. Does the process involve snaps?

    One thing I have been thinking about is, is there a way to make a yoke hang at different angles in the same blouse. All I can think of is a peasant blouse, using gathers.

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  302. A, I hope you don’t think I’m discussing demons from a Biblical angle! Au contraire, traditions from all over the world, polytheist as well as monotheist, recognize the existence of malevolent spiritual beings and offer various modes of protection against them! As for the medical profession, my only child was killed by a doctor’s malpractice, and I know literally dozens of other people who were harmed or killed by medical business as usual, so you’re preaching to the choir here.

    Patricia, glad to hear it. The hospital route has always seemed to me the worst way to go.

    Sunnnv, yes, I’ve heard those claims. I’ve also heard alternative claims that suggest much, much smaller quantities available. Since the sources that claim ample supplies of lithium generally have a financial incentive to make those claims, while many of the others have no dog in the fight, I have my doubts about the figures you’ve quoted. Still, no doubt we’ll see one way or another.

  303. Hi John Michael,

    Had some fun and hope you enjoyed. 🙂

    Hi Siliconguy,

    Dunno about your part of the world, but down here over the past dozen years I reckon about 10% of the year (that’s 36 days) you’re going to get less than one hour of peak sunlight (sometimes as little as 15 minutes for an entire day). I’ve set my life up to rely upon slightly less than one hour of peak sunlight energy harvested from the 8kW solar PV system with batteries. Mostly, you can make up the difference the following day. However, for 2% of the year (that’s 7 days every year), without adding in some charge from a fossil fuel source (i.e. a generator) the batteries would run flat (i.e. 20% state of charge).

    I dunno man, but I tell people that the sun doesn’t shine at night, the wind might not blow, and you can be in a drought – and they inevitably suggest that I’m lying. They need to give it a go for themselves.

    Cheers

    Chris

  304. A
    I’m definitely not going to tell you to let doctors experiment on you. I’ve had some fairly bad experiences with the medical profession myself and am firmly of the opinion I need to listen to my own body and be the one to decide what is working and what is not. The experimenter is me. This includes tapering off and stopping medications that were causing unacceptable sideffects or were no longer needed, without asking the doctor or informing them until after the fact. I’m still kind of cheesed off that one I was on for ten years caused worsened gum recession/gingevitis/periodontal disease and I didn’t realize the meds were causing it because none of that was on the list of potential sideffects. I would have gone off that one a lot sooner if I had known.

    There’s also the issue that birth control pills are not all the same, and have different effects on different people. It took me some experimentation to find one that worked for me. It would likely not work perfectly on the first one you tried, if you were to choose to try them.

    If you ever find yourself in a place where you have a doctor you can trust, and you are willing and able to experiment with medications, birth control pills are something that might work. I also have fibromyalgia and my period issues do seem to be solidly hormonal, so we may have similar root causes. Maybe one day, if you haven’t found another solution to the periods outside the medical system and are willing and able to cope with doctors…

    I really hope you find something that helps with your periods. Periods can be absolutely horrible, and most people (women included) don’t really understand because they’ve never experienced the kind of pain I think we’re talking about.

  305. I have had a small solar installation on my house for the last 22 or 23 years.

    A couple data points (1) the local “transfer station” ( the dump) had a sign on the intake booth, no solar panels allowed to be brought in

    (2) Yes, panels really do degrade on output, mine have. Mine actually are giving less power than expected even given the expected degradation, It would take someone going on the roof to try and determine if one of the panels is broke, but this won’t happen, because first, no solar installer will do that kind of small job, If they did, the labor cost would be prohibitive. I have a 2 story house with a metal roof, that is steep enough that an old lady like me wouldn’t be safe trying to trouble shoot this myself. I am fine with the lower output as my strategy is to disperse and simplify for critical needs. So, I plan on hooking up two panels that I bought used straight to the well pump, which will run off of DC power straight for solar panels when the sun shines, I have water storage tanks, so I don’t need well pumping on demand. I have practiced using water from the tanks with the other water pump, pump from tank to house off. The biggest issue when water pressure is low like that, as my tanks are not that much uphill of the house, is low flow aerators on facets. A normal low flow showered will not work on gravity feed water from my tanks. But, High Sierra shower heads, made in California, have a unique design that works with any pressure, including my gravity feed. Some kitchen faucets I can take the restrictor out of, I have a 1940s vintage double sink with original faucet that whenever I can get to it and put that in the kitchen, it will work even better as it has no restrictors. The point is to have water at very low power and simplicity of parts and not reliant on grid power or my aging main solar system.

    California right now makes moving people to time of use pricing, it is .42/kWh between 4 and (pm, yes, that is when everyone is at home needing to make dinner, use electronics and do laundry. This is while they are pushing more and more to all electric power. Their charts from the California agency I have posted here before clearly show the issue of power drop off every day, when the solar stops and then shows the CA grid importing electricity from out of state. We now import about 30% of our electricity, if I recall, due to the fact that solar electric and wind are intermittent. CA as the leader in conversion to the green dream of all electric is actually getting more dependent on imported energy, not less, as it increases solar installs. There has been 3 fires in the very large moss landing grid battery storage facilities, I believe it has been 3 fires in the 2 years, battery fires. This facility used to be a natural gas fired electricity producing plant, the amount of storage there is so much smaller than what is was capable of producing. The storage CA is trying to get would only smooth out small daily mismatches, so trying to have it for that 4-9 pm time period. Right now most Californians heat with natural gas heat. CA wants everyone to go all electric. But, we need heat in the winter, when there is less sunlight hours. It is not possible, well most of where they think we will go is not possibe=le, but it is really not possible to have battery storage to go from summer sunlight excess generation to winter need of heat.

    Heat is our most critical need for health and comfort. I have a wood stove and would like to explore coppiced trees, biomass, as a fuel source because I don’t use l

    I hope this is somewhat coherent. I actually cannot read anything I am typing, something is wrong with the reply window, don’t know if it is on year end or mine.

  306. @JMG

    If the AMOC did shut down, and Western Europe became somewhat colder, what effect do you suspect that would have on the flow of mass migration? Cold temperatures and crop failures might make the region much less appealing to migrants, but on the other hand, it might hasten Europe’s demographic decline…

  307. Late in the blog cycle, but let me throw in a couple of things:

    – JMG, some years ago, on one of your blogs, you mentioned the rise of new syncretic religions, and gave the rise of Santa Muerte as an example. I wonder whether you’ve seen this recent article on the topic by Rod Dreher? As you would expect from him, he is disturbed by it, but I found it an interesting piece: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/santa-muerte-the-spiritual-realities-of-the-drug-war/

    – Regarding world events, I’m starting to feel that there has been some kind of massive shift and slippage in global energies. The mass protests in both China and Iran may lead to changes there, but I think both regimes could make accommodations to the protestors’ demands and remain in power. With regards to China, it’s worth observing that current demographic trends are for a huge bulge in the number of elderly, supported by a shrinking cohort of workers. If the Party were to relax its no-Covid policy, and the virus spread widely, that group of retirees would be decimated. It would be a national trauma, from which the population would emerge both angry and, on average, much younger. Anyone hoping for a new government which is more amenable to the West is likely to be disappointed. Same in Iran: even if the mullahs are overthrown, Iranians are likely to remember who deposed their last democratically-elected leader and installed the Shah in his place. Meanwhile, Europe is deindustrialising and starting to see that the US is profiting… and both Iran and Saudi Arabia are moving towards membership of the SCO snd BRICS – the membership of which has helped calm tensions between India and China… Oh, and India’s population is about to overtake China’s… Change is accelerating, I can’t help feeling…

    – About Russophobia, and connecting it with Twitter… What’s the percentage of staff that Twitter has shed? I haven’t been following closely, but I gather it’s very large, yet the company still operates fine. Turns out that all those PMC staff didn’t contribute too much. I suspect that something similar is happening re: Russia. During the lockdowns, here in the UK at least, it became apparent that the really valuable and essential people in our society were the despised and low-paid workers at the bottom, who actually make things work. As the lockdowns eased, the PMC could begin to forget this again and convince themselves that their own contribution really was as valuable as they’d always thought – but the economic crunch that was supposed to bring Russia down is instead highlighting once again that a professor, journalist, HR manager, etc etc really isn’t as necessary to a functional society as they would like to think. This makes them upset and angry; they fear losing their positions, and have little idea about what else they might do.

    – Ah well: I’ve collected a few sewing machines, both electric and hand-crank, and will soon begin learning how to make clothes from commercial patterns… Perhaps I’ll be able to start a sideline making and selling house dresses and maxiskirts….

  308. Thanks to Raphanus, I started to look through Heinlein’s science fiction, and through further searching for authors of the same period found the actual story I was looking for.

    It is Natural State by Damon Knight, as published in the January 1954 issue of Galaxy. It is found at archive.org if anyone wants to read.

  309. >afterwards, the derangement set in.

    Nah, the screaming bluehairs were deranged before The Orange One became popular, you just weren’t aware of it. But if you had the pleasure of dealing with them, it was clear fairly early on they had a few screws loose, elevator didn’t go all the way, etc. And they also had absolutely no morals or ethics that I could see either. It truly was/is/will be a castle of mashed potatoes.

    Perhaps they were given unholy strength and loudness though. Their screams carried much much farther than they did prior and their hair became an unholy shade of blue. The direction of the vector didn’t change so much as the quantity. Then again, a quantitative difference can turn into a qualitative difference. You scale something up and it changes into something completely different.

  310. @Northwind Grandma,

    I will ask my husband if he has a book or website with an actual pattern, but basically it is a gathered skirt with “tails” on the waistband. The waist of the skirt (with the gathers) is longer than what you think you need. You leave a small (6″) opening in the skirt (like if you were going to add a zipper, but you don’t add a zipper). When you put on the skirt, you can overlap the excess, so the opening is covered and you wrap the tails of the waistband around, like a self-belt. I don’t really like how I look with gathers around my waist, so I wear a wide belt on top of it.

    If you are interested, I can take pictures of my skirt, if that would help.

    @SLClaire,

    I never thought of a winter maxi skirt! I love them in the summer, because I despise panty hose. But I guess in the winter, I could wear warm knee socks. Hmm… I know what I shall be looking for the next time I need winter clothes!

  311. @Northwind Grandma,
    Thank you for the data! I too would not know what to make of the five species you mentioned not showing up. It is probably too early to tell. It may be that those are sporadic in your area anyway. I’m glad that the other birds are showing up abundantly.
    In Japan, I find the forest birds to be doing well. I see open-space birds tending to relocate, but hang in there, while migratory birds seem to be having trouble. I’ve been keeping track of bird migrations as a climate marker for the past decade, but one after another has failed to return, or returns, but not to our area. This year, the dusky thrush has not arrived from Siberia for wintering like it did, abundantly, until now. It is more than a month late as of now. The great reed warbler apparently arrived in spring, but I didn’t see one until mid-summer. (A local shrike mimics it all year, but sits up in a pine tree or on an antenna.) The loss of those two birds leaves me with only swans as my marker. There are other birds, and they start to sing at a certain time each year, and it can seem like they are migrating, but they turn out to be year-round residents. Aside from the swans and associated waterfowl, I’m running out of migratory birds to watch!
    If you’d like, I can put in a prayer that your birds stay safe. I’ll be praying for mine over here.

  312. All–

    A fascinating nugget in the hyperlinked table of contents of the Federal Register deposited to my email inbox over the holidays (I’ve signed up to keep tabs on things coming out of FERC and the DOE). For those who enjoy the nebulous intricacies of bureaucracy, there is a hybrid online/live meeting of the Administrative Conference of the United States scheduled for Dec 15th:

    https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2022-11-28/pdf/2022-25895.pdf

    With information re public access here:

    https://www.acus.gov/meetings-and-events/plenary-meeting/78th-plenary-session

    Per the notice: : The Administrative Conference of the United States makes recommendations to federal agencies, the President, Congress, and the Judicial Conference of the United States regarding the improvement of administrative procedures (5 U.S.C. 594).

  313. @Anon123,

    A lot of others have already shared valuable comments to your question, and I‘d like to add yet another angle to look at this:

    Maybe it‘s not so much about sharing the interest in occult practices, but about sharing a general interest in growing alongside each other.

    Looking around me, there are people who are still essentially the same as they were 20 years ago. Other people have changed substantially in some ways. (I don‘t mean outer change here, but inner change: letting go of issues, becoming a more loving or more patient person, being willing to take a good, hard look at one‘s own shadow sides or one‘s own demons, letting go of major prejudices, changing one’s worldview substantially, etc)

    That change can be brought about in many different ways, I think: by some kind of occult or spiritual practice, by other ways of introspection or „work“ on one‘s own self, maybe by arts, martial arts, yoga or other practices, or for some people it simply happens.

    The important thing imo is that if one of the partners changes over time, that the other partner is willing and able to change alongside – and vice versa.

    That doesn‘t mean that you always have to believe in the same things, or say or do the same things – quite the contrary! But if your occult work will lead you to inner change and your partner isn‘t willing to go there, you will most likely run into trouble at some point.

    Example: Most people are prone to judging other people, and sometimes harshly. Your occult work might lead you to become more loving and forgiving, and over time to stop with this. However, your partner is still actively talking about and judging other people while the two of you have dinner – but this doesn‘t feel right to you anymore. At some point, dinner conversation will become a burden on both of you.

    So for me, the important thing isn‘t whether somebody shares your interests or not, but whether they share your own level of willingness to become a different („better“) person over time. This isn‘t easy to judge from the outside because it‘s not about superficial practices, but about an inner ability to change even if that change isn‘t comfortable at times. It‘s not even easy to judge this about yourself, as we all like to believe we‘re on the way to becoming Buddha or a saint 😉 – and in the end, it‘s probably a leap of faith that you must take at this point with your relationship. But that‘s what I would use as my main guidance.

    Milkyway

  314. Zak #84 Regarding hydration fixation there is definitively a small element of PMC superiority complex purity contest within it. A sort of “scientific studies say this is healthiest behavior and those who don’t drink water are ignorant”. Something relating to that which makes me uneasy in a way I cant explain are the motivational saying water bottles that urge a person to get through 32 oz of water in a day. But I like most things its isn’t a black or white issue but a lot of grey.

    Solely subsisting on HFCS based beverages or having urine a dark brown color are not exactly healthy. Also looking at the average amount of sodium in fast food or fast casual chain dining options makes me parched just to consider. Also intaking a lot of water leaves a person feeling more full and less likely to overconsume dense caloric foods that are much of the modern diet.

    My mother, who is a vegan, very health conscious and active in her 70s, is an obsessive drinker of water. When I go hiking with her she has to repeatedly urinate and I have had to ask her why she doesn’t see it as problematic that she is urinating multiple times per hour. I even made the suggestion to her to drink slightly less water when she plans on being away from bathroom facilities. Which she reacts to like I am speaking some sort of ungodly blasphemy. My mother grew up Catholic and the purity contests of veganism and maybe hydration are concepts she has been easily roped into.

    I myself do drink great deal of water but I not as blinded by whatever as my mother and can make conscious decisions to drink less water when constant urination would be inconvenient (long car rides, before bed, extended walking in urban areas).

    There is also a money making scheme within the hydration obsession as well. In the past 5 years dozens of hydration products (powders, premixed drinks, drop and tablets) have entered the market. A powder of a few minerals and salt can command a heavy mark up and i think that’s why so many companies have got into the game. The general consensus is that these hydration/electrolyte “solutions” are only really necessary for intense physical exertion in warm conditions. The electrolytes lost in the average level of activity can be easily replaced by normal diet.

  315. The comments about demons brought up this thought that the modern “scientific” name for a demon is sociopath or psychopath. There are many traditions that keep them away, best to use ones you are comfortable with. Oft time the land itself, where you physically live, will guide you in this.

  316. John–

    A random Tree of Life question. Back in my graduate studies (MS in Mathematics), I dabbled in graph theory among other subjects. Looking at the Tree of Life as a graph (vertices connected by edges which partition a plane into “tiles” or segments), is there any lore associated with the “faces” or plane segments by the paths? If not, it would be an interesting subject for exploration.

  317. @ Sunnv #299

    Re lithium supplies

    Certainly, as you note, Lithium is not the only potential constraint. A few points to consider when discussing lithium, though:

    1) Car batteries are not the only batteries under consideration. The utility-scale battery systems that will be needed to “smooth out” the intermittent production of wind and solar generation at higher levels of grid penetration are competing for that same limited supply.

    2) How economically extractable are those cited reserves?

    3) Who controls those reserves? Just because they exist somewhere in the world doesn’t mean that one’s country (the US, in my case) will have access to them. (That isn’t to say that US policymakers aren’t *presuming* that they will have access and I suspect said policymakers are in for a very rude awakening when that turns out to not be the case.)

  318. A #296: (NOT medical advice, just some suggestions based on my experience!) “I do think there is something off about my hormone balance though”: since you have a fear of doctors, you may want to look for a nurse practitioner in your area who specializes in women’s health and ask him/her to prescribe blood tests to check hormone levels (especially useful if you can take the tests at the same part of your cycle, say the 10th day, two months in a row – that would show you a pattern). That would also help the CNP to prescribe the right type of BC pill (progesterone only, estrogen-progesterone, etc.). You might ask about “bioidentical hormone creams” if you want to try a more natural approach. States’ laws vary, but in my state CNPs are allowed to prescribe blood tests and medications. I second JMG’s massage recommendation; also, consider acupuncture.

  319. I have a question regarding the legitimacy of the threat of a central digital currency/ social credit score, especially in a supposed attempt in financial “reset.” After speaking with a couple network administrators, they do not see it as plausible because the internet has become so frail – what will happen if people can only access their money through the internet but the internet is intermittently down for a day, a week, a month at a time? Apparently routers take an average of a year to acquire right now, and such is only going to get worse. Not to mention running out of space on IPV4 and a faltering attempt to make more indexing space… Is this another example of the “elites” of a failing age being stubbornly out of touch from the knowledge of their workers? It seems the most likely scenario if the government attempts to hand you a card that has “new money” on it, as well as your personal data, is crash and burn within a time-frame of certainly less than a year, then a mad rush back to the old system, and further chaos. Thoughts?

  320. @Northwind Grandma and “demons everywhere.” I’d be really careful about that, considering how easy it is to project your Shadow onto somebody, and what form that usually takes.

    Also, I remember the Great Satanic Conspiracy Panic of the 1980s &1990s. Satanic Ritual Abuse of children was said to be everywhere, though IIRC, the FBI kept saying they never saw any evidence of it. I also remember news stories about parents or members of some off-brand church groups being arrested for torturing or killing a child they were trying to “drive the Devil out of.”

    NPR et. al. are claiming the panic never went away because QAnon is still spreading that talk about Satanists Everywhere, though what QAnon spreads is nowhere near being accepted by en masse today. But, once again, be careful.

  321. yves #237 & Grandma #283

    re the smell of pee

    The reason urine is not a problem in a properly used biolitter toilet is that pee can take several pathways, and in a biolitter toilet you are helping it to take the non-toxic and pleasant one. When mixed with biolitter urine immediately begins to compost, and compost has little smell. Certainly no bad smell.

    This is why you can keep pigs, sheep and other animals in a “deep-bedded” system (involving lots of straw, old hay, or other biolitter) and have zero smell factor in your livestock barn. We have done both (deep bedded livestock housing, and biolitter human toileting) on this farm, with great success in avoiding smells – especially, we never had any bad smells during the years we raised pigs.

    The “smell” of urine when it cannot compost, and therefore goes bad, whether in dry toilet systems or in livestock barns, is the smell of ammonia, from the toxic (non-composting) breakdown of urea in the pee, and it is among the things that also turns biological wastes into toxic wastes when they are handled without a biolitter component, or when the biolitter component is not added generously enough.

    The website I cited earlier – humanurehandbook.com – goes into all of this in great detail. Short version – there is absolutely no reason to separate pee from poo – what you need is more biolitter. All of it makes good compost, and it would be a waste to let it become toxic.

  322. A #203 and Bei Dawei #244
    A comment if I may. About 5 years ago there was a “witchy” group in Lisbon/Portugal that had ceremonies in one (at least one) of the city parks to offer their menstruation blood to the trees and the Mother. It was for the most part a private ceremony but any secret that is known to more than one person is no longer a secret.
    The problem is that there was ate least one bag of walking pus and entropy that used to search for it to snatch away its power and use it.
    So please, if anyone is going to do this, Be Silent.
    Whispers

  323. Anybody – re periods.

    I just want to say that “harmonising menstrual cycles” is something that we do as a matter of course in TCM oriented acupuncture clinics. We have many useful theoretical framings and many practical tools for doing so. Not everyone will benefit, of course. But I have seen many, many women find relief from difficult periods, difficult premenstrual syndromes, as well as various syndromes that hang on a menstrual cycle (like migraines) and some of them have also come back to report changes that were visible in their medical scans (like visible reductions in the size of cysts, visible reductions in exogenous endometrial tissue, and so on).

    If anyone has a handle on harmonising a menstrual cycle, it is probably a TCM practitioner, and while I really hate to toot my horn, I would definitely recommend asking around for a local TCM practitioner (acupuncture and/or herbs) for dealing with menstrual cycle problems. Especially, anyone who knows of a young woman, who is already experiencing difficult periods, please, please, consider recommending a TCM practitioner. None of us will tell you that any of your symptoms are something that you just have to put up with! All of us will do our best to bring your cycle into a more harmonious set of transitions from one phase to another.

  324. Re bureaucrats bureacratting their bureaucracy

    I took a look at the seal/logo of the Administrative Conference of the US, more easily visible on the homepage:

    https://www.acus.gov/

    and I noticed that its motto is “To Form a More Perfect Union” (through better administrative procedure, of course!)

    Fun times…

  325. @JMG – re higher self

    Where did you come across the notion of higher self asleep during one’s physical incarnation?

    Does your cosmology have a concept of future selves?

  326. https://www.shakespearestudyguide.com/Folio.html

    The first authorized print edition of Shakespeare’s plays wasn’t released until 1623 – the First Folio. Any texts prior to that were manuscripts sold by actors or based on notes from performances.
    Given that anachronisms in question are present in the First Folio, one must ask how faithful the First Folio is to the actual original text. Given that the First Folio wasn’t produced until after Shakespeare’s death, the editors would have had to rely on all of the manuscript evidence, which unfortunately probably included contemporary performances.
    Until the introduction of modern critical textual theory by Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort, the instinct was to favor the “fuller text”, i.e. the text with more wording, under the assumption that you lose things in transciption and copying. What Westcott and Hort were able to demonstrate with the earliest manuscripts of the Biblical New Testament was that this instinct also extended to the copyists themselves, and it was demonstrated in many places in the Received(Byzantine) text of the NT where text had been added that could not be substantiated as original by the earliest manuscripts.
    Given that the production of manuscripts of R&J from 1597 to 1623 would be entirely a pirated affair and not overseen by anyone with authority over the text, I find it highly probable that much was added to the original text, mainly by those other than Shakespeare, but perhaps also by Shakespeare himself.
    That being said, the relatively concise nature of Q1 is a huge attestation to it’s originality. With the publication of Q2 (which is one-third longer than Q1) and the bias towards a fuller text, no attention would be paid to Q1, except to call it a “bad quarto”. Q2 would, from it’s point forward, be the basis for later editions of R&J. I will go so far as to say that what we consider the “text” of Q2 as it existed originally is likely not the original text of Q2. Q3 was based on Q2, Q4 was based on Q3, and Folio 1 was based on Q3 and Q4.
    Q1 then represents the single text of its line, with Q2/3/4/F1/etc being a separate line. This very very similar to the situation with the Biblical NT, with the earliest texts (the Alexandrian) not persisting long before being overtaken by fuller texts (the Byzantine and its many heirs).
    The tidbit of Thybalt and arithmetic fencing, instead of being of a weird matter of time travel or premonition, I think proves everything I am saying. There is no way such a detail would be in any text prior to 1610, and definately not prior to 1600. This immediately proves that any existing text with that detail cannot be closer to the original than 1610, and if it claims to be a copy of an earlier quarto, then it is immediately identifiable as an emended/unfaithful copy produced in 1610 or later. Given that everything from Q2 forward contains this bit, it turns out Q1, which doesn’t have it, becomes extremely trustworthy, despite the reputation it has gained.

  327. “A” 296

    > Fibro {fibromyalgia}

    I am sorry you have had to go through what you have endured. Thank you for sharing.

    I was poisoned by the prescription drug:

    depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA)

    around 1982. It caused permanent disability, including fibromyalgia. My life was over. After forty years of trying to get well, as much as I tried, recovery never happened.

    Something went horribly wrong — I have no words to describe “this loss of life.” When I feel sad, I say that I am tired and need sleep, remembering others are feeling as wretched as I do, and I send blessings to them, that they should enjoy some simple pleasures. Crying is futile because nothing changes.

    I downright loathe the healthcare industry and pharmaceutical industry. Both deserve to crash and burn,—the sooner, the better. The vast majority of those involved don’t give a flying F about people.

    I would like to mention a product that has helped me alot. The name is “Adr” (yes, three letters) standing for adrenal, by Loomis Enzymes, a company local to my region. I have been taking it for a couple years and actually don’t feel exhausted by noon. However, it is expensive.

    Twice a month acupuncture helps too.

    —————
    Bogatyr 307

    > Perhaps I’ll be able to start a sideline making and selling house dresses and maxiskirts

    Laughing out loud.😆Go for it‼️

    (I am currently eating a spicy Andouille sausage, so I feel like this😝.)

    —————
    Warm regards to both,

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  328. On demons, Buddhism has just about every kind of spirit imaginable. Some of them convert to Buddhism, or even achieve enlightenment, which I guess means that we have to think of them as very ugly angels! Basically what happened was that every pre-Buddhist culture’s mythology got grafted on, without much concern for systematization. If Ireland ever becomes Buddhist, then I guess we’ll get Buddhist leprechauns!

    I’m not terribly interested in spirits myself, but try not to be prejudiced against particular classes of beings, and will happily accept assistance from any demons, ghosts, local divinities, etc. who serve the cause of love and compassion.

  329. @A – and anyone – re CERN

    I came from a Christian background, went out into the world around 1973 (Yom Kippur War -> Arab Oil Embargo, Hal Lindsey’s book _The Late Great Planet Earth_, and all that end of the world, rapture stuff). I was out there on the street with Bible tracts in hand “Are you saved Brother?”, “Sister, do you have Jesus in your heart?”.

    Then I was forced to take a philosophy class (part of the honor’s program), and soon left Christianity.

    Are you familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? (or similar concepts).
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
    n.b. I’m unhappy with the wiki article’s rigid insistence that Maslow said one must complete each stage, etc., so if you’ve never heard of this, read the wiki page with a grain of salt to get a broad outline but don’t get hung up on details. But the point is, we are motivated by needs and when the basic needs are somewhat satiated, we turn our attention to “higher” needs.

    We live in a time of great physical abundance, even to the point of being a fools paradise, no fear of starvation or freezing to death. Which turns the focus on meaning/value.

    Most conventional religions, particularly in the West, have never really comes to grips with modernity. They have no good answer to Galileo, Darwin, etc., and avoid parapsychology/psychical research like the plague (because then they’d be faced with reincarnation, etc – and it’d be too shameful to stand up in front of the congregation after preaching hellfire and damnation for decades and say “I was wrong”). Yet science and technology have demonstrated great things (and some not so great things), and so have a certain mantel of prestige.

    So certain preachers/commenters/…, in search of meaning, value, money!, relevance, more money!, etc. try and latch onto any little thing to stand out from the crowd and get support/ad clicks/views/money!/…, either by trying to wrap themselves in the mantel of science, or attempts to try and claim the mantle itself by debunking that science.

    The world is very complex, and it is easy to think one knows things well enough to make meaningful comments/actions, but in fact be clueless.

    CERN’s LHC is a particle accelerator, the latest in a long line of them built since 1932.
    https://cas.web.cern.ch/sites/default/files/lectures/zakopane-2006/tazzari-history.pdf
    Nice historical pictures, but a lot of physics shorthand. The wiki might be easier to understand:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_accelerator

    The only thing new is the maximum energy of the accelerator.

    BUT – nature, in the form of cosmic rays, etc. has, since time immemorial, vastly exceeded those energies. CERN is now at 13.6 Tev, such an energetic particle hits each square meter – a bit more than a square yard – of the earth’s atmosphere every few hours.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray
    Given the Earth’s area of 500 trillion square meters, in the time it takes to read this sentence, millions of such particles and many of higher energies have plastered the planet. Any demonic invasions?

    So, if there are black holes, worm holes, etc. to be formed, they don’t have any effects humans have ever noticed.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_high-energy_particle_collision_experiments

    The guy’s just another in a long line of alarmists, consciously lying or not, using fear to sell himself, earn a buck, feel important/superior/clever and/or distract himself from mundane life, the failures of his religion, and the real problems we’re facing of fossil fuel depletion, ecological overshoot, and climate change.

    The riff off Shiva, etc. is a bunch of xenophobic alarmist baloney. He doesn’t know that when the first A-bomb was detonated, Robert Oppenheimer thought of Shiva. Humankind ought to have some sober thoughts about our awesome power to destroy.
    https://www.wired.co.uk/article/manhattan-project-robert-oppenheimer
    https://www.atomicarchive.com/media/videos/oppenheimer.html
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event

  331. “There is also a money making scheme within the hydration obsession as well. In the past 5 years dozens of hydration products (powders, premixed drinks, drop and tablets) have entered the market. A powder of a few minerals and salt can command a heavy mark up and i think that’s why so many companies have got into the game. The general consensus is that these hydration/electrolyte “solutions” are only really necessary for intense physical exertion in warm conditions. ”

    Yes indeed. At the chemical plant they were freely available in the summer.When it’s 100 F outside and you are wearing the full get up (steel toes boots, gloves, hardhat, safety glasses and Nomex coveralls (or fire-resistant jeans and long sleeved shirt) you really do need them.

    The popular one at work was Sqwincher. They had both powder packs or concentrates. I bought my own for hot summer work or hiking. I’ve had heat exhaustion twice, not recommended. The West will fool an Easterner, the sweat evaporates so fast it doesn’t drip off your nose, so you don’t realize you are running out of salt until you get woozy.

    Wisconsin, “It’s muggy today” means 80% humidity.
    Eastern Washington, “It’s muggy today” means 30% humidity. It’s often 15% during summer afternoons, the air will suck you dry right quick.

  333. JMG, I’m guessing you’re of a lucky minority who are living in the proper place and way to not be at such risk, but I’m also aware that it’s possible the mainstream media are fabricating or exaggerating a lot of the stories, I just want to be prepared and get to the safe places. About the land, that’s beautifully said and exactly what I’ve had in mind but didn’t know where are all these places exactly, America is way more important as a spiritual axis than most people assume, I’m guessing even many of the people there are not aware of this but I could be wrong. I have a friend in Ohio, hopefully he’ll accompany me in my travels.

    TJandTheBear, which 5 Dem-controlled cities are these? Thanks.

    Lathechuck, well, that’s relieving, I’ve always sensed there’s a misunderstanding about the US that the media keeps fuelling for some reason, so it’s good to connect and hear from the people there directly.

  334. @JMG

    I have a question –

    In your most recent post about writing practice, I asked you about combining discursive meditation with the writing practice, and you replied in the affirmative, encouraging me to go ahead and try it out; you even provided some historical perspective on the subject.

    Accordingly, I started doing it today. I set the timer for 19 minutes; and started writing on the subject ‘the tomato’. I did not have to take breaks to think about what to write next – the only couple of breaks I took (and they lasted less than a second each) were to adjust the notebook I was writing it in, and to turn the page. I wrote about the history of the plant, it’s place in the Linnaean classification system, it’s culinary influence (mainly on Europe, but also a bit on India), it’s relation to Renaissance herbalism (I mentioned Bert Wolf’s book), and so on. I found that it went rather smoothly; I ran out of time when I was ‘in the flow’, and was to write some more on the subject.

    It is precisely this that has gotten me a bit suspicious. I tend to subscribe to the maxim “if you were able to do it the first time, you probably weren’t doing it right”; and thus I’m somewhat skeptical as to whether I followed the suggested procedure correctly. Hence I thought of asking you – did I actually get it right, or is my skepticism justified? If the answer is the latter, could you suggest corrections to the procedure I followed?

  335. @Grandma Northwind #200 & Scotlyn #214

    Thank you for your answers.
    I’m not into caravaning, but your methods look very valid to me. Apparently here in Europe we are not allowed to deal with our human waste ourselves, lest we do something wrong. We can be fined if someone finds out. Hey, even my eco-hippy friends get shivers when thinking about humanure.
    That doesn’t mean that we should comply to every rule, but we are forced to be discreet about it.

    I don’t think the woman of the story is crazy. She just can’t think outside of what she’s been allowed to think about. She’s been given two options, none of them is truly ecological, but one is advertised as more ecological, and she’s bought into it. Only that she can’t afford it. This is the trend with most ‘ecological’ devices in sale: they are more expensive so people that want to show how committed they are with the environment can show how much they care by showing how much they paid for it. Virtue signaling anyone?
    The mainstream corollary is that looking like ‘being ecological’ is a luxury only a few can afford, and since most people cannot afford it, why even trying?

    Both sawdust and cat litter are pretty cheap and affordable and ecological, but we are not allowed to think about that, it gives profit to no big company, so we won’t see such thing advocated anywhere (but here!). I think this is the real moral of the story.

  336. JMG: “if Monbiot thinks it’s a good idea, I tend to run the other way. Your mileage may vary, of course”

    I’ve been reading Lierre Keith’s “The Vegetarian Myth” only part way through.

    She does make the interesting observation that the ‘history of civilisations’ tends to show that humans, having eaten all of the megafauna after 300-400 thousand years of happily hunter-gathering had to invent ‘agriculture’ to survive and not starve to death, in the last 2 or 3 1000 years or so.

    What we do is plant crops to feed us and the domesticated animals. We do this by clearing land of trees to make fields. Over time, every time, all the top-soil washes away leaving barren desert behind. So we moved over to the next valley to do the same.

    Are we now at the point where there is no-where to move to and all the trees covering potential fields have gone?

    Maybe ‘primitive’ man wasn’t so primitive after all? But a species in sustainable harmony with the environment.

    She also points out that the native Americans thought the incoming white settlers ‘insane’ to chop down all of the trees…!

  337. Luke Dodson says: After getting into a spat with him on Twitter which led to him blocking me, I wrote a piece on Monbiot’s fermented-bacteria back in 2020

    Fascinating, thanks Luke 👍🏻

    He did the same to me as well 🤔

  338. Hello again JMG and kommentariat. I have a doubt that could be expressed in two questions to you:
    What’s happening in China lately? And
    What could we know about these supposed massive riots apart of the Western PMC media propaganda?(Dutch farmers riots nearly never were reported from PMC propagandists in EU).
    I expect you asnwer to these questions, I know I am next to be late on your post…

  339. @Ben

    Regarding the idea of city-states being the ‘ideal’ political unit, you might find this talk by NN Taleb interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyXwrpmt0zk&t=184s.

    Taleb uses results obtained from careful mathematical analysis (as opposed to statistical methods), at the core of which lay a lot of mathematical proofs, to prove that small is not only beautiful, but also less fragile. While I haven’t seen a detailed discussion of the mathematics in any of his books, there appear to be research papers by him to that effect.

    Now, I know that mathematics isn’t the ‘universal’ and ‘perfect’ thing that many people, including David Hilbert, assumed it to be – Godel’s theorem debunks this common myth. However, all that said and done, proof-based mathematics is still incredibly powerful; remember, it was mathematics of this variety that put Sputnik 1 in orbit. So, I guess we might as well take Taleb’s thesis on this topic seriously.

  341. @ milkyway #231

    It depends on the yew! You have to read those deceitful catalog descriptions carefully. A lot depends on whether or not the yew is happy. The best way to get exactly the yew you want — in terms of mature size and shape — is to order from a specialty grower.

    It is more expensive, but if you don’t want to shear your yew to conform to a specific shape several times a year forever, buy the yew that grows the way you want.

  342. I need some help on some green-wizardry type stuff.

    A few years ago I got into candle making. I made a few recently, and having the materials wish to make more, but I’ve run into a snag. To plug the bottom of a candle mold where the wick penetrates and thus keep the molten wax from running out, you need a clay that won’t scorch in the waxen heat. My source for that clay has folded in the Covid farrago, and I don’t know where to turn. Can anyone tell me of a cheap and commonly available substitute? I’m hoping to find something that can be sourced locally.

    Thanks in advance to any who may have some helpful ideas on this seemingly minor technical issue.

  343. A #296: are you familiar with the energy medicine work of Donna Eden? I found her work very powerful. She has lots of free stuff on her youtube channel.

    Chuaquin #338: the Dutch farmer protests is strange in the sense that MSM is almost completely ignoring the protests but as soon as you leave the big cities in the Netherlands, the protest signs are everywhere. The farmers have adopted as sign the national flag flying upside down. At sea that is a sign of distress and call for help. The flags are just everywhere outside the big cities, but you wouldn’t know it from the MSM. Currently negotiations are going on, but nothing has been resolved. The situation remains tense but ignored by the PMC.

  344. Scotlyn 323

    Oh, I understand it. I didn’t know what “TCM” stands for, but finally figured it out by going to Wikipedia.

    Traditional Chinese Medicine.

    💨Northwind Grandma😓
    Dane County, Wisconsin, USA

  345. Chris, I did indeed.

    Atmospheric, thanks for this reality check.

    Luke, it might change the situation quite considerably, as the most likely mass migrations would be out of western Europe, not into it.

    Bogatyr, yes, I saw Rod’s piece about the Pretty Girl. Remove the Christian insistence that any spiritual being that’s not in the Christian camp is a demon, and you’ve got two good points: first, that the spiritual world is real, and second, that modern bowdlerized pseudospirituality is no more able to deal with that reality than modern materialism.

    Other Owen, oh, there have been deranged people all along, on all sides of the political landscape. My point is that the derangement went into overdrive and started affecting people who weren’t subject to it beforehand.

    David BTL, thanks for this.

    Marlena, hmm. Demons as I understand them are not generally incarnate beings — but of course modern science can’t deal with the existence of discarnate intelligences.

    David BTL, I’ve never seen anything along these lines. Remember that the mathematics of the Cabala haven’t advanced noticeably beyond Euclid and Nicomachus — even Diophantus is beyond it. Yes, it could be very interesting to take it further!

    Kat, that seems exceedingly likely to me. Do you happen to have a source about routers taking a year to order? I’d like to be able to cite it in an upcoming post.

    David BTL, hmm. Symbolically that’s very interesting.

    Sunnnv, (1) I got it from various sources in occult writings, of course, and (2) yes, of course — the concept of reincarnation assumes that you’ll have lives in the future, just as you had lives in the past.

    DT, many thanks for this! That’s exactly what I suspected — the version we have was amended sometime after 1611, when Thibault became famous. Since Shakespeare lived until 1616, he could have added the bit about Thibault himself — assuming for the moment that he wrote the play — or someone else could have stuck it in,

    TJ, thanks for this.

    Aziz, no, it’s a lucky majority. The vast majority of Americans never see a mass shooting. There are 330 million of us, remember, and just under 25,000 murders last year — and that includes every kind of murder, not just mass shootings. Here are the top ten US cities for homicide; the number following the name is the number of murders per 100,000 people:
    St. Louis, MO (69.4)
    Baltimore, MD (51.1)
    New Orleans, LA (40.6)
    Detroit, MI (39.7)
    Cleveland, OH (33.7)
    Las Vegas, NV (31.4)
    Kansas City, MO (31.2)
    Memphis, TN (27.1)
    Newark, NJ (25.6)
    Chicago, IL (24)
    So you see, the media’s inflating things pretty grossly. You don’t have anything to fear.

    Viduraawakened, no, you’re doing it right. It really is that easy once you get the obstacles out of the way.

    Keith, that’s a hypersimplified and tendentious account of the evolution of agriculture. First, as prehistorian Colin Tudge pointed out in his fine book Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers, human beings were planting food crops tens of millennia before agriculture became standard — hazel pollen shows up in the postglacial tundra in Europe long before any other warm weather plant, showing that Cro-Magnon hunters deliberately planted thickets of hazels so they could harvest the hazelnuts. Second, the collapse of megafauna populations happened thousands of years before grain agriculture emerged, and it’s still an open question how much human hunting contributed to the collapse: the drastic climatic and ecological changes at the end of the last ice age also played a huge role.

    No, what drove the rise of field agriculture were the tremendous global droughts of the Hypsithermal, the warm period that came after the collapse of the ice sheets; ecosystems that had supported human communities via a mix of hunting, gathering, and small-scale gardening collapsed, and in large areas all along the southern edge of Eurasia, growing grains in irrigated areas was the only alternative to mass starvation. Yes, that caused some problems, since the need to fertilize the soil had to be learned by trial and error, but it’s an exaggeration to claim that it always produced deserts. Wheat was first grown in what’s now Syria, and until the recent wars broke out, Syria was still a significant exporter of wheat…

    Chuaquin, I have no idea what’s actually happening in China. All I know is what’s on the mass media — and I know better thn to trust that.

    Kevin, hmm! I’ll pass this one to the commentariat.

  346. sunnnv – thank you for your thoughtful commentary.  I should probably follow those links and do more research on this topic.  I appreciate your thoughtful approach. 

    FWIW, I’m with you on the religious angle.  I’m not sure I’m there with you on CERN. 

    Part of it, of course, is that it’s been such a treasure of the scientific community that I’m suspicious; that this immense use of energy to tear things apart is somehow a good and worthy pursuit; and some part of me isn’t convinced of the “correlation does not imply causation” catch phrase we’re all supposed to believe (but then of course some have no wish to look closer when it actually DOES!). 

    Namely if things seem to be going to shit in the world when they start experimenting heavily at tearing bits of reality apart, I’m going to think it’s connected no matter how stupid that makes me.  I simply no longer trust the scientific establishment.  However, there’s something to be said for not being too knee-jerk; and part of me has felt i’m never going to be smart enough to understand it, so perhaps I haven’t tried as hard as I should.  I will try to give it another shot from this angle. 

    However, there’s no denying that my gut instinct still tells me: CERN is up to no good.  FWIW I’m also against GMO and nuclear because I don’t think it’s right to mess with things this way. I’m terribly anti-modern that way!  To tear apart bits of the world and try to outsmart nature and make things however we want with no care for consequence aside from profit or winning wars.  Even doing things for pure “science” (which is somehow almost always dirtier than it looks on the surface).  I’ll have to circle back to this another time.

    Again this is my feeling and talking about it allows me to consider it from different angles, which is good no matter what, so thank you again for your thoughts here.

    The demon angle that’s been discussed in several comments here, and the remarks in the video to which I linked, well, it’s all a bit muddy to me. I don’t feel capable of weighing in, and I don’t know how much I want to actually understand that side of things, either. I know evil exists, and negative entities exist, but my main goal is to avoid that side of things. I spend most of my childhood being mentally tortured by…something…that I truly think wasn’t all in my head. A dark voice of some sort that always knew just how and when to tear me down and torment / trick me.

    I truly relish any freedom or safety I have now from those things and I really value not letting these topics (dark energies) take up too much of my brain power. Despite or because of my personal experiences there. I now have some very strong knee-jerk resistance to the Christian view of evil entities, but I don’t necessarily have a better or wiser worldview now; I just don’t want anything to do with any of it. The bare, awful truth is that Jesus couldn’t save me from that side of things, no matter how hard I believed, or how much I tried my best. Having a more animistic personal faith now is more helpful, IMO. But I won’t deny that area of things is still scary to me. There are other experiences I could share, but what’s the point? I just want it all away from me.

  347. Whispers – yes this is a private thing i do on my own property once a month, with a silent prayer for earth healing.  nobody else is included

    Thank you to all who have shared thoughts about fibro and about menstrual problems!!

    pygmycory, thank you for sharing your experience! It really meant a lot to me to read that. I can’t really express it right, but it felt so peace-inducing to be heard and understood by someone who’s dealt with much the same stuff. Thank you.

    Yavanna – that does sound like it might be worth pursuing.  thank you!

    Scotlyn – that sounds promising.  I have not used acupuncture but my dad had several appointments to deal with an injury problem, and it helped him with that.  I accompanied him to one appointment and was thinking of going myself, but some pretty bad life stuff intervened and it got put on the back burner.  I had a good feeling about it, though.  A couple of small personal signs that it was a positive thing may have showed up for me while I was there. 🙂 Maybe I should make a real effort to try it.  I’ve been sick for almost two months at this point so everything is on hold till I’m better from that, obviously, but maybe next year I can actually make an appointment and follow through.

    Northwind Grandma – thank you for your story, and I’m sorry you’ve suffered so!  The supplement looks like it contains some of the enzymes I already take as well as: “Eleuthero, Gotu Kola, Rose Hip, Ginkgo, Wild Yam.”  Wild yam is one I think can be used for periods as well. I have some of that on hand.  Maybe I will do some more research on this. Thanks for the encouragement and ideas.

    Boccaccio – last year I bought  Donna Eden’s Energy Medicine for Women book. I admit I’ve struggled to incorporate much from it, but there does seem to be something useful in there to glean, so I should likely try reading it again.  Thanks for the reminder.  I did use her 5 minute energy routine a lot a few years ago.  During a time of intense personal grief it helped me get up and function enough to actually leave the house when otherwise i wouldn’t have been able to, so I do think there’s something to it.  I should try getting back into it! FWIW I followed the older video on that one from her, since deleted, but uploaded by someone else later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akIlrF-HSJM

    Health in general…
    Sometimes I think I’ve rounded the corner and almost have my health stuff figured out, but I’ve suffered so much in the last couple of months that I realize I just am not there yet and there’s a lot more to learn. 

    Feeling pretty humbled about it at the moment even though there have been long stretches of times where I’ve been pretty confident about my health moving in the right direction as i learn and try different things outside the beaten path. Natural remedies have been such a blessing to me in so many areas of life and health. I truly believe there IS a cure for everything — somewhere in nature, or possibly in the spiritual realm, though I don’t think I really understand that part too well, and i no longer want to go the faith healing, “if you just believe hard enough you’ll be healed (and if you don’t you didn’t believe hard enough)” route. 

    (Take the simple example of going to the doctors for repeated UTIs….the horrible discomfort and the side effects of repeated rounds of antibiotics leaving me weaker all the time. THANK GOD for some help from a natural practitioner and personal research that led to better outcomes in avoiding / treating these things so that I could finally start to rebuild my gut health. I mean antibiotics kept me alive but they were not very healing!!)

    I know there are answers for better health.  But right now I’m struggling to get back to where I was even last year.  This year has been a very bad health year for me and I’ve been incapacitated for different reasons far too much.  I AM READY TO BE WELL. I’m grateful for the input and ideas here, if only to help me think about things and try to get some hope and inspiration back to keep trying!!

  350. @Kevin

    The temperature of molten wax (~170ºF) is nowhere near hot enough to require special materials. I would think that almost anything of the appropriate consistency – pottery clay, playdough, etc. – would do the trick.

  352. OK John, I don’t have idea of what’s happening in China, I agree with you too. Their censorship and “our” censorship is working hard, maybe.

  353. @Heather #172 (and thanks to Four Sided Circle#88 for starting this) – please point me to resources for Catholic baking traditions. My wife is Catholic and is increasing her baking.

  354. @ Mark (#212)

    Doing the math on that 0.09 W/m2 figure, I find that providing a typical 100A service at 220V to an average suburban single-family dwelling will require 166 acres of geothermal extraction commitment. That should put things more in perspective for the viability of this resource as a replacement for fossil fuels.

  355. Kevin- Could something simple, like bread dough, serve your purpose? Or any kind of artist clay, or plumber’s putty?

  356. Hi JMG,

    in your answer to Keith at #345 you hypothesize that field agriculture developed in response to the droughts of the hypsithermal in certain areas of Eurasia. This actually jives very well with the David Wengrow’s account of predynastic Egypt, which I referenced above a few times. Since the hypsithermal led to a greening of North Africa, semi-sedentary inhabitants of the Nile Valley actually moved out of the valley, onto the new savannahs, at the end of the Ice Age. When domesticated sheep and goats arrived and cattle were domesticated, the inhabitants of modern Egypt became more mobile than ever. This was ~ 6000 BCE, at the height of the hypsithermal.

    Agriculture only made inroads in the Nile Vally after 4000 BCE, when the hypsithermal was drawing to an end and the savannahs dried out. This is ~ 5000 years later than in the Fertile Crescent, a huge difference in trajectories! Development in Egypt then went so (relatively) fast from nomadic pastoralists through agriculture and city-dwelling to a unified state that much of the nomad symbolism was transformed into rituals associated with the pharaoh, e.g. the cosmetic palette, and burial rituals.

  357. @pamouna #348, thanks for your link! As I don’t live in the Netherlands, I was unsure what to make of the protests, and the essay you linked to definitely adds to my understanding.

  358. Congratulations to those of you who have launched Substacks. I’m now subscribed to all of your accounts and am enjoying your offerings. Feel free to check us out as well at http://www.brunettegardens.substack.com.

    The “us” refers to me and Anthony, who discovered Greer’s work before I did, is a longtime member of this commentariat (whereas I am just a Johnny-come-lately), and has joined me there as a co-writer. My latest post is Slowpocalypse now: How to prepare for a post-limits world, https://brunettegardens.substack.com/p/slowpocalypse-now-how-to-prepare

    This essay of Anthony’s might be of particular interest to fans of Greer: “Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” https://brunettegardens.substack.com/p/never-let-the-perfect-be-the-enemy

    Podcast version: https://brunettegardens.substack.com/p/podcast-no-9-never-let-the-perfect#details

    Mr. Greer, in a recent comment thread, you recommended reading your book The Ecotechnic Future. Thanks for the recommendation. I found it enlightening and inspiring.

  359. Hi JMG, I was looking at your Fellowship of the Rose work and at your The Way of the Golden Section, and The Occult Philosophy workbook and was wondering which one you would suggest undertaking first. or would it make more sense for them to be studied in tandem?

    Thanks,

    Alex S

  360. I’m reading The King in Orange, and it occurred to me to wonder why people believe that if manufacturing/factory jobs returned to the US, they will be well-paid. I am sure you see what I see as soon as I say that. The well paid factory jobs in the past were generally unionized (cars, steel), and there has been pressure to decrease the (relative) pay of factory workers for years. I have worked in two factories and a mail order house. Those jobs were mind numbingly boring. We should not romanticize them. The well paid factory jobs also happened at a time when a smaller percent of the GDP of the nation went to to top 1% of earners each year.
    Might it be better to try to get better pay for the jobs that already exist, like taking care of old or sick people, daycare, retail, and other service jobs, rather than imagining that if we re-shore manufacturing, the jobs created will be well paid?
    Aree there other issues about manufacturing in the US? Manufacturing chips, for instance? Of course.

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