This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.
First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.
Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their followup comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here.
With that said, have at it!
I’d like to hear from the community, how important is breakfast? What foods if any do you eat for breakfast?
Hi JMG, I want to ask you about a book. Would Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch really help against the collapse of civilization? Have you ever looked at the book? It seems to me that it was written in accordance with the Zeitgeist. I would be happy if you could answer.
Hi JMG,
I suppose I should post this comment for this week.. Feel free to delete yesterday’s comment.
I received my paper copy of “The Annotated Ring Cycle: The Rhine Gold” (Das Rheingold). Here are details:
An English Reading Version of ‘The Nibelung’s Ring by Richard Wagner.’
Translation and Annotations by Frederick Paul Walter.
Pen and Ink Illustrations by Cliff Mott.
Amadeus Press.
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Lanham, Maryland 20706 [USA]
rowman.com
2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
German, with English translation.
Description: “A colorful new translation and notes by Frederick Paul Walter spotlight the libretto, lyrics, and stage directions of [Richard] Wagner’s colossal masterpiece, getting the most basic ingredient right: the actual story! It is gorgeously illustrated with dazzling graphic-novel artwork, plus classic pictures by Arthur Rackham and others.”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 9781538136683 (paper)
ISBN 9781538136690 (ebook)
LCC ML50.W14 R42 2020 (print)
LCC ML50.W14 (ebook)
DDC 782.1/0268–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037543
LC ebook available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037544
The cover is muted colors of turquoise, green, and yellow.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1538136686/
——-
Table of contents
The One-Minute Ring page v
Chronology: The Composition of the Ring Cycle page vi
Introduction page vii
Prelude and Scene 1 page 3
Scene 2 page 33
Scene 3 page 75
Scene 4 page 105
About the contributors page 147
——-
One-Minute Ring
[where it says “god,” I substituted “gods.”]
A. Dwarf steals gold from river; gods recover gold but gives it to giants. (The Rhine Gold)
B. Gods scheme to recover gold from giant and return it to river; fails. (The Valkyrie)
C. Dwarves scheme to recover gold from giant and keep it; human keeps it instead. (Siegfried)
D. Dwarves scheme to recover gold from humans; fail. Human returns it to river. (Twilight for the Gods)
Time frame: Three generations.
Motives: wealth, fame, power, justice, fear of death, humane love, and sexual love.
Consequences: 1 attempted murder; 2 manslaughters; 3 capital murders; 4 adulteries; many combat mortalities; multiple betrayals; countless deceptions; mass enslavement; self-immolation; and full regime change.
Gee, the storyline sounds like now.
—-
I lucked out and got a “Used-Good” copy for $13, but in this particular case, the book looks near mint.
I think this book is my Cliffs Notes👏🏼.
💨Northwind Grandma💨⛏️🎹🎶
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hello to you and the Ecosophia community! I’ve been looking forward to this post as I’ve had a topic in mind.
The three working tools of the magician are, as you’ve often said, the imagination, will, and memory. The first two I’ve found pretty intuitive in their importance since imagination allows us to build up patterns and the will allows them to be set in motion.
Memory, though, seems somewhat less obvious at first, though of course it’s useful for things like going over the events of the day in order to refine divination skills and for memorizing complex rituals and the like. But I have the loose impression that memory in the magical worldview is supposed to overlap heavily with some more unusual mental phenomena once it has been developed—perhaps linking with Platonic notions of knowledge as recollection. Am I onto something here? If so then I’d love to read a discussion of it.
You’ve doubtless heard the name “deep state.” Does it exist as a sentient entity on the astral plane and can it be attacked there?
Why is narrative so powerful even if it’s not true? The current political season is just so full of hoaxes. Disconfirming information has a tough time countering a preferred narrative. The culture says something like “The truth will out”, but it really does not seem to happen much. I’ve heard the powers that be want stability, so they’ll keep the story the same then suddenly flip to a new story, Any thoughts? Or if you’ve already written on the subject, a referral would be fine.
@JMG Re: Two Pseudomorphoses
Howdy,
Here and there, you’ve mentioned an elaboration on Spengler’s theory of cultural pseudomorphosis, specifically that you believe it is typical for any great culture to undergo two pseudomorphoses, with each contributing certain things to the development of that great culture. I realize this may be too big for an open post question (if so, into the “Fifth Wednesday” hopper it goes), but would you mind giving a short summary of your thoughts here? What do each of the two pseudomorphoses do for the great culture affected by them? What are some historical examples?
Whether this works for this open post or not, thanks very much for your time and thought, and I offer my blessings if you and those here will have them,
Jeff
I’ve been pondering the borderland between politics and “occult” thought (The King in Orange started this).
One of the things that I have noticed is, except for the current venue, the polarization in this area is as pronounced, perhaps even more pronounced, than the mainstream polarization. That being said, it seems to me that the left side of the political “spectrum” is pretty apt to try and pin the snarl-word of “fascist” on a lot of occult thought. But when you read the ideas of some of these supposed “proto-fascists”, you have to squint pretty hard to discern any substantive difference other than wording from the more acceptable “liberal approved” take on the issue. Maybe I am wrong (I often am), but I would love to hear from the commentariat here and perhaps an update from our gracious host.
Physicists are now rethinking the nature of space and time:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unraveling-of-space-time-20240925/
I was going to talk about this year’s arctic sea ice progression ( just another low year without breaking any records), but then i saw this article
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705
A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature
All i can say is WOW look at that curve!
For the last ~15 million years the earth temperature and CO2 levels have been plunging rapidly towards Snow Ball Earth and only very recently has the temperature and CO2 levels rebounded. Pan Piro Narrans to the rescue ( story telling fire chimpanzees aka humans)
If you look at the CO2 curve that matches up with the Temperature curve you see that ~750 ppm is average over the last 200 million years. ( currently at~420 ppm)
Climate change will wreck human industrial civilization but Gaia will love it long term and maybe Pan Piro Narrans will also thrive long enough to evolve into homo sapiens.
JMG,
Excuse my basic economics question. I ask it seriously, as I don’t understand economics well.
Can (or how can) the stock market crash crash if it’s propped up and subject to artificial manipulation? Stocks just keep going higher and higher. It seems there’s no real risk or corrections that correspond to real economic indicators. How does this all end, I wonder.
You have a way of boiling down complicated economic matters into plain English and wondering if you’d please share your thoughts/perspective on any of the above.
Thanks,
Jacques
Hi JMG and everyone,
just a heads-up that after an almost two-year hiatus I finally got back into doing mundane astrology charts for Germany. Here’s my current take for fall/winter 2024 in Berlin: https://mundanastrologie.substack.com/p/autumn-2024-in-germany (original German version: https://mundanastrologie.substack.com/p/herbst-2024-in-deutschland)
It’s amazing how long it took me to write so few words. I hope that doing it more regularly makes it easier and I’ll be able to write longer interpretations. Astrology is definitely not a mundane matter! (sorry, I’ll see myself out now.)
Feedback is very welcome.
Hello,
You mentioned a new edition of “The Retro Future” coming out soon. Is that basically the same content as the previous edition, or have you expanded / updated it?
Thanks,
Heather / adara9
#1 Anonymous,
For me, not eating breakfast is important. I gave it up several months ago as an easy way to control my calorie intake. I’ve found that I have just as much energy as before. My morning workout hasn’t suffered. And I’m slowly and steadily losing the middle-age fat on my belly.
I go to our local farmers market weekly and try and buy as much of our food as possible there. I have been paying close attention to the cars in the parking lot ( I bike myself) because something was odd to me. Then I realized it.
I live in an area between several Intel Campuses with the largest number of employees of that corporation in the World. As a result, we have one of the highest densities of EV’s on the road of anywhere. Finally it dawned on. me, and at that same instant a great title for a book popped in to my head. ” There are no Teslas at the Farmers Market.”
Commenters may recall Bill and I were invited to the Agatha Christie festival in Torquay, England.
We traipsed around Torquay, bookended by London, with a side trip to the Eden Project in Cornwall.
Some notes:
Overall, everyone we saw was fitter than Americans. It has to be the exercise because it’s not diet. We walked everywhere, on uneven footing that changed radically from one paving method to another. Thank God for my shiny, electric blue cane. Unlike the U.S., there were very few accommodations for disabilities, including in the tube stations where they were really needed.
I really understood the concept behind Tartaria.
Torquay in particular was like walking thru a once-great, now fallen on hard times empire. Gorgeous, gorgeous, monumental architecture dating back to late Victorian in a stunning setting that hadn’t been maintained in years. Or decades. Litter everywhere. Homeless people. Money was being spent based on the construction projects we saw, even while half the storefronts were abandoned long ago. This area should be tourism central based on location, climate, and scenic beauty. It was once but isn’t any longer. At the same time, a friend who attended the Agatha Christie festival told us that — as she wandered around Torquay — she kept meeting people who’d never heard of Agatha or the event.
The Eden Project was a stunner. We took the behind the scenes tour of the rainforest domes. Our charming young lady guide recited all the correct paeans to Gaia about how green they were while I gawked overhead at immense infrastructure, electrical use, high-tech HVAC systems, and so forth. That place isn’t running on windmills. Similarly, Heathrow Airport had huge billboards proclaiming the importance of managing climate change. This, at the biggest airport I’ve ever seen, with planes arriving and departing constantly and what must have been square miles of intensive energy usage.
I was amazed at the heavy infiltration of U.S. pop culture. Half the adverts in the tube stations were for plays based on American TV shows and films. There were genuine book adverts and I saw people reading real books on the train and the tubes. Otherwise, virtually everyone was glued to a cellphone. Maybe they were reading because I didn’t notice any eReaders.
The trip was overwhelming and eye-opening on so many levels. I kept saying, as we hiked past one gorgeous building after another, fallen on hard times, that decline is a choice. It may not always be a choice, but you do have to wonder.
The mountain building of late (in geological terms) lifted up the Himalayans, the Andes, the Alps, and Cascades, not the mention the Rockies which were a bit earlier. All that activity exposed a lot a new rock, and as rock weathers it reacts with CO2 taking it out of the atmosphere. The volcanos have not been keeping up, so CO2 has been dropping and the planet has been cooling.
Then the formation of the isthmus of Panama cut off what had been an ocean circulation route and that pushed the planet into the ice age cycle still in progress.
The last time CO2 was this high was the Pliocene about 3 million years ago. You can look up what the climate was like, the short version was quite pleasant. Sea level was about 25 meters higher though as there was no West Antarctic icesheet and most of Greenland was also ice free. Tell the grandkids to relocate accordingly. I noticed that Obama has two mansions just above sea level. He’s clearly not worried about sea level rise.
On a different topic I noticed Vega is nearly straight up last evening. Vega was the northern pole star around 12,000 BCE and will be so again around the year 13,727. Since it is basically across the circle the precession of the earth’s axis makes against the sky from Polaris (which will eventually need a new name) now a good time to meditate on the scale of time and space.
You might be addressing this next week, but…whatever happened to Loge? In Rheingold, he’s Wotan’s indispensable right-hand “man” (and one of the more sympathetic of the gods), then poof! he’s gone. Do you think Wagner meant something by his disappearance?
@kurt
They don’t understand the vacuum well at all. The math model says vacuum should be white hot with energy but it isn’t. I suspect that when that gets fixed, it’ll lead to a bunch of things getting upturned and rearranged.
What are some of the negative side effects of toothpaste and brushing your teeth with toothpaste every day? I remember when toothpaste first came out it wasn’t widely accepted by the American population and it took a concerted advertising campaign to convince Americans to start brushing their teeth.
Bradley (#6) asks:
“Why is narrative so powerful even if it’s not true?”
In a nutshell, because the world in which we actually live and move and have our being is made up of stories, not of matter and energy. Muriel Rukeyser put it (in her The Speed of Darkness) that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
And Rudyard Kipling, in an address to the Royal College of Surgeons (1923), rightly claimed that “words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
One of the several definitions that Aristotle proposed for humankind was “rational animal.” It’s hardly that simple: we are a story-telling animal, a rationalizing animal that on rare occasions manages to be a rational animal.
The dream of a future rational, empirically based life is but a pipe dream. Alas!
#1 As an endurance athlete, I find breakfast critical to fuel my workouts. I mostly eat either steel cut oats with a variety of fresh fruits and seeds, or fried eggs with homemade vollkornbrot (German rye bread…dense like a brick!). I had previously tried intermittent fasting in the form of an overnight fast lasting 16 hours, but I found myself staving off hunger with caffeine. Now, I can see I.F. as a means of caloric restriction, but I actually need to focus on taking in enough calories, so it’s three squares a day for this runner…YMMV.
Anon, it seems to vary from person to person. Me, I need a good breakfast or I’m not at my best all day. My usual breakfast is a bowl of rice with natto, and kimchi, or a cooked vegetable, or soup as a side dish. (Can you tell I learned to cook from my Japanese stepmother?)
Yiğit, not only won’t it work, if copies of that book survive they’ll become a dead weight on the revival of science and scholarship in any future Renaissance that might be burdened with them. One of the tasks that every rising civilization has to cope with is learning how to think its own thoughts instead of borrowing them from an old book. Aristotle’s writings were the burden that Western civilization had to overthrow to create its own science; Dartnell’s book will be a comparable burden to the future.
Northwind, glad to hear it. That’s not a bad summary!
Alex, fair enough. The secret is that memory is the past application of imagination, just as will is the future tense. Your will becomes powerful when you direct it at clearly imagined future goals. Your memory becomes powerful when you use it to reawaken vividly recalled past events. This very often involves revisiting your past, reinterpreting it, and sometimes reimagining it — not falsifying it, but fitting it into a narrative pattern you wouldn’t have thought to apply to it. What changes, for example, if you learn to see your entire past as the process by which you got ready for occult training?
AA, that’s a fascinating concept. Every social entity creates an astral egregor, so yes, you’re correct — just be aware that an egregor that large may be a whale of a lot stronger than you are, and it can and will fight back…
Bradley, narratives are the most important tooks humans have ever invented. They’re the tools we use to make the confusion of everyday experience make sense. Narratives are always fictional — that is to say, they always leave out much more truth than they incorporate — and there’s always a reason why they’re believed. If you want to overturn a narrative, you have to understand the payoff — what people get from believing in it, and why they’re committed to it. There are always solid practical reasons for it.
Jeff, let’s take Western civilization as an example. Its first pseudomorphosis came from Magian civilization, and gave it the framework it needed to grow in its early years. In the early Middle Ages, remember, Europe was basically a secondhand copy of the Muslim world, complete with petty kings and a dogmatic scriptural religion urging it on to holy wars. The second pseudomorphosis came from Apollonian civilization and sparked the Renaissance, which first inspired Europeans to throw off the Magian pseudomorphosis and then generated a counter-movement that threw off the Apollonian pseudomorphosis as well, launching Faustian civilization on its way. That’s a normal pattern for a recent civilization — Magian civilization’s two pseudomorphoses were Mesopotamian and Apollonian, for example.
Degringolade, the occult scene is much less distinct from the broader society than many of its members like to pretend, and so the schisms and the rhetoric within the occult scene aren’t especially different from those outside it. Thus “fascist!” is the snarl world du jour for the left both in and outside the magical scene. Of course it applies to the people who fling it much more than it does to the people thus shouted at; as Carl Jung pointed out a good long time ago, we always project the things about ourselves we like least onto the people we hate.
Kurt, I wonder how long it’ll take them to catch up to where the philosophers got two hundred years ago…
Dobbs, yes, exactly. Under normal conditions the earth is a jungle planet. I don’t know if you’ve read this post of mine —
https://www.ecosophia.net/riding-the-climate-toboggan/
— but it talks about where we’re heading.
Jacques, it’s quite possible that it can’t crash. I’ve suggested in the past that the stock market will keep on rising steadily even as the economy crumbles out from under it, and the Dow Jones average will hit an all-time high the day before the lights finally go out for good. As Bertram Gross pointed out a long time ago in his book Friendly Fascism, economic indicators have morphed into “economic vindicators” that say whatever the ruling elite want them to say — and this is true of every quantitative measurement of the economy, including stock market indexes.
Bendith, thanks for this.
Heather, it’s basically the same. I cleaned up a few typos and edit-os from the first edition, but I didn’t find much that needed changing.
Clay, please write that book!!!
Teresa, thanks for this. Keep in mind that it may be neither diet nor exercise — it may be chemical pollution, which is why obesity in the US correlates inversely with altitude. (The closer you are to the mouths of rivers, the fatter you tend to be…)
Roldy, we’ll address that as he fades out. The next couple of Ring posts deal with the part of the cycle when he’s at his most active.
Anonymous, hmm — I don’t know. Anyone else?
I hope everybody is having a good week! 🙂
Two things today: an offer to everybody, and a question to the people with chicken experience:
1. Since early this year, I practice my blessing skills by performing a formal blessing each Wednesday for people who’d like to receive one. The blessings are open to everybody, although a signup is required each week to keep things manageable for me, and to make sure I have everybody’s consent.
I’m grateful for people who sign up, as this gives me a chance to practice. You can find all the details and the signup for next week here:
https://thehiddenthings.com/weekly-blessings-39
I put up the signup post for the upcoming week when I take the old one down, so please feel free to check in at any time and request a blessing for the upcoming Wednesday. Thanks for helping me practice!
2. I’m reading a book called “Free-Range Survival Chickens”. The main point of the author is that it’s possible to keep chickens completely free-range, i.e. without a coop, and without much, if any, extra food apart from some kitchen scraps. The requirements for this are a. a sufficient area (an acre or two with sufficiently diverse vegetation and at least one mature tree to roost), b. the right mindset, and c., most importantly!, the right breeds of chicken – i.e. chickens which forage, defend themselves against predators, are agile and alert enough to seek cover, which brood, etc.
The book is well-written with an interesting history of chicken breeding, and ecosophia readers wouldn’t be put off by the authors ideas about “progress” and civilizational cycles. 😉
It has also made me curious about other people’s experiences… Do any of you have any experience with free-ranging chickens? Either fully without a coop, or maybe only during daytime?
If so, would you mind sharing how that works for you, what you do, etc? (And, if you have any neighbours or busy roads close by, how you keep the chickens from exploring e.g. your neighbours garden?)
JMG, thanks a lot for hosting an Open Post again – I’m looking forward to this month’s topics! 🙂
Milkyway
@#1 re: breakfast
I’ve been eating breakfast regularly for a year or so. It’s a simple scramble of ham, eggs and green onions.
By eating breakfast I’m not hungry through the morning. I also think it’s important to have enough protein during the day and I’m trying to eliminate carbs from my diet.
My wife doesn’t eat breakfast and constantly complains of being tired and hungry.
She thinks she’s reducing calories by skipping a meal. I reduce calories by not being hungry all day.
Teresa Peschel,
The British can no longer afford to keep maintaining their grand structures from their empire because the rest of the world kicked them out from their lands in the 20th century and prevented them from taking their resources and wealth essentially for free. Decline here is not a choice, it is an inevitable consequence of what happens when the British empire collapses and the British no longer have any capabilities to maintain their former standards of living which is based upon extracting wealth from the rest of the world.
More thoughts on our London/Torquay adventure.
The population in the two cities was … different.
Torquay, a part of Devon and nicknamed the English Riviera, was more … English is the only way to describe it.
London, the parts we walked through, was not.
We were based at the Latvian Guesthouse on 72 Queensborough Terrace, just off Kensington Park. It’s an extremely upscale area based on the real estate office signs, cars, buildings, locations, and so forth. We could afford to stay here at this super-posh address because the Latvian Guesthouse is cheap: no en-suite bathrooms, a standard breakfast (take it or leave it), no elevators, and so forth. Everyone who worked there was Latvian. Very nice people, too, and consciously trying to hold on to their Latvian heritage.
Anyway, as we hiked up and down the streets in that area (tube stations are Bayswater, Queensway, Lancaster Gate, and Paddington), we saw a far more mixed population. I’d guess that at least HALF of the people we walked past — and I walked slowly because my hips were killing me from all the stairs at the Latvian Guesthouse — were NOT speaking English. I don’t mean their English was accented. It wasn’t English. A sizeable percentage of the women wore headscarves. A smaller percentage but far more than I’ve ever seen in tourist areas in my area wore the full body covering with a mere slit for the eyes. Or not even that: a lace shield prevented anyone from seeing a woman’s eyes.
Very racially and culturally mixed. The streets around the Latvian Guesthouse were lined with tiny shops, most of them expensive restaurants from every part of the world. Not too much retail, oddly. It was souvenirs, high-tech repair, and food of every description. Even drug stores like Boots carried ready-to-eat sandwiches in a way I’ve never seen in an American grocery store. You’d think no one there cooked.
I know this is a tourist area but even so, you could see the population shifting to something you wouldn’t have seen before. The crowds didn’t look like a period English film. Some of the train station stops were labeled in some East Asian, maybe Indian language. It wasn’t Chinese; we saw that frequently on London office signs.
Change is coming to London based on what I saw. It’s already, depending on the area, there. It has to be seen to be understood.
Anonymous,
I don’t like having food first thing in the morning so my breakfast is around 10am after light exercise. Nor do I like to wolf my meal and go running somewhere, there are a bunch of useful things you can do on an empty stomach, and I like to get my metabolism running before hitting it with food. I usually just have warm honey water, do morning practices on that and then eat. I like all the standard breakfast foods: oatmeals with fruit and honey, eggs and ham or sausage and of course chilaquiles with chicken and sour cream come often too.
What pseudomorphosis was the Andes region in South America under before the Europeans came over and stamped a Faustian pseudomorphosis on the region?
@Anonymous #1,
I don’t do well without breakfast. These days, it’s mostly homemade sourdough bread, with some cheese and homemade jam. Plus a (black or green) tea.
@Bendith Fawr #12,
Thanks for this. There was somebody else who did an experimental chart for the Scholz government inauguration back then, and that was dire. Alas, I can’t remember where to find it – but I keep thinking back about it and wondering if it’ll come true. We’ll see, either way. 😉
@Anonymous #20,
If I may piggyback on that: The ecosophia readers who don’t use store-bought toothpaste, how else do you clean your teeth?
Milkyway
Hello JMG,
Another data point has emerged rather synchronistically this morning that I feel inclined to share. My X/Twitter timeline presented this suggested tweet to me this morning that ends up centering one of the topics you have been writing about recently, namely the woke movement and its apparent affinity for demonolatry: https://x.com/DimitriMonroeZ/status/1838700894088487079
Brief context, the tweet itself is a response to another tweet about a Japanese manga series called Frieren, which recently received an anime adaptation last year that was very popular domestically and internationally, at least among people interested in anime. The setting is nothing special, it takes place in a more-or-less standard Japanese medieval fantasy world. What makes it interesting is the titular character, her attitudes, and her goals. The story takes place after the grand journey has come to a close, and Frieren, an elf mage with a much longer lifespan than her traveling companions, takes a pilgrimage to make peace with their inevitable deaths.
There are many themes that get discussed over the course of the story, but the one centered in this particular tweet is about demons and how they are portrayed. Namely, they are wholly, unambiguously evil in any sense of that word that would meaningfully matter. They are portrayed as cruel, manipulative, and incapable of understanding human emotion. Any emotions they claim to feel are merely a means to manipulate people into dropping their guard and making them their prey. Despite this, a woke individual on Twitter sought to criticize this portrayal of demons, for encouraging “biological determinism”. To them, any portrayal of demons that is not on some level sympathetic is unacceptable. This tweet, in response to that allegation, blew up with nearly 10000 likes:
“Frieren never asks the audience to question the morality of demons, it spells out that any act resembling such is manipulation.
In fact, the show goes further, it understands that no matter how objectively evil something is, fools seek coexistence even in the face of destruction.”
That second sentence in particular hits the nail on the head, I think, and is the reason I felt inclined to share this tweet. Many of the replies agree and elaborate on this point, but I think the core insight here is that for the past 30 or so years, many in the woke movement have been raised on a steady diet of media that insists that objective evil does not exist, and that all things that we think of as “evil” are actually just “misunderstood”. This media is often a product of a reaction to a much older media trend that portrays good and evil as a black and white dichotomy of “good guys” and “bad guys”, with no room for gray area in-between. I think this a yet another example of how, to quote a certain Archdruid, “the opposite of one bad idea is often another bad idea”. If you insist that nothing is evil, then suddenly anything is acceptable.
I think it’s particularly instructive that this conversation is about a piece of media, which is so often the most comfortable target for those in the woke movement. It illustrates that, to some of the most dedicated of the “woke”, there is little difference between demons and any other “oppressed” and “misunderstood” minority group that gets portrayed unfairly, and as such it isn’t a huge logical leap for them to see them as simply another group they are poised to “save” and “defend”.
On the bright side, the overwhelming majority of replies to the conversation are in support of the surprisingly controversial idea that demons are evil (some even seemingly aware of the occult implications of this idea), and in general I have noticed that anti-woke sentiment has gained significant traction outside of woke spaces in recent years. Still, I think the tweet gives insight into why some fringe elements of the woke movement find themselves drawn to these practices: it is actually completely consistent with their ideology. I hope it was interesting, if nothing else.
@anonymous, I like porridge(quick oats, milk,water) with fruit and sometimes spices on top. Ideally fresh, but I use freezer berries I picked in the summer too. Or raisins and spices. No sugar.
I also use commercial cereals like cornflakes over quick oats and water, with fruit/berries on top, or regular oats in milk overnight in the fridge, topped with fruit or berries.
Re: John and Jaques on the stock market
I think a relevant concept here will be Naomi Klein’s ‘Disaster Capitalism.’ Disaster capitalism is a process where the elite profit from disaster and chaos. Another thing to think about is how GDP is a really bad measure of economic health and well-being.
I’m sure the stock market will keep on trucking along as everything else falls apart. We already see it, where the actual living standards for most people fall and expenses rise, but the elite look at the stock market and GDP and say “Look at how great the economy is doing!” (Replace the words ‘the economy’ with “rich people’s wallets” and you’ll have an understanding of what they actually mean by the phrase.)
I started in WWR. It’s readable, but dense. He has some paragraphs that compare to Joyce and Delany in terms of length. I can follow along with most of it, and its good to be challenged by the parts that are more difficult (mental sheaths need building). I really liked what he had to say about representation vis a vis dreams and the continuity of human experience between waking and sleeping in section five. I was curious if I might use this as my “occult” reading at night before bed, per instructions in the Way of the Golden Section?
@ Bradley #6, et alia–
Re narratives
Your comment reminded me of something my favorite history professor said that has always stuck with me: “What drives history is not truth, but what people believe to be the truth.”
Jacques, and JMG, for quite a while I have thought about stock market crashes, that for some reason, because of some politics, or because the economy isn’t growing anymore, stock market crashes can’t occur anymore, as least in nominal terms.
Hi! How likely do you think israel will launch a ground invasion of lebanon in the next few weeks?
https://druidry.org/resources/the-third-mount-haemus-lecture-phallic-religion-in-the-druid-revival
I read this (above) and it reminded me of this (below)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bna6gfNZH4xYhsoz0RURMDUfDy0sczPFRd970kdTvvM/edit?usp=drive_link
it is a humorous essay on a similar subject. palms are everywhere
Hello JMG and readership,
I’ve recently read the conversation John had with the young man asking about the link between pornography and disembodied entities…it made me wonder about other forms of addiction aswell.
Alcohol, tobacco, drugs, foods…after all, why wouldn’t a disembodied entity try and find a physical vector to interact with the physical plane?
Take grain as an example…could it be such a vector? Or, putting it the way harari put it, that it domesticated us?
I can’t help to think of the cult surrounding the Amanita mushroom and people talking about “Her” or “The Mushroom Elders” telling them to spread the use of Amanita. I don’t have a prejudice agaist believing such a thing. We are not the smartest things around. The only defence would seem to be either blissful ignorance (or a coerced one? I guess both the Church and Science would have something to teach about trying to “starve off” unpleasant things by denying their existence….neither seemed to have succedeed) or very deliberate moderation in all things (after all we are entering our Stoic era).
About starving off unpleasant things…I invite anyone to try watching the 2012 russian movie “Branded” with an occult practitioner’s eye…
@ Anonymous re #1
My breakfast consists of raw milk, yogurt made from raw milk (which I think was helpful while recovering from a nasty intestinal bug last spring) and a single slice of toast. I also sip about a half cup of home made broth, a habit I also got into while recuperating though sometimes I’ll substitute a fried egg. Eaten at 7-ish in the morning, it all keeps me going until early afternoon 1:00 before I feel hunger pangs. I haven’t eaten any cereal in years. I recall reading somewhere that the box the cereal comes in is actually more nutritious than the cereal itself.
JLfromNH/Taupe Felicitous Sow
#Jacques, most of the great crashes of the past happened either because the manipulators lost their ability to manipulate enough (or never had the power required for ever increasing manipulation) or started to worry about the bubble they had created and tried to deflate it gently. (The Fed started tightening in 1928.)
But what if they just keep on manipulating and being part of the most powerful nation on the planet not so far yet from its peak? I think that what happens in this case is that their manipulation warps capital markets (which decide what gets invested in and what doesn’t) until that warping creates some kind of real world problem that cannot be manipulated away. The West’s inability to produce nearly enough weaponry to keep Ukrainians dying on its behalf is one example of this. If the manipulation continues long enough, not only is productive capacity (plants and infrastructure) lost but the personnel needed to restore productive capacity vanish as the older generation retires/dies and no new generation is trained to run factories that were de-invested out of existence.
The problem with not being able to produce enough weapons could be solved by stopping poking the bear. My guess as to where the mis-investment caused by the manipulation will hit the fan is the electric grid. Or water supply.
JMG, you like natto????? When I was in Japan, friends from Tohoku tried to convince me that it is delicious, but to me it was just soy snot. The kimchi might mask it, I guess.
Just kidding. Of course, to each his own.
There have been reports from several sources recently that there has been a mini-coup by the pentagon. From what I have heard the higher-ups in the U.S. military have decided that senility and delusion within the current administration is now so bad they can no. longer be trusted to dispatch the U.S. military. Apparently this split includes the state department along with Blinken and Sullivan.
On one hand this is kind of good news as the Pentagon is probably more realistic about what a bad idea it is to have a war with China, or Russia or Iran than the crazies in the state department or the Neocons.
But on the other hand it is usually the first step to a banana republic when a countries military becomes independent from the civilian leadership.
Comment #1 on pseudomorphoses – That quite reminds me of an individual pattern of, first, breaking loose from your mother, adopting the values of your father, then breaking loose from him and going your own way.
Comment #2, for JMG, which I’ve been saving up since buying and reading – and rereading several times – your latest novel, “The Hall of the Homeless Gods.” (I loved it, BTW, though it took a while to unravel its complexities.) My first thought: Viewpoint character Jerry Shimizu – are you getting into Dashiel Hammett/Raymond Chandler now? Wow. Then, of course, it turned into The Third Man and other spy stories … again, wow!
On the first read, I couldn’t tell the players without a program, so I sat down and wrote down every name mentioned, who and what and “posing as….,” which helped a lot. Any more comments would result in spoilers, so I’ll leave it for much later, except for one question –
How in the world, under the circumstances, was it possible to have a mass migration of nanmin to the Atlantic shores? Clear across the continent. Considering the state of technology, political chaos, and above all, the geography of North America, which, as Lewis & Clark found out, is one obstacle after another?
Anyway, it’s one of those that is a pleasure to read and reread.
One other casual, personal observation: the presence of a young, socially naive and socially awkward young woman with a photographic memory and a savant talent in math and problem solving – it’s a type very easily recognized, though more often found (or recognized) in guys than in gals, and shouldn’t cause much comment in general even in Shoreside, since the late 20th century. And thanks for the affectionate portrait, and yes, in a world where everything had its price and every interaction was a deal, she’d be a drink of fresh water to a burned-out cynic.
Thanks for this novel – and you’re really moving into new waters with everything you write.
Hello JMG,
First time asking a question, I tried searching but couldn’t find anything for my question. apologies if it’s been answered already.
I’ve finished the GSF exercises and am going to continue with it. My question is I also have the Druid Magic Handbook, and Dolmen arch. I would like to start one of these books also. Do I need to change the opening of the SOP to the elemental cross? Which I have no problem with, coming from Trad GD, or can I continue the DMH with the SOP learned from the GSF and not perform the elemental cross?
Thank you and everyone in advance for a place I can ask questions!
Hello All
Just wanted to express my gratitude for this forum. It has opened my mind to new ideas and invaluable connections.
Also, an extra howdy and hope you’re doing well to Winifred Rose.
Well, while I’m here, my “two cents” on breakfast and toothpaste😉
What, if or when to eat breakfast most likely depends on individual needs- I always found the science of Ayurveda helpful for determining one’s individual constitution and how to tweek diet choices.
As for commercial toothpaste, I’m wary of the junk it’s made with – personally, I use a paste of baking soda, a charcoal powder and/ or a natural toothpaste (like Weleda) throughout the day.
Best to all always, and thanks again JMG for all you do
Oh, almost forgot to mention! PS I got a notice that my pre- order delivery of The Philosophy and Practice of Polarity Magic is slightly delayed but looking forward to it soon
Yogaandthetarot
Tell us something about the NATURE of gods, JMG. How are they born? How do they die? Are all gods immortal or only some? All they all intended to be human-facing, or do some not concern themselves with humans at all? What happens to a god who was once worshipped but is no longer worshipped?
I did read the original edition of your “A World Full of Gods” book some time ago, but I am now wondering if your new editions says more about the NATURE of gods.
@JMG #23 re: Pseudomorphoses
Thanks very much for this! Would you say it’s a fair generalization to say that the first pseudomorphosis tends to be “how to be an organized society” – basic presuppositions about what a government looks like, how to scale, what kind of things to value economically, and so forth, and that the second pseudomorphosis tends to be more “how to be something great” – what to strive for, what counts as “high” achievement, how to show off your glory/superiority, and such?
(In both cases, of course, I don’t mean that “how to” implies either a “right” answer or a model faithfully followed, but rather what the culture undergoing pseudomorphosis tries to treat as a right answer, inadvertently tweaking, twisting, and shaping such things to itself since it can’t help but express its own “world-feeling.”)
Cheers,
Jeff
I’ve recently learned about a curious 1990s phenomenon from Miami called Bloody Mary, AKA La Llorosa, believed by homeless children there to be a hideous demon who weeps blood from empty eye sockets and is joyful when a child dies. Seeing her means you are marked for death. Conversely, a beautiful blue lady protects the children from her and from other hazards such as flying bullets.
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/myths-over-miami-6393117#:~:text=One%20demon%20is%20feared%20even,murdered%2C%20she%20croons%20with%20joy.
Do you think it is possible that a religious movement of this sort, dreamed up by homeless children at the bottom of society, could gain any sort of traction in the future and become organised into a society/state structure following the downfall of industrial civ and the USA, or would you reckon such a mythology would be more likely to get incorporated into pre-existing beliefs such as Catholicism, in a similar manner to Santa Muerte in Mexico?
Hello there Mr Greer! I have recently made a couple posts about my intention to create a talisman to Jupiter as part of a ritual preparation for an upcoming court battle. You have given me incredible advice, especially advice to cleanse and cast off all resentment and make no attempt to banish or drive her out of my life or engage in the negative energy cycle with her. I already feel like a weight has been lifted from my soul.
So, I am now prepared to creat the talisman of Jupiter to invoke the spirit of justice. The coal has been gathered to run the casting furnace, the tin has been ordered and will arrive tomorrow, in time for Jupiter’s day, the clay os ready to be formed into a mold. Only one thing remains to be determined.
What should I put on this tin talisman? I was thinking of going with the first pentacle of Jupiter from the lesser key of solomon for the heads side, but I dont know what to put on the back, and I’ve heard its insanely bad luck for a coin’s tail to be the same as its head. Any recommendations? I’m moving along the path outlined Eliphas Levi’s doctrine, so I was thinking of either a simple pentagram, the full form of the pentagram from the doctrine, or the second pentacle of Jupiter.
As always, you help and advice are greatly appreciated. Thank you again for all you do here.
@Anonymous 2 farm fresh eggs (from the suburban backyard chickens) every day!
@siliconguy — thx for the panama reference — I was unaware of this — I will google it — any good books on this (the closing of panama cutting off ocean currents)?
thx
Jerry
Hi JMG,
I was thinking this morning that people who suicide do not have their ride ready, so to speak, when they die and they have to wait around until the natural time of their death for a pick up. That makes sense to me. What I was wondering is can a person live past the natural time of their death, say by extreme medical procedures, and what are the consequences of that once a person dies?
Maxine
PS Grocery prices have doubled in Canada in the last few years and people are cutting way back on eating meat and other expensive foods. I sure am glad I collapsed a long time ago ad avoided this rush.
Hello JMG and kommentariat. I’d like to ask you what do you think about spiritualism beliefs; of course, if you have an opinion about it…
Magic
The tools and techniques to cause changes in consciousness in accordance with will.
or
How actions can change representations.???????
I have been playing around with substitution of some words to see if i can get a deeper understanding.
Will = act or action or ability to act
consciousness—the ability to create representations.
Is that even roughly correct?
@ Anonymous (#1)
Breakfast is crucial to survival. I am hypogycemic, so most mornings I wake up literally starved stupid – so nothing, but nothing, happens before breakfast. As for choice of cuisine, I usually end up with nut butter and raisins on toasted rye with some grapefruit, but my first choice would be to have my two favorite vegetables: steak and eggs.
@ Bradley (#6)
Narrative gets its power from mental laziness. Thinking takes focus, patience, and effort; it is work. For most people, doing your own thinking is not just work, it’s perceived as pointless work because anything and everything you might think through for yourself has already been thought through by everyone around you – so why make the effort? Just copy your neighbors’ answers and you’ll make out as fine as they will. (Of course it doesn’t even occur to them that maybe their neighbors won’t make out fine, because figuring that out means thinking for themselves.) The powers that be are keenly aware of this and take full advantage thereof in creating their narratives; in recent years, we have seen a worldwide clown show of that with respect to a certain disease threat.
@ jacques (#11)
There’s a corny old joke out there that economics was created to make tabloid astrologers look respectable. On a more serious note, formal economics – or at least what’s published of it in the mainstream media – consists mostly of smoke-and-mirrors tricks run by The Powers Which Be to the intent of funnelling wealth and influence to those who already have too much wealth and influence. For a sneak preview of how it all ends, click here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929
If what you’re contemplating is dabbling with the stock market (as I did in my youth), do so if you feel you must BUT NOT WITH MONEY YOU NEED FOR ANYTHING ELSE! A wiser investment plan in our declining society would be to direct surplus capital into: (a) repayment of any outstanding debts; (b) learning skills that will make you a valuable asset to others but only if you are kept alive to practice it (agriculture, carpentry, healing, etc.); and/or (c) durable goods and supplies which you yourself may need to use later – other than for trading with others, because that unavoidably means letting other people know you have the stuff so they can shove you out of the way and take it.
@ Anonymous (#20)
The two primary concerns about toothpaste are:
Abrasives: some toothpastes have been known to contain fine grit particles for ‘whitening teeth’. When this grit is too hard, it erodes the enamel, making costly dental repairs necessary.
Fluoride: the sodium fluoride additive in most toothpastes is toxic, is readily absorbed into the bloodstream, and is known to interfere with neurological development and cardiac function. Some conspiracy theorists argue that these adverse effects are the reason this toxin is included in toothpastes and municipal water supplies, the supposed effect on dental hygiene merely being an excuse.
If you are looking for an alternative to commercial toothpaste, make up a 50-50 mixture of baking soda and table salt. It tastes thoroughly disgusting, but will clean your teeth efficiently without harm.
Why does no one talk about the dinosaurs that are flying through space on beams of light?
Just ask the guys 160 million light years away who just developed a telescope that can see earth.
Hey JMG
I thought I’d share two interesting changes I recently noticed in our favourite free ebook sources, internet archive and Global grey.
I have noticed that the filter in the archives search function no longer has that simple section that sorts the freely available books from the ones you must borrow.
Also, Global grey no longer uses public domain art on its ebooks cover-images, only the same green style.
I don’t know exactly why these two changes have happened but I feel that the reasons would be somewhat depressing if I did.
JMG,
Since its open post week, I thought I would ask this of you since I don’t really know who else to ask. Plus, you’re my favorite occultist anyway so I really would like to have your suggestions. I am really enjoying the Ring series of posts although I don’t comment very often since I am pretty busy in the real world.
My wife and I are currently building a new house in a small town and my elderly mother is moving in with us. The new house is on heirloom land that belonged to my wife’s grandparents and her elderly mother also lives right next door in the house my wife grew up in. Because it had been abandoned for 20+ years, her grandparent’s house wasn’t salvageable and had to be torn down prior to starting new. We’re planning/hoping for this to be a multi-generational home since my wife’s youngest son and his wife live a 1/2 mile in a very small house with 4 of our grandchildren. We’re hoping they’ll move into the new house and be there when we are older, same as we are doing with our mothers. Unlike most new construction, this house will be built to last. Her daughter also lives with her husband within 4 miles, with two more grandchildren. FYI, my wife had 3 children; I did not have any although I am very close with a nephew. Everyone gets along and is pretty close, so we frequently get together for birthdays, holidays etc. The only exception is my wife’s mother, who is a devout Christian that values her church more than her family and therefore virtue signals often. I blow it off but my wife gets pretty irritable about it. At 82 her mother is not changing anytime soon.
Any recommendations for blessing a new house?
Any recommended rituals for keeping the peace between my wife and our mother-in laws? I know I’ll be hen-pecked with “man chores” so I’m not worried about me..lol.
Any chance my wife’s grandparents might stop by for a “visit” or has it been too long?
This house will also have a substantial workshop that I will be using as a carpentry, auto and machine shop. In addition to the possibility of making money now and in retirement, I’m hoping to teach the grandchildren a ton of practical skills that will serve them well as things devolve. I already have these skills and do my best to pass them on as much as possible, but I have a special interest in the grandkids.
Any recommended rituals for blessing a workshop to be a place of learning and safety for the youngsters? Some accidents can be beneficial learning experiences, and I don’t want to prevent those, so just the big ones. Stupid should hurt a little, but not too much so they can learn from it.
Lastly, how muck stock do you personally put in Feng Shui? I know some of it is good design principles, but I’ve been reading up on it, but my main concern is that my library appears to be a problem since it also doubles as a home office. Supposedly a Bookshelf is Poison arrows? WTH? ☹ I have been stockpiling a lot of my favorite classics and how to manuals in an effort to preserve knowledge for the next generation. Yes, some of yours are there too. 😊
Thanks for all that you do.
#1 re breakfast
Steak and peas at the moment is my standard breakfast (last week it was steak and eggs – I tend to cycle between peas, eggs, and chilli beans with my steak – a week or two on each). My general view on the importance of breakfast is you should eat if you are physically hungry, otherwise don’t (I say physically hungry to distinguish it from socially hungry (everybody else is eating so I should too) or habitually hungry (I always eat around this time so I must be hungry)). I also tend to follow the mantra of “food is not entertainment”.
Ahoy there JMG,
I recently happened upon a copy of “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” at the most synchronistically appropriate time and place, after years of having it on my mental “to read” bookshelf. Tore through it in a couple days and looooved it—thank you!
Three amusing features stood out:
1. Several times in the book, characters sit and do discursive meditation to help them solve some mental problem. More generally, there’s a lovely emphasis on the power of creative, thoughtful problem solving. The entire plot depends on it. You certainly don’t see that in a lot of contemporary thrillers!
2. It should probably be surprising that the author of “The Long Descent” is an optimist, but somehow it isn’t. There’s so much courage and virtue and honor and downright hope in this book. I won’t spoil the ending for everybody else but it left me in tears—good tears, literature tears, the kind you always want from a good book but don’t always get.
3. You were eating a lot of Burmese food when you wrote this one, weren’t you? I kept craving Htut Thayar Palata every time somebody ordered take-out.
I’d ask what they are smoking, but I wouldn’t use something that potent anyway.
“Following a recent meeting at the White House, which was attended by OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman and other tech leaders, the startup shared a document with government officials outlining the economic and national security benefits of building 5-gigawatt data centers in various US states, based on an analysis the company engaged with outside experts on. To put that in context, 5 gigawatts is roughly the equivalent of five nuclear reactors, ”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-pitched-white-house-unprecedented-000550020.html
Also on the narrative topic, people don’t do well with randomness. A narrative or conspiracy theory lets you combine random events into a coherent whole. Even when the predictions based on the narrative fail to come true the narrative tends to survive because randomness is more frightening.
As for breakfast, yes, as soon as I’m up. Granola and cheerios or something flakes. I seem to need a high-carb hit to get going. Coffee and I don’t get along so that’s out.
Some book notes:
Rubicon, by Tom Holland, is a lively, well-researched narrative account of the events leading up to the demise of the Roman Republic. Holland is a professional writer, not historian; at a time when the pros have all but given up on narrative history, writers like Holland are most welcome, to me at least. He has his own opinions and point of view, as who does not, but he does not appear to me to be pushing any special ideology. I have so far seen no errors of fact or chronology, and he does not ignore geography, most important for American readers who might not be familiar with European places. Speaking of geography, the maps, alas, are the usual mere sketches with which the publishing industry expects readers to make do. It occurs to me that we are seeing a modest revival of the genre of popular history, a most welcome development.
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, by Peter Orner, should have been a lovely novel if only Orner did not suffer from the delusion that his own sexual and scatological obsessions are of absorbing interest to the everyday reader. I gave up after the chapter about amorous pigeons. A whole chapter!
Shooting Star by Wallace Stegner is about a land deal in California. It features one of the most unappealing female protagonists I have encountered, the beautiful, clever, rich and destructive Sabrina Castro. It is a pity this wasn’t taken up by Hollywood, Castro would have been a fantastic role for a young Meryl Streep.
Dinosaurs as beams of light
160 million light years from earth
strike an observing pupil
Staggering implications
I like to eat breakfast on a workday somewhere between 8 and 11. I take a late lunch at 1:30 so it works for me. I’ve been eating a bannana, oatmeal with a side of sardines or smoked herring.
Hi JMG. So we are going to colonize the moon, eh? We will know when we have done so when the first prison is built there.
@monkeypilled #39
I saw “Branded” in the theater when it came out (same theater where I saw the Met’s “Ring” broadcasts, in fact). This was just at the beginning of my occult studies, I’d never heard of the movie and had no idea what I was getting into, and it made a huuuuge impression on me. Great representation of how one type of “unseen forces” functions.
I’ve been wondering how your frequent advice about unintended consequences and “three solutions to a problem” relate to the (hypothetical) design of spells.
If one starts with the problem of vehicle traffic, and considers a “flying car” spell, from that popular children’s novel, the unintended consequences involve either the FAA, or distraction of the operator causing a no-longer-flying car. (The opposite solution, stopping every car except one and driving between them has similar issues) Both of these seem to be very energy intensive, and therefore a bad idea even if possible.
So, a possible third solution is for the driver to get magical advice about which route will be fastest and least hazardous. …this is potentially only slightly more effective than consulting internet traffic maps. The opposite would be a spell that would persuade all other drivers not to use the route you plan, with extra traffic for everyone else. Sounds sort of selfish, honestly.
The two remaining options would seem to involve creating general driving “luck”, or a spell that simply insures that the driver is as alert and relaxed as possible. It’s not clear to me how “luck” gets created or attracted, and what the unintended consequence might be. “Alert and relaxed” sounds like either caffeine or meditation, and are we even still talking about magic here?
If this mental exercise rules out everything except a nice cup of tea, is there even any point to pursing magic?
I must say… when people start saying that a stock market crash is impossible… that is one of the surest signs that a crash is imminent!
On investments, along the lines of @Old Steve #54, taking care of one’s health is a great way to invest in the future. Could be just good food, or maybe traveling to a Tai Chi training workshop, etc.
@ milkyway
I don’t keep my chooks free range for a couple of reasons (neighbors dogs etc) but I do have three that came from a totally free range home. It was hilarious the first night we got them home because they scaled my coop and roosted three metres up a tree by post hopping. First time I’ve had chickens sleeping up a tree!
They are smart, healthy birds. I think a mix of Orpington and possibly Rhode island red. Going into a poorer lifestyle you are much better to switch to these older breeds because the modern girls lay an egg a day but they absolutely could not make do without commercial feed. I think the guy I got my wild girls off did give them feed and complained that it cost them more to feed, I think his problem was, he lost the eggs. I am backlogged with about 30 eggs in the fridge atm, laying isn’t an issue so I can only assume he couldn’t find them! Personally I like my girls somewhere safe with plenty of space and some free range time but I don’t think I’d get an egg without a coop!
For those interested, famous war corespondent,essayist, and atheist Sebastian Junger
has a NDE.
https://youtu.be/uaYKdPEktA0?si=r6eFpk2WODQ-vDEd
Or
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peter-attia-drive/id1400828889?i=1000666618990
@Untitled-1, #31, on demonolatry among the woke.
Good catch, and it’s not really new. Years ago we had a family friend who was “into alternative spirituality”: he started his own church but stayed away from demons. But I remember him saying that sometime back in the 1970’s or 80’s, his daughter (then a teenager) asked him about the Devil. She said she’d heard from friends of hers that the Devil was just misunderstood, and that he really just wanted us all to have a good time. What did her dad think?
“Oh,” he said, “the Devil is a big pussycat.”
“Really?” she beamed. (She liked cats.)
“Sure,” he said. “And we’re pigeons.”
Last Open Post, some of us discussed emotions. I have pondered on our discussion and realized that I should not lump all ’emotion’ on the same plane. We might experience emotion on one plane, but the circumstances that precede an emotional response can occur on a different plane. And the emotional response to the same circumstance is different if we respond consciously (ie, transmuting the reaction from the lower plane to a higher plane) or sub/unconsciously (“sensing” the reaction from the lower plane in a higher plane without transmuting it). (If you want the long-version explanation, it is posted here: https://druidalchemist.com/emotions/ )
And THANK YOU to everyone who allowed me to practice my Spiritual Alchemy Oracle on you! Based on the feedback I received (and my refined understanding on emotions mentioned above), I have tweaked my Oracle and would love to do more readings.
If you have a situation and circumstance you’d like some Spiritual Alchemy guidance on, please either message me through Dreamwidth, email me at hello @ druidalchemist.com or post a comment on https://druidalchemist.com/oracle/ .
Thank you!
@Travis55
We are not supposed to talk about that. Nuff said. 🙂
Sorry mistake on the utube link:
https://youtu.be/lekPcBKAA-0?si=YA3kZlVf6wsyL6le
@Milkyway
I have been doing chickens for 30 years here in New Hampshire USA. There is absolutely NO WAY to have totally free range chickens here, or at least not for very long. We have 15 acres here of mixed open and wooded land, every habitat you could want. We tried a quasi-free-range deal in the early years, but…
The chicken breed does not exist that can protect itself against weasels, fishers, foxes, coyotes, an assortment of hawks, bears, and I’m sure I’ve left somebody out. We’ve lost chickens to all of the above.
Now, every evening the chickens go into a weasel-proof cabinet thing we built after we lost 9 in one night. That was inside their stall/coop – weasels can get into anything. By day, they have shelter in a stall, can freely go out into a space with a lean-to roof for shade, and out into a larger fenced-in run. I let them out in the morning, I put them in at dusk, when the predators start to stir.
Allowing one’s chickens to be free range around here is, frankly, animal abuse. They give us eggs (let’s be honest – we steal their eggs), we protect them from predation as best we can, and feed them and shelter them. They get plenty of time every day to be wild chickens.
Another problem with free range chickens is finding the eggs…
It sounds lovely to have free chickens, but the reality is pretty harsh.
Richard, I’m not a specialist in the region by any means, but it appears to have been a Mesoamerican pseudomorphosis, with the usual stairstep pyramids, astronomical worship, human sacrifice, and other elements of the pre-Spanish Mesoamerican culture complex. The Mound Builder cultures were the equivalent phenomenon in the Mississippi basin.
Untitled-1, that’s fascinating; thank you for the heads up. I’d point out, though, that the woke ideology doesn’t actually reject the concept of absolute evil. It simply applies it to different targets. Watch wokesters talk about Donald Trump, or for that matter ordinary white working class American men, and you won’t hear them claiming that they’re just misunderstood!
Enjoyer, basically, yes — until and unless the current elite class becomes vulnerable to overthrow by a rising class. The engineered collapse of the stock market might be a way to make that overthrow happen.
Justin, sure! The philosophy that inspired Lévi can certainly be used for that purpose.
Karim, I have no idea. It all depends right now on choices made by a handful of people who are not necessarily rational…
Anon, funny.
Monkeypilled, welcome to the wide and weird world of spirits. Each plant species, according to occult lore, has a deva or guardian spirit that guides its destiny, and grain spirits have quite often been worshipped as deities — Demeter, for example, is a barley goddess, and Inari is the Japanese kami of the rice plant.
Jessica, natto’s an acquired taste, but I acquired it early and enjoy it a great deal. If you don’t like the texture, here’s a trick: sprinkle your favorite furikake over the top of it, or simply dump a packet of katsuobushi on it and stir it in. (For gaijin, the first of those is a Japanese condiment that contains seaweed, dried fish, and seasonings, and the second is dried shaved fish.) They absorb the slimy stuff and make the texture really quite pleasant.
Clay, it’s also quite common when a regime is in the final stages of disintegration that power centers just below the top start hiving off on their own and taking control of whatever they can. Brace yourself; it’s likely to be a wild toboggan ride from here on in.
Patricia M, glad you like it! Yes, I’ve been reading Chandler and Hammett, but the spy elements are influenced by Eric Ambler — if you haven’t read his work yet, you’re in for a treat. The reason there are nanmin on the Atlantic coast is that the US hasn’t disintegrated in that future — refugees arrived in North America from the camps in the 2060s and traveled across the country by various means. The Habitats are far from the only nanmin communities in the US — I’m considering a future book that will take Jerry to New Washington, which has a large and lively Japantown.
Jay, since you’ve already learned a version of the SoP, simply continue that version in place of the learning process in each of the two books you’ve mentioned, then add in the Grail Working (in either book) and the methods of practical magic (in the DMH) when you get to that point in your studies.
Jill, I’m looking forward to seeing how that book is received in the occult community. I expect some people to like it a great deal and others to scream like gutshot banshees.
Batstrel, we don’t know. Seriously, we don’t know. How much do the bacteria under your left thumbnail know about the nature of human beings? As those bacteria are to you, we all are to gods.
Jeff, that’s one way to conceptualize it, certainly. I don’t have a definitive framing — I simply note that there do seem to be two pseudomorphoses in the background of every great culture, and they seem to have parallel roles. For another example, consider the soon-to-be-born Russian great culture; its first pseudomorphosis was Magian by way of Byzantium, which formed its cradle; its second was Faustian, and it is now beginning the process of throwing that off to create itself in its own image.
Sam, ah, you’ve encountered “Myths Over Miami”! Yes to all your questions. It’s precisely among the lowest classes of society that the religious metaphors of the future will take shape, just as Christianity found its home among slaves and the urban poor while their supposed betters were still either praying to Jupiter or had lost all interest in religion.
Paedrig, easily done. This is the pentacle you’ll be putting on one side, right?
On the other, put this:
That’s the kamea or magic square of Jupiter; since Babylonian times it’s been used in Jupiter talismans, as it embodies the core numerology of Jupiter.
Maxine, that’s a fascinating question I’ve never seen discussed in occult literature, so I don’t have a ready answer for it. As for soaring prices, interesting — your monetary system seems to be collapsing even faster than ours is.
Chuaquin, it’s an interesting folk religion in which I don’t happen to believe; that’s about as far as my opinions on the subject go.
Dobbs, excellent. Now you know what Eliphas Lévi was talking about.
Travis, probably because not enough people are comprehensively ripped on weed when they post here. That may be the best example of a pothead revelation I’ve encountered yet.
J.L.Mc12, oh, granted. Archive.org is frantically trying to defend a business model of outright piracy by making people use their borrowing function. I’m not sure why Julie’s gone to plain covers.
BobinOK, once the house is finished but before anyone moves in, you or your wife should sweep the place with a new broom, beginning in the kitchen and finishing at the front door; this sweeps out any lingering bad luck and leaves the place fresh and clean. Then splash some Florida water (you can get it from any hoodoo supply and most drugstores these days) in the four corners of each room. For domestic peace, again, any hoodoo supply shop can sell you a Peaceful Home spell kit (the exact name will vary from shop to shop but the ingredients are the same) which will help quite a bit with that. Finally, what passes for feng-shui here in the US is mostly abject crap. If you can find somebody who got proper training from a Chinese teacher, consult with them, but don’t rely on mass market books — I think they decided that bookshelves were sha arrows because anyone who has bookshelves might look something up for themselves…
Math, thank you very much for this! That was a hard book for me to write but I think it worked out well, and the optimism in the ending was the kind I like to put in my serious fiction — not a facile quick fix due to improbable heroics, but a recognition that even in a really bad situation it’s possible to rise up and achieve something worthwhile. As for Burmese food, no — I guessed that it would be the next Asian food fad in the US, and I put it in as a reminder that this is set in the near future.
Siliconguy, I think they should go ahead and build them. Then, when they can’t get the electricity, the bankruptcy proceedings can begin.
Mary, thanks for this!
Michael, oh, I think it’s possible that some poor souls will be stuck on the Moon for a little while, at enormous expense, before the sheer unaffordability of it all sinks in.
Sylvia, you’ve proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there’s no point to practicing the kind of sleazy fake magic that fills the pages of that series of children’s novels. I don’t argue with that at all — because that’s not what real magic does. Magic is the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will. Flying cars? That’s technology, not magic. As long as you insist on trying to change the world instead of changing yourself, you’re going to fail at magic.
Jim, there’s always that!
Dashui, fascinating. Thanks for this.
Random, that makes a great deal of sense.
John, are you familiar with the work of Iain McGilchrist? “The Master and his Emissary” and “the Matter with Things”? Both are heavy tomes 900 and 1600 pages, respectively, but his approach as a philosopher trained in psychology and neuroscience makes for a fascinating read. AND I think his views are convergent with yours on many issues, although he has an entirely different vocabulary.
@Sam Salzman (#48):
I’m so glad to see that Lynda Edwards’ 1997 article can still be found on the web! It’s a very important corrective to the dominant narrative about homless kids. (Something of the same sort was written by Alley Valkyrie about the homeless kids in Eugene, Oregon, about ten years back: wildhunt.org/2014/05/the-lost-lords-of-neverwhere.html#disqus_thread .)
The Miami kids have run two separate bits of folklore togethher when they identify Bloody Mary and La Llorona. (The first is Anglo, the second Latino; and they are not carbon copies of one another.)
The line between mythology and religion is a thin and porous one, and in non-literate cultures they both change over time. For my money, the Miami hhomeless kids already have their own effective mini-religion, not just a collection of their myths, but it only answers to the circumstances of their homelessness. That’s fine. Religions don’t have to make claims on all people everywhere and everywhen.
> Enjoyer, basically, yes — until and unless the current elite class becomes vulnerable to overthrow by a rising class. The engineered collapse of the stock market might be a way to make that overthrow happen.
I am curious, who do you think that the rising class is? I have no idea, it might be too early to tell right now. It’s definitely not the united global proletariat like Marx would have envisioned.
@Clay Dennis (#42):
It’s not the first time something of this sort has happened in American History. Look at the final years of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, or the attempted “Banker’s coup” that General Smedley Butler blew the whistle on way back in FDR’s days. These are only the best known examples from the 20th century. There were certainly others: some successful, others not.
Hi all,
I just bought Benebell Wen’s book on Daoist Esotericism – has anyone used this book and what did you think? Her online videos are really engaging and informative.
Also, I came across this clip (about 30 minutes long) in which Sam Harris gives a good account of the Hard Problem of Consciousness. He also concedes that his belief that consciousness is an emergent property of the material world is axiomatic. Maybe he read last week’s essay about the limits of human knowledge? At any rate, I was happily surprised to see such a humble position from him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v11PQuqhAxs
＠Milkyway (#24) Re: free range chickens
While I don’t have any personal experience with it, the stories in the Foxfire books record that, in that part of the world anyway, lots of livestock was kept free-range. Cows, pigs, sheep, chickens (and maybe more?) were set free in the woods, and rounded up only for slaughter, or maybe to keep warm in the winter. They had ways to mark the animals so the owners could sort them out.
Aside from the obvious problem with predators, what’s keeping me from trying it is the issue of how to keep the animals from wandering onto the neighbor’s land. A fence is the obvious solution, but I don’t want to spend the money on it, and I also wouldn’t want to shut out all the deer and other animals that wander in and out of my forest land.
I understand that there was a shift in thinking about fences in America, sometime in the 19th or early 20th century. Way back when, you had to put a fence around your land if you didn’t want animals coming into it. At some point, that reversed, and people are now expected to put a fence around so their animals can’t get out. I am curious how that has worked in other countries, in European commons, for example.
Justin Patrick Moore: #64
I hope this is a subtle advertisement for Heinlein’s “the Moon is a Harsh Mistress”. One of the top ten Sci-Fi books ever written.
Untitled-1 [#31]
I’ve found Frieren very enjoyable — both the manga and the anime, in different ways. For one thing, the narrative idea is wonderfully unconventional — not the story of a Quest, but the story of the lone long-lived member of the questing group who re-traces the path of the original quest to put her mind at rest. Readers find out about the original quest only as flashbacks that explain the context of her current choices. There’s a superb melancholy about the whole thing. I wonder how the author will wrap it all up.
And the demons! And the ruinous tendency to try to find chummy relations with powerful creatures for whom humans are simply prey. (Although there is the currently unfolding sub-plot involving a demon who is someone taken with that possibility.)
I remember that, decades ago, in the days of usenet newsgroups, one writer tried to float a kind of Satanic movement that saw the “dark gods” as a victims of a kind of an imaginary and unhustified enmity invented by authoritarians to oppress the powerless, etc. I showed the manifesto to a friend, who remarked, “Anyone who sets out to oppose the demonization of demons will have a tough row to hoe.”
Katrinka @ 69, 30 eggs! Wealth beyond the dreams of cooking avarice. Angel food cake! Mile high lemon meringue pie! Brioche, which takes flour, milk, yeast and beaucoup eggs. A surfeit of eggs is when you can really, really get back at and annoy, in-laws, relations anybody else who was mean to you last year.
JMG, at some point I do wish you would explain just what is a Burkean conservative? Or link to where you might already have explained it. Does your kind of conservatism have any relation to or nodding acquaintance with the various factions which are calling themselves conservative today?
My habitual breakfast, eaten around 7am, is a fried egg, 1/2 cup of a hot grain (steel cut oats, rice, corn mush, or bulgur) with a dollop of vanilla yogurt, and some kind of fresh or previously frozen fruit. For the next several months the fruit will be either persimmons or pawpaws that I froze from this year’s large harvest of each. The corn mush is made from corn I grew some years ago and grind before I cook it into mush. Occasionally our neighbors give us some eggs from their chickens.
This is almost but not quite enough food to get me through to lunch at noon, so I often have a hard sourdough pretzel as a snack around 10am or so.
Thank you!
I really enjoy the GSF and I’m going to continue the exercises and look forward to more learning from the DMH, or the Dolmen Arch
Blessings
@Hosea Tanatu #71
Ha! I appreciated that comparison, thank you for sharing. I think there’s also an element here, of humans today believing they are at the top of the food chain, and thus the idea that humans could have a natural predator is a foreign concept to many. I agree that the “misunderstood” angle certainly isn’t a new concept. Reflecting on it more, I suppose what I find interesting about the tweet is both its existence and the response to it, and what that says about current trends in thought among young people.
@JMG
Ah yes, I suppose you do have a point there. I will have to meditate on this topic more to form a cogent conclusion on that apparent contradiction.
Hmm…
Thinking about it some more, I think a key part of the disconnect here is power, more specifically the perception of the presence of lack of it. This is mirrored in the tweets I linked as well. The wokester criticizes others for admitting they’d “committing fantasy genocide” against a race for not having “the exact same value system as them”. Failing to point out that the demons in question happen to have the “value” of, erm, “committing human genocide”. His other posts clearly betray the assumption that demons can be safely controlled by humans, and thus their extermination is merely a cruelty when they could be co-opted for better causes.
Trump and his supporters were subject to similar treatment for a time: treated as a joke, labelled as ignorant, not taken seriously, until it was demonstrated (in 2016) that they couldn’t be controlled. That they had the agency to do what they wanted without input from the woke. Then they became an existential threat, and I think that is the moment they became the avatar of evil in their eyes. Demons betray no obvious signs of threatening woke control or superiority, and so they get a pass.
So I suppose I would revise my initial conclusion to say “all people and all values are acceptable to the woke, as long as they recognize they are subject to woke approval”. They have partially integrated the lessons of the aforementioned media, but don’t recognize that they are only doing it from a position of assumed domination over those they claim to help. Thus their conception of coexistence hinges on the assumption that the beings they coexist with never truly pose a threat to them, through force or otherwise.
If this theory holds, the moment a group demonstrates genuine power over them (as Trump has), the switch would flip. I’m now interested to see if things head that way in the future.
JMG,
If that’s the case, then I think there will be an Andean civilization in the future which has a Mesoamerican pseudomorphosis from Mexico and a Faustian pseudomorphosis from Europe, in the same way that the future Russian civilization has a Magian pseudomorphosis from the Middle East and a Faustian pseudomorphosis from Europe. It fits the pattern of civilizations having two pseudomorphoses before striking out on their own.
Hi JMG and commentariat,
I am trying to contextualize The Origin of Consciousness in the Break Down of the Bicameral Mind. Have you read it? What do you think about it? It’s next up on my philosophy reading list and I’m rather excited to get started. I’m particularly interested in seeing what Jaynes says about language and metaphor informing our perception of consciousness. I’m also interested in seeing what anyone in the commentariat has to say about it.
Breakfast: Is unnecessary, and most people are less carb-tolerant in the morning than at other times of day, so it’s not just that eating isn’t optimal first thing in the day, it’s that people so often choose exactly the wrong things *to* eat at that time, when they do. The whole bagels, toast, donuts, cereal… yikes. You’d be way better off with a couple eggs, or some leftovers from last night’s dinner.
But, eating in the morning can be a useful tool for adjusting your sleep schedule. Eating something as soon as you wake up will tend to have you waking up earlier, but if you want to carefully preserve the ability to sleep in when the opportunity presents itself, maybe best to put off eating until later in the day.
I’m a coffee-for-breakfast person. And not until 9-10am.
Bradley #6 et al – Re “Why is narrative so powerful even if it’s not true?”
I think it’s because we are taught to respect elders and other authority figures during our childhood. In fact, the better socialized stronger the tendency to submit to authority. Our parents and other authority figures provided us with sustenance, safety, and training in behaviors that would smooth our paths in life. I think this accounts for the fact that many of those who spent longer in school — college-educated and above — bought into the Covid narrative more strongly than a goodly proportion of the less-educated.
Narratives are powerful because people WANT to believe in them. They WANT authority figures in their lives who care about them and tell them how to stay on the straight-and-narrow. Their willingness to believe is deeply rooted in their childhood experiences when they had parents that gave them direction and a feeling of security, caring, and belonging. It is simplicity itself for those who crave power to take advantage of these very human desires.
@Milkyway
I had free-ranging chickens for about a year. Closed them into a secure coop at night, but they had the run of the whole acreage during the day. 6 hens, 1 rooster. This worked well, and for several months I did not lose any hens. There were feral cats, foxes, raccoons, skunks, and hawks in my area for sure, so it was not predator-free, but there were no coyotes or bears in that region, as far as I know.
After those initial months, the rooster developed an irrational dislike for my in-laws. This was a problem because we were living with them at the time. I had to get rid of the rooster.
The problem was, he’d been a really excellent rooster– big, intimidating fellow, took the safety of his hens very seriously, always looking out for hawks and things, and any time he’d see something, he’d give the signal and all the ladies would run up under the bushes. Without him, the hawks started picking off my hens, one at a time. 🙁 Then over the winter, we got an unusual several inches of snow cover that stayed on the ground a week or more. The poor dears ventured bravely out of their heated coop anyway, and got quite snow-blind. Couldn’t find their way back to the coop in the evening, and wound up roosting under the porch. One of them seems to have been nabbed by an owl in the edge of the woods. The remaining hens recovered, but by that time I was down to 4 (had added a couple somewhere in there, after the initial chicks), and then 2. I gave away the last two, because it was just too sad to let the hawks have them.
So… free ranging: it just depends an awful lot on where you live, what else lives there, and whether or not you have a good rooster/roosters.
Anonymous #1: Breakfast routine: One banana every day. Mon-Fri: rolled oats, pumpkin seeds, and sunflower seeds, soaked overnight in milk, topped with fresh fruit and kefir. Cooked in the winter, often with a 1/2 t of bacon fat. Sat: omelets, often with chopped kale & herbs, cheese. Sun: pancakes, usually 1/2 buckwheat flour, 1/2 whole wheat flour, served with peanut butter, honey, and sunflower seeds, often smeared with a bit of bacon fat. (I’m 6’2″, 160 lbs., mid-60s, with no health concerns.) All organic, some home-grown, or home-fermented.
After these breakfasts, lunch is optional.
@milkyway #24 re: Chickens
No personal experience of my own, but it was a path I looked into pretty seriously when I was getting out of the Army. For an alternate take with slightly higher set-up costs, but less likelihood of running afoul of neighbors or their cars, you might check out Pastured Poultry Profits by Joel Salatin. His approach is neither free-range nor coopless, but instead goes for mobile coops – you take two boards (something like 4x4s in US measurements, a board with a square cross-section of ~10 cm) to use as skids, connect that with two other boards to form a square, make the sides of a cube/rectangular prism with chicken wire, and put a roof on it made of corrugated plastic or the like, maybe add in a door/gate for feeding and egg access, if you they lay. Each day, you drag this from where it is to the adjacent fresh grass, with the chickens inside.
The basic idea is that the chickens are protected from predators and the elements, have space to move around, and get access to new bugs to eat and dirt to scratch every day, but they make more efficient use of whatever forage they find because they’re stuck with what’s in the coop on any given day. On Salatin’s farm, the coops follow the cows a day or two later so that they can scratch the paddies into the ground to get at fly eggs and maggots, giving them more protein to eat and better fertilizing the soil, but that’s optional. Not sure how well it would work with smaller livestock like goats. For winter, you might need a more substantial coop for warmth, unless you’re planning on just slaughtering every fall and getting new chicks from someone/somewhere else every spring. My army buddy who introduced me to Salatin’s work had this set up going on a semi-rural/large suburban lot and it was working pretty well for him last I heard.
Hope this gives you some food for thought (and/or literal food)!
Jeff
Hi in the book The Doctrine and Ritual of the High Magic book at chapter 13 is said, there is this passage:
> “Thus when a man renounces from early childhood his love for women, he renders the wife who was destined for him a slave to the demons of debauchery. Souls meet and multiply in heaven as well as in bodies on earth. Immaculate souls are the daughters of the kisses of angels.”
Does this mean that if people are celibate at younger age or later in life his destined wife is destined for debauchery. Or if other boy is having other obstacles like financial, etc, or is strictly about love and not lust of initiative?
In an even more clear-cut case IMHO could be the case when boys are transitioned young and from that might mean that their future wives are destined for debauchery. This sounds to me like a lever to create a lot of debauchery and suffering that a demon that can feed on that can have a lot of reasons to exploit, this can tie well with the other aspects of the demonic hypothesis that seem to have started around 2019, when also this transitioning thing picked up a lot of steam. Does this thing hold some water?
Jaques – Why financial crashes? You can read various sources and find that there are strongly held, inconsistent beliefs on the subject. My personal take is that trust leads to prosperity, prosperity leads to complacency, complacency leads to betrayal, and prosperity withers after enough betrayal. (Financial / economic crash.) There are various aspects of this. First, people with money trust banks to hold it for them. Banks trust people to repay loans. People who feel trusting of their neighbors need not invest in security (which is only useful when trust is broken). When people don’t trust banks, their wealth is more likely to be stolen. When bank loans are not repaid, bank deposits may not be returned. Without trust, a farmer can’t put out a table of produce by the road and expect to find a box of money at the end of the day, so someone who would otherwise be productive needs to “mind the store”. Such “security taxes” impact many aspects of society. When you can’t trust your neighbor to stay out of your house and leave your goods in place, then you end up only acquiring goods in small, inefficient, quantities, through a large number of (inefficient) transactions. (This, I am told, is typical of African society.)
I find breakfast important, I always have breakfast Generally the last few years I have oatmeal with walnuts, a few raisons, sometimes some other fruit too, and walnuts and a bit of milk. Then more milk in my cups of tea. Eggs and potatoes and toast is also good. But, I more often save eggs for lunch or dinner.
I do not eat after dinner, and I usually have dinner at 6pm, so I naturally go about 13hours with no food. But my food is during the day, when we are naturally active, not right before bed/late dinner.
Anonymous RE: Breakfast
Looking at the responses so far, it looks like I am in the minority because I rarely eat breakfast. When I wake up, my body is in fasting mode and is quite content to stay there. If I am busy, I might even work through lunch too. Whereas, if I eat breakfast, it’s on! In two hours I will be hungry, and in three hours I will be STARVING, and I can barely make it to lunch. Much easier to just skip ahead comfortably to lunch.
That said, I do listen to my body and if I wake up hungry, I eat. I can be a bit of a Food Camel where I don’t eat much for a few days, and then my body says “You Are Hungry!”, and I eat a bunch for a few days, and then the cycle repeats. Seems weird to be telling the world all this, but you did ask!
MilkyWay RE: Chickens
My buddy out in the hills tried that. First issue was trying to find the eggs, which they would lay in some clump of grass somewhere. Fortunately, he had an amazing dog that could find them and pick them up very gently and bring them home. But predation was really high. Mostly from Red Tail Hawks. Not recommended.
Hey JMG
I know that the Internet Archive does have a lot of people illegally uploading PDF scans of copyrighted books, but it never occurred to me that this could be considered part of how they do business. I always thought it was just a consequence of not thoroughly checking everything that is uploaded on account of how many things are uploaded daily. So, you think they deliberately allow it to happen for business reasons?
Also, on the subject of Julie. I think she is just tired of going through the effort of choosing art that goes with each book, when she gets so little in terms of donations in return. Also, coincidentally I found some of her books being offered on internet Archive a few days ago, and emailed her about it.
@milkyway
We have free range chickens and our experience is about the same as the other commentators. If you free range you are going to lose chickens to predators. But there are several reasons that I continue to allow some wild chickens around our property. First is that they really really help control bad insects like ticks and flies that affect our other animals. Second is because some of them really do prefer to be wild. We do our best to protect them from predators and that is most effective when the family is home. If there are people around the chickens are mostly fine. I have a regular conversation going with our local hawks and so long as they aren’t hungry we have a pretty good understanding. It is best for the chickens to be up at night in a secure coop, they seem to agree and have no problem coming home… That being said I do have two pairs that roost in our trees regardless of the number of times I have told them it is dangerous. They are a number of years old at this point and I credit the rooster with this. Most of the time when hens are out at night the owls or possums or racoons will find them eventually. If you have chickens for eggs then you want a coop and bring the good food to them. Our hens that are out always find a new place once the eggs start disappearing and even if they don’t the black snakes here will get them first after they warm up in the late spring. What I have taken to doing is trying to keep the hens cooped up with a single rooster and allowing the ‘extra’ roosters run of the yard. They are much less likely with our predators to be picked off. Regarding gardens it has been a challenge to keep them out, they really like to share in what I grow, and by share I mean dig it up too soon and eat it all otherwise. So that has taken some work but the other trade offs were mostly worth it for us. We have a good amount of space and for the most part they don’t wander far into the neighbors yard (unlike my geese or goats which prefer the neighbors to us). I don’t like losing chickens to the predators and we don’t want them to come back for regular meals so make adjustments if we do lose one but at the same time are supporting the wilds around be it chickens feeding the predators, fruits feeding the birds, plants feeding the bugs, and everything feeding the squirrels.
What do you think of the Kybalion? I’ve tried reading it a few times without success, but I just started again and I’m finding it much more illuminating than other times and will finish it finally.
in regards to chickens.
I live on over 2 acres, and chickens could not find enough on my land to survive. I used to free range them more, and their circle would just keep expanding. But, I live in a Mediterranean climate, where I get no rain for 6 months of the year, sometimes more. And once the chickens foraged further, there were coyotes.
When I moved into this house, the chickens left by the previous owners were free ranging. The roosted in a tree by my bedroom window. I do not think they were killed in that tree, not so far as I saw. But, the brooding mothers were generally killed by the racoons, they would nest behind hte woodpile or somewhere. and some chickens, as mentioned, were killed when foraging by coyotes.
Interestingly, feral turkeys do well in this area. They forage very widely. They roost in trees. They manage to hatch out new ones. But, the predation by coyotes and maybe mountain lions is very high. Quail manage to hatch out chicks too, they forage widely, they are heavily predated when the littles are still small, but then, eveything is green then in spring so they can forage by shelter and then they can fly as it gets drier. SO, I do not know why the chickens cant do it. And it is not just personal on my property, people drive out and dump chickens, and chickens escape, and we do not have feral chicken populations as we have feral turkey populations.
I wonder, in your book you read, how are the humans getting a yield off of the feral chickens ? Eggs are hard to find if they dont have nesting boxes.
Ecosophy Enjoyer,
I plan on proposing the question of what the next ruling could be for October’s fifth Wednesday post.
JMG, question concerning great cultures in Spengler. Great cultures have each a unique theme, for example, “how to live in harmony with oneself” in Apollonian culture, “how to live in harmony with the gods” in classical Indian culture, and so on. However, as different cultures come and go, the notional space for these great themes diminishes… won’t there be a point in which great cultures won’t have any new theme to develop?
Jerry, I’m very superficially familiar with his ideas; I haven’t taken the time to wade into either of his tomes.
Enjoyer, not even Marxists believe that the proletariat will become the emergent ruling class, though they pretend to; they believe that they themselves are destined to become the nomenklatura that tells the proletariat what to do. That is to say, Marxism is an ideology of the managerial class, which is now in charge and is in the process of sunsetting out. The next rising elite is pretty clearly the entrepreneurial class, as typified by Trump and Elon Musk — charismatic personalities that figure out ways to profit from a civilization that’s well past its peak.
Russell, no, but I’ve read several of Wen’s other books and those were quite good.
Mary, I have indeed discussed that elsewhere:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2016/05/a-few-notes-on-burkean-conservatism.html
Jay, you’re most welcome. Go ye henceforth and do that thing!
Untitled-1, that strikes me as a reasonable hypothesis, and one that has some hope of being tested.
Richard, that seems very plausible to me. I expect a great culture to rise someday further south in South America, centered on the region that includes southern Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and northern Argentina, but they’ve only had one pseudomorphosis so far; an emergent Andean culture might give them a second.
Luke, that comes up here from time to time. I read it many years ago, and it struck me at the time, first, as very reductionistic, and second, based on an oversimplified model of brain function. Mind you, it’s still worth reading, but some of the evidence Jaynes proposes can, I think, be taken in a very different sense!
Newton, that’s a traditional Jewish belief and was used to counter Gnostic ideas that glorify celibacy. I don’t consider it generally valid, as I don’t think any soul’s destiny is determined by what another soul chooses to do.
J.L.Mc12, a lot of freebie sites like archive.org are basically fronts for literary piracy. (Scribd is another major example.) The corporate world covertly supports this because it helps them squeeze small to midsized publishers out of business. They did the same thing with recorded music, which is why so few bands can make a living from music these days.
Dennis, it’s useful if it’s approached as what it is — a very good summary of the occult-influenced end of early 20th century American New Thought. It’s useful to take it a bit at a time, reflect on it, and — yes — use it as a source of themes for meditation.
Bruno, of course. Recall, though, that the current cycle of civilizations has only been going since around 3000 BC and is unlikely to keep going much past 3000 AD, if it lasts that long. Then, if the old occult teachings are right, we’ll have millennia in which no human society gets much past the tribal level, and when the next cycle of civilizations gets going, they’ll know no more about us than we know about Atlantis, and will be able to make all the same mistakes over again.
Anonymous #1
> breakfast
The last couple months, I have been eating 5-6 strips of beef bacon🥓for breakfast (one-third pound). Half the time, I am not hungry for anything further. In other words, having only bacon was more by accident than by design.
I feel better. It is an interesting ‘better’ — more like stronger. Bacon keeps me going until late afternoon. I haven’t changed any other habits that I can think of.
Twist my arm. What torture❣️I am going to keep eating bacon.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🥓
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
John Michael Greer,
Why do you think the current cycle of civilizations will end around 3000 AD?
I eat a bacon cheeseburger for breakfast every day.
In July ,1914 if you had told a German or a Russian what was going to happen to their countries and the world as a whole over the next 31 years they would have dismissed what you said as being beyond possibility. Yes, horror has happened in history repeatedly and it can happen to us. And we may be in 1914 even now.
Hey JMG
I must ask then, why internet archive is suffering in court if they are covertly supported by the corporate world? Did they go too far and have to go through some kind of show trial to placate someone? Also if they are being corporately supported then does that mean that even with all the money they are going to pay as a fine, they will somehow be able to carry on with business, maybe under a new name?
@ Theresa and experience in England.
I actually just got off the phone with my friend wh is from England and visits there regularly and saw your post. We were talking about food there and she says they do alot of take out and ready meals. I asked how anyone could afford to do that and not cook…. she says it is cheaper there to do so ? But, anyways, takeaway is she concurs that there are alot of restaurants. according to here, grocery shopping is alot cheaper there too, and she says her daughter and fiance just got back from being there for 2 months, they were thinking of relocating there, and her daughter was having sticker shock at the grocery store here.
JMG and all,
I was thinking, always dangerous I know., about bring in workers here, US, and other places like UK.
I do think many reasons are valid, esp corporate greed and wage undercuttin, and possible diluting of our native culture etc… so lots of reasons.
But, I noticed that one of the required school supplies for elementary students is ear buds to plug into a computer. My friend told me that even very small children she sees are constantly being entertained by screens, just stuck looking at screens. I have noticed changes with school offerings over the years, when I was in school, there were tons of electives, and required courses were less. So even as a college prep high school student, I took drafting, electronics shop, plastics shop, auto shop., cooking, etc…. even in junior high I took electives like band, metal shop, wood shop, sewing, etc… and we had no AP courses, college was saved for college. A fair amount of boys wrenched on cars or motorcycles in evenings and weekends, I even learned some from them. Now there are almost no “non-academic” course offered, they try and make them all “college ready”. Alot arent getting drivers licenses until very late and it is rare for them to learn any hands on at home.
Anyway, if people dont do anything spatially growing up, could it also be that they arent good at jobs that need hands on spatial skills like meat processing, construction, factory assembly ?
Are we becoming leterally incapable of meeting our own basic needs with the people raised here ?
Mobile chicken coop. This would not be hard to build.
https://homesteadingfamily.com/happy-farmer-chicken-coop-review/
Atmospheric River:
IKR? Where I live we have tons of quail, and wild turkeys. Why not wild chickens? Oh wait, that’s called a Grouse.
Milkyway
Being involved with chicken raising in the desert in CA, you wouldn’t have any chickens and certainly no eggs if you let them free range. In the daytime we let them run in a large enclosure, which they are happy with. At night they voluntarily go into their coop where their roosts and lay boxes are and where they feel safe. We even have a Great Pyrenees sleep in the enclosure at night. I have seen a coyote jump the 6′ fence in broad daylight and take a chicken.
Clay, JMG, et al
On the mini coup you mention, Clay, I have heard that Biden, Sullivan, Blinken and Starmer were going to announce that it was OK to use Storm Shadow and Attackms missiles deep into Russia, obviously needing US and UK technicians and guidance systems. The next day Putin declared that it would be considered an act of war by the US and UK and Russia would retaliate in kind. Supposedly Lloyd Austin with the backing of the Pentagon told Biden, et al: ” Ain’t gonna happen”, as in ” We are telling you so” and Biden, et al backed down. A military coup is not the greatest thing in the world, but it sure beats WWIII.
Stephen
Obviously Biden and Starmer were going to do the announcing, but it appears that Biden is so far gone in his dementia that Blinken and Sullivan are the real power behind the throne. There also appears to be a rift between the neocons in the State Department and the somewhat more pragmatic Pentagon.
Hi JMG,
Have you read Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas? l’m interested on your opinion. Related to the book theme, do you have plans to write another book on astrology? I read your book about Pluto with inmens pleasure.
Thank you
I’ve recently has a chance to finish reading through Gregory Shaw’s Hellenic Tantra, which, as a study of Iamblichus’ theurgy, is well worth reading, especially since Shaw takes theurgy quite seriously, without the traditional academical distancing.
I rather do think he sets up a dubious opposition between Plotinus and Iamblichus: their differences have always seemed to me to be more a difference in capacity — for Plotinus, contemplative union was relatively easy, and his notion of the unfallen soul (or aspect of the soul) has to do with the availability of contemplative union, at least for him and people like him. Iamblichan theurgy, and the theory of the completely descended soul, on the other hand, seem to me to have to do with people of more moderate capacity, who need to rely more on the traces of divine energies in the world. (The theory of the unfallen aspect of the soul, in the form of the scintilla or synteresis, persists into Christianity, as in Aquinas.)
My greatest reservation has to do with his use of non-dualist Saivite tantra as an elucidating comparison. (One of the interesting recurrent features of western esotericism is the discovery that some other tradition actually elucidates western esotericism — as in Beyer’s Cult of Tara. This is sort of an inverse Pizza Phenomenon. Non-dualism, especially of a more or less Vedantic variety, has become quite popular as am elucidating comparison among western esotericisms.) It seems to me that the non-nondualist traditions of Tibetan Buddhist, and Buddhist and tantra, would be even more apt, in light of Sara Rappe’s demonstration (in Reading Neoplatonism) that the thrust of the Neoplatonic tradition was always to criticize, empty out, and and try to surpass, its own formulations, leading to demonstrations that positive assertions (including I think monism and non-dualist monism) were actually untenable except as provisional formulations.
His core thesis is that both traditions aim at building a “heavenly body”, or transforming the okhema (the subtle or fluidic body) into a kind of body of immortality. This is quite plausible; again, the Tibetan Buddhist, and Taoist, traditions have a great deal to say about this, especially in the context of the non-substantiality of such a body.
He also sets out to show that this has remained a theme in western esotericism, which again is quite plausible, since it is already well formulated in ordinary Christian tradition(the resurrection body will be impassible subtle; agile, and bright). This again is not wrong, but somewhat incomplete. His account of the subtle body in later western tradition relies a great deal on Simon Cox, The Subtle Body: A Genealogy, which is itself quite valuable but limited in a way that persists in Shaw’s treatment.
Cox (I have read his dissertation, and looked at his published book, which seems pretty similar) skips from subtle bodies in the Renaissance, especially among the Cambridge Platonists, to the Theosophical versions of Blavatsky and others. He takes as pivotal Aleister Crowley’s synthesis of Hindu and Western esoteric ideas of the subtle body as something that is to be trained and enriched. While Crowley did indeed emphasize work with the subtle body, he was not the first to do so.
MA Atwood’s A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery (1850) is an exhaustive (and non-“orientalizing”) decoding of alchemy in terms of Neoplatonic theurgy and alchemy — and of magnetic manipulation of the subtle body. This book, though suppressed (by the author), and rather opaquely written, was already a major influence on many of the figures associated with the Golden Dawn, and, arguably, on the initiatory practices of the Golden Dawn. Cox does not mention this, and as a result neither does Shaw. But one can clearly see aspects of it in Crowley’s method of “rising on the planes” as a way of training the Body of Light.
Despite these reservations, both Shaw’s book and Cox’s book are well worth reading — although Cox’s book is pricey, costing some $100 in hardcover, and $95 in Kindle format. Hellenic Tantra, on the other hand, is about $23 in paperback,and $9 in Kindle format. So for Cox’s book, for most of us, the library is the way to go. But worth the trip, if one has access to an obliging library.
Maxine Rogers #51
Something happens to a person who lives past the time they should have died. In the USA, for the last fifteen years, “modern medicine” has kept people (mostly elderly) artificially alive by having them take umpteen drugs. There are enough such people to form a separate class. And I believe this class could be studied.
If one hangs out at medical facilities long enough, one can pick out those of this class. One “dead giveaway” (I suppose, pun intended) is that they look like walking cadavers. Hollowed out shells. Bodies where parts are visibly worn thin while other parts appear relatively robust. Their souls go along with how they look: they are wretches. One cannot risk getting close for an extended period of time because these of the zombie🧟class suck the life out of healthy people (who age early, among other things).
Then again, I doubt the zombie class will ever get studied. These so-called ‘people’ are cash-cows. The health industry (the death industry) thrives on keeping them alive, just so the zombies have opportunity to pay for even more drugs, pay for even more doctor visits, pay for even more specialists, pay for even more sophisticated tests, pay for even more surgeries. The walking dead keep on giving.
But beware. Zombies bite. They aim to deceive. They are not innocent. They are not nice. They are half dead. They are not alive. …they are a burden.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🧟♂️
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hey Yigit and JMG
It just so happens that I read Lewis Dartnel’s “The Knowledge” many years ago, and have refreshed my memory of it with a few quick reads through some of its chapters, so I can give my opinion of it.
As enjoyable as it is to read, I am unsure how genuinely helpful it would be for rebuilding civilisation. I don’t know if you have read the book JMG, but to my mind its fault has nothing to do with burdening readers with theories as there is not much emphasis on them at all in the book. Instead, it gives very general ideas and instructions on building the kind of technology that Dartnel thinks would both be easy for a post-apocalyptic people to achieve, and “leapfrog” any unnecessary intermediate technological steps that aren’t strictly required.
The problem is that due to his very general descriptions a lot of necessary details, especially of the kind that can only be acquired through practice, are left out so that on its own you would not be able to accomplish much with this book. Rather its value is that it gives the gist of what you need to do, and guidelines for what to focus your efforts on, so the reader doesn’t waste too much time on figuring out what needs to be done.
@Degringolade at #8.
You have to remember that the western ruling class is actually pretty ignorant, and its political expression–what I call The Party, and others have called,for example, the Uniparty–is only interested in power. Whilst its different tendencies fight about detail, the broad lines of its neoliberal economic and social policies remain constant irrespective of who wins elections. In order to occupying all the acceptable political space, though, ways have to be found of dismissing any other political movement, and the only epithet they can think of is “fascist.” This always works because nobody, or almost nobody, wants to be called a fascist. So occultists are in good company here. “Fascist” is flung around against any and all enemies. Even the Left is not exempt from the slur (bear in mind that, unlike the US, the rest of the world does understand that liberals and the Left are two different and antagonistic movements.) Leftist politicians in France and Germany calling for controls on immigration or criticising Islamic extremism have been called “fascists” because, well, it’s the only insult the Party knows how to pronounce.
@Jacques at #10. The point about stock markets is speculation. The point of buying shares is to sell them later for more than you paid for them. If shares go down, you buy them if you think they will rise again, when you can sell them and make money. If shares are rising, you buy them now to sell them later when the price has gone up again. The latter is sometimes called the Bigger Fool theory: all you need to make money is to sell the shares to someone who thinks they will go up further, even if you yourself are sure they won’t. At the level of the individual company, once shares start consistently falling in price, everybody wants to sell, and eventually the company can effectively disappear. If this happens on a large enough scale you get a crash. Bear in mind also that most people buy shares with money they haven’t got, on the basis that they will pay back the purchase price from selling the shares at a higher price. When share prices start to go down, everybody desperately sells all the shares they can, to pay back as much as possible of what they owe. Crash.
#1 re: breakfast
I‘ve been working very hard for the last three months, 7:30-5:00 every day, building a house mostly by hand, and have settled for two breakfasts. 7:00 is a big bowl of oats, whole grain cereal, fruits, yoghurt, and oat milk with a cup of coffee, and then at 10, 10:30 four sandwiches of whole grain bread and Gouda cheese.
If I don’t get two additional meals later in the day, I feel hungry. I‘m 43 and pretty lean, haven’t gained a pound eating like this for three months. Hooray for physical exercise!
#60 5GW data centers:
Sorry if someone has made the same point yet, I didn’t have the time to read all replies yet.
This supports my favorite current AI doomsday scenario: that two or more major powers (say US and China) get into an arms race about this, and the payoff of these systems (say in encryption or data analysis) turns out to be so critical that neither dares to back down and lose, ultimately driving one or both of them to the point where a triage of energy supplies becomes necessary, giving way to the cannibalization of other relevant parts of their economies. I‘d enjoy this as the plot of a short story, much more than those tired tropes à la The Terminator.
and to JMG personally, the Ring series has been awesome so far, I‘m looking forward to every new installment and hopefully a book some day!
Best regards,
Eike
Hello people again…My breakfast is usually a coffee with milk, with some cookies. If I need more energy because I’m planning to do some exercise during the morning, I prefer to eat cheese or kefir.
My breakfast for many years was cereal with milk and sugar. But in my sixties I developed a cow’s milk allergy (it’s not the same as lactose intolerance), plus I decided to stop consuming sugar and highly processed foods after reading how unhealthy they are.
So breakfast now is a cup of black coffee without sugar, followed by fresh fruit in season (currently bananas and oranges). In addition I take gelatine for my joints. I believe gelatine plus the vitamin C from fruit keeps them flexible. (My spinal column is fused due to ankylosing spondyliti, aka bamboo spine, a type of rheumatoid arthritis, and I can’t afford to lose any more flexibility.)
I get hungry late morning, but don’t eat anything before noon. Lunch is normally a couple of slices of sourdough bread with cheese, and supper is a proper cooked meal. No snacks allowed. If I don’t have enough protein with supper I might eat more at breakfast.
“try [to] pin the snarl-word of “fascist” on a lot of occult thought.” The main thing that strikes me there is that the Left appears to be openly anti-Christian as far as I can tell, and mocks Christians in America as often as they can (this is getting difficult as there aren’t any, or none with power). So they are tying the “occult” to “Fascists” then saying “We are the occult, new age, witches, wicca people”. We should look into the problem of coherency on both sides instead.
As our host would say, it’s really “Baddie bad word! Prickley word” vs “Yummy good word, Joy/Us word.” OMG, infants, this is just calling Karen and Kyle a “Poopy Pants.” It has no actual meaning, and I’d say “nor is it meant to,” but it IS meant to, they’re just too idiotic a thinker to get up to a level of mental meaning. Maybe large groups are always like that.
“how can) the stock market crash crash if it’s propped up and subject to artificial manipulation?”
You’re right, but what if the buyers stop believing in the con? They can get “returns” but the money is losing value faster than stocks are going up? Then they move to commodities as a purchase for protection, no stock buyers, it overwhelms the rigging machinery. All systems have goals, boundaries, and limits. But as another commenter said, what happens when the Dow is 900 Trillion dollars and everyone in America is homeless? (you know: like now) Does that work for the manipulator’s goals?
Why are stories? My guess is that’s a proof that we’re spirits in a physical world, not the other way around. Our primary reality is consciousness and information of the Spirit ether, and the physical world is the one that’s “unreal” or less real. People can endure pain and die for ideas. But without ideas, people wither, commit suicide, and perish. Which is the primary and foremost?
@Russel #81: Hi, I don’t have that book, but I’ve been using her new translation of the I Ching to learn the oracle and it has been very rewarding. I check out her blog from time to time and like some of the other topics she gets into like Feng Shui, etc.
@Degrinoglade: Funny, as I am reading (well, listening to audiobook of) Friday right now. I really am enjoying it, as I do in general when I read Heinlein. I loved The Moon is a Harsh Mistress when I read it (once) about 23+ years ago, so I don’t remember the detail, or the reference.
If it is the sardines, then…
On Sardines (and herring…)
I have loved sardines since I was a kid when my dad put them on frozen pizza for us. I got out of the habit of eating them for awhile, and then I had a dream where my deceased mother came to me in a dream and showed me some sardines. It was a time when I was going through one of the periodic bouts of depression I am somewhat prone to (it used to be more common in me) and the sardines helped me rebalance (along with other tactics). There high vitamin D and Omega-3s helps me stave off the winter blues – which was even more important back when I worked in the basement of the library. I’d go to work in the dark. Then I’d be in the fluorescent lit area all the day except for my breaks, and then I’d go home and it would be dark again. Thankfully (in most respects) my dpt. moved to a new building and we are above ground and have windows that let in the natural light. So, the past five years, things haven’t been as bad with that in the winter. In these past five years too, things have gotten much better with regards to those moods I would get into, not that they don’t ever happen, but they don’t linger as long. I attribute it to SOP, discursive meditation, and other practices to the overall improvement. I’ll use St. Johns Wort or other some other herbs (adaptogens and nervines generally, Ashwagandah and Hawthorn are near the top, but others like Chammomile and Lemon Balm too) as needed.
None of this, is of course, medical or mental health advice. This is just stuff that has worked for me.
>I’m sure the stock market will keep on trucking along as everything else falls apart.
To some extent these days, the stock market IS trucking along at the expense of the real economy. It has become one of the causes of the Collapse, perhaps not the biggest, but it is one of them. The headline numbers are now political objectives. It is politically incorrect to have smaller numbers. Bigger numbers, are better numbers. And they are goalseeked. Also see: The 30 minute ramp.
At least the Chinese are upfront about it. In news today, they have announced they are doing “whatever it takes” to make bigger numbers this year. Strange communists they are, so interested in propping up stock markets. Can someone point to me in Das Kapital the urgent and pressing need to prop up stock markets? I had no idea Marx was such a stock speculator.
Hi John Michael,
Hope you’re doing well? It’s cold here tonight, 37’F outside last I checked. Brr! Firewood is a lovely local energy resource to keep you warm. I’ve gotta increase the storage area for the firewood though. Since the you-know-what-and-that-health-subject-which-shall-not-be-mentioned, I spend more time working at home, and that shifts many costs onto my good self (such as an increased usage of firewood). Oh well, mustn’t grumble. Working on the firewood project tomorrow, because it is a public holiday. Footy finals, apparently. Who knew? 🙂
Sorry, I digress, it’s a bad habit. Just out of sheer curiosity, do you reckon there is any sort of magical working going on with the ever and ever larger debt situation? I know why it’s happening, I just can’t comprehend the carelessness of that outcome, so thus I was wondering if there is something more going on there. Dunno.
Cheers
Chris
@ Travis and the flying space dinosaurs:
I am reminded of a sketch in the 1990s British comedy show called the Fast Show. One character, a Californian hippy professor named Denzil Dexter, denies that TImothy Leary et al had any impact on his research. The interviewer asks:
“And what exactly are you researching at the moment Prof. Dexter?”
“Space bats.”
“…space bats?”
“You bet your *ss!”
Milkyway #24 – re chickens
My husband was once an inadvertent free range chicken keeper, when he was gifted a bantam rooster and 4 bantam hens by someone who was in a hurry to pack up and clear out. He made no undertakings, as he knows sheep, not chickens, and let them be. They all lived for quite a while, safely roosting up in the rafters of his shed, coming and going, finding their own feed and so on. The crunch came eventually, though, for all of the females, because when they got broody they would try to make a nest closer to the ground, and one by one they got picked off by the wily mink which had escaped from the mink farm that used to operate one mile upriver from this farm. The lone rooster then lived on for another 5 years or so, on his lonesome, without any extra feeding or care from my husband (or from me when I turned up).
We learned that (at least these) chickens are pretty hardy in most respects, but laying females ARE extra vulnerable. So if we were ever to get chickens again, we vowed to make a much more mink-proof house for broody hens. This never happened, so I can give you no follow up information. That said, the book sounds like a good read, and an excellent concept. I’d look into his methods of protection for broody/laying hens, though.
Hi John Michael,
I second your call that a good day begins with a proper breakfast, and likewise cannot function normally for the rest of the day without that start. Plenty of people don’t need that, and that’s cool for them.
Having been a middle distance runner as a young adult, I can tell when my body shifts from today’s fuel to that of using the stored reserves. Not something you want to experience when there are a few kilometres (or miles in your country’s case) left to complete.
Cheers
Chris
I asked this during ch. 15 of the book club as well, but it was so late that nobody answered at the time – this question keeps popping up for me so I’m hoping to get some thoughts here. Re Satanism vs Gnosticism, it’s my understanding that a number of the gnostic schools seem to think the serpent offering knowledge is the helpful spirit while the creator who wants humanity to stay ignorant is the adversarial one – where does that kind of gnosticism end and satanism begin?
To elaborate my own viewpoint a bit – the Christian view of divinity involving a tension between a righteous king and a righteous rebel aspect seems like a tradeoff on the level of worldviews. It undercuts the monotheism that is prescribed in the first commandment, but in return it helps the practitioner relate to society and the self in a more coherent way.
So it makes sense to me that a practicing Chrisitan would sometimes ask for guidance from the Son as a trickster subverting a corrupt order, and sometimes from the Father as a legitimate authority strengthening a just order. To my understanding the Cathars were very literal about that distinction and had an Adversary who was a tyrant, just as mainstream Christianity has an adversary who is a rebel. And while they’re not around any more, that basic narrative certainly is and feels very aligned with the new testament’s story of an incarneted deity’s relationship with Rome.
The question I have is about the distinction between Satanism as a worship of the Adversary, with gnosticism or orthodoxy as a worship of a specific aspect of divinity that might seem farther away from the culturally elevated aspect of divinity.
to give an example – I think Faustian culture is what happens when right relation with the rebel aspect of divinity is elevated (I’m convinced the term ‘enlightenment’ is a nod to the Prometheus/Lucifer figure). When the rebel is the figure to both adore and emulate, rules-following and stability are the only morally consistent way forward. If one takes the Star Wars fictions as a guide, that is where Return of the Jedi ends, with the rebels victorious and facing the hard task of building a new order. But to the great annoyance of people like myself, those who bought this franchise couldn’t tell a story about building a better order, and when making a sequel they had to shoehorn the new republic into the position of underdog rebels blowing up a corrupt order, again. From the outside, it looks like a fundamental lack of flexibility to distinguish between the rebel-authority axis and the righteous-corrupt axis. If anyone here feels they have a good handle on it I’d love to hear how they approach it.
@Quin
An update on Bridget’s recovery- (who fell from her horse) she is now in a rehab facility and is apparently ‘talking a lot.’ I don’t get many updates now but wanted to share this and leave the prayer up a little longer if that is okay. Also I offer my ongoing thanks to you Quin, the community and to dear JMG our gracious host.
@Teresa Peschel #16 #27
Goodness that came round soon and I clean forgot you were coming to Devon. It’s very interesting to read your account and see how you perceived Torquay and all it’s faded glory. It is seen as a very down at heel these days and has all the drug/homeless issues of large towns. I’m fascinated by your description of London – I last was there for the lying in state of QEII – we queued for about 17 hours to file past the coffin – in the early hours we were opposite the Tower of London built by William the Conqueror and later that day at the Houses of Parliament – I had such a sense of the hundreds of years of ‘National Story’ and to me it felt brittle – as if one good shake would bring it all down. One aside – we were just at the right place as KCIII and Prince William did a walk about – I felt something about Charles and shook his hand (not that he noticed me)- but I felt nothing about William -nothing at all in terms of kingly aura that is. Just my thoughts – others may have had a different t experience. Any way I’m riffing off your trip. Glad you are home safe.
@24 Chickens…
In 20+ years of chicken-keeping the biggest thing I’ve learned is that predators come in all sizes and are everywhere. There isn’t a city lot, suburban backyard, country acreage or spot in the woods that doesn’t have multiple predators that are looking for a quick dinner. The neighbor’s dog, my own dog, foxes, cats big and small, rodents and birds of all types will take out chickens day or night. You can literally go years without a predator loss while free-ranging until the day something finds your flock…then it’s all over. They will keep coming back until they’re gone or you put your birds in a well-built coop at night and protect them during the day behind a well-built fence.
We tried multiple times to free range the birds, but there comes a day when you just can’t handle the devastation anymore. We never name our birds, don’t get all cuddly with them like some people do, but there is something just soul-crushing about walking into the carnage left behind after the neighbor’s dog got a hold of your chickens. So it’s a nice roomy coop at night and a big fenced area from now on for us.
Thanks to everybody for your comments about free-range chickens. I’ll try to answer them all in one go – apologies for the longish comment! 🙂
Please keep in mind that I only have “book knowledge” about this method (and haven’t even quite finished the book yet). I.e. I’m only recapulating what I’ve read. However, the author seems to be somebody who walks his talk; this book isn’t just a rehash of stuff found elsewhere.
I’d also like to stress that he really seems to care about his chickens a lot – to the extent that he wants them to not just survive, but thrive, even if the times should get tough and he couldn’t feed them store-bought food anymore. I.e. this isn’t just a “throw them outside and let them fend for themselves” approach, even if it might have sounded that way in my summary.
There are three main components to his free-range method:
1. Probably the most important is the choice of chicken. For 24/7 free-range to work, you’ll need chickens which are not just adapted to your climate etc, but which also have the right “survival traits”: foraging, flying (to roost in trees), broodiness, and (very important in order to survive outside) agility and alertness, a healthy flight instinct and sense of danger, and (for roosters and brooding hens) the willingness and ability to fight predators to protect the flock/their chicks.
The book discusses these traits in-depth, and also potential chicken breeds. The gist is that your best bet are chickens which already live free-range, or, lacking that, old landraces or game fowl (i.e. chickens originally bred for cockfighting), or crosses of these. These are, generally, the kind of chickens which will forage, brood, and protect themselves and the flock. (That’s not to say that some chickens from typical modern “coop races” won’t be able to do the same, just that the chances are a lot worse with these races, and thus there’ll be more losses.)
2. The second main component is what the author (who, btw, goes by the pen name “Florida Bullfrog” 😉 ) calls “mindset”, i.e. the keepers expectations, choices, etc. E.g. free-ranging chickens 24/7 doesn’t make sense for people who want to keep them as pets instead of farm animals, etc. Similar for people who do gardening on their homestead, and aren’t willing or able to “coop” the gardens in order to let the chickens free-range (as the chickens will eat your salads and berries faster than you…). Etc.
3. The third main component is the habitat. According to the author, flocks are fairly territorial and will most likely not leave the one or two acres around their main roosting tree, as long as this area covers all their needs (i.e. at least one mature roosting tree, shrubs and thickets to hide and brood in, a wide variety of plants, shrubs, and trees for food, water, places to hide and shelter, …). He also suggests having a free-range dog or two for extra protection in predator-heavy environments (as his seems to be).
The book is rather thorough, and covers a lot of ground (including how to breed your own well-suited free-range chicken flock by crossing other breeds, how to get started, etc). One point I’m not quite happy about is his attitude towards predators, as he is very much in the “us-vs-them-it’s-a-constant-fight” mindset. I understand very well that if one wants to keep livestock, there is a need to deal with predators, vermin, rodents, etc, and this sometimes requires killing other animals wihch threaten your livestock in some way. It’s just that the mindset of “constant battle” doesn’t ring with me.
But apart from this, I found the book very thought-provoking, especially as he doesn’t just give the recipes which worked for him, but explains the underlying principles, thus allowing the readers to find their own solutions tailored to their needs.
As to how to find the eggs: His solution is to put up nest boxes near the main roosting tree (preferably different ones in different locations, to tickle every hen’s fancy). His estimate is that about 70% of the eggs from his flock are laid into these boxes. Since an established flock is more or less self-growing, and thus has more hens than the owner needs for eggs, those 70% are good enough in terms of yield.
I think I’ve covered everything – but again, please remember that I’m only quoting from a book I found interesting! (The book was rather affordable, btw, and is called “Free-Range Survival Chickens”, in case somebody wants to check it out.)
Btw, the method as it is wouldn’t work for my situation – we’ve got neighbours very close by who value their ornamental gardens, neighbours who value their vegetable gardens, and neighbours who value the lives of their free-range cats. The latter probably wouldn’t bat an eyelash if their cat killed a free-range chick (hey, that’s nature for you, right?), but might not be quite as cool if their cat engaged a protective rooster and lost – and I’m sorry to say some of the neighbouring cats have both the mental acumen and the surival instinct of a slice of toast, and would thus be likely to try just that…
Anyway, reading about everybody’s experiences with free-ranging has been very instructive and also thought-provoking. Thanks a lot! 🙂
Milkyway
Book alert: (This one you might want to skip, hence the alert.) The Long History of the Future by Nicole Kobie
“For decades we’ve delighted in dreaming about a sci-fi utopia, from flying cars and bionic humans to hyperloops and smart cities. And why not? Building a better world – be it a free-flying commute or an automated urban lifestyle – is a worthy dream. Given the pace of technological change, nothing seems impossible anymore. But why are these innovations always out of reach?
Delving into the remarkable history of technology, The Long History of the Future introduces us to the clever scientists, genius engineers and eccentric innovators who first brought these ideas to life and have struggled to make them work since. These stories reveal a more realistic picture of how these technologies may evolve – and how we’ll eventually get to use them. You may never be able to buy a fully driverless car, but automated braking and steering could slash collision rates. Smart cities won’t perfect city life, but they could help empty bins on time. Hyperloops may never arrive, but superfast trains are already here.
We always believe current technology is the best it could be. By looking to the past and the future, Nicole Kobie shows how history always proves us wrong and how what lies ahead may not be what we imagine, but so much better.”
Tech bro cheerleading, when the future we ordered is still not here… I’ll pass.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
This article is essentially a confirmation of the forces Greer had outlined in his old post about the death of the internet — that is, the internet becoming more costly and less convenient over time, as energy prices increase and the cult of uncontrolled growth tightens its grip. Google probably stands to lose quite a lot of market share in the near future, and I can’t say I’m sorry. Also a good example of lenocracy in action.
Hello JMG,
I have a request and hope it’s okay. If an updated version of your ‘Encyclopedia of Natural Magic’ is planned, might you consider including botanical names in the index as well as common names?
>The neighbor’s dog, my own dog
Grandpa was a farmer. He had to kill a dog once. Developed a taste for chickens and his experience, once a dog goes down that path, they’re basically chicken killers for life. So it was either the chickens or the dog. Talk about a brutal choice.
That does seem to be one of the themes of small scale agriculture. All the wildlife out there wants to eat whatever it is you’re growing or raising. You grow a garden, the deer want to eat it down to the ground, you raise chickens, the local critters want to eat them all. Nature sees a free lunch and it goes YUM.
@ slink #115
I dont know what IKR means. Domestic chickens are not grouse, and grouse are not native where I am. What is native is quail, officially California Quail. The turkeys in California are not native. There are no native California turkeys, but they do very well here. That is why I called them “feral”, as in used to be domesticated, now wild. Like feral, ie., wild, horses in other western states. So, the turkeys on my block escaped from someone home, a couple people used to raise turkeys about 1/2 mile from here. These are not the white turkeys. They are brown. But, there are turkeys all over California that were brought here and released to hunt, they were wild in others areas, I have heard maybe Texas or Mexico or ? And, so likely interbreeding with domestic escapees in those areas, the ones closest to me were from the people who lived there before. As far as turkeys able to survive feral, breed matters alot, you can look up which ones are better foragers and coloring helps too. Peacocks also do well being loose and feral here. They do alot better than chickens in any case when allowed free range.
Domestic chickens just dont have the correct nesting habits for this environment, and they are the wrong size too I guess, dont fit into the niche of the small quick flight quail or the large birds that are too big to be carried off by a red tailed hawk
@Tippy 137
Exactly this.
@The Other Owen
“That does seem to be one of the themes of small scale agriculture. All the wildlife out there wants to eat whatever it is you’re growing or raising. You grow a garden, the deer want to eat it down to the ground, you raise chickens, the local critters want to eat them all. Nature sees a free lunch and it goes YUM.”
Exactly. It really is pretty basic. Just an innocent organic vegetable garden is an act of violence, when you think about it. Rip it up, dig it up, plant the stuff you want, get angry when the local creatures want a share. Nature tries to heal the wound, but we rip the scab off every Spring and start over. Never mind Industrial Agriculture, which is basically ecological holocaust.
JMG:
Any recommendations for a translation of Schopenhauer (especially WWR)?
It’s funny, when I was doing a PhD in philosophy two decades ago, Schopenhauer never came up in the coursework. I would not even know of his existence were it not for the weirdo fellow student who was really into him. (Granted, I was the weirdo student who was really into Boethius and St. Thomas Aquinas, and the professoriat though both of us were not studying “real philosophy.” But I digress.) I have also been reading “The Myth of Disenchantment” which has confirmed my suspicion that there is a strong undercurrent of Cabalism running through werstern philosophy that also wound up on the editing room floor! I have the feeling I need to reread Spinoza with this explicitly in mind. BTW, you make Kant interesting and wish you or your equivalent would have taught him. The professor who taught Kant in my graduate program seemed hell bent on turning everyone off of Kant.
@ chickens
Roosters do help. But, they can only do so much. I had a coop invaded by racoons once and all chickens were slaughtered — exceot for the roosters favorite hen, and he was bloody, ripped comb. He could put one in the corner behind him and be too much trouble in the fight that they let him live as he was so much trouble and fight and slaughtered the other 10 hens ( yes, all at once, that night, that is what they do) .
If your guy in the book is killing the predators, well yes, that is one way to have success in free range hens.
But, his thought that a broody hen, of any chicken breed, could fight off a predator. Nope, no way a broody hen of any breed is going to fight off a racoon or a coyote. Or a red tailed hawk or barn owl for that matter, but the broody location will likely be out of the way for the large birds to predate. So, he is trapping and killing racoons or lives where they dont exist Coyotes and dogs you might be able to fence out
Yes, there are flighty breeds that fly better or forage better to try out. I have had all types, including the original fighting cocks that came with this place. 5 feral roosters when I moved in and only a couple hens left. They were of the pit fighting type. A couple killed each other.
I posted some thoughts on “Apocalyptica, Cli-Fi, and Deindustrial Fiction” over on my site for those who are interested:
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/apocalyptica-cli-fi-and-deindustrial-fiction
I know I’m speaking to the choir here. The post is aimed more at exploring the nuances between these genres and hopefully getting some readers to step their toes into deindustrial themes. Some of our hosts work are plugged, including his new one (which I have to pick up soon!) and of course New Maps.
The post might be of use to those who ask “what’s the difference”?
Agreed, John. I mean, in some Marxist circles they don’t even hide it. Leninists outright say that an elite needs to lead the proletariat because they are incapable of leading themselves. Great example of how marxism presents itself as anti-elitist but is actually deeply elitist.
As for the new elite- People like Musk or Trump might rule for a while, but when things really start going downhill I really doubt they’ll be the ones to end up on top. My money’s on the gangs and narcos.
Also I have a suggestion for a post, or just a comment. I would really like to hear how you harmonize the philosophies of Fortune and Levi, Schopenhauer, and Taoism. If you could walk us through your personal philosophy that would be great.
I have a question. Schopenhauer talks about ‘rising above the will’ to escape suffering. The Taoists on the other hand believe that suffering is reduced by living in harmony with the Tao, which I would take to be the Will. So how do you reconcile these two philosophies? Is it about subduing the personal will and living in harmony with the great Will of the universe?
@ atmospheric river #112
I thought the takeaway food selection was remarkable.
Bill and I found a Marks and Spenser two streets away from the Latvian Guest House and bought our dinner there every evening while in London. The selection was amazing, we had no leftovers, and it was cheaper — by far! — than the classy restaurants in the neighborhood.
They conveniently posted menus with prices. I’d read them, recoil, and we’d head over to Marks & Spenser, get sandwiches (none of which resembled what I could buy in local PA groceries) and salad and dessert and eat them in the small, walled garden at the Latvian Guesthouse.
Almost as close as the Marks & Spenser were a Sainsbury, a Waitrose, and several co-ops. Plus, every drugstore and tobacco shop had a cold case with more sandwiches! I’ve never seen anything like it. The tube stations were loaded with ready-to-eat.
Even their heat-at-home entrees were far more varied and extensive than what I see at the Giant. And it was all fresh! Not frozen!
A different world, indeed.
Next up on your shortwave dial: Skybird Radio International Instrumental
Beaming to Europe this Sunday 29th September 2024 there’s an instrumental episode of Skybird Radio International via the services of Shortwave Gold at 0900/1300 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and then at 2000 UTC on 6160 kHz and 3975 kHz.
As with the last shows, they’re of a worldwide flavour but the musical selection will have a lot less vocals in this episode. Tune in and you’re welcome to add the singing bits yourself.
Then next week beaming to North America via WRMI on Wednesday October 2nd 2024 at 0200 UTC on 9395 kHz we have the return of WDWD – Off the Map Radio. It’s as they say “an audio journey in the wrong direction to the wrong destination” but wherever we end up, they’ll be tunes mentioning place names, locations, compass points and maps.
Get some practice with that emergency shortwave set you picked up at the flea market and dial us in!
Sometimes breakfast sits very heavy on my stomach, especially if I had something heavy for supper the night before. This morning even a small bowl of crisp rice cereal with milk and a little orange juice sat very heavy on it. For what that’s worth.
@ free-range chickens – for what it’s worth, it seems to vary by region. Back in Albuquerque, the local organic farm kept them in rolling coops they could forage from without danger. Very tasty eggs, too, if pricey.
For everybody: here in North Florida we’re expecting Hurricane Helene to come by around 3’#0 this afternoon and end after Friday morning. What that means in our building is “Expect power failures.” The people on the Gulf Coast and in the Panhandle are the ones to pray for. And people here like my daughter’s family, whose house can be hurricane-proofed but most of the time leans toward acres of windows, the Gods forbid they use window treatments! They have a generator, which keeps the fridge running and two lights on, one in the bathroom. Thor will be riding out tonight!
Hello Ecosophia Readers,
I am looking for a volunteer or volunteers to practice my reading skills for tarot and transparent oracle. I’ve developed a past life-between life-current life-future possible life outcomes spread that I developed for myself and would now like to try out with others. This write-up will include both regular tarot and transparent oracle. The write up will be on my Dreamwidth blog which you can find at
https://happypanda.dreamwidth.org/ .
The write-up will include photos of the spread and oracle so you can see the results yourself along with the reading.
@LeGrand Cinq-Mars #84
I agree! Frieren is quite a lovely story. In some ways I’m surprised to see it catch on as it has, as it doesn’t fit into the typical pattern for popular anime at all. If you had shown me this series prior to its adaptation I would have thought it would find a dedicated niche audience, but nothing more than that. Clearly I missed something about it that gave it a wider appeal.
Re: your other story, the psychology of it doesn’t strike me as all that different from a child who gets in with the wrong crowd because those people “get him”. I guess for some, they look at demons and see fellow outcasts, without recognizing that those outcasts would like to see them served up on a silver platter!
@JMG
Yes, I’m fairly confident that this theory is at least reasonably logically consistent, but the true test will be whether it accurately predicts future events. So, we’ll see I suppose!
@ falling tree woman #136
It was an amazing, eye-opening trip from start to finish, even though we saw only the tiniest portion of Torquay, the drive through the moors to the Eden Project (sheep wandering aimlessly on the road and thank God we paid Alex Graham of Unique Devon Tours to drive us!), and the tiny bit of London we saw.
I’m always interested in infrastructure, maintenance, and storm water management. There was so much to see!
Maintaining buildings is hard! I couldn’t imagine how they handled storm water in Torquay other than hoping it all ran down to the sea. Those drains looked totally inadequate and the terrain was so up and down that plenty of low-lying areas wouldn’t drain to the sea. Torquay was so uneven, following the lay of the land that every single trip, without exception, was uphill at least half the time. It couldn’t be helped because the land made its own demands.
The other thing I noticed besides virtually no accommodations for disabilities was the remarkable variety of paving. We walked on cobblestones, bricks, stone of various types and ages and shapes, pavers, poured concrete, asphalt, gravel, and surfaces I can’t identify. Some patches were as small as a card table, other stretches much longer. They butted one up against the other with no warning that your footing would suddenly become a tripping hazard. The four flights of stairs just *killed* my hips so I used my cane everywhere and believe me, I noticed when my footing was uneven.
You’d never see that in the U.S.!
@LeGrand Cinq-Mars #84
An aside that just occurred to me, the fact that the word itself is “demonize” is quite revealing I think. Just as “humanize” stands to mean “imbuing someone with all of the qualities that make us human”, so should “demonize” carry the same meaning for all the qualities that makes demons what they are. It seems that, on some fundamental level, demons are inherently seen as enemies to humanity. At least at the level of language, we recognize that it is simply their nature.
Some very nice pictures of the wreckage from the Titan implosion. Nothing gory.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JCTbm2FndIM
Then there is this downer on renewable energy. He’s pushing his book but there some interesting data nevertheless. He has results from Germany. The solar capacity factor there is 11% on a 24 hour full year basis. I’m not surprised that short winter days plus clouds are very rude to nameplate claims. He also goes into the supply chain needed to make a solar panel which tends to get glossed over.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j3d4348UxvY
Then we have this,
“Energy Secretary Granholm Emphasizes Need For Small Modular Reactors To Power AI Data Centers”
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/us-energy-secretary-granholm-urges-need-small-modular-reactors-power-ai-data-centers-cnbc
Anon, it’s a rough guess, based on the dependence of this cycle of civilizations on certain mineral and metallic resources that are being depleted at unsustainable rates. Once energy availability drops below the point that makes it possible to mine ultradeep mines and refine a tiny fraction of one percent of ore out of rock, we’ll be stuck with salvage from then on, and that’s a losing game in the long term. At some point past 3000 AD I expect the last urban societies to go under, and then we’ll cycle through millennia of tribal cultures until some new basis for complex technology emerges, as metal smelting did around 5000 BC.
BeardTree, that’s my most significant fear right now.
J.L.Mc12, don’t make the mistake of assuming that the corporate elite is a unified force. It’s formed of a loose alliance of power centers constantly competing with one another for power and wealth. Internet piracy is one convenient battlefield where factions struggle against one another, using the Byzantine tangle of business law as the weapons of war. Will Archive.org survive at all, or in something like its current form? Depends on who wins and what form victory and defeat take.
Atmospheric, that’s a fascinating point, and very likely an important factor.
Sergi, I’ve read it; it’s valuable, though I think Tarnas’s focus on outer planet ingresses needs much more study and testing before it can bear the weight he puts on it. As for books on astrology, thank you for asking! I’ll be making the official announcement next month, iirc, but my second book on astrology — The Destiny of Nations, a practical guide to mundane astrology — will be published early next year. I have a third astrology book in partial-draft stage right now, too.
LeGrand, thanks for this! I have a copy but I’ve been too busy wading through scholarship on Yeats’s A Vision to get to it yet.
Eike, thanks for this. I’m assembling the posts into a manuscript as I write them, with an eye toward turning it into a book, but the gods alone know whether I’ll find a publisher who’s interested in it. It’s way off to one side of my usual publishers’ interests!
Other Owen, the Chinese government these days is Communist to exactly the same degree that the United States is a democracy.
Chris, fall is being gentler here than spring where you are — we’re supposed to have our first night below 50°F a week from now. As for the debt thing, I have no idea what to make of it. An ordinarily intelligent duck should be able to figure out that running up deficits on this scale is a recipe for inevitable disaster in the near future, but I gather our leaders would be considered unusually stupid among waterfowl. It’s enough to make me wonder if some factor or other is causing progressive cerebral degeneration among our elite classes…
Christopher H, hmm. If that works for you, by all means.
Justin, thanks for this. No surprises there — every failing religion churns out proselytizers to shore up the crumbling belief of the faithful, and the religion of progress is no exception.
Ethan, thanks for this! For what it’s worth, I stopped using Guggle a long time ago as a search engine — it never yields useful hits any more — and that’s one of the things that inspired my reflections about the end of the internet.
Bacon, so noted and I’ll keep that in mind.
Christopher S, the only one I’ve ever read is the one by Payne, which is a little fussy but perfectly readable. I’d be interested in other recommendations. As for philosophy classes, back when I went to university it was a source of great amusement to me that every single philosopher who interested me was left out of the curriculum, with the sole exception of Nietzsche — and the presentation of Nietzche in the classes I took was so stunningly clueless that I wouldn’t hesitate to call it dishonest. It fascinated me more generally to see an entire university department that seemed to be dedicated to obscuring the subject it claimed to study.
Justin, thanks for this. One minor note — for some reason everyone seems to think The Hall of the Homeless Gods as the name of my latest novel. Not so — the second “the” is nowhere in the title! Are people defaulting to “The Hall of the Mountain King,” or what? 😉
Enjoyer, it depends on how far we slide down the slope this time around. An elite usually lasts for about a lifetime — the managerial elite came in with the Second World War, replacing the capitalist elite that came in with the Civil War — so this one might reasonably last until 2100 or so. If decline follows the usual pace, industrial civilization will last longer than that, so the entrepreneurial elite may have the chance to rise and fall before it’s replaced by something else. As for reconciling philosophies, I’ll certainly consider that for a future post.
Patricia M, stay safe! Thor’s a boisterous god.
Siliconguy, thanks for this. I see we’re going to watch more money go gurgling down the nuclear rathole.
Hi John,
A few questions for you this week:
1) What are your thoughts on this article outlining why 2030 is likely be a car crash moment for our global economy?
https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/2030-our-runaway-train-falls-off-the-seneca-cliff-cd51db4e7dfb
I discuss it in my latest blog post here – https://forecastingintelligence.org/2024/09/25/quick-takes-7/
2) The Ukrainian frontline continues to fall apart in the eastern front. There is rising reports of mass desertions, conscripted soldiers refusing to fight (or plain useless solders). How long before we see a full scale collapse of the army?
3) What would you do if you were the Israeli PM? How would you deal with Hamas, Hezbollah and Fatah and try and secure a long-term security for the state of Israel?
Also a general observation on what is going on in the UK. PM Starmer popularity is tanking after stories about accepting huge amounts of free gifts from a superrich donor and axing the winter fuel support to most pensioners.
I’m also reading reports on how shocked new Labour ministers are about the poor state of the British public sector and many reports that they are hugely struggling in the transition to government. It feels like the new government is falling apart before they have even settled in office.
Its still early days but the omens aren’t looking good for the UK.
Thanks for correcting that. I fixed it on my post… I guess it’s like when radio announcers in the sixties on the BBC would introduce The Pink Floyd… No The in Pink Floyd.
“Bacon, so noted and I’ll keep that in mind.”
Thank you. I’ll buy an updated copy if you do it. It would be so much more straightforward to find what I’m looking for.
Stephen Pearson, I also have come across mention of the events you described. I would not call this principled refusal to follow unlawful orders a ‘coup’ or even mutiny. Once again, the media shows its’ true, war mongering sympathies. I do believe I have heard that such principled refusal to follow unlawful orders is part of Secretary Austin’s job. Am I right about this? Perhaps someone who has served in the armed forces can explain further.
@Atmospheric River #147,
I‘ve only read the chapter with the in-depth info about predators after posting my comment above.
As I understand, there is a mixture of elements: He himself tries to be a thread to predators (i.e. killing them if necessary by traps, shooting, …, but mostly making it clear that he _will_ hunt them, which he says makes them seek easier prey elsewhere). The second component are a couple of fierce free-range dogs (free-range = 24/7 outside), with his main flock living around the farmyard and thus within range of the dogs. That, plus a fierce mature rooster, and a flock of agile and alert birds, seem to do most of the trick with the smaller predators (raccoons etc up to foxes), also keeping bears etc away, and also help with some of the birds of prey. The flock itself seems to be mostly able to either outmanoeuvre or, in the case of the rooster and some fierce mother hens, outright tackle or fight back against certain other birds of prey.
He readily admits that some birds of prey (especially the larger eagles and owls) are, or can be, an issue, and that he patrols the nest boxes once a night during brooding season to check for (and kill) a certain kind of snake which the dogs won‘t hunt.
The rest seems to be a mixture of attitude (he simply accepts the loss of some birds per year to predators) and letting nature take its course (apparently, some predators mostly go after weak or sick animals which he wouldn‘t want to reproduce anyway, and since his flock is constantly reproducing, he‘s fine with that).
Comparing the book to your comments and those of some others, the main difference might be the chickens deliberately bred to be particularly adapted to free-ranging – and the free-range dogs. (Plus that he is fine with all this.)
I do think he has a point in that if a predator gets into a coop, most or all of the flock is toast, as happened with yours. If they are roosting on trees, a predator will get one bird max. There‘s also the fact that in some times and parts of the world, chickens will have lived like that by necessity, because their owners simply didn‘t have the resources to provide them with feed, or to build really predator-proof coops (with the added risk that if a predator gets in there, the whole flock of the family would be lost, vs. losing just the odd bird free-ranging).
So it has to be possible – but that doesn‘t mean it‘s suitable for all environments, and it will definitely not be everybody‘s cuppa tea. 🙂 That‘s why it‘s so interesting to read about the different experiences which people had.
Have you noted any differences in „free-ranging“ abilities between the game chickens and some other breeds?
Milkyway
@Untitled-1, #31
Did not expect to see Frieren brought up on this blog. I see where you’re coming from with your argument about the sympathy for Frieren’s demons relating to the affinity for demonolatry, but from the 60-ish chapters I’ve read, I don’t agree. I believe that the people who take issue with Frieren’s portrayal of its demons have found a genuine issue with the writing, but most lack the ability to correctly identify and describe said issue so they default to speaking in terms of the buzzwords they’re familiar with.
It’s basically the same problem which Tolkien identified in his own portrayal of the orcs. Based on their actions in the story, Frieren’s demons, like Tolkien’s orcs, appear to have every faculty necessary for at least the potential of moral action, but are treated by the narrative as if they were universally pure evil and incapable of anything else. This issue is sharper in Frieren because it actively brings attention to the potential morality of demons on many occasions only to decry it as foolish, while Tolkien’s fiction mostly leaves the issue by the wayside and so it can be ignored while reading his works. Frieren’s author might have been better served by writing their “demons” more like Rakshasas, who are primarily malicious and predatory towards humans but still occasionally capable of piety (as with Ravana) and even righteousness (as with Vibhishana); they already have more in common with that than they do with demons as usually understood in the west.
@Happy Panda
I’d be happy to volunteer and participate in any of those spreads.
@Untitled-1-
I was just thinking about Frieren and it’s messaging, which is a breath of fresh air in entertainment
Thanks for bringing it up! A remarkable story happened out in Taiwan in May 2024 where a group of people including 1 fan of this anime stepped in to stop a knife stabbing spree. In a subsequent interview, the fan said “It’s what the hero Himmel would have done.”
“The phrase is often cited by the protagonist Frieren in reference to a heroic character as a moral guide. It has since become a meme among fans of the series and has reportedly also made it into mainstream usage, referring to the right or noble thing to do in a situation. Mr Hsu said the phrase reminds him to do the right thing, and has adopted it as his life’s philosophy.”
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/it-s-what-the-hero-himmel-would-ve-done-taiwanese-otaku-who-stopped-knife-attack-on-train-says-anime-inspires-him
Breakfast: I usually work out (barre or yoga) then have breakfast around 11am or so. If hungry early, a boiled egg works. After workout, a large bowl of homemade lentil soup with fermented veggies and a large dollup of plain yogurt.
Before we go on, I’ve had to delete several comments today, including some from regular commenters, for various kinds of angry rhetoric. I know that a lot of people are having nightmares and bad sleep — it certainly looks as though some kind of really drastic pattern of events is building — but that makes it all the more important to keep it cool in forums like this one. Before you post something criticizing someone or other, stop, take some deep breaths, and try to be as calm and measured as you can. Thank you!
With that said, let’s proceed.
Forecasting, quite a list of loaded questions! (1) I’ll be impressed if things hold together that long. The signs of terminal dysfunction in the industrial West are piling up at an impressive rate.
(2) The collapse of an army is like the collapse of a speculative bubble. You know it’s going to happen, you know that each day that passes brings the inevitable closer, but trying to time the market in such situations is a recipe for failure. Nobody can tell in advance when investors are going to panic and run for the exits. Similarly, nobody can tell in advance when an army is going to disintegrate under pressure. I doubt it’ll take until 2026 for Ukraine to fall, btw — the Russian strategy focuses on eliminating the Ukrainian army (very much including its NATO “mercenary” elements) rather than on seizing territory, so once the army disintegrates, there’ll be nothing left this side of the Polish border to slow the Russians down.
(3) If I were the Israeli PM I would resign my position, flee the country, and change my name. As I noted in a post some years back, Israel has backed itself into the same corner as the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and sooner or later will suffer the same fate. The US is rapidly losing the capacity to intervene effectively beyond its own borders, and the threat of US intervention is the only thing that keeps Israel from being steamrollered now. As for the UK, no surprises there — my most recent ingress chart predicted that Starmer would be embroiled in a financial scandal and may not survive it. Your governing class is almost as decrepit and mindlessly corrupt as ours.
Justin, you’re welcome. The funny thing is that the people at the publishing house did the same thing! I’m considering a second Jerry Shimizu novel right now, and it’ll be interesting to see if its title attracts adventitious articles. 😉
Forecasting Intelligence
I follow B on the honest sorcerer regularly. I think he picked 2030 because he thought the crash ( or more likely unravelling) would come by then, and didn’t want to pin himself down to an earlier date. The process is going on, and I think he gave that date more as a warning than an exact forecast. I see reports of energy being in noticeable decline by 2026. There is so much going on in the world, such as wars and geopolitical realignment that can muddy the water for picking an exact date.
Mary Bennett
I used the word mini coup because that is the word Clay used in the comment I replied to.To me Austin did the correct thing in refusing an insane order. Whether or not it was a lawful order could keep a room full of military lawyers busy for a very long time. Following orders did not work as a defense at Nuremburg.
Stephen
David, by the Lake:
Just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your piece in the Winter edition of New Maps, “Practicality.” Something about it just tickled me. Cheers!
Justin Patrick Moore:
I also liked your opening piece in the Spring edition of New Maps about art. Inspiring!
Cheers to you as well.
@Siliconguy re #60, @Eike re: #123:
To put it into perspective: 5 gigawatts is roughly 1/12 the ENTIRE power usage of the entire state of Texas at present (at least the part of it on ERCOT). Texas is not a small state. Granted, that power consumption includes the data centers that are already here, but if that 5 GW figure is per data center…
@Untitled-1 re #88:
This is also, I think, likely why they militate against God/the gods so much. The idea of an agent or agents who (1) not only are out of their control but might control THEM, (2) can’t be coopted, coerced, or bribed by them, (3) can’t in any way be held accountable to them, and (4) might have values inimical to theirs cannot be countenanced. Therefore, in their heads, God/the gods cannot exist, must not exist, and if He/They exist(s), He/They is/are definitionally evil the moment He/They stop(s) siding with them.
Hi JMG,
BeardTree said: In July ,1914 if you had told a German or a Russian what was going to happen to their countries and the world as a whole over the next 31 years they would have dismissed what you said as being beyond possibility. Yes, horror has happened in history repeatedly and it can happen to us. And we may be in 1914 even now.
To which you replied: that’s my most significant fear right now.
Would you be willing to expand on this? I ask because I share the same fear, to the extent that its been hard to focus on much else lately, but I haven’t been able to sort out whether these anxieties are warranted, and based on rational reading of the international circumstances/genuine intuition, or alarmist and owing to an innate “doomy” bent of mine. Also, I’ve found your reasoning in the past about why nuclear warfare is unlikely, even during great power conflicts, to be reassuring. However, what feels like an inexplicable cluelessness about the actual nature of nuclear warfare among the elite currently has me worried again. Have you changed your assessment in this regard? (Hopefully not!). Finally, you’ve talked about the inevitable loss of U.S. dollar reserve currency status in the future and the decisive impact this will have on U.S. living standards. But what actually constitutes loss of this status? The percentage of U.S. dollars held as foreign reserves has been falling of course over the last 20 years, to 58% currently. Does dipping below 50% constitute loss of this status, or would another currency (group of currencies?) need to overtake the dollar for this threshold to be crossed, with the resulting dramatic effects on the U.S. economy? And how does the reserve currency question interact with the looming potential world conflict question?
Phew, I realize this is a lot! Thanks in advance for your response to any part of this comment you wish to address.
Hi JMG,
I had an interesting experience that I thought you might like to hear about. As a FC, I was able to participate in my first EA degree. Just before the event, one of the lights we needed stopped working. We couldn’t fix it and went ahead with the ceremony. Everything went extremely well. For my first participation in a degree it was very memorable.
The next day was our normal, weekly coffee gathering. I decided to go into the lodge and see what was wrong with that light. The second I entered the room, I was hit with a wall of something. The best I could say is that it was a charge.
Roughly twelve hours had passed but the energy of the ceremony still remained. I wonder if it had to do with performing a ritual that had been done countless times before? Were our actions a focus for the astral light? Or maybe the proportions of the lodge are able to hold the energy. Or both? To me, it’s solid evidence for the ideas you put forth in ”The Secrets of the Temple.”
@160 Pink Floyd…
Original advertisements/posters from the 60’s promoted “The Pink Floyd” when they were in their original form with Syd Barrett, for what it’s worth. I’d post a link but I’m not quite smart enough to do that 🙂
Unusually interesting mix of questions and contributions, imo, in the early posted questions. Thankfully I was able to find a link which may enlighten those talking about breakfast:
Skipping breakfast doesn’t work as a weight loss technique: https://nutritionfacts.org/blog/skip-breakfast-to-lose-weight/
Someone actually tried it as an experiment and, if I remember the results correctly, it is likely the wrong meal to skip. It appears to set you up for lowering your exertion during the morning, probably the best time to exercise, and then it gives you the false belief that you are now clear to eat more during the rest of the day. Drawing from memory, and a different study, the EVENING is probably the best time to skip eating. The body seems to do more fat storage when it encounters calories after dark — so there is a biochemical difference between how we evolved to handle morning, afternoon, and night.
But I can’t find that study, so maybe just go with eating some sort of breakfast, eating most during lunch, and minimizing any eating after, say, 4 or 5 pm (ideally not eating anything after 6 pm).
You can do your intermittent fasting that way, 6pm to 6am. But don’t be surprised if you find it harder to fast when your body, and society, is looking to pork out. Your body didn’t evolve with the luxury of having a surfeit of food. Your body evolved to survive famine, and that is probably why most people aren’t as hungry in the A.M. and most people, most of the time, have a “dawn phenomenon” where hormones drive sugar into the blood — even if you are starving to death — in order to make you as active as possible in searching for food.
S. Pearson wrote: “There also appears to be a rift between the neocons in the State Department and the somewhat more pragmatic Pentagon.”
Bravo for Austin. Can you name names of who the neocons in the State Dept are? Do you know why Victoria Nuland is out?
Atmospheric River,
IKR? is internet slang for “I Know, Right?”
Are you sure Ruffed Grouse (Bonasa umbellus) is not native? We sure have a lot of them in the woods up here (I’m about 300 miles north of you). My Audubon Field Guide doesn’t mention anything, although it does show the range petering out south of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Hello JMG,
Your reply #158 to Anon implied you don’t see an ecotechnic society – which in your scheme in the book of the same name would succeed a salvage society – as being sustainable for more than a few centuries. I’d been under the impression that you believed such a society, being analogous to a climax phase of vegetation, would endure for perhaps a few millenia. Have you changed your opinion or did I misunderstand in the first place?
JMG, regarding your Jupiter age (and Saturn, following), this makes sense to me in that, beyond a sheer reduction in numbers, the remaining, sunset humans will have presumably figured out that civilization cannot give any long term benefits that culture cannot deliver, provided that culture is sufficiently healthy and normal (eg., dead ends like cannibal culture, Marxism, and other such “cultures” that lead to perpetual warfare). They will probably not know this for certain (after all the collapses), but will have a great deal of anecdotal and relic evidence. With fewer numbers, there might be enough lack of up pressure, and with accumulation of “advanced cultural relics” (eg., Stonehenge, etc.) enough down pressure and incentive to chill and inhert “the ruins”, to bring about a sort of return to the Golden Age, but as a Sunset. At the end, humans might finally get the Utopia they are longing for, simply from “outlasting” history, and the happy happenstances of less intense negative up and down pressures. Maybe the cataclysms, in other words, leave us slightly better off, even in the remains department, and so eventually you hit the balance point where it thrives, at the ending. The curtain closes, on a humanity that hasn’t been made perfect, just mellowed like a fine cheese, or aged like a fine wine. At least, this is today’s version of the vision of this I imagined yesterday, walking through the forest. (It’s still a bit half-baked…but there’s something there…)
@JPM: No “The” in Handel’s “Messiah” either. Believe it or not, it’s a “bone of contention” among classical/baroque music lovers. But, still, people, even radio announcers, insist on adding the “The.”
@Mary Bennett, 162: I served in the USAF many years ago. The President is commander in chief, not the defense secretary. So Austin is risking his neck. Good for him!
Oh no! The Wlmnath have attacked!
@Mary Bennett 162: I once disobeyed an unlawful order. It wasn’t easy. We were doing “drill practice” in a parking lot, visible to the public, after class in my electronics school in Aurora, Colo (the former Lowry AFB). The student leader (called “a rope”) told us that when he gave the order we were all to begin goose-stepping and do a Nazi salute. I objected and was told to sit it out on the sideline. One other guy (Larry G. from North Carolina ) did the same, but only after I had objected. We sat it out together while everyone else did as they were told. Nothing happened to us. But it wasn’t easy to be the first to object, even in such a clear-cut situation.
@ Tamanous (#165)
Thank you for agreeing to be my lab rat. 🙂
I’ll get started on it.
A small request: If anyone is interested in also being a lab rat send me an email by clicking on the little envelope underneath the Happy Panda thumbnail pic over at my Dreamwidth blog.
https://happypanda.dreamwidth.org/
The second to the last of the four icons is the ‘send a private message’ icon. That way JMG won’t have to bother with modding any requests (he’s got enough work as is).
TY to JMG for hosting and moderating this forum.
(1) John, What do you think of Peter Kingsley? I just picked up a copy of his book: “In the Dark Places of Wisdom”. I’m early in the book, and maybe I ought to have waited until I finished, but this week is the open post. Any of his other books you recommend? You, and current EOTWAWKI events, have me rethinking my limited frame on the topics of spirituality, philosophy, and priorities.
(2) As an indirect response to a few posts here, and an example of vision: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ks2TPPyho. “Cars full of motors, painted green.”
As for Starmer in the UK, I don’t think he is hugely corrupt in the money-grabbing way that Biden & co seem to be in the US, rather it’s more a combination of arrogance arising from his huge majority and lack of political nous. However it’s already obvious that as Aurelian says, he has got into power not to execute any grand political plan, but to simply be in power. Also, all but a couple of his team look way out of their depth and have no real ideas even now when there is no real crisis at hand other than the steady deterioration that has been going on for decades. If something like the economic crash and/or geopolitical shock that more and more non-MSM pundits seem to expect to hit the West within the next five years arrives and Labour are still in power, I think one of two things will happen. Either they will freeze like rabbits in headlights or, especially if Starmer is still there, lash out with a range of repressive and unpopular actions. Either way it will be the end of them, but who would succeed them is currently wide open.
@163 More Chickens
Yeah, we just plain old aren’t willing to kill all the owls, fox, weasels, wolves, bears and bald eagles to protect the chickens in order to keep them totally free range, that’s just a different kind of soul-crushing (and illegal in some cases), as well as more than a little “me before thee” for my liking. Way I figure it, I keep chickens so they can provide us with eggs and occasional meat and as payment for that they get a home that’s as stress free as possible. They’ve got a solid coop to go into at night and get out of the weather (gets to -35 here) A pretty large fenced pen where they forage for bugs and worms and plants during the snowless seasons so much so I barely feed them in summer. Could they fend for themselves all year? Sure, the grouse and turkeys around here seem to do fine. There would for surely be losses but they reproduce fairly easily, and the broody hens are plenty feisty – I’ve seen hens do great and terrible things to protect their chicks. But we have a deal – they give to me and I give to them. It takes no more than 10 minutes a day of work and I get more than enough eggs for us and the neighbors in return.
@milkyway – From my experience – if free-ranging chicken are supposed to survive 24/7 outdoors they need to be very different from the ones I have met so far. We have a few fox burrows in the surrounding forests and they had a very strong year with a whole lot of offspring. Although our property is surrounded by other houses and a few streets, the foxes came at the broad daylight and killed almost all of our chicken including a very large and rather aggressive rooster. The only two survivors succumbed to their injuries two days later. So much for that.
I guess dogs will offer protection, but looking at this from an economic angle seems to make no sense since the dogs will probably eat more than the eggs the chicken produce. The balance will be more favorable if the dogs are supposed to protect other animals, too – for example sheep. But making holding sheep economically sensible again comes with a whole lot of additional requirements (we’ve tried that). And so on…
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
PS: Thanks for your reply on the last MM – It was too late for an answer.
I’ll confess, my sleepless nights were a couple weeks ago when it seemed to me we were in a direct line to WWIII regarding the long-range missile debacle with Ukraine. We’re not off that trajectory yet, but someone in the US made a wise decision not to cross Putin’s stark (and now starker) red line. We’re no longer in a unipolar world.
My heart grieves for those immediately involved in this unfortunate conflict that could have so easily been avoided. Even shortly after the invasion took place in 2/2022, it was on the way to resolution until the Western elite intervened. The result: the borderlands are smeared with primarily Ukrainian bodies as well as many Russian. The Russians in turn are empowering themselves with becoming a formidable military force and with embracing BRIC.
Regarding Israel, unfortunately, the Israeli PM would also need to have a facial reconstruction in order to avoid arrest. Regardless, at this point his choice seems to be to fight to the end – it doesn’t look good.
I’ve been focusing my prayers and meditations on peace.
“I know that a lot of people are having nightmares and bad sleep — it certainly looks as though some kind of really drastic pattern of events is building” – I usually sleep well, but taking a look around certainly confirms your observation. I clearly remember standing on the balcony of a lecture hall during a break chatting with a few fellow students – seemingly out of nowhere I said that I am deeply pessimistic for the future of our society. Needless to say that I was alone with this feeling and the others shook their heads in disbelief. That was 20 years ago, and it’s quite probable that today I could have the same conversation with the same people . Maybe part of the reason. The stories of my war-beaten family and ancestors are frequently on my mind nowadays, and only rarely I am able to think about them without the urge to hide my weeping face behind my hands some point. Can one be prepared for such times?
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
@Valenzuela #164
Sure, let’s have a discussion about this! Admittedly I am not completely up-to-date in the manga, and I’m certainly open to having my mind changed. Can you please clarify, what faculties are you referring to specifically, and why would they imply the capacity for moral action? Also, what defines moral action in this case? Can you perhaps give a specific example where you felt Frieren’s writing fell short and how it could be remedied? Apologies for the barrage of questions, but I find it’s usually best to lead with clarification when opening a conversation like this.
@Tamanous #165
I was not aware of this, but that’s amazing! It’s always a little bit magical to me when lines that originally start as a meme bubble out into the real world like that. Himmel would certainly be pleased to know he’s had such an effect on people!
Hey JMG
True, the corps aren’t a unity. Nonetheless despite its sins I do hope the Archive doesn’t get destroyed as I do enjoy many of its old books, hopefully it will become something like Project Gutenberg after all the dust has settled.
Btw, on the subject of books, have you read “the Tibetan book of living and dying” by Sogyal rinpoche? I’ve finally been reading it back to back after years of ownership and it is an interesting read.
#27: Your comments on how London no longer seems “British”, resonates. I live in Sydney, Australia. Chatswood, Sydney’s ‘third city’ (after Parramatta) might as well be downtown Beijing. Cabramatta is a Vietnamese enclave. Lakemba is dominated by (Muslim) Arabs. I suspect this phenomenon is common in most western countries. Of course, it’s considered impolite or even illegal to notice this.
Hi John Michael,
The frost this morning was dodged. Yay! The frost risk landed further east than here. Interestingly, the decent rainfall over the last few days produced a blanket of cloud last night over the mountain range. And that kept things warmer than they’d otherwise be. It’s been about four years since the apricots and almonds have produced a good crop here due to this sort of spring weather see-saw.
Your part of the world sounds to me as if it’s developing an ideal climate, usually seen much further south than where you are located. Hmm. The climate here has likewise shifted down from the north over the past eighteen years. Picking fresh grapefruit for inclusion in breakfast would have been unheard of here two decades ago.
Zippy the pinhead would surely do a better job… 🙂 Thanks for your thoughts because the situation bothers me, and I also have no idea what to make of it. It was hard not to note that the land of stuff was embarking this week on a ratcheting up of this policy, but for all we know, that lot may have an ace up their sleeves in terms of a ready replacement alternative – which is my best guess as to where things are headed. They’d hardly be using US dollars to purchase oil from the bear, would they?
The other thing I don’t understand about the entire mess is that the return on investment for running this not-insignificant-risk, is incredibly low. That seems so weird to me. Oh well. Today the sun is shining, and the cool spring skies are blue to the horizon. Lovely, there’s work to be done, and it’s a public holiday here today.
Cheers
Chris
@ milkyway
I’ve had chickens in the NSW suburbs of Chicago for 1.5 years now — today my egg count is at 1374.
In the suburbs, like other commentators state, free range is hard. I let my girls out during the day and they mostly stay in the yard, but can wander. (I wfh alot and can hear if they get into trouble) I have to lock them up as we have Racoons and owls at night.
I built a 8 X 14 run that they can hang out in when I am gone that is hawk proof, and I did buy a tractor supply coop that has withstood a racoon attack.
The phrase “chickens eat everything and everything eats chickens” is true. As some of our tomatoes rotted on the vine, I tossed them to the chicks, and they devoured them. They eat less of the store bought feed on days like that. Any kitchen compost is also something they like.
If things got rough I think they could survive on less, but predator protection is the biggest thing.
Have fun!!
Jerry
Regarding breakfast, I’m one of those strange people that somehow performs better without it. In Japan, however, skipping breakfast is subject to shrill opprobrium. To keep peace in the house, I have as much as I can tolerate: a salad, a bowl of miso soup, half a pack of natto and a bit of kimchee. When mountain climbing, I skip even that and have something with protein when I get back down. (I seem to be like Slink in this regard–eating anything invites an energy crash.) I once did a three-day trek in Siberia with no food (carried it to ward off shrill warnings), and did perfectly fine. Cleared something or other pretty impressive out of my intestines at the end of the third day.
Regarding narratives, one friend seeing me suffer from someone else’s lies, told me “The end of a lie is discovery.” Those sounded like wise words, but for the life of me, having lived all my life with the liar, I couldn’t really see how that worked out, especially in the long term, when people just want to forget. Maybe posthumously if you’re lucky, when the ego-involved are out of the way. Seeing the results of the vaccination campaign, I revised the aphorism: “The end of a lie is a black swan.” When two plus two don’t quite add up and “How could anybody have known?”
So far, no hurricane. I so have nonperishable items like my water bottles, single-serve applesauce cups, etc sitting out on the kitchen counter as well as a big paper cup of yesterday’s hot green tea. And this morning, I did address Jupiter Pluvius rather than Thor. We shall see what Friday brings.
I noticed the outcry over reports that migrants from some destitute locales in the Caribbean were killing and dining on dogs and cats and waterfowl. Mainstream media were quick to ‘debunk’, then it was the usual hustlers with howls of outrage and anyway we’ve seen and heard different versions of this a hundred times before so no need to belabor.
For my part, when I heard the reports, I wasn’t surprised. My parents and older relatives went through levels of deprivation that people on this side of the pond have no idea about. When you’ve suffered severe malnutrition, quadruped and avian look delectable. Growing up, what they wanted most was meat. Growing up, what they got least of was meat.
My Uncle T (RIP) would kill and cook blackbirds and pigeons. He had to be dissuaded at a family picnic at a lakeside park from storming a flock of geese in the hope of bagging one. He muttered imprecations and did desist but it was a close run thing.
I found pigeons and blackbirds too gamey for my taste. One day my dad accidentally killed a pheasant with the car so instead of letting it rot by the roadside, he took it home and cleaned it and that night we had roast roadkill. I was sick as a dog from measles at the time and wasn’t eating much but that pheasant was really tasty. As for canines and felines, these were regarded not as food but as very useful for guarding against varmints and robbers and rats and mice. Too valuable in that way to eat IOW.
Passersby would stop and watch us in empty lots and fields picking wild greens to make into salad. . My parents would say why pay at the store when in a few minutes you can pick enough for free. All I could reliably find was dandelion but my folks were pretty adept at identifying edibles of other sorts including mushrooms. Anyway, you get the picture.
Wealthy people, and this usually means progressives, with their refined sensibilities, have no clue as to what extreme poverty does to people. The last time on this side of the pond was in the 1930s and up to recent times in the Appalachians. In the former case, it appears to have been memory-holed, in the latter, well, they’re toothless addicts anyway so who cares. At least, that’s the progressive view.
In my case, I never starved and never resorted to killing pigeons and blackbirds for food but some of my parents’ thinking rubbed off on me. I cannot bear to waste food and I cannot bear to waste money. It can make me a real pain in the hindquarters. But praise to the Lord that I found a wife of my own ilk. Actually she’s worse.
Hi Mr. Greer,
This is my first comment on your site. I’ve recently discovered your work and you’ve already become one of my favorite writers! Amazing ideas!
I wanted to ask you about your thoughts on the newly emerging prime symbol within North America on which you wrote about, more specifically about it’s view of the physical world. Do you think this new civilization will like the Magian and Hindu civilizations, view the material world as somehow “unreal” and “illusory”, a sort of a mirage that hides behind an immaterial and higher world of essences and intellects, or do you think this new civilization will see the material world as the actual, real world with a single unified space like the Western and Graeco-Roman civilizations saw it.
I would also like to get your thoughts on the system of causality these societies will have. Each civilization has its own system of causality from which its sciences derive. In the Magian world, there was only one REAL cause – God – and they were seeking to find the cause of actual events. In the West, our causality states that the next most spatially proximate dynamic function/operation of a physical thing is the REAL cause of observed phenomena which consists of some other function/operation of a physical thing (Btw do you think your magical system violates the Western conception of causality – which was apriori FELT and not derived, all the way back in the Middle Ages). We are seeking to find the causes of functions. Graeco-Roman was similar, but they didn’t think in terms of functions, but rather, concrete pseudo-static absolute things.
Do you have any idea on what the causality of the newly emerging North American civilization will be like (oh and btw, do you think it will extend into parts of Canada as well?).
Thanks!!
“I would not call this principled refusal to follow unlawful orders a ‘coup’ or even mutiny.”
I joined the Navy not that long after My Lai. Boot camp included an entire class on illegal orders and not obeying them. It’s a bit tricky as an enlisted man, you may be forced to carry them out anyway, but you do have the right to get them in writing.
Once in the domain of things nuclear the rules got even clearer since everything is logged anyway. So let it be written, so let it be done, and we know who is going to Leavenworth.
Kuanyin, when empires fall, the result is inevitably an age of political and economic turmoil in which governments collapse, wars break out, and the certainties of the previous era implode. The US empire is collapsing around us, just as the British Empire collapsed in the 1914-1954 era. I don’t expect nuclear war, but I do expect convulsive and unpredictable changes comparable to those kicked off in 1914. Nor will we have any more warning than anyone had then.
Jon, I’ve had the same experience in Masonic and Odd Fellows halls. Building patterns in the astral light is exactly what good ritual does; now you know something about the point of these workings!
Robert M, oh, I think eventually we’ll see ecotechnic societies, but they may well not emerge until the next cycle of civilizations.
Celadon, that’s a very pleasant vision. I may try writing some fiction about the Saturnian cycle one of these days.
Augusto, the Wlmnath are everywhere. I spotted quite a few on billboards a little while ago.
Gnat, I find his angry tone off-putting, but he’s got some good points.
Robert M, well, we’ll see!
Llewna, that strikes me as a very good use of your time.
Nachtgurke, I don’t know. I think we’re going to find out.
J.L.Mc12, no, I haven’t read that. I haven’t gotten into the Tibetan material much.
Chris, it really is baffling. Enjoy your holiday!
Seba, both those questions are unanswerable at this point. The prime metaphor of a future society may be predictable — or not; I could be completely wrong! — but many of the ways that metaphor works out in detail are impossible to guess, because they depend on the actions of members of the creative minority, and those can’t be predicted. We’ll just have to let the future take care of that!
Aurelien: I somewhat inadvertently got someone thoroughly riled up when I pointed out the difference between fascists and socialists didn’t matter very much since both of them are likely to shoot you in the back and kick your body into the ditch.
Socialism is when the government takes over the corporations. Fascism is when the corporations take over the government. If you go down another level, socialists want everyone (other than them) equally poor (that’s what happens when you demotivate everyone). The fascists are more concerned with the national identity, and that can go wrong spectacularly too (although I don’t recall Franco going on any wars of expansion.)
As for the stock market, it has devolved into a gambling operation. However dividend investing is still a thing. There are growth and income funds as well as pure income funds. You don’t have to speculate, but like any other gambling the dream of striking it rich is a powerful draw. I remember around 2000 or so when Apple was selling for $12.50 a share and I sure wished I’d had the money to take the risk. At the time I was way too broke.
JMG said, “It’s enough to make me wonder if some factor or other is causing progressive cerebral degeneration among our elite classes…” and this ties in with what Atmospheric River was saying in #113. Dr. Oleg Grigoriev, Dr. Sc. (radiobiology), Ph.D.(radiobiology & hygiene of non-ionizing radiation), Chairman of the Russian National Committee for Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection is candid in his opinion about that. I’m not sure I can find it on public record, but I believe he has spoken out in interviews.
Looking at this from a cyclical sociological perspective, there are other factors involved. But I still see this as one of those narrative-induced black swans. And there are plenty of other Cassandras throughout history who warned and warned and warned and were simply despised for it. Grigoriev offered the WHO to translate some of the Soviet research literature for them. They weren’t interested.
Plutatorius
Aside from Blinken himself I couldn’t name names on the neocons in the State Department. I couldn’t name names of anyone there for that matter. From what I have read though, that ideology and mind set is pervasive throughout the department. It seems, like so many Americans, that they have no concept of the consequences of their actions and still view the US as the unquestioned hegemon that can do whatever it chooses with impunity. Perhaps the military has a bit more of an idea of consequences, though it has not fought a peer nation for a very long time.
I think Victoria Nuland either had to take the fall for the disastrous events she set in motion in Ukraine or, more likely, bailed out before she had to.
As I recall, the oath we had to take in the US Army was to the constitution, not to the president. He was the commander in chief, but not above the law. Austin obviously had enough backing within the military to make the decision he did. I doubt that I would have got away with it. Glad he did. The whole show obviously seems to be unravelling to the point that the military feels it needs to step in. Happens all over the world. Again the Americans cluelessly think it is something that happens to other people, not to them.
Stephen
@ slink
Oh, for sure, but here there are no grouse. Maybe they are north or east or something, but none around here. I am around 100 miles south of the golden gate.
Yeh, I dont know internet abreviations
Smith @ 197, In the days of the late Roman Republic there was a riot in the city of Alexandria because a Roman had killed a cat. Cats were sacred to a particular Egyptian goddess, the one depicted with cat head, I think, who looked after her worshippers by having her creatures hunt the rodents that infested grain storage depots. The point being that in every culture and civilization there are taboos, things you do not do. Such as in India you Do Not kill cattle. Throughout most of the ME, you do not serve pork.
Now, IDK about the pets, but Americans take our public lands, including parks, very seriously indeed. We expect to be able to go hunting and fishing, in season with the proper tags, without being shot at by marijuana growers. Which is why the weed is now all but legal across the country. We expect to be able to take our kids to a park without having to witness a duck or goose being decapitated. If someone is hungry, that is what food banks are for and we don wanna hear about their pride issues. Also many churches have free meal programs.
A reporter for the Epoch Times found that the Haitians in Ohio are legal immigrants who had been living in Florida. They were lured to Ohio to work at a processing plant operated by the Dole Co., I think it is, poorly housed and ill paid. People trafficking was the term used by Epoch Times. Which, I might add, is very much a Conservative, anti-woke publication.
From what I gather, what Austin told the president was something along the lines of Sir, don’t give that order. Mass resignations at the Pentagon and Defense Dept. is not a good look during a presidential campaign. Not to mention the revelations which would surely be made public, to the intense embarrassment of Blinken, et.al., nondisclosure agreements notwithstanding.
Victoria Nuland had become so publicly toxic that she had to be shunted sideways to a foundation job.
Gnat “Drawing from memory, and a different study, the EVENING is probably the best time to skip eating.”
Eating anything more substantial than a piece of pie after 8 PM and I don’t sleep well. Breakfast is at 6 AM, lunch is about 11:30, dinner at 5:00, and pie at 8 probably qualifies as supper in the old English tradition. My daughter calls me regimented but it works for me. And having four or five hours between a big meal and bedtime at 9:30 to 10:00 fits with what you said too.
It’s been hard to keep up this week and not just on this blog. Applesauce is canned, 28 quarts of grape juice is canned, 8 32 oz containers of pumpkin baked, packed, and in the freezer. Blackberry wine bottled, and the next batch of beer started. Kitchen floor mopped, (always sticky after canning) and laundry done.
The shelves are full of canned goods, the freezer is full, there are still plums to eat, but garden season is over.
JMG and All,
I agree, I have encountered many Wlmnath since about you mentioned it. I suspect I have also been more on the lookout, which I appreciate, because the ones I have encountered have been pretty rabid. Fortunately, the Blessing Walk is extremely useful in those situations, even if you are not walking. After all, what the Wlmnath want is for you to come down to their level and eat you there.
I am reminded of the image you shared sometime ago. I figure it is a good time to reshare it.
https://imgur.com/a/R6M81Qh
“some new basis for complex technology emerges” JMG #158
Charles Eisenstein in his book The Ascent of Humanity discusses what a future society based on a different type of technology could look like.
“many ecologically-oriented futurists quite naturally assume that a sustainable future means a low-tech future.
This conclusion falls apart if we can envision a mode of technology not based on fire. I envision a high-tech future, but one whose technology is so dramatically different from our own that it is almost unrecognizable as “technology” to present ways of thinking. The end of the Age of Fire promises a reversal of the course of separation and domination that fire has fueled. Immersed as we are in the ideology of separation, it is hard to conceive of a mode of technology that does not involve the objectification, domination, and control of nature. Yet such technologies exist, even if we hardly recognize them as such. They are based not on fire but on earth, water, light, sound, and the human body. Rooted in an ancient past, they nonetheless carry the promise of a “new age”.”
“Our age is so defined by the technologies of fire that we sometimes forget the possibility of other realms of technology. Other humans in other times were actually more highly advanced than ourselves in plant-based, earth-based, body-based, and mind-based technologies. Many of the practices that we dismiss as magic or superstition actually represented modes of mind-body development whose possibility and power we do not even suspect today. “
Breakfast: For almost a year now I have been starting most mornings with a pint of freshly made celery juice. It has done noticeably good things for my health; I’m mentally sharper, have fewer symptoms, better morale and more energy. Because I am a cheapskate, I dump the pulp into a bowl, mix it with arrowroot starch, salt, water, and chopped scallions, and make a sort of pancake out of it which I eat with cheese.
JMG, of course the political class thinks it is our future to have missions to mars, nuke powered AI centers and ever greater computer chips.
The problem is that this requires ( along with near infinite resources, and near infinite money) an incredibly disciplined, and educated workforce. To make and operate modular nukes ( assuming you can afford to build them) requires perfection of operation and maintenance because a 1% failure rate is not acceptable. The same is true of building space ships, and making 3nm computer chips.
But for the last 40 years our educational system has become a machine to turn out inept, illogical, entitled , sloppy and inattentive workers. This starts with giving everyone stars in preschool, to allowing kids to graduate with no math skills.
Every few days at the local beer hall I hear stories of bumbling at Intel’s flagship fab. I only hear the stuff that occurs within the trades such as pipe fitters, riggers and electricians. Last week it was an apprentice who cut a 99% pure chlorine line and luckily missed killing 8 people. Yesterday it was a line worker who made a mistake that broke a wafer in a EUV machine that cost $1million between the wafer and the many days it took to disassemble the machine and remove every last fragment of silicon. The unions do a very good job of training new workers, but they can not overcome 20 plus years of weak education and undisciplined life. The woke agenda has only added to these problems.
We should be looking towards a future of simpler, and more resilient solutions as we no longer have the human skills for zero tolerance activities like mini-nukes, space travel or chasing Moor’s law.
#31
I remembered a episode from the children’s animation Pokémon, concerning the psychic character Sabrina that I watched as a child. (Rewind to early 2000s)
From what I remember, she was a broken child who would literally play with other people by turning them into dolls to secure her own inner emotions (which was also represented by a doll.)
She had total power and was obsessed with becoming even more powerful, and finding boundaries, which for her did not exist. Increasingly acting out against the will of others without having remorse. (Sound familiar?)
Of course the saga ended with the characteristically silly resolution of a ghost acting out to break through to Sabrina’s inner emotions, ending her psychopathological rampage (by her supernatural powers.)
Now this is a simple children’s script, but I think in a lot of ways this saga exemplifies the problems with our society. We let the psycho-brats have all the power, and when we resist we are treated as their private playthings, to exist outside the bounds of normal reality, just for their sadistic pleasure. Eventually the playhouse expands it’s reach farther into the reality of normal people’s lives, until we are all seen as disposable dolls, with some dolls favored more than others, ruled by the totality of a unstable psychopath.
The resolution of the saga also shows how this ends in real life.
Sabrina was successfully taunted by the ghost outside her grasp, forcing her to find a way to interact safely with something she couldn’t control, allowing her to release her inner emotions, or inner child (the represented doll) and regain her humanity.
IRL, We have unredeemable psychopaths trying to provoke WW3, asking, practically pushing Russia to act as the taunting ghost, against their own digression and against all sane reasoning, in a conflict that could end humanity.
In the kid’s show, the ghost escalates to the point of throwing a trickster bomb at Sabrina, before she finally cracks up and begins to smile, ending the conflict. Reflected into real life, I am hoping and praying, that this never goes that far, because we won’t be smiling, we will ‘transformed’ into radioactive ash floating around in the upper atmosphere.
I know a lot of us have their own idea as to the ‘why’, but for me the Sabrina reasoning wins out. If anyone has a saner, more rational explanation, then please, by all means hail Mary it out there to the public.
—
As a disclaimer, this saga could very well be ripped off from a serious fictional work that I am not aware of, so it might be better to point the 6 year-olds and up to that source instead of a Japanese cartoon.
Gnat,
Appreciate your comment, but I’m actually more concerned with being too thin. I listen to my body and it tells me when, and what, and how much to eat.
Tippy, Which one’s Pink?
And since I’m here, there’s no “The” in Smokey Bear. I mean, it’s not Easter The Bunny. It’s not Santa The Clause.
I’m willing to put a pretty good bet on that the end of this cycle of civilisation will occur in the age of Capricorn. I can see the human race being given a very hard kick up the backside by old Saturn.
@Tippy #186,
I agree – it‘s a choice on how to make this work, and not everybody will be happy with the same choices (and not everything will work in all environments). I simply found the book’s premise interesting, and am trying to understand what makes it work etc – and then potentially how some of the concepts could be transferred to other settings.
Your fenced pen, is that fenced to keep predators out, or just to the extent necessary to keep the chickens in? And if the latter, how do you deter daytime predators?
Btw, I think the author of the book also invests at least a few minutes each day into his chickens, checking for snakes at night etc. It‘s not the time-saving aspect he‘s after.
@Nachtgurke #187,
The book very much stresses the importance of the right breeds – it‘s the main theme. He also says that he strongly recommends having free-range dogs, but that‘s by far not stressed as much. Comparing everybody‘s notes here, I have the nagging feeling that the dogs might be just as important as the right breed of chickens – something the author might underestimate since I think he keeps the dogs anyway to deter larger predators (e.g. bears) from wandering into the farmyard.
That‘s to say, from all I‘ve read now, even if I wanted to try 24/7 free-range and had the place to do it, I wouldn‘t attempt it without a couple of fearless dogs living outside, methinks. That should, to a large extent, also solve the issue with vulnerable brooding hens.
@Jerry D #194,
That’s an interesting mixture. How do you keep your chickens from eating the tomatoes all by themselves? And how does it work with the hawks if they free-range in the yard? I don‘t suppose your sheer presence in the house will deter a bird of prey outside. Or do they only free-range when you‘re outside? -)
Again, thanks to everybody who chimed in so far – I‘ve learned a lot from this discussion.
While the method as outlined in the book wouldn‘t work for my current circumstances (assuming we got chickens, and assuming we were even interested in trying it), some of the concepts might be transferable to other settings, and well worth doing. And, as some commenters have pointed out, the issues are essentially the same, whether you grow chickens or plant a vegetable garden – everything wants to eat what you want to eat… Lots to ponder there in terms of viewpoints and strategies… 🙂
Milkyway
Kind Sir,
The cycle of civilizations has come up a bit this week. Can you or anyone else here recommend any good reading material on this topic?
Hi John,
Fascinating responses.
Agree with you that we will be lucky to get to 2030 without any fireworks, my own tentative base case is around 2029 it will become apparent how bad things are but even before that we should see a huge inflationary spike around 2027.
What are your thoughts about Russia’s intentions once they conquer Ukraine? Peter Zeihan thinks Putin will try and gain control of the former Russian Empire lands, e.g. the Baltic states, eastern Poland, large parts of Romania when Europe is defenceless.
See this article – https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13890265/NATO-prepares-plan-huge-number-casualties-case-WW3-scenario-Russia-German-military-says-invasion-happen-decade.html
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/british-army-too-small-to-meet-commitments-lords-warn/
Of course, a war against China over Taiwan in 2 years would prove a game-changer –
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/us-navy-directed-prepare-war-china-2027?fbclid=IwY2xjawFjPPBleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHWiN50QA9zckq5vll4C0xIZAbn38vQGIjE14eX7Hj4ugR3HeVLZEO6a7MA_aem_eUkxWsFhYh97PDd0_mZ7jQ
https://thehill.com/opinion/4890957-china-japan-missile-attack/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwY2xjawFjPPNleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHfkLQZe3vl2bocHXblqeQyy2lFeKHBABDqs2H2gh15ZKExGZFykMn6vIWA_aem_P2o8xHXhHHTNRnsYvmhWUw
Also one further comment/question:
Whilst the threat of wars in eastern Europe are a huge risk to Europe, at a selfish personal level I am more concerned about the future risks of a Muslim invasion of western Europe (given I live a long way from Warsaw).
The Sahel is increasingly been taken over by armed jihadi groups and I see a risk, at some point in the future that jihadi fanatics will storm the the more developed countries on the rim of North Africa (I’m thinking Morocco, Algeria, Libya etc).
That’s probably the point we in western Europe really need to start worrying.
According to Einstein, the universe is 4-dimensional, composed of space-time. We mere mortals can only move freely through space; in the time dimension we are limited to an infinitesimal slice we call “now”.
However, in our imaginations we can travel freely through space and time, no problem. So does this mean the universe is imaginary, or possible the product of Someone’s imagination?
Hey JMG
Ok then, nevermind.
Another book which I finished reading was “Scale” by Geoffrey West, which essentially talks about how many aspects of an animal, city, or company vary in a roughly logarithmic way that is based on size. I have difficulty explaining its ideas very well, but the thing that I think would interest you the most is his work on cities as I think it may be relevant to your Catabolic collapse theory. He not only shows that you can predict a lot of a city’s socioeconomic aspects (Crime rate, business diversity) based purely on size, but shows that Cities grow superlinearly, growing faster the bigger they get. He talks a fair bit about the sustainability issues of this, and even talks a bit about peak oil as well.
I think I am stressed all the time. Cant stop thinking about nuclear war lately. But if not that it is always something..
#20 Toothpaste
Several years ago I changed to curd soap and like it. So I avoid the chemicals in toothpastes and have less plastic waste.
Weilong, in the UK the issue of animals wandering is dealt with by using a combination of fencing and cattle grids.
The New Forest is really the only place that sees a lot of animals let into the woods in an ancient scheme called ‘pannage’. There are some cattle and horses that live there year round, but pigs are released there in autumn by local people, ‘commoners’, to clear up the mast – acorns, beech nuts etc – that could make the cows and horses ill. This has been going on since 1079. It’s up to the commoners to sort which pigs belong to who and to gather them in for the winter. The first I knew of it was when I was walking in the forest and came across a large group of pigs snuffling about under the trees. They were the most contented pigs I’ve ever seen and the memory of them is one I’m glad to have.
https://www.thenewforest.co.uk/explore/wildlife-and-nature/pigs/
@212 The Pink…
Ah, my personal favorite Floyd album often overlooked in favor of the two more obvious choices. But I hold no ill will – can’t pick a favorite child and all and the world would be a worse place without the three.
The interesting point about the scandals embroiling Keir Starmer in the UK is, that in Germany, a few day ago the whole party leadership of the Green party has given up their posts as a consequence of the bad results for the Greens in the elections in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg. It was even suggested that the traffic light coalition is crumbling, because the FDP, too, is increasingly uncomfortable with the political course of the coalition. This aligns well with the opposition between the Sun and Neptune, which occurs in two recent mundane horoscopes for Britain (and Germany), the first is the Libra Ingress horoscope, the second is the last lunar eclipse. And similarly, as JMG predicted for Britain, in the Thüringer Landestag there was a row about if the AfD has the right to have one of their members function as an speaker. Like in the horoscope for Britain, the eleventh house, which govers the parliament, is governed by Mars.
About the end of the current cycle of civilizations, I have come to the idea, that, maybe, the resources which are depleted during the existence of a civilization cannot completely restored during the following dark age, so that there comes a time, when civilizations become impossible for a while. And as far as I understand what JMG has said about the occult lore about Atlantis and Lemuria, different cycles of civilizations would have different characteristics, so that in the next civilizational cycle, the mistakes of the current cycle of civilizations would not be repeated in the same way.
Patricia O, interesting. Thank you for this.
Augusto, that cartoon remains one of my favorite pieces of advice for dealing with the Wlmnath!
BeardTree, Eisenstein is of course quite correct. It’s only because our civilization is so arrogant about insisting that its kind of technology is the only kind that matters that we don’t notice how remarkably backward we are in so many fields.
Clay, that’s an excellent point!
Eruption, that seems at least plausible to me.
PumpkinScone, that also seems plausible!
DropBear, I may have to do a book on the subject. I’ve extracted this from a lot of old Theosophical and para-Theosophical literature, where it occurs in bits and scraps.
Forecasting, I don’t think Putin has any particular ambition for conquest. It’s the next few leaders who take his place who are the ones to worry about — and of course he’s not a young man. His focus is stability at all costs; Medvedev et al. are more likely to pursue a new Russian Empire. To my mind, though, the even more likely outcome is that Russia will be drawn into Europe as that collapses into a power vacuum. As for Taiwan, it just makes me shake my head to watch Westerners fail to understand China’s sense of strategy. We plan for months, they plan for decades; they don’t need to invade Taiwan, they just need to use it as a lever to bankrupt their enemies and then let it fall into their outstretched hands. As for Africa, that’s one possibility, but keep a close eye on the Sahel. If the three countries that have chucked out their European neocolonial overlords there become the nucleus of a new West African great power, which seems entirely possible to me, it’s by no means impossible that Europe may find itself faced with an ultimatum offering two choices: massive reparations for 500 years of colonialism, or war. It’s not a war Europe would win.
Martin, that’s a fine theme for meditation!
J.L.Mc12, I’ll see if the local library system has it.
Trusty, I recommend daily meditation. It really does help keep the stress down.
Booklover, thanks for the data points!
I just want to note that it is ten years this month since I personally encountered whatever subtle “working” must have been flowing through the Archdruid Report posts, and found myself coming to some realisations, and following them up with some decisions. I still remember making the comment “now, there’s work to be done”… it felt at the time, and still feels now, like it was a vow, a statement of commitment to following wherever that work should lead me.
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2014/09/technological-superstitions.html#c6473852314571389572
So, ten years later, it has been a great and ongoing blessing for me to read your pieces and be variously stimulated, provoked, educated and entertained by them. The comment threads have also been every bit as much of a blessing. And my own life has been blessed with more purposive and meaningful work, and a deeper spiritual connection to the world around me.
Please accept my thanks, and if you have them, my blessings. My blessings to all here, who will have them.
@ Milkyway #214
Our fence is dual purpose to keep chickens in and predators out. The woven wire fence itself is buried 12″ deep to make digging under less possible, the openings in the wire are small enough to keep baby chicks in and weasels out and tall enough to keep the random flying chicken on their side of the fence. Aerial predators are partly thwarted by tree cover and partly by well-placed chicken hiding spots in the pen – they can get under/in a safe spot pretty quickly from wherever they are. The big cats are the only predator I can’t keep out of the pen entirely, but since they mostly hunt from dusk to dawn it’s only been an issue once when one of the hens was inadvertently left out of the coop at night.
As for time savings – I only mention that as it’s something people often assume the way we keep our chickens is more time consuming then just letting them completely free range. I let the infrastructure do the work for me 🙂
Yesterday I received a 64 page Christmas Toy Catalog from Mall-Wart. For younger readers, the first sign of the season was the enormous Sears Christmas Catalog in the mail. The Retro Future is here, just unevenly distributed..
Curd soap? What is that?
a) Do you have any advice for how to go from rough draft to publishable material? I have a very rough draft of a book in hand, and am finding the editing of it far more challenging than actually writing the first draft. Is there anything I can do to make it easier, or is this something I can best learn by slogging through it?
b) You’ve said before that our technologies reflect the biases of the culture which created them, and I’ve started to wonder if the obsession with lighting up the night is one of them. I’ve started reading some good books on the history of artificial light and how it transformed the conception of what “night” meant; and one of the more fascinating things is that in Early Modern Europe, night was widely considered to be God’s way of reminding people that Hell exists. Other societies in different times and places were less psychotic about the night; but given how deeply routed this idea was in Western Christianity, I wonder if the frankly pathological obsession with lighting up the night is descended from this.
c) I know some regulars here work within the electrical industry and so might be able to help answer a question I have: what percentage of electrical generation goes to street lighting? I’ve seen claims as high as 40% of the electricity generated goes to street lighting, which seems quite high to me; but at the moment I am having a hard time finding anything I consider reliable.
Hi everybody!
I have two questions for asking you, John and kommentariat:
First, do you think vitamin supplements and other supposed “super-foods” are useful, or are they a mere rip-off for the fool? I have doubts about it…Some people I’ve met says supplements work, but some others told me they don’t…
Second, anybody has read “New York 2140″(K.S. Robinson)? Did you liked it or disliked it? I don’t have really a lot of free time for reading, so I’m doubting about its lecture. Is it worth to read it?
Thanks in advance for your answers!
#185 You can see this with interviews, if Starmer is asked a slightly awkward question in a media interview.
Either he will have that kind of ‘rabbit in the headlights’ look as he repeats the same soundbites again, or otherwise he seems to get a little bit riled up and starts sounding a bit peevish. I expect the £3000 glasses frames were to help avoid the impression of that kind of rabbit in the headlights look.
Teresa: Did you see anything else of Cornwall beside the Eden Project? It seems a little bit like a botanical garden that has just got a massive idea of itself which the reality doesn’t quite match up to. I live in Cornwall but its a few years since I’ve been to Eden. The last time I went they had fairly recently put in the tree canopy walkway, which I think is closed a lot in the summer because its too hot at the top of the dome apparently. They are apparently getting their own geothermal borehole, to heat the biomes.
Some years ago there was a sculpture by David Kemp, called the Industrial Flame Plant installed at the Eden Project.
Hi Milkyway!
About free-ranging chickens, what is your main reason for wanting to do this – is it mainly to save money on feed? I think it would be possible but with quite a few drawbacks as others mentioned: heavy losses to predators, a much lower laying rate and difficulty collecting eggs, and difficulty in containing chickens to a certain area. I think it ‘could’ work to a certain extent, but it would be worth analyzing your overall goals for your property to determine if that is the right system for you.
You could look at chicken keeping as a spectrum with total confinement on one end and totally free range on the other. I decided to go with a ‘middle ground’ approach as it works well with my goals which include having a reliable supply of very high-quality eggs for sale and maintaining a market garden that doesn’t get destroyed by chickens. The eggs produced on our farm are probably the biggest ‘draw’ for customers, who then go on to buy the other things we produce. So, I use an old 24-foot RV that we gutted and converted into a mobile coop, complete with nest boxes and roosts. It is predator-proof down to 1 inch, which is too small for even a weasel. At night the chickens go inside, and I lock the door. In the morning, I let them outside. The key to this system is portable electric poultry netting that runs off a solar energizer/battery, which keeps the chickens where I want them and predators out. When the chickens have eaten all the grass in one area, and before they scratch up the ground to dirt, I hook up the farm truck to the RV and move it to a fresh area. I still give them supplemental grain feed, but I estimate using about 30% less during the grass season (as compared to the winter when everything is covered by snow here). This system has several advantages: close to zero losses to predators (touch wood!), a high laying rate (85% or better), excellent quality of eggs thanks to the forage/bugs, zero destruction of my garden areas, and ease of collecting eggs. The chickens also get to live their best life and express their natural behaviors in a safe environment. The main disadvantage is that it’s a fair amount of work to move the chickens to a new location every week or so. You could do it on a smaller scale with a mobile coop that you move by hand (see Justin Rhodes’ ‘ChickShaw’ for example) which would probably be faster. The chickens also work for me, though, as with the electric fence I can move them to targeted garden areas to clean up and fertilize in the fall.
I wouldn’t discount the threat of predators: the only loss I had was of one chicken that liked to fly over the electronet and free range around the property. A fox sadly turned her into a big pile of feathers. I had Guinea Fowl for a (short) while, but they preferred to roost in the trees at night, even though they had a nice safe coop. Almost every night we would hear the screams as night-time birds of prey had them for dinner. And yet they never figured that they should go into the coop at night. They soon went into the freezer…
Hope all is going well with your agricultural adventures!
JMG and all
I am sometimes fascinated by the fact that UK has no large predators, they were all killed off ages ago, which is why large mammals can be let out to range in forests or fields. Not to mention older settled parts of the USA. But the PMC in both cases is quite happy to tell all other places what their environment has to be, resists natural drifts and changes ( ie., the Owl drift and replacement being violently resisted in the Pacific Northwest here in USA, wild horses, etc….) And, here is re-introducing Wolves to their natural range, but you will notice it is not to their full natural range, which was most of the continent. They seem to be being reintroduced in a political manner, wolves in a “red” ranching state but not in Massachusetts.
I dont want the apex predators to go extinct here, but boy life sure would be more difficult if there were still grizzlies in these hills. That’s a fun thought actually, Californians needing to go around with a large caliber firearm strapped on when out for walks, the thinking would drift too closer to Monatana….
Everyone is excited about the population comeback of the Mountain Lions in this state. And while in general they are still in the cool and elusive category, that has and is changing. The PMC has a shizo relationship with ecological overshoot, in the case of wild horses, they acknowledge it and say, we cant stand to see them in overshoot, dying of disease caused by malnutrition, so we must kill them first. Where in regards to the lions, they cant admit that in the absence of humans, if they were realy the apex ( which they are not) the young must go and find their own very large range territory and when the state is full, they will fight each other and/or starve until a balance is reached. But since we exist and are part of the world, first they will encroach upon us, which is happening, and move into backyards and hunt pets and small children.
@Grover: Thanks for the kind words about that art-icle. I enjoyed writing that one a lot. And it’s nice to get feedback, which I seldom get on my Cheap Thrills pieces. It’s appreciated. (I really liked David’s story too.)
@Tippy: You are right about that. It was just THE first example that came to my mind. I always thought it was weird listening to the BBC sessions and such and hearing them introduced as such. Piper At the Gates of Dawn must be in my top 100 albums, if I had a top 100 albums. The problem is, I keep discovering music that is new or new to me. And I like almost all of THE Pink Floyd, up until about The Final Cut. A lot of people didn’t like The Final Cut, especially because it kind of broke them up, and the other members say it was more of Roger Waters album. Such things, do happen in bands of course, but I still think it had some great songwriting. He is a talented dude. Of course, many more mainstream classic rock heads don’t care about The Piper At the Gates of Dawn as much, because it had that baroque kind of psychedelic chamber pop thing going on, and Syd was just weirder than Gilmour and the rest (being an acid casualty might have had something to do with it). They don’t care for the Final Cut very much either, probably due to the lyrics. As Waters writes of it:
“The Final Cut was about how, with the introduction of the Welfare State, we felt we were moving forward into something resembling a liberal country where we would all look after one another … but I’d seen all that chiselled away, and I’d seen a return to an almost Dickensian society under Margaret Thatcher.” Not to mention the whole Falklands thing. It was a powerful anti-war album among other things.
@Phutatorius: I imagine there are many “bones of contention” among classical/baroque listeners & lovers. I’ve interacted with some of them (I was hanging around some academic classical musicians from the conservatory last night, actually, at a panel discussion on “Deep Listening” before a show I went to). They are all erudite and talented for sure, but I guess in each field these little irritations settle in.
As for the number of civilizations in Spengler’s sense that can exist, I think it is very likely that they are infinite.
The reasoning is as follows:
1. The number of Prime Symbols that can be the essence of a civilization picture may be infinite (in the Faustian civilization, this is infinite; in the magician civilization, this is the essence; in the Egyptian civilization, this is the road)
2. Even if the prime symbol is limited, the cultural-civilization forms and paths that a single Prime Symbol can produce may also be unlimited (for example, China and Egypt have very similar Prime Symbols (both are some kind of road), but they have developed very different social and religious forms)
Of course, the time that the earth can provide for the development of similar civilizations is limited. As the novel Dune says: The future has infinite possibilities, but reality is only a narrow door that can only allow a very small number of them to pass.
In addition, I believe that the comparison between China and Egypt is a good sample for thinking about whether the same prime symbol can be reused, or whether it just repeats the path of the previous civilization. Both developed their persistence in history, their strong historical talents, and their superstitious belief in immortality under the prime symbol of the road, but they are completely different in many places (for example, the theocratic system in Egypt swallowed up the bureaucracy, and in China, the priests isolated themselves from society, interfering only when the empire periodically collapsed)
I have something I’d like to ask the advice of Mr. Greer, and the rest of the commentariat, on.
I’m currently enrolled in a university class dealing with energy, and my current assignment is to write an analysis of the costs and benefits of nuclear power. I already have a few good sources in mind, partially ones the teacher showed us and partially others on the internet, but most of these are likely to be biased in favor of nuclear, perhaps overestimating the necessity of investing in it to ensure a future energy source and generally being written by the faithful of the religion of progress?
So, does anyone have some (preferably online) sources they’d recommend for learning more about nuclear’s costs, benefits, and future necessity (or lack thereof)?
—-
Siliconguy (#157), your last article there was simultaneously sad and frustrating to read. The thought of using less never seems to have crossed their minds.
Booklover #224,
Call me a cynic, but I don’t have the impression that the FDP cares even one iota about the political course of the traffic light coalition – they do seem to care, finally, about their election and polling results, and hence their future access to the feeding troughs… 😉
Milkyway
JMG and anyone else,
Some people here have made comments this year that, basically, they have felt a disturbance in the force. Paraphrasing, that something big has shifted, moved down the planes, or changed in a significant way. But no one seemed to know what it meant, or had any more details or insights at the time.
Does anyone have any updates? Broadly speaking, I know that for a myriad of reasons there is some very significant change coming in the near future, and it will probably be accompanied by some world class stupid by the elites that will make it much uglier than necessary, but I would still like to hear if anyone has something to share.
Thanks
@Brendhelm #170
Yes, I think this is something of a common pattern in modern thinking. Much of it usually hinges on the belief that humanity is in absolute control of the universe, or at least has the capacity to get there one day. That assumption is a huge stretch if you ever stop to actually think about it, and yet much of what is labeled as “enlightened” thinking hinges on this presupposition. Science’s current status in society practically depends on it, as anything that cannot be controlled cannot be properly studied, and then that would require admitting that science does not, indeed, have the answers to everything. It’s much easier to believe that anything science couldn’t possibly control simply doesn’t exist. I think this general attitude has bubbled out into the rest of our culture, including its “woke” spaces.
I would like to start with a data point to add to the nightmares and trouble sleeping. I initially thought this was just me until I started hearing about it on MM and here. Several nights ago(would have to check my Druid journal to be exact) I woke up early in the morning and had a sudden thought thrust upon me that many people were going to get sick and die soon but that I need not fear as it would mostly be far removed from me along with this is a sign that things were about to change greatly and was to be looked at as the start of something good in the long run. That sounds harsh to start and does not reflect my feelings on the matter, and now several days later continuing to wake up early with good spirits I am surprised and alarmed that so many people are getting a sense of dread and gloom. I am curious if it is maybe influenced by location? I live on the western edge of the Missouri Ozarks just a mile from the Oklahoma border and few miles south of the corner of Kansas. But just wanted to share since this seems to be a sign of something big happening.
I also have two questions, one for you JMG specifically and the other for you or anyone in the commentariat that may have pertinent data. First question is can the Druid Magic Handbook and Dolmen Arch be studied along side one another or should they be separate study courses?
Second, I would like help in figuring out something I saw several years ago. My family and I live on a rural property that has been in my family for sixty years, and I was in the woods about thirty feet from my house one winter cutting a dead tree I had felled into fire wood when I paused due to feeling something watching me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a being made of shadow roughly three feet tall. It was human in shape, no facial features just a smooth black oval for a face and it had long hair. The best way to describe its look as it was a non see through shadow. I did not feel any hostility from this being, it seemed more like it was just watching. When I looked it was not there and there was nothing in the spot it should have been at all so I couldn’t have confused a shrub or anything like that. Do you or anyone else know what it was? My first feeling was maybe a land spirit and I left an offering of home grown tobacco there just in case I had offended it in some way. Haven’t seen it since, just wondering what it was. And I guess an extra question is there a book/books that describe metaphysical beings such as that or others ? It is a subject hard to learn about.
Hurricane update – it hit sometime in the night. I had planted fake votive candles in the bathroom and kitchen, and 2 in the bedroom, which was all the lighting I needed at night. I was jolted awake at 3-fracking-05 am to find the power out, and had no trouble, but did use the hurricane lamps – the kind you pull up to get the light – useful if you’re wakeful in the wee hours. No damage locally that I could see, but a tree crashed through the roof in my daughter’s house and took out the sun room, which was the heart of the family space: table and chairs, a couch and two other chairs, opened onto the kitchen at one end and the living room at the other. The sun was out and bright when I woke up after the sleepless bit, so it was easy to see except in the bathroom and kitchen.
The power came back on early this afternoon, which is quite fast. Management had pizza on the 1st floor, and probably coffee,or at least some sort of drink.
It seems like one industry or political group or another is willing to destroy themselves for short term gain. We have seen how the jump on to the woke agenda ( among other things) is destroying higher ( end even k-12) education.
Now it seems the political polling industry is in the process of destroying themselves. A point or two due to over sampling of one group or another is one thing. But now we are seeing dueling polls where one poll will show Harris up 7 points in Pennsylvania while another shows Trump up 5 points in the same state. At this point they are so random that people either totally disbelieve all of them, or just believe the one that they want.
I for one think the polls that show Harris gaining are suspect. Over the last few week she has nothing but bad interviews, damaging viral pet memes, and fake rallies while the trump add machine is cranking out some of the best videos in political history and holding sold out Rallys deep in blue states.
Trying to use polls as tools for political influence is a short term gain, but perhaps the elites in control think of this as a do or die moment.
Hi JMG
IAF has flattened like 8 – 10 high rise buildings full of people in the Dahiye suburb of Beirut (probably hundreds of victims), it seems with the intention to kill Nasrallah in a, as they like to call, “surgical high precision strike” made with 10 American MK-84 1 ton HE charge each one (for them I suppose the bombing of Hiroshima could be described as a “surgical high precision bombing of high Japanese commanders surrounded by human shields”).
In November last year, around one month after the Hamas attack of 7th October, I wrote in another open post what I thought will be the probable course of events:
1) IDF start the ground invasion of Gaza (North part) and continue flattening other parts with many more civilians casualties.
2) Hezbollah start increasing the volume of rockets volleys to the North of Israel, mainly to military outpost, bases and troops concentrations.
3) Israel retaliates not only to Hezbollah, but as usual, start demolishing Lebanese infrastructures and buildings, in the beginning only in the border with Lebanon; to pressure the Lebanese government (as usual, and, as in 2006, this also does not work)
4) Hezbollah start to attack more frequently the Israeli air bases with more powerful and precise missiles, putting out of service a few of them.
5) The IDF continue to bomb the South of Lebanon increasing the amount of ordinance used. For the first time the IAF start to bomb the suburbs of South Beirut the main base of Hezbollah leadership, with dozens of civilian deaths. Another red line is crossed. Nasrallah inform that they will attack all the air bases that attack Lebanese territory.
6) Hezbollah increase exponentially the volleys of missiles (NOT rockets) and drones against the North of Israel with a clear focus on the IAF air bases, in 7 days almost all the air bases in the North of the country are out of service (at least for some days) due to the Hezbollah missiles and drones attacks.
7) The IDF asked the Americans to defend them attacking Hezbollah targets in the South of Lebanon to help the IAF. Meanwhile the IDF is bogged-down in Gaza but also has lost many bases and planes in the North and cannot sustain the required pace of attacks against the Hezbollah, Gaza and the Lebanon’s infrastructures.
8) Of course Joe Biden gives green light to 2 US carriers in the Mediterranean Sea to start bombing Hezbollah targets all around Lebanon (“to fight terrorism”, he says), in fact to help the Israel Air Force.
9) The next day US is start bombing Hezbollah; the Iraq’s PMU, the Syrian Shia militias, the Houties, and all the rest of Shia militias (and some sunnies militias also) give an ultimatum of 24h to stop bombing Lebanon to the US government, or they will start to attack American bases in Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, UAE, KSA, etc…with all the means at their disposal.
10) The same day the US threats Iran that if the Shia militias in any country start to attack American bases in the ME, they consider this as an Iranian attack to the US military and they will retaliate against targets inside Iran. Meanwhile the Gaza ground operation is a mess with many IDF soldiers killed but many times more Palestinians also killed (90% civilians).
11) Iran responds to the US that if his territory is attacked, they will target all the American bases and assets in the ME and they will close the Straight of Hormuz to all traffic.
12) The answer of the American government is that they do not bow to pressure from terrorist organizations controlled by Iran and continue bombing Hezbollah but also start bombing “preventively” Shia militias all around the ME, and send two more carries to the Indian Ocean to “protect the American interests in the Gulf”
13) There are some small attacks on some American bases in Syria and Iraq, that are immediately answered by the Americans with heavy bombing of the (presumed) bases of these militias.
14) The NATO sends a message that they will fight alongside the US if they are attacked (article 5)
15) Hezbollah operatives inside Syria attack, with a huge rockets and drones barrage, and overrun an small American military base in Syria, the survivors soldiers are taking captives by the Hezbollah operatives and send to Lebanon.
16) The Americans start to deploy troops in Kuwait and in Israel and some op spec troops inside Lebanon. The number of rockets and mortar raining down in the American bases in Syria and Iraq start to increase exponentially as also the US casualties. The Pentagon send a lot of planes to attack the source of the volleys killing dozens or even hundreds of militias and also civilians, but the rockets and mortars continue raining down on all American bases anyway. The American helicopters tried to evacuate many wounded from the bases but they are under constant threat of MANPADs and ATGMs fire, and 8 of them have been downed in 1 day killing dozens of soldiers; the Pentagon order the evacuation of the bases deep inside Syria and Iraq, some of them by their own means, and for the big ones they are preparing an “expeditionary force” to the rescue. But they cannot evacuate any of them because all the roads are fill of IED’s that stop the US convoys, trapped in many ambushes (à la Teotoburg forest).
17) The American sends an ultimatum to Iran that if in 24h the militias does not stop attacking the American bases and soldiers, the US will attack targets inside Iran. Iran says they do not bow to Imperialism’s pressure and the problems of the American soldiers are not related to the actions of Iran.
18) After exactly 24h of the ultimatum to Iran the USAF and the Navy ships and submarines start bombing the oil terminals, air defenses and military bases inside Iran. The US and Iran are, in fact, at war.
19) After 16 h from the start of the US attack on Iranian assets, the US Al Udeid base in Qatar is flattened by more than 150 heavy Iranian missiles (prepared for this task years before), The Patriot batteries only downed a few of them. The oil go to 300$ and the US, UE and world economies sink.
20) The US threat Iran with nuclear weapons…..This also, of course, does not work to deter Iran or other shia militias, from attacking US military bases.
21) China and Russia advise US and Israel against the use of nuclear weapons in the ME and Russia sends ammo and “advisers” to Iran massively to return the “gift” to the US for the bombing of Russian soldiers and civilians with US weapons.
22) US threatens Russia with a military response….
From 1) to 5) have more or less happened, and may be after today the remaining phases could happen (I know they are redacted in a quite dramatic way).
You said then that this scenario I described has low probabilities to happens because Joe Biden (the democrats) has an election to win and a war in the ME is the last thing they want/need; but after the dramatic events of the last week, and specially today, do you still think the US really was trying seriously to avoid a big war in the ME?
(I do not think for any moment that the Pentagon and the US government were not informed by Israel of all the big attacks on Hezbollah or Iran, as the pagers, the attack of the last week on the high command and the attack of today to kill Nasrallah)
Cheers
David
Well figure this is good as any place to share the recent Retrotopia encounter . Those of you out here know my saga of trying to bring the book to light in a play/film in a radical cafe we attempted to bring to such an open artistic community such as Salt Lake City. Several weeks ago I was re examining work which one does as often in contemplation to know what is poopoo and what has potential and spirit. I tend to let the art guide me if it has its own girth as an elemental/muwwalkal. Retrotopia does this to me still even eight years later. When JMG had post 4th edition release of course had been reading the first manuscript and as these things go also had the prop guy who i worked with contact me at this same time about the play/film we done back 2016/2017 we had done.
So it gets funnier juxtaposition to the last time this was attempted, as from the interview JMG discussed on a podcast we did several years back. The main issue i found directing was within the idea of method acting the people that were from the no or lo tech country, these people that played these parts could not grasp that in order to become these characters it would of helped tremendously was turn off the distracting tech and get into the role.
Which leads me to another recent discussion with some folks who work in film. Long and short of it goes like this: great conversation in a hollywood kind of way, not new to me btw. But what i found strange was the same situation with the man who is interested in directing wanted to tokenize and all that other digitizing monetary. So i listened, observed, learned.
Call me old fashion here I would think if it was good thing lets just pay people for there work and let it be released and see if the public support the work by simply paying for it. Now not a Luddite here when it comes to the language this person is speaking. But from my experience of self publishing in music projection of profit from the investors of this new money the only folks who gain are those who have all distribution locked up for there purposes, which is a whole other subject. And as i have learned from being apart of it my whole life, its hard work and there are really no short cuts.
So where this is going I want to put it to you and maybe your community what would you do and of course asking you first? Really I think its great work and would be nothing but honored to be apart of bring this book alive in other forms of arts. And of course just seeing if you feel its even worth it JMG. Been waiting all month for this post to ask you and really I thought this community would have way more valuable input. Thanks for all your work JMG and giving me a chance years ago to putting it out with the cafe it was still amazing.
Re. the cycle of civilizations ending 3000AD
Interesting. Since I don’t have your familiarity with occult tradition, I assumed the cycles of civilization and collapse would just keep going, now that the cat of cereal agriculture is out of the bag. Running out of usable metals might be one reason for the forced pause, but to be honest I’m not fully convinced. After all, there were advanced pre-industrial civilizations in the Americas that weren’t all that dependent on metals or mining for most of their core technologies, even if they did use gold and silver for decoration. And of course there’s been quite a few cultures at a high level of sophistication with non-metallic technologies, like Gimbutas’ Neolithic “Old Europe” or several North American ones, but I suppose only fully-fledged urban civilizations with high complexity count here.
When I read your comment, a very different possibility occurred to me: what if there’s a “pause” in civilizations around 3000AD because that’s when the next round of ice ages will hit? Maybe things could be different this time (I know, I know :)), since we’ll presumably be going into the ice age with domesticated grains that could be brought to places around the equator still warm and moist enough to support them, but I still think it’s a reasonable guess. I know there’s a lot of uncertainty in timing ice ages, but wouldn’t 3000 be about right if the Holocene has the typical lifespan of the last few interglacials?
Also, I have to admit I didn’t catch on that your Hall of Homeless Gods book was released already. Will definitely pick up a copy soon.
This turned up at Newsweek today:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/illegal-immigrant-lived-in-us-for-2-decades-using-stolen-identity-lawyers/ar
Any administration, of any party which decides to get serious about illegal migration could, right now, or at any time in the last few decades, do two things which would not require new legislation. First would be to require any employer receiving any kind of contract or subsidy from govt. at any level to use e-verify and hire only citizens or legal residents. The second would be to establish a multi agency task force to investigate and prosecute ID theft. I hope I do not need to remind anyone that ID theft IS NOT a victimless crime.
@milkyway — had to invest in tactical fencing, so the the chickens can roam the yard, but not the garden. the only time they get in is when we forget to close the gate 🙂
Chickens are pretty smart and when spooked they hang out under trees and bushes — which we have an ample supply. That is a danger of course, I have seem hawks, but “knock on wood”, they haven’t hung around our yard much.
Hawks are afraid of people, I just spooked a hawk the other day on a nature trail. He did have a rabbit in his talons though 🙁
When I first had chickens I was more worried, I even had a camera on their coop at night, but have become more relaxed. And just 2 weeks ago pulled the camera down.
My only fear is weasels, as they can get into about anything with a gap the size of a quarter. The coop is safe, but the run is not, and the yard isn’t either. My sister in law has lost a fair amount to them.
And they survived the Chicago winter, -15 degrees, with just hay bales to block wind and a hot water bottle in the coop at night (electric fires are a killer of chickens). So get a hearty breed.
chickens are fun, pretty low maintenance, the eggs are tasty!
good luck in your journey!
Jerry
A request for any of you who are the praying or Healing Hands (etc.) sort; and with her permission, I’m requesting prayers for my youngest daughter (Merlin), the newlywed, who discovered a lump in her breast last night. May it prove to be of no consequence and resolve rapidly with no issues.
Many thanks
Clay’s comment is well timed,
https://fortune.com/2024/09/26/bosses-firing-gen-z-grads-months-after-hiring/
Bosses are firing Gen Z grads just months after hiring them—here’s what they say needs to change
My daughter reports that HR hired a Walmart checker for the QA lab. He’s having a great deal of trouble understanding how and why a high-pressure liquid chromatograph works. The phrase cookbook chemistry depends on a certain level of background knowledge that he simply doesn’t have, and even a well-written SOP can’t make up for it. Training him is taking vastly longer than expected, but Management was initially pleased that he worked so much cheaper than a college graduate. Now, not so much.
>I remember around 2000 or so when Apple was selling for $12.50 a share and I sure wished I’d had the money to take the risk
I think it was more like $5 or so at the bottom. But Apple was considered a joke at the time, a hasbeen company, weird and fuddyduddy. There were plenty other companies in the tech sector that were darlings at the time, Apple wasn’t one of them. Macs were a minuscule part of the personal computing market and they had some success with the iPod, but there were about 200 other mp3 players out there that were just as capable and cheaper. Meh. This was all before the first iPhone came out, of course.
I too, remember looking at that Apple chart and I said to others “I don’t want to short that”. It didn’t look like it was going to do much of anything at all at the time. And even looked like it might be bottoming. It was. Inexperience on my part. Staring me right in the face. Even if you had bought it then, you would’ve had to have been patient, it didn’t take off right away. At the time I didn’t feel like buying it. I should’ve Felt Different(tm).
I think Apple may return back to being weird and fuddyduddy again. But like all megacorps, it’ll happen in slooooow mooooootionnnnnnnnn.
>I think I am stressed all the time. Cant stop thinking about nuclear war lately
Monty Python wrote a song, just for you.
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=nT5JBrKC5M0
Kind Sir,
That would be great. Can’t wait to get my hands on it.
P.S: what on earth is a Wlmnath?
May as well chime in on the breakfast question. I have to eat in the AM or risk headache and inability to concentrate. Workday breakfast is steel-cut oats with dried fruit (usually raisins, cranberries, or dates) and sweet spices. On Saturdays I just eat toast, a granola bar, or a bowl of wholegrain cereal like Kashi; on Sunday I often make tofu scramble and hash browns or home fries for brunch. Lunch is always the biggest meal of the day, and dinner is usually a sandwich or something equally light–this is, I think, related to my childhood. Dad worked 2nd shift and ate dinner before he left; I got home from school an hour or two after he’d gone, so Mom and I always ate then, as the food just needed a little warmup. My grade-school classmates thought this was bizarre, but it seemed reasonable and practical to me. I have never understood how people can sleep on a full stomach!
–Sister Crow
@ Mawkernewek #232
No, sadly all we had time for was the Eden Project. It didn’t disappoint either!
I’m a big fan of public gardens and have visited many. If you’ve seen one garden, you’ve seen one garden because they are all so different.
What worked for me at the Eden Project (ignoring the silly paean to Gaia our guide gave us) was the infrastructure of the domes and the impressive HVAC system. It gets hot! I can see how air flow would be a constant problem and of course, everything has to be hand-watered with the sprinkler system. No rain. Our guide told us that sometimes IIRC they have to “make it rain” with hoses to wash off insects and such.
The domes did *not* feel like a greenhouse, even a gigantic one like Longwood Gardens has. The roof isn’t nearly as high as the domes were.
Why was this so great? Because I write (as Odessa Moon) a science fiction romance series called “The Steppes of Mars.” One of my books, “The White Elephant of Panschin,” is set in the domed city of Panschin, far, far to the north. The work in progress, “The Bitch Queen of Atto” takes place in Panschin again and I wanted to spend time under domes and look at HVAC and temperature controls.
Short of visiting Biosphere 2 in Arizona, the Eden Project was as close as I’ll get to Panschin.
The place is huge and would require multiple visits to see everything. It’s doubtful, however, if I’ll be back because if we return to England, we’ve got other gardens higher on the priority list like Kew or Sissinghurst.
@234 Wolves in blue states…
Here in blue Minnesota we have more wolves than any state except Alaska. There’s a pack that holes up in the woods surrounding my property when they come through the area a couple times a year.
My guess is wolf location has a lot more to do with appropriate habitat than who the residents vote for.
Hi JMG
Lively discussion as usual. Unfortunately, from your request, it sounds like the national chaos is getting on everyone’s last nerve. Stressful times to say the least.
Awesome job keeping the cats in this herd amicable and inline.
On your response to my previous question, sweeping everything out with a new broom makes sense, but what do you do about carpeted rooms? Also, is there a particular recipe of Florida water I should look for…something like an active ingredient? Figured you could use some easy questions. 😉
@everyone
I can’t believe I’m saying this but thank God (or all of the gods) for SecDef Austin. I’m not a fan but he may be the only reason we aren’t glowing. The neocons have enough blood on their hands for 1000 lifetimes. I’m glad that’s not my karma.
Hi John Michael,
Yeah, the whole thing is just weird.
Thought you might be interested in the latest gushing article on new ways to generate electricity: University of New South Wales researchers make renewable energy breakthrough with radiant infrared heat sources .
The dead giveaway for me was this line in the article: it was expected the technology would always collect about a 10th to a 100th of the power of solar. – As a note, the thought of installing 10 times (at best) the number of solar panels which are already here, gives me an attack of the vapours. There’d be no space for anything else.
Sounds a lot like the thermoelectric generator devices you wrote about years and years ago. I tried one too, but accidentally melted the thing. Elementary, my dear Watson, it all comes down to energy density, however, improved energy literacy might help (although these sorts of articles are provided for comforting purposes, don’t you reckon?)
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
Sorry, forgot to mention, beware the Wlmnath! Your dream was very prescient.
Cheers
Chris
@235 THE Pink Floyd
Yes, The Final Cut. I’m probably in the minority but I about wore that cassette out when it was first released. Haven’t listened to it in ages…time to take another listen to see how it has aged. Might as well put Piper on the turntable while I’m at it. Roger Waters is a lyrical genius even if he’s a less than stellar human being… “got a grand piano to prop up my mortal remains” What a visual of Syd Barrett!
Patricia Mathews, #205, yay!, what you said about taboos, hunting in season, with permits, not having to witness waterfowl slaughtered in the park at a family picnic. All that. In short, learning and adapting to and adopting the new local and national culture.
Exasperating isn’t it? I lived exasperation, every time I went out the door I leapt the chasm between the old ways at home and the new outside. Some people call peasant cultures ‘conservative’. Yeah, that and rock-headed too.
When some lily-white denizen of a wealthy community lauds multi-culturalism, I laugh. They consider themselves cosmopolitan. I laugh harder.
What applies to the scientific community, you know, change happening one funeral at a time, applies here also. Meanwhile, you’d be further ahead cursing the tides.
This might earn me a lifetime ban from ecosophia, but this is called ‘Ask me anything’ so I am willing to take the chance.
Some guys over at clearerthinking.org wanted to determine, I have to assume in good faith, whether there is something to astrology [bear with me]. They devised some sort of test, apparently with the collaboration of several serious astrologers, to find out.
The test itself and the results they had with many astrologers of different skill levels taking it, are available at:
https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/does-astrology-work
I am curious to know your thoughts about this experiment. Does the test make sense? Why?
Hi JMG,
Have you ever read any of Gore Vidal books or essays? I consider him the towering intellectual of recent times (mostly from his essays). Many things I first read from him seem undeniable now (marketing runs the world, The US is over, unpleasant & not often acknowledged ideas about what many people are really like, military industrial complex, etc,). He’s the only writer who could make me feel very sad and laugh out loud simultaneously, which still seems very difficult to do as I write that sentence. If, yes, your thoughts are appreciated.
Scotlyn, you’re most welcome and thank you!
Jon, good heavens. Now there’s a blast from the past.
Anonymous, the most important thing about editing is not to overdo it. Your book will never be perfect; good enough is good enough. Make sure that it’s clear, connected, and cogent, and then send it in. As for lighting up the night, good heavens. I think you’ve identified something very important.
Chuaquin, I prefer to get my vitamins in food, and I haven’t read the Robinson novel.
Atmospheric, I know. The attitude of the privileged classes is that nature is supposed to do what they tell it and stay where it’s put, and they get really quite flustered when it doesn’t.
林龜儒, that’s an unfalsifiable hypothesis, you know…
Ethan, it’s a long time since I pursued the subject. Anyone else?
Team10tim, I don’t. I’m still watching things and seeing how they take shape.
JD, fascinating. It may well be a function of location; if more than 50% of the population were to die in any given area, there would be drastic issues with everyday life. I recommend doing the DMH and the Dolmen Arch separately, as each one has plenty of work to do. As for your encounter, I’d wonder if the local native tribes know of anything like that.
Patricia M, thanks for the update — I’m glad to hear that you’re fine.
Clay, this is one of the reasons why wonder if there’s some kind of cognitive collapse going on. It’s so obviously self-defeating.
DFC, it’s always possible to come up with a train of events leading to Armageddon. My prediction remains the same.
Hawk, I think it’s worth trying, but — wow. What a weird but entirely plausible sequence of responses.
Kim, an ice age could certainly do it. Please note, though, that I’m only talking about urban civilizations — there have been, and will be, some very rich tribal cultures right through the city-less period.
Mary, granted.
Temporary, positive energy en route.
DropBear, the Wlmnath are entities from a dream I had earlier this month, which I discussed in a Dreamwidth comment:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/296814.html?thread=51138414#cmt51138414
BobinOK, every brand of Florida water I’ve used — and I’ve used quite a few — was about equally good, so use whatever’s convenient. As for carpeted rooms, vacuum those and empty the bag outside.
Chris, what an embarrassingly lame article. Pure progressivist fairy tales!
Jean-Baptiste, no, you won’t get banned, but I’m also not interested. The Unamazing Randi, who admitted that he “always had a way out,” cured me for life of any interest in participating in this kind of pseudoskeptic ambush.
JR, I have indeed, and I consider him one of the supreme essayists of his day.
JD #241
RE: Shadow persons. I’m affiliated with a local ghost tour company, and we know a location which has experienced shadow people. They are not well understood, but generally they seem to observe, but not interact with us. That seems to correspond with your experience.
Hey JMG
Your discussion of salvage and civilisational cycles reminds me of something I have been puzzling over for a while since I read you short story “The next 10 billion years”, but never really discussed with you, which is why exactly is it that you think the amount of metal we have mined can’t be used indefinitely.
The best idea I could think of that would make your statement plausible is the accumulative loss of concentrated metal via the very gradual process of rust and filling/grinding in manufacturing. which would over time convert more and more metal into diffuse trace elements in soil, along with shipwrecks losing metal cargo to the sea. But even then, it seems hard to believe that humanity won’t have some access to concentrated metal indefinitely, considering that we have already mined enough metal that meets or exceeds the needs of 7 billion people, and it is likely that the world population is going to remain at around 1 billion or less for the rest of human history. True, energy constraints will limit how much we can use, and how much we can recycle, but we should still be able to have indefinite access to it.
And even in the case of trace metals, what would stop an Ecotechnic civilisation from “Farming” Bog iron, or maybe using Phytomining, which current experiments are already using to extract promising amounts of Nickel from the soil?
Regarding Wlmnaths, I must have missed that discussion, but whoever commented at https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/296814.html?thread=51146350#cmt51146350 – their dream about houses that aren’t houses sounds a lot like the AI takeover of online irreality. (Note: if you want to discuss that dream in the context of AI, I have a post on my dreamwidth where AI discussion is allowed.) – Sorry JMG for mentioning the unmentionable.
Smith, Patricia M, et al
I have read that the whole story of Haitians in Ohio catching and eating people’s pets was fabricated by Vance as election propaganda and was not true at all: even that he admitted it later and was quite unappolagetic about it. Then again one reads so many things from so many perspectives, all claiming to be true
Stephen
Hello JMG and everyone,
Firstly, re chickens, mine are in Fort Knox, one bad experience with a fox (in suburbia, but a creek runs through the area) was enough 😞.
I also have quails in a coop, but I’ve decided they will be my last and when they are all gone to the Quail’s God, I am going to convert it into a small greenhouse.
A small request JMG, are you able to put the number as well as the name, to your replies? Or maybe the number range, eg 50-60?
I always find that I have to go back to the commenter to remind myself of what was said, and a number is quicker to navigate.
Also to all those in the US, how come you say, a couple ‘whatever’ and not a couple of ‘whatever’? Poor of… 😄
Why does Fall get a nickname that replaces Autumn, but the other 3 seasons don’t?
And why don’t your dates don’t go in correct numerical order? IE day month year?
I’m reminded of Obelix tapping his head. Fans of Asterix will know what I mean. Anyway, this is all just an affectionate dig, everywhere has their idiosyncracies 😊
I recently finished The dark side of Camelot, a book JMG mentioned a while back.
Well, I think if you are from the US it should be required reading., (I’m not obviously, see previous paragraph) .
It’s definitely an eyebrow raiser and put to bed my rosy portrait of the man and his brother and I suppose the whole family.
I knew Joe was a rogue and about JFK’S infidelity, but I didn’t realise just how power obsessed they all were.
He was a charmer, but I don’t think he had a clue about the life of the common man.
Bobby was one angry dude!
I also didn’t realise how obsessed with Castro JFK was and the recklessness that came from this obsession.
It’s quite similar to today’s Putin obsession and it’s consequences, as well as the Iran and China obsession of certain sections of the Establishment.
I am very much enjoying the Wagner series, I’ve gone a bit overboard with second hand book, DVD and CD purchases 😬, and I’m finding the man to be quite fascinating. I look forward to reading more about his life, I acquired one book that contains his letters which should be interesting.
As far as a good translation, I’m liking Andrew Porter’s.
There are cheap second hand copies available, it’s good because both languages are printed side by side.
I also have the ones with the Rackham illustrations because I’m a huge fan of his art.
This translation is a bit clunky, but still ok.
A while ago, when JMG was talking about Schopenhauer, (has anyone figured out yet, that this blog influences many of my book purchases?) I decided that the whole tome was a bit much, so I bought The Essential Schopenhauer, edited by Wolfgang Schumacher.
I’ve read the first chapter and although he may have been a curmudgeon, even at a young age – he actually wrote the first edition in his 30’s I believe? He seems to have had a good sense of humour.
Here’s a couple of examples;
He talks about Utopia, where if pigeons were to fly about ‘ready -roasted ‘ and everyone found his sweetheart, then you would either die of boredom or hang yourself, or fight and kill one another! 😂
Then a few pages later he’s talking about someone who kept a dog chained up.
I won’t say what happens but it ends with, “May this happen to all who chain up dogs”.
Maybe it’s just me, but I was in hysterics 😁
I was reminded of the comedian Bill Burr, I think he’s got a bit of Schopenhauer in him 😉
JMG, you’re pretty good with the humourous replies too I must say, many times I’ve chuckled at your answers.
With regards to the upcoming election, I think both candidates are a poor choice. KH, no need to say anything, Trump seems to be getting more unhinged. It seems like the security state are beginning to whisper lots of scary stuff in his ear, especially about Iran and he’s apparently believing it.
Plus he still seems to love Pompeo and repeatedly bends over backwards for the Adelson 💰.
From a Karmic perspective, I think voting for any of these warmongers is “Not good”.
But, that’s just my opinion.
I would just write in ‘Peace’ , or ‘No more wars ‘ or something.
As far as the basic trajectory of where things are headed, Gordon White’s regular astrological discussions with Austin Coppock, over the last few years have been pretty accurate in my opinion. I think I may relisten to a few.
Regarding Nuclear bombs, it is concerning, but to be honest I think the ongoing danger of accidents in power plants is more of a worry. Not to mention the risks of decommissioning and trying to do it on the cheap. Just look at all the abandoned mines that were meant to be rehabilitated as part of the contract.
Anyway, on that happy note, I better get back to the stuff that needs doing .
Regards,
Helen in Oz
Hi there. I read somewhere in one of your previous pieces of writing that all magical action is subject to an equal and opposite force, and that a skillful magician is one that knows how to direct the opposing force in such a way that it doesn’t impact something significant in the working. Could you give an example of what this would look like in practice? Maybe a money/abundance spell example since that was the scenario you listed in the original writing I believe. Thanks for your work!
What are some good texts on discursive meditation?
Jean Baptiste, I actually did the survey when he was soliciting responses. I have only a very limited knowledge of astrology, but basically, the way it is structured is not useful for testing anything about traditional astrology at all.
The questions are largely about personality. Personality based natal astrology is a fairly modern perspective on astrology, most works written before WW2 talk about predicting events with astrology instead.
J.L.Mc12, not so. Every time a certain quantity of metal gets reshaped for any purpose, a little is lost. Every time you sharpen a knife, for example, you lose a little metal. Over a lifetime, that’s hardly noticeable, but if you’ve ever seen knives that have been kept sharp in the same family for a few generations, it’s obvious. Fast forward that for a billion years, especially with all the ways that metal in larger quantities can be lost forever factored in, and you run out long before you get to the corbicules. Will there be a little bog iron here and there? Sure, unless some new form of chemosynthetic bacteria replace the ones that make it — a hundred million years from now, that could well have happened — but it will likely be much more useful to come up with a renewable substitute, like the ceramic-bioplastic composites I imagined in the essay.
Helen, I’m glad you read The Dark Side of Camelot. It really ought to be required reading here.
Evergreen, money spells are a great example, because they blow up catastrophically more often than any other kind of magic except love spells. What usually happens is that some poor fool casts a spell to get money he hasn’t earned. He may or may not get it, but the blowback comes in the form of a sudden financial setback where he loses a bunch of money or valuables — the car gets totaled, a burglar strips the place, the job goes away, or what have you. That’s why successful money magic focuses on getting opportunities to earn money. That way you’re taking the hit preemptively — you’re investing your time and labor — and so you get the money without other blowback.
Anonymous, the last one I know of was published in the 17th century — Bishop Joseph Hall’s The Art of Divine Meditation. I probably need to get off my rump and write one.
Another blow for “green” energy “Scotland’s power sector came under criticism after it was revealed that diesel generators were being used to ensure dozens of wind turbines could function. “According to the Sunday Mail, they were tipped off by a whistleblower… [that] half a dozen diesel generators [were] running for up to six hours a day to de-ice the wind turbines.” From https://x.com/wideawake_media/status/1839991173328318820
Yet politician still pretend that “green” energy will save us!
>University of New South Wales researchers make renewable energy breakthrough with radiant infrared heat sources .
Semiconductor that generates electricity from heat? That sounds like a Peltier Junction. That tech has been around for ages. The problem with it, is it’s not very economical. It has its uses, you can generate electricity in places you otherwise couldn’t and in those cases, the extra expense is justified.
You can also inefficiently run those Peltier Junctions the other way to make a refrigerator of sorts. They don’t work very well and they draw a lot of power. But in certain cases where something is better than nothing, you can justify the cost.
If they have made it more efficient, props to them but if you read that article closely, they’re talking about powering satellites with it, not using it to generate bulk electricity. Makes me think they found a way to refine the Peltier Junction a bit. Meh.
>I think both candidates are a poor choice
If all your choices are poor, do you still live in a democracy?
re: nukes
For the most part, they sit in their silos and don’t do anything. *coof* Now what have we seen recently that has caused a major impact on people’s lives? *coof* *jab* *thud*
Methinks people have been paying attention to the wrong technologies. In any case, I refer you back to Monty Python being so worried.
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=8jDLuU74F2o
All – I ran across Bill Watterson’s new book (his first in decades, since Calvin & Hobbes), called “The Mysteries”, in a local library. As one might expect, the artwork is excellent. The theme is relevant to the overall topic(s) of this blog, too.
There’s one particular illustration that I really, really, like. Do you suppose there’s any way to get a poster of it?
I wasn’t sure about the idea of two pseudomorphoses per great culture, but thinking about it, it pretty closely parallels the way that individual human beings develop. We first take on an identity from our parents and immediate family. Around the time of adolescence, we go through a process of rejecting our family’s identity and finding a peer-group with which to identify. In modern times this takes the form of teenage culture and so might seem to be an artefact of modernity, but I think that it’s a universal process– this is why many societies send young men in particular away from their home or village at this time, either to foster, or to apprentice, or to run wild as a pack of wolves, or whathaveyou.
In the same way, a great culture might first take on the identity of its parent culture, and then “rebel against its parents” by “fostering” with another mature culture, and only, during the years which might be the great cultural parallel to the individual’s Saturn Square and Return, take on its own identity.
I wonder if the time scale can be tracked astrologically. Is there a usual length of time for each of the pseudomorphoses?
JMG and the Commentariat Generally,
May I ask a practical question?
I need to create some diagrams in order to illustrate things like internal energy work and drawing pentagrams, as one often finds in books of magic (such as your own). But I actually have no idea how to do that with a computer program. Is there any kind of (preferably cheap) software or an internet program anyone can recommend for this kind of thing?
The eating pets meme is very interesting. The democrats think that if they debunk the origins of it ” snopes” style it will go away and they are incensed when it does not. What they are missing is that a meme like this lives on for several good reasons. First of all, it is believable and makes sense to them. We just spent a year hearing the media tell us the leader of the recent Hatian uprisings name was “BBQ”. If someone had claimed that a recent wave of Japanese immigrants to a small town were eating pets it would not get much traction.
Secondly, the bigger message that was unveiled with this meme was that a small town in the heartland had been overwhelmed by a group of refugees that made up a third of the towns population. No matter how you spin this it smacks of official government malfeasance.
The democrats don’t seem to realize that all the memes or conspiracies they hate get traction because they are believable. For instance it drives hardcore dems, I know, crazy when I chide them about Hillary’s suicide epidemic among her inconvenient associates. But that is because her persona and history makes this believable. If someone had suggested that Julie Andrews or Jim Nabors had climbed to fame in Hollywood by offing their enemies it would not get much traction.
If you want to avoid people spreading untrue ( when that is the case) memes about you, the best defense is live an upright life and like the old Google slogan says, ” Don’t do Evil .”
To All:
I really hope that the world isn’t in a literal repeat of 1914. I understand the US and Western Europe have done everything to make it impossible to fight a large war against a peer military power, and if the news about the US Department of Defense vetoing the use of deep strikes i Russia using western weapons is true, at least someone in a position of power understands. Still, given the overall incompetence, delusions, and wishful thinking of Western elites and power centers, there is plenty of room for mistakes, miscalculations, and disaster. After all, i would bet nobody in the Imperial German or Russian governments in 1914 would have thought the end result would be the end of their regimes.
As a possibly hopeful thought, the present elites have also done their best to eliminate the support of the people who would do the fighting, supporting and supplying the war effort, and making the sacrifices needed. However, the elites appear to be so out of touch, they probably cant see that either!
On a happier note, Mr. Greer; please follow up on The Hall of Homeless Gods. I love the book.
Cugel
@ Chuaquin– I have personally found a range of supplements immensely useful, and others not very useful at all. It seems to depend on the brand, the quality of the ingredients, what specific condition you’re trying to treat, and your own individual physiology. To give one example, I’ve found taking magnesium glycinate daily eliminated the “restless leg” issue I’d had every night before falling asleep. Other forms of magnesium taken internally did not seem to help at all, and magnesium sprays just made my skin itch. I’ve taken other supplements which didn’t do much of anything that I could tell, and still others that have helped me manage a serious chronic health condition (I’d rather not go into details).
More generally: We seem to be going through the same process with medicine that we’ve been going through with news. When I was a kid in the 1990s, CNN and later Fox and MSNBC were “The News.” Later, the internet allowed alternative voices to have a presence. Now we’ve reached a point where independent journalists like Glenn Greenwald or Tucker Carlson reach 10-100 times as many people as the “mainstream” sources. They did not do this by changing the corporate structure, but by being cast out of it and leaving it behind as irrelevant.
In the same way, many medical professionals, especially in the fields of functional and integrative medicine, chiropractic, and various Eastern modalities, have developed a model where they put out enormous amounts of information for free on venues like YouTube. They then support their practice by selling supplements, consultations, cookbooks and so on. Corporate Medicine will never change and so it is being left behind as irrelevant, just like Corporate News. But that means that, just as you have to do the legwork to find sources of news and political commentary you can trust, we all now have to spend some time listening to various sources of health and wellness information and testing out different approaches with ourselves as guinea pigs.
@Chuaquin, #231. I read New York 2140 and liked it. Robinson is a talented writer and the story is interesting. It moves along pretty well.
That said, I know New York very well. I grew up in the city and worked there for many years, so there is a significant additional appeal for me. I’m familiar with all the places and many of the stories in the book. The problems for me are that it is fairly woke, and addresses more than a few tired ecological/dystopian future themes, so if that will bother you, perhaps it isn’t worth reading. I also did not find it particularly believable.
Conclusion, if you like NYC or that has appeal to you, read it. If not, and your reading time is limited, there are probably other choices. “Station 11” is better, “After Dachau” is great and “Ishmael” is a classic that everyone should have read. “Radio Free Vermont” is fast and fun, with some similar ideas, obviously very much mot set in New York.
Hello JMG,
Regarding your reply at#274 to J L Mc12, would not 100+ million years of plate tectonic processes bring to near the surface from presently inaccessible depths, concentrated metal deposits? In that time some more fossil fuels would be made too, so the Corvids or whoever would be able to build another industrial civilization!
On a more immediate note, blogger Tuomas Malinen alleges there is circumstantial evidence NATO used a small nuclear weapon a few days ago to destroy the Russian ammunition store at Toropets, but it is not in the current interests of either side at this stage to admit this is what happened. Do you give this any credence? My own opinion is that he is, as you like to say over there, smoking his shorts.
I really liked The Final Cut! Definitely no mindless optimism there. And Amen to the wishes in “The Gunners Dream”
Cugel
Re: Civilizational cycles and technologies not based on fire
Dear JMG, if you find some time to write that book on occult lore about cilizational cycles, please do so!
Pondering this topic, together with BeardTree’s comment #208, I had the following idea. If I understand correctly, each of the seven cycles is supposed to be ruled by one of the classical planets. In terms of order, the historical sequence of the latter corresponds to the classical ordering of the planets (i. e., by period of revolution, geocentrically seen). Now, planets can be linked with the four elements; for sake of simplicity, let’s assign to each planet the elements of the sign(s) it rules in the modern sense. Thus, we get the following table:
Cycle of civ’s planet element(s)
Polarian Moon water
Hyperborean Mercury air / earth
Lemurian Venus air / earth
Atlantean Sun fire
Eurasian Mars fire
Sixth Jupiter fire
Seventh Saturn earth
What if this tells us something about which element or elements each civilization uses in its central technologies? Then we would be in the middle of a long fire period. To push this a little further, our ‘martial’ technologies would be the most aggressive of them all, while the ‘jovial’ technologies of the coming cycle would be more spark-like, albeit prone to exaggeration …
“Ethan L. says:
September 27, 2024 at 12:39 pm
I have something I’d like to ask the advice of Mr. Greer, and the rest of the commentariat, on.
I’m currently enrolled in a university class dealing with energy, and my current assignment is to write an analysis of the costs and benefits of nuclear power. I already have a few good sources in mind, partially ones the teacher showed us and partially others on the internet, but most of these are likely to be biased in favor of nuclear, perhaps overestimating the necessity of investing in it to ensure a future energy source and generally being written by the faithful of the religion of progress?
So, does anyone have some (preferably online) sources they’d recommend for learning more about nuclear’s costs, benefits, and future necessity (or lack thereof)?”
***
Probably on paper only I regret, but a landmark publication for me was the 1976 report on Nuclear Power from the UK’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. It recommended no committment to a major nuclear power programme until the waste disposal problem had been resolved beyond reasonable doubt. It seems that it still hasn’t been resolved. Only Finland has a final plan for how to dispose of its high-level nuclear waste permanently, underground, in a way which ends the human obligation to look after it for 100s or 1,000s of years into the future. 30 or so other countries haven’t announced any definite plans and are keeping the stuff on the surface.
But due to arguments between rival reactor types, incompetence and high/rising costs, I think only two nuclear power plants have begun in the UK since the Flowers report 48 yrs ago. One, Sizewell B, was finished some years ago. A second plant, Hinkley C is now not expected to be working until the 2030s. I don’t think the Flowers report alone had a decisive effect. Probably the other problems were also relevant.
The Chair of the RCEP was the physicist Sir Brian Flowers, later Lord Flowers. He was also on the Board of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. He died in 2010. As far as I recall he got glowing obituaries – pardon the unintended pun – from all sides for his professionalism and honesty.
When I read in the Gainesville Sun that Trump has said he will not run in 2028 not matter what happens, I found myself wondering what was next. And thinking about the men and women who presided over post-crisis recoveries and provided a few decades of stability. Augustus. Vespasian . The Four Good Emperors ending in Marcus Aurelius. Elizabeth Tudor. Elizabeth Windsor. D.D.Eisenhower. Those are the ones who make or break their era after the dust settles.
More later: current Round 2 of post-hurricane (and hurricane-scare earlier) laundry is probably ready to by put in the dryer.
#229 Lazy Gardener
Curd soap is essentially basic soap, made from plant oils and free from artificial fragrances, colors and additives.
The brand that I use contains Sodium Olivate, Sodium Cocoate, Sodium Stearate, Aqua, Glycerin, Sodium Chloride, Tetrasodium and Glutamate Dictate.
I use it as a bar, wet a corner and apply the soap on the toothbrush. Then the bar goes in an open container to dry out until the next use.
Choose a brand without flavor.
JMG – I was somewhat surprised at your comment to Forecasting, “…but keep a close eye on the Sahel. If the three countries that have chucked out their European neocolonial overlords there become the nucleus of a new West African great power, which seems entirely possible to me, it’s by no means impossible that Europe may find itself faced with an ultimatum offering two choices: massive reparations for 500 years of colonialism, or war. It’s not a war Europe would win.”
Is this “entirely possible” thought based on extrapolating larger scale socio-political tides over large spans of time? Or on specifics from on the ground there? Timbuktu was a ancient center of learning, wealth and trade but the desert has/is swallowing it and the camel caravan routes across the desert are now crossed with trucks laden with refugees fleeing the ecological and social chaos. I agree that a great power seems certain to rise in West Africa eventually but I would put my money on Nigeria being the core, not the empty deserts to the north.
The ice age cycles again.
A good summary,
https://coherence.com.au/curlew/2018/03/milankovitch-cycle-a-timetable-for-ice-ages/
“7) A model of future climate based on the observed orbital-climate relationships, but ignoring anthropogenic effects, predicts that the long-term trend over the next [seven] thousand years is toward extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.”
The detailed version,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
A good book on the topic for the general audience is The Long Thaw by David Archer. Check the library for that one. Have we put enough CO2 into the atmosphere to hold off the glaciers? Good question.
As to wolves in blue states Washington is having continuing squabbles about that. Seattle projects its virtue and the East Side pays the price. Seattle wants the troublesome wolves trapped and relocated to places where there are already wolves which won’t work with territorial animals. The obvious solution of relocating the wolves to Seattle always seems to be rejected. 😉
Right wingers on twitter are calling you a leftist:
https://xcancel.com/SaysSimulation/status/1840068312404791593#m
@J.L.Mc12 In addition to losses from wear, corrosion and the like, many metals are used very dispersively in cosmetics, paints and pigments, agricultural chemicals and the like, and others are used in tiny quantities in billions of electronic devices and in complex combinations in alloys from which recovery will be expensive and energy intensive. Such issues are among of the drivers of the low tech movement.
@ Happy Panda #153 –
I’m interested in volunteering as a B-tester guinea pig for your tarot oracle multiple-lives reading. I’ve been to your Dreamwidth blog that you linked but can’t figure out where to sign up. Can you point me to the link or otherwise direct me to right place? Thanks!
Kevin
P.S. – I notice you’ve referenced Sadhguru quite a bit. For what it’s worth, from his videos I have impression that he’s the real deal, a guru I’d actually like to meet. K.
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Rebecca’s new job position scheduled to start on October 1 indeed be hers, and fill her and her family’s needs; may the situation (including coworkers and dodgy commute) be pleasant and free of strife.
May the lump in the breast of newlywed Merlin, TemporaryReality’s youngest daughter, prove to be of no consequence, and resolve rapidly with no issues.
May Tyler’s partner Monika and newborn baby Isabella both be blessed with good health.
May Erika be blessed with good luck and radiant health.
May Mariette (Miow)’s recent surgery have been a success. May she make a full recovery and regain full use of her body. May she heal in body, soul and mind.
May The Dilettante Polymath’s eye heal and vision return quickly and permanantly, and may both his retinas stay attached.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery to treat it.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.
May Kyle’s friend Amanda, who though in her early thirties is undergoing various difficult treatments for brain cancer, make a full recovery; and may her body and spirit heal with grace.
Lp9’s hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
On the breakfast theme…
My own experience is that I can delay but probably not skip breakfast (I’d end up overeating all the wrong kind of food more often than not, when I try). To keep glucose levels low, you may want to avoid high carb food at morning; a dish of egg, onions and mushrooms is my default choice, when I have time to cook it. Skipping dinner, with a late lunch around 3pm is what works best for me.
@Anonymous, #230. Not an expert of insider, but the figure in question C sounds a gross overestimation. Maybe it is meant as “40% of the electricity *consumed* at night-time”, instead?
What this hypothesis’ based on is commercial/industrial energy rates in Mexico. Over here domestic electricity uses a flat rate, but business pay different rates at different times of the day in order to incentivize a more homogeneous consumption pattern. It is more capital effective to not have large differences between daily low/high watermarks, which results from the pesky habit of hominids to live with the sun and sleep when it’s dark. As a single data point to illustrate the issue: at my wife’s job they have a morning shift (6am) and a night shift (10pm) but they stop operations between 3pm and 10pm in order to avoid the high costs of electricity. And,- I have just confirmed with her,- the nighttime rate is actually cheaper. This would be simply impossible if almost half of all electricity generation went to street lighting, but makes sense for the government* and companies to make people stay awake and work, in order to more than double energy demand at those late hours.
* In retrospective, that might not make sense to some readers… I say “government” because most public utilities are indeed public in Mexico. I sometimes forget that’s not the case everywhere else.
@ Teresa Peschel #16 –
Long live the mighty Tartarian Empire! What wonderful material for Steampunk/Solar Punk/Windmill Punk fantasy.
I haven’t seen the Eden Project, but I have seen photos. It looks spectacular. I’m into geodesics, so I love it.
Kevin
Falling Tree Woman, thanks so much for the update. I’m glad things seem to be looking up. Please feel free to adjust the prayer if you learn more about her progress.
Do you have any advice, besides doing the work contained in the Order of Spiritual Alchemy, for healing from having had the misfortune to have had emotionally abusive parents? I am about to finally be able to get enough space from them that I think I’ll be able to start healing in about a month, but they have left me with a great deal of emotional baggage I will need to deal with in order to be able to do anything more than drift through an empty, pointless life.
@JMG, something I’ve been avoiding saying so far because I was trying to ascertain it myself but I think you are atleast partially wrong on the russia issue and that Putin might fall before Russia wins anything on the eastern front.
Recent murmurings of CIA regime change ops targeting russian elites, lot of internal inflation in Russia, the ruble is struggling again etc.
I would say Russia is the weakest out of the 3 major regimes, followed by US/china which both have big issues. Iran also looks very weak. If anything, one could expect all of them to fall in some way in the next 2-5 years…..
Ethan Re: Nuclear Power stats
There’s a great online source for this. I think it’s maybe presented as a kind of on-line class about energy from a professor at San Diego State University.
Search on : Do The Math
“running up deficits on this scale is a recipe for inevitable disaster in the near future”
I asked my mom, a diehard blue voter, about this. According to her, the fact that the US is borrowing a trillion dollars every 100 days is all Trump’s fault, due to his tax cuts.
I can absolutely buy that the tax cuts are contributing to the situation, but I don’t care for this continued pretense that the Biden administration’s hands are clean. “Don’t blame us for the past four years” is an infuriating campaign motto.
(Also, supposedly the situation with all the immigrants in Springfield and Aurora and so on are also Trump’s fault, because he called up Republican lawmakers and told them not to vote for the border bill this past spring. But seeing as how millions of immigrants were pouring in around this time last year, well before the border bill came up in Congress, I feel comfortable blaming the current White House occupants.)
Regarding Kier Starmer, some readers may already be aware that rumours are swirling in the murkier corners of the internet, youtube channels and comment sections of online newspapers that there is another scandal surrounding him that is not mainly financial in nature. I won’t mention here some of the suggestions as they are unsubstantiated and may be without foundation, but keen observers of UK politics might want to check their stocks of popcorn! While it might come to nothing, if some of the claims are true, he might just claim second place behind Liz Truss in relation to a certain record.
My meditation verse of the day, “Then will I go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy”
Psalm 43:4
Smith, “When some lily-white denizen of a wealthy community lauds multi-culturalism, I laugh. They consider themselves cosmopolitan. I laugh harder.”
Multiculturalism is a seductive and destructive ideology. Seductive because it allows adherents to believe themselves part of history’s elite. As if their neighbors were Shakespear and Einstein instead of the guy with the massive boat and huge American flag on one side and the dotty cat grandma with her messy herb garden on the other. It was introduced to a gullible segment of the public, recent grads, future PMC, in the 1970 to gain their support for high immigration. So, now we have a glut of rich kid from overseas commentators on the lefty websites. Smart folks, some of them, but never had to scrounge to pay the rent or carry a bag of groceries home in the rain.
Hey JMG
Well, firstly I am happy that I correctly figured out why you believe metal will be rare in the distant future by my own efforts.
Secondly, I agree with your prediction in general. However, I have hope that by Phytomining (here’s a link that talks about it https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2019/07/australian-plants-extracting-high-value-metals-mining-wastes) and the artificial cultivation of Chemosynthetic bacteria some metal use will continue indefinitely.
Thirdly, I am curious about your belief that Bioplastic-ceramic composites could be a substitute for metal. I am personally unsure how one could make such substances in a primitive setting, then develop from there to something more advanced. I also don’t understand clearly how you would mix ceramics and bioplastic together, or how favorably such stuff would compare with metal. Another idea for a metal substitute could be the chemically altered wood that some researchers have made, which has strength and hardness similar to metal. (https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/knock-on-super-wood)
Hi John Michael,
Yesterday I was alerted to the ongoing ‘chicken’ discussion of this week. Did you have chickens when you were at the west coast err, hippy farm (not sure what you’d call the place?)
Thought I’d chuck my twenty cents in on this subject. Chickens are messy eaters and, well, it’s been remarked upon elsewhere that rats and mice are opportunists. Chickens and rodents go together. In my corner of the planet, rodents attract the third deadliest snake on the planet. Not something you want to encounter whilst enjoying a few quiet moments in the garden – always a startling experience. Best then to make certain that rats and mice cannot access the chicken enclosure and have no reasons to hang around the farm (in numbers) – few people achieve this hallowed state. Here, steel and concrete are your friends., not to mention months of observation and testing of fortifications with the dogs. In the end the dog and I put an end to 24 rats – they sure can eat a lot of feed. Such a structure needn’t look unattractive though, and in about 10 hours from now (set for release at 7pm my time), the latest short video will finish at the chicken enclosure. Looks like a little temple surrounded by pear trees which are now all in flower. Our off grid home Oldest part of the Garden.
I’m pretty certain the above paragraph will get replies along the lines of: I’ve got this amazing feeder system, which blah, blah, blah Sure, but you’ve also got rats and mice, you just haven’t noticed. At the very least, the rodents will eat the chicken poop – remember opportunists.
Also, chicken is obviously super tasty. As a mostly vegetarian, I can well appreciate the deliciousness of the meat, but I note above other people have put it more politely than I – Everything wants to eat chicken. It’d be a nervous experience don’t you reckon? Still, everything gets eaten, just once. 🙂 There’s a reason the old timers suggest that foxes have rat cunning – as do the rodents. Hmm.
If you may indulge me in one further observation as to chickens – the protein needs of the commercial breeds, revolt me. There is no way such a diet is sustainable, and I’ve seen such breeds eat eggs and err, other less formidable chickens. Oh yeah, that was a fun day I can tell you. And their life spans are very short. A very sharp and heavy knife put a rapid end to all of that mischief, and an even sharper sense as to what breeds (hint: older heritage breeds) work on a small holding avoided such dramas in the future, but people can do what they want to do, and will continue to do so whatever my words are.
Thanks for providing this forum, and um, I should mention that one of the chickens is fourteen years old, and she’s very much a battle axe of the Carrie A. Nation school of bad attitudes. 🙂
Cheers
Chris
JMG and All,
I liked it very much since I used to be hooked by Wlmnath easily.
It so happens that I know someone who can deliver a letter to the future president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo; and the current president of the senate, Gerardo Fernandez Noroña is accessible and lives in a town close to mine. So I can ask for their explicit permission to bless them using magically charged space and receive a reply with confirmation. These two politicians currently represent many of my political ideas and views, and I would like for them to continue being clear, bright, and tempered as they have been lately in the face of the tantrums their opposition is so vividly displaying.
What would be some considerations to have? I would like for the divine and their higher self to guide them, not my stances, nor do I want to become biased towards them as I prefer to see them in a chiaroscuro, instead of becoming a fan or getting too involved with politics on the ground that clouds my judgment. Any ideas?
Stephen Pearson #269, what a world it is. I could believe that the whole thing was a fabrication and I could equally believe that it actually happened, as I explained in my earlier post.
If it was a fabrication, well, Vance didn’t seem the type, but then again I only know him through media. And a good conman by definition has your confidence.
Ok but when you look at the whole panoply of lies and damned lies, I think the Democrats have it over the Republicans by a wide margin what with that audacious and utterly laughable (I was rolling on the floor) Russia collusion baloney (a tip of the hat to whoever came up with that one).
And a salute for the rock-face solidarity of the Democrats and their Deep State allies in backing the veracity of the accusations. You remember, indictments are imminent? And how many said that they saw the evidence?
Evidence? What evidence? There was none. Not a stitch. Mueller and his intrepid gang came up goose-eggs. The same goes with claiming that Hunter’s laptop was a Russian plant. How many intel guys signed that letter? The bloody nerve. Boy, I raise my glass, these guys have cojones like church bells
The Republicans could also take a page from their adversaries for the ruthless prosecutorial zeal (lawfare) in going after Trump and guys like Flynn and Giuliani and now even Eric Adams. IOW they go after the whales and not the minnows.
You know, leave the Haitians be (regardless of their dietary preferences) and issue forth thundering denunciations for the heinous malfeasance and malpractice of the Democrats and their billionaire blobalist backers. That said, the Democrats are unsparing in their scathing deplorations of the Deplorables. Which is puzzling. A real head-scratcher, that. I mean, insulting people is no way to get their votes.
But never mind, this is all a long way of saying that if the half-dead Republican Party wants to win they better sharpen up. Thing is, I’m not sure they want to.
Breakfast:
I eat a large brunch rather than breakfast, usually around 10:30 am. I then skip lunch or have tea and piece of fruit or bread. I then have good dinner between 5-6 pm. This means my body is fasting for about 16 hours/day.
David (#289) and Slink (#303), thanks for these! For the former, I was able to find a transcript of the exchange online:
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1976/dec/20/environmental-pollution-nuclear-power
For the latter, I wasn’t able to find the exact post you’re referencing (yet), but I did find another source from UC San Diego’s Deep Decarbonization Initiative, which (surprise surprise) states that the nuclear power industry in the US will require increased political support and funding to remain competitive.
https://deepdecarbon.ucsd.edu/policy-and-tech/nuclear-power-in-US.html
Bridge, yep. Those big turbines are simply roundabout ways of burning more fossil fuels.
Other Owen, why should a democracy produce candidates any better than the people who vote for them?
Steve, essentially, yes. As for drawing, I use the Word drawing utility; it’s crude but it’s what I know how to use.
Cugel, I’m strongly considering it. I’m glad you enjoyed Jerry Shimizu’s adventures!
Robert, oh, probably. As for the supposed nuclear attack, no; the immediate aftermath of that would be a hypersonic missile strike on a major NATO military base, and that hasn’t happened yet. That’s interesting about elemental cycles, and makes sense — hmm.
Ken, it’s an extrapolation based partly on long-term trends and partly on what’s likely to happen to resource-rich West African states once they start to profit from their own mineral wealth. Keep in mind also that rain is starting to fall semi-regularly in the southern Sahara, so it may not be desert for long.
Anon, yep. The leftists call me a right-wing extremists, the right calls me a left-wing extremist. Neither side is able or willing to imagine that there’s such a thing as a centrist.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Anon, what worked for me was the OSA work and cutting my abusive parent completely out of my life. Your mileage may vary, of course.
Daedalus, obviously I disagree. Specifically, I think that this fantasy is being embraced by the political class in the NATO countries because it’s the only way to avoid having to deal with the reality of Ukrainian/NATO defeat — and that defeat, combined with the rise of the Russo-Chinese alliance and its increasing popularity in the global South, marks the end of the line for US hegemony and a very high chance of convulsive economic and political unraveling. Putin’s popularity in Russia is far higher than that of any Western head of state in their countries, and the fixation on flashy media attacks against Russian assets isn’t changing the catastrophic condition of Ukrainian forces on the Donbass front or the steady advance of Russian troops there.
Cliff, I wish I could say I was surprised.
Robert, hmm! No, I hadn’t heard.
J.L.Mc12, “bioplastic-ceramic composites” are a variety of imaginarium, of course. I have no idea what would actually work.
Chris, we did indeed. I fed the hens, made sure they were safely into their coop before nightfall, and collected the eggs.
Augusto, prayer and divination are your guides!
EVERYONE eats breakfast – breakfast being the meal you eat when break the fast after sleeping. The only question is when (and what, and why). Personally, I like intermittent fasting. I’m surprised it didn’t get a mention from anyone in the comments. It seems to me that most people these days are carbohydrate addicts (excluding the individuals who mentioned bacon and eating yesterday’s leftovers) – not unusual in this day and age, since the 1980s when grains became lauded and oils and fats vilified. But the food pyramid only works if you wish to end up resembling a pyramid! Not being reliant on carbohydrates, which are not essential to the diet, and not having to pump up levels of insulin to fire sugar into the body’s cells from the bloodstream (which can only tolerate a teaspoon’s worth of circulating sugar in the entire body) means that you can more easily access your stored reserves. Otherwise they remain locked in vivo. The average person carries about 2 months’ worth of energy as stored fat. I’ve been on the carnivore diet since March of this year. It has morphed into the keto diet these past few months.
@ Chris, there is a working link to your you tube video, but it says it is a private link and needs a password
JMG,
Do you think the Israeli’s assassination of Nasrallah will turn out to be a distinct node in the decline of the American. Empire? It seems to me that if we hadn’t already alienated every last person in the Middle East we have done it now. I feel that by letting this to happen we crossed some kind of line that we can’t come back from. From now on we will only see a growing list of countries that the U.S. is kicked out of. Yes that was already in the cards but I think from now on it will be like we put a turbo charger on it.
Hey JMG
Fair enough, but I guess you could use a bio plastic as a binder for a ceramic powder, which may be useful for something.
Clay Dennis re #282, great point about those stories. Truthiness without being so far-fetched as to verge into truthinesslessness ie consistency with a framework of facts or impressions about the world and how things work. Cannot recall who coined ‘truthinesslessness’ (stroke of brilliance there).
A fair number of posters appear to be getting thoroughly bugged out by various inevitable features of civilizational decline suddenly appearing as stark realities on the horizon. While I have no magic cures to offer for those unwelcome realities, as they are just conditions we’re going to have to deal with, I might have a useful habit for reducing their stressful impact. Simply ask yourself if you’ve been ensorcelled.
We are in the midst of an epic struggle for power between vying factions of élites, with each peddling its own unique vision of the future. What tactics they use to try to get their various visions picked up by the populace are quite varied. Some try to oversaturate their preferred narrative, while some try to suppress all competing stories. Some try to inspire their listeners, while some try to scare their marks into submission. It’s that last one that warrants deeper analysis into the unfortunate effects that tactic quite reliably has on its adopters.
Spell casters would make for an equally suitable name for any vision-peddling élites, and that’s not pejorative, as spells can be cast for your benefit as well as your detriment. Any spell casters who go about trying to win your allegiance by scaring the bejesus out of you are definitely not your friends. There is a lot of that fear-mongering going on at the moment, and it is not being done for your benefit.
Let’s face it, lots of things are scary and always will be, like war and famine and despotism. Lots of things can offer character-building challenges, like war and famine and despotism. Lots of things open up unexpected opportunities where only obstacles used be, like war and famine and despotism. Lots of things can provide bold new meanings to otherwise bland and dreary lives, like war and famine and despotism. And lots of people don’t want you to think about how exciting and unknowable the future, with all its vast possibilities, will always be. They work overtime trying to promise you predictability, as though your main goal in life were repititious sameness. They tell you change is bad and always worth avoiding, because otherwise you might just change them out for someone with a better vision.
Social primates have a habit of going to war. We always have and we always will — just ask the chimpanzees. Whether we’re hurling coconuts or atom bombs at our adversaries, it’s just something that we do. Why would anyone want you to suddenly start having nightmares about that? Really, though, why is someone going out of their way to ensnare you in a fixed narrative about the future, when they don’t know what it is going to be? Someone is trying to force the future into a fixed narrative that they believe will slant things to their own advantage, and they seriously don’t care how much of your focus and balance gets sacrificed in the process. Their x-number-of-minutes-to-midnight catastrophe clocks were always designed to hijack your mind, while doing nothing to reduce nuclear stockpiles. All that elaborate programming just to control you. What exactly are they so afraid of? Kind of leaves you wondering just how powerful and important you actually are, doesn’t it?
So avoid surrendering your focus and balance over to these charlatans. You will find it much more difficult to learn about all the amazing healing properties of your local flora should you let yourself be distracted by someone else’s peddled fear-mongering regarding something you can’t possibly do anything about. Oh, but we’re supposed to be deathly afraid of eating wild plants, now aren’t we? Of course, that would be their real goal — to keep you from training your will to focus on things that can actually make a difference in your own life.
There are a million things to get distracted worrying about, and a million people trying to keep you distracted for their personal advantage. There are also a million things to focus on that you can choose for yourself, without anybody else’s damn “help” distracting you. They all want to cast their spells over you because they are quite terrified of what little ol’ you might be able to do were you not encumbered by their incessant, tedious ensorcellments. So again, ask yourself if you’ve been ensorcelled, and then go do something better with your time.
@anonymous – on healing childhood wounds.
I’d advise you to go gently and expect it to take some time. I’m 7 years down the line of healing from CPTSD caused by an emotionally abusive mother and an alcoholic father. It’s seems to come in fits and spurts for me. You heal through a bunch of stuff, then you get a period of calm (where you might become falsely confident that you’re ‘healed’), but then you get smacked with more stuff. I’ve had many days where I don’t want to do it any more – I can see the appeal of buring my emotional trauma with alcohol or drugs or gambling like my parents did on those days. But when I enter those periods of calm and I see the person I am today compared to the out of control, impulsive, angry person I was 7 years ago and it’s all worth it. If you focus on creating space for your pain, it will rise organically and in its own time. If you can afford it, I found a few sessions of Hakomi therapy to be invaluable in helping me learn to connect to, and tolerate, the emotional sensations in my body again and to develop an understanding of how my reactive behaviours in the present were reflections of unhealed trauma from the past. Good luck.
Re “green energy” per #275 by Bridge
The local grapevine** is buzzing, because a large consignment of windmill parts – the blades and columns to build maybe 30 or so complete windmills – which have been languishing in storage at the pierside for around 8 years, are now due to be dismantled without ever having reached their intended installation site.
It appears that overlong storage has “perished” their materials and they are no longer fit for purpose. However the proper and correct manner of their disposal is still being negotiated, or so I hear…
**Killybegs, Co Donegal, Ireland
For the people in Florida (Or others) without electricity from the hurricane. This might be a good litmus test for a grid-down society. (Even if you live off-grid sustainably, your neighbors probably do not, which is still your problem when people get desperate.)
– What do you notice as a primary concern when the lights go out?
– What do you focus on once electricity is restored? And how would you change your approach in a society that rations grid electricity usage to a certain time of day?
– Would you be comfortable with living off the grid for a month or more? (I assume there are more preppers here than elsewhere)
– Would you be inclined to continue living in Florida (or the south in general), as compared to other climates in a world without electricity?
– If the supply chain was gone (no grocery stores), where would you go to source for food by default, if not already well prepared at home?
—
On a separate note, I have been watching the podcast by LTC Steven Murray, and making my own conclusions on the USA collapse.
Think what you may of our present and future situation, I think that future generations will be inclined to field a long term psychological studies looking back at our current population, to understand how the critical mass develops and projects in the individual psych of people living in a society of decline. To put it lightly, we have problems for our problems.
From that podcast, I think a lot of people underestimate the potential of human capital. If people were motivated and tenacious, then we could move mountains. Unfortunately I fear those same energies could launch Mao’s long march into the Inferno downstairs.
In america it seems that a lot of people have been disenfranchised, and whatever needs to change in the culture/society will change in order to re-enfranchise those people. I am unsure what those changes would be, who would be directing them (who benefits), what the end result would be, and whether it would have a positive or negative outcome.
—
By the way, has anyone had any issues or known of people with issues involving free speech, or information online?
I think we will be nearing the end of this era, once blogs like this are targeted for pointing out the obvious.
Steve T – Re: Digital drawing tools. I like Gimp, which is free to use, lets you keep your work on your own machine (rather than in their cloud), and allows you to draw on multiple layers. So, you can have one layer of guide lines, and a second layer for the final product. You can have a third layer for some stuff that might end up in the final product if it goes well, but if it doesn’t, just delete the layer. You can start with a photographic image as the base layer, and use it for reference to a line drawing, then delete the base layer. Gimp reads and writes a wide variety of formats, on both LInux and lesser OSes.
However, it is a complex and powerful program, and takes some time to become productive. The main problem that I have is forgetting to create (or select) the drawing layer after I’ve added some text (which always creates a new layer for itself). When the text layer is selected, the drawing tools have no effect! If you want to draw a rectangle, the trick is to use the “select rectangle” tool, then “Edit/Stroke Selection”.
One feature that I really miss (or haven’t discovered) is that I have to draw arrowheads manually on lines that need them. MacDraw did that decades ago!
@Steve T, 281.
You might give Inkscape a go. Free, available for many kinds of computer. Has a certain learning curve but there are lots of educational videos on YT. You would probably want to look for some freely usable examples of human figures and then adjust them to your needs.
@Steve #281 diagramming tools
Depends on how sophisticated you want your diagrams to be. Of the diagramming tools that I have used nothing beats MS Visio for complex stuff.
But try Inkscape first. For simple diagrams it might be sufficient.
Clay, no, to my mind we passed that node some time ago. The Israeli strike, to my mind, just shows that Israel (like Ukraine) has succumbed to the delusion that mediagenic strikes on individual targets can win a war. Hezbollah has had backup leadership in place all along, and in the real world, as distinct from Hollywood fantasy, the death of the other side’s leader doesn’t end the struggle, any more than FDR’s death led to an Allied defeat in the Second World War. Also, of course, a religious movement that honors martyrdom isn’t exactly going to be discouraged by more martyrs!
J.L.Mc12, no doubt. I expect the craftspeople of the future to work that one out, though.
Christophe, thank you for this.
Eruption, so far I’ve had no trouble maintaining my own various internet presences. It’s quite possible that I remain unhassled for the simple reason that the defenders of the status quo think I’m too far out on the fringe to worry about.
Jed (offlist), er, please get a good night’s sleep and recover from the hangover before posting something like this. It might also help to write it out on Notepad or something and make sure it’s clear before you post.
#293 There are other views about the results of projecting the Milankovitch cycles forward, such as this webpage by Jan Hollan: https://amper.ped.muni.cz/gw/articles/html.format/orb_forc.html who didn’t think there was going to be another ice-age for at least 130,000 years and maybe not for 620,000 years. He used a fairly simple model, based on an idea that the summer insolation at 65°N was the key factor for Northern Hemisphere glaciation, i.e. whether ice can persist from one winter to the next.
#281 I’d also suggest Dia or Inkscape. Also the last version of Visio before Microsoft bought out the original developers is available online: https://winworldpc.com/product/visio/2000
Anon #301
Re how to heal from an abusive childhood. Like JMG I found the OSA work good and also cut my abusive parent out of my life which made a huge difference, though I have to say that it wasn’t until she died that I breathed a true sigh of relief.
The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has a guide on healing from an awful childhood and it’s one I found enormously helpful. Basically, you go within, find your inner child and give them all the comfort, care and advice you didn’t experience yourself. Sometimes scenarios happen on their own, but you can make them up – I might buy my inner child a new frock, put ribbons in her hair and take her for a day out at a big museum or the beach, always stopping for something tasty to eat. One of the odd things is that when I do the work and invite my inner child to come forward, it isn’t always the same one and I’ve worked with younger versions of myself at all ages.
For me, the method brought a great deal of comfort and changed me in a few ways. I relaxed a lot, feel more confident, can laugh more easily and the previously constant knot in my guts undid itself.
If you decide to try it out, it can help to focus more intently if you can find some photos of yourself at particular times of childhood, such as when certain things happened.
The guide is here and is included in his book ‘Reconciliation’. https://www.lionsroar.com/healing-the-child-within/
@ Kevin #299
The Eden Project was amazing. I don’t believe it could have been constructed 50 years ago because it needs super lightweight but also super tough plastic to form the triple layer pillows filling each hexagon in the dome. Those pillows really trap heat! They also eventually cloud up. Our guide told us that the Eden Project is beginning to replace the oldest pillows. The structure is about 20 years old, I think. Nothing lasts forever and maintenance must always be done.
The feeling inside is NOT like that of a conservatory or giant greenhouse. I’ve been in them. This is different.
As for Tartaria, it was impossible to shake the feeling while hiking through Torquay. The part of London we were in wasn’t as … dilapidated, I guess. Paddington is such a wealthy area you could smell the money.
On the other hand, taking the train to Torquay and back gave me a stunning view of the English landscape that you don’t normally see in the movies. The Hobbiton parts were there, no question. But so were gritty, grimy, rundown, industrial, smeared with graffiti sections that could have fit right into the meaner parts of Philadelphia.
Travel is so enlightening if you’re paying attention!
@ Peter #26
I don’t know what happened to my earlier reply. Apologies.
Anyway, you’re correct! The British Empire is in decline. But that doesn’t mean the citizens should be littering with abandon. That’s a choice. A poor one.
As a person who routinely picks up litter, which I did a little of in England, I can say littering is a symptom of a larger malaise: “I don’t care.”
My other point about Tartaria and Torquay is that, as a person always interested in infrastructure, they were sure pouring huge amounts of money into the waterfront promenade. I mean, trainloads of money. At the same time, it didn’t look like any money was being spent on the numerous, empty storefronts facing the waterfront promenade.
I attend municipal meetings (something everyone should do) because citizens are not completely powerless. It’s work. It’s tedious. It’s boring and time-consuming. But it’s the only way the citizens can prevent the municipality from building the Taj Mahal of swimming pools with our tax dollars when so much of the local roads are in crying need of repair.
Why did Torquay build this grand waterfront promenade when the roads needed repair?
I dunno and the two local weekly newspapers (which I read) didn’t say. Maybe it was grant money.
But it was money being poured into that area. There was other money being poured into the area too, based on hotels being rebuilt.
So there is money. It’s a choice as to what gets done with the money.
@Christophe #320
Exceptionally well said. I have similar feelings but have not been able to state them nearly so eloquently. I found this helpful. Thank you.
” Would you be inclined to continue living in Florida (or the south in general), as compared to other climates in a world without electricity?”
Most houses recently built in the northern US are not designed to be heated with a wood stove. I did spend a summer in Florida and it wasn’t that much worse than a hot day in Wisconsin. 90 degrees and 90% humidity was much the same. Florida lacks the -30 degree nights and the -20 daily high in winter though. So in the “not dying in the current dwelling during grid collapse” department Florida wins in that choice.
Where to find a mellow climate not too eager to kill you. Tennessee? Arkansas ? Western Oregon?
Dear John Michael Greer,
I just got my sample ballot for Nov. 5th. There is a candidate running for State Assembly named Michael Greer. I should probably look into him more before I vote for him just because of my affinity for his name. I notice he is retired, but used to be a “Special Educator”. Which I find amusing since I think of you as an Educator, and absolutely special to me.
He’s the R running against some D I’ve never heard of. I’d say his chances of getting my vote are good.
With all the worrying around, here’s something for an ever so little cheer: On my Sunday hike today I came through an officially designated ‘nature reserve’ close to my home (in South West Germany). The unusal diversity of plant species was evident even to my untrained eyes. Now the remarkable thing was that the area was strewn with little farms, with a lot of broad hedges and copses inbetween. In particular, one part of it was especially rich in wild plants, and a little board explained that they had started to let mixed herds of sheep and goats graze there, which apparently had been the traditional use of the place many generations ago, and that this was preferable, from an ecological point of view, to ceasing all human intervention.
I was instantly reminded of this old post by our host: https://www.ecosophia.net/an-anthropocene-worth-having/ . In particular, the place looked much like Tolkien’s painting in that post. I hope the farmers there will thrive and inspire others to do likewise!
Anonymous #301: “Do you have any advice, besides doing the work contained in the Order of Spiritual Alchemy, for healing from having had the misfortune to have had emotionally abusive parents?”
I found this helpful, as well as cutting the abusive parent(s) completely out of my life, but as JMG said, YMMV:
“You Carry the Cure In Your Own Heart” – https://www.vachss.com/av_dispatches/disp_9408_a.html
Hi JMG, You said:
“DFC, it’s always possible to come up with a train of events leading to Armageddon. My prediction remains the same.”
I was not talking about “Armageddon” and nor of WWIII; as in your TLG the American nuclear threats (ultimatum) to China didn’t ended up in a “Armageddon” in fact in the cold war there was a bad habit of the Pentagon to threat countries with nuclear attacks and, of course, they never (fortunately) fulfil de promise, like in the Korean War against North Korea and China, in the Cuban missiles crisis (that was solved, as you know, through negotiation nor because they scared the soviets), or the “mad man” strategy of Nixon to “win” the Vietnam war, etc…
No, what I was talking is, in fact, of what seems to be is an extraordinary capacity of the Israeli lobby to in fact manage the policy of USA in the ME, even at risk of thousands of US soldiers and the destruction of the global economy with the closure of the Straight of Ormuz.
For many of us, as foreigners, the spectacle of the 53 standing ovation to Bibi Netanyahu in the Congress or both candidates presenting themselves as the “real” defenders of Israel, in particular Trump threatening “to blow-up the Iranian cities to smithereens” (cities, of course full of Iranians), and both fully supporters of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, is an spectacle really astonishing to see.
John Mearsheimer is a proffesor I recommend about the issue of the Israeli lobby in USA.
As far as I know it seems the Israeli lobby is more powerful in your country than ever, and I think a kind of your TLG scenario is more probable in the Persian Gulf than in any other place of the planet, all around of Israel behaviour with the Muslim populations/nations.
Cheers
David
Hey JMG
Alas, that is true. I’d love to see what future Ecotechnic craftsmanship could achieve, especially in material science. Maybe more refined transparent wood and fungus-derived leather, that are now only experimental prototypes?
Oh, that reminds me. Awhile ago I accidentally came across a French science fiction short story that can be seen as a precursor of deindustrial sci-fi. It was called “after three hundred years” by Pierre Mille, published in some magazine in 1922 and republished and translated in “13 French science fiction stories” by Damon Knight.
It’s essentially a short slice of life story of a man and his wife in some rural French town in the aftermath of “the great disaster” which I think was a Chinese invasion as the inhabitants are described as speaking a debased French with Chinese loan words, and have some Chinese ancestry. There also a lot of detail about the loss of past technology such as fine cloth and hard leather boxes.
>I did spend a summer in Florida and it wasn’t that much worse than a hot day in Wisconsin
What you’ll find isn’t the temps and humidity that are different but the length of the seasons. Summer lasts longer, Winter lasts shorter. And in FL, they don’t really get any winter at least as someone from OH or MI would reckon it.
Lots of bugs and hurricanes though. Which do you like doing less? Shoveling snow or spraying for bugs?
Quin, an update for the prayer request for Rebecca. My start date has been delayed a week, apparently because of problems setting up my computer login. Hoping and praying that this is the only delay and that all else will be well!
Thank you so very much for coordinating the prayer list–Rebecca
@false eruption
Replace FL with MI and ask yourself those same questions. Also ask whether you could live without heat during January and February. I remember one year during one of those Polar Vortex events, the highs in Detroit never got above freezing for a whole month. I remember when the Superbowl was held in Minneapolis, the outdoor temp was around 0F (that’s -18C for the rest of you). And that’s pretty typical for that part of the world.
There’s no perfect place. If you get something, you’re inevitably giving up something else. Everybody values different things.
>If anything, one could expect all of them to fall
Along with Murica too. There is a precedent for that. The Late Bronze Age Collapse. All the big empires just went *fomp* with Egypt barely hanging on in a dystopian repressive state. The Hittites sort of bounced back a little bit, a few city-states managed to band together to put something on the map. These were the Hittites mentioned in the Old Testament, BTW.
We’ve heard so much about “toxic masculinity” lately, and all the debates around it. I was wondering couldn’t there also be a “toxic femininity”? What would that entail? The dolled up Barbie look, with a valley-girl or soccer mom overlay? Maybe along with how you look, it’s how you act? Pursuing what is considered “woman’s work”? Or simply more of an emasculating spirit toward manliness? If the latter is true, aren’t all those feminists attacking men loaded with toxicity themselves? Has anyone looked into this or written about it?
Joy Marie
#333 Siliconguy
Your point reminds me my favorite twilight zone episode, the midnight sun. I would leave the Floridian summer to then freeze in the north’s winter climate. The reverse effect we call snow birding.
I think it comes down to people’s personal cold tolerance. I can handle the cold in short durations, as long as I am healthy, but I know I cannot handle the wind. When I was a kid I would enjoy laying in a mountain stream with just my nose out of the water and relax for around an hour, by the time I got out I felt numb and slightly hypothermic, but it was still worth it. By contrast my experience in Cumberland island, off the coast of Georgia, where the wind was so bad that I thought, (I knew internally) that I would die if I stayed there without wind protection overnight, which was the worst freezing/cold I have ever felt.
I know there are better climates out there, with my personal preference of conditions (of course nothing is perfect, in any place.)
My point with the question was to ask whether Florida’s extremes would be easier for people to adapt (or move elsewhere if not) than other climates, when the air conditioning/heating stops, and as a result ‘climate change’ accelerates via perception.
I assumed it would be easier for most people in a grid down situation, with access to aquifer/water, open land, and favorable agricultural conditions.
Sometime in the future I would predict that Florida’s aquifer (water table) will run dry from overuse, possibly leading to desertification of the peninsula. That could happen within my generation, the water table has already dropped and run one of our locally drilled wells dry, and it is liable to happen again. For the long game, I would assume people would live wherever there is fresh water, and Florida is among the first water sponges to be squeezed dry in the near future.
I often wonder about the future water scarcity/wars, and would ask if freshwater Lake Baikal is a strategic Russian asset, just as much as hydrocarbons are presently?
About living without electricity – The only problem I had, and it was a big one, is that the (lactose-free) mllk, organic green leaves, and hard-boiled eggs were in the fridge. The various packets of trail mix, oat bars, singe-serve honey nut cheerios, etc were not the healthiest diet for my guts. I did keep out the single-serve applesauce. It uses plastic and is wasteful, bu tunopened, doesn’t need to be in the fridge at all. I tried the various canned meats and tuna during the last hurricane scare. and not even a big strong attendant could get the suckers open.
@ Yavanna – thanks for the Andrew Vachss link. I read all of his novels back in the day, and even watched “Law & Order SVU” back in my TV- watching days. And for a long time, read a number of “damaged heroine” detective novels like Betty Webb’s Desert Murders. Alas, all too many were physical superheroines, tough as nails etc. I do , still, recommend Abigail Padgett’s Bo Bradley series, starting with Child of Silence. Because – she’s psychic, knows it, and with her Irish grandmother’s teachings, accepts it as part of her nonstandard mentality – she’s bipolar, a major handicap, but also can spot a lie a hundred miles away. Other than that , no kind of a superwoman. Padgett takes the glimpses of the otherworld quite seriously, you can tell, and that’s unusual for the late 20th century. (1980s).
Re: Hall of Homeless Gods – I spotted a classic “projecting the shadow” near the end, which the viewpoint character didn’t even pick up on: the villain, characterizing another character we’ve already gotten to know, used a description that was a dead-accurate picture of the villain himself.
Slink, it’s not impossible that he’s a relative. By all means, though, check his policies and record!
Robert K, thank you for this! That’s really good to hear.
DFC, your scenario led straight to a military confrontation between the US and Russia, at a time when the Russian government has announced that they’ve sharply lowered their threshold for using nuclear weapons. That’s close enough to Armageddon for me. As for the Israeli lobby, the US has a larger Jewish population than any other nation on the planet, including Israel, and that makes it a voting bloc more than large enough to swing an election; at a time when the parties are closely balanced, that’s impossible for any politician to ignore.
J.L.Mc12, hmm! I’ll want to read that one. Thanks for the heads up.
Joy Marie, of course there’s toxic femininity — as much of it as there is toxic masculinity — and there are plenty of people, mostly male, who talk about it. They do so in private, however, as you can lose your job quite easily by saying something so, ahem, “sexist.” (Look at the shrill feminist reaction to Karen jokes, themselves a reaction to one fairly common form of toxic femininity.)
Patricia M, heh heh heh…
A Yavanna et. al. – Reading the Vachss article on emotional abuse – my ex-husband’s late father was a cast-iron bully, and his youngest son, who had some learning disabilities, was the scapegoat. He both internalized the characterization of him as stupid (which he wasn’t) and accepted his father’s values to an uncomfortable extent – and undercut me in every way possible during the marriage., until I started screaming in frustration. I refused to pick on the kids, though. It was a classic case of “Am I crazy? Am *I* crazy?” It’s been a long, hard journey, with many rough spots along the way, but I’ve always had a one successful strategy: “Feet, do your stuff,” as a last resort. But not while the kids were little; the last thing they needed was the instability of a nearly unemployable mother who was none too sane herself at that point.
They came out all right, though I was afraid that my oldest daughter would be that kind of bully, and up until quite recently, was sure she was. Anyone who’s read JMG’s Ariel Moravec novels, look at her mother.
For those in my shoes, one refuge is creative work – handcrafts, in my case. And another is being able to go in your room and close the door, until your daughter starts telling the grandkids that grandma’s nap is Do Not Disturb. A third is books. And music on the car radio., if you’re alone in it. And a third, in my case, is when you throw other people’s expectations out the window and suit yourself – when possible. And finally, a close friend who is a born mind-healer, and has helped others as bad off as I was. And finally, being the most opinionated little beast on the planet.
Hope this helps whoever needs it
Luke–I read _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown . . . _ when it was first published and was fairly unimpressed. The idea that major structures such as the pyramids could have been built by people getting individual message from part of their brains struck me as implausible. As anyone who has built so much as a chicken coop will tell you it is hard enough to coordinate efforts when everyone is talking to one another and working off the same plans. It is my opinion that the major reason some intellectuals come up with cockamamie theories about ancient structures is that most of them have no practical experience with making things. I include von Dankian (Chariots of the Gods, etc.) in this group. My second major question about Jaynes’ theories is this. He seems to be saying that some disastrous event or series of events in the eastern Mediterranean area led to this sudden change in the nature of human consciousness. But if this is the case wouldn’t people outside of that area have been unaffected and retain the original “bicameral mind”? Now different cultures have different ways of thinking, different value systems and different beliefs as documented by travelers and by anthropologists. But I am unaware of the discovery of any culture that resembles Jaynes’ speculations. My undergraduate major was anthropology, so I was fairly well read about a variety of cultures worldwide. What I couldn’t understand was the enthusiasm for the theory shown by many of my neopagan friends. Why would you welcome a book that says the gods aren’t real, they are just voices in our heads?
re illegal orders. I had a friend who served several years as an officer in the US Navy. He told me that when his ship was entering a harbor in the Philippines his captain gave the order to empty the waste tanks. He objected that emptying waste in that area was not permitted and that the order was illegal. He told me that his captain’s reply was “Illegal order? Well you can use that as a defense at your court martial.” The tanks were emptied. Not the hill to die on. Training of armed forces does emphasis that there is a duty to object to an illegal order and that “I was following orders” is not a legal defense. But clearly a junior officer or non-com is going to want to be really clear about their position before challenging an order and risking their career. Same as any large, rigid organization.
I remember the immigrants’ eating pets and the wildlife in parks rumors when the Laotians and Vietnamese immigrants were arriving in California. “Those people eat weird stuff” is one of the most common accusations against strangers, so not surprising. Made worse if it is an animal regarded as taboo for food in one’s own culture. Some Europeans eating horse meat, snails and frogs is an old example. I also recall rumors that the rabbit dishes on the menus of some French restaurants were more likely to be stray cats. I read a book of essays about rural life in pre-WW I England which told about catching sparrows for food. And a little reading about Europe in earlier years will show that all kinds of songbirds were regarded as eatable.
Rita
What pseudomorphoses did the Mesopotamian and Apollonian cultures have?
Christophe #320
What a wonderful way of putting it. I remember being very worried through the 70s and 80s but nothing happened. I am a worry wart, though.
Robert Jenrick, a top ranking member of the UK’s Conservative Party, is talking about mass immigration putting England’s national identity at risk:
https://news.sky.com/story/conservative-leadership-contest-robert-jenrick-claims-mass-immigration-and-woke-culture-put-englands-national-identity-at-risk-13218324
This is notable because he’s talking about English identity and not British identity, suggesting that the UK is pretty close to falling apart into its constituent nations England, Scotland, Wales, etc. If the British identity was still as strong as it was a few years ago, Jenrick would have been talking about how mass immigration would put Britain’s national identity at risk.
Re Frieren, and the issue of getting chummy with demons —
There are lots of “nice demons” in manga and anime, and lots of tales of rapprochement of humans with demons. But I think the core problem or issue being addressed in Frieren isn’t “can’t we all get along”, but ” is it possible to imagine, and work out, what a genuinely evil intelligent being would be like?” Many of the people who object to seem to find Frieren wrong-headed seem to be starting from a position that actual evil beings are either (a) cannot possibly be imagined or (b) something that ought not be imagined, even if it were possible.
Frieren’s hypothesis is that such intelligent evil beings would be beings that could not share any feelings with human beings, and could not even figure out how to model human feelings enough to see how those feelings can serve as to serve to motivate human actions. The main feeling that demons in general show is hostility and a desire to destroy — in human terms, as though they found human beings a disgusting contaminant.
What is quite interesting is that several of the central characters, including Frieren herself, are highly inept at understanding their own feelings, and those of others, and often misunderstand and miscommunicate, but at some point begin to recognize that something has gone wrong, and have to go back and sort things out.
In fact, one of Frieren’s motives for beginning to retrace the rout of her earlier quest is her realization that she has misunderstood a great deal of what went on during it — and, in the flashbacks, it is clear that she missed a great many cues. Part of the poignance of the story is her gradual recognition of all the cues and signals she missed in the earlier adventure, and her earlier life in general, and her attempt to begin to be more aware. And her realization that her traveling companions at that time actually recognized her incapacity, and made allowances for it, rather than trying to push her to do what (they knew) she could not even imagine doing. (Several of her companions in the current adventure are barely more better at relationships than she is.)
So the story plays two kinds of emotional incapacity against each other: the demonic, characterized by a state of complete comfort with having no capacity for understanding what human feelings might be, and the human (or elven or dwarvish), characterized by incapacities that the characters can recognize, recognize as deficits, and determine to do better.
This article is about a recent film. We all know JMG doesn’t watch them, but the issue highlighted in the film is police abuse of civil forfeiture laws – in some places, if you’re found with a large amount of cash, they can simply assume it’s proceeds of crime and seize it on the spot, and for you to recover it the onus of proof is on you, and of course the legal process is lengthy, expensive and uncertain in result.
JMG has many times spoken of how towards the end of a civilisation, quite often its bureaucracy costs far more than any benefits it gives (that cost:benefit ratio dropping below 1:1 more-or-less defines “decline”). I would express it more cynically: any sufficiently-burdensome bureaucracy is indistinguishable from banditry.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2024/09/20/the-real-stories-behind-netflix-hit-rebel-ridge/
Hi Rebecca, just wanted to let you know I saw your updated and have adjusted the prayer listing accordingly.
Reading the comments regarding US climate zones makes me realise how lucky we are here in the temperate parts of the southern hemisphere. Due to the fact that the majority of our half is made up of ocean our seasons are very moderated, with much less difference between seasonal extremes. We get hot spells, but nothing too constant, as the power of the ocean always end up blowing the heat away, and winter is often pleasant when the sun is out.
It means that it’s relatively easy to live independently and off grid from a climatic perspective, you just need a well designed house to be quite comfortable.
False Eruption-
When I think about places and means by which one might live after The Grid goes down, I look to the histories of Native Americans. They lived in most of the climates here, though in much smaller numbers, from the swamps of Florida to the Black Hills of South Dakota. Just look at the names of our states, derived from Native American words: Michigan, Minnesota, the Dakotas… they found a way to live in the cold winters.
Yet another sign of elite liberal bias? In today’s Washington Post (Style section), an article with the jump headline “Why some older women may mind Trump less”. I guess they just can’t force their fingers to type “…may prefer Trump.” After I read the headline, I expected the poll results to say that Harris has a smaller majority in this age group, but when I found the actual numbers (54% Trump, 41% Harris), it was no majority at all! Even my dear liberal wife finds this to be very odd language.
Some of the anecdotal reasons? Struggling to survive with inflation. Uncomfortable with “woke” hypersensitivity.
>Where to find a mellow climate not too eager to kill you. Tennessee? Arkansas ? Western Oregon?
I wouldn’t characterize AR’s weather as “mellow”. I’ve never seen so many big messy thunderstorms spinning down through AR. Maybe FL has more. And if it isn’t those two it’s TX with the big red blotches. TN is somewhat less active but I also wouldn’t call it mellow either. Have no idea about OR, either the wet or dry side of it. If it’s like CO at all, I bet the dry side is cold and windy in the winter with lots of snow.
CA has the best climate for outdoors that I’ve seen, period. The cruel irony is, that you will have to spend all your time indoors, stressed out, just to live there. And that was back in the good old days. I can’t imagine how miserable it must be to live there now. Reminds me of those racoon traps with the shiny thing at the bottom. The trick is to let go of the shiny thing.
Hi John,
Normally agree with you but it does look like Israel has dealt a devastating blow on Hezbollah.
The biggest revelations is how massively they have penetrated the organisation.
Mossad spies are everywhere.
I don’t disagree with your longer term outlook on Israel but it does strike me as now or never for Israel to massively degrade the military threat posed by the axis of resistance when the Americans are still around the region.
I have been thinking about community and remembered that you guys have one. That came after I was reading Dorion’s scintillating writeup on entropy, which mentions that the average persistence of a species in the vertebrate line (estimated from the fossil record) is 4 million years. He does a good job of navigating the line between science and mythology.
Entropy, Said the Devil (Entropy & its Discontents: From Heat Death to the Eternal Return
https://technophany.philosophyandtechnology.network/article/view/14438/19945
The persistence of vertebrate life forms recalls this post:
The Next Ten Billion Years
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2013/09/the-next-ten-billion-years.html
That recalls the ending in H. G. Wells “The Time Machine” where he travels to the far future and sees the sun becoming a red giant. Perhaps it was not yet understood that a healthy normal main sequence star will grow dramatically at the red giant stage.
If I had been tutored by Lynn Margulis and Carl Sagan, I’d be pretty smart too. Dorion and Lynn seem not to be mentioned, but Gaia appears frequently here. There appear to be occasional mentions of Carl Sagan. Lynn Margulis had a hand in crafting the Gaia hypothesis.
James Lovelock, Gaia, and the Remembering of Biological Being
https://philotechne.substack.com/p/james-lovelock-gaia-and-the-remembering
By Dorion Sagan Jan 25, 2024
I had to turn on the heat pump in heating mode last night. I guess summer really is over. It didn’t quite freeze though.
Forgive me if you’ve already been alerted to this, JMG, but I was tickled to learn that Rhyd Wildermuth, the Catholic author Nina Power, and yourself have been painted by British Trotyskist publishing house Verso as operating some sort of ‘anti-woke’ druidical triad:
“You maybe already know about a recent example of this, something I referenced in a subscriber chat last month. That was an essay on Verso’s blog, written primarily as an attack on Nina Power. It also included references to both myself and John Michael Greer in an attempt to create a larger conspiracy of “anti-woke druidry.”
The piece is riddled not just with errors, but woven together with a particularly sloppy kind of conflation which is truly dazzling in its absurdity. I’m a Marxist druid. Greer’s a druid who’s known for being rather vehemently anti-Marxist. And Nina, who was really the primary target of the essay, isn’t a druid at all (she’s quite public about her Catholic faith). Yet to read the essay, you’d imagine the three of us are all part of some dark druid order distracting preteens from puberty blockers by getting them to like trees.”
https://rhyd.substack.com/p/sundry-notes-september
Smith #319
> truthiness
STEPHEN COLBERT
It was Stephen Colbert who coined the word “truthiness” in 2005 on The Colbert Report.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness
I don’t know about the word truthinesslessness.
💨Northwind Grandma💨⚖️
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
“Let me pause to say something about America’s current intellectual class, from which the “anti-disinformation” complex comes. By the way: there are no working-class censors, poor censors, hungry censors. The dirty secret of “content moderation” everywhere is that it’s a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it.”
-Matt Taibbi, “Rescue the Republic” speech
This text of his speech isn’t paywalled:
https://www.racket.news/p/my-speech-in-washington-rescue-the?r=5mz1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
>And a little reading about Europe in earlier years will show that all kinds of songbirds were regarded as eatable
Alouette gentille alouette /
Alouette je te plumerai
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=NySWw1U_1QY
Just wanted to pop on to say thank you to JMG and Peter Khan for responding, thanks!
Telecommunications are down for millions across the country (Verizon, AT&T, and a bunch of the usual suspects), and, although this is unconfirmed, it looks like another tech error (an “upgrade”) is the likely culprit. It appears that the July Crowdstrike incident was not a one-off and the Gods of technology continue to lose power.
My sincere apologies JMG! It won’t happen again and thank you for your reply.
Anon, we don’t know enough about the origins of Mesopotamian civilization to be able to tell. The planet-names in Sumerian sources aren’t Sumerian words, so somebody else influenced the Mesopotamian civilization early on, but who? Nobody knows. As for Apollonian, that’s easier — Egypt was the source of the first pseudomorphosis, and Persia of the second. As for Jenrick, interesting.
Warburton, yep. That’s one of the reasons why ordinary citizens welcome the barbarians — they may be crude, violent, and brutal, but their upkeep costs much less than the bureaucratic state they overthrow.
Lathechuck, that’s very odd. I wonder what’s going on in what passes for the thinking of the people who wrote that.
Forecasting, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We’ll see what happens when the Israelis go across the border.
CM, it used to be thought that the sun would get smaller, redder, and cooler with age — the concept of the red giant didn’t exist yet in Wells’s time. (Or, for that matter, Lovecraft’s; he imagined the earth becoming cold and desolate in the light of a tiny red sun, as one intelligent species after another rose and fell. “But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.”)
Siliconguy, Rhode Island right now is in that pleasant place where it’s warm enough not to need heat and cool enough not to sweat. I know it won’t last long.
Luke, I have indeed seen it, and forwarded a copy to my editor at UnHerd — we had a good laugh about it.
Eagle Fang, oof! He went there. I’m glad to hear it.
JD, you’re most welcome.
Dennis, that land line of mine is looking even more sensible than usual…
Jed, you’re welcome and thank you.
Again, thanks a lot to everybody who chimed in about the chickens! 🙂 There is a lot of information in all your comments, and I hope I’m not the only one profiting from it. (And we do have weasels, foxes and similar stuff around here, but at least, thankfully, no toxic snakes!)
As for why I was asking for people’s free-range experiences… I’ve toyed with the idea of keeping chickens for a few years now, but have been hesitant to commit to it. Animals do take a certain amount of time, energy and focus, even if one can minimize that to some degree, and I’m not sure I want to invest this into chickens right now.
Still, the vague idea was to keep them in a sort of chicken tractor/mobile coop, so that they could make themselves useful in the orchard (if I should decide to get chickens, that is). But there are certain issues with this housing in our case: on a slope, i.e. takes more effort/people to move the coop, and very uneven surface, i.e. hard to make things predator-proof at the bottom. But then a fixed coop would be a waste of valuable chicken workforce… 😉
I read the free-range book since I thought there might be some ideas in there which would at least help with the housing issues. It was fairly obvious from a few chapters in that the method as a whole wouldn’t work in our case (neighbours too close being an obvious reason). Still, just because a method can’t be used wholesale doesn’t mean there aren’t certain aspects, ideas or parts of it which can’t be transferred to other settings.
Thus I wanted to understand how and why this method works for that guy, what the important aspects are, etc, and comparing everybody’s notes to what I read in the book has helped tremendously (e.g. I think he underrates the effect of his free-range dogs). And I also got some other ideas and valuable information from all your comments.
(Plus, there is always the meta level as a take-away: predators love chickens, snails love salad, etc etc – I’ve still got a lot to ponder about how some of these concepts could be transferred to other areas…).
So, again, thanks a lot to everybody who replied! 🙂
Milkyway
Late to the party, but I just put up my monthly “Long Forum” links, where I point people to all the best long form content I have encountered in the previous month. A big emphasis on agriculture, economics, history, evolution, and all sorts of other fascinating odds and sods.
https://open.substack.com/pub/zeroinputagriculture/p/the-long-forum-october-2024?r=f45kp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
“Have no idea about OR, either the wet or dry side of it. If it’s like CO at all, I bet the dry side is cold and windy in the winter with lots of snow.”
Eastern Oregon is like Eastern Washington. It’s further south but it’s also higher so it evens out. I used to live in northern Nevada which is even further south and even higher. The climate there at 4200 ft is quite similar to the climate here at 1200 ft.
Maybe it’s a measure of how adapted to stormy weather I am that I considered the states I listed as being mellow. If there are neither blizzards nor hurricanes I don’t worry. Tornadoes are too isolated to worry about. I had two different ones near miss me as kid, both within a half mile. No damage to our house.
@Forecasting Intelligence #359.
The Israeli assassination of Nasrallah was actually not some brilliant military blow. It is actually a last resort of desperation. The leader of Hezbollah for the last 30 years has been a very public figure and they have not really tried to kill him before. That is because he is so hugely popular around the entire Middle East that such a blow would bring in enemies from all sides.
By doing it now they know they will now be fighting all of Lebanon, Hamas, the Iraqi militias, the Houthis, Iran, and the Syrians, perhaps a bit later Turkey and Egypt. As you have mentioned it is their hope this will bring in the U.S. to do their dirty work for them. But it seems that they have been palling around with the senile elites in D.C. and bit too long and have become senile themselves. They seemed to have missed the US being run out of Afghanistan by tribal militias. They seem to be ignoring the the US is at this moment being run off their military bases in Iraq and Syria. They even seem to have missed the US Navy being chased out of the Red Sea by the Houthis.
The Israelis are like a gang of bank robbers cornered by the entire police force. They think that because they got off a lucky shot and killed the police chief that things are going their way.
JMG
I live in a bright blue state and see a lot of Harris/Walz signs. Every time I see on I think maybe there is a new dance craze
Naw it is just the same old political side step side step side step
My friend Ahnaf and I just spent four hours in a podcast with writer and intellectual Malcom Kyeyune. Much of that time was spent discussing our mutual Favorite Living Philosopher(tm), John Michael Greer. Which was fortunate, because on Wednesday John Michael Greer will be coming back for a second appearance on our humble but lovable show.
This is our recent interview with Malcom
https://www.notesfromtheendofti.me/p/eurabiamania-45
And here is our previous JMG interview
https://www.notesfromtheendofti.me/p/when-east-meets-west-13
If anybody here is interested in joining us for a discussion of geopolitics, techno-stupidity, and DOOM, drop me a line at kenazfilan@gmail.com. We’re always happy to chat with members of JMG’s commentariat.
So Trump tweeted the prayer of Saint Michael on September 29th, Michaelmas: https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1840550305085141221
and tweeted “Happy birthday, Mary!” on September 8th, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin.
Not sure what to make of this…interesting times!
JMG, After reading this blog and the Archdruid Report for over a decade now, I have see you mention that lots of esoteric gurus have embellished the truth quite a bit. And same goes in eastern circles. Everyone’s qigong is the best. Of course there are lots of other religions professing to be the one and only. I myself am over 50 and been seeking my entire adult life. Recently I saw BOTA mentioned here and decided to give it a try. I am a few months in and liking it so far, but still feeling restless. I wonder if this is my destiny to always be looking for more. Any thoughts?
>their upkeep costs much less than the bureaucratic state
I’d say in general that’s how collapse gets incentivized. When enough people perceive that collapse to be less miserable than the status quo, down we go. Well, that and the people in charge derive real pleasure from the misery they’re creating. Towards the end, the people at the top really enjoy themselves. Really really enjoy themselves. Those two things put together are well nigh unstoppable until they’ve run their course. Kind of like how a thunderstorm has to run its course once it gets going.
The more you can do for yourself, the better you’re going to be.
The whole thing is worth a read, but here are two other choice tidbits:
“In prerevolutionary France even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. They have no honor, no belief, no poetry, art, or humor, no patriotism, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They’re simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off. …
What was the American personality? Madison said he hoped to strengthen the “will of the community,” but other revolutionaries weren’t quite so polite. Thomas Paine’s central message was that the humblest farmer was a towering moral giant compared to the invertebrate scum who wore crowns and lived in British castles.”
https://www.racket.news/p/my-speech-in-washington-rescue-the
Dear Anonymous (#301) regarding thoughts about healing from an abusive parent.
I had moved cross country 20 years ago and had done major work for the last 25+ years through my spiritual path. I did not formally cut off contact but the distance helped although I still had some PSTD. I returned recently to the Midwest and found myself “triggered” by my abusive parent on several occasions so engaged in EMDR Therapy (described below). I used the alternative of tapping and found it very effective. Possibly it has to do with years of other work I’d done, but after one full session I noticed the electric edge of being triggered was absent. I am actually able to engage with this parent and be sympathetic, slightly amused but definitely detached. As if that excruciating ambilical cord to my mind had been cut. What a relief!
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy technique that can help people process traumatic memories and heal from trauma or other distressing experiences.
Re: “Dennis, that land line of mine is looking even more sensible than usual…”
I’m sorry to tell you that our landline, and the neighbours’ landlines, including one for a business office, for around a quarter mile up our road, have been dead as a dodo for the past two weeks. We all believe this may be due to a lorry going off the road at a point beyond which the dead landlines continue for a way. We have all been reporting this fault to call-line operators who are entirely sympathetic, but powerless. I get a very nice text every day telling me – “your situation matters to us, our engineers are working to restore your line as soon as possible.” Needless to say no telephone line crew has been spotted on any day anywhere in the vicinity.
So, the uneven decline is also affecting both the capacity and the urgency, to repair and maintain landlines as well. They will continue to be a backstop, so long as they remain entire, undamaged, and (eventually) unscavenged. But their days, too, are numbered.
Forecasting Intelligence @ 359, for how long has it been known that the Israelis are good at intelligence? Best in the world according to some. The Lord doesn’t love fools.
DFC @ 337 About AIPAC, etc. First the disgraceful exhibition at the Netanyahoo speech. My crongresscritter was there, participated and bragged about it on social media. I am voting against him for that reason alone. Now, I am an old woman (never been a lady and not about to start now) weirdo, but judging from the negative flyers I am seeing in my mail box in which congresscritter’s opponent, a mild mannered teacher who promotes vocational education, is denounced as a degenerate moron. CC is running a bit scared. Time will tell, but I can’t help wondering if AIPAC influence, and our tolerance of same has not peaked. Israel’s erstwhile progressive allies are furious and unforgiving over AIPAC taking out promising primary candidates in whom a lot of time and effort had been invested. African American voters, without whose enthusiastic support Democrats cannot hope to win national elections, are almost to a person anti Israel now. A goodly number of the AIPAC victims came from their ranks.
Quin and Commentariat,
My nephew passed this morning 10/1 after an extended illness. He was in his 40s. The family asks for prayers for his comfort and clarity during his transition.
Punky Little Kid
Were there intelligent beings around when the Late Permian extension event happened?
The link above (“The Next Ten Billion Years” sent me down another rabbit hole and I ended at your essay “The Way the Future Wasn’t.” There I read “…as America stumbled into its age of global empire after the Second World War, a very large number of its young men (and a much smaller but still significant fraction of its young women) had grown up daydreaming of rockets to Mars and adventures with the Space Patrol.” And then I thought of Trump and his Space Force. Great again, indeed.
Shane, thanks for this.
Tom, funny. Somebody with a talent for musical comedy really needs to write, and perform, the Harris Waltz.
Kenaz, delighted to hear it — Malcom is always entertaining and insightful. One note to my readers, though — my interview with Kenaz and Ahnaf is on Thursday, not tomorrow!
Yavanna, a brush with death quite often does that to some people. Trump grew up going to church — his pastor was none other than the New Thought writer Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, which is where Trump got his good working knowledge of New Thought methods — so it’s not at all surprising he would turn to Christianity more seriously after dodging two assassination attempts.
Clark, that’s a common reaction. Put up with it and keep going. Like most of the old correspondence courses, the BOTA course was written to be accessible to people with no background at all, and so it’s a little slow in the opening sections — and your patience, and your willingness to keep working, are among the things that are being tested.
Other Owen, the folks at the top enjoy themselves for a while, sure. Then their road starts getting very rough…
Eagle Fang, “invertebrate scum” is a keeper. Oh, for the glorious days when people knew how to flay the hides off their adversaries with well-chosen words, and never needed to waste their breath on profanities!
Audrey, positive energy en route.
Anonymous, good question. I don’t happen to know.
Roldy, yep. The nostalgic dimension in Trumpismo is very strong.
>The Israelis are like a gang of bank robbers cornered by the entire police force
Sigh. I really don’t want to have anything to do with them but here we go. I’d say they have more in common with Germany during WW2 and The South during the Murican Civil War. They have better trained, better led, better equipped soldiers and they perform better than their rivals, by far.
But that isn’t their problem. They have no depth. At some point fingers on triggers matter more than just about everything else. Casualties have always been an issue with them and they can’t take too many of them before their performance degrades. Part of the reason they’re going for genocide in Gaza (no matter what they say), they can’t sit and bleed for any period of time.
Here’s a question you should think about. What do you think Richmond would’ve done, if they had nukes and were getting overrun during the latter part of the Civil War? Or Berlin in the last days of WW2?
I wouldn’t park myself anywhere near Tel Aviv. Or Tehran. The strong nuclear force doesn’t care about your ideologies. Or your religions.
@JMG: I’m curious: whatever attracted you to the music of Rutland Boughton? I’d never heard of him. Probably a far cry from Wyndham Hill.
I write this as missiles fall on Tel Aviv. Israel is involved in yet another battle, this time a big one. It hasn’t won every battle, but its win ratio is pretty good; 5-1, 10-1, something of that order. And it will probably win this one too, especially with the the helping hand of Uncle Sam.
But is it winning the war? It started as a garrison nation surrounded by enemies who hated it and considered it illegitimate. 75 years later it is still a garrison nation surrounded by enemies who hate it and consider it illegitimate. That’s not progress. And looking forward, I get no sense that the situation will change in any material way.
FWIW I believe that a one-state solution where Jew, Christian, and Muslim live together under one set of laws is the only long-term solution. They don’t have to love each other, but with mutual respect they can get along, each contributing their particular talents to the common good.
Mary B wrote: “DFC @ 337 About AIPAC, etc. First the disgraceful exhibition at the Netanyahoo speech. My crongresscritter was there, participated and bragged about it on social media. I am voting against him for that reason alone. ”
My Crongresscritter voted in favor of the “Antisemitism Awareness Act” that equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Of course all but 90 of our Crongresscritters did the same. But that alone is enough reason to vote against her. I doubt her opponent in the upcoming election would have done differently, but still… Kudos to John Mearsheimer, and also to Jeffrey Sachs.
@Dennis, Scotlyn, JMG re. landlines: not much of a consolation around here. A few years back, the formerly state but now more or less privatized agency responsible for telecom infrastructure here in Norway proudly announced the old copper-based landline network would be physically dug up and removed, all in the name of our old friend “modernization”. Apparently it was “outdated and prone to problems” per an old page I found. Further down they speak in glowing terms about how 5G and fiber optic internet will bring the gifts of Progress to the faithful. These days you can still get an old-fashioned phone and subscription, but it’s actually using the mobile net.
For the first time since the industrial age began, we’re now without a solid physical telephone infrastructure. Rather than another step on the glorious march to the stars, this seems more like a small but symbolic step down the path of decline to me.
While I didn’t have a landline, this “upgrade” did actually result in me losing my wired internet access, so now the only reasonable option is using my phone as a modem, even if I’d rather not deal with the extra radiation in an ideal world. (There’s fiber optic, but the extreme speeds I don’t need also come with a very high price tag.) At least I don’t think there’s any 5G out here in my rural area yet, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.
Clay #373, that sounds plausible.
Netanyahu strikes me as a modern day Pyrrhus: with every brilliant victory he brings the demise of his country one step closer. He is always the smartest man in the room, but lacks the wisdom to consider that 7 million Israeli cannot survive long term when surrounded by 1,500 million antagonized muslims (a point that JMG made a long time ago).
Netanyahu can only imagine a safe Israel when it dominates the neighborhood at all costs. So he is dependent on killing ever larger quantities of his neighbours, and of a superpower in decline selling him weapons and propping up friendly regimes in the adjacent countries. It won’t end well.
Even if Israel “wins” the coming war, I think the country will soon become uninhabitable due to sustained attacks from all sides and a massive increase of terrorist actions within. Many Jews will leave the country and the rest will have to live in a ME version of North-Korea: an impoverished, hated, very authoritarian led country with nukes.
In my country we had recently posters put up in many places that say” Israel: you cannot heal your old trauma’s by creating new ones”. I think that sums it up, sadly.
Phutatorius, I ran across references to him in a book about the early 20th century occult scene in Glastonbury, England, and then happened to find a couple of CDs of his work for sale cheap. I’ve been intrigued to find a little group of British composers in the early to mid-20th century who still remembered how to write music — Boughton, Cyril Scott, Gustav Holst, Percy Grainger, Charles Stanford, Vaughan Williams before he got old and grumpy.
Kim A., I know. That’s going to speed up the process by which technology implodes. I wrote about that a long time ago here:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2006/07/climbing-down-ladder.html
Martin Back says:
October 1, 2024 at 3:14 pm
“FWIW I believe that a one-state solution where Jew, Christian, and Muslim live together under one set of laws is the only long-term solution. They don’t have to love each other, but with mutual respect they can get along, each contributing their particular talents to the common good.”
That was exactly what Nasrallah was defending in many of his speeches.
@LeGrand Cinq-Mars #352
Thanks for the write up, it was an interesting read. You bring up a great point, which is that demons are not the only nonhuman characters that Frieren presents to its audience, and the other species are treated in a much more sympathetic way. This at least leaves out the possibility that the story is about how different species could not possibly get along, but simply as you said, is it possible to conceive of a form of intelligent life that is fundamentally incompatible with the human species? I can see why ideologically that is an uncomfortable idea for some people, but I think dismissing the possibility is ultimately anthropocentric, or perhaps just comes from a belief that intelligent beings should be able to understand each other on a rational level. Personally, I don’t think morals are strictly rational, so I think it is possible for intelligent life to exist that simply doesn’t value human life and never will.
This conversation is probably wrapping up, so I’ll close by saying that this is, of course, just my current thinking on the issue. I’m open to being wrong on any number of points and may change my mind depending on what happens in the future. Thanks to everyone who decided to contribute to the discussion, it was interesting reading what you had to say.
JMG, re English composers there also was George Butterworth, who died at the Somme in 1916.
>a one-state solution where Jew, Christian, and Muslim live together under one set of laws is the only long-term solution
It existed. It was called The Ottoman Empire. Was on its last legs when WW1 broke out and got chopped up afterwards. Ever since then, the powers that emerged after WW2 have been dealing with the wreckage of that empire. Iraq? Ottoman wreckage. Syria? Palestine, er, Israel? You could argue the same.
You hear Turkey making noises about bringing it back but I’ll believe it when I see it. At least they like petting cats in Istanbul.
Historically, that part of the world has been rolled up into one empire or another. My guess is the beginnings of another Caliphate or Empire will be rolling everything up in that area by 2100 or 2200.
@Anonymous #230: This is in fact an interesting observation. C.S. Lewis, in the last chapter of The Allegory of Love, draws attention to Spenser’s characterization of night and darkness. Throughout the immense Fairie Queene, every single night is called “sad”, “dreary” and so on, and every single daybreak is celebrated.
In European poetry, there is one genre that celebrates night and is afraid of daybreak, and that is the poetry of secret love. Donne calls the morning sun “Busy old foole”. But Spenser might have disapproved. It took Novalis to completely invert the value judgement with his Hymns to the Night, inaugurating Romantic poetry.
It would need somebody with deeper knowledge of Chinese, Indian, Persian, Arabic etc. cultures than I have to tell if the characterization of night is entirely distinct from the medieval and early modern European one.
“Yet to read the essay, you’d imagine the three of us are all part of some dark druid order distracting preteens from puberty blockers by getting them to like trees.”
How can I sign up for this group?
@ Dave and Owen
When I recommend a one-state solution, I’m not thinking of Nasrallah’s vision or the Ottoman empire, I’m thinking of South Africa where I live.
We tried a two-state solution, actually a multi-state solution, with several “independent” bantustans. It didn’t work because the bantustans weren’t buying it, despite massive investments in their development.
So now we are one state. It’s not perfect, there are many problems like crime and corruption, but it’s working and doesn’t need an army to keep the peace.
“And it will probably win this one too, especially with the the helping hand of Uncle Sam.”
1st-Define “win” please…not in Pyrric terms.
2nd-The helping hand of Uncle Sam is dubious, because the U.S. are getting weaker and weaker as Empire every day…
Audrey/Punky Little Kid, I’m so sorry to hear this. Please accept my condolences. Clearly this was Jon with ALS who was previously on the prayer. I will add a new prayer for him now.
This news comes simultaneous with a prayer I am adding for an old friend of mine who also has a diagnosis of ALS. It’s funny how these things work sometimes. Anyway, may Jon’s transition be blessed.