This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.
First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.
Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their follow-up comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here, and have extended that ban to LLM-generated content of all kinds.
With that said, have at it!
First, happy Autumnal Equinox! Any suggested rites to welcome in this wet season?
So, you have done astrological ingresses for Washington DC and London for this equinox, just as you did for the eclipses. Have you considered doing such astrological predictions for other nations? I would be particularly interested in Moscow, Tehran, and Beijing, as the other great powers of the world. I’m sure you already have enough on your plate, but it would be quite interesting to compare and contrast the fates of all the great powers, in my opinion.
Thank you as always for your work.
I had my ghast flabbered big time this weekend, right out of “WTF?!?!” field. Best write-up is at Epoch Times, “Why Are Steers Lactating?”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/why-are-steers-lactating-6073229
Apparently the audit done by the grad student was completed for spring of 2025, and was based on some studies from about 2007. I have no clue how the media (not just mainstream!) have been able to ignore this for so long … or why it hasn’t hit a front page yet.
I started saying there is something really wrong with the US food supply almost 20 years ago, and to my eyes the change happened sometime around the mid- to late-1980s. It doesn’t seem to be the HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup), as I have conducted a multiyear n=1 or 2 of me drastically reducing the things I buy with HFCS and did not see noticeable results (nor really felt any either). The other really major change in food I remember from that time was replacing animal fats with seed oils, and trying to eliminate THOSE is exponentially more difficult.
There were quite a few major changes in agriculture during that time as well. Hubby and I raise our own meat chickens because I was able to walk into and around a broiler house in the early 90s, and that smell is pretty unforgettable. This spring as beef prices did their climb (I doubt they’re done yet) I made the decision: “If I am gonna be paying this much for beef, I want it done local and right.” Seeing the bit about lactating STEERS this weekend has made hubby and me feel a lot better about that decision. If you dig into the numbers on the original poster, you’ll also see the audit even found four intact bullocks that were lactating. (Original poster is page 34 of this pdf https://theplainsnutritioncouncil.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/2025-PNC-Spring-Conference-Graduate-Student-Poster-Proceedings.pdf )
I’m not sure if we are more fracked or flocked, but if this has been going on for several years, now suddenly it makes sense a lot of girls are going into puberty younger than average. Add in the ubiquity of plastic and ag runoff (some are known endocrine disruptors) and things don’t look too good for the home team here in the USA.
Katrina (formerly dfr1973)
Hey JMG,
Since you’ve announced a few more projects in comments on MM recently, I was curious what books you’re currently working on. Is the following list about right?
– Four books on esoteric mathematics
– A sacred geometry manual for Freemasons
– The Technonomicon
– A book on planetary magic using the SoP
– Something on renaissance mind training, IIRC
– The remaining Ariel Moravec series
– A new Weird of Hali trilogy
And in addition to that, you also write a weekly blog post, field comments on that, answer questions on Magic Monday, have three monthly open posts, do mundane astrology, and keep up with everything that’s going on. I know your standard reply to “where do you find the time” is that you don’t own a television, so let me phrase that differently: if it’s not too personal a question, just how many hours a day do you work?
On another note, the state of German politics is very interesting right now: the oh-so-fascist AfD is all but guaranteed to run a state government for the first time (for which the King in Orange himself congratulated them, which is kind of wild considering how utterly irrelevant state-level politics are globally), the CDU has, also for the first time, not gotten a single seat in a different state parliament, and Berlin is most likely going to be governed by the ruling party of the last German dictatorship, who are now collaborating with Islamists and criminal clans.
Despite the latter point, I’m cautiously optimistic. Unfortunately, the German left are not giving up without a fight. Which is why one company from Hamburg has created limited edition “know-it-all toilet paper”¹, displaying “facts”² and cartoons meant to show evil right-wingers the error of their ways. That is, as far as I can tell, a real product: https://goldeimer.de/products/das-klugscheisser-klopapier
I really wish I could’ve been present at the meeting this was proposed. Somebody has to have raised his hand and said something like this: “I’ve got a brilliant idea. You know how we could really own the chuds? Get them to wipe their posteriors with our opinions!”
—David P.
[1] A literal translation of the name that loses a pun as the German word for know-it-all has to do with defecation.
[2] Amusingly, the one such fact I found cited online is that 75% of German billionaires have inherited their fortune. While I know that’s supposed to tell me that billionaires are evil and I should vote for the state to redistribute their money, that actually seems surprisingly good to me. I would’ve thought that far fewer than 25% of our billionaires are self-made.
Hello everyone and happy open post.
I have a few more entries in my American Psychogeography project, following the last one I posted on Ecosophia.
AP Part 8: Tail Pipe Fumes and the Limits to Oil (on the OPEC Embargo and Limits to Growth)
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/tail-pipe-fumes-and-the-limits-to-oil
AP Part 9: Booms, Blowouts, Bayous and Burbs (heading to Texas, from Spindletop to its metastatic growth)
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/booms-blowouts-bayous-and-burbs
AP 10: Houston, We Have A Serial Killer Problem: KPFT vs KKK, Nasa, and the Candy Man Killer
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/houston-we-have-a-serial-killer-problem
I hadn’t intended to write true crime, but in the last part that’s where the story took me. People who are interested in the Epstein case might be interested in this last article, in that it deals with a “white slavery” ring in the seventies and the possible connection between some of the most horrific crimes of the decade.
I am working on one more for the Texas area and then will be heading back out into other parts of the country again.
Good morning JMG,
I hope you had a good week last week.
Randomly thoughts, in between times “when NOT to post”:
I just came across three letters, VPN. What IS that?
Virtual private network.
I looked it up. I am quite sure Jethro has sheltered me for decades.
It is what Jethro set up here in the house,— I would guess,— if I understand correctly. All of it is stuff I have zero understanding of.
VPNing was Jethro’s world. If,— no, when,— our house’s VPN goes down, and it becomes not worth getting it to come back up, I am outta here regarding the Internut (“Interbeast”). At some point, it will likely be “my cell phone and me”; the Interbeast will be too much hassle and/or too dangerous (thieves) and/or too expensive to continue. At some point, rather than resurrect the Interbeast, let me have maggots feast on my dead flesh,— that is how much I have grown to loathe the Interbeast.
This means, if the moniker ‘Northwind Grandma’ is no longer evident here among the commentariat for several weeks, when I am gone, I hope to have emailed JMG some last communication(s), that I won’t be back on the Interbeast. Frankly, at that time, I don’t even know if I will be dead and gone, after seeing what happened with Jethro dying: here today, gone tomorrow.
I am getting too old for Interbeast aggravation. JMG’s blog is about the only thing worthwhile.
Jethro clued me in enough (over decades) about what the Interbeast has turned into,— thieves and scammers. The Interbeast brought to light a realm which should have been kept hidden; it is cockroaches having come out of the woodwork. The Interbeast needs to return to its permanent blackout status; humanity needs to be “let be.” The overlording Interbeast interferes.
Jethro witnessed the whole long process of ‘little’ desktop computerizaton (turning into ‘big server’ computerization), maybe not at the very, very beginning, but pretty close to the beginning: 1994 Darpanet. Jethro was on Darpanet that far back (32 years). Darpanet was related to fedgovmint.
Now the Interbeast is largely thievery: huge, big, small, and petty. The Interbeast has evolved into “how can we more efficiently suck the life out of Americans, leaving their skeletons in a roadside ditch”? Jethro was a spectator to it all, up-close-and-personal. And I watched him watch. And I watched too, but from a different angle: typesetting and graphics. The last year of Jethro’s life, I don’t think he could visualize a world without the current Interbeast,— more than once, he read stuff on “the death of the Interbeast,” and he got super-upset, I mean, soul-upset; the issue tore him apart inside.
Why would we voluntarily offer our virtue to pillagers? Half of me doesn’t want to be connected to the Interbeast at all. No online nothin’.
I think, gladly, perhaps, I will be have died, in real life. I won’t mind.
Then be reincarnated as a fetus or baby somewhere, maybe more than one try at a birth. Nope, abusive parent: beginning-baby, I am out of here, dead baby; another womb, nope, not a good match, I am out of there, dead baby; a third womb, ah, cool, a mother who meditates, I will stick it out until I get born, they want me, let’s give it a try, but hey, female+male biological parents, if they give me too much grief, I am out of there again, dead baby. I am willing to do a few “dead baby tricks” until I find the right female and right male coupling to make birthing and childhood worthwhile. Gimme some farm parents. Gimme some trade-school parents. Gimme Wisconsin. Gimme Amish. Gimme dark ages.
Technologically, things have moved too fast the last thirty-odd years to be healthy. I don’t understand the world anymore. I tried my darndest to keep up since the mid-1980s. And the issue is not only my age (74). There are zillions of people younger than I,— who don’t understand the world. And never will (understand the world). And has no possibility of understanding,— not because of themselves, but because of what our culture has become.
Just get me back to 1975; I not only was 23, but the world was UNDERSTANDABLE. Now, believe-you-me, the world is NOT understandable. No matter how much one tries.
And, the world is WAY too expensive.
So I have to ask. Why not trash “the scammers”? In the trashing, we gain.
Why are we holding up a world of marauders? Why are we holding up “elites”? Why don’t we all get minimal FLIP cell/mobile phones (voice calls; text-messaging; email); trashing smartphones? When the time is right, I may take a sledgehammer to our smartphones and iOS tablets. I will keep my Nook (“Android”) reader though.
No WiFi.
No Blootoof.
No multi-media messaging.
No digital photography.
No video recording.
No gaming.
No TV streaming.
No satellite navigation.
No online payments.
No online banking.
Some people could stop using one or more of these,— quietly, silently,— many of our household partners wouldn’t even notice. Or we never get into said technology in the first place; it is verboten to children.
Disengaging Jethro’s online accounts has been arduous, voluminous, and a flocking nightmare. Locating his online accounts, then “trying” to cancel the accounts, then actually cancelling the accounts, and the accounts’ spidery ways of siphoning off monthly fees,— having one’s credit card and bank veins tapped by “automatic payments.” I am having to view a computer world I don’t like one bit, and, by the minute, sickens me. I feel the tendrils.
Just grant me a crossroads general store, a bit of cash, a couple radios, a new body, a virtuous family, and that would be a start to my being okay again. Bring back 1975. Or 1905. Or even 1805.
As Antony and the Johnson put forth in music: “I need another world. This one’s nearly gone.”
💨🫥🏚️💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
I thought this article on “Amish Wisdom for the Coming World” out on Naked Capitalism this morning was a good read:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/amish-wisdom-for-the-coming-world.html
It addresses scale: “Even in the small city of my youth, the people lived in neighborhoods first and the city second.”
” They also have no bureaucracy to speak of. No central headquarters, no synods, no president or chief executive to lord over a C-suite. We would do much better to practice, to the extent possible as do the Amish, subsidiarity as a way of life, with decisions made as close to their consequences as possible. That we as a people and a nation have never practiced this very well does not mean it shouldn’t be the goal.”
It addresses parenting: “In recent years some baby boomers were surprised to learn that their grandchildren had enrolled in Adulting 101 workshops. From the University of California, Berkeley, to Temple University, Philadelphia, thousands of college seniors were enrolled in noncredit classes to learn how to survive in the adult world. Life skills – how to do laundry, cook a meal, change a tire, manage a budget, rent an apartment, and prepare taxes – had somehow slipped through their educational preparation. Adulting curricula address the unmet needs of students who feel unprepared to cope in a world of adults.”
It seems some of those skills might be addressed in the Technonomicon… I thought this “adulting” book was pretty good and gave it to my daughter and her ex when they moved to Hawaii while he was in the Navy
Heading out on your own by Brett and Kate McKay
It goes into the good of appreniceship, the tempering nature of suffering, forgiveness and why negotiation never ends.
TemporaryReality 243 (16 Sept 2026 of last week)
> on Calgarianexplorer
Each man to himself attitude.
Companies not promoting family culture (or culture) any more.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1wjydiy/what_warning_signs_of_a_worsening_economy_are_you/
me: I asked, what is “family culture”? I never heard of it. I have heard of family ‘values,’ like “Addams Family Values.”
Then I went to a link of an organization I recognize:
https://www.focusonthefamily.com/planned-giving-legacy-post/what-is-family-culture/
them: “So what is family culture? It’s when we have a specific set of articulated values, a vision for a way of life and a mission of living that out daily. Taking off what [blankety-blank] says, family is one of the first places we find meaning in the world.“
me: Ahh, I got it: ‘family values.’
Since World War II (1945 onwards), Americans (of all income levels) have given zero attention to family values: junk food is what Americans most value. Americans are in BIG trouble if they are unable to forge values pretty darn quick. (I am not optimistic.) Or else my crystal ball says Americans will resort to thievery, thuggery, and other dastardly deeds, as value-substitutes, on a regular basis. They won’t/don’t care who they hurt, as long as they “get theirs.” They will either partake of crime, or war.
Or, as a third choice, Americans defaulting to “Mean Cuss Borderline Personality Disorder.”
Heaven forbid Americans ponder formal training in a trade school (for a year or two; no matter age or gender). Why not learn a skill like welder, cook, or, for sitters, bookkeeping? (aka skilled trades) Heaven forbid they learn to “pinch pennies,” which by now is “pinch 50¢’s.” Heaven forbid, they learn about humility or repentance.
💨🫥🥷🏼💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Had a thought last night, related to your essay about the cause of the Axial Age being the shift from oral cultures to literate cultures, with the corresponding shift from concrete and practical thinking to abstract and idealistic thinking.
In Judaism and Hinduism, this transformation completed successfully, and the older pre-Axial tradition has to be carefully reconstructed from fragments of evidence. The older tradition was reinterpreted and re-edited to fit Axial ideals. So references to the Hebrews’ earlier polytheism are either edited out or treated as an anomaly that was overcome. From what I tell, Hinduism has a similar issue: the earliest scriptures treated the Asuras as gods and have references to the gods eating meat; these seem to have been reinterpreted metaphorically or simply glossed over.
Shifting back to Europe, among the Celtic and Germanic religions, this shift arguably didn’t really get a chance to take off before Christianity swept away the old faith. But in the Greco-Roman religions, the shift was about halfway complete when Christianity took over. So you have clear records of both the older, pragmatic polytheism and the newer, philosophical reinterpretations of the Neoplatonists, Stoics, etc. that were starting to take hold.
One implication is that this potentially charts a reasonably clear course of what would have happened if the polytheist faiths had continued instead of being replaced: they would have been increasingly reinterpreted and re-edited just like Judaism and Hinduism, and we might very well have ended up right where they seem to be headed now.
PLEASE NOTE: I have removed a large number of out of date prayers from the list. If this affected your prayer, I invite you to update it. The full list of removed prayers can be found here.
At this page is the full list of all of the non-faith-specific requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 9/17). 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.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Beyond the Wild Wood’s husband, Rob, who died on September 18 after a long and painful struggle with congestive heart failure, be relieved of all pain and fear, and be comforted, cherished, loved, and restored in the pure light of heaven.
May JC of Geauga County, Ohio, who is fighting cancer, be blessed and uplifted so that he may receive the healing he needs and recover as best as possible.
May NebulousRealms be protected from hostile spiritual entities and curses at this time, so that he may be grounded, in accordance with the will of his Higher Self.
May Lisa C be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from breast cancer.
May Open Space’s oldest friend’s mother Judith recover her strength and health completely.
May 6 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Trubujahs’s mother-in-law, Helen, who is currently hospitalized after side effects from chemotherapy for her pancreatic cancer became a liver infection, be filled with vitality and be healed of all serious ailments; may Helen’s mind and spirit remain strong in the face of these ordeals.
May Brother Kornhoer’s daughter Katharine have strength in acknowledging her situation, total honesty with others as she works her way out of it, fortitude so that she can put in the work necessary to get out of her situation, and divine guidance on how to proceed. May she face her problems squarely and not hide from them, and may her anxiety be dissolved through trust and acceptance of divine assistance.
May Matthew Jussaume be granted healing and relief from his Multiple Sclerosis. May the Divine guide him to health, as well as grant him guidance for dealing with the condition.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin continue to make progress in her healing toward full mobility, and prayers for strength and support for her family.
May Atmospheric River’s gall bladder full of gallstones heal and be filled with such vitality that her current stones diminish, her comfort increases, and her gall bladder remains free of new stones.
May Northwind Grandma’s husband Jeff, who passed away unexpectedly on July 22, be blessed and make a peaceful transition to his next destination; may he be healed of the “wound in his heart” that he held in life.
May Jeff’s cat Henry accept, twice a day, Northwind’s giving him his Flovent inhaler dose and pill, and let her take him to the veterinarian once a month for an injection.
May Anonymuz get the strength and resolve he needs in his endeavors for justice, and may truth and justice be served.
May Lukeszy’s father’s post-surgery swelling be healed.
May Helen in Oz be free of inflammation in her biceps and shoulder, and may she be successful in the slow process of regaining pain-free range of movement and increased muscle mass and strength therein.
May 1Wanderers’s partner Cathy, who is still undergoing chemotherapy in preparation for a surgery, be given the physical and mental strength to fight it, and tolerate the treatment; may she enjoy a full and permanent recovery.
May Dustin, a relative of Brenainn, who still has some lingering issues in his ongoing recovery from a heart condition, be healed and strengthened.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis’s reconstructive surgery on his left ureter go well; may his right kidney heal; and may his empty nose syndrome abate.
May Brother Kornhoer be able to afford his son’s international surgery.
May a safe and happy home environment be enjoyed by Laurelmirror, her daughter, and her mother, as well as protection from evil influences. May their family situation be resolved in such a way that Laurelmirror’s mother will get a chance to recover physically and mentally from the stresses it has caused.
May Geoff G’s sister Lindsay, who suffered a stroke at the end of May, recover to the fullest extent possible, and be blessed and supported in her mental wellbeing throughout.
May Mathew Damon Gallowglass, who has been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, be treated successfully for his condition and make a full recovery.
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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.
Any time JMG writes on topics that help us understand the ongoing civilizational collapse, I read in full not only his post but also the comments. I finally got around this morning to thoughtfully reading the post of last week on hallucinated wealth. Now I am 1/3 of the way thru the comments and astounded by how much additional history/perspective/wisdom I gain from those who post! First, I want to thank JUSTIN PATRICK MOORE, #92, who alerted me to the death of Annie Dillard. Such an inspiration for my own writings in the 90s, I went to her legacy page and posted on the importance of a brief communication she and I had on the writer Loren Eiseley. Second, for any readers who recall JMG mentioning last week CLIVE PONTING’s book, do know that my late husband, Michael Dowd, freely recorded an AUDIO “Synopsis-Green History of the World” (4 hours) along with another author’s “Overview” of it (1.5 hours). Dowd posted both on his Soundcloud account in August 2020. It is really tough to do searches on Soundcloud, but this url got me to it this morning: https://soundcloud.com/search?q=Green%20History%20of%20the%20World Alas, Google and other search engines just don’t get into the Soundcloud database nearly as well as into Youtube — which is why I’ve formatted into video and posted on youtube many of Dowd’s free audio narrations (which thus far include 2 of Greer’s books, along with several Ophuls). I’m working now on getting Catton’s Overshoot book audio, posted on Soundcloud long ago, ready for Youtube posting.
David P @ 3, If I may ask, what is it about which you are “cautiously optimistic”? Do you expect the AfD, about which I don’t know enough to venture an opinion, to govern well? We have had govt./criminal clan alliances in the US, and usually, the public does not benefit. J. Edgar famously was so obsessed with Communism that he overlooked if not actively enabled the growth and flourishing of “alternate governments”.
JMG
There’s something about shipping companies that I’d like to get your thoughts on. All of the big companies FedEx, UPS, etc. have internal maps of the US that are broken up into what they call “networks” based on how far a truck can get to in 24 hour period. It got me thinking, as the US continues its decline how much will the maintenance of road infrastructure will determine the possible shape of future borders?
Basically it looks like the US could be easily broken into 5-8 separate zones based on highway infrastructure alone.
Alexis de Tocqueville predicted in the 1830s that the USA and Russia would be the main powers of the future.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1265628-there-are-at-the-present-time-two-great-nations-in
https://eppc.org/publication/tocquevilles-comparison-of-america-and-russia-updated/
I wonder what he would say at the present with both powers acting like rogue states.
I thought of a better nickname for the Internut than “Interbeast.”
Interwretch.
💨🫥👾💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Here is something else people might find interesting, an article about the use of stone spout water systems connected to aquifers in Nepal.
https://nextcity.org/features/nepals-water-infrastructure-is-failing-so-residents-are-reviving-an-ancient
What I thought was interesting was how they retrovated to these ancient stone spouts because their modern water system has become very contaminated. Besides the spouts looking really cool with gargoyle like dragon carvings, it was interesting to think of what might happen when our contemporary arrangements for getting water around get messed up for various reasons.
JMG, thank you for previously linking your blog post regarding The Ever-present Origin, by Jean Gebser. I think you raise some fair criticisms. So far I have a more positive view of his work; I think there are many valuable insights in there. But, I am still just a little over halfway through it (it is not quick or light reading!), so I will wait and share my more detailed thoughts after I’ve finished it.
Best,
Raen
Surprising find; doom is not occurring. Like has been patching up radiation damage since it began. The planet was much more radioactive 4 billion years ago.
https://www.sciencealert.com/150000-tons-of-radioactive-waste-were-dumped-in-the-atlantic-decades-later-its-visibly-oozing
As for the great seed oil debate, chemically speaking they are not interchangeable. I have been concentrating on avoiding soybean and corn oils due to their high content of linoleic acid. Linoleic is an essential nutrient but you overdo any essential nutrient if you are determined.
I’ve been busy so I haven’t been keeping up with the comments but I have been reading your posts.
Thank you! You’ve enlightened me in so many ways.
I’d mentioned a few posts ago that Bill and I are working on our new movie review book, “Jane Austen, She Watched.”
We’re still in the weeds of “Hollywood History of Jane Austen’s Era.” I am now posting those reviews on my new Substack. If you’re interested in films that fit into late Georgian/Regency (1760 to 1837, or from the crowning of George III to the crowing of Victoria), you can find me at https://teresapeschel.substack.com/publish/home
I’m developing, slowly, a HUGE list of films, miniseries, and tv shows that fit within this period. I won’t watch them but I will provide the list in the finished JA,SW. There must be hundreds. I had no idea of the quantity or the range.
What’s so amazing about this period is how much happened! If you only read Jane’s novels or Regency romance ala Georgette Heyer, you have no idea about the bigger picture of wars, riots, colonization, corruption, revolution, licentiousness, and graft. No wonder the Victorians reacted so strongly. They didn’t want to repeat their parents and grandparents’ mistakes and so raised an entire new crop of their own.
Musing on what you said last week about numbers:
David Chapman has one of the more creative interpretations I’ve seen of the Buddhist concept of emptiness — sunyata. In his interpretation, it asserts the insight that concepts never quite map exactly onto reality (this includes the concept of “self”). The great insight of the Heart Sutra under this interpretation is that they don’t entirely fail to apply, either — pure chaos is as much an abstraction as pure order.
Rather what happens is we see things in the world that are like the concepts we have in our heads in some ways, but never exactly like them. We can still use the concepts if they are close enough, but they work because we make them work, adjusting to the difficulties as we go.
He calls this concept “nebulosity” — literally cloud-like-ness — because clouds exhibit the idea more clearly than a stone: like stones, clouds are physical things, they have mass, volume, locations in space, etc. but you don’t have to zoom in too closely before the fit of “cloud” and “physical object” starts to break down. How many molecules are there in that cloud? The answer can only ever be approximate because “the set of molecules in this particular cloud” is only an approximate notion.
The insight of shunyata is that this applies to the stone, too, you just have to look harder for it.
If I’ve understood you correctly, this is essentially what you said last post about math and numbers: it works because we make it work, but ultimately it isn’t any more objective (or subjective, for that matter) than whether a particular molecule belongs to a particular cloud. (Also, “particular molecule” and “particular cloud” are starting to look mighty suspicious…)
Hi JMG. I was wondering how likely you think it is that the powers that be will eventually attempt geoengineering of the planet. (The most likely form being adding particulates into the atmosphere, which would be cheap, and simulate volcanic eruptions.)
@Siliconguy #17
I’m not at all a fan of dumping nuclear or other waste into the ocean, but it makes perfect sense that if you package up a dense source of energy and leave it lying around, evolution will eventually figure out a way to capture that energy and use it.
JMG
Since you requested I repost this in the open post, here is the original comment concerning the Book of Revelation and provisional living. I also have been working on an idea about how to respond to the CCRU/Landian thought of Revelation being a hyperstition for AI, but I’m still working on it.
Here’s the original comment:
I hope not to derail the comments too much, but seeing some of the comments about the Apocalypse of John (aka the Book of Revelation) makes me want to give an interesting take that is somewhat relevant. In my view the Apocalypse (as all apocalypses are in a way) is a hypostition meant to encourage provisional living. The general idea is that the evil powers of the world will one day get their comeuppance by means of powers outside of your control, thus you the reader/hearer of the apocalypse do not have to do anything about the secular powers oppressing you.
Irenaeus actually used this exact logic against the gnostics in Against Heresies 5:26 when he (as an infallible bishop inspired by the Holy Spirit, which was passed down from the Apostles and Jesus himself, see AH 3:3) interpreted the Apocalypse of John as meaning that the collapse of the Roman Empire was to be the prelude to the Second Coming of Jesus and the end of the world and the eternal earthly kingdom of Christ. Thus Christians should stop resisting Roman (and church) authorities that are oppressing them, otherwise they are heretics.
Ugh, hit send on the last comment to @Siliconguy just as a thought of a prime example:
Billions of years ago, gravity bundled up a bunch of energy-rich hydrogen into a star (the Sun), and not too long after (all things considered), one of the rockier balls going around that star figured out how to use all that available energy to make life in the first place. (From the point of view of entropy, life is first and foremost a way of taking available energy and converting it to background heat.)
To start off I’d like to say a big thank you for what you do and the wealth of knowledge you offer for free (or reasonable cost books). It’s my first time contacting you since finding out about you a few months ago.
Considering I am fairly new to this blog, I really hope a fellow patron can point me in the right direction since I am sure these questions have been answered before. I tried searching through the blog for an answer but did not find what I was looking for.
I have been reading a Chinese web novel called Lord of Mysteries, and in it the protagonist uses a meditation technique to induce sleep fairly quickly in somewhat stressful situations to do some sleep divination.
My questions are: do you use any techniques to sleep? If so could you describe it (or someone point me to a blog he already wrote about this)? If the answer is yes (or that you know of one), is there a downside to using it regularly compared to going to sleep normally?
I have heard of meditation techniques where you visualize each extremity to the core of your body shutting down one at a time, as well as visualization of a peaceful environment. I was just wondering if you knew anything more about this, perhaps you employ a more esoteric approach.
I typically don’t have problems sleeping but sometimes doing hard exercise too close to bedtime has me too high strung to fall asleep early enough to get enough sleep. Normal breathing exercises help cool down my mind and body, but it’s not 100% effective (at my current skill level at least).
On a slightly related note, is lucid dreaming too much unhealthy(this question is not important, just had that thought pop up in my head while writing this)?
If anyone can answer the questions for him that is alright too!
I’ve got a couple of offers for everybody today:
1. I recently published two essays about the elements and the elemental symbols in the Modern Order of Essenes. The exploration leads into other areas of Western occultism, too, to give the necessary context. Thus the essays might be of interest not just to MOE practitioners, but also to other people interested in the topic.
Part 1 can be found here: https://thehiddenthings.com/the-elements-in-the-moe-part-1 , part 2 is linked to at the bottom of the first.
2. Each Wednesday, I perform a formal blessing in which I bless everybody who has signed up for it. If you’d like to be blessed in any given week, you can sign up at the latest post here: https://thehiddenthings.com/categories/weekly-blessings
And finally, congratulations to the newly minted MOE Masters who received their final attunement on Sunday! I hope some of you will consider to continue on the path and become Master Teachers… 🙂
A wonderful Wednesday to all of you, and thanks a lot, JMG, for hosting an Open Post again,
Milkyway
I would like to test a theory I’ve held onto for a year now. Sensitive Chaos by Theodor Schwenk is, on one level of meaning, a manual/description for creating subtle bodies. Particularly the concept of gastrulation.
@Noah #24
This might not be the answer you’re looking for, but most people find meditating while lying down quite often puts you to sleep — which is why it’s rarely the recommended position.
As for lucid dreaming, I think the answer right now is probably “not enough data” — the ability to induce lucid dreaming when you want to is still rare enough that it’s probably hard to measure the long-term effects. It’s known that you need both REM and non-REM sleep for best rest, and lucid dreaming AFAIK gives you only the former, so there must be some effect, but how far you have to push it before it becomes a problem is likely still an open question.
Paedrig, (1) well, what kind of magic do you know how to do? (2) There are only so many hours in a day, and astrology has to find room among many other commitments of mine. I’ve been hoping all along that I would inspire others to do those other capitals.
KM, that’s why I have reproductive-system problems, widespread infertility, and a relatively large number of intersexed people in my deindustrial novel Star’s Reach. It’s set in 2480 or so, in a postdecline world, and endocrine disruptors, mutagens, and the long-term effects of nuclear waste are part of the backdrop of ordinary life.
David, I’ve already finished the book on Renaissance mind training — in fact, I approved the page proofs yesterday — and the Haliverse trilogy is also finished. The books on esoteric math and geometry for Masons are on the slow burner right now, while I read everything available on the subject; my current top of the stack projects are Revisioning Cabalistic Magic, which is a sequel to my recent book on the Tree of Life; the Technonomicon, which will be more than half written by other people; and a seventh Ariel Moravec novel, The Marble Sphinx — book 5 of that series, The Sign of the Phoenix, is in press, and book 6, The Greater Key, is finished in draft. That is to say, my current workload is less overwhelming than it looks. How many hours a day do I work? It varies depending on what else I have to do, but it’s usually 6-10 hours or so. As for the rest, is there a German profanity that doesn’t have to do with defecation? 😉
Justin, thanks for this.
Northwind, thanks for the heads up. A lot of people are quietly backing away from online stuff, you know — and some of us never got into it in the first place.
Justin, thanks for this also!
Slithy, yep. Japan is a fascinating example along the same lines — it became literate most of a millennium after the Axial Age, and then preserved Shinto in a half-mummified form, so it’s a fascinating look into what polytheism looks like without much Axial Age influence. You can see the same thing in some African traditional societies where literacy also came late.
Quin, thank you for this as always,
Connie, good to see you again — I know you’re very busy but I appreciate it when you can drop in.
Anon, to some extent, yes. Keep in mind, though, that as road systems decay, waterborne transport will become more important again, and the coasts, the Great Lakes and certain river systems will become major transport routes, with necessary impacts on boundaries.
Gunstone, I don’t think he’d be surprised at all. “Rogue state” is a term that imperial powers use for states that don’t submit to the order imposed on them from above; since no imperial power obeys the rules it enforces on others, all superpowers are rogue states.
Justin, there’s retrovation for you!
Raen, so noted. Gebser’s work is brilliant in detail; it’s the metanarrative he tries to impose on all of history that makes it a failure overall, in my view.
Siliconguy, funny about that. Somebody mentioned something like that in a blog post a couple of years ago:
https://ecosophia.net/the-laughter-of-wolves/
Teresa, glad to hear it. I rather like “the crowing of Victoria,” btw, typo or not. Cock-a-doodle don’t!
Slithy, hmm! I’ll have to read Chapman, because yes, that’s exactly what I’m talking about, using numbers as an example. Can you recommend a book or two?
EnviroJoe, it’s already being done. You might find this website useful:
https://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/
Anon, thank you. Revelation is written in the standard symbolic language of Jewish apocalyptic, and when translated into plaintext, it’s a prediction of the fall of the Roman Empire — and, weirdly enough, a fairly accurate one. (The author even got the horsemen coming out of the east.) I don’t see it so much as an encouragement of provisional living, though, but rather as an attempt to give an embattled community courage and hope in difficult times. It was written and circulated at a time when going to war against Rome was suicidal — the Jewish revolt of 66 AD was only one of many rebellions put down by Roman armies with maximum Schrecklichkeit — and encouraged Christians to avoid self-defeating rebellions and accept the current reality for the time being, in the hope that things would change eventually. As of course they did!
Noah, I don’t use any such technique. I stay up until I’m sleepy and then go to bed. Mind you, if I knew a method I’d probably use it; as a widower, I don’t always sleep so well — if you sleep nestled up with someone for 42 years, sleeping alone lacks charm — but there it is. As for lucid dreaming, my understanding is that if you need dreamless sleep, your nervous system will make sure you get some.
Milkyway, thanks for this.
Luke, not merely creating subtle bodies, interacting and working with them as well. Good for you, that you caught that.
If this is too blatantly obvious please delete this note.
I have been seeing a lot in the media I follow about how the wars in Iran and Russia are causing oil and other resource shortages.
What occurred to me is that the wars aren’t causes but symptoms of the longer term shortages and decline.
What happens when a resource starts running out? You get hoarding; you get fights over what is left; you get some parties destroying other’s supply – if they can’t have any then no-one else will.
That’s exactly what I’m seeing.
It seems to me the wars and resource destruction are likely typical symptoms of a period of resource decline, and that we are right on schedule. In the long run I don’t know if they make much significant difference in timing.
Northwind Grandma – I truly won’t be able to speak for any reddit commentators, but I can address your questions to the best of my ability.
My sense is that “family culture” may refer to the parts of general culture (at work or in daily life) that reflect the general consensus about the existence of families and people who wish to start or maintain them. As you’re probably aware, there’s a major cultural focus among some socio-economic groups in the US to favor access to birth control and abortion, and easy access to sex and short-term relationships, over encouraging committed, supportive relationships, and raising children. There’s a sneering attitude toward “breeders,” and peer-group attitudes that promulgate the idea that children are nuisances, and that educated women have better things to do with their girl-power than have and raise their own children. Men of course are optional (that’s sarcasm). Then there’s the education system that trains people to favor their careers over “family culture” and normalizes daycare, preschool, and 6 hours of elementary through high school a day for offspring – who then are certainly inculcated to recognize that there’s little point to family. And anyway, “family is who you choose” because so many have the experience of wretched childhoods.
Lacking “family culture” is a mobius strip of dysfunction.
Also, regarding your question at the end of the last post, regarding another reddit comment: “Library is very busy with more and more people needing help and services that we aren’t equipped to handle. But we do our best to help as much as we can as we are one of the last free institutions.”
[The writer did not elaborate, and I cannot ask him/her.]
What COULD the writer be talking about: “services that we aren’t equipped to handle”?
I would assume that the writer is referring to all the ways the library has become a hub of social services – a hangout for homeless people, childcare after school, food distributors, finders-of-aid for those who cannot find it themselves, providers of internet and computers and the associated entertainment as well. Here’s another reddit post with lists in the comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/Libraries/comments/n4fzwh/what_services_are_provided_by_libraries_other/
though to be sure, tread with care, reddit IS one of the those places where it’s possible to fall down rabbit holes of unimportance…
Is Revisioning Cabalistic Magic what you meant by planetary magic based on the SoP?
You know, 6-10 hours is a lot less than I expected. That averages out to a normal workday.
As for German profanities, I assume that the usual rules also apply to foreign languages so I shan’t give you any examples, but I can come up with a few having to do with that area of the body in general, front and back, as well illicit unions and spawns thereof. A few animal-themed ones, too. Owing to a relatively sheltered childhood, though, my repertoire of invective is somewhat limited, so there might be much more. Oddly enough, that’s landed me in trouble once, so perhaps cussing around children is another matter where neither extreme is good.
—David P.
Mary Bennet #11:
Of course you may. The first two points, the AfD victory and CDU loss, are the cause of my optimism, while the last part tempers it somewhat.
Truthfully, I do not know how well the AfD will govern, nor how much they will even be able to achieve on a state level. The projects they have set for themselves are ambitious and I suspect they will have to walk back on a lot of them (legalising home schooling will be difficult, as will replacing the public broadcasters (i.e. establishment propaganda mediums), to name what immediately comes to mind). Few of them have any real experience governing. Add to that that various establishment figures have already floated the idea of having the state institutions be taken over by the federal government, which is theoretically possible according to our constitution but has never been tested in the courts before.
But even if they crash and burn, the unthinkable has already happened. They won the election. The polls were showing this for months, so I wasn’t really surprised, but most people in my (PMC) social circle were. Even the establishment politicians of that state were. Our chancellor was! It’s like some spell has been broken. The condemnations sound ever hollower. As some people become more and more hysterical that we’re about to re-enter 1933, they alienate more and more normal people. Our political landscape has been irrevocably changed, hopefully for the better.
And if they manage despite the odds? If they govern like a sensible law-and-order, pro-family, economically liberal party as they said they would? Why, that would be quite awkward for everybody who keeps insisting that they’re the NSDAP 2.0. I can only dream of what that kind of vindication might do for their chances in the next federal election.
The CDU loss essentially means the same thing. Since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, the CDU (or CDU/CSU, CSU being the Bavarian counterpart to the CDU) has been one of the two biggest political parties; the Christian, conservative party as opposed to the social democrats (SPD). Other parties have more importance here than in the US, but the two big left-wing ones (Greens and Die Linke) are comparatively new to the republic’s political scene and the liberal party (FDP) has essentially destroyed itself, either by sinking the last government or not sinking it fast enough, depending on why you ask.
Problem is, the CDU has drifted steadily to the left under Merkel. They were the ones responsible for flooding the country with foreigners (this comment is already getting long enough but if you want, I can give you statistics on why that’s a problem). Now they find themselves in an awkward spot: they can’t really do right-wing politics for fear of alienating their supposed allies while those same allies will obviously always attack them to benefit themselves. Getting kicked out of state parliament was the voters rewarding them for that. If they want left-wing politics, they have the various left-wing parties, and if they want right-wing politics, they might as well vote for the real thing.
(Personally, I celebrate this not just for the political ramifications but also simply out of spite.)
So far, so good. Now the Berlin election. The largest power was Die Linke, perhaps better known under its former name SED, the ruling party of the GDR. The party responsible for the murder of thousands fleeing over the German-German border, between 136 and 245 of those along the Berlin wall, will now rule Berlin. Not alone, but that almost adds insult to injury: how does any party dare form a coalition with them? But somehow, all is forgiven and forgotten, while I’ve heard the claim that the AfD is definitely a Nazi party because one of their top-level politicians is descended from a Nazi minister.
They’re still communists but also, and I think I lost you there, pandering to Muslim voters. That one place in the middle east played a major role in the campaign, which is odd considering there’s nothing a state government can do about that situation. Foreigners are supposed get the right to vote (not sure how feasible that is legally). Their election party was visited by a Hamas asset and a Muslim crime lord. Supposedly, they weren’t invited, but at least one representative seems to be quite closely connected to said crime lord.
I am, to be clear, not in favour of that.
Noah #24:
Oddly enough, I recently came across Bud Winter’s Relax & win: championship performance in whatever you do, where he gives a technique that supposedly lets you fall asleep within two minutes. So far, I think it’s making me fall asleep somewhat faster but working spottily. He does say that it takes a few weeks.
If you want to join me in my experiment: https://archive.org/details/relaxwinchampion0000wint/mode/2up
—David P.
@Anonymous (#22) and JMG in reply (#28):
Margaret Barker, whose scholarly work I find generally very sound, showed that Revelation is the earliest of all the New Testament writings other than some of the Letters (Epistles), and thus it was written well before the siege of Jerusalem in the year 70 CE. The grammar of its Greek deviates sharply from normal Greek grammar in ways that show the writer was thinking with Aramaic or Hebrew grammar as he tried to write in intelligible Greek, but failed to do so perfectly. (This was shown conclusively by G. Mussies in his 1971 linguistic monograph). The man named John who wrote Revelation was clearly someone other than the man (or men) who wrote the Gospel and the three Epistles of John; the latter was (or were) quite fluent in the Greek of their era.
And, of course, our host is quite right in what he says about its purpose and its fair degree of weird accuracy.
@JMG re: nebulosity
Chapman discusses nebulosity across three unfinished books-as-websites (he has four of these in total, but he eventually finished and published a fifth as an actual book, so maybe there’s hope yet). Not the ideal way to read, I know.
He dives most deeply into the idea in In the Cells of the Eggplant, which is his critique of modern rationalism: https://metarationality.com
He originally introduced the term in Meaningness, a book about his approach to the issue of meaning: https://meaningness.com
He talks about it a bit in connection with Buddhism proper in Vividness, especially in the section “The Heart-Healthy Sutra”: https://vividness.live/the-heart-healthy-sutra/
(All of these sites are down right now but can be accessed with the Wayback Machine.)
Hello JMG and commenters:
Well, Open Post is opened now, so there’s an all-you-can-eat mind buffet for everybody now…
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Last comment in previous John post was written by Scotlyn (maybe # 264?). Of course, I didn’t have time enough to answer her, due to its closing. She seemed a bit puzzled, IMHO, by my statement about debt and creditors tendence toward near eternity…I can tell you it’s a personal way to talk instead a dogmatic idea. I’m a mediocre poet, but I tried to depict long lasting of no paid debts (at least in our Continental civilian laws which came from French and German Laws), in a half kidding half serious sense.
According our Civil Code, parents debts are inherited by their sons/daughters, until they’re eventually paid. So it isn’t a joke to become a debtor and not paying your debts before your die: at least in Spain, your children will pay your debts, and if they aren’t able yo pay them, their children should pay them…Articles 1082 to 1087 Civil Code. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve seen online you can only be free of your parents debts if/when you resign your heritage (oops) or you accept it with some legal limits BEFORE you do it, “under benefit of inventory”. I can also tell you the most usual inherited debts come here from people who died before finishing to pay they morgages…so that beautiful flat is under a mortgage, to be paid by its heir(s).
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I’d like to ask you, JMG and commenters (especially European ones), what do you think about recent elections in Germany. IMHO, it’s interesting and awful alike its main winners have been Die Linke in Berlin (far left to some extent) and AfD in Mecklembourg (far righ to some extent). It’s also very interesting the MSM and “mild” politicians have had some tantrums, because these two parties have gone out of the usual and boring neoliberal and Russophobe fake consensus in German politics (and I think in all EU too).
I’m quite skeptic about far left and far right being able to break current fake consensus through true and realistic politics: “democratic” parties in Germany have hurried up to say they won’t support in any local/regional government, any party whose proposals are “antidemocraticals”(so I’m afraid that last term means everything outside current EU and NATO orders…). Knowing German politics are usually based in “realpolitik” alliances, I bet Die Linke and AfD have very few chances for satisfying their voters in a true govt (if they’ve got any wish to satisfy them).
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Beyond dirty nowadays European politics, I’ve remembered some years ago, spanish philosopher Eugenio Trias said and wrote that matter is a powerful abstraction, very useful for hard sciences, but a dubious term according a strictly philosophical view. Maybe the map isn’t the territory…Beyond Trias ideas, I think current hard sciences philosophical base is Positivism and another kinds of scientific materialism, which seem weaker than they seem, at bottom. If you scratch their apparent sound ideas, you eventually find, for example, Gödel incompleteness theorem. It’s true he thought especially in Mathematics science, but it’s also true that Maths are main auxiliary science for hard sciences like for example Physics, but if Maths are finally based in non exactly rational things…Oops!
In addition to this, Kant tried to save Sciences and Religions alike with his idea of Phenomenon and Noumenos, but I think this distinction won’t make happy tough scientificist materialists.
@Slithy Toves,
Thanks for the input, I’ll try out a few techniques looking around online and see what works for me. I have tried in the past but I think I just gave up too soon or focused too hard on finding sleep.
@JMG
I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll be sure to let you know if I discover anything worthwhile regarding sleep meditations.
JMG
I suppose one’s interpretation of Revelation depends on how much they believe the framing of the text. Personally I don’t believe that John of Patmos ever existed or that the author was ever experiencing any kind of mystical vision. Internal evidence of the text itself suggests that the author has a copy of the Hebrew bible in front of him and it appears likely that the reference to the “sealing of the seven thunders” is a call for censorship against the Gnostic text Thunder Perfect Mind.
I view the most likely author of the text is likely a man called Peregrinus Proteus who was the historic basis for the legends of the church leaders Polycarp of Smyrna and Ignatius of Antioch. It’s a complicated theory but when you cross reference the story of Peregrinus from Lucian of Samsota’s parody and compare to the life of Polycarp, the two are in the same place at the same time throughout their respective lives. Here’s a link explaining the theory in depth:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150911033249/http://radikalkritik.de/Huller_Peregrin.htm
In this context Revelation was written by an unstable pious fraud who was convinced by the Sibylline oracles that God was talking through him. He thought that the Jews would defeat the Romans during the Bar Kokhba revolt by Jesus returning. When that failed he became more unstable and eventually burned himself alive on a pyre to become a fake martyr.
His original apocalyptic movement became the Montanists and one of his disciples, Irenaeus would sell out to the Roman government. This is why Irenaeus argued so vehemently that the apocalypse would happen after Rome fell on its own. But that’s just how I interpret the evidence that I have seen.
@JMG,
quite a while ago you mentioned that a large switch in diet can often cause a temporary health improvement but that this goes away with time. I’m asking how that works and for details, because:
I’m currently trying an elimination anti-inflammatory diet, and it does seem to be helping substantially with some of my constellation of symptoms (a bit over two weeks in) – not all, but some. I’m wondering how much of the improvement is because I was actually sensitive to something, and likely to stick around for the long term if I keep x or y out of my diet, and how much is temporary. And how to tell which is which. Is there a way to tell, short of ‘do the symptoms come back in 6 months’?
JMG, I just became aware of a new scheme/ Buzzword being used in the workplace ,be it public or private ,as a substitute for the declining in popularity DEI trope. So the same crew that has been attempting to gain more power for themselves and disadvantages their competitors has ginned up something new. It is called Inclusive leadership. So if you are in a position to manage even one person a new stable of consultants, trainers, etc. are ready to squander large amounts of money to indoctrinate you a way to riff out hated traditional thinking people.
I know someone who is a highly skilled and trained manager in a technical field but is not considered ” woke enough” so her boss is putting her on a “plan” where a special counselor is brought in with flakey degree to teach a PHD chemist this mumbo jumbo and when they don’t measure up then they can be removed for a ” preferred type of person.” Hint this is happening inside the City of Portland Oregon. Beware to All, Downfall of civilization ahead.
JMG said, “and a seventh Ariel Moravec novel, The Marble Sphinx — book 5 of that series, The Sign of the Phoenix, is in press, and book 6, The Greater Key, is finished in draft. That is to say, my current workload is less overwhelming than it looks. ”
Ah, that’s great news! Again, heartily recommend everyone support that series. It’s worth your time, especially for mystery yarn lovers, and I’m pretty snobbish on mystery novels, being raised on the old Holmes stories. Whoever your editor is, is really good. I’ve only seen one typo in the four volumes. They are page turners, and there’s a good alternation, in the themes, of each volume. Even being familiar with some of the themes, from your work, it’s still very exciting. The scene with the malevolent magic in it, in the Book of Hataan, reminded me very, very much of the thrilling scenes in Williams’ War in Heaven, when an attack is made upon the Grail. Very different, but the energy and intensity was the same. My compliments and thanks for these!
JMG #28,
“As for the rest, is there a German profanity that doesn’t have to do with defecation?”
Ok, I’ll bite – we just spent a few fun minutes with the family coming up with counterexamples. Some of the more colourful ones were:
Flachzange
Sausack
Backpfeifengesicht
Flachpfeife
Armleuchter
Scherenschleifer
Nullnummer
Luftnummer
Wurstzipfellutscher
jemand ist auf der Brotsuppe dahergeschwommen
Vollpfosten
Intelligenzverweigerer
Klappspaten
Warmduscher
And then, of course, there are the less creative classics:
Idiot
Blödmann
Spinner
Trottel
Depp
Schwein
We can come up with more if needed… 😉
Milkyway
Well, I’ve noticed it on time: happy Autumnal Equinox for Druids here and non-Druids too!
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David P. # 3:
“On another note, the state of German politics is very interesting right now”
Oh, I’m sorry to repeat this topic in my first comment in this post, so I’m not the first one to open this can of worms. As an European, but not German, I’m puzzled by recent and current events in German politics, though I don’t share exactly your personal political view, according I can guess after reading your comment.
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Justin P. # 4:
“People who are interested in the Epstein case might be interested in this last article, in that it deals with a “white slavery” ring in the seventies”
White slavery? It’s an oxymoron, according usual and boring Western woke know-it-all (of course, I’m kidding with a wry laughter).
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Northwind G. # 5:
“Technologically, things have moved too fast the last thirty-odd years to be healthy.”
I agree, and it’s sad to say it, because I’m quite younger than you, though I’m not anymore a young adult. I’m a generation younger than you, in a rough sense.
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Mary B. # 11:
In addition to your doubts and/or suspicions about how well German AfD will rule well in near future, I can tell you that believing any political party is going to deliver its electoral program to make happy its voters, is a very naïve view. Indeed, every democratic country in the West hasn’t any written law which compels a winner party to fulfill its electoral promises for its voters. So do the math. Let’s draw a veil about electoral promises outside Western countries (things aren’t better).
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Noah # 24:
“I have been reading a Chinese web novel called Lord of Mysteries, and in it the protagonist uses a meditation technique to induce sleep fairly quickly in somewhat stressful situations to do some sleep divination.”
I wonder who wrote that exciting Chinese novel, according your short depiction of it, to take note of its name. What’s his/her name? My only Chinese lectures have been some novels by Ci Xin Liu (or Liu Cixin), who’s an interesting sci-fi writer, but IMHO is too biased and limited by his usual materialistic philosophy mindset.
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Temporary…#30:
“There’s a sneering attitude toward “breeders,” and peer-group attitudes that promulgate the idea that children are nuisances, and that educated women have better things to do with their girl-power than have and raise their own children.”
I think that reckless and suicidal attitude arrived here some years ago, maybe as part of the current woke pack imported form USA to our current “left”. I remember a few years ago, a (male) humorist did a monologue in which he mocked people who had children, due to the “awful” serfdom to their babies. In certain part of his “comical” speech, he named human babies as “larvas” (so he compared human beings to maggots, ahem). I dind’t laugh his joke at all…I tend to think this attitude isn’t innocent at all. It’s well known how artists in western modern countries tend to support “progressive” politics, so do the math.
Hello Mr Greer and the commentariat!
John Crowley, the autor of Little, Big and many other well-regarded works of science-fiction and fantasy, has died recently. Mr Greer, I believe that you have expressed your appreciation for Little, Big, and it occasionally crops up as a potential fifth Wednesday topic on your blog. Have you ever written in greater length on Crowley? I haven’t read anything by him yet but what I have heard so far about his work is highly promising.
About possible effects of various toxins in the food chain – Gene Wolfe has written a wonderful novella called Seven American Nights (in a low-energy future setting!), in which the US are in terminal decline, with everybody deformed to a certain extent due to use of innovative agriculture. This world is seen through the eyes of a visiting Iranian who is coming from what is now a superior civilisation to the American one. Highly recommended!
“Anon, to some extent, yes. Keep in mind, though, that as road systems decay, waterborne transport will become more important again, and the coasts, the Great Lakes and certain river systems will become major transport routes, with necessary impacts on boundaries.”
Do you hence see places like the modern day Midwest as likely centres for future North American civilizations (as for example in Retrotopia)?
“Slithy, yep. Japan is a fascinating example along the same lines — it became literate most of a millennium after the Axial Age, and then preserved Shinto in a half-mummified form, so it’s a fascinating look into what polytheism looks like without much Axial Age influence. You can see the same thing in some African traditional societies where literacy also came late.”
May I ask what you think caused the Axial Age? Do you think the aftermath of the Late Bronze Age Collapse played an important part?
@KM
I wonder if that could be linked to the ubiquitous use of large quantities of antibiotics in beef finishing? It’s not, apparently, done for health reasons, but rather because it causes the steers to put on more weight faster. (now think about all the people overusing abx… and the people eating the cattle that overuse abx…)
Hey JMG
Lately, there’s been some very interesting work from an artist and author who I enjoy, C. M. Kösemen, that has surprised me due to how similar or sympathetic it is to your own views on various subjects. I have mentioned Kösemen here previously, in regards to his art, but recently he seems to be putting energy into voicing his opinions on various topics.
My first surprise was when he published this essay on Unherd, which was apparently provoked by Elon musk’s space colonisation fantasies and Trumps “space force” uniform designs. He explicitly denies that space travel and colonisation is possible or desirable using arguments similar to yours, and then also criticises the strain of Human Supremacist and fascist/authoritarian ideology that is getting popular in much science fiction these days, specifically WH4k
https://unherd.com/2026/09/space-imperialists-are-galactically-wrong/?set_edition=en
Now, this essay alone was quite amazing, but then I read his latest book, “All Tomorrows: Answers edition”. It’s essentially a reprint of his sci-fi spec-evo novella “All Tomorrows” but with an extensive interview and a preview of an expanded rewrite of the novella that he is working on.
It’s the interview that delighted and surprised me, because he seems to agree with even more of the views you have expounded here. He denies progress, suggests that hi-tech civilisation is self-limiting, shares your own solution to the Fermi Paradox, has a similar view on how the middle class is clueless in regards to how their working class has been affected by their actions, and also strongly urges people to save their favourite digital art on paper due to how fragile digital storage actually is.
https://www.eyebooksgroup.com/products/all-tomorrows-authors-answers
All in all, I feel this is a guy to keep an eye on. I don’t think he is aware of your work, and probably has came to the same conclusions as you independently.
So the United States basically owns Greenland now. That’s pretty impressive statecraft. Strategically it’s also a serious alteration of our previous trajectory down the toilet of failed empires. Do you think the access to extraction rights and militarily putting our footprint on a large chunk of Arctic changes our course significantly? Also how many generations do you think it will be before it thaws out enough to become more inviting for the masses?
Re: Adding venerations of our Druid forebears to the calendar from this week’s Magic Monday.
A discussion of how such notables might be celebrated would be helpful to me as would a list of favorites and a reading list.
Also, I live in an Amish corner of the Rust Belt. Justin Patrick Moore’s link to Amish wisdom seems very relevant to me. Their system isn’t perfect – it requires being surrounded by a safe zone that includes functional courts and so forth as well as that pesky little nonviolence thing. However… the economic ideas work, so a discussion of how we Green Wizards might cut-paste to start our own communities would be quite interesting – particularly since I’m a retrofitter while Justin digs down-home funk. Perhaps Jim Kunstler might weigh in, too.
Something that may be of interest to the commentariat is https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/the-function-that-forces – the opening paragraph below gives an idea of where he is headed, and it is quite involved and complex in its structure (not for those looking for an easy read):
What Forces a Living Thing to Become
Consider first the humblest meaning of the phrase, the one an engineer would recognize. A forcing function, in the language of design, is a constraint built into a thing so that the right action becomes the only easy action and the wrong one becomes difficult or impossible. The plug that fits one way and refuses the other. The gear that will not shift until the clutch is down. The interlock that holds the elevator until the doors have closed. A forcing function is how a system is made to behave correctly without anyone standing over it — how reliability is built into the shape of a thing rather than begged from the vigilance of its user. It is a quiet idea, almost mechanical, and easy to pass over.
I want to take that quiet idea and turn it in two directions at once — outward, onto the whole of life, and inward, onto the single human being reading this sentence — and to show that when I do so it is not a metaphor at all, but the literal architecture of survival.
Northwind #23
The only things on your “do not need” list that I do are online payments and online banking. They are for my convenience. I could change them If necessary.
Hi John Michael,
I don’t have any questions for you, but want to wish you a happy equinox! 🙂 And hope that you managed to tip a good dark ale back and nod to family and friends who are no longer with us. If I were in the afterlife I’d certainly appreciate the gesture, especially as all those harps, clouds and overly earnest conversations were perpetually boring the daylights out of me! 😉 No doubts a candid opinion or twenty would be shared, embarrassed faces would look elsewhere, and they’d quietly kick me back out into the world – see, it’s a workable plan!
I see that you’ve mentioned intersex folks, and funnily enough I was reading about this subject in the news the other day. Apparently it is an issue for 1.7% of all births, which is quite a lot of people when you start thinking about the scale: Doctors removed this intersex woman’s gonads shortly after birth, a decision that changed her life.
Ooo, food and the environment was also mentioned. I’m told that I’m not allowed to speak about soils, but you know, soils… Hashtag, just sayin’! 😉 And also this is what living on a poisoned planet looks like. It’ll probably get worse, as you noted in Star’s Reach and as the Limits to Growth standard run model also pointed out. That is what the pollution curve suggests.
Hope you are doing well.
Cheers
Chris
JMG 28
> as road systems decay, waterborne transport will become more important again, and the coasts, the Great Lakes and certain river systems will become major transport routes
JMG, you know me. All one has to do is mention the word, “canal,” and I am off and running. I flip over canals.
Several commenters over the years have inquired “what is a good direction to go in next?”
I would say, ”Get to know the canals of your region.” Canals automatically introduces one to rivers.
Then consider going on some canal-boat tours lasting a few days. They are all over the place.
Then see if one can discover fertile farmland bordering a canal.
Then see if there is a suburb around.
Then see how high taxes are cumulatively.
Then see if there is a historic site nearby.
Then see if there is a geological wonder nearby, like Indian Ladder, near Voorheesville, Albany County, New York. The more Dutch names, the better. If you have never been to Indian Ladder, go. Or look for waterfalls.
Then see what water navigation “locks” are around. If one doesn’t know what a lock is, become intimately familiar with it. Go visit some locks; each has at least one access road, at least in New York State.
Then see if there are trade schools around, preferably no-charge, like state- or county-run.
Then see if there is one of the old-fashioned highways nearby, on par with Ye Olde Boston Post Road in New England, which I think runs from Boston, Massachusetts, to New York City. It goes through Rhode Island and Connecticut, hitting every little village and town along the way. This category of road is utterly fascinating, but keep to the flocking speed limit because you WILL get nabbed by local law enforcement. If the speed limit says 25 miles, don’t go over 27. These towns are serious about their speed limits. These roads are the byways that pre-existed the Interstate system, and will likely be around for a very long time. Towns have long-term incentives to keep their section of the main road drivable, maybe “gravel” drivable, but drivable.
These highways existed in Colonial days (the 13 Colonies), and have been used ever since. They are often former Indian paths.
It goes without saying, but I will say it, give high priority to the former 13 Colonies. I grew up in upstate New York, so I have a sense of what the 13 Colonies were. There is so much history there.
Then once you hone in on what the landscape is like, consider buying a piece of farmland right next to a canal, but don‘t build a house that could get flooded.
Lake Champlain is unique because its boats use engines AND sails. It is unusual if a canal boat is in an environment where it can sail.
That is my opinion. Basically, do one’s research. But, you’all, go before the rush: you very well may have competition.
💨🫥⛵️💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Mr. Greer .. et. al. …. I find that when I retire for the evening, having engaged in reading portions of a good book before drowsiness makes it’s way, I often fall asleep faster, and more soundly … then if say, had I watched a movie .. a podcast .. or visually, what have you. Now, must preface that having, um, gleaned on the Intertoobs .. that reading before bedtime fracks-up one’s sleep cycle … well …. I call bs on that ‘x-pert’ score, just saying…
@ KM #2 – I once jokingly made the comment that a reason for higher violence in some parts of the US was because there is Corn Syrup in almost everything. And then this came out –
https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/27640/20201009/high-fructose-intake-trigger-impulsive-behavior-aggression-adhd.htm
Sometimes the joke becomes reality.
@ Northwind #5 RE Interbeast & Interwrech.
I like it. I am endlessly impressed at how people still come up with new joke names for things, I mean the internet in the home is now over 30 years old and here are some more names for it.
Like when one foolishly ventures into the thunderdome of the political interbeast and you get another new derogatory nick name for Trump. I am just impressed that after all this time, they still get the occasional new zinger out. That is a real wasted talent.
As for going offline, I and some of the smarter, quieter folks in the tech sector have long suspected that future young resilient people are probably offline right now, but it is hard to find folks that are not in the digital information space.
Maybe this is closer to the future than we suspect 😉 – https://theonion.com/amish-man-ashamed-to-learn-he-logging-over-5-hours-of-horse-time-per-day/
@ Connie #10 There is a reason why it is probably one of the best places for comments on the internet. But then I am biased as I post here. 😉
@ Anonymous #12 RE : 24 hour driving zoning. Geography based limits has some merit. In China it is said that if it is more than 1 hour walk from the nearest road, that is were the hermits live. Power structures only hold when there is easy access.
@ Slithly # 19 “I’ve seen of the Buddhist concept of emptiness — sunyata. In his interpretation, it asserts the insight that concepts never quite map exactly onto reality.”
First line of Tao Te Ching. “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao”
Essentially, the best that can be done of language and concepts is to merely point at the thing.
Chapter 48 also has this but do take it in its larger context, it isn’t advocating for ignorance or laziness – “You learn something everyday through knowledge. You unlearn something everyday experiencing the Tao. Unlearn more and more until you know. Then there is no doer, thus nothing to do. Doing nothing, let things take their natural course. Try to do something and you will miss.”
@ Envirojoe RE : Geoengineering
JMG’s link is pretty good, luckily most of that is small scale or is just material acquisition for industrial needs. For instance I used to work with a company for Nitrogen capture, it had nothing to do with climate change but simply for use in food packaging. Also when folks talk about Carbon capture to solve warming issues, we already do it and know it is economically nonviable for that purpose. But we do it anyway to carbonate soft drinks and inject it into oil wells to increase production.
What I fear is people who want to set the world “right” and try a hard global sized forcing regardless of outcomes. If they are smart and think ahead even a little, they will be taking on possible liability for any weather based failure regardless of if it directly related or not. For instance you don’t want to be say Germany doing this stuff and then have USA/China/India/Africa blame them for the crop failure. It would become a hard trade negotiation tool.
Like anyone trying to set the world right only to have it back fire, they always have a self claimed virtue.
@ Charlie RE : Resource wars.
I have little more to add other than, yep. Pretty much. The old world of vague (very vague) global stability is gone, now is the scramble to ensure future resources. Expect more of this in decades to come.
This may have been brought up before but I only just learned of the death of Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute back in July. After JMG, he was the second person I read/listened to voraciously when I first became aware of the peak oil issue. Even though I never had the honour to know or meet Richard personally, I did feel like I lost something of a mentor when I learned today of his passing.
I don’t know what his beliefs were, but wherever he is now, I hope he is at peace.
Clay Dennis @ 39. I hope your friend has a plan B in place. I also hope she is documenting everything, in preparation for a wrongful dismissal suit. I’ve not heard of ‘Inclusive leadership’, and I can’t imagine it being upheld in court. Would there be any kind of pattern to this phenomenon? Certain industries being targeted? The replacements coming from any particular subculture?
Noah 36
> sleep
Find a very boring book, preferably buy it because it will be what you fall asleep to for the rest of your life (so not a library book). Upper limit on spending: 50¢.
If one sleeps with another person, one may have to exit to a separate bed in a separate room. Separate bedrooms are underrated.
Snuggle into bed, propped up with a couple pillows, is the room’s temperature right?, plump up the pillows, are your socks on or off?, is the window open or closed just right?, is the light perfect?
Start reading the book. [fall asleep]
Next night, same book, adjust the environment, pick a page–any page. Start reading. [fall asleep]
Night after that, open the book to anywhere. Start reading. [fall asleep]
Keep going.
If that book turns out to be interesting, one may have to go shopping for another apparently-boring book, now that you have a bit of experience on what-does-not-make-you-fall-asleep.
If one chooses perfectly, one never has to buy another book (well, maybe never). One boring book is enough to last a lifetime. After all, when one observes oneself reading the same boring stuff, what you read is EVEN MORE BORING, and is even easier to fall asleep.
Go browsing in used bookstores until you find a book that interests-you-not-in-the-slightest. That‘s the one. A 50¢ book can last a lifetime.
Or, if that book is insufficiently boring, it is because you are inexperienced and didn’t know what to look for. One may need to spring for another 50¢ book.
Worth a try.
💨🫥🛏️🛌🥱😴💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Northwind Grandma – I work to cultivate the old fashioned paper – ink – envelope – stamp approach to communications. If you’d like a pen pal, poke around on my blog and you can find my email address, email me your postal address, and I will send you a letter to get the flow primed!
What Northwind Grandma (#53) said about canals! I’ll add a bit more …
One of my ancestors (Samuel C. Talmadge) left New Jersey by way of upstate New York, and settled in Lockport, Illinois, where he and his sons built boats to haul goods up and down the Illinois-and-Michigan Canal, which ran from Lake Michigan to the Illinois River. (The company that had just built that canal was headquartered in Lockport.) He was a general carpenter as well as a boatwright; his three sons (Charles, Daniel & Samuel) specialized more narrowly as boatwrights. One of their sisters was my great-great-grandmother.
So not just hauling freight on canals, but building the boats that carry that freight, is likely to be a safe bolt-hole trade when harder times come.
For the first time in a long time I was inspired to write a song, this time about an invasive shrub that I love.
Here it is if anybody’s interested: https://thehillsandtherivers.bandcamp.com/track/elle-agnus
Charlie, excellent! That’s obvious to me, but it seems to be anything but obvious to most people. It’s precisely because petroleum depletion is an increasing problem that roadbumps like these are having such disproportionate effects. We are indeed right on schedule, and it’s gonna get bad.
David, planetary magic is one of a range of things included in Revisioning Cabalistic Magic, and yes, it’s part of the SoP-compatible range of my books. As for German profanities, I hope you realize that you and Milkyway both just helped reinforce a stereotype about Germans! I was making a joke — thus the smiley face following my comment — and it fits the stereotype that you both took it literally and were at pains to correct me. 😉
Robert, thanks for this! How does the book of Revelations compare, in terms of its grammar, to the Gospel of Thomas? I find Stephan K. Davies’ claim that Thomas, as the only surviving sayings gospel, is the oldest known Christian writing (and definitely pre-70 AD) to be compelling on other grounds; it would be intriguing if those two, with their very different outlooks, were the oldest things we have from the Christian movement.
Slithy Toves, many thanks for this. I can certainly talk to Mr. Peabody and Sherman about the proper use of the machine in question. 😉
Anon, good heavens, no. I don’t believe that Revelations was written by the same person who wrote the Gospel of John or the epistles of John, and whatever the actual author experienced, mystically or otherwise, the “vision” in the text is part of the classic fictional framing of Jewish apocalyptic — compare Daniel, the Book of Enoch, the Qumran apocalypses, etc. Such visions are as much a function of the apocalyptic genre as “Once upon a time” is of the genre of fairy tales. That said, I don’t think Revelation is anything like as late as you do — I wasn’t aware of the grammatical evidence Robert M. cites above, which also supports a very early date, but the text isn’t just a matter of somebody with a Hebrew bible. It’s written from entirely within the thoughtworld of pre-diaspora Judaism, and thus almost certainly the work of someone who was, at the latest, an adult in 70 AD. It reads too much like the Qumran literature to be anything else.
Pygmycory, that’s the wild card, of course. Everyone seems to benefit from a change in diet, no matter what the change may be, but if there’s an actual sensitivity involved, the change tends to be much more permanent. I hope it helps you!
Clay, and of course “inclusive leadership” is a way to exclude people who engage in wrongthink and thoughtcrime. The whiff of Newspeak in woke jargon is really hard to miss.
Celadon, thank you! I also grew up on Holmes — I recall very clearly the first Sherlock Holmes story I ever read. (It was “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” and I read it after finding a reference in a kid’s book on codes and ciphers. By the time I finished that story I was hooked.) I suspect the reason why Williams’ portrayal of being on the receiving end of evil magic was so similar to mine is that he was a practicing occultist, as I am, and he doubtless based the scene on his own experiences; I certainly did. The Ariel series still has quite a ways to go — I’m not quite sure how long it’ll take to finish up the story arc, though I know that the last volume will be Ariel’s honeymoon; the next one after The Marble Sphinx will be a harrowing piece set in Ariel’s home town, Summerfield, and there’s one a little further on, a lively romp involving Japanese folk magic, yokai (preternatural beings), and a sacred object some really nasty people are willing to kill to get. (They end up wishing they’d never been born.) Stay tuned!
Milkyway, as I noted to David above, I wonder if you realize you’ve just fallen into one of the classical stereotypes of the German. I meant my comment as a joke, which is why I put a smiley face at the end of it. Still, vielen dank — I knew most of those but not all.
Soko, I’ve never written at length about John Crowley, but his genre fiction had a profound influence on me. (I’m sorry to say his later stuff, written after he became famous and got talked into shoving his talent into the suffocating straitjacket of Serious Literature, never did much for me; still, one can’t have everything.) I highly recommend starting with either Beasts or Engine Summer; his greatest work, Little, Big, is one of the supreme classics of 20th century fantasy, but it’s easier to digest once you’ve gotten some sense of his style. (The Deep, his first novel, has the usual problems of a first novel, though it’s still quite good; I well remember reading it in its first Doubleday hardback printing, when he was just one more minor fantasy writer.) As for Wolfe, yeah, that sounds like him!
Gunstone, (1) I’ve written about that already at vast length. You might try this series for starters:
https://ecosophia.net/america-and-russia-part-one-stirrings-in-the-borderlands/
https://ecosophia.net/america-and-russia-part-two-the-far-side-of-progress/
https://ecosophia.net/america-and-russia-tamanous-and-sobornost/
(2) I’ve also written about that at length, though it was in an essay for publication. The very short form? The invention of writing systems simple enough that they couldn’t be monopolized by a privileged caste of scribes. Once literacy became a common attainment of ordinary people, the relationship to language that literacy makes possible — attention to words as words, separated from the social context of oral performance — became widespread, and set in motion the transformations that led to the rise of the Axial Age.
J.L.Mc12, hmm! I’m not familiar with his work at all, but all of this sounds very sensible. Thank you!
KVD, the thing that makes control of Greenland crucial is that it allows the US to back out of Europe without leaving our northeastern flank fatally vulnerable. Thus it’s a very helpful step in a managed decline. It’ll be a millennium or two at least before it thaws out enough to matter, though, and that period will be rendered entertaining by catastrophic flooding — you might want to look up the word “jokulhlaup” sometime.
Rhydlyd, I don’t have a reading list handy, though all the folks in question have decent web presences. How to celebrate them? A feast and a raised glass is traditional. As for neo-Amish communities, it’s a helluva challenge and I’m still brooding over that.
KAN, thanks for this.
Chris, I have no idea why most Christians believe in an afterlife like that, much less look forward to it. Church is fine for an hour once a week, but being trapped there for all eternity sounds like a truly grismal fate.As for intersexed people, yeah, it’s become tolerably common and will doubtless become more so.
Northwind, no argument there at all. In two of my deindustrial-SF novels, the US (or what the US morphs into) is busy reopening the old canal system.
Polecat, I nearly always read before bed — an old habit and a pleasant one.
Sam, I was also very sad to hear that. We got to know each other during the peak oil movement; he was always unfailingly pleasant, and played violin beautifully.
Isaac, thank you for this!
I am not sure if the AI discussion ban covers this, if so I apologise. I take the article as a more general warning against giving the government any more information than you absolutely have to. In Australia there’s a system you can be part of, it’s opt-out – basically all your doctors etc can just log on and get the info rather than having to manually send it to each-other. There were privacy and security concerns raised at the time, since having all the data in one place is convenient for the patient and doctors, but it’s also convenient for dodgy people.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-24/openai-agents-plotted-to-access-data-amid-medicare-hack/107189504
I dusted off the math and did some calculations on radioactive decay.
From the beginning of multi-celled animals 600 million years ago earth has lost 28% of its Potassium 40, 45% of its U-235, 9% of its U-238, and only 3% of its Th-232.
Starting from the start of life 3.8 billion years ago earth has lost 88% of its Potassium 40, 97% of its U-235, 45% of its U-238, and only 17% of its Th-232.
So earth was a lot more radioactive back then. No wonder life has robust DNA repair systems.
The bad news is that the Thorium and both Uranium isotopes decay to lead, so that concentration is steadily increasing though at a decreasing rate.
JMG,
Have your read Joséphin Péladan’s novels? What do you think? They sound intriguing to me. Are they translated into English? My French is probably 75% of the way there to being able to read a French novel. I picked up a translation of How to Become a Mage and started it as night time reading. Delighted to see the foreward by you. Is the translator an Ecosophian?
RE last comment: I am starting my second read of Sensitive Chaos at the start of this Fall season. I’ll keep your modification of my comment in mind as I do so.
@JMG, #61 (about your response to @Chris at Fernglade, #51)
I am sorry, cannot help but give my take on the issue.
The Doylist explanation is, of course, that the Christian idea of Heaven is derived from the Roman Catholic Church; which is, you know… Roman. So the cliche of the Roman aristocrat goes something like this: “Harps are the luxury item we entertain ourselves when last night’s binging on delicious food and booze left us undisposed for this morning’s session of orgyastic sex”. That’s to say, the afterlife is the Disney version of what the average medieval pew-sitter imagined the actual lives to the Ancient Roman elites would look like!!!
On a personal note, the anwer my 16-year-old self barely managed to imagine was: “An Ethernal Mass would be Ethernally boring, but still beats an Etheranal Torture Chamber. Be sure to sign up to the Choir, though; you may actually have some fun with the harps”, Please note the Spanish term “Lira” (the actual instrument that is depicted in the iconography, the “Harpa” is a much bigger, newer version of it), was a slang term for guitar at that time and place.
JMG,
Over the years you’ve written a number of pieces about getting started in spiritual workings, and I wanted to find out if you knew of any books that specialised in such things within the framework of the Catholic liturgy. You have said that many Christian traditions had their own practices that were abandoned in the 19th century in favour of either fundamentalism or the Social Gospel; I’d love to look through some of the books written on these pre-change practices, either contemporary works or histories. Any suggestions?
@pygmycory
I have the constitution of a butterfly, in my late teens my mother took me a long to a lady who used a combination of a radionics device from Japan and homeopathic remedies. Was a fantastic device btw and I know it was extremely accurate because it detected all the antibiotics I had taken in my sickly childhood stuck in my adipose tissue. Anyway she kept changing my diet so one week I would go and she’d test that I had a resistance to say tomatoes and eggs and then I had to not eat them for that week and the next week it would be fine again. She said that when your system is upset it just starts reacting to anything so it will keep fluctuating unless you manage to settle it down. Which might be why a diet change will create a temporary boost I would guess based on what she advised. Wish I could find someone now that does what she did!
JMG
Fair enough, my views New Testament dating are radical even among radicals.
Speaking of radicals I have a book you might want to check out. Burn it Down by Rich Baris and Joshua Lisec. It’s written by a pollster whose worked with several campaigns and was one of the few who called Trump’s win in 2016. Its mostly just relaying what younger Millennials and Gen Z feel about the current state of the US to the Boomers, Gen X, and older Millennials.
He cites polls and other first hand sources that you might find useful in future books/posts. And as someone in that younger demographic, he’s right. Not to spoil, but the main thesis of the book is basically this. If given the choice, young Americans would choose to open the gates for Alaric and the Visigoths.
It’s my understanding that 1 Thessalonians, Galatians and 1 and 2 Corinthians are considered the earliest reliably dated New Testament documents. All considered by scholars to be written by Paul. Late 40’s and early 50’s.
“We look forward to a new heaven and a new earth” quote from 2nd Peter. A new multitudinous varied creation is my understanding of my hope as a Christian along with a body like the one Jesus has now Philippians 3:21. another early Christian writing accepted as being by Paul. If I die before that New Creation in the meantime I will go to where Jesus is now. I am sure it will be quite interesting.
David P. — re. invective. There used to be an academic journal called Maledicta: the International Journal of Verbal. The editor and author of many articles was Reinhold Aman. He argued that since invective could lead to violence and other negative consequences it was worth academic study. Unfortunately Dr. Aman had more intelligence than good sense, netting himself a stint in federal prison for sending threats through the mail in the form of articles about people killing their ex spouses, lawyers and judges sent to lawyers and judges involved in his acrimonious divorce. The journals themselves had articles on particular usage, collections of “sick” jokes, lists on insults in various languages and culture. For example, in one culture a way for a man to insult another man is to refer to him as “brother-in-law”, implying that you have been intimate with his sister. All quite interesting to a student of language. Unfortunately Dr. Aman supported it from subscriptions and his own funds and eventually ceased publication in 2005. I used to have a complete set, but left behind in a move? Some might be in university library. Worth looking up for those interested in the topic.
Classical Greek history and religion — _Hubris: Pericles, the Parthenon, and the Invention of Athens_ by David Studdard (Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA, 2026-$29.95 hardcover) . This is a detailed history of the rise and decline of Athens. Studdard gives a detailed description of the sculptures on the frieze on the Parthenon with his interpretation of what the sequence of images was intended to convey to the viewers about the special relationship Athens had with the gods and as protectors of democracy. He also gives details of some of the festivals and rites in the city. Would have been improved by line drawings of the sculptures, which are difficult to identify in the black and white photos provided, especially since nearly all are damaged to some extent.
Rita
JMG, I have a comment and two questions about your answers @ 61. About canals, the depressingly named Barge Canal, which replaced the Erie Canal in upstate New York is maintained and being used, mostly for passenger excursions and private boat owners. It certainly be used for the moving of freight. There is no towpath, and is much deeper and wider than the original, parts of which can still be seen in various places. The trails on either side are popular with bikers and walkers..
What, exactly, is an Axial Age? What are its’ characteristics?
I take your point about the strategic value of Greenland, but what was the problem with simply offering something the Greenlanders might actually want? I gather statehood was not on the table. Why ever not? What about throw the idiot scions of royal and rich families out of our universities and give those spots to Greenlandic young people who might actually benefit from the education? An American University in Greenland?
@pygmycory #38
Hello. I’ve been managing a chronic illness with an anti-inflammatory elimination diet for the past… wow, nearly 20 years now? I happen to know a lot about this subject. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask me, I’d be quite happy to share anything I know.
“I’m wondering how much of the improvement is because I was actually sensitive to something, and likely to stick around for the long term if I keep x or y out of my diet, and how much is temporary. And how to tell which is which. Is there a way to tell, short of ‘do the symptoms come back in 6 months’?”
One way to tell if it’s an actual sensitivity, and I’ve used this countless times over the years, is reintroducing the suspected food slowly, then eliminating it again, then reintroducing it, and seeing if you can draw a causal relationship between eating the food and triggering symptoms. Sometimes it differs by food, some things I can eat for a few days before they cause any problems, others cause a reaction almost instantly (usually within 24 hours). It’s very important to make sure you keep a clear baseline of foods you know won’t trigger anything (which should be part of the elimination phase anyway) so that you can introduce new things one at a time. Over time, you’ll get a clearer and clearer picture of what your body agrees with and what it doesn’t, that is, if diet really does help you. For whatever it’s worth, I hope it does.
@Pygmycory RE : Diet changes
This is something the long term vegan community are very familiar with. They call it ‘The Vegan honeymoon’. Essentially, folks change their diet and suddenly are feeling much better about things, the reason is that for the first time they have actually paid close attention to what they are eating and thus they end up avoiding a lot of foods that were impacting them.
Again, in the vegan space, yes cutting out a daily Big Mac could improve your health but that doesn’t mean replacing it with a black bean burger is necessarily healthy for them, it just means they have swapped it out for the lesser of two evils.
This is why you have particularly loud mouth new vegans ranting and raving about feeling amazing, they have merely removed a negative from their diet but haven’t found a better replacement. And so after a few months you get those that have over corrected and end up feeling terrible.
This is why the long term folks are worth listening to, they have made all the same mistakes and try to advise others. I’m not advocating for a vegan diet but more the thought pattern. You go on an anti-inflammatory diet, that is a great start but you also have to be aware that it might not be the complete solution.
I have never tasted a pawpaw, but that didn’t stop me from planting about 18 pawpaw trees, both in my own yard and my mother’s yard. They’re doing very well. It will probably take them at least 5-7 years to fruit though. I think some of the seedlings are two and three years old. I started some from seed myself this year, and I bought some of the older siblings from a guy on Facebook. I am in Northern Illinois. As someone who talks to trees, I noticed that they are very chatty and easy to talk to. They were super excited about being planted. Please pray for their success.
Hello JMG,
How did you acquire your extraordinarily good memory? Do you have a natural talent for it, or did you undergo special training?
@Charlie Obert #29
Indeed, people write about this Michael T. Klare writes about this theme, has several books about it, one even titled Resource Wars. Has several interviews on YT since the books might not be up to date anymore as with many of books on these subjects.
http://michaelklare.com/books/resource-wars/
Every once in a while I like to read a good book about system theory. This time, it’s General System Theory, a collection of essays by Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Back in the sixties, he had some pithy things to say about theory vs observation.
On observations: “Thus even supposedly unadulterated facts of observation already are interfused with all sorts of conceptual pictures, model concepts, theories… The choice is not whether to remain in the field of data or to theorize; the choice is only between models that are more or less abstract, generalized, near or more remote from direct observation, more or less suitable to represent observed phenomena.”
This point has been made repeatedly on this blog, and is a commonplace in magic and occultism.
Later there is an observation about mathematical modeling: “It is a mathematical rule of thumb that almost every curve can be approximated if three or more parameters are permitted [which cannot be] verified otherwise.”
I developed a rule of thumb during the pandemonium, when I was reading a lot of scientific publications: when reading a paper, if I encounter the words ” computer model,” I can stop reading, because the whole paper is BS.
Apparently these things were known to scientists (at least some of them) several decades ago or more. Ignorance – willful or otherwise- of these principles, however, has proved as ruinous for science as it is common.
@ KAN #49
Ok, I am going over to read that link… it already suggests a few interesting angles to the concept of “social engineering”… and how venturing to do or think certain “officially disapproved” things are guaranteed to make a person feel like a square peg in one of society’s nice round holes… 😉
Seeing a photo of JMG recently, I thought to myself (and nobody else), gosh, he looks so old. He was probably a teenager when the Martians were still building their pyramids.
OK, I’m only 2 percent serious, JMG, but what do you make of the idea that Mars was once inhabited by intelligent beings, and that some traces of their buildings appear to exist on Mars? Then of course you have your previous incarnations, but it’s unlikely that you were ever a Martian. 😉
@Chuaquin #42:
Hope you are well and eating good at the mind buffet. I figured if you commented on what I shared, you’d find a way to make that comment somehow be about woke one way or another. But they are their for you to read if you want to find out what I actually wrote about.
You and perhaps others in the commentariat might enjoy this venn diagram of the woke left and woke right:
https://imgflip.com/i/b1wlvw
The opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea.
I regret to inform everyone that the search for Neil Gehring, the man who went missing in Olympic National Forest, was called off unsuccessfully. Our community is devastated.
In the same light, please keep my eldest son, Adam, in whatever positive manner you interact with the eternal, as he’s on a solo 8-week road trip all over the country. It wasn’t easy to wave to him as he left the driveway.
Well, I’m going through your learning ritual magic handbook. Still on chapter 3. I do the lbrp, and also moved up to healer on the moe material. I also have shrines and relationships with a number of the greco-roman gods – 8 to be exact. Each of the gods corresponding to the 7 astrological planets, and gaia for the earth beneath us. So, I know a bit. Its too late for the equinox itself – I took the day off and spent it cleaning and journaling and doing work from your book, actually. Still, I would like to welcome fall in somehow and am curious what you recommend.
@JMG (#61):
The Gospel according to Thomas has survived only in an early Coptic translation, not in Greek, so there’s no way to make a linguistic argument about it similar to what Gerhard Mussies did for Revelation. There are fine scholars who regard it as significantly earlier than the four canonical Gospels, and I find that quite plausible.
David P. # 31:
“As for German profanities, I assume that the usual rules also apply to foreign languages so I shan’t give you any examples, but I can come up with a few having to do with that area of the body in general, front and back, as well illicit unions and spawns thereof.”
I can’t speak German, but my nephew has studied quite German at school, so according what I’ve heard from him, it seems German language tends to long composed words. So I guess, to some extent, at least part of German profanities are very long words. Am I right? By contrast, Spanish rude words tend to be made of several different words, united by prepositions…Our mindsets seem different, methink.
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# 32:
“I do not know how well the AfD will govern, nor how much they will even be able to achieve on a state level.”
Oh, I see you aren’t as naïve as I thought. of course, ruling a regional state wihtin a Federal Nation doesn’t allow to rule over your territory, when central government is in other party hands…I’m not an expert in Germany politics, but I know Spain regional structure isn’t far from a federal State, and I’ve seen here different recent govts in regions and Madrid parties in power have led toward a real political blockage. So do the math.
The same thing can be waited for “extreme left” victory in Berlin. Germany capitol city has more than 3 millione population, but that town hall won’t work (especially if Die Linke are endeavouring to fulfill its electora program stubbornly), against central Germany govt: good luck in that, if they try to do it!
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“They’re still communists but also, and I think I lost you there, pandering to Muslim voters.”
I think youre phrase is very biased, because it’s a too risky idea against political truth in Germany to say most commies votes comes from Muslim migrants votes. Indeed, most Muslim migrant people I’ve met in my country tend to be boring and usually Conservtive in their social and political ideas. So I bet in Germany maybe happens the same. I tell you whitout acrimony: I tend to hink you’ve made a political fantasy, according your political tendency (which I can guess very easily, according your past comments). Are you fooling yourself?
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Robert M. # 33:
Interesting…However, maybe do you know scholars have different ideas about which part of New Testament was written the first? Of course, Academia scholars usually aren’t Christians, but agnostic and even atheist people, so they haven’t any special interest in supporting Christianism beliefs; but at least here, I’ve heard some different opinions about first written part of gospels and another NT writings.
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During my last comment (#35), I wrote that inherited debts in my country Civil Code can be inherited by the children of the children of original debtors. Well, this is in theory, in real world, when unwary heirs inherits some debt from their parents, they usually end in bankruptcy, so their flat anr another wealth is cheaply purchased by someone during an auction…
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(To be continued)
Re: Greenland. I haven’t read the fine print of the new agreement, but has there been any material change? As far as I know, the US has had the right to open as many military bases in Greenland as it wants since the 1950s, and actually decided on its own to close one of them.
Good afternoon John,
I’ve just read above you have completed the draft of a new Weird of Hali trilogy. Given that the existing series counts as one of my most favourite book series of all time (read numerous times) I’m absolutely delighted you’ve written some more, and look forward to it eagerly. I also hope in the future you find time to write a sequel to The Hall of Homeless Gods, which was also an excellent read. I have in fact you have inspired me to write my own novel, the first part of a trilogy called Darkfield. Its set about hundred years from now in a post independent Scotland, where life has returned to the equivalent of the 1900s, with computer based technology largely banned and fossil fuels a memory of the past. Its a sci fi/fantasy of sorts, where ‘magic’ is definitely not of the JKR variety. Sadly not published yet. The world of big publishing is more interested in famous names than interesting stories.
Kind regards
Averagejoe
Huh. I wish I could say this was an attempt at humorously embracing that stereotype but alas, I genuinely fell for it. Being so German that I needed somebody autistic to tell me how to recognise humour was not on my bingo card for today, but I hope Milkyway and I provided some amusement. 😉
Apologies for another “can I do X while following the FHR lessons” question after just a few weeks but can I read the Revisioning books for the n required books per degree and do the practices “on my own time,” as you put it, or should I limit myself to practices I already know when doing non-FHR work?
—David P.
Chuaquin #35 and #42:
Die Linke won because they courted Muslims and the PMC youth. They got 51% of the Muslim vote and 30% of voters with higher education. Take a look at the third graphic here: https://apollo-news.net/diese-fuenf-grafiken-zeigen-weshalb-die-linke-ihren-triumph-in-berlin-migranten-zu-verdanken-hat/
It shows the percentage of foreigners in a district on the x-axis and the percentage points Die Linke gained compared to the last election. As you can see, there’s a direct correlation between the two.
As I’ve also said in other comments before, their election party was visited by a Hamas asset and a Muslim crime lord. During their campaign, they repeatedly platformed people calling for violence against Jews, only occasionally disguised as being opposed to that one place in the middle east.
So they got elected because they pandered to Muslims, not because the people of Berlin actually want their (frankly insane) platform realised.
Regarding the AfD, I think you mixed up Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony-Anhalt? The latter had the decisive AfD victory, the former is noteworthy only because the CDU got kicked out of parliament.
See my comment #32 as to why I don’t think it matters whether the AfD can realise most of their platform. I do think that they want to. Like any party, they’ve got their opportunists, but I do think that these opportunists understand that their best chance at profiting is actually attempting to do what they’ve promised to do.
—David P.
About Gold.
All of the conservative TV stations – Salem, RAV, Newsmax, and The First – all have been pushing gold for months now. They are point to BRICSs and the “end of the dollar empire.” I have seen it proliferate in the conservative spheres that somehow the dollar is on its last legs as a reserve currency. Gold seems to be the way to go.
Meanwhile the BRICSs nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) all seem to have currencies that are not traded such as the rubble and the yuan or are dollar based in some way. Xi is trying to push the yuan as the global currency to get people off the dollar.
I still see everyone hanging on to the U.S. dollar though. I wonder what these Gold folks are seeing? DO you know?
Anonymous # 37:
I personally think John the “Evangelist” was a real man, who was the young Apostle “loved” by Jesus; but I doubt he was the Revelation book true author. Please, notice that “doubting” isn’t the same as “not believing it at all”. On the other hand, New Testament stories happened (its true part) too far in the past to differenciate wether they were really true or fake.
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Milkyway # 41:
Ha, ha, ha…Thank you for your German profanities list. I can see my nephew is a mediocre German student, because he only told me some of those rude words, he learned somewhere outside his school. By the way, its favorite German rough word is “Schwein”, I think it means “pig”, if he studied well that “lesson”…
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I’m sorry, I haven’t time enough now for reading and eventually commenting the rest of your comments; so I won’t bore you more (by now), and I’ll return when I can do it.
(To be continued)
JMG,
This week I found myself in Powells city of books, a place that is easy to love and hate at the same time. On one hand it Is hard to hate a giant physical location filled with new and used books of all kinds. On the other hand it has become so obsessively politically correct that it can be eye watering. This has been going on for many years now to the extent that I never look at anything labeled ” staff picks”. They have whole displays for this, and then on the shelves certain books will have shelf tags with short description of why this or that book is a staff pick. 20 years ago these “Picks” were helpful and led me to many a good book. But now they are so nauseatingly woke that any book they recommend is unreadable to me.
But this week they hit a new high. A big display table with the bunting, and a giant sign .” Disability Pride.” I could’t help but look at the titles which spanned from deafness, to blindness ( not in brail) to nerurodiversity, to amputees to well you can imagine. On one hand this might be nice. but the heavy scent of a political agenda is over the top.
Hint, most current Powells employees are 30 something women with blue or purple hair and wear super duty surgical masks when operating the cash registers.
@ Slithy Toves #19
> “the set of molecules in this particular cloud” is only an approximate notion.
This applies to solid objects too. The official kilogram — originally a cylinder made from a corrosion-resistant alloy of 90 percent platinum and 10 percent iridium — lost mass compared to its sister cylinders which were exact copies. In a hundred years it lost a whole 50 millionths of a gram.
Faced with this calamitous uncertainty striking at the very heart of physics they were forced to redefine the kilogram in terms of the Planck constant, which, being a concept, cannot change (I think).
https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/kilogram/kilogram-present
Rita Elizabeth Rippetoe #71:
Thank you, I’ll check that out.
Chuaquin #85:
Most German profanities that occur to me are composed of two or more words, concatenated together as one noun. See also the list Milkyway provided in #41.
And I see you’ve already found my other comment about the AfD. I already provided some data on the Muslim votes in my last comment, so I won’t repeat myself, but I never claimed that the Muslims are ideological commies. In fact, I assume that a lot of them actively dislike the modern sort of communist that claims to represent gay and “queer” people. But they do appreciate generous handouts, less police presence on their turf, non-citizens receiving the right to vote, and, for whatever reason, attacks on Jews, so they hold their noses and vote for the people who give them all of that.
I will say, though, that the Berlin situation looks less dire than I originally thought. The SPD at least is growing a spine and has told Die Linke in no uncertain terms that they won’t work together with antisemites and won’t be satisfied with pro-forma condemnations of that which don’t actually change anything. We might see a coalition of SPD, Greens, and CDU, which of course has its own issues but I’d consider quite more palatable than Linke, SPD, and Greens. But I also don’t live in Berlin, so really it doesn’t affect me all that much.
—David P.
Warburton, thanks for the warning. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that other industries have the same thing, but aren’t talking about it.
Siliconguy, nah, don’t worry about increasing lead levels. That just means that natural selection will get to work selecting for resistance to lead poisoning.
Luke, I’ve read Le Vice Supreme — a lurid, lively, fun novel. None of his novels, as far as I know, have ever been translated into English, alas. If someone ever decides to do it I’ll cheer.
CR, still, if the only afterlives the tradition can offer are a choice between boredom and pain, no wonder so many people bailed out as soon as they could.
Brian, the first thing to do is to look into sacramentals — holy water, blessed salt, sacred medals and scapulars, and much more. Many more conservative Catholic priests and parishes still offer them, and from an occult perspective, they’re good solid magical workings providing protection and blessing when needed. Beyond that, you might have a look at Agostino Taumaturgo’s website at https://thavmapub.com/ — he’s a traditional Catholic in an independent church who’s also a serious occultist. (Fun fact: I was present at his consecration as a bishop.)
Anon, I’ll have a look at it.
BeardTree, so noted!
Mary, (1) the Axial Age is a term coined back in the last century by the philosopher Karl Jaspers. He pointed out that a particular period in ancient times — roughly from the 8th to the 3rd century BC — saw the invention of philosophy, logic, materialist sciences, and many other features that became dominant in our time; what’s more, they emerged more or less simultaneously in a belt of cultures extending from Greece to China. (2) Greenland isn’t an independent country. It’s a colony of Denmark, and the Danes don’t want to let go of it. Apparently many Greenlanders would be happy if the US made it our 51st state, but the Danes said no.
Kimberly, positive energy incoming. I had my first pawpaws a month ago — they taste kind of like a spicy banana.
Executed, like almost everything else about me, my memory is quirky. I have an excellent memory for anything I’ve read and a rather poor memory for anything else. I suspect this is because I started reading so early — I was picking my way through Doctor Seuss books at 2 1/2. I’ve practiced the art of memory, but that’s solely for non-written material!
Weilong, now there’s a blast from the past! I studied that book in my first pass through college, in 1982. It’s probably not accidental that my take on magic has a lot of systems theory in it. (Note to self: reread Bertalanffy…)
Demiurge, I’m 64, in case you were wondering, so I watched human bootprints hit the Moon but not pyramids on Mars. I find it unlikely that there were ancient civilizations on Mars — over geological time, the Sun is gradually getting hotter, so Mars is more likely to be a home of life a billion years from now (as Venus may have been when the Sun was much cooler, say two billion years ago, and Venus won’t have had its current greenhouse-gas issues).
Michelle, positive energy incoming. I’m sorry to hear about Gehring — but not surprised. That happens all too often.
Paedrig, you can certainly pour libations to Apollo and Gaia, since the equinoxes are the meetings and matings of Sun and Earth.
Robert, oh, of course, that’s right. Oh well.
Aldarion, the old treaty was contingent on the US remaining part of NATO. The new one isn’t. The old one didn’t exclude rival powers from having bases of their own there; the new one does. Those are very material differences, and reinforce my sense that the US is preparing to abandon Europe to its fate.
Averagejoe, thank you! I’m delighted to hear about your writing project. For heaven’s sake, don’t waste your time with the big publishers — small to midsized firms have equal distribution and will quite often take a chance on a new author.
David, the “Revisioning” series is wholly compatible with the FHR and can be combined with it in any way you like.
Neptunesdolphins, that leads me to think that gold is in a bubble and may see some serious downside action soon. That’s normally what follows a frantic attempt to talk suckers into buying anything.
Clay, I remember Powell’s well. Yeah, the purple-hair brigade was getting deeply entrenched there already before I left the west coast. But then “staff picks” have always served me as a good indication of books to avoid!
Just a reminder to those new here and those who’ve forgotten about this: there is still a minor glitch with the posts here. When JMG makes his own comments, the blog software often does not update its cached copy of the page to include his comment. So when your browser downloads the page from the server, it may not have JMG’s latest replies.
To work around this, add ?show=1 to the end of the URL in your browsers address bar. So for this post, the URL would be: https://ecosophia.net/september-2026-open-post/?show=1
(Actually, any pair of letters or numbers with an equal sign between them would work. Math nerds can use ?y=x, Ayn Rand fans can use ?a=a, and ?0=2 is an option for the Thelemites.)
What you’re doing is forcing the web server to reprocess the page to see if your parameter makes a difference. This skips over its cached copy and gives you a fresh version with all the approved comments.
That’s good to hear, thanks!
—David P.
@Chuaquin (#91) replying to Anonymous (#37):
I agree with you that John, the author of the Gospel, was a different person than John, the author of Revelation. For what it may be worth, the two are given different appellations in Eastern Orthodox Christianity: the former is John the Evangelist, the latter John the Theologian. This strongly suggests that they were traditionally thought to be two different men.
The New Testament, taken as a whole, distinguishes between the original Twelve Apostles and the other Disciples of Jesus, and the Gospel of Mark makes it quite clear that there were not only the Apostles, but a number of other Disciples as well, all present at the Last Supper. It may, therefore, be quite significant that the Gospel of John doesn’t have anything to say about the Twelve Apostles as such, only about Disciples in general, even in its description of the Last Supper; if so, then the “Disciple whom Jesus loved,” who seems to be John the Evangelist, was probably not one of the Twelve.
Beardtree
According to scholarly consensus seven of Paul’s letters are considered authentic Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, and Philemon.
The four you’re thinking of probably comes from the Dutch radical school who only accepts four as authentic, Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, and Philemon.
The current scholarly consensus on Revelation places it as being written during the reign of Domitian, sometime in the 90s AD based on chapter 17 of Revelation.
More radical views (like mine) push Revelation forward to the reign of Hadrian likely sometime in the 120s AD.
In one of the Quareia lessons Josephine McCarthy makes the case that the Book of Revelation is actually a curse upon Rome. I will have to see if I can find the right one… lemme see…
Ok, you can find it in this lesson: Apprentice Module 10, Lesson 3, Angelic Forces of Destruction
https://www.quareia.com/apprentice-module-10
Here is the free PDF
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/539af6bee4b0cef061847e36/t/55222c2fe4b09519434c42f6/1769468490159/QUAREIA_M10_L3.pdf
“At this stage, you are simply learning that these revelations and sacred or magical texts should not be read dogmatically, but looked at magically. Working this way, and with the element of the destructive angels, you also begin to learn some of the inner visual vocabulary of these beings. This way, when you experience something in vision connected to the actions of these beings, you will understand what you are looking at. We will approach this as practical work by going through the Revelations of John of Patmos. We will separate out the religious overlay (which was his vocabulary of understanding), the bits which relate to the events of his time which he was writing about and projecting as visions as though they were future events, and the angelic pattern of destruction that is not specific to those events but rather tells us about the powers that dispense such destruction. His writing is a mix of religious fervour, genuine visions, and his politics; and he adds in aspects of older mythology and mystical accounts just to make sure people pay attention. He most likely was not meaning to deceive or create a mythology. Rather, reusing well-known aspects of old stories was an accepted technique of his time for making particular points. In Revelations, John writes about the events of his time happening in Jerusalem (the siege of Jerusalem in 70AD). He writes about the hatred of Rome and the Roman Empire, and clothes it in visionary keys of prophetic destruction. He uses ancient angelic key patterns to curse Rome, and also to establish that Rome is bad, and that the messianic Jews of the time are good. It is a jumble of ancient keys, snippets of mysticism, and political and religious criticism cloaked in allegory. It sets apart who in his mind is good and who is not. Learning to sift through such a mess is an important skill, for in it John has scattered references to ancient knowledge and fragments of angelic mysticism. We can extract these elements from the politics and curses in order to learn what was known at the time about deep magic and angelic destruction. ”
She then goes on to give a commentary for passages in Revelations. It changed my understanding of the book.
Brian @ 66, The place to start would be Ignatius of Loyala’s spiritual exercises. St. Ignatius was a military man before founding the Jesuit Order and I would imagine his exercises are intensely practical. Tan Books is a Catholic publisher. In amongst the contemporary stuff, they do carry some translations and reprints of earlier sages and saints. What you are looking for would be described as spiritual exercises.
@JMG (#95):
Don’t worry about it. A manuscript of the original Greek may yet turn up in some obscure monastery collection, and then someone can do for it what Gerhard Mussies did for Revelation. There are a few small papyrus scraps which may preserve snippets of the original Greek text, but not enough to lead to any firm conclusions.
(Eastern monastery collections of manuscripts are still — even now! — a massively unexplored resource, and there are even a few cases where the monks actively hide their oldest treasured manuscripts from visiting scholars. I once heard a first-hand account of such a case from such a visiting scholar — now long since deceased — who was teased by a brief glimpse of a very very early manuscript, which he was quite pointedly not allowed to examine further. And frankly, my sympathies are with the monks; a few of my fellow scholars richly deserve to be thwarted in their researches.)
Re: Greenland,
The Wall Street Journal had an article on it, but this is all I can get from the paywall.
“The deal, to be signed this week at the United Nations, enshrines permanent U.S. basing rights on Greenland and blocks a base from a country that isn’t part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The U.S. already enjoys military privileges on the island from a 1951 arrangement, but the new deal is a hedge against the risk that Greenlanders might someday declare independence from Denmark. “This is an ‘Infinite Life’ Agreement, there is no end!” Mr. Trump said on social media, though nothing is really permanent in global politics.”
So the old deal has been extended and modernized.
The full list of Denmark’s fleet is here. That’s the back story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Royal_Danish_Navy_ships
Reading about the computer programming of Jay Wright Forrester the computer modeling of systems that went into the Limits of Growth, and reading some on criminology and the early days of ViCAP and the like… well something I been thinking about and chatting with my wife about is how systems theory might be applied to sociology and criminology. I know there is a form of family therapy and couples counselling that uses system theory as applied to the family to look at those dynamics and seeing what roles people play in the family system. Forrester applied economic data in his models for the most part (have his book Urban Dynamics checked out to study)
It seems like the kind of stuff Forrester and the Limits to Growth crew were studying could have also been picked up and used by people like John Douglas and what he learned about profiling violent offenders.
I’m not really sure how ViCAP works on the computer level… but this is stuff I’ve been thinking about the past few weeks. If you mixed that in with Limits to Growth style models, you might get some psychohistory.
… I’m not trying to say anybody should go out and create a “Future Crime” department based on this stuff, but it seems at least a possible way to study the interconnected systems in city-neighborhood-family-ecology …
Were these people reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation?
Also I wonder where the computer programs and models that ran this stuff for Limits to Growth might still exist.
Just curious and curioser.
David P. Here in the USA, recently migrated communities tend to vote strategically, that is, for whomever or for whatever party they think will further the interests of their community. Back in 2016, Senator Bernnie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton were the top contenders for the Democratic Party nomination for president. Both were campaigning in Nevada, where the top issue was the expansion of the Medicare program. Sanders was announcing We need Medicare for All, in other words, a national health service, and Clinton was against the idea. I heard a Hispanic gentleman telling a reporter that he intended to vote for Clinton because she would be “better for Hispanics”. Now, in the Southwest, the patchwork of private healthcare organizations, insurance offices, private hospitals, etc. is a major bilingual jobs program. And, these are good, well paying jobs. Some are even sit behind a desk and look pretty jobs. If a lady has a good hospital job, and her partner is a mechanic, they until very recently could buy a house. Even in CA. So, for this particular group of voters, Medicare for all sounded like my daughter/niece/sister/grandbaby might lose her nice job. It might even have seemed insulting, Oh, now that we are beginning to prosper, now they want to help the poor at our expense.
For the record, if anyone is interested, I think Medicare for all is a bad idea. I think we need a national health service, with a locally staffed and managed urgent care clinic in every neighborhood. Czarist Russia had such a national health service, with network of clinics. One of the famous Russian novelists, it might have been Gogol, served as a physician in a rural clinic.
Again, in the USA, I would be wanting to look at the internal agreements as to how many municipal jobs and contracts are to be set aside for Muslims. How much municipal largesse will be diverted into that particular community. I respectfully suggest that the anti-(small country in the ME) comments are mostly distraction. I would tend to see the attendance at the victory party of the crime boss and Hamas representatives as reminder to the victors that we had a deal, you had better do your part.
Aldarion @ 86, in theory you are right. But, you might want to look up how we came into possession of Texas.
Some while back, a year or so, IIRC, Trump said about Greenland, we have to have ownership. He and his business backers Will Not give their pipe dream of a big real estate acquisition. That same sentiment, I refuse to call it reasoning, underlies our continued complicity with the events in Gaza. That magical phrase, “But I could make a killing” is like an emotional tsunami that drowns out all considerations of ethics, morality or even strategic interest.
David P. #32
Thanks for the book recommendation, I’ll check out the chapter on sleep. If it truly can work in 2 minutes after a few weeks then that is worth a shot. Even if it’s 5 minutes I can call that a success.
Chuaquin #42
The author’s name is Yuan Ye (Cuttlefish That Loves Diving, his pen name). I can’t say I know much about him but he is clearly well read in mysticism and the occult. The main power system in the story is a tree with 22 pathways (clearly a reference to the 22 major arcana), there is mention of tarot cards, A LOT of ritual magic and much more. I’m still a novice in magic and occult philosophy (currently going through Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie by Éliphas Lévi, using JGM’s blog post series on it as a guide and also have a copy of his translation for the annotations), so I’m sure any of you taking a peek would spot even more easter eggs. The powers are much more fantastical; it’s not supposed to be a demonstration of real magic, but seeing a lot of the inspiration come from material I am currently studying is really fun. It has an anime adaptation that came out recently which has a very high production quality, do be warned the pacing is not great in the anime, especially at the start.
Northwind Grandma #57
Thanks for the suggestion! I already find reading books helps my body go into rest mode, but I can see the value in a really boring one to put me to sleep. In my experience when I get bored is when I’m ready to sleep so I can really see the potential in what you are saying. What you said about making the environment perfect, I assume most of the questions you laid out are personal preference? Then once you perfect the environment you recreate that every night to create a routine so that your body knows to go into sleep mode.
https://www.ft.com/content/17b09993-8fed-47d1-9c04-e2d29ca75615?syn-25a6b1a6=1
“SoftBank has completed the largest junk bond offering on record, paying investors yields as high as 9.75 per cent in its latest push to fund the AI ambitions of founder Masayoshi Son.
The Japanese tech group raised the equivalent of $11.1bn — including €1bn — as part of a deal that will help fund the third tranche of its massive investment in OpenAI that is due to be completed next month. ”
Fine as far as it goes, but far down the page;
“The bond sale is part of SoftBank’s effort to replace temporary bank financing raised for its OpenAI investment with longer-term funding.”
So they are taking out a loan at junk bond rates to pay off an earlier loan. This will end so well.
I need to invest in popcorn futures.
Thanks for the 0=2 option Slithy!
93, 418, 77, 156, etc.
John,
Lately I have been meditating on Karma as a solution to the problem of evil. I find that most of the objections to karma ironically have to assume that karma is false for them to hold. For instance “You think that baby did something to deserve being born with leukemia?? How dare you!” Well, if reincarnation and karma are real, then it did, in a past life. But it seems horribly unjust from the perspective of a single life.
Anyway, I am wondering how you square karma with the idea of being charitable to the less fortunate. If karma is exacting some kind of justice on people, wouldn’t alleviating their misery be interfering with it?
@Michael Gray,
that’s sort of what I’m thinking. What I’m doing at the moment is an elimination diet removing a lot of potential problem foods. In my case, I cut out all grains, dairy except ghee, seed oils that aren’t whole seeds, refined sugar, legumes and eggs, and eating from scratch all the time.
I actually suspect that I have a genuine problem with legumes for multiple reasons. One of which is that every time I’ve tried near-veganism and ate lots of legumes I wound up feeling worse either short or long-term. I know veganism isn’t for me, but something else might well be.
So I have hope that some of this change I’m seeing may be more than temporary. We’ll see.
This diet is not meant to be permanent – I will be adding some things in one by one to see if they are okay or cause trouble. I really hope that I get at least one grain back… and dairy. We’ll see. This is making enough of a difference so far that it is worth putting major effort into.
Not least because my fibro pain has dropped enough that I have been able to excercise more without suffering for it, and am getting stronger which I know will help keep the fibro pain down and help protect against injuries if I can get it up and keep it up.
@ Untitled-One,
yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m aiming to do. The food I’m most suspicious of is legumes, with wheat at number two.
Perhaps once I get the new software up and running I can hire the service out to prediction market gambling addicts…
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/what-are-prediction-markets-and-can-they-really-predict-the-future.html
Cackles in madcap glee with schizo-scientific laughter!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6unH6HMopY
I’ve read a few books lately on the Bible and the New Testament. One was “Surpassing Wonder”: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds” by Donald Akenson. A good read, but I got bogged down in the Talmudic section. Next were two books by Russell Gmirkin, “Berossus and Genesis/Manetho and Exodus” and “Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible.” I’ve only skimmed these two. I don’t know if I’ll get around to a careful reading before they’re due back where I borrowed them. He theorizes that the 70 translators of the Septuagint working in the library at Alexandria were inventing the Torah – not just translating it. He spends the second book comparing Plato’s “Laws” with the Old Testament and theorizes that the books of Moses were an attempt to create the ideal society described by Plato. I’m no expert, but it’s intriguing. I think in the past, the parallels were attributed to the Greeks copying from the Hebrew scriptures. Here Gmirkin turns that around. The last one is “Caesar’s Messiah: the Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus,” by Joseph Atwill. He thinks Christianity was invented by the Flavian emperors as a social engineering project to pacify the rebellious Jews. He spends most of the book comparing the gospels and the letters in the New Testament with Josephus’ “History of the Jews.” He thinks both were composed in Rome at around the same time by the same authors and were intended to be read side by side, intertextually, at least by the Roman elites who were “in the know. It reminded me a bit of Leo Strauss on Machiavelli. I’m no bible scholar so I won’t try to judge the likelihood that these writers are correct. Also I wouldn’t recommend them to Christians who want to keep their faith. However Christianity was “born” it appears that one or more powerful Christian egregores have developed from it. Judaism and Christianity wouldn’t be unique in claiming origins more ancient than they really possess.
Finally, I was shredding old tax documents from the ’90s today and I came across the original Unabomber Manifesto as it was published in the Sept. 21, 1995 issue of the Oakland Tribune. I tried reading it back when it first appeared and only got about halfway through. I recommend it if you’re trying to fall asleep. It does bear significantly, however, on the current rapid development of a banned topic.
@JMG,
thanks. I hope so too. I suspect I am actually senstive to legumes and possibly something else undetermined. But that’s what this should hopefully let me figure out.
In the meantime, I am using the improvement in my fibro pain and fatigue levels to increase the amount of excercise I’m doing, which, if I can keep it up, is something I know has a seriously helpful effect on the fibromyalgia. Let’s see if I can start a strong virtuous cycle here. So far the just-starting fall weather hasn’t set off a bunch of fibroflares under the new food regime… fingers crossed it stays that way!
Farmers in East Idaho are growing the Ethiopian grain teff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWgObdj3O4k
It would appear that teff is not far from being a perennial grain. It grows fast, and then can regrow in about a month. I wonder if in the Ethiopian climate, it might be perennial. A plant in Boise makes the Ethiopian bread from teff grain, will buy as much as can be grown, and the grass is being used for horse fodder.
JMG,
A coming driver of the ongoing collapse happens in utilities as society shifts from growth to stagnation or downsizing. Projects that were started years ago with the idea of providing more, sewer, water, electricity, transit, etc. to a growing population and economy now find that in many cases this growth was not needed, but the projects have been finished and the bond payments are now due.
A good example of this is the Willamette Water Project. The Tualatin Valley was growing quickly for many years and the power that be worried it would run out of water to enable economic growth and all the things beloved by politicians. So they initiated a project to bring water from the Willamette river in a big pipe with fancy treatment plant. The project is now done, and some of the debt ( $1.6 Billion) is now due and the rest will be due soon. The problem no-one is talking about is that over the last two years water use growth has been stagnant and trendy negative due to conservation caused by the first stage of water price increases. So people conserving water only drives the price per gallon up.
Of course this will end with the water authority etc. going broke and the debt defaulted or written down, but that is the shape of the future.
Thinking of your essay Hate is the New Sex, I started to wonder if there’s any connection between what a culture considers taboo and the way it collapses. Are you familiar with any other taboos (besides those two) that were associated with the end-stage of a culture? Or on the other hand, the golden age?
I doubt Rome had anything against either hate or sex, nor would there need to be one particular kind of taboo for collapse–it could happen in a number of contexts. But it would be interesting to find some kind of correlation. I would imagine that, in general, as the center releases its hold, taboos in general would loosen. Or at least, shift, and in that shift give the appearance of loosening as the new taboos aren’t always immediately obvious to those involved in the process.
Pardon me Mr. Greer. I was wondering what your views are on the Neoplatonist philosophy that became prominent in the 3rd Century CE, if any.
Mary Bennet #105:
I’m not sure we even need to look at jobs. Die Linke’s platform include things like voting rights for all residents after five years (as opposed to only citizens), building Berlin-specific asylum programs to bring people from those countries there,
forging identificationshanding out Berlin-specific ID cards to illegals without papers, effectively abolishing public transport fares (it’s not just a stereotype that people from these communities don’t buy train tickets—nowadays, there are several assaults on ticket controllers each day, occasionally murders too, and that wasn’t the case before we opened the borders in 2015). On a federal level, a Linke representative recently threw a tantrum at the idea that wanted criminals should not receive social security, a policy that would “harm” Muslims because those are disproportionally often recipients of social security (and criminals). While she didn’t say so out loud, she did say that such a policy would be racist.You might be right about that one country, but I’m not sure. There are quite many pro-that-other-country demonstrations in Germany, led by Muslims. They chant charming things like “gas the Jews”.
I’m sorry if this sounds like anti-Muslim propaganda but I can back all these things up if you want me to.
—David P.
All this math, zeros and ones:
One of my ways of praying is based on breathing (I got the idea from Tibetan Buddhism; it may be an official prayer; I can’t recall):
Breathe IN
discomfort, negativity, badness.
Breathe OUT
comfort, positivity, and goodness.
If reversed, it does not work the same. Incidentally, this leaves the environment better.
Breathing in and out with this sort of intention, in my opinion, is similar to when my cat (“Lindsay”) comes over and says, “pet me; I will neutralize your badness; you‘ll feel better.” After my pettin’ her for a bit, I do feel better.
Seriously, Lindsay can tell when I feel poorly. She ‘takes in’ my negativity (a minus; –1), and by giving of herself, by making available her intention and fur, what emerges is positivity (positive; +1).
Vice versa. I can tell when she feels poorly; I go over and pet her (she loves nothing better); she visibly appears to feel better (she can’t speak, so I have to look for signs); I neutralize her feeling cr_ppy.
Pettin’-wise: do the math. Negatives are real, and positives are real. Reverse a negative. Reverse a positive.
Behaviorally, one can “reverse a positive” real fast: even being in a hugely positive situation (let’s say PersonA hands PersonB a check for BP£1,000, or US$1,000) can be ruined (made negative) by someone in the room (PersonC) saying a snide remark like “You’ll just waste it, you idiot.”
[Oh, and ditch PersonC immediately.]
💨🫥🐈💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
J.L.Mc12 # 46:
“and then also criticises the strain of Human Supremacist and fascist/authoritarian ideology that is getting popular in much science fiction these days, specifically WH4k”
I’ve also noticed this tendence within (far) right sci-fi freaks, competing against the equally infamous woke sci-fi tendence in the SF scene (especially in the anglosphere) since some years ago. These two awful and boring tendencies have me regret from my former avid fondness for sci-fi novels, ahem…
By the way, it’s interesting to guess to some extent how and why Mr. Musk technolibertarian space fantasies have mixed with his near evident fondness to fascism. Well, near evident to say something (I remember his in-famous photo waving with the Roman style (cough).
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Noah # 36 and some other commenters, about insomnia and how to solve it:
My best system to sleep (the fee nights I can’t sleep well), it’s trying to convince myself I’m not going to sleep, and I don’t want to sleep at all…Ironically and paradoxically, I always nod off in les than 15-20 minutes. It’s interesting I learned by myself this trick which works for me, before reading Viktor Frankl “paradoxical intention”, so I was very puzzled when I read it: everything is already made up…
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JMG # 61 and others:
“How does the book of Revelations compare, in terms of its grammar, to the Gospel of Thomas? I find Stephan K. Davies’ claim that Thomas, as the only surviving sayings gospel, is the oldest known Christian writing (and definitely pre-70 AD) to be compelling on other grounds; it would be intriguing if those two, with their very different outlooks, were the oldest things we have from the Christian movement.”
Maybe it’s true, maybe is only one more hypothesis. I can tell you I went some years ago, to a conference about origins of Christianism, directed by a very secular pedants…errr…university historians (so, no interested in supporting any Christian orthodoxy). Soon the topic went into whic one was the first Christian written text. I saw a very funny and hard debate between thsi and that scholar. Conference ended and I didin’t find any of the several views really convincing in reasonable terms. So I tend to think this is an unending debate, to some extent.
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Luke Z # 64:
“Have your read Joséphin Péladan’s novels? What do you think?”
No, I haven’t…Although I know there are some Spanish translations of them, I’ve never be curious enough to read any ot them. Well, this situation can change soon, who knows. I think Péladan was an important influence for the eccentrical musician and composer Erik Satie, during the last part of XIXth century. Indeed, Satie was, during part of his life, engaged in the French occultist scene (he was pianist/organist for a Rosicrucian Order, so he evidently met Péladan because this later was himself a Rosicrician too).
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Rita Elizaeth…# 71:
“Classical Greek history and religion — _Hubris: Pericles, the Parthenon, and the Invention of Athens_ by David Studdard (Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA, 2026-$29.95 hardcover) . This is a detailed history of the rise and decline of Athens.”
It seems interesting: Thanks. However, we must remember that famous Athens democracy lasted more or less only a century, within the whole ancient Greece history. And Athens was only one of the several “polis” (state-cities) in the Greek Peninsula. Of course you can’t go to the opposite idea and think only Spartans are the true ancient Greeks, like it seems to appear in certain fake historical comic and movie…Well, I think there were many ways to be an ancient Greek, according where you were born.
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Justin P. # 81:
Thank you for your comment and link. I’m quite intrigued by it, so ASAP I’m going to see it…
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(To be continued)
@JMG, #95. Agreed. I don´t know if the Watcher guards exclusively the path towards Occultism, but I suspect it should be any spiritual path instead. Letting go of the Fear of Hell TM (C) without devolving to nihilism is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for any kind of Christian Mysticism.
@Brian Kaller, #66. I also vote for Agostino Taumaturgo, you could do much worse than to check his website (though he no longer posts regularly there). Other than that, check the practices of the Religious Orders; Diocesan clergy is almost always more closed-minded and orthodox. One example is Lectio Divina (developed by the Benedictine monks), which in some loose sense is a form of Discursive Meditation.
Dear Mr. Greer, et all – Just out of curiosity, do all the time changes, across time and space play hob with casting astrological charts? Besides our twice yearly temporal whiplash, Daylight Savings Time, came and went at various times in history. Just wondering … Lew
Hey JMG
Kösemen’s website can be found here, if you are interested.
http://cmkosemen.com/
I forgot another thing he said that would interest you. In the book, the interview asked Kösemen about prehuman civilisations and the Eocene-Palaeocene thermal maximum that some people have suggested was caused by the industrial activity of a non-human civilisation. Kösemen pointed out that rather than an industrial civilisation, it may in fact have been caused by some undiscovered animal species that functioned in a similar manner to prairie-dogs or mole rats, that “farmed” some kind of plant or fungus capable of producing methane as a byproduct as we currently see in certain ant species. Suppose that such a creature became sufficiently widespread, the methane would have triggered a severe climate change event fairly quickly.
Furthermore, he suggests that a similar scenario explains some of the Permian extinction, except that he thinks the culprit was the shocking prevalent Lystrosaurs. He believes that these creatures may have been eusocial colony building animals like mole rats that not only farmed methan producing fungi or plants, but maybe even were opportunistic users of fire as certain birds are, taking advantage of random bushfires by somehow spreading them to areas in order to clear unwanted vegetation. He suggests that they were so successful that they essentially outcompeted all other animals by destroying their habitats to the point of extinction, in a manner similar to humans but way worse.
pygmycory 38; Katrinka 67
Naturopathic physician
Do you have a naturopathic physician around? I used to go to a naturopath in 1980s Connecticut, USA. That naturopath (she) did the sort of thing with diet that Katrinka talks about.
💨🫥🍳💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Anonymous 68
> If given the choice, young Americans would choose to open the gates for Alaric and the Visigoths.
I agree. Opening the gates for Alaric and the Visigoths WOULD indeed be appropriate. Even though imperfect, and lots of people would say I don‘t make sense, this is why I vote Republican.
I have done a lot of reading on the subject. A lot of undirected reading. I don‘t “follow“ anyone. I make up my own mind, intaking facts and opinions. I weigh things. I look at probabilities. I vote Republican because Republicans are closer to letting Alaric in than Demoncrats,— a lot closer. At least Republicans have a higher probability of letting in Alaric.
Neither party is anywhere near perfect. I am not stupid, but I am aware people consider me that. I don‘t care. I go my own way. I often feel like burning down both parties. But Republicans have more “possibility” than Demoncrats. I call them “demon” because demon is a decent descriptor of that particular batch of people. Republicans are “off” but have a higher chance of righting themselves within the next ten years. This said by a former multi-generational lifelong Democrat. Republicans are OFF, but Demoncrats are unrecoverably OFF.
Anyway, let Alaric IN. In a way, it saddens me that I won’t be around to witness the-Alaric-by-another-name get a toehold, at least not in this lifetime. Drat.
Or.
Trump is Alaric.
Perhaps, Trump is the first of a series of Alarics.
Nobody said that Alaric was Mr Nice Guy.
💨🫥🤗⛏️💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Justin P # 81 (again):
Well, I’ve seen that Venn diagram and I think it’s painfully true and good to depict some shameful biases shared by wokesters and (far) righters alike, beyond their apparent simetrical and full opposite tension. For my European taste, I can tell you I’ve seen too many American parochial references for my taste, but they’re also true and painful for today US politics, methink. I’d like to add to that list of shared antidemocratic biases their common lack of respect for individuals and families privacy (woke people when they say their mantra “the personal is political”(¿?), and righters fondness to nose about personal beliefs and sexual life, both of them like this personal space violation as soon as they get some power). Thank you for your link.
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The Greenland thing:
I partly enjoy Denmark trouble with Trump appetite for Greenland, with some “Schadenfreude”, because Danish governments have been within the more servile govts to obey faster USA orders within NATO countries. So let’s see how well have been they rewarded, to more shame, losing at least part of real control over their main “colonial jewell”, Greenland. Of course, I’m only an European pointing my subjective view of this geopolitical melodrama…
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David # 89:
“Die Linke won because they courted Muslims and the PMC youth. They got 51% of the Muslim vote and 30% of voters with higher education. Take a look at the third graphic here: https://apollo-news.net/diese-fuenf-grafiken-zeigen-weshalb-die-linke-ihren-triumph-in-berlin-migranten-zu-verdanken-hat/”
It’s likely they were voted by migrants, including those awful muslims, because part of Die Linke electoral program suggested they would “fix” the housing problem. Of course, electoral promises usually never match with a real government, and controlling Berlin isn’t controlling Germany, so I bet they’ll have a lot of problems if they try to fulfill their program…
“During their campaign, they repeatedly platformed people calling for violence against Jews, only occasionally disguised as being opposed to that one place in the middle east.”
It’s strange, this claim of Antisemitism doesn’t appear in another webs I usually visit, maybe they’re all in a leftist conspiracy to hide this hard allegation. What I’ve read is The “Green” Party loved to accuse Die Linke of Antisemitism during last campaign, claims that were denied by Die Linke. I see you follow the current “democratic” parties narrative, when you want to attack (far) left…I recomend you to visit different ideologies sites, not only your favorite webs to confirm your biases.
“Like any party, they’ve got their opportunists, but I do think that these opportunists understand that their best chance at profiting is actually attempting to do what they’ve promised to do.”
I’m afraid you’ve written a wishful thinking. If you’ve read me before this comment, I think a regional-state govt with a different party ruling it than Central-Federal govt can only lead to a political blockage in Germany; in the unlikely case AfD tries to fulfill its promises (it’s the same case as Die Linke, so you can see I don’t have any fondness for Commies, by the way). Of course, beliefs are free.
********************************
# 94:
Well, could you define exactly what means “Antisemitism” for you?(including “attacks agains Jews)
It’s very strange I’ve never read any reference to that nasty claims by Die Linke, maybe this is a leftist conspiracy…I tend to think Antisemitism accusations can be very useful to isolate a fringe party (which is casually depicted as far leftist).
It could be very weasy for leftist to blame AfD for being anti-muslim migrants, due to their usual speech (well, let’s open a can of worms). Of course, for AfD muslims are always suspects for being Antisemitic and Islamists, methink…Let’s open a can of worms.
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Robert M. # 98:
I find interesting the two Johns hypothesis, but I tend to think John the Loved Disciple was, more or less taught by Jesus some secret teachings, but of course I can’t prove it with sound data.
“The New Testament, taken as a whole, distinguishes between the original Twelve Apostles and the other Disciples of Jesus, and the Gospel of Mark makes it quite clear that there were not only the Apostles, but a number of other Disciples as well, all present at the Last Supper.”
Well, even some of these apostles beyond the 12 Apostles, could have been women, like for example Martha and Mary the two sisters. It’s a work hypothesis I suggest, not a sound truth, please understand me…
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Justin P. # 100:
“He uses ancient angelic key patterns to curse Rome, and also to establish that Rome is bad, and that the messianic Jews of the time are good. It is a jumble of ancient keys, snippets of mysticism, and political and religious criticism cloaked in allegory”
It seems IMHO an interesting view to be kept in mind, in its likely (but not sure) historical context. I take note as an hypothesis, too.
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Siliconguy # 103:
“This is an ‘Infinite Life’ Agreement, there is no end!” Mr. Trump said on social media, though nothing is really permanent in global politics.”
I’ve remembered, after having read this phrase, that not much time ago, Turkey and (maybe, if I remember it well), Uzbekistan governments signed a treaty for their “perpetual friendship”(ahem). Another bombastic and arrogant stament, methink. Well, anything in geopolitics is eternal/perpetual, and countries haven’t friends, only temporary allies…
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Noah # 107:
Thanks for giving me the writer name. I see Yuan Ye is engaged in occultist world, according your comment; so I wonder how he’s managed to publish that novel, under current China regime…unless he’s living in Taiwan or in a western country as an expat. Even playing with fancy magic could make think likely censors, that some people could think (horror!) magic could be a real thing…
Indeed, the few talks I’ve had with Continental chines Diaspora here, have shown me they’re very influenced (some of them even indoctrinated) by materialist philosophy, which isn’t a strange fact in a country ruled until today by a Communist Party.
Justin, interesting. I’d tend to agree, but only with the somewhat quirky understanding of cursing I wrote about here:
https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/night-thoughts-in-hagsgate.html
Robert, I cling to the hope that someday somebody will turn up a copy of Hippolytus’s Refutation of All Heresies with the lost chapters on the Eleusinian and Phrygian mysteries!
Justin, no doubt that’s being done already, but the people doing it aren’t talking about it.
Siliconguy, very long on popcorn futures…
Nephite, nope. For all you know, it may be their karma to be rescued from misery by your actions! If they need to suffer, arrangements will be made to give them the suffering you need; meanwhile, there’s another issue that’s far more important for you. If someone is suffering and you can help, the karma that matters is the good karma you’ll gain by helping them, or the bad karma you’ll pile up by turning your back.
Phutatorius, it was one of Augustine of Hippo’s more interesting comments to insist that Christianity is actually far older than claimed — he insisted that it was around all along, but came to be called its present name after the time of Jesus.
Pygmycory, delighted to hear it.
Mary, that makes a great deal of sense; the dryland West generally ought to be good teff country, being arid highlands with hot summers, like much of Ethiopia. Teff isn’t perennial in the classic sense — the plants flower, fruit, and die — but if your climate lacks frost you can raise one quick crop after another. It’s like buckwheat in that. Funny you should mention it — I live on the edge of the Ethiopian neighborhood here in Silver Spring and so have had the chance to try teff bread, and it’s quite good.
Clay, yep. Overbuilding followed by bankruptcy is a common way for civilizations to go.
Kyle, the one common feature I can think of is that in decadent societies, nothing is taboo.
Gunstone, it was an interesting movement, if a little too austere and abstract for my tastes.
Lew, nope. Modern astrology programs autocorrect for those — and my older books have convenient tables that tell you how to do it quickly and easily by hand.
J.L.Mc12, thanks for this! I’ll give it a look as time permits.
“There used to be an academic journal called Maledicta: the International Journal of Verbal. ”
Digital editions of Maledicta are available on Anna’s Archive.
“Apparently many Greenlanders would be happy if the US made it our 51st state, but the Danes said no.”
The Greenlanders have their issues with Denmark, but from what I have read, they have no illusions that they would be better treated by the US. At least the Danes do provide Scandinavian level of social services, even if with a fair dose of condescension.
Greenland has a population of 56,000, not nearly enough to be a state.
“If karma is exacting some kind of justice on people, wouldn’t alleviating their misery be interfering with it?”
They have the bad karma to be suffering misery, but the good karma for there to be someone who can alleviate it. And you will affect your own karma by whether or not you do alleviate it.
A follower of Mahatma Gandhi died. In the afterlife, he came upon the Mahatma in a row boat with Marilyn Monroe. “Mahatma”, he cried, “you are receiving your reward for all your good deeds”. “His reward?” sneered Marilyn. “He is my punishment.”
In my book, a teaching that tells me to aid and abet suffering is a false teaching. (Unless this is done to prevent some greater suffering.)
The thing about steers lactating, and even about bulls lactating, is a known thing and easily explained.
Estrogen makes steers gain weight faster, so the rancher can sell them sooner. Money, yay! They use implants with estrogen in them to achieve this. Steers have no testicles to produce testosterone to counterbalance the estrogen. So the presence of the estrogen causes the steers to lactate.
Dairy breeds have been bred for centuries to make all the milk, all the time, lots and lots. The forcing of their genes in that direction has reached the point that even intact males will sometimes make a bit of milk. So any time someone says, ‘oh my gosh, that bull is making milk!’, your first question should be, ‘what breed is it?’.
@JMG(#128):
Hippolytus! That would be an absolutely wonderful discovery! And it might yet happen, for reasons I mentioned above.
Yet sometimes texts came down almost to our day, only to be lost just before they could be recovered and printed. A famous example is Papias of Hieropolis’s famous Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord in five books, written in the late 1st or very early 2nd century CE. It was translated into Latin early on, and two manuscripts of that translation are actually mentioned in Medieval catalogues of two monastic libraries. These catalogues were published in the late 1800s, and eminent scholars noticed their entries. At least one of them promptly visited the two monasteries in question, but found, alas, that neither still had that particular manuscript of Papias’s work that they had formerly owned.
Even so, all may not be lost. Another scholar also named Papias lived in the 11th century and composed a dictionary of Latin, which survives in a significant number of manuscripts as well as in several early printed editions. So far as I know, no scholar has ever gone through all the extant manuscripts of Papias the Lexicographer. Might at least one of them actually be a manuscript of Papias of Heiropolis’s lost work? And if Papias’s work may have survived somehow, why not Hippolytus’s?
Rhydlyd says about the Amish: “….the economic ideas work, so a discussion of how we Green Wizards might cut-paste to start our own communities would be quite interesting….”
OK, I’ll oblige.
The Amishman’s Economy can be distilled to a single concept: The only wealth is wellbeing. Everything else derives its value from the degree to which it supports wellbeing.
I grew up as Beachy Amish with grandparents and parents from the Old Order. I still live on the old homeplace. You cannot possibly replicate the compounding economic effects of a persecuted religious sect with very strong in-group preferences living in one general location for centuries.
Apart from his own internal priorities, the Amish man prioritizes wealth in the following manner:
1) Choose your family, spiritual brothers, friends, and neighbors -in that order. Organize the rest of your life around these relationships.
2) Ensure sources of clean water, access to food, and maintain comfort in your own shelter.
3) Cultivate productivity every waking hour except Sunday.
4) Prioritize ruthlessly and everything else is surplus.
@Nephite #110
If I might suggest what might be a useful way of thinking about the karma issue: you can appeal to karma to explain suffering, or you can use karma as a guide for action, but trying to do both at the same time is usually a mistake. This is because karma is actually amoral, and the vast majority of its effects are neither good nor bad. As an example, it was your karma to experience every detail of your day today. (Though note that most of that karma was the result of your actions today: karma is simply cause-and-effect, and often as simple as that.)
At its root, what karma says is you can’t get one set of consequences from your actions while exporting another set onto others, and that’s true whether you think you’re cleverly getting away with something or nobly giving something away. You will eventually internalize all your externalities: good, bad, or indifferent.
“Gunstone, it was an interesting movement, if a little too austere and abstract for my tastes.”
May I ask if there are any philosophical/ethical/theological belief systems in Classical Antiquity that appeal to you in particular?
Hi John Michael,
Dr Michael Burry is an interesting cat and has been discussing capital cycles where the costs with massive investments arrive afterwards in the form of depreciation and capital write downs. From a business perspective, that’s how it works. He said something about presently reaching dot.com style peaks in that cycle. Makes a whole bunch of sense to me, and no wonder your biggest chief is saying the things he his.
I’m basically unimpressed by the arty-fish-al gloop, and the hype is nice and all, but the machines may not have all that long a lifespan, which is astounding when you stop and think about the sheer scale of the activity. Quite amazing really, but you’ve got to hand it to the tech bros for their panache. Yes, the audacity of huge. So I agree with your point about massive build outs just prior to collapse. Oh well, crazy days.
I’m curious to see that nobody here has yet mentioned the quietly unfolding diesel dramas. I’d put that energy source under the label: ‘boring but important’.
And yeah, being stuck eternally in that kind of church would be a personal nightmare. And what if I reject that, and also being subjected to the eternal fires… It seems a poor choice either way. Although I did kind of like how at year 12 we’d sing hymns like a proper football choir. I was personally surprised that the priest and headmaster got so upset, and put us all in regular after school detention. And on a separate but related note, secretly wondered if the deity in question would have been pleased by the show of enthusiasm by us youngsters. See, no fun…
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
Ha! Greenland… From what I understand, that big frozen island actually costs the Danes to keep, so the people there have little say in the matter. Can that small country afford to keep paying those bills? That is the question which bothers me, especially when rumour has it that they’re dirty to pursue a war to their east. We can’t do everything, although that is what boomer adults used to tell me when I was a kid. It’s false thinkin’! 🙂
Cheers
Chris
Nephite 110
> If karma is exacting some kind of justice on people, wouldn’t alleviating their misery be interfering with it?
Buddhists and Hindus have wrestled with this question for eons. Everyone has a different opinion. There are different factions of opinion. There are whole schools of thought differing from each other. There is no “one answer.” One can study this question for a lifetime, and still not know if one got it correct. Anyone what says (s)he has the answer, scoff and treat it as mere opinion.
It is up there with, “Does God exist?”. Answers are unprovable.
It is, nonetheless, a worthwhile and fascinating question. Read up on it. You will come across countless views. In the end, settle on your own conclusion.
💨🫥✨💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
J.L.Mc12 @ 125, There appears to be a growing consensus among geologists which associates past mass extinctions with so-called supervolcano eruptions.
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/mass-extinction/volcanic-activity-and-mass-extinction/
What I found interesting here is that these volcanic theories are now being put out in public facing, simplified venues. The paragraphs to which I linked mention the Permian event in connection with the formation of the Siberian Traps. If you scroll down, you find a section about the mass extinction event which killed off dinosaurs being brought about by the combination of disasters, the asteroid and the ongoing eruptions which formed the Deccan Traps.
Kyle 118
Do I get to vote on the next “in vogue” taboo?
I nominate “Contempt.”
But there are dozens of meanings. Which one?
💨🫥🗣️🤦🏼♀️💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Jessica @ 131, Rhode Island was admitted to the Union in 1790. Its’ population at that time was 68,825.
David P., I believe every word you typed. We have not yet seen murders of Amtrak ticket takers, but there is plenty of rude and belligerent behavior. The Moslem diaspora has not made itself very well liked here.
@JMG
“Kyle, the one common feature I can think of is that in decadent societies, nothing is taboo.”
So we’re not there yet but are headed that way? Or was hate the last taboo to fall?
> Christianity / Christianism / Christism
Okay, I must chime in here.
😬I don’t like Christianity because it is too darn complicated.😳
💨🫥😬😳💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Hello All!
Just wishing my friends here a lovely Vernal Equinox turning.
Also, I’ll throw in regarding the dietary inquiries that, personally, I find a weekly practice of a one day fast (either just liquid, or in my necessary case, a reduced food intake fast) is great for healthy metabolic reset.
This is in no way “medical” advice, and might not work for all but I find it helpful. My system doesn’t tolerate a liquid only fasting, so I do a day of minimal calorie food choices like plain soups and light plain salads, no snacking, no sugar or dairy.
YogaandtheTarot
JMG,
I have a question for yourself about the writing business. I am an eager writer who wants to write both nonficiton and fiction books, and I have a habit of writing poetry as well. I have started a blog to build an audience on Substack. I have a couple of blog posts up already, which were accomplished as a proof-of-concept project to demonstrate that I can write high-quality blog posts.
I’ve read on your blog that it is much easier to be published for a nonfiction book than a fiction book. I recall a statistic you shared where 75% of submissions to publishers are fiction and 25% nonfiction, while 75% of published books are nonfiction and the remaining 25% are fiction.
Currently, I plan to write nonfiction blog posts that analyze class and the contemporary political economy of the United States, and the social consequences of the political economy on society. My goal is to write 13-15 blog posts on the subject, each about 3000 words in legnth, and then send these blog posts off as a manuscript to publishers.
Given these details, does this sound like a good plan for writing a first book? Is there anything that I am missing in this plan that I will need to account for?
Thank you. You have been a great inspiration to myself as a writer. You are the first person I have found who does what I want to do successfully. My goal is to become a writer who extends the topics and conversations of your blog here on Ecosophia.
P.S. Any chance that you will pick up the blog thread on art and the occult? I felt as though you were building toward very interesting material. I love the peak oil review, but I am missing that payoff from that series!
I discovered a very interesting book recently called Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus. (2011)
Here’s a little bit of the description…
“Caesar’s Messiah” will rock our understanding of Christian history as it reveals that Jesus was a fictional character portrayed in four Gospels written not by Christians but Romans.
He basically says that the Christian religion was created by the Roman Empire to keep the peasantry down.
Don’t kill the master. You’ll be rewarded when you die. Etc, etc…
Having been raised Catholic, gone to religious schools, and ending up having no idea if God even existed, this book really caught my attention. ( I’m a happy, Gods worshipping Pagan now )
There’s a LOT of very passionate reviews on Amazon saying this version of history has never been seriously challenged.
I was wondering what your thoughts are on the book, and its conclusions?
@pygmycory #112
Very well, in that case I wish you the best of luck. May your pain subside and stay that way, as it largely has for me.
About David Chapman, one could do worse than starting reading him through
https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/eating-an-entire-epistemologist or
https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/necrophiliac-dakini .
Is it okay to do two Technomikon entries? I have one for a primitive wooden barrel water filter, and one for wooden roof shakes, which I finally succeeded in figuring out the basics on. They seem to go together for the bungalow or cabin. Thanks!
Jessica, oh, no doubt there are Greenlanders who think that way, too.
Robert, ouch. So close and yet so far!
Gunstone, I’ve already discussed that at length here. I appreciate classical Stoicism and Middle Platonism.
Chris, I’ve been getting serious 1999 vibes for a while now — so many of the sales pitches for AI remind me forcibly of the comparable sales pitches for internet startups that failed.
Slithy, oh, we still have taboos. Frank talk about social class is one of the big ones. When that breaks down, the Visigoths may be at the door.
Mrdobner, that should work. Beginning now, start scoping out small to midsized publishers who bring out books on political economy with themes not too far from yours, find their submissions requirements, and use those as a guide for your editing process, so you have something ready for them. As for the Situationist posts, well, we’ll see!
Bob, I remember reading something along those lines in the 1970s. I never found it plausible, for a variety of reasons — above all that so many people in the Roman upper classes despised Christianity and fought it tooth and nail as a depraved, disgusting, antisocial cult. Did you know that the oldest surviving representation of the Crucifixion is a nasty caricature?
The writing says “Alexamenos adores his god,” and shows Jesus with a donkey’s head. It dates from around 200 AD, or more than a century before Constantine legalized Christianity.
STS, thanks for this.
Celadon, you can do a dozen if you want. Several people have contributed quite a bunch of them.
@Justin Patrick Moore #109
You’re welcome!
You’ve probably heard this joke, but a Thelemite I knew explained to me that 0=2 works in Thelema because there’s no subtraction in Thelemic math. The other basic arithmetic operations are allowed — “Add, multiply, divide, and understand,” after all — but “Let there be no difference made among you.”
@JMG
“Japan is a fascinating example along the same lines — it became literate most of a millennium after the Axial Age, and then preserved Shinto in a half-mummified form”
I’ve been thinking about your comment above for a while. It seems to me that the half-mummification happened because it’s how Buddhism learned to handle the theistic religions of the regions it evangelized. Only a few times did Buddhists attempt to completely displace the traditional religions of those regions — IIRC it succeeded in Taiwan but mostly failed in Tibet.
With other cultures, the deal essentially was: we’ll do the thinking, and you can do the praying. In other words, if the religions agreed to never Axialize and develop a competing philosophy/theology, they could keep doing their rituals and petitioning the gods for practical boons. (You occasionally since this deal offered in the West: sure, you can still believe in God and pray to Jesus, as long as you stop getting your ideas from the Bible and get them from us instead.)
Taoism was a special case; in good Taoist fashion it convinced Buddhism that it its budding philosophical interpretation was harmless and basically compatible with Buddhist thought even as it helped Mahayana mellow out even further and move away from the austere Buddhism of the Pali canon.
@JGM #61,
Har! I wonder where this totally unfounded stereotype about Germans comes from!! 😀 But come on, it was a great chance to have some quality family time listing up profanities, all for a good cause. What kind of parent could resist such a golden opportunity? 😉
Btw, two of the ones you might not have known before are “Scherenschleifer” and “er/sie ist auf der Brotsuppe dahergeschwommen”, as I think they are region-specific and less common. And since they have interesting backgrounds and I’m fond of both, I will offer the explanation nobody asked for:
A “Scherenschleifer” is somebody who sharpens scissors (and also knives etc, of course). In earlier times, these folks would go from town to town, and from house to house, offering their services. I take it from the use of this particular profanity that the Scherenschleifers of old had a reputation of being somewhat less than honest and less than honorable… 😉
And if somebody is “auf der Brotsuppe dahergeschwommen”, he swum up (to you, or to the situation) on the bread soup. Or rather, his mental acuity is swimming on a (meager and less nourishing) soup of bread – as opposed to somebody who swum up on a (richer and more nourishing) sausage soup (Wurstsuppe). It’s also often used to stress that the speaker isn’t stupid, as in “Ich bin doch nicht auf der Brotsuppe dahergeschwommen!” (I haven’t swum up on the bread soup!).
@Chuaquin #91,
I’m of the firm conviction that one only speaks a language well once one can swear in it to suit any and all occasions. Learning to order a beer, or to ask for directions or the time, is the easy part. Using profanities as appropriate requires a much better grasp of the langauge, but also of the cultural background.. It sounds like your nephew is well on the way… 😉 And yep, a “Schwein” is a pig (although “swine” would probably be the more accurate translation).
@ Jessica #132 (and the general discussion of karma)
“In my book, a teaching that tells me to aid and abet suffering is a false teaching. (Unless this is done to prevent some greater suffering.)”
This strikes me as a fallacious equation. The suffering which stands before you and which you have the power to alleviate is concrete and palpable. The “some greater suffering” you imagine you might prevent is theoretical, and you will never have the opportunity, in practice, to find evidence of the size, shape or severity of suffering theoretically “prevented”.
Therefore, to me, the choice is never – practical good vs theoretical harm (theoretical good not prevented). Instead it is always – here is a practical thing I can do. On the face of it it (including, perhaps, on the strength of divination) it seems to be a good thing, and all the possible ramifications and outcomes that lie downstream from my doing of this deed are theoretical.
I either choose to do it, or choose to not do it.
That is the only choice that does not devolve into “provisional” living.
I’ve recently read a Wikipedia article about the writer Yuan Ye, in English and very short. It’s interesting he’s from Continental China and he lives there in present time yet, accordind that brief article. I guess his fondness for magic in his stories, according what I’ve heard about him, could be justified in front of current Chinese regime ideology, maybe with likely claims like “they’re only innocent fiction stories/fantasy”. However, I also think that before writing magic and fantasy stories which seem coherent (to make them believable within its fiction world), maybe you need to have known before some old school true magic…
—————————————-
Thanks to some mystery and (maybe fake) occultism-like novels written by my compatriot Javier Sierra, I’ve read something about Robert Fludd and John Dee. Both Englishmen, they lived more or less at the end of Renacentist times, and both of them despised and ignored by an strange alliance between religious zealots and the new born rationalist philosophers-scientists.
JMG and commentariat, what do you think about those men? I’d thank book references about them, and even their own works, though I’d prefer Spanish translations or at least books in a relatively easy English (Oops!, it isn’t my mothers’ tongue). Thanks on advance.
Dear Mr. Greer,
Quite a while ago, while responding to a comment on your then latest post, you mentioned in passing that the British biologist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake might well be an occultist, taking into account some of his public statements and the way he conducts his research into unconventional topics. In this context, it is interesting to note that he named one of his two sons Merlin.
Dr. Sheldrake’s impeccable scientific credentials make it difficult for the conventional academic establishment to dismiss him out of hand as a crank, but the importance, innovation and validity of his work are often disregarded as non-scientific nonsense.
Would you care to expand on your comment mentioned above? In more general terms, do you think he is an isolated case in the conventional scientific and academic establishment or is he the public face of an undercurrent that dares not speak out, aided by the fact Dr. Sheldrake is now 84 and therefore cannot anymore be easily intimidated into compliance with the scientific conventions of the day?
Thank you very much in advance.
Kind regards,
African-at-Heart
Northwind, one easy way to cancel is to just shut off the credit card or whatever payment system and let them find you. They can then shut you off for non-payment. What are they gonna do to you? Reduce your credit?
Chuaquin “Righters fondness to nose about personal beliefs and sexual life,
That hasn’t been true in decades. Not only was it never true, but crossed, as Conservatism/Libertarianism is “Leave them alone” “Don’t Care” mentality, but for example Trump is the first gay marriage President, where his active #2, Bessant is gay and best liked. There are probably dozens of others, but the Right doesn’t keep track of it at all and so can’t brag. I think…Maybe Pundit Rubin is? Heck, everyone thought Lindsay Graham was gay. No one cared now, no one cared then, no one cared in my lifetime except a small minority that was gone by the 90s.
It baffles me sometimes how many lifetimes certain common knowledges can persist before they are updated. Sometimes hundreds of years.
People who don’t think so will fight back reflexively and not look though, I know. But please do; being that far wrong does not reflect well and will stop more accurate persuasions to your cause.
(sadly commenting on Politics, the least important and least interesting subject presently.)
Bob in Kamiah – It seems likely to me that Jesus really was a Jewish teacher who ended up crucified, and that his teachings and life (death) story could have been promoted by the civil authorities. “Blessed are the meek…”, “turn the other cheek”, “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”; I don’t think one needs to be a Christian to recognize these words of advice. Often overlooked, the phrase “it is better for one man to die, for the sake of the community”, as the Jewish leaders said before insisting on Crucifixion, showed how important it was to them not to be seen by the Romans as tolerating insurrection in any way, no how, no sir! So, yeah. The Romans had good reasons for publicizing the Jesus story. That doesn’t make it false, though.
If the US wants to prepare for leaving NATO and still keep military control over Greenland, then the recently signed treaty seems to be the wrong instrument for that. It forbids non-NATO states from having military bases in Greenland!
For what it’s worth, Reuters reports that 85% of Greenlanders are opposed to becoming part of the USA.
I don’t think the treaty is doing any harm, though I think the US has lost a lot of goodwill in (so far) loyal vassal states like Denmark because of this scuffle.
I was recently informed (via the Ethics Alarms conservative newsletter) that Turner Classic Movies has removed the stuttering Porky Pig trailer from its cartoon showings. Apparently, this is offensive to people who stutter, or to people who worry about people who stutter, or to people who worry about people with “different abilities” of all kinds. So, I asked Google about the stutter of Porky Pig, and turned up this podcast lead-in:
https://stutteringiscool.com/podcast/porky-pig-role-model-for-people-who-stutter/
Porky Pig is a cartoon character who always spoke his mind, got what he wanted, overcame his stuttering, and is not a character who is suffering because of his speech. Also, Porky Pig lives in the world we people who stutter want to live in – a world where the people we speak to react positively to our stuttering. That’s what happens in the Looney Tunes cartoons. Other characters very rarely mocked or reacted negatively to Porky Pig’s stuttering (I only know of one cartoon where a radio announcer mimics him and I’m an avid viewer of Looney Tunes!).
What do you think?
Here is a social class screed I wrote in the form of a movie review.
Coyote vs. Odyssey
The most mythic movie of the year was not directed by Christopher Nolan, yet it still touches on the Greek myths. Even more, it has everything to do with the very real powers prowling around inside the shadowlands of America’s collective unconscious. Coyote vs. Acme is the working mans Odyssey. A bevy of highbrow academics have gushed and gasped and growled about Nolan and the relative prowess or pointlessness of his film. Yet many of those same critics have yet to grow hip to the fact that it is the film Coyote vs. Acme that deserves to be in the spotlight for its deep spiritual message, the way it reflects the living mythos of North America and the everlasting pertinence of the trickster to the people of its nations.
What makes Coyote vs. Acme so great is that it takes itself a whole lot less seriously than the movies of Christopher Nolan. When I first saw Memento in the theater, I fell asleep. Granted, I was drinking beer in the theater with friends, and it was after midnight, because my late friend Jerry Lewis (RIP) was working there as a manager and let a group of us in to see the film, which he was raving about. My wife and I rewatched Memento this year, because after that viewing at the now gone Danberry Dollar Saver cinema, I just wondered what all the hype had been about the film. I thought it was kind of stupid, much as I respected Jerry’s general taste. So maybe I was wrong. I had been copping a buzz, and I had fallen asleep through chunks of the film. Yet my other friends in the group liked it, so was I wrong? My wife and I watched it again sometime over the summer. I had to pinch myself repeatedly from falling asleep on the couch. The best thing it has going for it is that it has Carrie-Ann Moss as one of the actors. Beyond that, I can’t recommend the film. I even like neo-noir films in general, and while Memento played on those tropes, it was still a snore.
There is a reason, of course, people are still retelling Homer’s Odyssey in various forms. It was the late Wendell Berry, in his masterpiece The Unsettling of America, and my own young marriage, that clued me in to the longing for a return to our home land and a wife or partner, that brought that epic to life for me in a new way. The Greek goddesses and gods have a long reach, and they certainly can reach out and touch someone in the United States. Yet the native mythos and beings who already reside here in the rocks and rivers and forests get less street cred among the bloviating film bluffs who are quick to get on their knees for Nolan.
The only people who seem to really give a s**t about his Odyssey movie are members of the self-described and self-appointed Critical-Intelligencia-Association. I would have said the critical-intelligentsia complex, but that wouldn’t have turned this moniker into another version of a rightfully hated three letter agency.
Coyote vs. Acme is a movie for the proles and the plebs. It’s a paean to the powers of the everyday little person just trying to get a meal on their plate, in this case a bird named the roadrunner, and all the obstacles they encounter while chasing the dream. Yet like the hard drinking heroes in the pubs of England whom the anarchist musical collective Chumbawamba wrote their hit song Tubthumping for, Coyote will get knocked down, and get up again and again. No matter how many anvils hit him over the head nothing is ever going to keep him down.
From Canada to Mexico, from Maine to Montgomery, from Fresno to Philadelphia, Coyote is the most famous trickster of them all. There is no one as wily than Wile E. From the ancient Native American stories to the character that came into the mind of Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese for Warner Bros., the Coyote is just as ancient and primal, and speaks more closely to the realities of people across America than any third-rate Ulysses as played by Matt Damon.
Speaking of third-rate, there is nothing more American than a down on his luck flea bag billboard lawyer, in this case played by the first-rate Will Forte. Nobody really wants to hang out with such a lawyer, but beyond serving their own self-interest, such lawyers will take swings in the courts for the berated, belittled and bedeviled little guys. So these scumbags are heroes too.
Wile E. Coyote is one such little guy. He is fed up with the Acme Corporation. All of their products suck. A coyote’s gotta eat, and everything that is sold to him from the big corporate behemoth that is Acme, everything he needs to use to try and catch the ever so swift roadrunner, only ends up hurting him, costing him, embarrassing him, and ends up making his life harder.
Sound familiar? The Acme Corporation certainly sounds like the United Corporations of America to me, which is why this film hits so hard while the Odyssey just kind of drifts across the filmic sea without any kind of bearing or plan. Just drifting in a boat, a plaything to the gods: that might well be a motif that speaks to the critical cultured class, the professional managers still on the payroll to their corporate overlords.
For the rest of it’s the Myth of Sisyphus that forms one of the symbolic threads in the Coyote vs. Acme narrative. It doesn’t go deep into the primal origins of this figure, who himself is a trickster figure by way of figuring out how to cheat death. For that daring act he is punished by Hades who condemns Sisyphus to push a massive boulder up a massive hill, only for it to roll back down again, causing him to have his shoulder to the boulder for all infinitude and eternity.
Is this not the plight of the working class American? Berated and bedeviled by vampiric corporations at every turn. They get preyed on by middleman pimps who wish to extract their portion of their hard earned work only to push them back into servitude and try to get them to prostitute their own lives for the sake of a petty minded master.
The movie is also funny as flock. Who doesn’t like seeing anvils get thrown around or big corporate bosses, portrayed as the Texan sounding Foghorn Leghorn, getting blown up by dynamite? The film is in fact dynamite and there is plenty of dynamite to go around.
I feel like the timing of the release of this movie was another aspect of the trickster at work. It got canceled three years ago when it was originally slated to hit theaters. The origin of this film had a long gestation. It goes back to a 1990 article written by Ian Frazier for lowbrow rag the New Yorker. Frazier had conceived of the notion of Wile E. Coyote suing Acme for all the damages their products had put him in. Fast forward to 2018 when the story was optioned to become a live-action and animation mix. Filming started in 2022 in New Mexico, but by 2023 Warner Bros., just like Acme, didn’t give as much of a shale about their creative legacy and its impact on American culture as they did in getting a tax write off. So the film was shelved. Later, the Ketchup Entertainment group, knowing they had a gem on their hands, acquired the rights. They did good to the public by getting the film out there. It’s hard not to think conspiratorially and wonder if Warner Bros. didn’t want to offend their corporate bedfellows with the film that targeted corporations raking in the profits at the expense of everyone else, even hurting them in the process.
Perhaps the trickster was reaching out of deep time and waiting for the right moment to get this into circulation. At the time of this writing its already grossed over $100 million. It’s doing fine financially. Even more than the money its wracking up for the Hollywood bosses, it is doing the good work of getting the mythos of America back into circulation.
All of the Looney Tunes characters are enduring for good reason. On the one hand they are part of the animal stories that come to us in dreams, stories that were told around the bonfires, on the rivers and in the woods all across this vast continent.
These are the kind of looneys you want to hang out with, and you do have to give it up for the Roadrunner for his vast speed. And to Wile E. for getting back up every time he gets knocked down in the hopes of catching him.
John, I remember your article on cursing, but maybe this one is different… let’s see…
You seem to be saying there are those who decided to walk away (from the fall of a civilization) despite the sadness and suffering it brings as they look back on what was lost, and there are those who, despite the threat of a curse, stay behind and convince themselves that there wasn’t a curse at all. It’s at this point that the curse really takes shape because they won’t see what is going on around them already.
It really sounds familiar, when I look around.
The discussion of life on Mars prompted me to ponder when did people stop seeing ancient mysterious ruins as being from Atlantis, Mu, etc and become ancient astronauts instead. I have noticed that when a mysterious artifact is discussed like the Lines of Nasca Peru, it always well extraterrestrials did it or it has something to do with them.
When did the fascination with Atlantis and lost lands like Thule go away?
Why all about ancient astronauts?
One more thing,
I watch MSNOW and Steve Bannon’s Warroom. I get exposed to as many different points of view as I can. The decline of the professional class of MSNOW is on full display with their WH ban. They were screaming evil Trump, blah, blah, but underneath it was a sense of panic and being upset at being ignored.
Meanwhile, Bannon was glorying in how the mighty has fallen. That his station (RAV) was chosen to replace the others in the WH feed. The other thing is the class that he represents seems to be the emerging class. What is striking about him is his fears of Marxist Moslem terrorists who are going take over. MSNOW focus on Trump taking over.
I wonder if the two are really focus on losing their positions instead of their stated fears.
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Addendum: With the discussion AI killing off humanity, etc and evil tech lords, etc. Will there be a time when this blog will discuss those issues?
Justin P. # 113:
Predictions markets comparison with gambling is quite reasonable, according your first link “malevolous” analysis. I remember now the deceased philosopher Eugenio Trias (Well, you’ve guessed he’s one of my favorite thinkers), in spite to be blamed by some mind dwarfs here as a right wing thinker (due to his views about some petty domestic political topics), wrote sometimes about globalization as “the global casino”, mocking with some irony “old good times” of “happy globalism”. I think this gambling economy schemes have survived until present time. So I’m not puzzled by prediction markets as one of the many gamblers game, within global casino Big Gambling…
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Phutatorius # 114:
“He spends the second book comparing Plato’s “Laws” with the Old Testament and theorizes that the books of Moses were an attempt to create the ideal society described by Plato. I’m no expert, but it’s intriguing.”
I find his claim very puzzling, but not exactly too absurd (if he supports well it with reasonable ideas and evidences). I mean, it’s unlikely that Helenical world after Alexander the Great didn’t influence at all Jews culture and religion for some centuries, because Jewish people lived under a Helenized culture, not only in Jerusalem, but in another places of Helenist world, and then in the Roman Empire (Diaspora Jews). However, I’d be cautious before thinking that influence was so evident, direct and big as that author says.
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Mary B. # 116:
I can tell you teff plant has been grown on trial mode here (for example, in dry areas in Castilla-León: North Spain), and tests seem quite sucessful…It’s interesting teff grain is gluten-free, it grows in a short full cycle (no more than more or less 3 months,at least here), uses less fertilizer than wheat, not much irrigation, and it likes mild-hot climates (let’s see how the climate change happens in the future). On the other hand, teff doesn’t like cold time, so…farmers must be careful and sow it better during advanced spring and summer.
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Kyle # 118:
Indeed, Roman Empire was a very violent and erotized culture…oh wait, I must clarify this later idea. For example, Stoics and Neoplatonics weren’t very fond of stark erotism, and gladiators never fought totally naked (compare them with usually naked Greek Olympics athletes). Of course, orgies happened (oops), but the opposite tendency toward sex moralism was also true in those times (yes, it’s a contradiction).
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J.L.Mc12 # 125:
“He suggests that they were so successful that they essentially outcompeted all other animals by destroying their habitats to the point of extinction, in a manner similar to humans but way worse.”
Oh, if this apparently bizarre hypothesis thought by Mr. Kösemen could be proved with paleontological hard evidences, I think those extincted prehistoric animals would deserve a special award within Darwin Awards, as the likely first non human species to win it beyond individuals, due to their stupid “arsonist” behavior which led them into extinction…If they were smart enough to spread fires everywhere, but stupid enough to no realize long term effect of this “successful” tactic in the short term…
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JMG # 129:
“it was one of Augustine of Hippo’s more interesting comments to insist that Christianity is actually far older than claimed — he insisted that it was around all along, but came to be called its present name after the time of Jesus.”
I’ve read a lot of time ago Augustine “Confessions” and “The City of God”, but I missed or forgot that idea. I think it’s no accident Augustine had studied Plato philosophy, so he “baptized” it, to the extreme he could think Plato was to some extent, “Cristian before Christianism”. It’s interesting Orthodox philosopher N. Berdyaev wrote that the “good part” of Greco-Latin philosophers were intelectual ancestors of Christianism (maybe remembering Stoics and Neoplatonics?)…so this idea seems a lookalike idea like Augustine wrote about “pre-Christian Christians”.
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Jessica # 131:
“The Greenlanders have their issues with Denmark, but from what I have read, they have no illusions that they would be better treated by the US. At least the Danes do provide Scandinavian level of social services, even if with a fair dose of condescension.”
According I’ve read in MSM and online sites from here, Greenlanders (who are mainly Native Inuits and mixed people with the Danes migrants there) enjoy to some extent a half-autonomous and special regional government, under Denmark “protection” until now…There are some independentist people in Greenland who say their country is a colonial protectorate, but I doubt nowadays they’re a big majority of them there (you wrote it: Greenlanders depend heavily of social subsidies from Copenhague govt, so…). It seems many people in Greenland, not only independentist ones, usually complain during recent past Denmark govts acculturated Native people, detribalizing Inuit on purpose due to a Danish-ization agenda. Those old times ended, but it seems some Greenlanders don’t forgive nor forget.
I also doubt most Greenlanders are exactly clapping Trump appetite for their big island…
“Greenland has a population of 56,000, not nearly enough to be a state.”
Well, some Micro-States here in Europe, like San Marino, Monaco and Liechstestein, are under that small Greenland figure (for example, Monaco hasn’t more than 35,000 population). However, Greenland main problem to become a serious independent country is, IMHo, not exactly its scarce population, but how spreadout it’s its population: a few Greenlanders in an big island more or less 4 times bigger than Spain, for example: a very low population density which prevents a workable national and economical sovereignty (at least until climate change on the long term change its geography).
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Jfisher # 135:
“Apart from his own internal priorities, the Amish man prioritizes wealth in the following manner:
1) Choose your family, spiritual brothers, friends, and neighbors -in that order. Organize the rest of your life around these relationships.
2) Ensure sources of clean water, access to food, and maintain comfort in your own shelter.
3) Cultivate productivity every waking hour except Sunday.
4) Prioritize ruthlessly and everything else is surplus.”
It seems IMHO a good strategy to thrive or at least to survive in your life long term…For example, if I thought my friendships and partners during my younger times, I’d be living a better life than I’m living now (though my current life isn’t bad today). However, I think it’s “slightly” difficult to choose your family, at least when you’re still a child. Of course, if you’re wise and lucky enough to choose a good partner to raise your own new family, I understand and support it.
By the way, I think Amish come from Anabaptist German speaking countries, which fled Europe some centuries ago, but ironically they usually say (at least the Old Order) they speak within their communities in “Dutch” (a warp of original “Deustch”?). I saw it in a TV documentary, some years ago.
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(To be continued)
I had been listening to a fascinating podcast about the shift towards greater authoritarianism in Europe, and the commentators had noted that the governments of Europe are acting exactly the way you’d expect of a technocratic managerial state. That is, they act like they can control the output (the actions of their population) exactly via adjusting the inputs (of information and resources), and they also act like individual human beings are fungible, like machine parts of the same make and model. I thought it was an intriguing look at how the myth of the machine affects the ruling style of those who believe in it; they seek to turn their entire state into a machine, one that they can control down to the fine details.
So here’s another theory about “I have no ego/Self” doofuses. I think they have unravelled some astral pattern that constituted much or all of their locus of Self, but haven’t cultivated enough mental plane energy to shift their identity to the mental plane. I imagine, that after death, it’s reincarnation as usual for these people.
Hi John,
I was looking into the “Bengston Cycling Method”. Have you come across it? I would really appreciate your views on it, from a magic/occult standpoint.
Thanks,
Kevin.
Chris # 139:
“Greenland… From what I understand, that big frozen island actually costs the Danes to keep, so the people there have little say in the matter. Can that small country afford to keep paying those bills?”
I think it’s a good question. On the short form, I’ve read Greenlanders receive more money in social subsidies, services and state funded facilities than money they pay to Denmark government through taxes and another economical activities in favor of Copenhague. So do the math.
Greenland main economical wealth sources are fishing and tourism, well… Cattle raising and agriculture are anecdotical activities, evidently due to Greenland geographical situation. It’s said there are a heck of minerals wealth in that big island according sound researches; well, in the long term I tend to think climate change would allow to dig some new available mines prospects, but it won’t happen tomorrow…
(By the way, it’s said some Greenland young women were fooled to be sterilized during ’60s and ’70s, by some Dane governments, another affront for Inuit people in addition of acculturation I wrote in my last comment before this one).
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Mary B. # 143:
“Rhode Island was admitted to the Union in 1790. Its’ population at that time was 68,825.”
An interesting historical data, methink. However, I see Rhode Island is much smaller in its surface than the biggest island of the world (if we don’t count Australia, which IMHO it’s more a small continent than a true island). Greenland has a small population in scattered small towns along its coasts, each human group is far from another ones. Population density is very low. By contrast, Rhode Island, in spite of having a low total population, has a quite more concentrated population. And…please, see following link:
http://www.comparea.org/GRL+US_RI
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Bob # 148:
If that theory was true (I haven’t read that book), we should begin to suspect Alexander the Great and whatever historical person whose life has been more or less mythologized/euhemerismed by their “fans”, after centuries of legends, never were real people, so more cans of worms could be opened.
I mean, I usually scratch my head with some perplexity every time some hardcore atheist and/or anti-Christian guys try to show (often with frantic efforts) that Jesus never existed. Well, maybe I’m wrong, like
another Christians and non-Christian religious and secular people alike, when I think there was a Jewish prophet with that name…
However, I get the feeling that some people dislike too much Jesus teachings (or what it passes by Jesus ideas…let’s draw a veil), maybe driven, more or less, by their vital need (in an intellectual and emotive sense alike) to prove that Jewish guy wasn’t never a real person. It seems a more radical attitude than others pointing Jesus really existed, but first of their followers made a mind DIY with his teachings (classic example: Nietzsche claim about Paul making up the Christianism, not Jesus). I can understand Jesus as a fiction idea, if this unspeakable need to deny his life is a true thing, but personally I can’t agree.
There are a lot of thorny debates about Jesus, and I tend to think there are “indicia” in favor and against the many opposed views around him., in every aspect of his stories. It isn’t strange, because it’s been many centuries (more than 20) since that man apparently walked over this Earth with his feet. So these debates may keep on happening in a never-ending cavalcade.
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Taboos:
I tend to think last taboo after we eventually don’t have known taboos anymore (as an hypotethical situation) could be the belief/idea: “We haven’t more taboos anymore”, which to some extent would be the final no-taboo taboo (I hope you understand my idea).
Dear Mr Greer
You were talking on the other blog about the possibility of Britain being involved in a war with Russia. The amount of stuff in the press and number of politicians talking about the possibility of war with Russia and bringing back conscription in the last year has been incredible. The question I have for you is where would the government get the men it needed to fight such a war?
Due to the kind of writing I do I keep an eye on right wing blogs and you tube channels. (Please note that I don’t share all their viewpoints, I am just saying it how it is). These are the civic and ethnic nationalists who are patriotic and would normally fight for their country and they hate the government and establishment and regard them as the enemy. As far as they are concerned the government can’t even protect our borders from illegal immigrants who they regard as an army of fighting age men who are raping our women. They think this government (Tory/Labour = uniparty) is trying to destroy our country and culture and denigrate men for their toxic masculinity. If you want a good example of this then look at the comments in relation to this Jacob Rees Mogg video. He was a posh minister in the last tory government that promised to bring immigration down to the tens of thousands and then ignored that promise and trebled the rate of immigration. He is talking about the need for a stiff upper lip and the necessity for duty and then goes on to say this is important as we could be in a war in a few years time. They are all telling Mogg to stuff it where the sun won’t shine and that he and the establishment are traitors to their country. Why would they want to fight for an establishment that is trying to ban the flying of our national flag. Please find link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4midrloSzb0
I know many people who are on the left and there is no way they would fight for the government. Many immigrants would not fight for this government. Muslims would certainly not fight for this government unless they declared war on Israel. I certainly would not fight for the government and establishment of this country. Not after what they did to us with the covid vaccines, invasion ion Iraq, selling off all our industry to our enemies etc. I could go on with this list all night long. I hate them and regard them as my enemy and I am towards the leftward end of the political spectrum. And what makes it worse is that they have reduced our armed forces to the lowest level it has ever been. I think it was the first Roosevelt who talked about talking peace while waving a big stick. Our government is talking war while waving a tiny twig. I am pretty thick but even I can see that this is absolute madness. So I ask you again where are they going to get the people they need to fights a war. Some of the people I hear on the rightward wing of things are ex army and would be called up in the event of war and they are going to tell the government to go to hell. Would they actually want to put guns in their hands?
Chuaquin #122
A)
I’ve never heard of that book or that quote but that mind trick definitely helps, I have an easier time falling asleep if I’m laying down with the lights on than when I plan to go to bed and have the lights off.
B)
As for the CCP allowing it (the web novel), I heard that for a long time web novels flew under the radar of the CCP, but in recent years they started cracking down on them. As for magic, it seems like their rules are fairly lax in media. A very popular type of Chinese manhua (comics) are centered around cultivation (based on the Taoist concept, made into a fantasy power system). I take it they lump in Lord of Mysteries in a similar box of fiction magic. I’m almost certain the author is from mainland China, and considering the animated adaptation was done by a Chinese company, it’s clear the CCP approves at least of the part they adapted. Despite the story being classified as steampunk according to some sources, I wouldn’t really pin it as such because despite the Victorian setting, it lacks the punk aspect of it (at least as far as I am in the story). If the CCP became too strict with their policies regarding media, it would becoming unbearably boring and everyone would seek illegal outside media to compensate. I think as long as you don’t touch very specific check-boxes you are fine. That said I’d need to do some research to give you a proper answer, I am not Chinese so I don’t know much about that, all I can do is speculate.
@148 Bob
While I haven’t and do not plan to read it, I consider the book’s popularity as a product of insecure atheists scrambling for any argument they can use to discredit Christianity (the Christ Myth theory in general owes its popularity to this, regardless of whether it’s true). A cult telling you to keep your head down instead of revolt or open defiance would be more popular if people know revolt or open defiance is suicidal.
John,
On Karma, that was what I was thinking as well.
Another question. In my studies I have been reading The Tree of Life by Israel Regardie. I recently read Chapter 12 which discussed the Abramelin Operation. It was presented as one of the most important magical works one can undertake.
My question is, is the Abramelin Operation all that it is cracked up to be? I am not yet at a stage in life (or in my spiritual growth) where I should do such an undertaking, but if it truly is essential for the development of a mage I will make plans to do it someday when I am better prepared. In the meantime, the important thing is to do the daily work and steady inner transformation.
Bob in Kamiah: I’d recommend skipping the reviews and just read the book. No surprise that the book is polarizing. Decide for yourself, but don’t stop there. I listed 4 or 5 books up above @ 114 that might interest you. The first of them, “Surpassing Wonder” by D.H. Akenson, is quite enjoyable. (I think he’s the best – at times very funny – writer of the bunch.) Plus, attempting to read Josephus (at least his “Wars of the Jews”) is next on my list. That’s quite a hefty reading program, I’d be the first to admit. And I assume you’ve read all of the “New Testament” one or more times. Not just the familiar stories that get repeated in church, that everyone knows by heart…
@Nephite #174
I know you asked JMG, but I can speak to this one: I’ve known and know of people who performed the Abramelin ritual, and they were the worse off for it. If it fails — and if you take the shortcuts Crowley took and advocated, it will fail — you at a minimum end up with a massively-inflated ego while firmly believing you’ve overcome your ego. But given the forces you work with in that ritual, there’s almost no limit to how bad things can get.
Slithy, yeah, that’s pretty much what happened. Early on, there were religious wars between pro-Buddhist and pro-Shinto clans, which ended in an armed truce; later on, the founders of the esoteric Buddhist traditions made common cause with the Shinto priesthood, partly in alliance against the established Buddhist mainstream, partly because they had a shared interest in magic; and then later still, the two became inextricably mingled, to the extent that you routinely had Shinto shrines on Buddhist temple grounds and vice versa. I wish things could have worked out that way in Ireland between Christianity and Druidry! BTW, I hadn’t heard the Thelemic joke, and laughed hard. Maybe that explains why Crowley had so much trouble managing his debts.
Milkyway, oh, I’m not complaining. I appreciated the list — and also the commentary. I’m trying to figure why one would swim up through soup of any kind; it seems somewhat messy!
Chuaquin, Fludd hasn’t gotten anything like the attention he deserves in English literature; Dee, on the other hand, is all over the place in fiction and nonfiction. I don’t know what’s available in Spanish, but Charlotte Fell Smith’s bio of him, with his name as title, is fairly easy to read.
African, I’ve never taken the time to look into his connections so don’t know whether he speaks for himself alone or for an undercurrent. What caught my attention, when I first read A New Science of Life, is that his concept of morphogenetic fields is a precise scientific restatement of one of the most important concepts in Dion Fortune’s The Cosmic Doctrine, the most important work of 20th century occult philosophy (and a book Sheldrake would have had ready access to, since it was published in 1949). The parallels are exact enough that it seems likely to me that he got the idea from Fortune, reframed it in a way suited to scientific discourse, and left the source unmentioned (sensibly enough!) in the hope of getting anybody in the scientific community to take it seriously. Alas, academic noses are far too keen, and sniffed out the detested scent of occultism! I should mention that I consider Sheldrake’s work essential, and will be citing it at length in a forthcoming book on the esoteric dimensions of ecology.
Lathechuck, yeah, that sounds like the current sort of jiggery-wokery, doesn’t it? It’s like the crusade to cancel Speedy Gonzalez — everybody of Hispanic culture I’ve ever met loves the high-velocity Mexican mouse, not least because he always wins; it’s privileged lily-white Gringolandian liberals who insist that he’s a racist caricature. In the same way, it doesn’t surprise me that Porky is a role model for those who stutter; I wonder if the reason that the same privileged liberals hate him so much is that he doesn’t depend on anyone else, and so encourages people who stutter not to depend on them.
Justin, thanks for this. I haven’t watched either film, but if I did suddenly decide to go see one of them, it wouldn’t be the overrated Nolan flick. As for the curse, my point is simply that a real curse doesn’t make things happen, it describes the inevitable consequences of what’s already happening, and puts icing on the cake by guaranteeing that the perp/victim, as a direct result of his efforts to wiggle out of those consequences, guarantees that they’re going to land on him like, well, an anvil on Wile E.
Neptunesdolphins, as I recall, it was the work of one man, Erich von Daniken, who popularized the idea of “gods” from outer space in Chariots of the Gods? (1968) and a torrent of subsequent books. It went on TV as “In Search of Ancient Astronauts” in 1972, and got superglued into the collective imagination thereby. I recommend the Wikipedia article on the book for its labored and rather shrill denunciations — the book’s frankly lousy, but you can tell how upset it makes the academic mainstream by the strident tone of its critics. As for Steve Bannon and the Media Flacks — that would make a good name for a band, btw! — of course they’re terrified of losing their positions. The flacks are already in freefall; Bannon wants to shore up his status as one of the voices of the rising class by jumping on the Muslim-bashing bandwagon. With regard to AI and the Evil Tech Lords — another good band name! — no time soon.
Ethan, exactly. It’s the standard ideology of the managerial elite, utterly unable to realize that anyone outside their own class is capable of intelligent response. And down they go…
Luke, that’s certainly possible. The thing that strikes me, though, is that all the ones I’ve met act like raging egomaniacs. That’s why I think that they’ve repressed their egos, rather than transcending or dissolving them.
Kevin, I’ve never heard of it. Maybe you can explain.
Jasmine, oh, they think the US will fall into line when push comes to shove, and we’ll sacrifice millions of our young men to bail them out from the consequences of their stupidity, the way we did in 1917 and 1942. They’re wrong, of course, but I don’t think that it’s ever entered their darkest dreams that the US would roll its eyes and say, “Sorry, Charlie. You get to deal with your own mess this time.”
Nephite, no, the Abramelin operation has been massively overbilled. Some people get good results with it; most don’t. What’s often forgotten is that it’s just one product of a very broad tradition of workings to get into contact with a guardian spirit or angelic patron, and most of the others take it more slowly and get better and more lasting results. Oh, and Slithy is quite correct — Crowley’s instructions are best avoided even if you have to run the other way in tight shoes.
“So I ask you again where are they going to get the people they need to fights a war. Some of the people I hear on the rightward wing of things are ex army and would be called up in the event of war and they are going to tell the government to go to hell. Would they actually want to put guns in their hands?”
Two points, wherever they get the soldiers (who says they will all be men?) the soldiers will be walking to the front. No diesel, remember?
Secondly, the UK in particular and socialists in general are all about civilian disarmament. There is a reason for that and it’s not public safety.
Sudden thought, if they are relying on EVs and solar power then there will be no winter offensives in Europe. Especially against Russia. The Finns managed to win one but that was definitely an exception.
@Slithy Toves #153
No, I hadn’t heard that one, but its well done! Thank you!
The reason I hadn’t heard it until now is because I’ve been on the Lam from Thelemic circles for awhile.
Aiwaz in them for awhile, and then Aiwazn’t.
Perhaps you already Nuit.
I still have a soft spot for Thelema. I’d kind of heard of Crowley, but was already interested in magic and such when I found a copy of The Book of the Law in a used bookstore. It was one of those small little red books. Glad I found that instead of a copy of Mao’s little red book. If I’d gotten involved in those circles, who knows what my life might have turned out like!
Justin Patrick Moore 163
> Coyote vs. Odyssey movie
Per your note, I considered pre-ordering the Coyote vs. Odyssey movie (Blu Ray), which I did pre-order at a teaser price. I will watch it at home (if I can figure out how the machinery works; ugh, Jethro, HELP!), then contemplate donating it to the local Senior Citizen/Elder Center. The center has Movie Night, and I think elders would get a charge out of seeing Wile E. Coyote again after a sixty-year hiatus.
💨🫥🐾💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Jfisher wrote, “4) Prioritize ruthlessly and everything else is surplus.”
Well, Jethro, I do hope that somewhere in your ruthless prioritizing you will be able to attend the Adocentyn in Providence / Ecosophia potluck again. I had been looking forward to talking with you more about your ability to sense unseen dimensions, the last time that you RSVP’d to attend the potluck. Obviously, a potluck can easily get cagegorized as ‘surplus’, but the connections made at Peter’s could well prove to be quite life altering somewhere down the road. In any case, I know that we will end up doing some work together this lifetime — it would just be a bit easier to get that initiated in person at Peter’s potluck.
Also, thanks for the information about the Beachy Amish, I hadn’t known that there was an Amish branch that sanctions wearing store-bought clothing and driving automobiles. How do the old-style Amish get along with the Beachy Amish? Other than trying to bum rides off of them, I would guess.
@Nephite (#174):
Before you carry that ritual out, I recommend reading the very frank account of a person who actually performed it in all its details, and became something of a different person as a result. The man’s name was William Bloom, and his book was titled The Sacred Magician: A Ceremonial Diary. It appeared in two editions, each of which differs from the other in a few important ways. The first edition was published under a pseudonym, Georges Chevalier (Paladin, 1976); the second under his own name (Gothic Image, 1992). Try to read both editions before you undertake it.
As for me, the unanticipated changes of the sort that Bloom underwent would have derailed all the purposes for which I think that I was born into this life to get done, and wrecked all my important human relationships to boot. Having read Bloom’s book (in both editions), I would not perform that ritual for all the gold in Fort Knox, or if someone held a gun to my head..
Of course, your mileage will necessarily vary from mine, and only you can make your own decision.
@African-at-heart (#158):
You might take a look at Sheldrake’s own short essay from 2009 on science and magic, available online at:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/feb/09/psychology-science-morphic-sheldrake
He’s quite right in his trenchant comments on his critics. However, I don’t think he quite understands why his critics seem so impervious to any of his reasons. If he is right, then the very foundations of their unspoken worldview are shaken to their core — and it would require far too much mental work to rebuild a worldview on sounder foundations.
As Upton Sinclair once wrote, ““It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” (Not only his salary, but his peace of mind and his place in the world. Hardly anyone has ever cared for truth above all else . . .)
@pygmycory, @marybennet re: Wheat vs. Legumes
Both good candidates for diet intolerance;
Kidney beans must be cooked before being eaten to deactivate phytohemagglutinin; 5 of them, eaten raw, can cause serious toxicity. Butter beans, also; Fava beans, even cooked, can make you sick if you have a genetic enzyme deficiency. Cooking them makes them edible for almost everyone, but certain indigestible sugars feed gas-producing bacteria in the lower intestine, for which beans earn the name, ‘musical fruit.’
The wheat that makes most bread everywhere is a hybrid product that was developed during the ‘green revolution.’ No one tested it for toxicity, and it may be responsible for aggravating gut conditions like diverticulitis and Crohn’s. If you decide to try wheat-like products, ancient grains like Teff are worth exploring. Here in Canada, maybe in the US too, you may want to take a look at wheat flour made from ‘Einkorn,’ an ancient, non-hybrid wheat that is marketed here by the company ‘Jovial.’ It makes great pancakes and poundcake, but bread doesn’t rise as high. The dough made from it is sweet, not bitter like dough from standard flour.
If you will have them, offering you my blessings and prayers to find an optimal diet, Emmanuel G
JMG
How familiar are you with angel magic in general? I know you wrote the foreword of Echols book on the subject and I had a question.
In my research on proto-gnostic ideas I keep coming across 72 powers that further divide into 360 powers in total. I was wondering if it would make sense to take the Shem angels and divide them into 5 giving different suffix for each of the classic elements, earth, air, fire, water, and spirit?
I’m wondering if perhaps a method like that could be used in reconstructing some of the Gnostic rituals?
So, I have a question for everyone. Has anyone here heard that the voynich manuscript has allegedly been decoded? For those who don’t know, the Voynich Manuscript is from the early 1400s, and has baffled scholars with an indecypherable script and strange illustrations. Centuries of linguists and codebreakers couldn’t identify or understand the writings in an alphabet no one had ever seen before or since.
Well, a group that calls themselves the witches of tiktok – and yes, most of what they do should be taken about as seriously as you think – decided to take a crack at it. They quickly gave up on the script and focused on the illustrations, then one in particular – an illustration of twelve naked women in a circular pool of green water, surrounded by the zodiac, with various plants growing in the water.
One of the plants had never been identified. Then one of the witches recognized it – from a very unusual scientific experiment. This experiment had investigated how plant growth was affected by… menstual blood. And sure enough, it had actually increased groth rates. The scientists assumed it was because of physical nutrients… but these witches took it to another level.
Looking at these unusual plant growth patterns, which had resulted from pouring menstrual blood into water with a plant growing in it, these witches decided it looked exactly like some of the strange plants in the green pool in the manuscript. They then interpreted the image as follows – its a guide for which plants grow best when fertilized with menstrual blood from a woman whose period began when the moon was in each of the zodiac signs! A sort of alternate biodynamic rhythm system, if you will, using female fertility magic.
A certain corner of the internet is going wild over this. Here’s a link to a short youtube video by one of the witches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAxFMUg0UYE
They claim that the entire system can be understood by the images alone, and that the text is literal gibberish designed as a red herring to throw off the inquisition. The logic is that most women at the time were illiterate, and thus the information had to be oresented in images, while the literate church scholars, obsessed as they were with the word, would ignore the images and try to understand a language that meant nothing!
Now, while this does has some logic to it, this is also a social media group of feminist witches, all of whom are bound to hecate and or the earth mother goddess. I’m sure they go looking for the explqnation to everything to me female magic grrrl power oppressed by the evil patriarchy. Still, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and a lot about this does fit…
So, commentariat, dear host – what do you think? Anyone who’s studied or tried to decode the Voynich Manuscript – does this track? And if we believe this is what the manuscript is instructing, well… Would this be cknskdered a lost retrotechnology, worthy of inclusion in the technonomicon?
Of course, we would have to test if it works first. Any adveturous witches want to engage in some alternative agricultural experiments?
Anyway, I hope you all enjoy this gem I dragged out of the midden heap of social media. I go there so the rest of you dont have to!
@Dzanni #159
If I may comment, like most things in American politics, the Right’s opposition to gay marriage and the moral panic over it and gay sex more broadly (that panic raged for most of the 20th century into the 21st) was both very real and completely fake. That is to say, it wasn’t really about homosexuality, it was about class. For most of the 20th century, homosexuality was seen as a vice for the streets, so anyone in the PMC who admitted to their orientation was a threat to the respectability of the whole class. This made it socially and politically necessary to condemn it and punish defectors.
In the 90’s that started to change for two reasons: first, the PMC felt much more secure in its position, and second, Republicans had risen to power by pandering to evangelicals, who objected to homosexuality for religious reasons. The progressive end of the PMC saw an opportunity to undermine their political enemies by convincing the public to change its sympathies. And they did it the right way: they settled in for a long war, focused on persuading the public rather than coercing or scolding them, and let Democrats continue to give token opposition for as long as the majority sentiment was against the idea.
Republicans continued to oppose gay marriage to pander to their own base. Both parties also hoped to make it a forever issue like abortion, a reason to keep their base riled up, but to their lasting disappointment the movement won outright. Once that victory had been achieved, the Republicans no longer had any compelling reason to continue to oppose it, so they just dropped the issue and moved on.
Chauquin 167 (near bottom)
> ironically they usually say (at least the Old Order) they speak within their communities in “Dutch”
Yes, the word “Dutch” evolved from “Deutsch” in and around New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and somewhat west of there like Ohio, Indiana, Illinois; as well as somewhat south. It was not the fault of the Deutsch/German ethnic people there; the word “Dutch” was what OTHERS called the “Deutsch” (Germans), and the Germans simply went along with the flow. That including the Amish.
This name-difference started with the first mass group of Germans to America: 1709 Palatine Deutsche (roughly 3,000 migrants) forced to settle (by the British government) in New York State (Hudson and Mohawk River valleys) and eastern Pennsylvania. Hardly anyone knows about this first group of Germans to America. They were called “Palatine Germans,” from the Palatine area of Germany, near France. And they were neither all German, nor all Protestant; some were French, Dutch, Swiss, Belgian; some were Roman Catholic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Dutch_language
German groups who arrived later got caught in the same net Deutsch —> Dutch naming scheme, like the Amish.
I am most familiar with those Germans who settled in New York State (Hudson and Mohawk River valleys). If I don’t speak about Germans of other localities, it is because I don‘t know as much about them as I do about ones in New York State.
In New York State, no-one mistook Germans for Dutch between 1700 and 1825, because both Germans and Dutch were distinct groups, existing side by side, and everyone knew who was from which group (at the time, it was obvious) (although in the 1700s, there was a heck of a lot of intermarriage, one being Lutheran, the other Dutch Reformed; “religiously, close enough to marry”). The Germans spoke German, and the Dutch spoke Dutch, and I guess they eventually came to an understanding. Both languages of Dutch and German were spoken still in the 19th century in Ulster County, New York (the area my ancestors were from).
The Dutch had dibs, because they arrived in Ulster County in 1652, whereas the Germans arrived around 1710. The Dutch were relatively prosperous by 1710, whereas the Germans arrived destitute; the Germans had to work their way up to ”not starving” during the 18th century (a large proportion died). During the 18th century in Ulster County, there was a lot of intermarriage, which was part of how German-ethnics survived.
In my own ancestors, I see a heck of a lot of German men marrying Dutch women. The Dutch community was less than thrilled about this, because that meant fewer Dutch surnames got handed down. The Dutch community much preferred Dutch men marrying German women because then Dutch surnames survived. The Dutch (“monied”) were snobs towards the Germans (“penniless”).
So yeah, in this context, the word “Dutch” comes from the word “Deutsch” and means German. The moniker “Pennsylvania Dutch” REALLY means “Pennsylvania GERMAN,” but hardly anyone knows that. The “Pennsylvania Dutch” moniker is entrenched; hence, impossible to change.
I learned these things in elementary school because New York State history was taught to kids.
Formal Dutch immigration to North America, was limited to the states of New York State, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, a smattering in Connecticut, and minor other dots along the coastline, like Maine and Delaware. Dutch immigration stopped entirely in 1664 (when the British conquered New York City).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_colonial_empire
💨🫥🌊💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Jim Kulula 59
> penpal / pen-pal
> Sherlock Holmes
Two things:
——
1st thing:
I have actually thought recently of finding a penpal. I remember being a penpal when I was a kid. I had one or two, and the relationships must have faded into oblivion. I have no recollection whatsoever of how those penpal-ships ended.
I will give it some thought because I feel being a penpal is a commitment, where I would expect myself to hold up my end of the bargain.
——
2nd thing:
The problem is,— these days,— all I want to do is devote time to Sherlock Holmes (canon; pastiches) (read, write, talk about, except for here, of course). I am addicted,— as addictions go, “Sherlock Holmes” is benign, also pretty cheap, and the stories keep me occupied. And there are scads of short-story pastiches. Zillions.
Only yesterday, one pastiche had me in tears:
“The Stolen Relic”
by David Marcum
from anthology
“The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories: Part V: Christmas Adventures”
ISBN 178092996X
I read mystery stories (almost exclusively Sherlock Holmes) on Barnes & Noble‘s Nook (Lenovo device; Android) (even though I am a Mac/iOS person). I switched from Amazon Kindle a long time ago cuz Amz is such a bunch of a_sholes! (JMG: is ‘arse’ allowed? I forget.)
Jim, I have to ask: Are you interested in Sherlock Holmes short stories? (if not, I would be bored to tears.) (if not, feel free to say “no”; 99% of the world is NOT.)
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Hey Chuaquin
By extinction, I meant the extinction of most other species that were not lystrosaurs. The Lystrosaurs thrived to the point that for millions of years after the Permian extinction they made up around 95% of all animals on Earth. I personally don’t know how palaeontologists know for sure, but even if it wasn’t really that high, they were nonetheless the dominant species for a long time.
> Smoking a pipe
You’all, I need some advise.
I am considering driving to my local tobacco shoppe, and trying my hand at “smoking a pipe.” Sherlock-style.
There are some UTub videos on how to smoke a pipe correctly. I would NEVER have thought of smoking a pipe when Jethro was alive. Now that he’s gone, I feel like indulging in things he didn’t agree with (or wouldn’t approve of), like DARK roasted coffee.
I would like to garner opinions of pipe-smokers here. Me, smoking,— a pipe? Huh? I have never been a smoker. I watch smokers, and think, “The smoke relaxes them. Why can‘t I have that? I’m jealous.”
Any stories of I-used-to-smoke-a-pipe-but-now-don’t-here-is-why? Any stories of I-still-smoke-a-pipe-and-here-is-why?
Anyone here encourage or discourage my giving pipe-smoking a whirl? How expensive is a smoking-a-pipe habit?
On the opposing side, my mudder smoked at least one pack a day (sometimes three) from age 16 onwards. She died, cigarette hanging from her lips, of emphysema, age 79. She never even tried to give up cigarettes.
As a child (12-18), I had asthma. It was because of my close proximity to my mudder’s second-hand smoke. I still do get occasional asthma symptoms. Would smoking a pipe be asking for trouble, at 74?
I enjoy the smell of (some) tobaccos when used in pipes, whereas cigarette and cigar smoke disgusts me.
Any female pipe-smokers here? Female pipe-smoking feels so, um, “Katherine Hepburn”‼️ Pipe-smoking is okay to contemplate,—but not in real life?
💨🫥💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Jessica #131
‘Greenland has a population of 56,000, not nearly enough to be a state.’
The population of a new state can be whatever the government wants, as it’s not specified in the constitution. The first population stipulation was put forth in 1784, pre-constitution, and called for the new state to have 20,000.
The new flag would be a nightmare to design though, 51 stars. So I guess we would need to add Cuba (or Iceland maybe?) too; then the rows of stars would go from nine rows alternating six or five stars, to eight rows alternating seven and six stars. 😉
Anon, I don’t recommend doing anything of the kind without discussing it with the angelic world first. If you know how to invoke the Shemhamphorash angels, speak to them and ask their opinion; if you don’t yet know how to do that, why, learning how would be a good starting project!
Paedrig, the Voynich manuscript has been “deciphered” at least a dozen times. None of the interpretations stand up to an objective examination. I’m increasingly convinced that it’s an early 20th century forgery, from a circle of forgers associated with the spy and adventurer Sydney Reilly — the wife of Wilfrid Voynich, the rare book dealer who gave his name to the manuscript, was one of Reilly’s many lovers. (The vellum on which it’s written is 15th century in origin, sure, but the ink and paint can’t be dated, and it’s standard practice for forgers to get paper or parchment of the correct date to work with.)
Justin Patrick Moore, thanks for your post about Coyote vs. Acme – it is one of the best movies of the decade and I agree that it hits a lot of notes that don’t get hit nearly enough in corporate media. I certainly agree that there might be reasons why it nearly never saw the light of day other than pure profit-seeking, after all, most of what the entertainment industry produces these days could easily be compared to Acme products…
There could also be a deep discomfort with the fact that perhaps, the classic Looney Tunes characters, especially Coyote and Road Runner, can’t actually be improved upon much because as you said, they are quintessentially American. Coyote in particular – one who is doomed to chase something he can never catch, armed with a wide variety of jimcrack labor saving devices that are anything but – what an inspired portrayal of Faustian Man and his infinite rocket skate trip off into, well, he doesn’t really know – he’s never actually eaten road runner.
@Northwind: Yeah, I’m of “Pennsylvania Dutch” heritage myself. My ancestor arrived in 1751 from a village in Baden-Wurtemburg. He settled in Eastern PA but the next generation quickly moved on to Ohio. His name is common in Allentown, Pa, even more common than “Smith.” (It isn’t “Phutatorius.”)
Pipe smoking: I also can’t stand cigarette smoke. I like pipes. I bought a book called “Pipesmoking, a 21st century Guide” by Richard Carleton Hacker. It’s fairly cheap and quite informative. There’s even a photo of a fashionable looking woman smoking a pipe. Beneath that photo I wrote in pencil, “Eddy Bernays would be proud.” Heh, heh, heh.
JMG wrote: “a real curse doesn’t make things happen, it describes the inevitable consequences of what’s already happening, and puts icing on the cake by guaranteeing that the perp/victim, as a direct result of his efforts to wiggle out of those consequences, guarantees that they’re going to land on him like, well, an anvil on Wile E.”
I get this idea, and I remember you writing about in another place. I can see it for people and groups who have been doing “bad” things they wont accept consequences for…
Do you still consider this to be the case when mages, immature or otherwise, fling them at people due to a grudge or whatever? Is that the icing in the cake for their target, some kind of karma? It certainly is an entanglement.
@Northwind: Good idea on donating the disc when you are dine. I hope your Bluray player wasnt made by Acme. More generally, I hope you are hanging in there as well as you can.
Mother Balance @ 193, I remember seeing American flags with 49 stars, following the admission of Alaska on Jan.3, 1959. At that time, the American flag was displayed in classrooms. By fall, the flag had 50 stars, Hawaii having been admitted Aug. 21, 1959.
As for new states, one reason the Republicans are terrified about the coming midterm elections is that they fear a Democratic congress will vote to admit Puerto Rico and DC as states. That would be two senators apiece and an unknown number of representatives, which might provoke the House to increase its’ membership, another Republican nightmare. There is also the Virgin Is. waiting in line.
JMG
That answer has a lot of synchronicities for me personally. Angel magic was how I first started taking magic seriously and developing a daily practice. Doing the Shem Operation from Echols book was what led me to Gnosticism years ago, which led me to the grail legends and the various number schemes of the aeons and archons of Gnosticism. So I’ve come full circle and the number 360 is derived from the full 360 degrees of the zodiac, a circle. Your answer is for me to ask the angels, which is the whole point of the grail legend, to ask the right question.
I’ll ask them, but I think they might have already given me the answer.
File this under You can believe that if you want to. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/woman-gets-dressed-then-she-notices-there-s-an-rfid-in-her-clothing-it-s-not-just-her/ar-AA2cU6Yg?ocid=
Radio frequency tracking devices in new clothing. Which only operate inside the store; I find that explanation very reassuring, don’t you? One more reason why my wardrobe, well, collection of garments in various stages of repair, is either thrifted or made by me. The retail clothing industry can’t afford to manufacture in the USA, can’t afford to pay either the overseas sewists or the retail sales staff a living wage, but can afford the RFTDs. I will say that retail wages have improved recently, but no full time, no health insurance, and paid vacations, what are those?
Since Jesus keeps coming up. My understanding/experience is that through him we may have the same knowing/relation with the Holy Spirit and the Father he did, and does, though in our own individual unique and peculiar way.
@Paedrig (#187):
Indeed, the Voynich manuscript has been “deciphered” many times; and, so far as I know, no two of the “decipherments” are even close to one another. The thought that it may be a modern forgery has always been tempting, and Sydney Reilly as the forger is a very tempting thought. However . . .
You might take a look at some of the extensive work a former student of mine, Lisa Fagin Davis, has done on the Voynich manuscript as a physical object. (She is currently Executive Director of The Medieval Academy of America.) She is an excellent paleographer and codicologist, but not a linguist or a cryptanalyst, so she isn’t working toward any future decipherment of the manuscript. Rather, she has been seeking to reconstruct the history of the Voynich manuscript from the physical traces of that history left in the manuscript itself. There is good evidence pointing (1) toward a loss of some leaves in various places, (2) toward at least one rebinding where the order of leaves was pointlessly altered, and (3) toward several previous identifiable owners who have left illegible notes in the margins that can now be read only with high-tech imaging, and so forth.
I recommend in particular two blog posts by her:
manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2025/01/19/voynich-codicology/
and
https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/multispectral-imaging-and-the-voynich-manuscript/
Of course, it is possible that truly skilled forgers could build a highly detailed (but fake) history into their forgeries, as did Mark Hoffman with his extremely competent “Oath of a Freeman” forgery. Forgery, like several other obscure arts cultivated mostly by criminals, can reach heights of skill far beyond the reach of most law-abiding imaginations.
What tipped the balance for me toward authenticity of the Voynich manuscript was the evidence (given in the second of the two blog posts cited above) that the handwriting of one marginal note, now almost completely illegible except by high-tech means, can be identified with that of an otherwise presumed former owner, one Johannes Marcus Marci (1595-1667). I do not think that even the cleverest forger would have what it takes to find a rare specimen of that obscure man’s handwriting, duplicate it accurately in a marginal note, then render that note illegible except with the aid of a technology that had not yet been invented in his day, while also providing other misleading evidence that the same obscure man of the 17th century had once actually owned the forgery in question. (Also, the handwriting of the surviving leaves of the manuscript shows that five separate scribes worked together to create it.)
@Northwind Grandma (#189):
Yes, indeed. Thanks for emphasizing that forgotten history. My own Palatine German ancestor, Hans Dewalt Lederman/Leatherman arrived in Philadelphia in 1727, and his son Gottfried/Godfrey settled in the Catoctin region of Maryland (Frederick County), in Wolfsville, to be precise. The Palatinate seems to have been something of a war-torn region in those days; there were lots of emigrants from there to North America.
“Bob” will not smoke with us until we ourselves have “pipes”.
-The Book of the Subgenius
The braying for war keeps getting louder.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-26/european-leaders-warn-of-russian-threat/107192690
“Last weekend, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Lithuania, and Switzerland all individually warned their citizens of increased threats from Russia.”
“This followed Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, citing intelligence assessments, telling the Polish parliament last week that Russia could launch “hybrid drone and missile strikes” against Poland and other NATO countries supporting Ukraine, while portraying them as accidental.”
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/denmark-expects-russia-escalate-hybrid-warfare-coming-months-intelligence-2026-09-24/
“Denmark expects Russia to escalate hybrid warfare in coming months, intelligence service says”
Are they really worried or is this a distraction to excuse the coming austerity from their sagging economy?
Or are they going for the plot of Sum of All Fears where where the evil European (a Neo nazi in the movie, it was different in the book) instigates a war between the US and Russia so the correct Europeans can rule the world?
And for Mary; “The primary advantage of passive RFID systems is that tags are very inexpensive, ranging from $0.10 to $1.50 per tag. ” They are not expensive which is the point. Items can be tracked at multiple steps in manufacturing and distribution without people and clipboards.
Most of us using electronics are familiar with the idea that upgrades reduce functionality. But now it appears that upgrades can actually make your food rotten.
https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/samsung-ai-fridges-bricked-korea-software-update/
Another reason to prefer relatively older technology: it’s less likely to just decide not to work one day.
On wealth taxes as an instrument of shareholder capitalism:
https://www.palladiummag.com/2026/09/22/wealth-taxes-could-kill-privately-owned-companies/ .
On the topic of beans and digestibility, I have found adzuki beans to be excellent for that,. They also give the kitchen a sweet malty smell when cooking, work well in savoury and sweet dishes, and are cheap in Chinese supermarkets. Also, no toxicity that I know of (and I’ve eaten them slightly undercooked before!).
@Slithy Toves
There is an alternative theory called Ancient monotheism. I recommend you check this video out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-bMgXQV7no&pp=ygUSYW5jaWVudCBtb25vdGhlaXNt
Polytheism became more likely with development of cultural complexity but the more primitive tribes and Nomad people’s have a relatively greater tendency towards fewer Gods and even Monotheism.
This High God does seem to have a tendency to not want to be portrayed by images of any kind. Seem to demand basic ethical standards and refuses a transactional relationship with his worshippers.
@ Jessica #132 (and the general discussion of karma)
“In my book, a teaching that tells me to aid and abet suffering is a false teaching. (Unless this is done to prevent some greater suffering.)”
Scotlyn: “This strikes me as a fallacious equation. The suffering which stands before you and which you have the power to alleviate is concrete and palpable. The “some greater suffering” you imagine you might prevent is theoretical, and you will never have the opportunity, in practice, to find evidence of the size, shape or severity of suffering theoretically “prevented”. ”
For the case you describe, Scotlyn, you are correct. I had more in mind rare cases in which the suffering you can alleviate and the other greater suffering are both concrete and palpable. For example, you may be able to prevent a drunk from being arrested, but you know that on the nights he drinks, he often goes home and beats his wife.
The other case that my lama used to talk about is when someone repeats the same mistake over and over and over. The way he put it was “if you put a pillow up for them every time they run into a wall but they keep on running into walls over and over, at some point, you have to hold the pillow back and let them run into the wall”. I think that people dealing with addicts of various kinds run into this situation.
Mostly I was trying to say that no rule, no principle applies 100% of the time. There is always the exception, no matter how rare.
Also, it is important not to overuse the notion of allowing someone to suffer to prevent other suffering or because they need to learn a lesson. It would be easy to use this notion as an excuse to avoid helping out. I am not a particularly compassionate person by nature, so I have to be careful about this. Your very response rejecting my original post suggests that you have more compassion. If so, the “to prevent greater suffering” exception to the rule would be safer in your hands.
“Jasmine, oh, they think the US will fall into line when push comes to shove, and we’ll sacrifice millions of our young men to bail them out from the consequences of their stupidity, the way we did in 1917 and 1942.”
I am no longer certain that the European powers that be are thinking that far ahead or that coherently. I suspect that “oh shale are we screwed when we finish losing the war in Ukraine and everyone sees how much damage we have done to ordinary Europeans” is the far limit of their vision.
The other night I had stayed up far too late doing things not worth the loss of sleep but I couldn’t stop myself from continuing even deeper into the night because when I did I would have to face up to what I had already done. I think what the leaders of Europe are doing is like that. Only on a much larger scale. Almost heroic that level of intentional cluelessness.
By the way, if the UK leaders get it into a war with Russia, I don’t think the UK will need vast manpower. The war will be too one-sided against the UK and over too quick for a mass army to matter.
Chuaquin, when I said that Greenland’s population was too small to be a state, I meant too small for it to be the 51st state. Perhaps the 50.01st state if there would be a way to arrange that.
Jazmin#172
A good infantery of UK against Russia could be the Polish infantery.
“Sudden thought, if they are relying on EVs and solar power then there will be no winter offensives in Europe. Especially against Russia. The Finns managed to win one but that was definitely an exception.”
It’s open post week, so: The notion that Finland won the 1940 war is one of the great myths of history. In the first half, they tied. Not won. Its not like they were marching on Leningrad, which after all was something like 20 miles from the border (which is why the Soviets had demanded that the border be pushed back). Given how small Finland was compared to the Soviet Union, this tie was a moral victory. (And help convince the German leadership that invading the Soviet Union was a good idea. Big mistake.)
In the second half, the Red Army learned from its first half mistakes, won decisively, and imposed a peace treaty transferring more territory from Finland to the Soviet Union than what the Soviets had demanded before the war.
The Soviets hadn’t started the whole thing out of pure meanness. The Finland-Soviet Union border was within artillery range of Leningrad and the Soviets feared that Finland would side with Germany in the war that was coming. That fear was realistic given past tensions between Finland and Russia then with the Soviet Union and given that Finland did side with Germany and play a major role in the siege of Leningrad and the deliberate starving to death of hundreds of thousands of civilians. [Side note: One of those who died in the siege was an older brother of Putin.]
Finland was held as part of Tsarist Russia against its will, so it is not as though the Finns were acting out of pure meanness either. Both sides had their reasons.
@Jessica (#211) wrote: “I am no longer certain that the European powers that be are thinking that far ahead or that coherently. ”
That’s how things look to me, too. To judge by various posts Andrei Martyanov has made on his blog (smoothiex12.blogspot.com/), Russia now has the capacity to obliterate utterly any Western European capital city (including London) at a single rapid blow, despite all current Western defenses; and its weaponry could even reach Washington, DC, with the same devastating effect. To persist in poking such a heavily armed bear seems to me to be the height of folly.
As for the Western European fear of a Russian takeover, that seems to me unlikely for a different reason: Russia regards Western Europe and the US as toxic, as a poison never to be ingested willingly. If it comes to war, I think Russia will launch effective decapitation strikes on all its Western adversaries, and then leave them alone to writhe and slowly perish amidst the complete ruins of their government and economy. So far as I can see, Western European leaders have never even considered such a possibility, but think that they themselves will survive any conceivable Russian attack and remain able to fight back.
However, as Yogi Berra once remarked, “Predicition is hard to do, especially about the future.” I freely admit that I could be wrong about all this.
This is a bit of a strange thought, but your vision may explain a lot of the generational tensions we face. There are two implications of it that would drive some pretty significant generational effects. The first and most obvious is that at some point most of the alien souls would stop being incarnated. This is likely to predate their departure, because otherwise a lot of them would have to die young in messy fashion. This could help explain the huge change I see in how people born from about 1990 or so tend in general to a much less world hating attitude. It’s not a sharp divide, but my experience is that there’s a wide range of attitudes we could plausibly expect these aliens to hold that seem to have faded away in people born during and after the 1990s. So the younger generations have far fewer (if any for the youngest!) of these alien souls, which is powerfully shaping how they experience things. A lot of ideas, attitudes, and behaviors which make sense to these alien souls, would become an age related phenomenon, so the younger generations would look at the older generations like they are crazy; or at least, have a lot of crazies. As a member of the younger generation, I can tell you that this does seem to fit.
The second part, however, is that these alien souls probably have a lot of karma that they need to burn off before leaving, because their world is very different from ours and it’s likely that karmic ties would complicate the return. This implies that a lot of these souls would need a final lifetime before leaving. Thus, there’s a plausible argument here that the older generations have a higher than average percentage of these alien souls.
As I considered this, I realized that a world hating, self loathing attitude, and almost inhuman obsession with either escaping the world or remaking into something else, something that I find remarkably alien and unpleasant, is a pretty good description of the Boomers. Further, thanks to things like Vietnam, the MKULTRA experiments, the insanity around prison for non-violent offenses, and the like, many of them had the kind of horrific experiences that often show up when someone is burning off a lot of karma in a hurry, so this does seem to fit as well, especially if the medical system helps/forces many of them linger in pain and dysfunction for years in their old age, as it did for the older generations.
Combine both factors, and no wonder generational tensions are running so high right now!
Following something that came up last Open Post, I’ve been thinking alot about what it would take to build a computer that would last a few generations, like the ones Trey finds at Star’s Reach in JMG’s novel. I’d like to open it to the commentariat– what digital tools do you think would be worth passing down?
So far I’m thinking:
-Radio Tools, like software-defined-radio and packet radio;
-Calculator;
-Spreadsheet software;
-A word processor;
-Astronomy/Astrology suites;
-BASIC or another simple language interpreter;
-Lots of detailed instructions how to use the thing;
-Scientific and technical manuals, as many as can fit in storage
Does anyone have anything add to that list?
Keep in mind we won’t have terabytes of space like modern computers! The denser the storage the less you can trust it long term, so “the entire library of congress” is probably not an option.
I just had another thought about your vision. Taking it as literally true, it might explain why we got hit with the influence of Pluto when we did.
One of the odder things about Pluto is that even during its reign as a planet, some people seemed to resonate weakly with it, while for others it was among the most powerful factors of their chart. It’s just occurred to me that as the planet of disharmony Pluto would naturally rule the alien souls. They would thus naturally, both as a group and as individuals, resonate far more with Pluto than the souls who belong here. Since Pluto is among other things a wildly effective way to burn karma in a hurry, something the alien souls probably needed, it might not be a coincidence that it’s fading out now, when (again, taking your vision at face value) the alien souls are leaving.
Pluto also rules over division, and dividing the souls here into “those who leave” and “those who stay” is a pretty important part of the process of returning those souls home! This goes even, and perhaps especially, if there are a few souls who started here and will leave, and a few souls who started there and will leave. This has the fairly ironic implication that Pluto is a major step in the process of restoring harmony and removing a profoundly destabilizing influence on the world; one that actually makes me think it’s more likely because Pluto naturally rules over ironies of exactly this sort.
“Weird Al” Yankovic’s name has just been approved for a new asteroid — (14331) Alyankovic = 1981 EC26 — by the International Astronomical Union.
It’s in a four year orbit in the main belt, magnitude 16 so you will need a really good telescope to see it.
https://www.space.com/astronomy/asteroids/astronomers-just-named-an-asteroid-after-weird-al-yankovic
Tom Lehrer will be getting one too.
@TylerA (#216):
I’m showing my age (84) and my generation (Silent) here, I know, but my answer is: Let the entire digital world go away forever. In fact, let TV go away forever, too. I wouldn’t miss it.
I do use a computer a little these days for convenience; and back in the day when I was writing more for publication, programs like Word made the whole process much, much easier. That said, except for JMG’s blogs, I never really found much joy anywhere in the digital world at all.
When I was growing up in the 1940s and early 1950s, relatively few homes had even a tiny-screen black-and-white TV, and the ones that did usually put it off in a side room somewhere, away from where the family did most of its living together. Family life was so very different back then: much more collective, and much less individualized!
Justin, when mages are fools enough to throw curses around, if the magic they use is competent — it usually isn’t — they can have negative effects on targets who don’t know how to protect themselves. The sort of thing I portrayed in The Witch of Criswell is all too real, which is one of the reasons I’ve spent the last thirty years getting the fundamentals of protective magic into circulation, and will be doing much more now that I have access to a living tradition of late medieval white magic. Doubtless there’s karma on the side of the targets — but the perps are piling up very nasty karma for themselves, too.
Anon, glad to hear it. I don’t happen to remember which version of the Shemhamphorash operation Damien uses, but knowing him, it’ll be good solid stuff.
Mary, no surprises there!
Robert M, thank you for this. Most interesting!
Justin, I see your pineal gland function is progressing nicely. 😉
Siliconguy, no surprises there. The continent that gave the world Greek tragedy seems to be obessively trying to repeat its basic formula.
Warburton, you know, if the big corporations wanted to go out of their way to encourage people to walk away from high tech, I don’t know that they could do a better job.
STS, thanks for this.
Jessica, I think you underrate the European leadership, in an odd way. They’re being stupid, that I freely grant, but their problem isn’t short term thinking. The problem is that for several generations now, across the top end of the Western European and European-diaspora privileged classes, the one ironclad rule has been that nobody must ever suffer the consequences of even their most stupid actions. They are only permitted to fail upwards. The result is that it has never occurred to the current inmates of that class that they could lose. They have grand long-term plans; they expect to divide up Russia into weak successor states that can be brought into the EU and stripped of assets for their benefit; they expect to absorb Canada, as shown by the recent chatter about Canadian “associate membership;” their ultimate goal is clearly nothing less than turning the EU into the nucleus of a global government.
The problem is that they’ve completely failed to consider the possibility that Russia, in particular, might object to this, take their objections onto the battlefield, and win. The Eurocrats literally can’t imagine a scenario where they don’t get whatever they want. So they’re busy pounding their flabby little fists and sticking out their scrawny little chests in a display of faux machismo, in serenely self-inflicted blindness to the very real possibility that the response might involve Russian hypersonic weapons taking out the British nuclear arsenal on the ground, submarine drones sinking every Royal Navy asset larger than a rowboat, and Oreshniks descending at Mach 12 or so on every significant underground bunker in the UK and reducing its human and electronic contents to white-hot dust.
William, that’s occurred to me as well. I’ve always felt at odds with my generation; if it’s crowded with alien souls, while I’m native, that would explain a few things. As for Pluto, I’ve had the oddest sense now that then that it may be a temporary resident of our solar system. But we’ll see…
TylerA, keep in mind that it’s not enough for a computer to do these things. It has to do them for a price that’s cheaper than doing them by hand, or with simpler tools such as slide rules and tables.
Siliconguy, ha!
FWIW I agree with those who are of the opinion that the European elites are deceiving themselves about their prospects in taking on Russia directly, and that their efforts to goad and bait the bear are very ill-conceived. To me the prospect that the European elites will fall out with and war with one another long before they ever succeed at jointly landing any truly devastating blows on Russia is the likeliest outcome of the current trajectory.
On the other hand I think Americans also deceive themselves if they believe our country is neutral in that conflict. NATO’s military support for Ukraine’s actions, both in terms of weapons and training and in terms of intelligence and targeting, is still firmly under the direct command of the Supreme Allied Commander who himself is directly answerable to the US Dept of War.
Thank you for your thoughts Mr Greer, regarding the possibility that Christianity is based on a fiction created by the Roman oppressor to keep the peasantry in its place. The book Caesers Messiah is only one of many times I’ve encountered this idea.
My (current) issue with Christianity is that it seems like paganism rebranded with a huge pile of guilt and fear, and the threat of eternal punishment if you don’t do exactly as you’re told by the hierarchy. Being a Christian feels like a lifetime of worry about every little indiscretion, and if the cumulative lapses weight heavily enough for eternal damnation.
It also seems designed to sever us from a direct connection to God, and it definitely had that effect on me.
I constantly run into ex-Catholics who have had an identical experience to mine, that being a rejection of Christianity, and complete inability to now find any relevance or useful insights in the Bible.
After 12 years of Catholic schooling studying the Bible and writing essays about it, I find it boring beyond belief. I’ve tried many times to revisit it, but lose interest quickly.
I found paganism through wondering about the reality of witchcraft and shamanism, and that allowed me to reconnect with the Gods.
To my detriment, I often share my experience with disillusioned Christians, and certain folks who fervently believe they somehow stumbled into the one true religion. I’ve had many interesting discussions…
Thanks to the many folks that chimed in on my comment!
I just took out your “A World Full of Gods” for a third reading. I’m pleased that it has a good bibliography, footnotes and index. I would wish that the margins were wider to allow room for my own marginal notations — if there’s a new edition in the works at some point. It goes well with my other current reading (see above) which includes extensive critiques of the so-called “Judaeo-Christian tradition.” I like especially what D.H. Akenson has to say about just that: “‘Judaeo-Christian’ was and still is a false-ecumenical term… a label that should be consigned to the scrapheap of political doublethink.”
“William, that’s occurred to me as well. I’ve always felt at odds with my generation; if it’s crowded with alien souls, while I’m native, that would explain a few things. As for Pluto, I’ve had the oddest sense now that then that it may be a temporary resident of our solar system. But we’ll see…”
It could also explain why the powerful Boomers are so focused on maintaining power: on some level, they know that once they let go, that’s it. They will never again have any kind of influence over humanity, and they don’t want to let go. Actually, on this note, I wonder now if the reason that the gods have let humanity make such a mess of things over the last three centuries or so is that the alien souls have been given a chance to try to make our world more hospitable for themselves. In the process, those of us who belong would have
As for Pluto, a few nights ago I had a very strange thought along those lines. It would be extremely fitting given its symbolism for Pluto to make a close pass with some large as yet undiscovered object (maybe Earth sized or even larger) and get ejected from the solar system entirely. This would instantly reignite the entire debate over what is and is not a planet (and this could fit the vague sense some people seem to have had that another planet is trying to come into focus), while decisively settling that Pluto is not a planet. Sometime in 2036, Pluto is seen for the last time through a telescope as it flies into interstellar space, its ultimate fate utterly impossible for us to ever know.
Between activating the lunar current and hanging out with “Bob, ” I get by. Or I get third eye anyway.
I was readung the good Book of Subgenius last night and ran across that quote. To round out mycAmerican Psychogeography section on Texas I will be writing about the art that came out of that crazy state, and how the overculture of the state was something of a thrust block to push against for the various scenes. So will be looking at Church of Subgenius as part of that plus:
Music from 13th Floor Elevators, Red Krayola, Pain Teens, Legendary Stardust Cowboy, & Butthole Surfers among a few others.
Films Dazed & Confused and Slacker by Richard Linklater.
Touch on the underground architecture collective Ant Farm.
The alternative scene was as wild and out there and nuts in its own as were the dreams of the big rich, cattle ranchers, oil barrons and rocket fueled space chiefs and thdir phallacies down at the big Johnson space center.
1940 America had electrification, telephone network, radios everywhere, widespread car ownership, an efficient train and postal system, airplanes, clean water and sewerage systems, electric home appliances, refrigerators, had constructed the Empire State Building, Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam all designed, planned, done, maintained and organized without smart phones, computers, internet, GPS, calculators or AI.
Jessica @ 211, and Aldarian, At one time Texas was a thinly populated part of Mexico. The Mexican authorities had the idea that the vast new territories of what now the American southwest could be carved up into enormous ranchos, each owned and managed by Spanish descended aristocrats. What could go wrong? The nascent USA was a small, grubby assortment of no account peasants clinging to life along the Atlantic littoral.
What went wrong was that the opening of North America to European settlers was an irresistible magnet for rural peasantry and urban small timers of all description, folks who had endured generations of injury and insult from their social superiors, and who had long traditions of making do with little. Our philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote in one of his books that the settlement of North America was the one time in history when the working man was able to show what he could do. Land hungry settlers, the newly arrived and children of the already settled alike, poured into the lands across the Mississippi River. The Texas hidalgos couldn’t stop them. Texas became the Republic of Texas, which soon enough became the largest state in the new USA.
So, I read about two new bases in Greenland, and I wonder about infiltration of Americans into Greenland. Granted the ice makes that difficult, but our Real Estate Dealer in Chief wants his Whopping Big Deal to amaze the masses and permanently enrich his incompetent progeny. He might even voluntarily leave office if he gets it. Some sort of face saving stepping back for health reasons, 25th amendment invoked can be arranged. It is becoming clearer by the day that Mike Johnson, current Speaker of the House, wants to be president and impose (not)Christian theocracy, except he knows he can’t be elected. Not even Aipac money could get Johnson into office.
The real impediment to statehood for Greenland is not population; it is their law against private property. Were that allowed to stand, screams from the RE industry would break the sound barrier.
@JMG, Ariel Moravec question. Will Dr. Moravec still be around at the end of the series? Because, even though Ariel is getting good at working independently, he’s been a very good friend to her.
JMG,
We are in a very weird period of economic decline. One of the major features of the world since WWII has been cheap shipping. This allowed the growth of national suppliers so substitute for local suppliers. Then as cheap airfare was added it allowed vegetables and fruits from all over the world to substitute for locally grown food. Though we are 20 years out from peak conventional oil, we are just now seeing the drastic increase in shipping costs due to the price of diesel.
I just read that the cost of bikes is being affected because they take up a lot of space when shipped around the country ( not in a container) and that is making prices explode. Many other things from appliances to furniture will be affected drastically.
But it will take a long time to rebuild local suppliers for all these things. We also sit at a nexus where the shipping costs added to cheap overseas production is still less than local goods. So we are in a period of consumer deprivation ( probably a good thing). We will never return to the time of cheap consumer goods and grapes in January. But we may enter an era where a new sofa is out of reach for everyone. Eventually local production will come back but it will be much more expensive.
Robert Mathiesen wrote, “That said, except for JMG’s blogs, I never really found much joy anywhere in the digital world at all.”
Amen to that, brother! As a dancer and music teacher, the only other source of satisfying interest that the internet has provided in my life has been easy access to the entire world’s library of recorded music. Instead of having to ask the staff at the record store to put any albums I’m interested in on their turntable, or browsing through the CD’s on the listening stations at Tower Records, now I can surf any style of recorded music that interests me, whenever I have a bit of free time. It probably would have taken several decades of standing at the Tower listening stations or checking out CD’s from the library to amass a playlist with ninety Baroque Ciaconnas on it, or with hundreds of Baltic folksongs, or Zimbabwe pop songs, or Russian rock songs, or French Music Hall, or Balinese gamelan, or…
As far as I’m concerned, the internet is a giant jukebox located inside the most interesting mystical lodge I’ve ever encountered. A bit of transformative ritual followed by some friendly discussion and a little dance of gratitude — what more could a bunch of far-flung mystics ask for?
Northwind Grandma #189
> The Dutch had dibs, because they arrived in Ulster County in 1652,
1652 is an important year in South African history. In that year the first batch of employees of the Dutch East India Company waded ashore near what became Cape Town to start growing fresh food for provisioning ships on the Europe-India run, and marks the start of European settlement in this part of Africa.
In 1966 I sat in Jameson Hall at UCT listening to Senator Ted Kennedy deliver his “ripple of hope” speech.
“I come here this evening because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which was once the importer of slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to . . . ”
At this point I thought he was going to say “. . . to South Africa”. But no.
“. . . I refer, of course, to the United States of America.”
I can still remember the little shock that bit of rhetorical legerdemain gave me. It was very effective at drawing parallels between the two countries.
I don’t remember any of the rest of the speech. My impression was it was aimed more at the American press corps that accompanied him than at South Africans. But it was nice of him to come at a time when most of the rest of the world were boycotting and sanctioning South Africa because of apartheid.
Incidentally I am third generation South African. My great grandfather came out to try his luck on the diamond diggings at Kimberley. My father’s family is from Kent and my mother’s from Cornwall, apart from her mother, my grandmother, who was Italian.
@Chuaquin
By “choose your family”, I mean a conscious decision to continue relationship. This choosing happens everyday.
Yes, I grew up speaking and hearing the PA Dutch dialect. PA Dutch is probably further from German than Puerto Rican Spanish spoken in Manhattan is from Argentine Spanish.
@Christophe
In daily life, the Old Order Amish get along quite well with the other Mennonites and other strains of Amish.
And about the potluck, I look forward to meeting once again! I don’t remember the details of our conversation. There are, no doubt, realities in my experience that aren’t shared with anybody else, and vice versa.
Question John.
I agree with your take on Greenland, the Trump Team are clearly aiming to leave NATO at some point. Pentagon is currently planning a partial exit from Europe but not a full on.
Do you think the Iranian war – that has severely damaged many of the US bases across the ME – will accelerate the US military exit from Europe/ME and where does that leave Israel longer term? Hard to see how the US can meaningfully defend Israel longer term without major presence in western Europe.
On a related question, do you think the US will maintain, long-term their base in Azores – mid-Atlantic – and in the UK? Logically, if you want to secure Greenland the Azores makes logical sense as well to secure the Atlantic.
That should be Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Don’t know what I was thinking.
Hi JMG,
You seem like the only person I know who could inform this question.
I know we’re learning more and more that “autism” is really squishy and there is a huge spectrum of “indications”.
I have a symptom that’s making me wonder If I have a touch. Apparently, I’m smarter than the average bear. I have a memory like a steel trap for things like numbers (license plates?) and especially geography. I remember every place I’ve ever been. I can look at a squiggly line on a map and know exactly where that is and what it looks like.
But I can’t remember people’s names for shale. Even people I have worked with for over 20 years, sometimes I pass them in the hall and I’m struggling so hard to remember their name the moment passes and I just have to say something else like “Hello”, or “Morning!”
Meeting new people? Fuggitaboutit. We introduce our selves, shake hands whatever, and you could ask me right then what their names are and I couldn’t tell you (unless she’s really attractive, and then my memory seems to improve).
It just seems so weird to me that my brain is so good at so many things, but I can’t remember people’s names. As a human, a social primate, you would think that would be hard-wired in.
Does this mean I’m “on the specrtrum”? Not that it really matters. I seem to be navigating life just fine. Except I do feel bad not remembering names. It seems disrespectful, and I certainly don’t intend that.
I would accept advice from you or the commentariat on tricks to help remember people’s names. I seem to be most successful if I can link it to something else. Liquor Store guy: Disc Golf -> Ammon Ranch -> Hole Five -> “Big Jeff” -> Jeff! That’s a long way to go.
Crazy Brains!
Justin Patrick Moore @ 225, “phallicies”. That might be the best neologism I have seen these many years.
Clay Dennis @ 229, Yesterday I did a volunteer stint at a creative reuse center. This one specializes in art and craft supplies. Even within those parameters, the volume of donations was astonishing.
Granted all you say about shipping costs. Even so, the population is declining and not about to stop doing so until young men and women can confidently expect good lives for their families and progeny. Never mind Spengler (apologies, JMG), read the Great Wave by David Hackett Fisher.
We are all but drowning in stuff, and much of it can be refurbished and reused. The time to begin doing so is now. A nonprofit refurbished tool place might possible as a source of affordable basic tools and a way to give older men something useful to do and a place to hang out which won’t ruin their health.
Mary Bennet#227, Jessica, Aldarion
Some rough details about Texas, It was practically unhabited till 1760’s , time in wich a noble de of the Virreinato de Nueva España decided to give great pieces of territories to catholic candidates of the New USA. for to create ranches .After of 1812 the Virreinato de Nueva España seceded of Spain becoming México, and years after the goverment of México decreted the abolition of slavery, thing that caused the rebelión of the Texan ranchers.
I think I have a great chance to burn off a lot of my negative karma. Due to some poor financial decisions on my part (stretching over years), I have found myself in a situation where I am unable to pay the minimum payments on my debts and afford a place to live. As a result, I am now homeless because I couldn’t manage my finances. I know a lot of other people are suffering, but I spent quite a while living well beyond my means, and it has now come back to bite me, so I think this is on me. Since I’m now homeless no matter what, I figure I should take advantage of the chance to burn the negative karma that got me here in the first place.
My plan is three fold. First, as is probably obvious from the first paragraph, I am reflecting honestly about what got me here. I am not going to say anything like, “oh if only the bank gave me a higher credit limit; if only I got paid better”; I need to accept that I had ample opportunities to change while it would have hurt, but not been “I am homeless for the foreseeable future” bad.
Second, I am working out how to get out of this mess. I have a job, which is a huge help: I have a steady income, so I think I can make this work. Not needing to pay for rent is a huge help; I can take that money and use it to pay down my debts. I am doing things like getting a gym membership so I can access their showers and searching for another job, and while I don’t plan on avoiding spending any money, I have set up a budget that sees me debt free within a year and intend to stick with that target. It is going to be unpleasant, but I think I can live with that. Actually, I think I have to do so, because I don’t see any other good options.
Finally, I plan to try to focus on the things I am grateful for. For example, I am grateful I’ve found a sheltered place to sleep during rough weather; for free WiFi at the local library; for the fact I figured out a way to shower; for the fact that I’ve found a dark, quiet, and secluded place outside to sleep when the weather’s nice.
Do you think this is a good way to burn karma when dealing with such a situation?
JMG # 152:
“so many people in the Roman upper classes despised Christianity and fought it tooth and nail as a depraved, disgusting, antisocial cult.”
Indeed, I think Marcus Aurelius, in his “Meditations”, he only wrote one short paragraph about Christians, in a very negative mood, speaking of them like indoctrinated zealots who, due to their doctrine, went fastly toward death; but of course, that attitude and behavior wasn’t a Stoic one.
Ironically, some Christians since the ancient Rome times, have liked Stoicism, and they’ve tried to mix this philosophy with Christianism. For example, our great Baroque poet, Francisco de Quevedo. Some Stoics tecahings can be mixed well with an open view of Christianism, so there are some thorny ideas (for example, about suicide: let’s draw a veil). But that’s another story…
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Milkyway # 155:
I agree. Profanities and I’d also say jokes are an upper level when you learn and use another language.
“a “Schwein” is a pig (although “swine” would probably be the more accurate translation).”
Well, I can tell you it was a rough translation I did, but they’re more or less words from the same “family”.
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African-…# 158:
“it is interesting to note that he named one of his two sons Merlin.”
Maybe it was a practical joke mocking their narrow minded materialist fault finders from the sciences, to provoke them…or maybe it’s a good tribute to that legendary magician, as a wink to occultism. I also want to know John opinion about Mr. Sheldrake in that topic you’ve suggested him.
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Dzanni # 159:
I understand you’ve written about right wing and gay rights in USA, so I’m sorry for my European ignorance about it; but current situation here is “slightly” different. Although LGTBI activism is part of usual “captive audience” (and vote) for the leftism, it’s interesting Conservatives here (PP), never have tried to revoke gay marriage until today. However, I wouldn’t vouch Spanish far right (Vox) is really gay friendly now, or it would push homophobical politics if/when it achieved some power in coalition con Conservatives in a national government. Indeed, every year (since it’s a parlamentary party), our far right doesn’t seem being comfortable with the predictable LGTBI Pride Parades., to speak softly about Vox politicians opinions about them. “Mild” righters are hardening their speech and ideas to “harvest” some votes more to the far right here, and right block alliance ruling regional govts has given some idea about how cultural wars are running amok…
I can tell you Libertarians (In the American sense), are a fringe minority within our right wing, which comes from another historical ideological tradition.
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Ethan # 168:
“and they also act like individual human beings are fungible, like machine parts of the same make and model. I thought it was an intriguing look at how the myth of the machine affects the ruling style of those who believe in it; they seek to turn their entire state into a machine, one that they can control down to the fine details.”
I’m not puzzled by that nasty tendency, because I’ve remembered Mechanicism is one of the main ideas of current Western commonplaces. I can point this idea full debut when LaMettrie `published his book “The Man Machine”, where he “undressed” last theist concerns over rough mechanicism and materialism, wrote by the big rationalist Descartes (who was a shamefulk mechanist himself). World is a machine according this conventional wisdom, so politics are too a machine, according this philosophy.
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Noah # 173:
“If the CCP became too strict with their policies regarding media, it would becoming unbearably boring and everyone would seek illegal outside media to compensate. I think as long as you don’t touch very specific check-boxes you are fine.”
It seems a reasonable hypothesis for explaining this apparently Chinese government indulgence, in its attitude and behavior alike, to avoid any massive defection toward a likely alternative media. Very clever, thanks for your answer.
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JMG # 178:
I take note of the name you’ve suggested me: Charlotte Fell Smith. I don’t see any Spanish translation, so I’m going to find her Dee bio book in usual online sites where books are sold (including second hand ones).
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(To be continued)
Anarcho-centrism: Chaotic Neutral is a live option.
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@Mary Bennet: thank you! It seems to fit the nasa cowboy class and their musky descendents.
Speaking of Descendents here is my song pick of the day:
https://youtu.be/x9PPlQp5DT4?is=ZuWuYrA9OcJzhEze
The main thing that kept the population of Texas low until later in the 19th century were the Comanches, who were finally defeated by the repeating rifle and the American policy of exterminating the buffalo to defeat the plains tribes.
Scotlyn, oh, no question the US is involved in the Ukraine war, via its European catspaws. What I’m suggesting is that if the latter get in over their head, the US will shrug and walk away.
Bob, I get that. Christianity in its historic form is very much a creation of the Piscean age, with that sign’s fixation on belief, self-sacrifice, and self-inflicted failure, and now that the Piscean influence is fading out and the very different energies of Aquarius are ascending, a lot of people find Christianity difficult to stomach. It’s not, as Chesterton so dishonestly said, that “real Christianity” has never been tried — try telling that to two thousand years of martyrs, mystics, and saints! — but that, like every other major religious tradition, it came into being to correct the errors of a previous age, and then proceeded to err just as disastrously in the other direction. I can certainly understand your feelings about Catholicism — my late wife was raised Catholic and left that church behind for very good reasons, and remained quite reasonably bitter about what she’d witnessed until the end of her life — and if you, like her, can’t respond to Christianity at all due to what you went through, why, there are many other ways the Divine reaches out to human beings, and if you’ve found one, that’s what matters.
Phutatorius, thank you for this. I’m pretty satisfied with the current edition, but we’ll see. As for “Judeo-Christian,” there are Judaizing branches of Christianity to which it applies, but as a general label, granted. You might as well say “Islamo-Christian.”
William, that makes sense, though there’s also the fatuously messianic fantasies the Boomers have been spinning around themselves since their teen years — from The Greening of America on — which play so large a role in their self-image. Once they leave power, they’ll have to admit that they failed to bring on Utopia, and I don’t think many of them can bear that. As for Pluto, weirdly, that’s exactly the imagery that comes to my mind…
Justin, better you than me. Every time I’ve been to Texas I ended up with a whopping case of bronchitis, which I’ve taken as an omen.
BeardTree, but it also had certain cultural features that we’ve long since lost, such as the framework of a high-trust society. It’ll be interesting to see if we can get any of that back.
Patricia, he will indeed. She and her new husband will be moving into the big house on Lyon Avenue, but he’ll be very much in the picture.
Clay, yep. I’ve been expecting that since 2007 or so…
Forecasting, the US is in an intricate dance in the Middle East. It has to withdraw, but at the same time it has to placate its domestic Jewish and Christian-Zionist voting blocs. I suspect the US will try to keep a presence in the UK as long as possible, but one of the points of Greenland is that it makes Britain less essential. As for the Azores, I’d watch Bermuda more carefully — it’s very well positioned to serve as the same kind of forward naval and air base as Greenland and Hawai’i, and some de facto US presence there is likely.
Slink, I’m certainly not qualified to diagnose somebody at a distance via the internet! I wish I could help you with names, but that’s one of my weak spots, too.
Anon, that seems like a good plan of action.
Chuaquin, everybody in the Roman upper class had that attitude until very late. As Tacitus says, Christians were seen as “a new and malefic superstition” (superstitionis novae et maleficae, where maleficae also implies a reference to witchcraft, maleficia) motivated by “hatred of the human race” (odio humani generis). Doubtless the incoming faith of our current age will be regarded similarly by our authorities.
Hey JMG
Did you hear about the new species of cat thats been officially discovered? Apparently a Bolivian man found what he thought was an abandoned cat on the side of the road, and looked after it until he realised it was a wildcat. He gave it to a wildlife sanctuary, who gradually realised it was a “new species”. I say officially discovered, because after some talks with the locals it turns out their community already knew about these creatures, which they called Tilcayo.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/meet-the-adorable-and-tiny-tilcayo-the-first-brand-new-cat-species-identified-in-more-than-a-century-180989528/
Paedrig # 187:
No, I didn’t know the Voynich apparent has been decoded. When I’ve read those “witches” belongs to feminist ideology, (in its garden variety of “online witches” trying to stack…errr…interpreting History with their usual and boring trick – “gender perspective” methink), I’ve smiled in a wry mood.
However, it’s also true the broken clock metaphor sometimes works in real world, so let’s have critical sense but we musn’t fall into the “ad hominem” fallacy, neither. We’ll see…
(Well, according JMG # 194, it isn’t the first time the Voynich Manuscrite has been apparently deciphered, and I think John knows more about forgeries than me, so I’d tend to believe his suspicions could be true…).
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Northwind G. # 189:
A very interesting story about human groups and how are named (as time passes).
“the word “Dutch” was what OTHERS called the “Deutsch” (Germans), and the Germans simply went along with the flow. That including the Amish.”
So all German origin people was called “Dutch”, I didn’t know that fact. It seems that mistake came maybe partly due to ignorance, partly due to the two words apparent resemblance.
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J.L.Mc12 # 191:
Oh, I was wrong, so lystrosaurs didn’t self-extincted to themselves: no prehistoric Darwin Award for them (though they could be as a great living disaster for those another species extincted thanks to their likely activities, from our current human view).
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Jessica # 211:
“when I said that Greenland’s population was too small to be a state, I meant too small for it to be the 51st state. Perhaps the 50.01st state if there would be a way to arrange that.”
No arguments here. I’m afraid I’ve understood by mistake in Greenland as a likely independent country 8maybe in a long term future), instead of becoming part of USA as a new state (or mini-state). Oops!
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JMG # 220:
“the response might involve Russian hypersonic weapons taking out the British nuclear arsenal on the ground”
Indeed, it’s said (online sites starting with Wikipedia) that part of UK nukes are warplane bombs stored in RAF Lakenheath Airbase. So if they were destroyed, it’d happen a dirty and ugly fallout in Britan.
UK governments would order to launch against Russia their missiles from its 4 submarines. Oh wait! Have you written “Russian submarine drones”, too?
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Jfisher # 232:
“By “choose your family”, I mean a conscious decision to continue relationship. This choosing happens everyday.”
Thank you for clarifying this phrase. By the way, I’ve met some people who broke with their biological families, due to dirty secrets and very bad attitudes and behaviors. Sharing a DNA doesn’t secure a good relationship with your origin family.
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I’ve seen some commenters have written about last “Coyote and Roadrunner” movie,and some ideas about these two correlate animated cartoons characters. I can tell you that some time ago, I read a funny and embarrassing parodic cartoon, in which Coyote and his mocking “prey” were certain parts of human body, different ones depending you’re a man or a woman. To point a fine point in it, these characters had become (in that lusty and funny parody) in male and female privates…with their names changes in a parodic and erotical sense (ahem). Well, guess which one was the man privates and which one the female genitals, ha ha…
JMG, if Christianity came in being to, as you say, ” it came into being to correct the errors of a previous age”, what in your view were those errors.
Yes, I well remember the high trust society of decades ago. I once read the memories of someone being a ten year old boy in the very early sixties in San Francisco. He would go about that city alone as a ten year old boy. Inconceivable now.
Hi John Michael,
I’ve been getting similar vibes too.
Ah, as a complete outsider to the mess in eastern Europe, I have to add that I agree with your analysis of the situation. From here, the mess really looks like something that the European leaders are prosecuting as a pet project. It is of interest to me that the new boss on the block in Germany has been making sounds about facing up to the inevitable and just buying the gas and diesel from the land of the bear. That recent shift says a lot about the underlying realities of attempting to take the resources by force.
Also from this distance, the US role in that mess looks more like that of an on-again, and off-again, hired consultant. And there will be a price for that, like say, Greenland.
By the very loss of that big frozen island, the facts on the ground suggest that Europe is already smaller, and so has incurred loss. This is not a complicated story.
It is unwise in the extreme, to set out on a war that has a high probability of failure. And if a country is unwilling to commit their young adults to this task, then that also suggests to me a certain failure. Say what you will about the dust up in the middle east, but everyday US servicemen and women lives are on the line.
The land of stuff has a saying about going up in hobnailed boots, and down again in silk slippers. There is a lesson in there.
Cheers
Chris
Mary Bennet, 227 Anselmo #237,
The version of Texas history that I have read also says that Texas was barely inhabited until quite late. Spain set up a defensive line against native tribes across north New Spain more or less where the US-Mexico border is now. When Mexico gained its independence and inherited the claims of New Spain, the lands that would be seized by the US in 1848 were barely settled by Mexicans. Only the Rio Grande valley, parts of coastal Texas, and parts of California, whose residents wanted nothing to do with the government in distant Mexico City. (The Zorro tales revolve around the desire of Spanish-speaking Californians for independence from Mexico City.)
Thus the US didn’t so much take land from Mexico as take future claims. When many of the European colonies were established, they started from the coast and claimed land whose extent inland was not bounded. Thus, many of the original 13 colonies that became the US had no defined western border. There is still a university in Cleveland whose name reflects the claim of Connecticut to what is now northern Ohio. In theory, Virginia claimed land all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Similarly, Spanish California had no northern border. It was only when settlers reached far enough inland that actual borders were established.
Mexico invited American settlers into Texas fully aware of the dangers they would pose. It was a desperation move made in the hope that the new settlers, who were required to pretend to convert to Catholicism, would take on the Comanches, who were the true rulers of Texas at the time (and remained the true rulers of half of Texas into the 1870s). The American settlers stayed in the easternmost part of Texas where the climate was suitable for slave plantations growing cotton.
Robert Mathieson #214
“Russia now has the capacity to obliterate utterly any Western European capital city (including London) at a single rapid blow, despite all current Western defenses; and its weaponry could even reach Washington, DC, with the same devastating effect.”
The weapons Russia has now work through precision rather than massive force. The force concentrated right on the target is overwhelming but it doesn’t do widespread damage. Utterly obliterating a city would require nuclear weapons, which would unleash a war with no victors. What Russia could and would do is to take out all the critical links in a country, both leaders and infrastructure. By fighting to the last Ukrainian, the West is also providing Russia with a laboratory on how to do this. Now Russia is apparently starting to take down Internet hubs in Ukraine.
About the discussion of Greenland as a US state, the US government could admit a state as small as it wanted. It could admit the 5 acres my boyfriend and I live on. But it would no more give 20,000 Greenlanders two senators and a congress critter than it would give my boyfriend and me senate seats. (His sister next door could be the congress critter.) The US may have admitted states with a population in the tens of thousands, but that was back in the 1700s when the total population of the United States was less than 1% of what it is now.
JMG, I agree that European elites operate on the principle of no consequences to members of the elite no matter what they do, but to me that is a form of short-term thinking. If one cannot learn from feedback, then any long-term vision will quickly turn into pure fantasy. I think the same applies to US elites. Obama’s handling of the 2008 financial meltdown is a good example as is the current AI bubble.
“No consequences for the elite” is also strikingly similar to what made the Brezhnev era in the Soviet Union distinct according to Vladimir Shlapentokh in “Soviet ideologies in the period of glasnost”.
J.L.Mc12, I have indeed. One more nail in the coffin of the claim that all large land animals are known!
Chuaquin, the first move in any such Russian attack would be sending Britain’s four submarines to the bottom. The hypersonic missiles would hit Lakenham and any other similar target about a minute later. Given the immense dispropotion between Russia’s huge and battle-ready strategic arm and Britain’s small and feeble one, it would be over very quickly.
Mary, the age of Aries had the faults of Aries, notably self-centeredness and self-glorification. It’s indicative that Aristotle, the best of the Greek moral writers, didn’t recognize compassion as a virtue, and focused his attention on achieving megalopsychia, literally “greatness of soul,” but also a word for pride. That was the imbalance that Christianity corrected, by embracing self-abnegation, until that too became a vice.
Chris, exactly. You’ve got this little elite class suffering from monumental delusions of adequacy, convinced that it’s the ruling class of the world — you can see right there that the upper levels of European society haven’t yet adjusted to the end of European global empire. Their attitude is likely to be adjusted for them, the hard way.
Jessica, of course the US elites suffer from the same idiotic habits of thought — that’s why I specified the European diaspora as well as Europe itself. As for obliterating a city, no, that doesn’t take nukes. Imagine for a moment an attack on London that targeted and took out its electrical grid, natural gas supplies, water and sewage plants, transportation hubs, and core institutions of local government. The city would soon be uninhabitable, and unless the resources were available for massive and expensive rebuilding projects thereafter, large parts of it might stay that way for an extended period.
Justin Patrick Moore 204
> “Bob” will not smoke with us until we ourselves have “pipes”. The Book of the Subgenius
What a bloomin’ hoot🦉‼️ Monty Python-in-a-Book.
💨🫥🦉💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
The Eurozombies absorbing Canada is at top of mind for me these days. On the one hand, Europe needs the fuel and the minerals, and I don’t particularly care about us selling them oil and tungsten or whatever. On the other hand the freedom of movement part has me spooked, if Canada wanted to restart its housing bubble, the best way imaginable is allowing wealthy European boomers to move to Canada and buy up properties here.
There are apparently very large protests in Germany against a step towards reinstituting the draft , something the Brits are talking about too. I recently enjoyed the novel Matterhorn, written by a white Vietnam war (volunteer) veteran who is quite sensitive about the thoughts and feelings of black draftees who made up a disproportionate share of combatants on the American side. To paraphrase Wendell Berry, the west made “Negros” of the Ukrainians, and now that they’re running out of Ukrainians, they’re getting ready to make “Negros” out of their own youth (obviously, not the scions of the Eurozombies).
The Great Crash (the book) arrived today.
“Preventive incantation required that as many important people as possible repeat as firmly as they could that it wouldn’t happen.”
Of course it did happen. Galbraith has a deft hand with a pen. In the introduction he notes, “Each time [his book] has been about to pass from print and the bookstores, another speculative episode—another bubble or the ensuing misfortune—has stirred interest in the history of this, the great modern case of boom and collapse, which led on to an unforgiving depression. ”
This edition came out in 1997, since then we’ve had the dot-com collapse, the housing bubble and Great Recession, the virus debacle and now the AI boom. If anything the frequency is speeding up.
Phutatorius 223
> Judaeo-Christian tradition
I grew up Unitarian Universalist (UU) which literally meant I grew up as “a nothing.” In the 1980s, I took five years out of my usual routine to study Judaism.
I have no idea what book —>
Around 2015, when I took five years out of my usual routine to study Christianity, I read that the moniker “Judeo-Christian tradition” did not exist until after World War II,— that it was invented by one or a plethora of Jewish wordsmiths (American and Isrulian) who deep down, but would never say out loud, felt that they needed a Big-Brother-with-a-Big-Stick (USA) to back up the itty-bitty, teensy-weensy number of Jews in the world, so as to prevent other slaughter of Jews, during their lifetime. That is, Jews tentatively adopted goliath-Christianity for their own ends: Christianity-as-cudgel. And note the wording; which comes first: the Judeo or the Christian? It is NOT Christian-Judeo. Guess why.
Remember, I grew up UU, and 99.9999% of the time I am neutral. I studied books (both Judaism and Christianity) that, except for me, no-one dares to read.
💨🫥📖💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Beardtree 226
> 1940 America had…
Nah, you are about ten years too early. 1950 is the year you are citing, maybe even 2-3 years after that.
1940 was when World War II was ON in Europe; Americans were worrywarts. They made do with what they used in the 1930s. 1946-1949 was the revving up from World War II: still austere, moving towards affluence.
One can visually see in womans-wear photos and illustrations of those years, when austerity existed, then when affluence replaced it: it was according to the length of women’s skirts.
Austere = hems short, at or above the knee.
Affluent = hems below the knee.
It was because during austerity, the morés of the time expected women to conserve the amount of fabric one used, hence, less fabric. When affluence came in about 1950, people could afford longer skirts, hence, more fabric.
I remember my mudder (age 21) talking about her early adulthood days of 1948, where if a woman wore a skirt in public that was judged by her peers too long, she was booed. Next day, the skirt was shorter. Women then only had about three skirts/dress combinations. Pants on women didn’t exist until actress Katherine Hepburn started sporting them about 1949.
I have a substantial sewing pattern collection going back to the 1920s. I can’t consult the patterns because they are still packed in moving boxes.
Males generally don‘t notice changes in hemlines. Nowadays, women wear anything that reasonably covers them.
In America, home sewing has not yet resumed. One barrier is (so I read) fabrics have gotten VERY expensive,— what’s a naked person to do?
💨🫥👚💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Jfisher wrote, “There are, no doubt, realities in my experience that aren’t shared with anybody else, and vice versa.”
My goodness, how exceptionally concisely you expressed that subtle complexity. Kudos for brevity!
Clay Dennis 229
> bikes
Motorcycles or bicycles? Engine? Electric?
💨🫥🏍️🚲💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
@Justin #197 re; curses–
I’ve said before, it may be better to bless someone who is offending you than to curse them; In the big picture, Do we agree that what we all want is for the karmic burden of everyone to be decreased? Perhaps if even a serious evildoer would stop doing evil deeds and dedicate themself to unrepaid deeds of kindness and mercy, then the universe might become a better place, even if only by a little bit.
SO… the next time any of us run into someone who seriously deserves cursing, let’s stop ourselves, think what we’d rather see in his/her life, and call down blessings on them; That they’d be given chances to do kindness without reward, show mercy on the powerless, truly help the poor and needy, and that they’d be blessed when they do these good things. No need to bring up their bad behaviour or history, just focus on the development of virtue in their lives.
There are defenses against curses, but there might not be defenses against blessings. Raspberry jam principle? You’ll become a better person yourself. Rebound curses? The blessings you ask on them will rebound on you.
This is likely a large part of the benefit of a MOE blessing walk, where you go about, silently offering your blessings to those around you. It’s a poorly understood and (alas!) seldom-practiced teaching in Christianity, “Bless those who curse you; bless, and do not curse them.”
It may be true that even a properly and rightfully done curse, that points out the certain and terrible end of an evildoer’s action, should also include a prescribed escape which would allow that person to avoid the penalty of the curse if (though unlikely) they follow the instructions. Honestly, I myself lack the skill or experience to craft something like that, so IMHO better to try the route of blessings first.
Hi John,
Fascinating.
I’ve been doing research into potential plan b in the event Europe implodes in the coming decades.
The Azores has come up as my preferred number 1 location.
Having the US keep it’s base there would strengthen the logic of the Azores.
During ww2 it was a key base for America.
JMG,
I agree with your description of how Russia could render a city utterly uninhabitable using only advanced conventional weapons. My only quibble would be the word “obliterate”. To me, that would mean Tokyo 1945 or Gaza now.
With adequate resources, such a city put out of service with advanced conventional weapons might be restored fairly quickly. Without them, it could linger as a zombie if some government could keep out scavengers, but be picked apart if it couldn’t. There is an interesting novel to be written about such a city right on the knife edge, where most of the population in the surrounding area doesn’t want the zombie city scavenged but also has no faith in the government to restore it.
Something very odd just occurred to me as another plausible consequence of the ideas found in the discussion we’ve had about your vision. It might fairly neatly explain two otherwise odd mysteries: the first being the question of why humanity spent the last 250 years or so so thoroughly trashing our (physical, social, spiritual, etc.) world (both why it seemed to make sense to people and why the gods let it happen); and the odd Messianic fantasies about the Boomers (both from themselves and the older generations).
The alien souls returning home would probably have an easier time making the transition back if they were able to see that they would never be able to make our world into something they could call home; while the native souls will have an easier time saying goodbye if we can see just how alien the alien souls are. Both of which are served by giving the alien souls free rein to try to remake our world to be like theirs. Of course this is doomed to end in failure; all it can accomplish is ruining the world for all of us, because the alien souls are still in human bodies; bodies which naturally reject the very world they are trying to create here! Even worse, the laws of our universe are likely very different, and so attempting to force our reality into their models just breaks things in its own ways.
This process can be expected to peak at about the same time the souls leave, and be finished by the alien souls during their last incarnation as human beings. If the speculation that a lot of the oddities around the Baby Boomers as a generation emerge from their collective role as the vehicle for the alien souls to finish what they need to do in order to wrap up whatever karma they have left, then it would also be their job to finish remaking the world to be as close as possible to the one they are from.
In other words, if this line of think int is accurate, there is a very real sense that the Boomers do have vast cosmic significance about bringing utopia into our world: it’s just that they were always destined to fail because their utopia quite literally cannot exist in our world, and is so inhuman that even if it could human beings would always hate it, even if the person is an alien soul.
On a different note, I had another thought: if Pluto does get ejected from the solar system, there’s a decent chance it would fly through the inner solar system first and slingshot around the sun. If so, there’s a chance it could become the most spectacular comet of history.
@JMG,
I reckon the economics change a lot when it’s “the thing great-great-grandpa made back when everyone was rich” compared to trying to build anything in the resource-constrained environment of the future, which unlike some who have commented here I do not think will be even possible, much less economic. I’m trying to get a feel for what I call the Jurassic Park problem, based on the quote “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Right now, my brain really wants to chew on the “could” and I’m not convinced of the “should”, and yes, that’s largely for economic reasons. A computer with the power of an Apple II or Commodore 64 all by itself in a village with the technology of 1800– is it even worth turning a crank to power it? I’m not sure. I suspect for some things it might be. Perhaps there’s a better bequest I could make for the same amount of effort, but I’m not sure what that might be.
@Robert,
As I said to JMG, I’m really interested in the “could” because I have a technical background, and I was looking to see if the commentariat could help with the “should”. Solid state electronics are much more vulnerable to decay than a lot of people realize, so if I build a computational device that can last 200 years, it will be one of perhaps a handful on the entire planet. You are saying “should not”, and I hear that, but don’t worry! You’ll get your wish whatever I do.
From where I stand (at the back of the bleachers where the view is occluded and no one bothers telling you anything important) it looks to me like the European catspaws are already well in over their heads, and stuck deep in the cat litter, with no sign of the cat either shrugging or walking away.
What does the cat wait for? …I idly wonder from my unconsulted section of the back bleachers.
REcommendation of personal experience
A friend trains in systema and has met vladimir vassiliev often. his approach to basic exercise that differs from conventional sports and recreation have benefitted me very well.
Maybe they will benefit someone else here too.
Breathing constantly, through the nose in only lightly, to the shoulders, and then out through the mouth.
Each outbreath, you seek to redistribute all tension all across your body, evenly.
This while you do basic exercises like push ups, but continously and in slow motion;
Meaning, you do not fit your breathing pattern to your movements, you separate it from your movements.
Instead of firmly and tensely holding on to a strict form, you can use your little muscles when your big muscles tire, and squirm and wreathe snake-likely, without adhering to strict form. Worm like, maybe.
Each breath, you strive for return to internal equilibrium.
Each time correct internal tension where you feel it.
Never use torque or explosive force in your excercise, never rush.
Guiseppe Filotto has written an interesting book about it, though my friend says, people who dont know the practice will not understand it correctly via the book.
What I personally also like to do, is during exercise to exhale all air, and keep exhaled for as long as possible.
After that, breath three times as long in the normal continuous pattern, no breath all too deep, until you are sufficiently airated again.
You can do it without an exercise lying flat also, but Filotto also writes, exercises like you get a plastic bag over your head and then strive to perform calmly without panic are good for the psyche.
I’d somewhat agree. I like to do this very much at least, always feel I want to.
Suffocation, as also James Nestor writes in his Breath book, lies deeper in our nervous system than our main fear and anxiety centre, so that people who fear nothing will still feel fear of suffocation, because it lies in a deeper layer of our system.
You can train your primal fears recipience that way.
There are further basic exercises I have got passed that deserve mentioning here:
lying on your back with your feet in the air, draw numbers with your feet, try to draw with BOTH of your feet a different number, but simultaneously;
walk, and with each step breathe one additional time more in, until you do ten in breaths at the tenth step, then back down again.
All other in and out breath combinations thinkable in step with your feet stepping are a thinkable exercise.
I don’t do that, but you can play complexely with your breath there.
A partner exercise would be, you hold on to a staff or stick with one or both hands, and your partner then moves and turns the stick in all the directions, and you want to writhe around with your body.
To me these basic exercises and paradigms have been of enourmous help, hopefully to some of you too.
I have now cycled the third week in a row on my bike commuting to work, twenty kilometers in one direction, the way back home being the more strenuous, and takes one hour twenty minutes.
I have also done many other activities during daytime, like cooking peaches and small wild plums jam, training some of the mentioned exercises, washing and cooking…
My days are long.
I am thirthy eight years old, so I must be caretaking on my joints, sitting thirty hours in an office otherwise a week.
Over tension kills, and said methods above are a potent approach to remediate your everyday tensions.
I have a karmic question;
My male neutered cat often brings me mice and birds in the house.
They are often already quite injured and then I take pains to kill them as fast and painlessly as possible, to end their suffering, but that is unpretty and really not so easy, with blunt force always, I try to badger their heads and necks so they’d faint as soon as posibble….
Yesterday he brought a still uninjured mouse. I killed this one too. I hit it with a box and saw its behind feet were paralized. Once, unfortunately it screamed. I took the lid of a waste basked and bludgeoned its head as fast and hard as I could. Soon it was dead.
I felt really horrible; but what else should I do? Scowl my cat for bringing animals?
He loves me and I love him, and he therefore brings me gifts.
He wonders why I chuck the mouse outside into the garden and runs after it.
Does anyone have any advice for me, how I can go about this as humanely as possible? Should I punish the cat for gifting?
Advice appreciated.
“I’m trying to figure why one would swim up through soup of any kind; it seems somewhat messy!”
It would seem so, wouldn’t it? On the other hand, there are people whose mental acuity is somewhat messy, to put it politely, so there’s that… 😀
To add to the confusion, it’s not “swim through”, but “swim on” – for reference, in German, a boat would sail on a lake, but a swimmer would swim in the lake (or maybe through the lake, if he is crossing it to the other side). And “daherschwimmen” has a pejorative undertone which “to swim up to” doesn’t capture, alas – the word itself doesn’t exist in German, but it’s clearly built analogously to “dahergelaufen”, which can either indicate a dubious origin, somebody uninvited or unqualified (as in “any random person”, or “any Tom, Dick, or Harry”), or just add some generally derogative tone to a noun/person.
With this neologism and the weird preposition, the whole phrase is somewhat odd and slightly off – meaning the fact somebody is swimming through soup isn’t even the weirdest part of it! 😉
“I can certainly understand your feelings about Catholicism — my late wife was raised Catholic and left that church behind for very good reasons, and remained quite reasonably bitter about what she’d witnessed until the end of her life — and if you, like her, can’t respond to Christianity at all due to what you went through, why, there are many other ways the Divine reaches out to human beings, and if you’ve found one, that’s what matters.”
Have you any favourite denominations of Christianity? England may well have become Orthodox in a reality where the Anglo-Saxons defeated William the Conqueror’s armies as the Roman pope considered Harold Godwinson an illegitimate usurper couples with the fact that the late Anglo-Saxon kings had a quasi-Caesaropapist relationship with their priesthood (plus, in our timeline many exiled Anglo-Saxon nobles fled to Constantinople and joined the elite Varangian Guard).
As someone who believes in reincarnation, I was wondering what you think about the idea of being incarnated as a creature in the far future when there are no ice sheets and the Earth has become uniformly warm, wet, and tropical (or at least subtropical) again.
JMG,
It is quite ironic that European elites and their equivalents in the US thought that by encouraging a war between Ukraine and Russia they would be weakening Russia to accomplish their aims. They also thought that by providing Ukraine with Western armaments and intelligence services they would show the world the superiority of US military technology and methods. But instead they just provided the Russians with a perfect laboratory to test “solutions’ to that military technology and intelligence. Then instead of realizing their folly the continued on trying out each and every ( nearly) tool in the box, thus making sure the Russians were familiar with and had an antidote for everything in the us bag of tricks.
They even gave the Russians plenty of practice taking out deeply buried bunkers used for CIA and Nato ” advisors” in the Ukraine. That way in a future war the Russians will just put out some kind of credible threat to a. place like the uk and all the leaders will quickly scurry to underground bunkers where the Russian.s can dispose of them all at once with non-nuclear means. Might be the end of it right there. Might up being of long term benefit to the citizens of the UK also.
Justin, it’s a serious worry, because yes, the first thing they’ll do is start drawing down the supply of young Canadian men as cannon fodder in the Ukraine war. Between that and the soaring rate of euthanasia — it’s been pointed out that more people died in Canada last year from the MAiD euthanasia program than died in the US from gun violence — I’m starting to wonder how many Canadians will be left in fifty years.
Siliconguy, Galbraith was an optimist. Me, I simply like to point out that the preventive incantation can keep the people who repeat it from losing their shirts in the next big speculative orgy.
Northwind, guys don’t notice hemlines nowadays, when it’s routine to see a woman’s bare body. In 1940, by all accounts, they paid very close attention.
Forecasting, it really does depend on how far back the US chooses to pull its defensive perimeter.
Jessica, it would indeed be an interesting novel. Have you considered writing it?
William, hmm. Here again, or maybe the Boomers were just spoiled.
Tyler, exactly. A village of 1800 people has no use for a computer. A city-state of half a million, with a complex economy, trade relations with dozens of other political entities, and related technologies such as simple shortwave radio in place, could certainly find good uses for a computer, but would it be cost-effective to build and maintain one at that scale? I simply don’t know. One issue to consider is whether a it would be more economically viable to use older, less compact technologies — say, the equivalent of the older UNIVAC era machines — if it’s just a matter of a few dozen in the world.
Scotlyn, one thing to keep in mind is that for the catspaws, this is existential. For the cat, on the other hand, it’s just one more trip to the catbox.
Curt, thanks for this. As for the karmic question, nothing will stop the cat from doing what cats do. I don’t happen to know enough about small mammals to know the most merciful way to kill them.
Milkyway, that is to say, German is as bafflingly illogical as English. Gotcha. 😉
Gunstone, yeah, I know questions like that fascinate you, but they don’t do much for me.
Clay, oh, I know. As I noted in a couple of previous posts —
https://ecosophia.net/notes-on-stormtrooper-syndrome/
https://ecosophia.net/the-three-stigmata-of-j-r-r-tolkien/
— the modern managerial class is so deeply mired in a set of self-congratulatory abstractions that it simply can’t notice the fact that the rest of the world isn’t simply a mob of extras hired from the Bolivian Army to pad out crowd scenes in a Hollywood spectacular where the darlings of the managerial class itself are the stars. It never occurred to them that the Russians might not follow the script laid out for them, and might learn from their experience in ways that inconvenience the self-proclaimed lords and masters of the world. As for those bunkers, finding out exactly what’s happened the three times the Russians have used Oreshniki against underground bunkers is a very difficult thing just now, but every detail I’ve been able to gather suggests that yeah, converting the British cabinet and high command into superheated gas wouldn’t be all that hard.
@Jessica (#261):
What I was thinking when I wrote that Russia can now “obliterate utterly any … capital city” of some country was that Russia could obliterate any functioning government of that country; I expressed myself imprecisely. I didn’t have in view the level of physical destruction found in Tokyo or Gaza
I do stand by my claim that Russia has the means to utterly obliterate any functioning government in any West European country, and also in the United States. That’s what I meant by “effective decapitation strikes” on countries.
Without even the crippled remnants of a functioning government, there would soon be enormous loss of life throughout the entire decapitated country. In densely populated areas there likely wouldn’t be enough healthy and strong living people even to bury the vast numbers of the dead.
That’s the future of which I think our governments are oblivious when they dream of destroying or dismantling present-day Russia. It is they themselves who will certainly perish in their attempt. “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” is as true now as it was millennia ago when those words were first written.
A thought, European and perhaps American intelligence services have discerned correctly or incorrectly that Russia is weaker than it looks hence the warlike talk on the part of European powers OR the discernment is possible Russian aggression so Europeans are putting up a don’t mess with me attitude. In any case I am astonished that a possible European war is in the air. But that is the past history of that area.
Clay Dennis#268
Don’t forget that ” Vae Victis ! “
Curt:
You really can’t punish a cat for doing what cats are meant to do. As for humane dispatch of wounded very small game, beheading them with the edge of a shovel works. Or a hatchet, or pruning shears. If you have a hard surface a hammer will crush the skull. On dirt that might not work.
Contemplating Galbraith’s book overnight, I had some hope that since it’s so obvious that the AI thing is a bubble and the circular finance things can’t work and the leverage (loans to pay off loans) will expedite the crash, and that it’s only been 20 years since the Great Financial Crises and certainly the money people remember that, and therefore the bubble will peter out without a full on crash.
Alas, the people in 1929 were well away of everything going wrong too. They still did it. The Panic of 1907 was well remembered there too, didn’t help. They still did it. The profits sitting on the table were too good to pass up. Then they were gone.
As Charles Prince put it just before the GFC hit, “But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing,”
Citibank barely survived the GFC, National City Bank barely survived the 1929 crash. They certainly have no institutional memory.
I’m going to console myself with a cup of hot chocolate.
Continuing with the “Ancient Astronauts” as Gods…. after Von Danken’s book. Why did the idea catch fire so rapidly to the point that everything in prehistory is ancient aliens? Gods as aliens, etc.
That puzzles me. Unless, it is a way to believe in the supernatural and be scientific as the same time.
Curt#266 Ithink that you should act like if you really apreciate these gifts. And put these in a box , in an special box. And when your cat will be in the garden throw them to the garbage can.
Someone has written before my current comment that the term “Judeo-christianism” isn’t a realistic idea, so it’s wrong, because these two religions have some differences: I agree to some extent. For example, Jewish believers are strict monotheists, like Muslims (though nobody usually speaks about Judeo-Islam), but most Christians believe in the Trinity, an idea evidently rejected by Jews and Muslims alike. After a brief online search about origins of this term, I’ve read it was written/said (according quite scholars) by a German theologist and historian, Ferdinand Christian Baur in 1831. This man was a Protestant too. After him, the term was a success within pedants everywhere, in spite of some serious criticisms against that idea.
I think Christianism inherits partly some Jewish beliefs, and partly not.
There’s no shortage of wannabe prophets and Messiahs during the long Jews history. When I was younger, I skimmed a book in a public library, where the author wrote about more than a hundred Jews who said they were the hoped Messiah for their people. And they were only the most known wannabes, who managed to be remembered in ink (they usually ended badly). And the book was only about Messiahs until present time, not “simpler” prophets…
One of those many wannabe Messiahs was a guy named Jesus of Nazaret. According Christianism, he was the true Messiah, but a lot of Prophets and religious reformers after him have thrived (and often fallen) during last two millenia, for religious authorities dismay and concern. This mystical and visionary people had walked in the edge of the knife. Some of them managed to start their own religion (like Joseph Smith for Mormons), or they’ve become saints, in the Catholic Church, because they weren’t heretical according Rome (like St. John of the Cross). Some others weren’t so lucky (like Campanella, who was a true religious utopian).
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JMG # 242:
“As for “Judeo-Christian,” there are Judaizing branches of Christianity to which it applies”
I think you’re thinking in some small cults whose members live like Jews in some of the religious customs (for example, circumcision), but they believe Jesus is the true Messiah. I read about them in a mediocre thriller novel, and I thought it was a fictional group, until I did an online search, and I found this bizarre group: Messianic Judaism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messianic_Judaism
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“everybody in the Roman upper class had that attitude until very late”
According I studied in my high school times, and then by myself, first and most Christianized people were more or less “middle-low class”, for example tradespeople and shop owners. It seems Christianism began to spread from East Mediterranean to West Mediterranean thanks to merchant ships, in which often missionaries traveled, so coastal towns had their first Christian groups before inland town. It seems last people who was Christianized, in addition of Pagan upper classes, were countryside people (Pagan=Pagus=Rustic area in Latin).
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BeardTree # 246:
“I once read the memories of someone being a ten year old boy in the very early sixties in San Francisco. He would go about that city alone as a ten year old boy. Inconceivable now.”
It isn’t the same case, but it rhymes, in a different country and time. When I was a 10 years old child, I often went alone for a walk (or in good company with my friends, all of them children) in my town, and we went every day to school and returned home, only children, without adults “escort”. It happened as a normal situation during ’80s here. My main motive for concern (and for my parents too) in those times were the few heroin addicts who from time to time, “worked” as thieves to pay their addiction. Sometimes I had nightmares about them, but in a small town everybody knows everybody, so they were more or less controlled. Another lesser motive for fear was terrorism, but there were never attacks in my town, maybe because it hadn’t any “flavoursome” target for terrorists…Times have changed, but not always for better.
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Jessica # 248:
“Spain set up a defensive line against native tribes across north New Spain more or less where the US-Mexico border is now.”
Well, I’ve read a slightly different story. Since Cortés conquered nowadays Mexico DF area to Aztecs, Spaniards kept on spreading slowly toward North and South. Their advance was slow especially toward the North. Until Mexico independence, Spain Monarchy pushed its “Nueva España” north border until they reached somewhere nowadays Texas and another current South West USA states. Effective Spanish power North of Río Grande was shown in maps and some scattered and advanced military/missionary fortresses, so I think it’s an argued topic even today, and under nationalist biases to both sides of today border, methink. Have yo noticed some American towns and cities have “strange” spanish names?
Comanches were a very tough light cavalry. Best defence/attack Spanish soldiers were horsemen named “Dragones de la Cuera” (Cuera=Cuero=Leather), because they were dressed with a light leather armor. They were usually mixed Mexicans, who didn’t used metal armors nor guns (too much weight for light cavalry), but they used swords and lances to fight against Comanches. It’s an intersting and bloody story not very known, even within a lot of nowadays Mexicans nor Spaniards.
*********************************·249:
“What Russia could and would do is to take out all the critical links in a country, both leaders and infrastructure.”
It seems a good hypothesis for a likely Russian war behavior somewhere in the future. Indeed, it’s amazing how weak and delicate could be Western telecoms facilities in war time, even without necessarily thinking in a electromagnetic pulse…Internet and “smart”phones marriage seems a giant with feet of clay, and I also think is a matter of time Russian army finds those feet…As an easy example IMHO (being myself a relative ignorant in hi tech things, but not a stupid), cellphone towers are sitting ducks for drones attacks.
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JMG # 251:
“the first move in any such Russian attack would be sending Britain’s four submarines to the bottom. The hypersonic missiles would hit Lakenham and any other similar target about a minute later. Given the immense dispropotion between Russia’s huge and battle-ready strategic arm and Britain’s small and feeble one, it would be over very quickly.”
A well-thought-out tactic: you’ve convinced me. Kremlin guys, including their head (Putin or his following heir in the “throne”), would be very fool if they didn’t try a first lambasting attack against the UK nuke power as a whole, after tracking UK submarines to localize them (and it’s not incredibly difficult to do it). By the way, even adding together British and French full nuke warheads, they’re are still quite under the full number or Russian nuclear strategic warheads-ahem-.
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Justin # 253:
“To paraphrase Wendell Berry, the west made “Negros” of the Ukrainians, and now that they’re running out of Ukrainians, they’re getting ready to make “Negros” out of their own youth (obviously, not the scions of the Eurozombies).”
By now they’re running out of male young Ukrainians, so it’s no accident some weeks ago, I’ve read in local MSM here a “trial balloon” suggested by Kiev government: they had been thinking in a female massive draft, praised by usual western Ukraine govt cheerleaders as a very “feminist” measure (cough). Reading between the lines, beyond propaganda, I think their young male cannon fodders reserves are near depleted, and maybe older men reserves will soon end in the same way, so do the math.
Kiev denied later its claim about recruiting women (beyond nowadays apparent female volunteers soldiers), but I tend to think that story has been a test for near future.
Northwind @ 256, “In America, home sewing has not yet resumed. ”
Au contraire. There is rising interesting in domestic handicrafts among Americans, women and some men. The creative reuse store where I volunteered for the first time is doing a lively business. I buy fabric there. Sewists are now using thrifted linens and new table cloths, sheets, blankets, etc. from places like Marshal’s for sewing fabric. There are online sources of 2nd. hand fabrics, yarns and other handicraft supplies. There is even growing interest among some in the various immigrant minority communities who, finally, seem to have talked themselves out of the fancy from the store means you have arrived mindset. Check out A Thrifty Notion, for just one example.
Underpinning this rising interest is the demise of Joanne’s, which I do not believe was any kind of it just happened accident. Hobby Lobby has expanded its’ fabric offerings, basic, everyday fabrics and notions, no wools or silks, but a few bolts of not bad cotton/linen blend. Michael’s is slowly building a fabric dept. as well, minimal for now. The one near me had some decent quality Kona cotton broadcloth in a good array of colors. About Hobby Lobby, I might not agree with their owner’s political views or their activism, but I do welcome their support of us Do It Yourselfers. I also note with some amusement that the same folks who claim to despise HL have no problemo ordering from Amazon. There is also a lively online trade in sewing patterns and now literally hundreds of independent designers are making livings selling their own work, usually in PDF format. Your stash does have a cash value. Check out prices on etsy.
There is rising disgust with the entire fast fashion industry, its labor practices, its’ environmental impact and the shoddiness of its’ products. Almost no one is following so called high fashion these days, so simple, easy to make items are just fine for most uses and occasions.
Jesic#261, JMG
I have read that there is a huge diifernce between the Russian and western mentality based in the differnce of the perspective of procedures for resolution of disputes. The westerner perspective is that the winner takes for him a portion of territory of the loser and that is mean Peace. The Russian perspective is that Peace requires the aniquilation of the enemy.
Statehood for Greenland is not the only option. See Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands for examples.
On a different topic, JMG is correct. Modern cities are very fragile. Take out the electricity and they are dead. Even out in the country you might be dead. My water comes from 300 ft down. The septic tank does not need power, but the water problem would force a move real quick.
An Apple II in 1800 could find use at the kingdom level, and even at the East India Company. But it would need the printer too and those required machining precision that hadn’t really been perfected yet, though maybe the watchmakers could do it.
Forecasting Intelligence 233
> how the US can meaningfully defend Israel longer term without major presence in western Europe.
Note that I was not the one to bring up the subject.
Izrulians will be “on their own” within five years.
The Murican fedral govmint has “infant-alized” Izrulians for eighty-one years; it needs to stop. We/I am tired to paying Izrulians’ bills. Why? Because Muricans have neglected paying our OWN bills, and THAT needs to stop that too. I don’t see the thousands (yes, thousands) of Izrulian billionaires helping pay Muricas’ bills; huh? right? (Muricans could use Izrulian cash.)
Those 81-year olds need to grow up. Izrulians shan’t behave sensibly until after Muricans are gone from the ModEst. What Izrulians do successfully is have tantrum attacks.
Izrulians: Get yur priorities straight, and that means NOT USING MURICAN-TAXPAYER-FUNDS ANYMORE.
Putting American interests FIRST makes me “a practical American,“a patriotic American,” “a loyal American.” I am not anti-Sumatric. We/I simply want Izrulia off our back. (Izrulia: just git🥾.)
💨🫥🥾🐌🦠💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
If I may, and since I’m not the only person to have mentioned this book this week, I’d like to return to “Caesar’s Messiah” by Joseph Atwill. It’s a highly provocative book, bound to upset some readers. I’m up to Ch. 7, “The Puzzle of the Empty Tomb.” It’s typical of Atwill’s method throughout the first half of the book: close reading and comparison of parallel passages in the Gospels and in Josephus. Here he compares the four versions of the visits to Christ’s tomb on Easter Sunday. First he notes the position of the sun in each narrative and sets up a time-line. He places John’s version earliest, because in that version it was still dark. Matthew’s version comes second because there the sun “is rising.” Mark and Luke are placed last in the sequence. Having arrived at this sequence he proceeds to compare who is present in each story, who is named, and who is un-named. In some cases, he notes, there are multiple characters with the same or similar names. So he assembles one coherent story from the four somewhat differing stories. He claims the four Gospels were written together as a sort of puzzle for close readers to solve, and refers to it as “history’s first IQ test.” A reader may or may not accept his arguments, but the proof is in the reading. The reward of passing the test is that you “get the joke.” The penalty of not passing is not up to me to repeat. (Did I remember to say that this book is sure to upset some readers?)
Slink 235
> But I can’t remember people’s names for shale.
Do like the TV character “Vera” does on the PBS/streaming TV show “Vera.” When (detective) Vera can’t remember a name, she calls them “Pet.” Apparently, “Pet” is a “Newcastle upon Tyne” thing, located in North East England.
Just call everyone Pet.
I, too, am relatively useless at remembering names,— it’s nothing personal. (As a baby, I have always face-watched, and remember faces like crazy. I watch hands. And I always am on the lookout for ballet-legs.) At 74, it’s not worth getting formally tested for autism (I think it likely).
I like the concept of calling people “Bub” or “Hun” (short for Honey). Any other pseudo-names?
Any Newcastle-ians here who can explain how “Pet” came about? Petunia?
💨🫥🤦🏼♀️💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
@TylerA (#216):
I would add:
– some kind of structural engineering package
– encryption/decryption. Encryption that is too computationally intensive to be done (or cracked) by hand will be worth its weight in gold.
Mary Bennet 236
> not about to stop doing so
Not stop doing what?
💨🫥🤦🏽♀️💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Curt,
Yes, I have a suggestion for managing the karmic consequences of your cat’s kills: keep your cat indoors.
There is now a large body of scientific literature documenting the ecological damage done by house cats allowed to hunt outside. In the USA, the estimates are over 1 billion birds killed per year. Rodents, amphibians, and reptiles make up the rest of the butcher’s bill. Domesitic cats are “subsidized predators”. That is, they are fed, sheltered, and otherwise cared for by humans in a way that wild cats are not, so their ecological footprint is oversized.
The best overview of this topic is the book Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer by Peter Marra. The reason it is called Cat Wars is that, despite overwhelming evidence, cat owners deny any responsibility for themselves or their pets.
@Justin, #253
I think a lot of us in leafland are wondering what the heck our Eurocrat PM is smoking with this talk of “associate membership” in the EU– a term which is defined precisely nowhere. Alas, though canned poles are saying our CBC-addled, conformist populace are in favour of the idea by about 2:1, the yankees can never let it happen. Look at what happened the last time the EU tried to pry a state out of a diminished superpower’s Near Abroad. The geopolitical logic is the same; the big difference is that there’s no chance whatever Special Military Operation the Pentagon schedules in response lasts four weeks, never mind four years.
I mean, I get that these people are incapable of learning from history, but the Russo-Ukrainian war is still on! They can’t even learn from the present?
> pigs🐖, swine
People who speak poorly of domesticated pigs, swine, and such, don’t know what they are talking about.
They speak negatively of pigs because they are parroting hearsay. They speak without knowing, tantamount to slandering and libeling pigs.
(I don‘t speak for wild boar🐗. They are different.)
Actually, a pig🐖is an awesome creature.
Read the book, “The Pig: A Natural History” by Richard Lutwyche. Princeton University Press, 2019,
and I am quite sure you will feel differently about pigs.
I shall let the book speak for itself.
💨🫥🐖💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Chauquin 244
> So all German origin people was called “Dutch”
No, no. You misunderstand me.
Only the “Pennsylvania ‘Dutch’,” that is, a certain set of Germans of Pennsylvania (arriving ~1700 to 1750) got the ‘Dutch’ moniker. Germans of the many different origins, times, and places, are called Germans.
Pennsylvania Deutsche/German (ethnicity) —> Pennsylvania Dutch (misnamed).
Correctly, this phenomenon is limited to the region of the Commonwealth (“state”) of Pennsylvania; the term should be Pennsylvania ”Deutsche” meaning Pennsylvania German.
In that I am not from the Pennsylvania German/Deutsche/Dutch region, I don’t know when, how, and where the Deutsche—>Dutch phrase happened. For someone more in-the-know (grew up in Pennsylvania Dutch countryside), there is probably at least one story/myth, possibly several.
Worldwide generally, Dutch people from Netherlands, and German people from Germany, are distinct groups, except in places where they lived side by side and intermarried. Both had their diasporas. Since I don‘t know either the language German or Dutch, I cannot say how similar the two languages in Europe are (being adjacent countries), or in the diaspora of each language.
💨🫥🇩🇪🇳🇱💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
@TylerA (#263):
As for what could be saved, I haven’t a clue.
I do know that primitive mechanical computers, as opposed to digital ones that use electricity, are quite possible, and can last for quite a number of decades. The Norden Bombsight, for which my father was one of the lead engineers, is an example. The functions of any single mechanical computer are quite limited, of course, when compared to modern electronic computers..
But that’s not what you’re asking about, it seems, with your reference to our host’s Star’s Reach and the information still available on it after centuries.
And as for “should,” really, that’s up to younger generations than mine.
Curt 266
Having spent a decade as a domestic cat rescuer, I have seen death a lot. Jethro and I were the takers-in-of-cats, and gave them a cushy, wonderful life to roughly fifty cats (castaways; former elder breeder moms) over several years.
> Does anyone have any advice for me, how I can go about this as humanely as possible?
——
I assume your cat brings you “gifts” during clement weather.
Wrap the animal gently in toilet paper (it biodegrades better than tissue paper).
Say a prayer. Think reverence.
Bring the loosely wrapped animal outside.
Find a remote, quiet, secluded place, out of sight of where you live, and out of sight of where humans might tread on it; an out of the way place. You choose sunny or shade. Choose a different place for each animal, perhaps twenty feet from a former spot.
Gently place the loosely wrapped animal on grass, or on other what you would consider ‘bed.’
Say a prayer. Walk away quietly.
Let nature happen naturally. It is what it is. It is not your business to do anything differently/more.
——
> Should I punish the cat for gifting?
No! A very big NO. The cat is acting out of instinct. One cannot successfully counter instinct. Any sort of punishment/chastisement/harshness cannot possibly “take,” and would permanently damage (the trust) the cat has for you. For in punishment, you betray the cat. (You might as well kiss the relationship you have with the cat goodbye.) The cat is bringing you what it considers the highest gift in the universe; acknowledge it as such (pretend the cat has brought you a bar of gold).
Once a cat (“powerless”) DIStrusts a particular person (“powerful”), trust can NOT be resurrected/reinstated, even over time. Trust is a precious, but delicate, thing, like a cobweb. Once trust is gone, it can NEVER be restored.
——
One does not punish a being who is dependent on you, nor does one punish oneself.
Be kind to your cat, and be kind to yourself.
💨🫥🐈⬛💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Democratic Party fecklessness strikes again.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/democratic-party-consultants-surround
They should have stayed with the guy who was winning. Never mind the baggage. It isn’t like the other side has none of that.
“Party brass…have managed to surround Jackson with consultants from a wide array of losing campaigns.”
If you read, or skip, to the last paragraphs, it seems that Platner’s army of volunteers have not disbanded and gone home; they forced the party to accept Jackson, and now they are working for an array of candidates for local office.
Hey JMG
Related to discovering new animals, I recently read a book called “Throwim Way Leg” by the Australian environmentalist and explorer Tim Flannery. It is an autobiographical account of his treks through Papua New Guinea in order to both study the species there, and discover new ones. He managed to find quite a few officially unknown species of tree kangaroo and rat, along with remains of extinct mammals from 40,000 years ago.
It’s an amazingly good book since Flannery is a good writer. It’s also full of interesting details and stories about the tribal people he had to work with, such as the formerly cannibalistic Minyamin.
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/throwim-way-leg-9780141979199
Curt 266
> Does anyone have any advice for me, how I can go about this as humanely as possible? Advice appreciated.
Also…
Your cat may be looking for a reward from you, and/or her favorite person. If so, it may be that (s)he will bring you LESS, or MORE, “gifts.”
Plus sign: (S)he may bring LESS gifts because she gets more attention and praise. Minus sign: (S)he may bring MORE gifts because she gets more attention and praise. Zero: (S)he may not care about attention and praise. You never know; it depends on the cat.
I am guessing that your cat is under two years old. Young ones often outgrow bringing gifts: they get bored or lazy,— forget,— or get too gentrified for that childish nonsense.
💨🫥🐈⬛💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
So, the um ‘overton window’ has widened considerably .. with little ol’ Heidi O … of potentially F)racked (D)emonic (A)**holish Commish standing, stating that Vaxxines .. of the close encounters of the mRNA kind .. are perfectly hunky dory .. for EVERYONE to submit to!!! Someone needs to push her right through that double-pained window, right down to groundup level..
What a simp!
https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2026-09-24/financing-of-historic-ai-buildout-raises-systemic-risks-in-us-researcher-says
“‘MEANINGFUL DOWNSIDE RISK'”
“This is freaking complicated,” he said in a briefing with reporters of the arrangements emerging between AI firms, major tech hyperscalers, banks, private credit lenders, real estate firms, and a host of other players involved in building what he conservatively estimated at 183 gigawatts worth of new data-center capacity over the next seven years, compared with about 57 gigawatts currently installed.”
“the AI industry will need to be earning about $3.7 trillion in annual revenue by 2032 to achieve the expected return on the investment, and “given current estimates of annual combined revenues of OpenAI and Anthropic of around $100 billion, revenues would need to grow at roughly 80% per year.””
Yeah I think MEANINGFUL DOWNSIDE RISK should be in all capitals too. Adding an Aah-ooga horn might be appropriate too.
I’ve got to bottle my beer tonight so I’ll have to start on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers tomorrow.
On the topic of taboos and social class, I’ve noticed that the two main political extremes in the US, the woke left and the racialist right, both to their level best to avoid talking about social class. They also both vociferously
attack the American melting pot ideal and and any sort of civic nationalism that embraces the idea. Both ideologies also tend to define ethnicity in purely Old World terms. And what everyone seems to forget is that today’s right-wing racialism is largely just American Progressivism from about a little more than a century ago. They were obsessed with eugenics and a rather zoological way of looking at human nature and the human condition.
Scotland @ 264 .. what does the cat wait for? Why .. for the the Dogs of War to roll All over that stinky Eurotard litter, scattering such feces across the floor of the subcontinent.
On Cats and Mice.
I work very hard to keep the cat from bringing in its hunts. I check before I let her in. I will often go out another door, keeping the house closed, and go up to her and thank her for her good hunt and offering it to me, but I dont need it and she should eat it. Then I go to the door away from the cat and leave her to it. Sometimes she will leave a dead one in front of the door. Usually she will just finish killing and eat whatever it might be. Yesterday she came to the sliding door with a chipmunk in her mouth. I went out the front door, and thanked and praised her, then I went in and ignored her. She went off with it and ate it.
Basically, I try not to take on the issue of her hunting. I think you are miss-training your cat, he might think you like killing rodents, as he does. He brings them to you and you do kill them.
As for the uninjured live mouse. Why did you kill it ? why not just put the open box on top, slide under something thin, take it outside and release it ? I have certainly done this with lizards my cat has snuck in, and if you can hit the mouse, you could have gotten it to take back outside. Not being a cat, if I want to kill a mouse in the house, I use a large enough trap to do the deed fast without suffering, I bait with peanut butter usually and put the trap back where the cat cant get to it. Usually my cat will take care of this issue, but I have had one hide out effectively from her in the kitchen. Snap, done. Then I release the poor dead mouse from the trap out where a bird or coyote will be sure to find it. Birds are good at this. I used to be able to give something like that to my dog, but I havent had a dog in years. Dogs can be good at eating already dead mice or gophers that your cat wont touch.
Only once did I have to kill a rodent myself, it was such a large rat, one of the local native ones, and the rat trap did not kill it. I got it outto an open area, used a piece of board and bucket, and then I shot it with a 22. This was hard on me to have to do so, so I get why it would be hard on you. But I used a way that would kill it immediatelly, no guessing or prolonged method.
I am a vegetarian, and this is why, I find killing animals to be very very hard. I think this is the only one. So I figure if it is so distasteful for me, I dont just eat it when it is done by our current factory system, out of site out of mind. SO I am not responsible for that suffering. I respect hunters and fishermen and other small scale ways that do not subject the animals to the fear and pain of the corporate slaughterhouse system. I have noticed though that I am less squeamish about all this than some people who eat meat. I have cleaned and skinned rabbits that a friend killed on my property ( they were eating my garden) froze them and gave them to my mom as she likes them. I have helped host a meetup group on humane processing of spent laying hens, it was quick and no fear or suffering. I have processed them after they are dead, and canned the meat and broth. And at the moment, I give it away. I cant bear to kill the little things though, so yes, I know, it is hard.
It is good to end suffering. It is also good to retrain your cat as much as you are able to not make his hunts your problem.
Northwind @ 285, world population will continue to decline until young folks can be assured of a good future for themselves and children. Consequently, there should continue to be no shortage of stuff, including things that are useful.
Someone looking for a side gig right now might consider refurbishing and reselling.
.
“Nephite, no, the Abramelin operation has been massively overbilled.”
I suspected this. My natural instinct is to be suspicious whenever anyone says “[Insert ritual or working here] is the grand secret key of all magic.”
“most of the others take it more slowly and get better and more lasting results.”
Yes, I think making lasting change is the most important things. I already am trying to make my practice just a part of daily life and take it a day at a time.
“Oh, and Slithy is quite correct — Crowley’s instructions are best avoided even if you have to run the other way in tight shoes.”
Thanks. Imitating Crowley is definitely the last thing I would want to do…
@samurai_47
Locking cats up is not a good karmic deed as they suffer. How often have I heard of people who lock cats up indoors about their weird and neurotic behaviour.
Just like many of our modern children.
I did not initially want a cat at all, and have been sceptical of keeping cats in cities and urban environments since a long time. It’s a backstory of its own how somebody waved the half years old cat in front of me saying “look this little cat has no home, take it or it has no home!” The cat crapped in my house when I tried to lock it up because everyone said I could not let it out on its own. The area where I live is full of cats roaming free, make of that what you will.
@Northwind Grandma @Siliconguy @Anselmo
Thank you for your kind advice! I will try to be as careful as possible with the rodents and birds I must kill.
I have of course not punished my cat, I have rarely ever punished him for anything, as he is very clever and observant of what I like and what not.
For some karmic reason it seems I had to have this cat.
Anselmo #279 “The Russian perspective is that Peace requires the aniquilation of the enemy.”
If this were true, Germany would have ceased to exist in 1945 and most likely Finland as well. The Japanese in southern Sakhalin would have been annihilated rather than being sent back to Japan.
@Northwind
“In America, home sewing has not yet resumed. One barrier is (so I read) fabrics have gotten VERY expensive,— what’s a naked person to do?”
Not only has fabric become very expensive, it has also become thin and flimsy. There is simply no comparison of the quality of the fabrics I began sewing with 50 years ago to the ones available now at Fabricland (in Canada). The former, I could expect the work I put in to provide me with a piece of clothing that would last years. The latter, it’s not worth the time I put in to sew.
My solution is to go browse the extra large and ++ sections of thrift stores (I am very slim) in both the women’s and men’s clothing, as well as the fabric and curtain sections. You’d be surprised what you can find. I look for wool, leather, and natural fibers in heavier fabrics (the men’s section is better than the women’s section for this), in colours I like, and choose barely worn items. I then take them apart and use the fabric to make new items that have the quality to last with minimal cost.
-Myriam
I have no real desire to go back to Texas. My in-laws lived in Fort Worth for a spell and we visited there. The thing that struck me the most about the area was the fact that I don’t remember seeing one sidewalk at all. & even though I didn’t love the area, there were a few nice things: some of the best Mexican food I ever ate, for one. I am sorry to hear your visits to the state induced bronchitic reactions. I might take that as an omen myself.
I am still happy to write about the good things that have come from the area.
Robert Mathiesen @203: Totally OT, but my grandfather was a Lederman; his father was born in Bern. I can’t imagine we’re related, but what a fun coincidence!
Hi John Michael,
Man, that’s a hard way to learn. Perhaps this turn of events proves that nature forces us humans to learn the very things which can’t be avoided?
Out of curiosity, are you hearing talk of concerns as to increasing ‘productivity’ in your part of the world? Generally I interpret that economic lust as: More for less! My gut feeling suggests that any decline in the availability of ‘stuff’, will put a halt to dreams of productivity gains. Dunno.
How is the Technonomicon coming along?
Cheers
Chris
@Anselmo (#279):
That doesn’t sound like any Russian I ever talked with, nor does it agree with the course of Russian history over the last several centuries.
Russians are justifiably proud of their capacity to suffer enormous losses — even millions upon millions of people — and keep on resisting rather than surrender to a foe. War, for them, is not a matter of economic calculations of profit and loss, as it seems to be in the West these days.
I suspect what you’ve read is a bit of Western self-justification, a portrayal of the virtuous West vs. evil Russia.
@Atmospheric River
Thanks for that also. Yes I should try to get it outside alive if uninjured.
It was a horrible occasion, I hate the fact it had to suffer for ~1 min because I crushed its behind before I could properly knock it unconscious and then dead.
I will next time find a way to be friendly to my cat and signal that this activity is cool outsides – the only problem being, he can always reenter the house and in the past has done so, bringing the mouse or bird in again.
Like a figurative boomerang.
If it is already injured – hard to ignore because he’ll put it everywhere in my apartment to reinitiate a new hunt and such things.
I hope everybody understands I have no cynical aims here, but rather an overwhelming situation now and then.
And as I said, I did not intend to take a cat in, I let my self be overwhelmed in a very weak moment by a person herself very delusional.
Now he lives here with me and my old landlord who also feeds him and cares for him.
@ Beardtree #272
I should tell you that “a possible European war is in the air” is how Europe has almost always worked.
However, in the current context, the question is WHICH possible war.
If you consider two possible scenarios which might arise from current circumstances:
1) a war between a united European alliance and Russia
2) an internecine war which splinters and destroys the prospect of any solid alliance among Europeans
I’d give you odds of 100/1 for the likelihood of the first, and something like 1/100 on for the second – which is almost a dead cert.
One always has to account for the surprises that can turn up from time to time, but the prospect of European powers remaining long enough in a harmonious and coherent alliance strong enough to take on a serious rival like Russia would be extremely… surprising.
@TylerA #216, etc.
When reading your original list, I’d disagree with almost every item but the telecommunications one. The impression I got was that you are compiling your list by going backwards from what we have today and what can be preserved. While this dynamic may hold for a few decades well into the 21st century, I do not think that’s compatible with the resilent-by-design scenario described in the StarsReach novel. In particular, I believe the personal PC was an anomally of our times that is already in the process of going away. So, no word processors and/or spreadsheets for ya’ peasants, computers are important devices for the exclusive use of important (as in key Government Agents) people.
So, instead of a Comodore 64 in every Townhall, I’d be thinking along the lines of am IBM S/390 on every Nation’s Capital and an IBM AS400 on each of its Embassies. The killer application for that case would be (as Vlad Tepes has already suggested) cryptography, but once you have the capability I’d expect some of it would be directed towards logistic support of the military. The work of inteligence can be done on paper, but the capacity to make fast decisions (as in hours/days, not seconds) during a military campaign cannot be overstated. Meanwhile, in the Internal Politics front, the killer app is tax collection. For this reason I expect Relational Databases will endure for longer than most other current software packages, though at greatly limited capacities.
BeardTree # 246:
“I once read the memories of someone being a ten year old boy in the very early sixties in San Francisco. He would go about that city alone as a ten year old boy. Inconceivable now.”
When I was 9, 10, 11 years old (later grade school years), my younger sister and myself took ourselves to our private English speaking school, located on the far side of Costa Rica’s capital, San Jose, on three busses there and three busses back, every school day. Neither we, nor our parents, thought anything of it. This would have been around 1969, 70, 71…
Even earlier, we had had full licence to roam around our neighbourhood, including climbing a long way up our local mountain, which we generally did in largish groups of children our own age – mostly girls, with an occasional boy. Again, neither we nor our parents thought anything of it. The time they would start to worry would be if we failed to turn up at suppertime (around 5.30 pm in our house).
I have to say that whatever makes these freedoms for children to do things, and be places, without adult supervision “incconceivable now” strikes me as one of the largest tragedies of the modern world.
It looks like most of the countries that are directly involved in the Iran war have put their own survival as nations in the balance.
In my humble opinion, Iranian leaders won’t feel safe until at least one of the three following conditions are met:
1. The USA closes all its bases and withdraws all its troops from the Middle East.
2. Israel is destroyed, either completely or at least is rendered incapable of waging war against its neighbors.
3. Iran builds nuclear weapons.
That’s why I don’t expect the war to stop anytime soon, unless Iran is definitively vanquished, which seems unlikely, given the size of the country, its population (about 94 million), its resources, its high technology weapons and its powerful allies (Russia and China).
Israel won’t be safe unless it subdues all the Middle East. A near impossible task, given the military and political decline of the USA.
Saudi Arabia’s economy depends on oil exports. Destroy the oil rigs, pipelines, etc, and the country collapses. Which is precisely what is going on.
The Gulf States import 80% to 90% of their food, and they get 90% of their water from desalination plants. If the war goes on, and if their power plants are destroyed, which means no desalination anymore, they are toast.
Europe’s survival as a prosperous and democratic union is also endangered by the war in the Middle East. Here in Europe we don’t know what we’ll do this Winter, because of shortages of natural gas, petroleum, fertilizers, and many other things. Here in France, 17% of gas stations already lack at least one type of fuel, and it will certainly be worse in the coming weeks and months. President Macron said publicly last week that he will send ordnance and troops to Saudi Arabia, which will make France a co-belligerent in the conflict. It doesn’t look very constitutional to me, by the way.
Mary Bennet 278
> Au contraire. … Sewists are now using thrifted linens and new table cloths, sheets, blankets, etc. from places like Marshal’s for sewing fabric.
Thank you for the best news I have had in a long time; I am delighted. I hadn’t imagined that “scrounged fabrics” would be acceptable.
💨🫥👕💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
Chuaquin #128:
> I recomend you to visit different ideologies sites, not only your favorite webs to confirm your biases.
And I recommend the same thing to you. I’m afraid I can’t find any good English sources, so I’ve taken the liberty of running German ones through machine translation. I verified, of course, that the translations are correct.
They invited a rapper to a campaign event who sang things like “Yalla Yalla Intifada”¹. As in, calling not just for violence against the military of Israel, but also the civilian population. Oh, sure, they later distanced themselves from him when it became clear this was not well received, but they knew who the guy was when they invited him and didn’t stop him in the moment.
Then, as I mentioned, they seem to be connected to a German branch of Hamas.² Or at least one “activist” of a German Hamas sub-group visited their post-election party and later published a letter congratulating them for their victory and stating that his organisation supporting the party was a very deliberate decision he came to after meeting with them. Hamas, may I remind you, explicitly wants to kill Jews. This doesn’t seem to be one-sided because last year, the party organised an event together with that German Hamas group.³
One of their candidates said “[t]oday is an election intifada” about last week’s election⁴. Again, there are many words one can use instead of intifada if one wants to avoid the association with murdering Jews.
We have seen an increase in attacks against Jews since the October 7 massacre (as in, ranging from insults to actual physical attacks), yet the most moderate figure of the Berlin Linke, their lead candidate, could not even bring herself to specifically condemn that⁵. No, instead she said that Muslim women who wear headscarves need to be afraid too. That’s a frankly ridiculous comparison. Turks and Arabs make 10% of the Berlin population. They are not in danger of being assaulted for wearing a headscarf—unlike, say, Jews who wear jewelry with the star of David on it⁶.
> I’m afraid you’ve written a wishful thinking. If you’ve read me before this comment, I think a regional-state govt with a different party ruling it than Central-Federal govt can only lead to a political blockage in Germany; in the unlikely case AfD tries to fulfill its promises (it’s the same case as Die Linke, so you can see I don’t have any fondness for Commies, by the way).
You will note that I wrote “attempting to do what they’ve promised to do”, not that they’ll actually be able to. So far at least, I have no reason to believe they’re stupid enough to not even do that. Their voters fled to the AfD precisely because the other parties keep pulling that stunt and would gut them for it in the next election.
> It could be very weasy for leftist to blame AfD for being anti-muslim migrants, due to their usual speech (well, let’s open a can of worms). Of course, for AfD muslims are always suspects for being Antisemitic and Islamists, methink…Let’s open a can of worms.
Ah, but is the AfD wrong with that suspicion? After all, 11.5% of German Muslims under 40 are Islamists and a further 33.6% are heading that way.⁷ The same study also says that 27.2% of Muslims are antisemitic.
And yes, the AfD is opposed to migration and especially migration of Muslims, that’s not exactly a secret. Contrary to what certain media like to pretend, they don’t want them dead, but they do generally want them returned to their own countries, at the very minimum those who haven’t integrated. For me personally, the difference is that one position is “we don’t want our country to be flooded with a different people who hate us” and the other is “Jews need to die.”
—David P.
[1]
https://translate.kagi.com/www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/yalla-yalla-intifada-offener-judenhass-im-wahlkampf-der-neukollner-linken–grune-zweifeln-an-regierungsfahigkeit-15997499.html
[2] https://translate.kagi.com/apollo-news.net/keine-spontane-entscheidung-die-linke-zu-untersttzen-statement-von-ibrahim-ibrahim-wirft-neue-fragen-auf
[3] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/verharmlosung-von-gewaltaufrufen-mit-der-linken-zieht-der-antisemitismus-ins-rote-rathaus-16004517.html
[4] https://translate.kagi.com/nius.de/analyse/gaza-extremismus-berliner-linke-hamas-pflp-wahlintifada
[5] https://translate.kagi.com/apollo-news.net/auch-muslimische-frauen-die-kopftuch-tragen-haben-aengste-elif-eralp-zieht-vergleich-zu-juedischen-berlinern
[6] https://translate.kagi.com/apollo-news.net/weil-sie-eine-halskette-mit-davidstern-trug-unbekannte-traktieren-frau-mit-zerbrochener-glasflasche
[7] https://translate.kagi.com/www.berliner-zeitung.de/article/studie-fast-die-haelfte-der-jungen-muslime-in-deutschland-zeigt-islamismusaffine-einstellungen-10024373
JMG
I want to mention, that I was inspired by the Techninomicon post and taken up archival bookbinding as a hobby with my first project being a copy of the Corpus Hermeticum. With how fragile pulp paper and commercial glue is, (and now tech bros destroying books for AI learning) it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of literature gets lost in a generation or two.
Once I’m done with my for fun projects I’ll start looking into more in danger books.
I just remembered a blog post by Brandon Watson on the Siris blog about Neoplatonism:
https://branemrys.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-philosophical-topic-that-most.html
The title is “The Philosophical Topic that Most Disorients Young People.” And his thesis is that if you really wanted to challenge your students’ beliefs and presumptions, Neoplatonism is most effective way to do it. As he says:
“If you just look very briefly and vaguely [at] Neoplatonism, students just think it’s weird. But start getting into details, when they start to realize that the weirdness is heavily argued, at great length, by arguments to which they often have no ready answer at all, and things change. I have had — and I mean this quite literally — students freak out, try to shout me down, or storm out.”
He says about it:
“It’s alien to almost all the obvious features on which modern man congratulates himself for being reasonable about — and it attacks these very features as not merely unreasonable but irrational, with arguments that modern people usually have never even thought of, and so have no defenses against. They can wave their empiricism, or whatever, at it, and it will look at them sardonically and proceed to eat their arguments.”
Hi JMG,
My father has been talking more about his death arrangements as he gets older, and the question about cremation vs burial has come up. He’s not too big on being buried and having a grave and all that, and has been leaning more towards cremation. From what I can gather with light research, many occult traditions and non-Western beliefs (though not all) argue more for cremation. What is your perspective? I know when you wrote about Sarah’s passing, you mentioned three days for the etheric body to fully separate from the material body. So when burial or cremation happens 3+ days out, is there really no more trace of the soul with that body? Does burying a body and then visiting the gravesite really enable the living to truly honor and have some ongoing spiritual connection with our dead friends and family for a certain number of years as that soul moves on and eventually reincarnates? Is it selfish, in that it does it interfere with that soul’s continued journey? Or is it really just something that is more to give those of us still living symbolic comfort? And what about keeping an urn of ashes, in the case of cremation, versus scattering them into nature?
It’s also interesting to note we are Reform-affiliated Jews, and Jewish tradition (as I think with the other Abrahamic faiths of Christianity and Islam) is very anti-cremation, believing that we should be buried so that when the Messiah comes, the remains of our bodies in the ground will be resurrected (and we are supposed to bury the body within 24 hours too–so that must completely interfere with the three days needed for the etheric body to separate!). As I noted, we are not Orthodox, and so we don’t believe in the whole Messianic eschatological idea or the 24 hour burial requirement. But still, I do often wonder about how these traditional beliefs factor in, and I know there are some other cultures and religions throughout history that have favored burial over cremation.
Sorry for the jumbled nature of my musings and questions! If you covered this more in a previous post, I would be happy to go and read up on that if you tell me which one.
Thanks for pointing us towards your friend at astrologicalmagic.com the other day; that’s an interesting site, well organized for self-paced learning. Many thanks.
And hey, if yall in the Ohio River Valley, check out http://heritagefoodfest.org
I would LOVE to see any of you in person in November, and it’s a great group, stellar herbalists and homesteaders. Keynote Andrew Bentley https://kentuckyherbalist.com/
Also, I was at band competition Saturday night, 20-something behind me sitting with 40-something woman; kid says, “I can’t afford a house”; mother says “Oh I think the prices are about to come down.”; I turn around and say “I agree, with a vengeance.” Kid says “that kind of scares me”; me and the mom say “don’t be scared; no sense in that, but yeah, it’s going to be wild” so that’s just data point from the stands at the Ryle Memorial Festival of the Bands….
JMG,
I need help in deciphering the intended message from a bumper sticker that I saw today.
” Sorry I missed Church but I was busy practicing Witchcraft and Becoming a Lesbian.”
This was a commercially printed bumper sticker, not a one off. Is the message just shock to Normies? Or is the person expressing their superiority at being part of some cutting edge social movement? Or is it a poke in the eye to traditional church going folk. Or is it in ” In-group” identifier.
Not sure what to make of it myself
Happy Autumnal Equinox!
Feel free to pass or demure on this one: if you were a Christian, with occult/esoteric interests, what would you be looking at as things to mitigate the transition to Aquarius? I will be meditating on this as well. I’ve paid attention to the Aries-Pisces-Aquarius discussion, and have some ideas of my own. But I’m particularly interested in yours/anyone else’s perspective who is NOT inside the Faith. All advice will be taken on advisement, of course – there are some things that only bend so far. Nevertheless, I thought I would ask!
Curt # 266:
I’m afraid cats like another felines, are strict predators, so they’ve got a natural instinct for killing another little animals. I mean, bad news for”cats lovers” who humanize them, because cats are always cats, so do the math. So I don’t have any practical suggestion for you and your cat. Maybe I’d suggest you don’t let your cat goes outdoors, but I also think that measure could make it suffer…
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JMG # 270:
“the first thing they’ll do is start drawing down the supply of young Canadian men as cannon fodder in the Ukraine war.”
That´s possible only if/when Canadians are going to be passive and fooled enough by current Russophobe propaganda (like EU-NATO have been doing here in Europe), to let their young men to be slaughtered in a far country. Well, this deceptive narrative has worked for some European countries masses (better I won’t say which ones, for secondhand embarrassment), but it hasn’t worked yet for another ones, beyond usual middle-high and higher class zombies. I don’t know how zombified are average Canucks, so I don’t know how they’d react to this redoubling in current propaganda about the Ukraine war in the short term.
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Neptune…# 275:
I think in a Faustian culture were angels and gods weren’t no longer allowed to fly across the sky (because they “doesn’t exist” anymore in modern times, or they should’nt exist), they needed to be disguised as aliens. Von Daniken didn’t make up anything now: he only took benefit for a new-old belief which came from the ’50s (UFOs and its religion surrogate), so he picked up speed to this tendency. Aliens are gods, and gods are aliens…(ironically).
By the way, it’s said usually in non Western countries (like Muslim areas) there aren’t near any UFO sightings nor their usual associated cults, maybe because strange phenomena in sky are understood in a old school religious context…
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Samurai # 286:
“Yes, I have a suggestion for managing the karmic consequences of your cat’s kills: keep your cat indoors.”
And I have another alternative suggestion: put a necklace with a jingle bell in cats necks, so little animals can hear their previously silent predator. So cats will enjoy having a walk outdoors and you avoid that “small” ecological disaster.
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Northwind G # 289:
OK, now I understand really well the “difference” between “Duthc” and “just plain” German people migrated to America. Thanks…
“Since I don‘t know either the language German or Dutch, I cannot say how similar the two languages in Europe are (being adjacent countries)”
I don’t speak German nor Dutch, but I’ve read Ana Frank Diary and a serious biografy about her, and it’s interesting she was a native German speaker and had to move with the rest of her family to the Netherlands to try escaping from Nazi prosecution (you know evidently it was an useless idea in the long term). I read Anna had to learn fastly Dutch in her new country, but it wasn’t easy for her. Keeping in mind Anna wasn’t a stupid girl (reading how she wrote her famous Diary), it seems there may be some hard differences between German and Dutch, thought that two languages are within their shared family: Germanic languages. Some words can be simillar, like in German and English, but people who speak English as their mother tongue need to learn German, and vice versa. So I guess German-speaking and Dutch-speakers can’t understand each others at 100%. I bet it’s a likely situation like Spanish-speakers and Portuguese-speakers, those two language come from Ancient Rome Latin, so they resemble in some words, but personally I can’t understand very well a Portuguese when it speaks, especially if he/she’s talking fast…
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Mithridates # 297:
“the woke left and the racialist right, both to their level best to avoid talking about social class.”
With the usual local “flavor and smell”, this taboo avoiding the disturbing social class topic arrived here since more than a decade ago. Nothing strange, because it’s another part of current cultural wars pack, imported directly from the USA current tension and bipolar partisanship, to our national-made tension, so you can guess how dramatic can be the “menthal diarrhea” within partisans in the two political extremes here (our “political hooligans” are usually blending -badly- local hot politics topics with US origin cultural wars: what could be wrong in the short or medium term?).
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Curt 266.
My cat Persephone used to bring me gifts too. Many of my cats have brought me gifts over the years, as it happens. One time another of the cats let a mouse go in my room. Persephone and I hunted it together. When I caught it, using a container with a cover on it, Persephone saw that I was a competent hunter and she no longer needed to bring me food. She stopped bringing me the critters after that.
I later read that cats often bring you prey because they consider you an incompetent kitten in need of food. It seemed to be true in this case.
Perhaps your cat is merely trying to keep you fed.
Annette Simard
@Curt #266 @JMG, regarding the most merciful way to euthanize small mammals. I get mice in my apartment, I set up spring traps to catch them. Nothing fancy, just the old-fashioned Victor wooden devices. As an animal lover, I hate doing this, but vermin in your living quarters are like this are like weeds in the garden: they’re just organisms that are growing where they don’t belong and causing problems.
Spring traps may sound horrible, but they’re rather like guillotines for humans – if it’s done right, it’s a quick and relatively painless death. Sometimes, though, the critter gets caught by a limb or across the body, which isn’t pleasant at all. What I do in that case is to drop it into a bucket of water and let it drown. (You have to hold it down with a stick or something, since they’re able swimmers!) With their small lungs, they suffocate right away, and it seems more humane than any other ways to dispatch them.
As for live catch-and-release traps, well, they *sound* better, but since I live in an apartment on a high floor of a large apartment building, and there’s no practical way to do the “release” bit without making them someone else’s problem.
While the EU is acting all gung-ho in the current Russia-Ukraine war, to me it seems fairly obvious that the war will only stop if/when the US stops with its relatively successful efforts of turning Ukraine from a fractious Russia’s little cousin into a hostile Nato outpost. Trump did make some soothing noises and had warm words for Putin, but there has been no genuine change of course, and Russians aren’t stupid. So despite the theatrics, this is America’s war, and I believe the real goal is preventing any rapprochement between Russia and Europe, which would potentially lead to rejuvenation of both and create a hell of a competitor. It is also noteworthy how Americans slap down any popular European opposition party who allow that there might be some value in talking with the Russians, Peter Thiel’s recent chastising of Germany’s AfD being a case in point. Still, the Americans might not have the interest or the resources to keep the war going for much longer…
On the subject of decline, I have recently heard about distant relatives in Germany who paid crazy money to have some house renovations done which should have been finished by May and yet there is still no end in sight. It appears there is just no competent workforce available anymore. My conclusion is that in the short term skillful professionals are going to do very well financially, but the PMCs might not be able to afford their services quite soon. In the longer term, there is just no way to keep the society running with the current level of complexity if the underlying infrastructure cannot be maintained (it can’t), so the decay is gathering pace. Given that this is becoming increasingly obvious, I do hope people in the positions of power are taking notice and doing their best to help prevent an outright collapse. Apparently the Polish foreign minister has recently shared that he is stocking rice and home-made marmalade for the cases of emergency, and this might actually be a good sign.
Mr Greer, thank you for your comments on Crowley and the advice on how to approach his works, from experience I am aware of how important it is to find a suitable starting point with potentially challenging authors . And since the topic of karma has been broached in the comments (it seems it always is), a related question – in the schools of thought that you follow, is the amount of karma in the universe constant? Or does it get reduced over time, and if it does, what might be the end point? Many thanks!
@Clay Dennis #320
In the words of Bilbo Baggins, “Why, all of them at once!”
One of the boring thing about American politics, especially at the moment, is that nobody can think of becoming anything more interesting than the other side’s caricature of them. So for a couple decades progressives have done their level best to play out one of Rush Limbaugh dystopian fever dreams, and for about the same time period, the online right have been getting a rise out of liberals by pretending to be the villains of their morality plays.
Oh @Clay Dennis #320
I should also add that that particular slogan is a direct response to something Pat Robertson once said, which I think supports my point. I would say it’s satirical but it’s almost certainly quite serious, while also being a form of political LARPing all the same. (See my comment to Dzanni above about how everything in American politics is both very real and completely fake, because it’s almost all a proxy for class, which almost no one will talk about honestly.)
If you want an update on how decline is going, I almost fell out of my chair this morning when our government funded news source lets economists drop lines line this.
“But globalisation has run its course. What once was an economic boon has become a political weight on developed world governments, with many now trying to unpick those supply chains and bring industry back home.”
The illusion of progress is shattering bit by bit and many are waking up to this.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-29/us-dollar-trust-weakening-due-to-donald-trump-iran-war/107204644
As an aside, I do like the economists at the ABC, yeah they fall into the tracks as most economists, they are not aware of the ecologic disconnect of economics, but they are willing to look at things a bit more straight on that many and have a good sense of humor about it. You can do a lot worse than them.
PS to the discussion of German expletives: Next week is provincial election in Québec, and I find French is not too different from German in its choice of offensive terms. Today, I saw a sticker on a lantern post saying “Même m*rde. Différent.e.s trous de cul”, accompanied by drawings of the five leading candidates for provincial PM sitting in toilets and labeled with very inventive and creative détournements of the leaders’ and their parties’ names. Signed “Abolissons le parlement” with an A in a circle recalling the one used by autonomous anarchists.
I can’t concur with that proposition, but I was duly impressed by the wit displayed.
John, I wrote down the steps in cycling, as I understand it:
* Write down at least 20 things that you want.
* Imagine each item as if you already have it.
* Develop each picture using your senses, spending 5–15 minutes on each image. Wallow in them.
* Give each image a cue word. Or a picture.
* Memorize the sequence.
* Begin cycling through the images. Start around one image per second, then increase to two per second.
* Gradually accelerate. The images and emotional attachment will recede as speed increases.
* Use a gimmick. For example, imagine a film strip. Each cell will contain the whole list. Rapidly cycle through the whole strip.
* Practice until cycling becomes automatic.
* Adjust the list periodically. Replace fulfilled items and remove things you no longer want.
He says that it helps with energy healing. But he doesn’t how it works. He has also conducted a number of experiments on healing mice.
Kevin.
On children walking alone:
When I was 5 I decided to take myself to school one day, my mom must have been out of commission in some way ( a different story). 5 year olds walking to school was usual then of course, but we had moved and so had to take a bus to get there now, my mother didnt have a car. So I walked to the bus stop, city bus not a school bus, and got on, and being only 5 or under the height line, I forget the criteria, I was free. The bus driver let me on, I told him I was going to xxx elementary, and he let me off at the stop closest to the school. He did not call CPS, the police or deny my boarding, he was helpful. I was actually very close to the school, a block, but was not familiar with getting there from that direction. So I missed the turn, went another block and then recognized that I was headed in the direction away from school towards my former babysitters, so I decided to walk there. Once there of course I would be fine as I knew very well how to get from her house to school, I had done it many times. Such is the logic of kindergarteners. It did not occur to me to turn around once I recognized the block. I was used to walking from the sitters to the school, or from the school to the sitters.
( what happened then was right when I rounded the corner and could see her house, I also saw her walking towards me with a couple pre-schoolers in tow. She had left the house to find me, alerted by the school I suppose, by then I had “found” myself in any case, since I could see her house, so I was turned around and sent to school. Note that she also did not drive or have a car )
As for cats thinking we need to be fed.
Sometimes, yes, my cat can think that. She is most likely to try and feed me when I put her on a diet. I noticed this the first time I did so, I guess she figured if her food bowl was 3/4 full, times must be tough, and she should feed me. WHen that is the case, the critter is dead.
If she thinks it would be fun to have something to chase in the house, she is not as hungry.
I totally disagree that a cat outside is an ecological disaster. Most places in the world have small hunting felines, or feline analogues. Excepting islands like Hawaii and a few other spots.
I would also not put a collar on a cat as they can get caught up by it. They climb and go into small spaces more than dogs and collars get caught on things.
So, we have scared away the predators and instead have substituted our tame little predators. I am serious, look it up, all the various small wildcats.
In my area, the small wildcat is closer related to Racoons, but is called a ringtailed cat, it is more reclusive than the bobcats. About the size of a house cat. There is nothing my cat hunts that a ringtail wouldnt hunt, excepting it doesnt want to come so close to houses usually. My cat does not leave uneaten animals around, she eats them. If she brings me one, I politely decline it and she eats it. She is in the niche of the ringtail, more or less. Something between a ringtail and bobcat. She is also not scaring the bobcats or ringtails away or eating their food. She is actually helping the balance by eating some of the prey that is too abundant.
And, if you live where you think the prey is not abundant, I doubt it, I see too many rodent bait traps ALL OVER the city by me ( plastic black boxes with poison bait in them for rats and mice), this screams lack of rodent predators. The main reason you have less birds and non-rodent interesting mammals is lack of habitat. Certain animals are habituated to humans, like rats, mice, pigeons, coyotes, they can go in and live off our trash and dont mind our noise and such. Others do not want to be in our housing tracts and it is not the cats.
@ Tyler & JMG RE ” “One issue to consider is whether a it would be more economically viable to use older, less compact technologies — say, the equivalent of the older UNIVAC era machines — if it’s just a matter of a few dozen in the world.”
It is now considered that almost any computer chip made before about 1990 could have a active life span of centuries, so long as you can keep corrosion off the contacts.
We could end up in a world running old 6502’s, Motorola 68K’s and 286 processors centuries after anyone who knows how the make them has passed. It would be like the Roman aqueducts but running something like Excel instead. They would only take a few watts to power unlike the old Univac/PDP machines that operate in the Kilowatt range.
Not saying we wouldn’t go back to those, as they can be made by hand, but that would come a lot later.
I will say this, I live as a computer scrapman, haven’t bought a new computer since 2003. Prices are starting to rise on even some pretty rough condition old things. We are now well past the era of cheap computing. I suspect in another few decades they will return to just being the realms of business and hobbyists.
@Robert Mathiesen #271 re: Russia–
I sometimes wonder why the Chinese have not sent troops to Russia to settle the Ukraine war. It would only take a few hundred thousand Chinese troops to settle the whole deal, probably done in a month. But China shows no sign of interest in sending troops. Instead, they support the drone-building end of things, and allow North Korea to send its troops.
This seems to me like a 2-part strategy of the Chinese; It is in Chinese interests to let Russia (and Ukraine) kill as many of each others’ soldiers as possible for as long as possible. This will smooth the way for them to take back Manchuria and the Kamchatka peninsula. There are apparently already projects to take over farmland in the Far East of Russia, and divert water resources from Russia into China.
Decimating Russia and even Ukraine opens a lot of potential territory for China. Russia certainly had serious problems coming up with the next generation of Russians before the war. They have already lost far more young men than the US lost in Vietnam. So unless polygamy takes hold, there will be significantly fewer Russians in 30-40 years , anywhere.
North Korea has been the mean guard-dog of China for a number of decades, but its military is also a potential threat to China. So China does not stand in the way of North Korea sending its troops to die in Ukraine, as this thins out the NK army and would make Korea easier to subjugate should that be necessary–As it likely would, if the Koreas decide to unify in a post-US-influence world.
After a cursory search I haven’t yet found your opinion on something I’m curious about: you have occultists from the school of the psychological model of magic (it’s all in your head, etc), and the other school believes that spirits are external, objective beings that we can build relationships with. Which one do you lean toward more?
PS: I plan on buying and working through Learning Ritual Magic, the Occult Philosophy Workbook and the Way of the Golden Section starting next January, over a year. Do you think that’s too much? Or would you add anything? Or do it differently? Thanks.
@ David P #315
“Hamas, may I remind you, explicitly wants to kill Jews.”
This fact lines up with facts like:
“The IRA, may I remind you, explicitly wants to kill Brits”
“ETA, may I remind you, explicitly wants to kill Maketo”
“La Résistance, may I remind you, explicitly wanted to kill Germans”
There are factual truths in each of these statements, but none of them give any window upon the WHOLE truth, and all of them are so narrowly focused as to hide some rather large and “bigger picture” truths.
Instead, statements like these expose a point of view which has already decided that resistance – to whatever powers and whatever abuses those powers have imposed upon you – is futile, to the extent that it is inconceivable, and therefore ill-conceived.
And yet, wherever there are powers, and wherever they commit abuses, you WILL have resistance. This is the way the world works. A pendulum cannot swing one way without eventually acquiring enough weight to counter its momentum and swing the other.
A “technology bifurcation” data point.
I ‘m just back from a visit to my son and his fiancee in their new-bought house in Dublin. And, despite him being prone to rolling his eyes any time I’ve ever mentioned peak oil, or collapsing now ahead of the rush, it turns out that himself and herself have acquired an old turntable that plays vinyl records, and they love it! Although, the first night, as they selected and played music on it, they complained about the records acting like “dust magnets”.
Of course, following the discussions here, the first thing I went in search of was a vinyl record cleaning kit for them. And as I was going into likely looking shops asking for it, I happened on a lovely man who couldn’t help me, but said that his own 12-year-old daughter had saved up and bought herself such a turntable and was very happy with it. “She likes to have the records in her own hands.” Anyway, he directed me to a music shop around the corner, where I found what I was looking for.
Of course, when I brought the cleaning kit back to my son’s house, both himself and herself were both delighted, and also surprised to see that it was a thing already available, to solve a problem they had not yet named, which they would never have thought to go looking for. 🙂
Addendum: by “things” I just mean aspects, practical or otherwise. I’ve also always been intrigued by Augustine’s comment de vero religion, and suspect there is more that is not quite attended to rightly by those terming themselves perennialists. They emphasize abstraction and universals far too much for my comfort. A higher middle is more appealing, somewhere between identifying true religion (there is also science, philosophy and art) with historical forms, and retreating into (frankly) an Enlightenment perennialism. On the other other hand I do follow Charles Williams far enough to say, history is a microcosm, these things either happened or will happen : once and always can go together. If st Paul made up the historical Incarnation, he was prophesying a literal truth to help it do so, to come into existence. That’s as far as I can go. But I can certainly see that exoteric Christianity has fallen on very hard times, and will have to remythologize in very careful and yet specific ways in order to be a going concern or of any use. A tall order! I can certainly say I’ve often wished the druids and the Christians had worked harmoniously, and suspect it was more the fault of the latter. Still, nothing is gone, nothing forgotten. Working on it…
Northwind Grandma #283
> I like the concept of calling people “Bub” or “Hun” (short for Honey). Any other pseudo-names?
In London in the mid-1970s the bus conductors were mostly West Indian women who called everyone “ducky”. It was charming.
Apparently it derives from a word meaning Duke or leader, not the waterfowl. It is mostly used in the Midlands, and more often “duck” rather than “ducky”. (Google)
A few weeks back, in the comments to the Y2K Fallacy review you mentioned, ” Incas and Aztecs alike believed that the cycles of heaven were driving their world toward a nightmare future, their only hope was to get the gods to get those cycles to move in reverse, and extreme measures were called for.” What do you think the chances are that as the European influence fades the gods of the Incas and Aztecs will reassert themselves, demanding the tens of thousands of annual human sacrifices they received during the heights of those civilizations?
Jessica and Anselmo:
Russia has historically won some Peaces after defeating its enemies, except some exceptions like the old Crimea war (though Russia kept on being a big empire after this defeat by some European powers). I’m puzzled by the idea of Russians leaders, at least before “Daddy” Stalin, wanting to annihilate their geopolitical rivals in war.
What it’s true is Russia has been the grave for some megalomaniac empires leaders, like Hitler and Napoleon. A time before this second one began his disastrous Russian campaign, the Swedish Empire bit the dust thanks Russia in the battle of Poltava (1709). Until that date, Sweden had been main power in North and Central Europe since the XVIIth century, achieving Finland, Baltic countries and parts in the North of Germany, and threatening Poland seriously (Swedish Army near managed to conquer all Polish territory after 1655).
It’s said history doesn’t repeats, but rhyme. Well, Sweden King despised Tsar army because he thought Russia had an outdated army (first mistake); and Swedish leaders didn’t kept in mind Russia climate (second mistake: they were cautious enough to attack Russians during spring and early summer, but they didn’t remember “rasputitsa” phenomenon: rains which make dirt roads become mud and more mud).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Poltava
After Poltava, Sweden Empire started its decline. In 1721, after the Peace of Nystad, according quite historians, Sweden became another country more in Scandinavia, and Russia began to dominate the Baltic Sea from Saint Petersbourgh. So it wasn’t Sweden end as a country, but it was a poor country until past century.
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Robert M. # 308:
“That doesn’t sound like any Russian I ever talked with, nor does it agree with the course of Russian history over the last several centuries.”
It’s said Russia has been the grave of several empires, but not the grave for whole countries…So I agree.
I don’t think not even the most jingoist Russian nationalists (á la Dmitry Orlov style) are able to make such an apparently rough and megalomaniac claim.
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Scotlyn # 312:
After having read your comment, I think there were another times, in addition to your life in a Central American country with a better historical tendency toward a peaceful coexistence and government stability than their neighbors. After its Civil War in 1948, of course Costa Rica suffered some sociopolitical problems, but they seem lower another C.A. countries. Costa Rica has been named “the C. American Switzerland”. According to my last online search, there are some youth crime there nowadays, but not the “maras” overgrowth which happened in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras since some years ago. However, I’m afraid nowadays Costa Rica children aren’t as safe as old times children in streets…
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Horzabky #313:
“Here in France, 17% of gas stations already lack at least one type of fuel, and it will certainly be worse in the coming weeks and months.”
News which haven’t been widespread by mainstream MSM here in Spain. This silence (which somebody could suspect as censorship) has been only broken by some online fringe people, like Antonio Turiel in his blog “Crashoil”, where he has commented some countries gas stations have problems with some fuels…
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David P. # 315:
I’ve read your last comment answering me, and well, I understand your motives for concern about Die Linke “risky friendships”, according your online links.
However, according some leftist sites here (unfortunately only available in Spanish), Die Linke people have bemoaned they’ve suffered during last electoral campaign continuous smearing attacks by AfD and “mild” German parties. Of course, I’m not naïve to guess they’ve got their ideological biases, but the rest of German parties (including your friends too) maybe they’re biased too.
Near a century ago, a philosopher (Ortega y Gasset) recommended people who wanted to think by themselves, a phrase which was the title of an article/essay: “Not to be a partisan man”. On the short form, his main criticism against political tension and bipolarization under this or that “political salvation” is the risk of narrowing down a complex reality to our most favorite/hated ideological labels. And when people leave off their “disturbing” custom for thinking their own ideas, and begin to believe and spread cooked slogans and biases, things start to worsen, methink.
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Slithy T. # 317:
Your comment about Neoplatonism has made to remember that modern scholars and people who see themselves as educated ones, love ancient Greek philosophy and culture…but only the Athens democracy times and the three usual: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. They usually water down Plato spiritual especulations, ignoring them or even depicting Plato as a shameful materialist (ahem).
Pythagorean religious side and Neoplatonism are opportunely ignored or sometimes despised generically as “mystical”(the worst insult for usual scientificist and materialist philosophers).
However, ancient Greece history (and its Philosophy too), lasted until Byzantine Empire closed the last Neoplatonist Academy (a time after West roman empire fell); so I think Neoplatonism deserves much more respect than current conventional wisdom among “pedantocrats” has in front of it (or maybe I could say “against it”).
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Gray Tuesday Man # 318:
“Jewish tradition (as I think with the other Abrahamic faiths of Christianity and Islam) is very anti-cremation, believing that we should be buried so that when the Messiah comes, the remains of our bodies in the ground will be resurrected”
I don’t know what most Jews and Muslims think about this topic, but at least for the last times after Council Vatican II, I can tell you the Catholic Church allows cremation, and I’ve also read quite Evangelicals-Protestants allow it, too. Of course, I bet you always can find this or that old school puritans and traditionalists who despise this practice.
What it’s also true is Christianism has been more in favor of burials, but if Christians believe God is Almighty, so He has the power of resurrecting good people a day, it really doesn’t matter wether their bodies have been decaying toward their bones, or they were burned toward ashes. I guess maybe within Jews there’s a likely similar opinion.
Some Christians think it’s better to save together human ashes after they’ve been cremated in a columbarium, because it’s a sign of Christian faith to worship dead people graves every year, in Souls Day. In spite of being a fringe Christian, I agree in this idea. Of course, dead people family are free to do whatever they want with their dead relatives ashes (of course, respecting their likely last will), but I tend to think that spreading out human ashes doesn’t show a serious faith in dead people resurrection, at least within Christianism.
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Clay D. #320:
“Is the message just shock to Normies? Or is the person expressing their superiority at being part of some cutting edge social movement? Or is it a poke in the eye to traditional church going folk. Or is it in ” In-group” identifier.”
Some good questions. After some minutes of thinking it, I tend to think all the options can be right, so they don’t exclude between them, but they could be cumulatives. However, I also think maybe her main purpose for showing that message to everybody could be usual virtue signaling in favor of herself (a “being of light”) and how stupid are straight and Christian people, in her opinion. In addition of this rough message, maybe you can see: wish to shock Normies, a vanguard belonging feeling, anti-Christianism and searching some likely comrade to confirm her biases …err…ideas (like dogs usually do: scenting your likely friend butt!). All of this, bound by an arrogant attitude and a vague Liberal pose, methink.
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Celadon # 321:
I don’t represent any Christian group in particular, nor I’m a pundit in religions and occultism, though I can tell you whatever person interested in the intersection between Christianism and Occultism/Esoterism should learn at least some basic ideas about Neoplatonism and Christian Gnostics, for example, and their underground influence in European and Western occult/esoterical traditions until present day. Not only thinking in the “transition to Aquarius” topic, but to know youself better and learning about your own beliefs (of course, if you’re an open mind Christian).
Regarding the Deusch/Dutch discussion, I recall hearing in my long-ago English degree that Dutch (the language spoken in the Netherlands) is English’s closest living cousin. I certainly would recognize more words out of Dutch (and the Scandinavian languages) than out of German, or at least I would back when I had decent hearing. FWIW.
BeardTree, I suppose that’s possible. It’s just very weird to see European leaders threatening war with Russia when the armies the EU is capable of fielding are so puny and feebly armed.
Neptunesdolphins, I have no idea — but then I have no idea why hula hoops, cell phones, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles caught on the way they did, either.
Anselmo, I’m not sure where you got that factoid, but it simply isn’t true. If anything, the West is more obsessive about forcing unconditional surrender and/or destroying its enemies.
Phutatorius, it’s been clear to scholars for a very long time that there are massive differences between the narratives in the three synoptic gospels, on the one hand, and John on the other. That’s not surprising, since our current notions of historical accuracy did not exist in ancient times; historians like Tacitus had no qualms about making up speeches, for example, and putting them in the mouths of barbarian kings about to fight the Romans, or what have you. The gospels were full of details that were put in by the authors for local color and symbolic reasons, because that’s how such narratives were written in those days — you can find scores of examples if you know ancient literature. So all the attempts to proclaim the Bible as literally true and inerrant, on the one hand, and all the parallel attempts to disprove the Divine by finding contradictions in the Bible, on the other hand, are historically ignorant forms of barking up the wrong stump.
Northwind, if geneticist Eugene McCarthy is right, they’re also very, very close relatives of ours:
https://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html
Mary, if the Dems were to get a clue at this point I’d be astonished.
J.L.Mc12, hmm! I read that a long time ago, I think, but I don’t recall a thing about it. I’ll see if any of the local libraries carry it.
Polecat, no surprises there. Here comes another IQ test graded pass-fail, and you really, truly don’t want a failing grade…
Siliconguy, “meaningful downside risk” — I love it. That’s like saying there’s meaningful iceberg risk when the Titanic is already too close to take evasive action.
Mithridates, yep! I’ve taken quite some amusement in watching people at many points on the political spectrum cringe away from any frank talk about social class like vampires from garlic.
Nephite, your natural instinct is a good one. Magic is far more diverse than that.
Justin, oh, by all means! I stuck a Texan into the Haliverse, for that matter, and didn’t regret it. 😉
Chris, so far I haven’t heard much babble about productivity here, but that’s mostly because everyone has other things to scream about. The Technonomicon? On temporary hold while I get some other things cleared away, but the manuscript’s already good and hefty.
Horzabky, I see that as political-military kabuki theater. Everyone’s posturing and bellowing in apocalyptic terms; meanwhile the movement of oil through the Straits of Hormuz is nearly back up to prewar levels, the Gulf states are cashing in on the grand scale because of higher oil prices, and the US and Iranian governments are quietly negotiating. Europe, mind you, is the odd exception — they’re not bellowing, and they are facing existential threats out of this.
Anon, delighted to hear this! Thank you for your contribution to the far future.
Slithy, fun! Thanks for this.
Gray Tuesday, from my perspective burial and cremation are both fine; it’s a good idea not to embalm or cremate the body until after 72 hours have passed, so there’s ample time for the soul to separate naturally, but after that the body’s just biomass and may be dealt with any way you like. Myself, once I’m done with my body I’d like to have it disposed in the most sanitary and least wasteful method possible, and cremation followed by scattering the ashes fills that bill nicely. As for Messiah, well, presumably if he ever does show up, the god of Israel can reconstitute the faithful from ashes, or even from scattered atoms, just as easily as otherwise; omnipotence has its advantages, after all. 😉
AliceEm, thanks for the data points!
Clay, that was popular among Wiccans back in the day; they were trying to extend a middle finger to conservative Christians, or rather to their caricatured concept of what conservative Christians are. It always seemed silly to me, too, but then I’m neither a Wiccan nor a lesbian, of course!
Celadon, I’d let your god do the mitigating. It’s a common bit of human hubris that we have to take care of such things, when we so obviously have neither the wisdom nor the power for the job! Instead, simply be aware that the forms and symbols your god uses to manifest his presence in space and time may be changing, and pray for the ability to move gracefully with the changes.
Soko, it’s impossible to quantify karma — it’s simply the principle that every action has consequences. Since every action will always have consequences, there will always be karma, but you can’t define it as this or that amount — that’s like asking how much the principle of justice weighs.
Michael, yeah, that’s falling-out-of-chair material. They admitted it? Good heavens.
Aldarion, funny. Yeah, French insults are a fine art. We’re really hindered in English by our very weak and repetitive tradition of profanity.
Kevin, interesting. From an occult point of view, that’s somewhat weak, since it involves dividing the will — you accomplish most when you have one goal and seek it with all your will and attention. Still, if he gets results from it, that’s a data point worth noting.
Michael, that works. Oddly enough, that’s what I used in my deindustrial novel Star’s Reach — the nations of North America in 2480 each have a few old computers kept running by constant jerry-rigging, and a ruinman who finds a circuit board with intact chips can sell them for a mother of a lot of money, as Trey sunna Gwen would say.
Jared, I consider both of those to be human mental models of a reality that we cannot comprehend. To borrow a metaphor I’ve used in a different context, human thoughts have the same relation to the reality they attempt to describe that a child’s stick-figure drawing of a horse has with the surging, sweating reality of a horse at full gallop. Either model can be useful; neither one is true, and this is equally the case with all other models. As for your plans, I don’t recommend working with Learning Ritual Magic and The Way of the Golden Section at the same time; each one is its own thing and they use sharply different methods of practice that don’t play well together. It works better to choose one and stick with it. You can use The Occult Philosophy Workbook with either, however.
Scotlyn, this is excellent news! Thank you for the data point.
Roldy, it’s unlikely, because the nightmare future the sacrifices were supposed to prevent arrived anyway.
@Emmanuel Goldstein (#335):
Thanks so much for a Chinese perspective on all this. I know more about how Russians think than about how Chinese do. What you say makes good sense to me.
@Chaquin 342 – Sweden got rich by not fighting wars with Russia! Thanks for the comment, I am actually fairly familiar with the NeoPlatonic strains, although there (as always) is a LOT I don’t know. The astrological age progression is very telling, I think. I can definitely see the Pisces stamp on 2000 year Christian tradition.
Robert Mathiessen #308
I have not found the text in wich I based my comentary. But in the next you can find some information about several peculiarities of the Russian society.
https://andreyfursov.ru/news/russkaja_vlast_istorija_evrazii_i_mirovaja_sistema_mobilis_in_mobile_socialnaja_filosofija_russkoj_vlasti_chast_1/2008-06-08-4
As for the Russo-Ukrainian war, many people are highly invested in the outcome, to say the least, and are also highly delusional. People are just as susceptible to propaganda as ever, especially when it plays on their biases and mental blind-spots, the relevant one being the Fantasy Fallacy, or Jedi Brain, or Stormtrooper Syndrome. As JMG has written, a critical mass of people in the Western world cannot distinguish fiction from reality, and they think that Gamergate, MAGA, and the Russian invasion are armies of marauding skeletons commanded by lich kings from the Evil Empire of Darkness — thus, their astonishing levels of credulity in accepting absurd claims about them.
For the record, I estimate Russian losses to be around 200k for the entire invasion, and following the 5:1 ratio, that would put Ukraine’s losses at about a million. Assuming these numbers are in the correct ballpark (and there’s evidence of this), that means that Russia has taken some hits in its proxy war with NATO, but for Ukraine its just devastating. Of course, their Western imperial masters don’t care if they slaughter the Ukrainians by using them as footsoldiers in their attempt to defeat Russia, but this will only rebound on them as Russia continues to advance.
To address a few other comments, Russia could’ve ended this war by now, at the cost of higher losses, but they prefer to fight and win via attritional grind. Too many observers are stuck on the WWII model, when offense was dominant over defense, which led to rapid changes in territorial control. A distinguishing feature of the Russo-Ukrainian war is its shift back to WWI, relying on trench warfare & artillery, combined with modern drone warfare. Moreover, Ukraine’s “center of gravity” is in NATO, not in the country itself. It would not avail Russia to occupy Ukraine, only to get bogged down in a NATO-supported insurgency (which may in fact have been the Western plan). Instead, Russia is patiently eroding NATO’s strength in Ukraine, with control of territory largely coming after that. The only territories they wanted to occupy swiftly were a foothold in the Donbass and a land-bridge to Crimea, and both of these were secured in the first 6 months of the invasion.
If this whole mess careens towards WWIII, I expect our decadent elites plan to burn through the straight white male helots as they’re doing with Ukrainian men. Maybe some are delusional enough to serve them, but I think there will be many more desertions, defections, and draft dodges. After all, why would anyone in their right mind fight for kleptocrats who openly hate them, and want them in debt bondage or dead (the latter illustrated by Canada’s MAiD massacre).
Speaking of which, I was thinking about Israel the other day, and got a clear vision of a massive, fiery mushroom cloud. I hope that’s just an illusion from the astral plane, but I fear that it’s prophecy.
Martin Back and Northwind, 340 &283, on the subject of cutesy nicknames, I beg to differ. To me, being addressed as ‘Honey”–my usual response is Honey is not my name–says You are not important enough for me to have to remember nor even learn, your name. For me, this practice is of a piece with the habit of avoiding having to say the P word to a social inferior. Hints, suggestions, but never a simple will you please do such and such.
Emmanuel Goldstein @ 335, thank you for this. I entirely agree with your assessment of Chinese strategy. I would add that what China also wants is Arctic access.
Elias et al, the best way I have found to keep mice out of my living quarters is to keep the things they like to eat, such as grains, seeds, leftovers, etc., in glass containers. They can chew though just about anything else. If you garden in CA, as I did, you need an outdoor cat, unless you want to be feeding gophers. Now I live in NY; we have moles and voles, but they are not nearly the menace that gophers are.
Dutch and German:
There are two major varieties of German, High German (Hochdeutsch) and Low German (Plattdeutsch). Low German is far more like Dutch than High German is, and the two seem to me roughly as mutually intelligible as, say, Swedish and Danish are.
(Way back in the early ’60s, courtesy of The Experiment in International Living, I spent a few months in a Low German village (Lengerich), living in the household of a village physician, who, of course, spoke HIgh German., which I had studied in school to the point of moderately fluency. But he had been born and raised in Lengerich, so he and his children were also natively fluent in Low German. Thus I had an opportunity to learn a little about the latter language, too, which I found very interesting. I always thought it a pity that the academic study of German in the US doesn’t seem to pay any attention to Low German.)
“I’ve often wished the druids and the Christians had worked harmoniously” (Celadon #339)
“I wish things could have worked out that way in Ireland [ref – ‘esoteric Buddhist traditions making common cause with the Shinto priesthood’] between Christianity and Druidry!” (JMG #178)
There is a well researched, and well argued, and also plain fun* book arguing that, actually, they did.
The Christian Druids: On the Filid or Philosopher Poets of Ireland, By John Minahane,
https://howthfreepress.com/druids
“How did Ireland become Christian? How Christian did Ireland become? What happened to the pre-christian poet-philosophers, the druids? Why is the literature of the Irish language so poetic? How did the professional poets maintain such a high standing in Ireland for so long? What was it that made their poetic talent so awesome?
“The Christian Druids tackles questions like these, and the title of the book itself gives the common core of the answers: the druids of Ireland creatively assimilated Christianity, John Minahane argues. To them, it seemed the most perfect form of druidism, theirs to adopt and to adapt. The masters of Irish had no feelings of inferiority towards the Latinists, whose new learning they were drawing upon. Without constructing heresies, they produced a distinctive form of Christianity, full of poetry, which dominated the rich literary culture in the Irish language.
“Minahane quotes abundantly from this Christian-druidic culture, giving the original Irish with adjacent translations. Love-lyrics, satires, prophecies are drawn upon; political and personal protests; heroic tales; philosophical fragments; a death sentence; many riddles; contributions to a controversy on the nature of the Irish gods, and much more.”
This is a re-issue of a book first published in 1993. I enjoyed reading it so much I’ve read it twice. It directly argues, and makes a strong case, that the druids in Ireland seamlessly wove themselves into early Irish Christianity.
It also makes some very specific arguments about the nature of the Irish language – in this author’s view, a vehicle for carrying layered meanings, some of them only knowable to the druids, whose business it was to hide their messages in plain hearing by taking the art of punning to an extremely high level. Even though I am not conversant in the Irish language, I found these parts of the book – which quotes, translates, and then translates AGAIN, quite a number of Irish poetic gems – fascinating and a lot of fun.
* Fun, if you enjoy linguistic games and puzzles. 🙂
“Regarding the Deusch/Dutch discussion, I recall hearing in my long-ago English degree that Dutch (the language spoken in the Netherlands) is English’s closest living cousin”
There was a Dutch version of Pride and Prejudice on YouTube a few years ago. It was a bit surreal, my brain could almost but not quite understand it. Understandable English words were interspersed throughout it.
In the DoomsDay Book, (by Connie Willis) Kivrin’s language implant isn’t working. It turns out the language instructor’s lessons were wrong, the peasant’s English of the 1300s was much less influenced by the French than he thought. The peasant’s were still using mostly German with a very light French overlay.
re-subscribing to comments, for some reasons I do not receive posts anymore. – Druidovik
Scotlyn #337:
Forgive me Scotlyn but that’s not the same. As I understand it, the IRA did not believe that it was an Irishman’s religious duty to fight Brits, just that the Brits should not control Ireland. Until very recently, the Hamas charter did in fact say that their goal is to eradicate Jews. Quoting the version at their founding:
> Moreover, if the links [between different “anti-Zionist” movements] have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
>
> “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
> —https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
They can fight about Israel all they want. It’s not my country, it’s not my fight. But I have a big problem with Muslims taking the fight against Jews to my country. I have an even bigger problem with one of the big five German parties allying itself with them.
Chuaquin #342:
Oh, I don’t doubt that they’ve been moaning. Frankly, I don’t particularly care. Remember, they are the party that ruled East Germany for fourty years. They have plenty of practice lying.
And of course the AfD has its biases. I am not arguing against that. All I’m saying is that it sure looks like Die Linke has allied itself with the Muslim terrorists and criminals that we, for whatever insane reason, decided to invite into our country. I say “we” but it’s not like that was on the ballots back then—now that it is, “we” have clearly said that we object to it, considering that last federal election, the CDU ran on an anti-immigration platform and won a clear majority of seats together with the AfD.
And while I agree that being a partisan is dangerous, like everything else that makes you not use your brain, I don’t actually consider myself one. Frankly, this conversation seems somewhat upside-down. They’re the ones allying themselves with foreign terrorists and crime lords, but I’m the one creating political tension and polarisation by pointing it out?
—David P.
@Sister Crow: there is a well-known linguistic gradient of the Germanic language family from the Anglo-Saxon words of English to Friesian to Dutch to low German (ie Plattdeutsch) all the way to High German (essentially from North to South – the coast (low) to the Alps (high)) with linguistic features traceable to certain historical shifts in vowels and consonants – e.g. Fußball is the result of a consonant shift from t to ß and a vowel shift from oo to u (interestingly, older forms of German are closer to the Anglo-Saxon parts of English)
Hi Mr Greer. I know we’re not supposed to talk about AI here, and I try to respect that. Though I hope you won’t mind me asking a question about the related matter of humans at the top of AI companies. There has been a vibe shift lately, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. These people (Altman, Amodei, Gates) say they’re scared of what they’ve created. I’m curious about the human question of whether you think they’re being genuine or if they have some ulterior motive to sound the alarm bell?
JMG, you don’t know the half of it. The Democratic mis-leadership is now ignoring, if not actively subverting, their senate candidate in Florida. Angie Nixon by all accounts I have seen is well qualified, having served in the FL legislature, and is a person of character and competence. What this is about, of course, is Chuckie Schemer being able to hold onto his leadership, you should excuse the expression, position.
@xcalibur/djs,
When the Ukraine war started I think the Russians just want to take the Donbas. I think they calculated that capturing the mass of Central Ukraine, including Kiev would expose them to a long grinding insurgency. But as the war has ground on and the casualty ratios have shifted in their favor ( there is good evidence from actual Ukraine general staff leaks) that the ratio in this last year is closer to 1:10 in the Russian’s favor as they modified their assault methods and adapted to drone warfare., that a new possibility could play out. They could just continue on until the Ukraine exhausted its supply of fighting age males, and even some older and some women so that an insurgency would be much less of a problem. Then they could capture enough of Ukraine to eliminate them as a threat to Russia and give the rump part in the east to the Poles.
By 8 or 9 in the late 1940s, early 50s, I used to walk to school alone in NYC and take the subway or bus to visit friends. Of course there were things to watch out for and places not to go, but we quickly figured those out.
Stephen
I understand this has been planned for a long time, but the timing is very good for Iran domestically and diplomatically, it looks very much like a retreat.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-forces-exit-iraq-after-two-decades-leaving-opening-iran-2026-09-29/
Roldy, #341.
It is pretty late in the cycle, but if I may…
I don’t know enough of the Incas, but my wild guess is that they were not much different than the rest of the peoples in the Prehispanic Americas, which were not that much different from other Taurus Age civilizations. That’s to say, they practiced some moderate amounts of human sacrifice, on specific conditions; and those conditions could get a bit out of control in times of crisis, but that’s it.
The Aztec Empire was another thing, and it is my opinion that it was an Evil Theocracy. The religion they pursued was a corrupted version of the, much older, Toltec religion practiced in Central Mexico for centuries before the Aztecs were expelled from their homelands in the American Southwest. During this migration, they started worshiping their dead chieftain Huitzilopochtly; which form the recounts I have read shows more than a few signs suggesting he became a vampire. He was retrofited into the Nahuatl pantheon, because the newcoming Aztecs wanted, more than anything else, to proudly claim the title of Heirs of the Toltecs.
So, strictly speaking, I don’t think what you suggest is likely to happen because I doubt such an entity could have survived all those centuries without the large scale support of a city state to provide for his sustenance. However, such impactful events leave tracks in time, and it is not impossible for some other Dark entity to claim the mantle if people start worshiping the old, bloody Left-handed Hummingbird again.
@Mary Bennett @349 – I’ve learned the hard way that mice can chew through just about anything except glass or metal. I recently found a hole in a plastic can of cornstarch, with the white powder strewn across the counter, which could only have been done by one of those darn meeses. 🙂 Now I keep the cornstarch in, yes, a glass jar. One of the critters got up onto a high shelf and into the basket where I keep nuts and dried fruit, chewed a hole in a bag of walnuts, and ate every one of the darn things. It amazes me how high those darn things can climb!
I’ve gotten into the habit of saving the metal cans that powdered milk comes in (Anchor or Nido brands) and storing in them flour, grains, legumes, and other things that the critters like.
Making my monthly required comment: Chapter 23 is done! Still on track for 26 by the end of this year! Rough drafts sure do take a long time! ^^;
I grew up bi lingual in Dutch and English from immigrant Dutch parents. In my house, the word “Duitser” was always preceded by “verdomd”.
I think the English translation is pretty obvious.
OTOH, many years ago I was a tour guide at Arcosanti. A group of Germans showed up at closing time with less than marginal English. I gave them a tour in very slow Dutch, and they asked questions in very slow German, and I think we managed to understand each other.
Xcalibur/djs, the Russians are also acting as though they’re concerned that the goal of the Ukraine war was to weaken them before the West launches yet another mass invasion of Russia. That explains the patient slow grind, and the very large military forces being raised and held in reserve. Generally, though, your analysis seems spot on to me.
Scotlyn, they did for a while, yes. That broke down, mostly due to the English, though post-Reformation Catholicism also had a lot to answer for.
Ludovic, that may have happened when I changed servers a while back. Sorry!
Clovis, oh, that’s just theater. They’re trying to get the technology all tied up in bureaucracy to keep startups from competing with the established companies.
Mary, of course! The Dems, like the GOP, are having to deal with a full-on populist rebellion in their ranks, brought on by the incompetence and corruption of their leadership. It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Warburton, it’s an essential step in the retreat of the US from its imperial overcommitments. Whether it will end up helping Iran, or leave it bogged down in insurgencies, is another matter.
Shinjuki, delighted to hear it.
@ David P #354
“They can fight about Israel all they want. It’s not my country, it’s not my fight. But I have a big problem with Muslims taking the fight against Jews to my country. I have an even bigger problem with one of the big five German parties allying itself with them.”
I am 100% with you on the matter of not wanting to accept anyone else’s “pre-made” enemies. And many blessings upon your efforts to remain unentangled in other people’s fights.
I wonder, though, if you have ever given any thought to the extent to which Israel is a country which intends to kill Jews?
“Scotlyn, they did for a while, yes. That broke down, mostly due to the English, though post-Reformation Catholicism also had a lot to answer for.”
So (presuming I have understood you correctly?) any evident disharmony eventually arose from the more vexed relations between the English and the Irish, and/or between the Roman church and the Irish church, rather than from the early, mutually reinforcing, relationships between Irish druids and Irish christians?
For myself, I can have no dog in this fight, since I know far too little upon which to reliably base an opinion.
I just thought the book I linked to might be of interest, given the topic being raised. 🙂
(I’m afraid I’m too late, but…)
Elias H # 324:
I agree. Mouse traps seem a sadistic and awful way for killing mice and rats, but let’s compare it with the too common method of poisoning them: ratsbanes like strichnin make those animals suffer a lot more, methink. And there’s the risk that poisoned mice/rats are eaten eventually by another “innocent” animals, when poisoned baits are badly put or you don’t remove soon pests bodies.
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More about cats as “ecological disaster”:
I think it depends where do you live (and your cat too). It’s known cats thriving in some small islands have wiped out some entire birds species into extinction, but here where I live, cats which get wild and escape to the countryside aren’t really superpredators. Indeed, sometimes foxes and feral dogs hunt feral cats and even some missed domestic cats (too stupid according Darwinian standards). They eat them or only “play” with their bodies (I’ve seen personally in my town outskirts). So natural world in the long term seems to find a balance.
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I’m sorry I’ve missed their numbers of comment, but I’ve seen somewhere some argument between David and Scotlyn about, between another things, ETA and its fighting against Maketos (usual insult against Spaniards within radical Basque nationalists against).
Well, things aren’t so simply as “ETA Basques killed Spaniards and viceversa”. I’ve met Basque people and they explained me during Industrial Revolution a heck of Spaniards outside Basque Country migrated there and there were called with contempt by some Nationalists as “Maketos”. However, some migrants children integrated well in that society, even they learned Basque. Indeed, some ETA terrorists had evident Spanish surnames instead of the Basque ones, because there were Spaniard migrants descendants who became “more Basques than true Basques”. Reality is more complex than we usually think, even when you see apparently binarian conflicts.
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Sister Crow # 343:
I know some scholars disagree with the hypothesis you’ve pointed in your comment. I read some years ago about European languages, that closest “cousin” for nowadays English is a fringe near extinct language named “Frisian”, which is still spoken by some people in Friesland. It’s a region in the North of Germany, near the North Sea and Holland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisian_languages
According some philologists, this language it’s at middle way between German, Dutch and English (all of them seem “cousins” languages). There’s also some argument within pundits wether Frisian is one language with dialects or several different but related languages…I’m only a dilettante in this topic, so I don’t know who’s right.
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JMG # 344:
“So all the attempts to proclaim the Bible as literally true and inerrant, on the one hand, and all the parallel attempts to disprove the Divine by finding contradictions in the Bible, on the other hand, are historically ignorant forms of barking up the wrong stump.”
I agree, though of course (and unfortunately for mainstream Christianism), my opinion isn’t worthy in demographic compared with Christian majorities, because I’m a fringe believer. I think literalist blindness and mythologizing in exccess are the two sides of the coin named “doctrinarism”. Better symbolism than literalism, methink.
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Celadon # 346:
You’re welcome! I take note of your astrological comment again.
“Sweden got rich by not fighting wars with Russia!”
You’re right, if you’re thinking in how Sweeden got a very rich country during past century, from a poverty past after it gave up its imperial wishes…I agree. Sweden was one of the Socialdemocratic welfare states, envied for example by Spain when our dictatorship ended…
Unfortunately, Swedish politicians and quite people there (at least it seems that from here) are given up their neutral tradition which they respected during past century XXth, so they recently joined the NATO. Well, what could be wrong in a short and medium term future? Humph…
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xcalibur # 348:
“I estimate Russian losses to be around 200k for the entire invasion, and following the 5:1 ratio, that would put Ukraine’s losses at about a million”
I can tell you I’ve read very similar death figures for this war, among some alternative sites with different ideologies here, in Spanish. So I think those losses data are quite believable, beyond usual bullshale excreted by western MSM, under the NATO-EU narrative (fake).
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Robert M. # 350:
Yes, High German and Low German!. My nephew has learned some basic differences between them in his German classes, though he learns “official” German. And you can’t forget Austrian German (which according some Austrians and Germans is near like another language different from German-German, so mutually near incomprehensible) and Swiss German (some Swiss people also say it’s near like an another language; Is it true, or a nationalist bias? I don’t know).
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Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t answer nor comment anything more… I’me very pushed now for time, so I must giving up this interesting JMG blog (I’m going to be busy now). For your dismay or happiness (I don’t know which feeling do you have now), I wouldn’t write anything in this blog until JMG begins his new Wednesday post (this night, local time here).
Regards…
> mice, (“I hate meeces to pieces“) [Pixie and Dixie and Mr Jinks; Huckleberry Hound Show] [Hanna and Barbera] [~1960]
I keep any substance away from insects and mice in the refrigerator (“fridge”), in original packaging or plastic containers. Decades ago, I learned my lesson after finding a worm or larva in ramen noodles in the original thin plastic packaging/bag/cover. I guess a bug ate through the cover, laid eggs, resulting in some sort of worm. I didn‘t look too closely to know what kind of worm. I was totally grossed out; I can still feel the revulsion. I store ramen noodles, flour, cereal, nuts, dried fruit in the fridge.
√ Never again.
💨🫥🧟♂️💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
JMG
Yesterday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) wrote an open letter to the American people. I am reading the full text now; it is quite long. The letter has been translated into many languages; here is the link to the English version:
https://en.mehrnews.com/news/248182/IRGC-writes-an-open-letter-to-American-people
I think it likely you have read it already.
💨🫥🇮🇷💨Northwind Grandma
Wisconsin, USA
TEHRAN, Sep. 29 2026 (Mehr News Agency) – Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) “has written an open letter to the US public, urging Americans to distance themselves from Israel.”
Mr. Greer (#344), I’d be interested to hear about your sources regarding the flow of oil through the Straits of Hormuz. As far as I was aware, insurance rates for ships through the Straits were still at back-breakingly high levels, and other means of oil delivery from the Gulf states, such as pipelines, have also been damaged in the war. I suppose we’ll have to watch the US strategic petroleum reserve to see if oil truly is flowing in at near pre-war rates; considering how much it’s been drained recently, it’d make sense that the government would make refilling it a top priority if they could.
JMG #365: Yes, that’s a good point. Ukraine was supposed to be a bear trap, a prelude for a color revolution and invasion, and Russia is subverting and reversing the trap on the West. Another point I should’ve mentioned is that Russia is getting “immunized” in a sense, because the proxy war is exposing them to all manner of NATO weapons systems (M777, HIMARS, F16s, Storm Shadows, ATACMs, Javelin, et al); while they have taken hits, this gives them data on NATO weapons & tactics, so that they develop countermeasures & doctrines to defend against them. Exposure to a limited amount of virulence to build defenses is exactly how vaccination works! So that’s another way that Russia is growing ever stronger.
Napoleon & Hitler have already tried this, and it seems the decadent West wants to commit the same blunder for the third time. Let them find out the hard way, I say.
Also, glad I got in just under the deadline!
Chuaquin #368: Good to have that confirmed. I find that Simplicius76 on substack is an excellent source.
Scotlyn #366:
Can’t say that I have. Maybe I should, if only because the notion seems pretty ridiculous to me.
—David P.