Two weeks ago, as regular readers will recall, we discussed The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, the rest of the really rather dreary literature of planetary preaching in which that volume fills an overfamiliar role, and the usually disastrous consequences that follow when the clueless rich set out to tell the rest of us what the future ought to be. It may seem like a substantial leap from that subject to a collection of six bomb-damaged granite slabs in rural northeast Georgia, but the connection is there.
The Georgia Guidestones, to give the slabs their proper name, were a monument erected on a hilltop near Elberton, Georgia in 1979 and 1980, and were blown up by persons unknown last month. They were planned and paid for by an anonymous group acting through an individual who called himself R.C Christian, which he himself admitted was a pseudonym. He told local officials and businesses that he wanted a structure that would survive an impending catastrophe.
Following his instructions, a local firm carved the stones out of Elbert County’s abundant granite and put up the structure. It had various astronomical features—a hole drilled in the central slab that pointed to the Pole Star, for example—but what has attracted most attention to the Guidestones are the inscriptions in eight languages on the four main slabs. They proclaim the following commandments:
- Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
- Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
- Unite humanity with a living new language.
- Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
- Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
- Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
- Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
- Balance personal rights with social duties.
- Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
- Be not a cancer on the Earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.
Despite the efforts to maintain secrecy around the project, a little sleuthing on the part of investigative journalists has shown that the principal figure in the raising of the Guidestones was an Iowa surgeon named Herbert H. Kersten. A lifelong (though not very orthodox) Roman Catholic, Kersten was born in 1920 and spent most of his life in Fort Dodge, IA, where he raised a family, practiced in a clinic founded by his father, joined the Rotary Club, and was active in the Republican party. He died in 2005 after a struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. His obituary in the Des Moines Register talked about his passionate interest in environmental and world population issues.
These details, however, only surfaced after Kersten’s death. Before the Guidestones were even set up, the idea of persons unknown handing down their own set of commandments to the future attracted a lot of attention. On the positive side, this brought tourists to a corner of the United States that could definitely use some additional income—around 20,000 visitors a year on average. On the other side of the balance, the Guidestones quickly became the focus of a flurry of conspiracy theories and fundamentalist Christian denunciations; some writers and speakers referring to the edicts on the stones as “the ten commandments of the Antichrist.”
It’s hardly my place to tell Christians what to believe about the Antichrist, granted, but I have to admit if the Antichrist were to show up in person and proclaim some commandments, I’d expect to see much more in favor of sexual depravity and the other six deadly sins and a good deal less about truth, beauty, and love. The ten precepts on the Guidestones sound a lot more like what you would expect from an educated twentieth century American with a bee in his bonnet about overpopulation and environmental causes—a man, that is, very like Herbert H. Kersten.
It does not sound, in particular, like anything you would see from the Rosicrucian scene. That’s at issue here because the pseudonym used by Kersten looks a lot like the name of Christian Rosenkreutz (“Christian Rosycross”), the legendary founder of the Rosicrucians, which is often abbreviated C.R.C. That detail led one faction of conspiracy theorists to insist that the stones had been erected by evil Rosicrucians for some sinister purpose. As it happens, like a lot of American occultists, I’ve been initiated in several Rosicrucian orders and I know the literature well, and I’ve never seen anything like the text of the Guidestones anywhere in Rosicrucian literature. Quite the contrary: if Rosicrucians had written the thing, it would gently recommend prayer, meditation, and reverence toward the Supreme Being, rather than handing down preachments about world languages and government officials.
That said, I’m not at all surprised that the Guidestones attracted the instant hostility of so many ordinary Americans, and that one or more of those Americans took their hostility to the point of setting off a bomb. Let’s start by taking another look at the precepts on the stones, with an eye toward their context rather than their content. Who is being addressed with these commandments? And who is addressing them?
If you know your way around twentieth century postapocalyptic science fiction you’ll have no trouble figuring out these details. One of the most persistent tropes in that genre is the notion that people in a postcollapse America will think that their precollapse ancestors were gods. You can find this notion in full spate in one of the first and greatest works in the genre, Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1937 short story “By The Waters of Babylon,” which imagines a bold young man, the son of a tribal priest, making his way down the Hudson (“Ou-dis-son”) River to the legendary Place of the Gods, which is of course Manhattan.
The same gimmick appears with dreary predictability in many less competent contributions to the genre. The brutish, skin-clad tribal peoples of the American future, the assumption was, would look at the remains of modern American skyscrapers, recall legends of airplanes and cars, and convince themselves that only gods could have done such great works. It’s an interesting testimony to the collective egotism of our time, and it also reveals an embarrassing ignorance of the common themes of Dark Age cultures.
It’s quite common, after all, for peoples living amid the ruins of an extinct civilization to come to believe that those ruins—so much vaster than anything they themselves can produce—must have been put there by other-than-human entities. It’s not the gods, however, who get credited with such feats. In Anglo-Saxon England, for example, Roman ruins were assigned to the ettins or giants, the enemies of the gods. In archaic ancient Greece, similarly, the Dorian tribes who settled among the ruins of the Mycenean civilization assigned the great stone buildings they saw around them to the Cyclopes, one-eyed giants as powerful as they were wicked. (Big ancient buildings made of very large stones are still called “cyclopean.”)
Understand the language of mythology and you can follow very quickly what was being said here. Storytelling is humanity’s oldest information storage and retrieval technology, and it’s still one of the most effective, having been honed by our hominid ancestors for millennia: if you want knowledge to survive, turn it into a vivid story full of colorful symbols and incidents, tell it to children when they’re of an age to want to hear the same thing countless times, and they’ll be able to repeat it word for word to their own grandchildren most of a lifetime into the future. The requirements of the technology impose certain distortions on the data, but the important information generally gets through.
When a Saxon grandmother told her grandchildren lively tales about the terrible ettins who built mighty halls of stone in the old days, before Thunor smote them with lightning, what was she saying? Her message was as straightforward as it was important: there were people who lived here before us, more powerful than we are today, and more evil. They were the enemies of the gods, and the gods destroyed them. Do not live the way they did.
Some similar message is far more likely to be passed on by our descendants than the one that the popular fiction of the last century imagined. Grant for a moment that modern American society crashes to ruin over the next few centuries, following the usual trajectory of civilizations on their way to history’s compost heap. Grant that the decline and fall has the usual effects: population drops to 5% or so of the precollapse peak, most technology and information resources are lost, literacy becomes a rare skill, and a long and bitter dark age settles over the land. The people of that future time will use storytelling the same way every other illiterate culture has done—it’s apparently hardwired into human brains at this point, after so many generations of evolutionary selection in its favor. What stories will they tell about us?
If you think the stories in question will be the sort of thing that would allow us to preen our egos if we happened to hear them, think again. The people of that age, after all, will mostly be descended (as the people of dark age societies are always mostly descended) from rural populations far from the centers of power and wealth, either in the imperial nation our outside its borders—people who never had the chance to forget how to feed themselves by their own efforts and get by during hard times. They’ll have little reason to remember the good parts of the industrial age at its zenith, and much more reason to remember the bad. So, no, they won’t remember us as gods. They’ll remember us as a evil, powerful, but doomed race of beings who offended the gods, and were destroyed for our sins by some future equivalent of the thunder-weapon of Thunor.
Imagine, with this in mind, an alternate future in which the Georgia Guidestones didn’t get wrecked by a bomb. A millennium from now, the site of the monument is surrounded by cow skulls on poles, warning of the terrible spiritual evil emanating from this place built by the ancient giants. Talk to the tribal priest in the thriving little town that stands where Elberton is today, and he’ll explain to you earnestly that the ancients wrote baleful words on the sides of the stones, words whose meaning no one remembers any more. Even to gaze at the words is to risk falling under a curse; to try to decipher them… He shudders visibly.
A thousand years further on, as some new age of reason gathers strength—those are a common feature in the history of every civilization, after all—the passionately held superstitions of the tribal priest will have given way to more nuanced and reasoned views, but that change won’t necessarily improve our reputation any. Imagine two savants of that future era walking up to the Guidestones and considering them. Ancient English is tolerably well known by the learned in those days, and the two of them have no difficulty reading the inscription. One turns to the other and says, “That didn’t work out very well for them, did it?” The other raises an eyebrow and says, “I’m reminded of one of their proverbs: ‘do as I say, not as I do.’” They share a mordant laugh, and then one gets to work sketching the ruin while the other walks a short distance away and gazes over the landscape, musing over the ironies of history.
I’ve thought for quite some time that the reason why our culture is so fascinated with notions of imminent apocalypse is that so many people in our elite classes are horrified by the thought of scenes like the ones I’ve sketched out above. The chronological snobbery that leads people these days to insist that we’re smarter than their ancestors, for the mere reason that we live after them, has a sting in its tail: our descendants, after all, might reasonably take the same attitude toward us. The thought that we might be judged by the cold eyes of the future according to our actions, not according to our fond self-dramatizations, is a bitter pill to swallow—not least because the world industrial civilization is leaving to the future is a steaming mess, and we will be judged accordingly by those who come after us. Thus the fascination with claims that everyone is going to die, so we don’t have to worry about that.
Nor should the Georgia Guidestones be exempt from the judgments of the future. The text on the stones, after all, is a summary of a particular set of values espoused by a sizable fraction of the American intelligentsia in the twentieth century. Exactly how much good did those values do to keep us from our self-destructive trajectory? For that matter, we’ve become wearily familiar with the ways that rhetoric all too similar to Kersten’s ten postapocalyptic commandments has being used, and is being used now, to defend absurd concentrations of wealth and brutal abuses of power. That’s the kind of rhetoric on the lips of Klaus Schwab and his friends, as they insist the rest of us have to eat bugs and shiver in the dark so that they can dine on filet mignon in well-heated mansions and fly to lavish conferences in private jets.
Thus we circle back to Schwab’s Great Rehash—that is to say, his attempt to insist that the rest of us have to listen reverently to the latest bursts of cerebral flatulence coming from the current iteration of “the best and the brightest.” Schwab and his absurdly overpaid cronies clearly want to be the ones handing down commandments on tables of stone, with the rest of us assigned the role of grunting, primitive tribespeople gazing in awe at the words written by the gods. I frankly doubt they’re capable of realizing that the respect they get from anyone who isn’t angling for cash from them can best be measured in imaginary numbers. I don’t think it has entered their darkest dream just how deeply most people despise them.
With this in mind, I’m not at all surprised that the Guidestones attracted the hostility of so many ordinary Americans. Those ten rules are exactly the sort of vague abstractions that have been used to justify wave after wave of incompetent meddling in economic political affairs by intellectuals who have no clue what they’re doing. “The best and the brightest” used a bevy of such slogans to justify their policies in Vietnam, and the Club of Rome and the World Economic Forum have brandished plenty of similar rhetoric in their turn.
My take, in effect, is that too many Americans encountered the slogans on the Georgia Guidestones and recognized, from long and weary experience, the preachy tone and vacuous content that normally accompanies each new round of corporate-bureacratic attempts to inflict the latest intellectual fads on their lives and communities. They expressed that recognition in languages the elites of our time refuse to speak—the language of conservative religion on the one hand, and the language of conspiracy theory on the other—because that kept the bosses and their flacks out of the conversation. The fact that someone was willing to take the risk of blowing up the Guidestones in the face of the legal penalties offers fair warning that the ongoing impoverishment and immiseration of ordinary Americans at the hands of the current system may have a more potent blowback than the beneficiaries of that system want to face.
That said, the Georgia Guidestones were a tourist draw to a county that needs the income, and of course they also appeal to my Druidical fondness for standing stones. I’d like to suggest, on the off chance that anyone from Elbert County, Georgia is reading this, that the county might seriously want to consider running a GoFundMe campaign to rebuild the Guidestones. This time, however, they might have the people of Elbert County vote on what words, if any, they want engraved on the granite slabs of the new monument.
And if, dear reader, your first reaction to this suggestion is to come up with some snide putdown or other about what will go on the stones if this happens, I have two suggestions for you. The first, to borrow a bit of currently fashionable liberal jargon, is that maybe you should check your privilege, and ask yourself why it’s so important to your emotional life to feel superior to the decent, hardworking folk of Elbert County. The second is that if you really can’t stand the thought that Georgia farmers are going to have a chance to offer some suggestions to the future, maybe you and your friends should raise the money and put up a set of Guidestones yourselves, and engrave whatever you want onto them. After all, you have as much right to address the future as they do: as much, and no more.
The town where the Killdozer incident happened regretted cutting it up for scrap instead of putting it in a museum and turning it into a tourist attraction. 🙂
It’s interesting the guy behind the stones was a Catholic – they’re often vigorous opponents of overpopulation theory, eugenics and population control. The greatest evisceration of the horrors of China’s one child policy I ever read was by a Catholic organisation.
“Sit down, kids, and Grandma will tell you how, aeons ago, the demons Pelosi and McConnell destroyed the Deecee people.” 😄
“In Anglo-Saxon England, for example, Roman ruins were assigned to the ettins or giants, the enemies of the gods. In archaic ancient Greece, similarly, the Dorian tribes who settled among the ruins of the Mycenean civilization assigned the great stone buildings they saw around them to the Cyclopes, one-eyed giants as powerful as they were wicked. ”
It’s exciting to see what popular legends told ancient people opinion about their ancestors ruins’ origins…In my country there are some myths on bridges or another High Medieval or Roman building (more os less in ruins/functional). Some old people said that they were made by the “moors”; another told in the popular folklore that they were built by the same Devil, in only a night (after a satanic pact of course). These legends have survived until the mid-20th century as “true” in the farm land. They were not precisely the gods outcome really…
Greeting all, two observations I would like to note/pass along:
The merchant side platform of the Great Online Ecommerce Sales Giant was suspended or unable to resolve web traffic for several hours yesterday. As I age, I have come to view these incidents as nonrandom. Yes, entropy related mechanical fatigue and failures occur, but too often these suspensions coincide with World Events.
A company I used to work for – medium sized enterprise was maliciously sabotaged (E-virus) about January 25 2020 paralyzing their entire operation for months. My intuition – unprovable – was that this was not state sponsored as the company was not paying for the next most expensive corporate security package – although – how separate are these entities in practice really…
In these parts, the skies were unusually/extremely active with planes and helicopters and drones. I recall from a former Secretary of State’s book, that in a tense negotiation there were no need to communicate to the Soviets the elevation of the Army to a higher degree of readiness – their sensors would reveal it to them. Perhaps we simple civilians can also make such inferences…
So I wonder rhetorically, what cosmic event took place Yesterday into whose warnings we dare to stick our members
Excellent read and yes there will, most definitely be blowback directed at Schwab and Co. People are starting to figure things out organically. It is why the Dutch farmers have become so unpredictable and are not backing down because they saw what happened to the Canadian Truckers at the hands of Justin Trudeau, a Schwab disciple.
The other thing working against them is that in order to have a centralized networked and global government, it takes massive amounts of cheap energy, which we no longer have. Wind and Solar cannot equal the productivity that oil creates.
I’m reminded of the 2009 Michael Ruppert movie trailer, “Collapse”. He figured it out and it all came down to oil because wind along with solar was a non-factor. As he said the current system of industrial civilization was built on oil, cheap and affordable energy.
Hello John Michael,
I was waiting relentlessly for this second part, thanks.
In your last installment, you mentionned that monument without naming it anyway I was able to figure it out. Can’t remember where I heard about the Georgia Guidestones at first but I guess it was reading one of your posts in the old blog. You tell me.
It is a pity that this monument got blasted. Not for the scriptures but for the overall symetric design of it which I like plus the fact it was made of carved stone.
If I may, I indulge myself with a proposal for the new crowdfunded Georgia Stones. We had, here in France, a tradition dating back to the aftermath of WWI to erect “Monuments aux morts” in every town to honour the memory of the locally-born soldiers who died fighting for our country. Most of them were built after WWI, a large part of them were rebuilt after WWII. I suggest to the fine people of the Elbert County to carve the names of departed friends and local figures who counted whatever this means for them. Doing so, they’ll build a monument for the future honouring the past and not the other way round.
Please JMG and fellow commenters, let me know about such a funding campaign, I may put a few eurobucks in that.
Those were my two cents for this week.
Cheers,
John–
Could you (briefly, of course) address the concept of conspiracy theory as a language? Serendipitously, I was just reading an article making reference to a recent conspiracy theory re the pens being used in voting booths (namely, that the pens placed there by election officials were designed to allow them to erase your mark and change your vote after you submitted your ballot) and your passing comment has piqued my curiosity of this phenomenon as a social device. What role does this mechanism play? How is it a tool for effective communication, organization, and action? The idea is fascinating.
It would be quite interesting to see what the good people of Elbert County would choose to engrave on a restored Guidestone. I actually hope that they do adopt your suggestion. As I’ve grown to disdain the elites and their “wisdom” more and more, I find myself very much attracted to the wisdom of the common man and woman. Folks who have to struggle for a living, and get creative in surviving. I think much better solutions would emerge from them, and not the likes of Schwab and other knock-off Bond villains.
If I were to make a serious suggestion about what should go on such a stone, I’d recommend a variation of a common Roman epitaph: “As your civilization is now, we once were. As we are now, so will your civilization be.” Or something like that.
Not a bomb. No footage of anyone planting a bomb. It was some form of RPG.
What words to put on a set of standing stones. An intriguing question. The seven laws in the language of ecology wouldn’t be a bad start. The 400 characters of the Qingjing Jing would be something to ponder. beyond that I’m running on empty.
A few of the rich and famous are getting called on climate hypocrisy.
https://weareyard.com/insights/worst-celebrity-private-jet-co2-emission-offenders
This was particularly interesting.
Taylor Swift’s representative said the following:
“Taylor’s jet is loaned out regularly to other individuals. To attribute most or all of these trips to her is blatantly incorrect.”
So is Ms Swift running an unlicensed charter service? The FAA may have something to day about that.
If she is not charging the people she is loaning to plane to, then that trip should count as a gift. Is she paying the gift taxes? The IRS may be interested in that answer.
And somewhere else Jay-Z claimed he did not own the plane. So he must be leasing it. Does that excuse him? I think not.
As for the Guidestones, I have nothing against a standing stone type observatory. Washington has Cement Henge along the Columbia near Goldendale. It’s also close to Maryhill Museum which is worth a visit.
https://www.maryhillmuseum.org/outside/stonehenge-memorial
Keep pounding the stake reverend Sir – you’ve done it but I want to see the vampire heart come out and go through the wound into the earth. The heart blood gusher you’ve hit is the motherlode. A palpable hit! Now if I can convince my fellow Christian’s we are dealing with rank heresy and a competing religion of progress and that there is an opportunity here I’ll be in tall clover…should get easier as the hubris and self inflicted stupidity mounts.
I’ve always been fascinated by artifacts designed to last forever but in contrast, also by daily life in ancient times. The idea of The Georgia FARMER Guidestones sounds excellent. Rarely do the common people get a say in monuments. Usually we have to piece together their lives from random bits of fossilized grain, graffiti and so forth.
From a different angle, I’m reminded of the Pioneer Plaques attached to space probes in the 1970s. They depicted some basic facts about the solar system but also a sketch of a nude man and woman to show any prospective ET who sent the probes. However, the woman doesn’t have a vulva line because our national institutions were still sufficiently prudish at the time that Carl Sagan didn’t think it would be approved with explicit female genitalia. I wonder how the whole project would go down today. Would it be cancelled for reinforcing the gender binary? And how would we choose the ethnicity of the figures? Sagan’s wife modeled the figures on classical Greek statues. Clearly an affront to the Global South.
tldr; So much of “eternal” art and architecture is just a cultural power snapshot in time.
Those engravings seem vague in certain ways, unrealistic, utopian, and fascist in others. The problems inherent in population control, eugenics and other forms of reproductive determinism, one world government, and some *****y enforced Esperanto are many. They could be remembered as some of the worst drivers of colonization and empire. I have no doubt that the people who erected the stones meant well and had a vision for the good of humanity. But so do many tyrants and theocrats. I like your more democratic suggestion for rebuilding the stones and your willingness to trust the best insights of everyday people.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Genesis 6: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.”
Somewhere the Bible says mankind in the ancient past was taught metallurgy, cosmetics, sorcery,, psychedelic drugs by non human entities, I’ll through in we were probably taught the alchemy of the lending of money at interest, too.
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
John, do you think Tarot deck could survive to the Long Descent and keep being a source of wisdom in the centuries ahead us? -Maybe this question could be in the E. Levi post, if you don’t mind to answer here…
And my second doubt is: do you think pop culture mythology could survive (in a transformed way, of course) to the contemporary world slow implosion?
I mean, wicked monsters and characters like: film and series zombies, Terminators, Candyman, evil aliens like Predator, demogorgons…(my list isn’t closed, you could add a lot of possible bad guys). I know you, John, don’t watch TV, sorry anticipated!
As a Christian, I would say that the commandments on the Guidestone definitely had the character of the Ten Commandments of the Anti-Christ. Several of them go directly against commandments of God. Maintaining a global population of less than 500 million goes against his command to be fruitful and multiply. Guiding reproduction rejects the fact that God controls the womb and creates people. Uniting the world under a single ‘living’ language denies that God created the nations and intentionally confused the languages at Babel. As for the commands that extoll truth and beauty… well, Satan often disguises himself as an angel of light.
Thank you JMG!
The deep dislike that the ordinary people feel for our ruling class, they are not “elite” in any meaningful sense of the word, is apparent in so many things. I’ve had disturbing dreams for the last few months that remind me of the possibility of political violence as in the assassination of a national leader.
I don’t think that it takes a person with the gift of prophecy to see that we are headed down a dark path.
Thanks, I enjoyed this! It dovetails with something I wandered into while following a trail of breadcrumbs left by another story (The Lion of Boaz-Jachin by Russell Hoban). The story makes metaphorical use of the ancient Assyrian royal lion hunts, bas-relief scenes from which were excavated during Sir Austen Henry Layard’s 19th century explorations of the ruins of Nineveh.
Thomas Mann Baynes’ marvelous painting of Assyrian palaces in Nineveh is evocative of the fallen capitol at its height, as are the stone sculptures and murals of the lion hunts preserved in the British Museum. For me, an aura of magnificent splendor and deep sadness hangs over them.
The last remnants of Nineveh were destroyed by ISIS in 2014. I can only speculate as to the significance of the name of an ancient Egyptian goddess connected with this particular modern tragedy.
Your image of the large apartment buildings engulfed by greenery growing up the sides reminded me of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which may actually have been in Nineveh, or so it seems.
Nothing lasts.
“Formation, transformation,
Eternal mind’s eternal delectation.”
Goethe, Faust
Dear JMG,
I confess that when I learned of the Georgia Guidestones bombing, I heard Buffy Sainte-Marie in the far distance singing:
“Though laws were carved in marble
They could not shelter men
Though altars built in parliaments, they could not order men….”
The whole trope of the corporate godmen in a postapocalyptic America seems to me so incredibly hubristic, which never ends well, and in fact is not ending well, right now. Frankly over and over again I find myself baffled and appalled by the egregious and needless stupidities of the elite whose immediate actions may well seal their doom in the short to mid term. And not a just a few stupidities, either, but stupidities so absurd that I couldn’t have anticipated them. While the blowback does not surprise me, it does worry me: things could get so ugly on the road down from Empire.
Having them rebuild the Guidestones with different “commandments” seems like a fine idea. Of course, since the words would be written by locals, there would not be the same air of mystery as there was when the words were written by some shadowy unknown entity, so the tourism may not be as good as it was– for better or for worse, more people care what the Illuminati think than what regular folks think. My other concern is that the elites would seize control of that process and then have the locals vote on either moving to commandments based on the Great Reset (“Eat bugs – own nothing – be happy”) or going back to the original wording.
Were it up to me, I would want the rebuilt Guidestones to simply say “SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE” in large letters in as many languages as will fit. That’s really the only thing we should presume our far-future descendants will want to hear from us ettins. Also it’s a nod to one of the greatest book series of all time, so there’s that.
Before reading this, I was going to post the horrible thought that came to me the other night, that what we’re in right now may actually be the recovery and the new normal. My PMC daughter told me Sunday to remain conservative in my investments because she expected “the COVID-caused recession” to last quite some time – several months, in fact. Of course, a moment’s thoughts on the political stalemate – offset by the dropping price of gas per gallon and per barrel – made me think “no.” In fact, “Gods forbid.” And then, “chaos was the new normal in every other collapse of civilization.” So….
Now you’ve made it plain that the well-meaning sentiments of the Georgia Guideposts (which I’ve never heard of before) and the reaction to it is simple proof of how far out of touch with reality I and mine actually are. (Bends over, plants a kiss on one hand and transfers it to suitable portions of anatomy, bids it a fond farewell.) And every last one of my descendants and those of my sister and brother are in the same boat. And those elders in this community, many of whom over 85 came from farm families and grew up knowing how to feed themselves.
Well, the Grateful Dead said it all. “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” And, no, the far future won’t have much use for us. Even the near future – when the recovery does hit, sometime in the 2040s, won’t have much use for “the Decades of Excess.” That much has been obvious for a long time. We’ve been in The Crazy Years for a lot longer than Robert Heinlein’s Future History timeline ever showed, and my grandsons and -nieces-and-nephews will be looking at those years. To which I hope you’ll devote a blog post or series somewhere down the road, just for those whose children tried to raise their children to be as resilient as possible *within the framework of the only ‘truth’ they know.
Thanks for listening to (reading) this screed (if you are), and let this walker-between-your-world-and-theirs know.
P.S. The one elder in the family with a nurturing heart, practical skills, and sound common sense in everyday matters, Shirley Vulpe, just passed away yesterday. My daughter, her daughter-in-law, called me before lunch to tell me. Her physical heart was failing her, her multiple problems finally overwhelmed her, and a heart attack took her from us. Prayers for her welcome: she had no religious beliefs that I know of, but respected mine. And her son’s and my daughter’s vague gropings towards a respect for Nature. And the pentagram Carol’s oldest son wears openly but will not talk about.
Oh, John Michael…what a beautiful, timely, and perfectly worded post! Just read it aloud to my beloved bride, Connie, and we both loved it…reminding us of our years of reading and recording some 400 of your Archdruid Report posts. Bravo!
@ Conan #18 – at least two commandments (not among the 10 Big Ones) were situational and should have had “and when you’ve finished, stop,” clause added to them. The one you cite, about going forth and multiplying and replenishing the earth, has obviously been fulfilled a long, long time ago.
The other one is the command to go forth and preach the Good News to all the nations. Every last nation on the face of the planet is aware of the Good News, and is pretty much up on what that message is. And if they then chose to say “Thanks, but no thanks,” they’ve still heard it. And we still keep sending missionaries out again and again, both to the heathen in hopes they’ll change their minds, but more often, to members of other denominations who are quite happy in theirs, thank you. “Okay! You’ve fulfilled that commandment! Take a break!”
Mr. Greer,
Loved the column, as usual.
I have to ask you, with respect to commandments 1 and 2, in your opinion what is the deal with the Davos set and population control plus eugenics? It is an obsession with these people.
I do not mean to suggest that population levels are not a problem, but I have also seen data that suggests that we are going to witness a die-off even if we weren’t plowing headlong into the consequences of climate change, resource depletion, and the inevitable wars that will follow. But, even if we do not witness such a die off… the suggestion that we “engineer” a sub 500,000,000 world population would require something monstrous.
Curious for your thoughts,
-Anonymous Millennial
“I’d like to suggest, on the off chance that anyone from Elbert County, Georgia is reading this, that the county might seriously want to consider running a GoFundMe campaign to rebuild the Guidestones.”
Hello Mr. Greer from Elbert County, Ga. LOL. Actually my daughter lives in Elberton, I live just down the road a half day’s easy ride on horseback.
I have read your work for years, back to the Peak Oil Blog, and have about 6 of your books both Kindle and Printed Paper — Green Wizardry, After Progress, Celtic Golden Dawn, The Long Descent, Dark Age America, and Retrotopia. So I have tried to put a little in the till.
I wish I could send more but I’m trying not to lose my house in this best of all possible worlds.
I’m 73 yrs old, Vietnam vet, and belong to the United Curmudgeons of America Society. I was almost elected president but I made the mistake of being nice to somebody and I will never hear the end of it.
You have improved, expanded, deepened, and flat out changed my thinking in many areas, primarily dealing with the next, round numbers, 10,000 years or so. I will continue to read your thoughts, and they could benefit a much wider audience but that would require thinking, etc.
Just great to see our little corner of Paradise mentioned in your blog.
I’ve been to the Guidestones several times. And everyone has an opinion from one end of the spectrum to the other. To me blowing them up is said. We should preserve the past, at the least as guidelines from the past, to learn from.
I will pass on your suggestion for GoFundMe action to my daughter but don’t expect much to happen from it.
Civilization is bumping along downhill now.
I sure would like to see how it all comes out, 5 or 10 thousand years from now.
Really enjoy your work. Pls keep it going as long as you can. Take care of yourself and your loved ones.
I’ve never left a message before, but saw Elbert county and go all excited. Got to run. Almost time for Norfolk Southern 2:30 Freight to pass thru. You can see if from the hill out back of my place…
oh gee, I don’t even have a handle or whatever an online name is called. I guess Jimywood will do, from the days when computer names could only have 8 characters.
Jimywood
Yorkshire, little rural museums are a lot of fun. If Elbert County does decide to rebuild the Guidestones with their own words on them, I hope they set up a museum in Elberton with info about the original version and what happened to it.
Your Kittenship, always a possibility!
Chuaquin, thanks for this! The Moors and the Devil are both familiar images of evil in southern European cultures, so I think that probably supports my point.
Joseph, many thanks for the data points. No question, a close eye to signs like these is worth while.
Rod, Mike Ruppert was right, of course. He was wrong about the timeframe, but of course he was far from alone in that.
Sebastien, hmm! I could definitely see that. If I hear about a crowdfunding project I’ll certainly post something.
David BTL, that needs an entire post, and it’s going to get one. Stay tuned!
Brenainn, I hope they do it! I think it’s pretty likely they’ll put the Ten Commandments on one of the stones and quite possibly the Bill of Rights or some summary thereof on another, but it’d be interesting to see what else they put there.
New Order, duly noted. Somebody blew it up, whatever the delivery system for the explosive charge.
Tom, keep working on it. There may be a monolith in your future. 😉
Siliconguy, funny. I’m glad to see them squirm.
Celadon, please do try to convince your fellow Christians that the worship of progress is idolatry — as of course it is; it’s rooted in precisely the same attitude that led to the building the Tower of Babel, according to the Bible narrative. If more people realized that the worship of progress is a religion, and a failed religion at that, we’d be much better off.
Brian, yes, I remember the fuss about the Pioneer plaques. It would be nice to see some alternative messages forwarded to the far future.
Michael, yep — vague, unrealistic, utopian, and authoritarian: you’ve just summed up the basic worldview of the WEF and other fix-the-world (-and-keep-us-and-our-friends-rich) brigade.
Dashui, it’s a good example.
Old Steve, excellent!
“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Chuaquin, it will survive if there are people who are willing to put in the effort to make it survive. That’s the thing that makes the difference.
Conan, fair enough. As I said, it’s hardly my job to tell Christians what to believe about the Antichrist.
Raymond, I’m very worried about that possibility.
Goldenhawk, interesting! The only thing of his I ever read was Riddley Walker.
Violet, now there’s a blast from the past! Thanks for this; I hope you’re feeling better.
Troy, funny! I could see that.
Brian #13, that’s why aliens don’t want to have anything to do with us – we send unsolicited nudes. 🙂
There’s an interesting study that showed a lot of people see the plaque figures as members of their own race. When I heard that I gave it another look to see what ethnicities they could be interpreted as. I could easily see the man as black and the woman as Native American or Thai. So it is pretty flexible.
Oftentimes the only difference between Gods and Devils is which side the definer is on. So it would make absolute sense that someone looking at such things as suspension bridges and massive dams would think of themselves as great enough to be Godlike in future societies while the people having to deal with the dangerous remains of their efforts would come to see them as a race of Evil Giants whom (The) God(s) had to destroy.
As for a locally-funded and built Georgia Guidestones II, I’d like to see it, even if it just has The Ten Commandments and the Ten Beattitudes on it. If nothing else, between those two lists you have a workable guide for a future society.
I remember reading about the Georgia Guide Stones when I was teenager. The message on them seemed reasonable enough if not practical, original, or likely. While reading your article you referred to them as “vacuous content.” That hits the nail on head perfectly. So much of the discourse I hear everyday is vacuous content. Thank you for helping me find some words to describe it. When I read your content, which I have been doing since 2010 I almost always find myself leaving with a sense of “same as it ever was.” Is that a conscious theme of your work or is that just my interpretation?
What strikes me most forcefully about these “commandments” is that they appear to be addressed to a presumed future elite, who hold the control of the earth in their hand.
Just for example, the first commandment: “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”
There is nothing in this sentence that could possibly recommend a course of action to a single person, a family, a community. As phrased, it could only be acted on by some party well enough placed to effectively act on behalf of humanity as a whole. When, again, will there ever be such an individual, or body? Also, it betrays the modern scientistic fallacy that a qualitative goal – “balance with nature” – can be addressed, by proxy, with a quantitative measure – “maintain humanity under 500,000,000.”
The rest of the commandments also read as if addressed to some future world government, and are not in any way “actionable” at an individual or small scale level.
I think the idea that what actually happens, happens because *someone* makes it happen… while there is no *someone* who can invalidate, or neutralise, what all the other *someone’s* will also make happen, is nowhere to be found in these commandments.
In any case, if the Go Fund Me you suggest ever happens, I will throw a fiver that way, just to see what comes of the *someone’s* of Elbert County deciding to make it happen!
Patricia, I’d be surprised if we get back up to this level once the current wave of crisis peaks and recedes. That is to say, I don’t think we’ve hit the bottom of the current cycle yet — not by a long shot. I’m very sorry to hear of your family’s loss; positive energy en route.
Michael, I know, it’s kind of a rehash, too!
Anonymous, the Davos set is incapable of believing that nature can do anything to us. They’re stuck in the mindset of triumphalist anthropolatry, convinced that Man is the Conqueror of Nature and that they get to tell Man what to do. The thought that we’re in the middle of a head-on collision with hard natural limits that they can’t manage is literally unthinkable to them; the ecological language they fling around is pure empty rhetoric — as can be seen by their enthusiastic carbon footprints. So the only reaction to population pressure they can possibly think of is managing population numbers, since management is what they do.
James, good heavens. Thank you for this! I’ve never been to Elbert County but it looks like a very pleasant place. Trust me, I’ll be writing until they pry the keyboard out from under my cold stiff fingers.
Godozo, that’s less true of traditional religions. Nobody in Anglo-Saxon England had any trouble at all telling the gods from the ettins.
Penny, excellent. Yes, that’s a central theme of mine and a very deliberate one. Only when we realize that history isn’t over, that progress just enables us to make the same old mistakes on a much bigger scale, and that the lessons of the past are just as relevant as they’ve ever been, can we maybe, just maybe, avoid some of those mistakes and learn from a few of those lessons.
Scotlyn, that’s an excellent point. As for a future crowdfunding project, I’ll doubtless chip into it too.
Dear JMG,
A hundred years ago probably every county seat in the American South erected a Confederate memorial. Among the motives might have been the passing of the last living veterans. Today iconoclasts in the big cities have removed them but if you visit the small towns most still have that little obelisk at the corner of the courthouse square. The appeal for those monuments was no doubt widespread, but still their creators represented a relatively more powerful group than say black Americans. Seems natural to want to speak to the future while remembering the past. I read somewhere that the Iroquois principle of considering the impact on seven generations wasn’t seven generations ahead but a balance of three generations back, today’s generation, and three ahead. That seems a human scale concept of time. Much beyond that is as you say, ego.
The rage continues to build among the populace (and things like the stupid “January 6” commission aren’t helping!). I too am concerned about political violence erupting, especially if the upcoming elections are more obviously fraudulent than usual. Let’s hope and pray we are all wrong and things will remain relatively peaceful.
“Violence begets violence” would be a nice engravement. Although it might be pleasant to leave the space as is and make it a park.
Here is your essay rendered in heavy metal format:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqodh4DEHOc
(Not a video, just music.)
JMG, of course it was a rehash (of important stuff)…that’s why we loved it so much! (I’m still a kid at heart… “Tell me that story again, daddy.” 🙂
After 19 years of itinerant speaking throughout North America (as eco-spiritual evangelists) we settled and now live permanently in the best part of Ypsilanti, Michigan: “Depot Town”, and live two blocks from our youngest daughter, Miriam Joy, her husband, Trevor, and their 26 month old granddaughter, Anjali Sirona. Just yesterday, in fact, she insisted that “Grandpa Mike” read the same book to her three times. I love it!
I’m reminded of what an author / teacher / collegial friend of mine recently said…
“Storytelling is humanity’s oldest information storage and retrieval technology, and it’s still one of the most effective, having been honed by our hominid ancestors for millennia: if you want knowledge to survive, turn it into a vivid story full of colorful symbols and incidents, tell it to children when they’re of an age to want to hear the same thing countless times, and they’ll be able to repeat it word for word to their own grandchildren most of a lifetime into the future.”
@Joseph I don’t know about yesterday, but Aug 1 Canada did decide to tax:
“certain vehicles and aircraft priced above CA$100,000 (€76,400) and certain boats priced above CA$250,000 (€191,000). It will be calculated at 10 per cent of the full retail value of the vehicle, aircraft or vessel, or 20 per cent of the value above the threshold.
The tax will only apply to new vehicles purchased by consumers for personal use. It will apply retrospectively to most sales made after 1 January 2022.”
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/08/01/tax-the-rich-canada-imposes-new-levy-on-luxury-cars-yachts-and-private-jets
I guess if you’re renting your private jet out to other celebrities, or using it for business or government though, that might not count. I wonder if they foresaw that loophole?
Maybe the answer is in the mysterious orb that feel on Mexico Sunday night!
““FOLLOWING UP ON THE METALLIC SPHERE THAT FELL ON TOP OF A TREE,” Luna wrote. “IT SHOULD NOT BE OPENED OR TRIED TO BE OPENED. A SPECIALIZED TEAM AT THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY OF MEXICO AND/OR THE SECRETARY OF NATIONAL DEFENSE NEEDS TO COLLECT IT AND TURN IT IN FOR SPECIAL STUDY.”
“ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE SPHERE THERE IS A CODE, BUT NO HOLE OR SLIT THROUGH WHICH IT COULD BE OPENED …. THESE SPHERES HAVE A TIMING MECHANISM THAT, AT A CERTAIN TIME THEY OPEN BY THEMSELVES AND SHOW THE VALUABLE INFORMATION THEY HAVE INSIDE.””
Well rats, now we’ll never know.
https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/bvmm7a/mysterious-metallic-orb-falls-on-mexico-may-contain-valuable-information-meteorologist-says
I find it funny that it was an Iowa physician that raised the Satanic Illuminati Stones of Hell, it’s almost as if he pulled a prank.
About the people from the future seeing us as evil djinns/demons/giants that offended the gods, they will be quite correct when one remembers what you wrote in the Dark Age America. The people that wrecked the climate, made the seas rise 100m, filled the world with weird chemicals and nuclear wastelands won’t be seen as gods or heroes or angels. And while the focus of the Dark Age America series was about, of course, America, the same disasters will happen everywhere. For example, China. It’s possible that the communists or their successors will be the last dinasty of China, because unlike other chinese colapses before like the ones in the end of the Han, the Tang, the Sung, and the Qing, this time the chinese overshoot too much due to fossil fuels and the ecological damage to China will make it hard for it to recover. The mongols, turks, malay and russians that will inherit the former middle kingdom won’t see the proud and arrogant Last Emperors of China in a good light. The same for India, for the matter, for the same reasons.
Now for the current news: Since the american government had it’s *** handed to it by the russians in the Ukraine while at the same time failing to goad Putin to attack NATO/USA first and trigger the mutual protection pacts that bind USA, Europe and Latin America, it tried to humiliate mr. Xi. It, of course, blew on the face of the american government. The bait wan’t taken, Xi didn’t kill or trapped Pelosi in Taiwan. Instead Xi decided it’s time to show that Taiwan is China and do live-fire military drills right on the coast of the island while at the same time closing the airspace for some time, showing to the oh-so-smart ancient chinese elites there that can be trapped in the island anytime the CCP feels like it and that the 20+ carriers american navy will do nothing. I belive that the taiwanese will soon sit on the table with the reds and settle the chinese civil war, another american PMC failure, like everything they do nowadays.
At least some of the European elite are catching on faster than others:
I have a family member who is doing consulting work for a European firm that’s over 100 years old and worth a few billion. They’re investing heavily to stand up solar production in North America, zero inputs from China. The chairman of the board told them privately that he thinks global trade will implode within 6-12 months and we’ll face a big recession or worse. He believes that Europe won’t be able to count on trade with anyone other than itself and America in the near future, and that any industries worth having need to be stood up independently in those countries.
This is more than a wild speculation. The firm is investing many millions of dollars to get such a project going. Of course any reader of this blog could have told us that, but it’s interesting that the old money elite of Europe see the writing on the wall. The only thing the chairman is missing is that solar doesn’t work well with increasing costs and decreasing availability of fossil fuels, but at least he acknowledges those fuels are going to be harder to get and more expensive in the near term, if he still misses the long-term ramifications.
JMG, I may be wrong, faulty memory or sources, my seminary training is old, but: As I recall the Antichrist is not a bad guy, but the ultimate BAD GUY, that is to say an imposter.
There is no-one on he horizon good enough to impersonate the Christ, so we needn’t worry about that for a while.
Dear JMG, thank you so much for the kind words! I’m still not 100% but I’m doing better than I was. Since part of this conversation concerns monuments from the past, if I may I wish to share some research I have done in local monuments and history with a little adventure in local archeology concerning the Old Town Bridge — constructed 1643 — and the newer Old Sudbury Road Bridge, constructed 1956: https://violetcabra.dreamwidth.org/315462.html
@SEBASTIEN LOUCHART #6
We also have these local memorials for the fallen soldiers of the two world wars in Germany. I have found the most obscure one in the Harz mountains where they errected a memorial just for the local foresters. If I come to one of these memorials, I always pause for a moment and commemorate the fallen. Therefore, I like your proposal very much.
Kind regards
Secretface
“Adapt to the circumstances you find yourself in.” Except, they’d already be doing that or they wouldn’t be the people of the future reading the relic. While I’m at it, I could give the Earth permission to continue to rotate.
As Scotlyn pointed out, the dictates of the Georgia Guidestones are goals, with no suggestion for how to achieve them and for the most part aren’t actionable by individuals. “Oh, truth beauty and love. Never would have thought of that. Thanks, O wise ancient ones!” Advice needs context to be useful. My inability to draw has spared the world from any number of dark cartoons, including this one: a woman has entered a living room with typical frilly decor, where her husband is lying dead of a self-inflicted gunshot, and the caption is, “For heaven’s sake Harold, what part of ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ didn’t you understand?”
So far I’ve only come up with three words I’d want to carve on an obelisk. “Wash your hands.” More likely to do some people some good than any grand moral position paper.
He have recently moved from the suburbs of Boston to a rural area in New Hampshire. I am far from convinced thes areas will do better than urban places. The point being the mass dependency on cars and trucks. Almost everything is too far to walk or bike. Basic things require some form of fossil fuel. It’s way worse than Boston suburbs for mobility.
I am trying to find an area where it is possible to have a small plot of land and not be very dependent on fossil fuels. Urban America is not it, but most of rural America sufferers from even more oil dependency.
Any suggestions?
It’s worth noting that both J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis referenced legends about the Ettins in their fiction, which is not surprising considering that they were two of the leading medieval scholars of the 20th century.
https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Ettenmoors
https://narnia.fandom.com/wiki/Ettinsmoor
The whole debacle over Covid and its ensuing lockdowns and economic ruin as aftermath smacks of the Vietnam War to me, and not just because deaths from the “vaccines” have caused a Vietnam-level mortality event among Millennials. I think historians will one day look at 2020 as the beginning of global human depopulation and the end of belief in Progress. Eventually, I believe far-future historians will consider MRNA vaccines to be the worst collective mistake ever made by the human race. Like Vietnam, those who were damaged by it or had loved ones taken by it will scowl with the bitter memory of it once 30 or so years have passed from the height of the nonsense (now). The main difference is the number of countries that participated in the Vietnam War versus the number of countries that bought into vaccine hysteria.
As for the stones, maybe rebuild them but leave them blank? It worked for Stonehenge. This time, how about a community garden around them? One reason I thought the Georgia Guidestones were so hideously ugly was the bald landscape of dead grass and dust surrounding them. No wonder they were called Nazi Stonehenge with their brutalist design, denuded landscape, and obtuse, anti-human messaging. I thought Zeus and Hera leveled them with lightning because of the way the George Floyd mural went up. I wonder if there was any bomb shrapnel found from humans setting up bombs? Whatever. Same result either way.
Princess Cutekitten wrote
“Sit down, kids, and Grandma will tell you how, aeons ago, the demons Pelosi and McConnell destroyed the Deecee people.”
Love it! I have a deep-rooted loathing for Nasty Nancy and Midnight Mitch, who are two of the foulest boils infesting the nether regions of the American body politic, the political equivalent of monkey pox.
Anonymous Millenial @ 26
From reading our host’s sketch of Kersten’s background, I think that Kersten was well aware of a die-back due to the resource constraints mentioned. He did not mention getting the population down to half a billion, just that we should stabilize it at around that point.
I sense that he thought if we didn’t maintain population at this level, and just let it resume growth, that in due course, we would again proceed into another round of overshoot, followed by another nasty die-back.
Antoinetta III
JMG,
I find myself linking the destruction of the stones – and your callout to put up stones – in the same context as the woke movement’s destruction of public monuments. I wonder if they have the capacity to make statues of similar craftsmanship, or can commission artisans who do, to put up statues of people they would like to see commemorated rather than destroying statues of those they do not.
Today’s nominee for the Marie Antoinette Obliviousness Award is;
“I don’t feel the pain of inflation anymore. I see prices rising but I have enough… I sometimes balk at the price of things, but I don’t find myself in a space where I have to make tradeoffs because I have enough, and many Americans have enough.” – SF Fed President Mary Daly.
Reportedly she makes $427,000 annually.
In regard to a new set of Guidestones, I would put “DON’T PANIC” at the top, and then, as mentioned, “SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.”
Although “HELLO SWEETIE” would also be good as it would include the other classic British Science Fiction/humor Institution.
Another humiliating failure for Sleepy Joe. this time at the hands of the KSA.
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/08/03/saudi-arabia-humiliates-joe-biden-with-major-oil-announcement-n606414
The passages on sorcery aren’t in the Bible, it’s in Enoch. Everything important supposed in the Bible is in Enoch. https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/
“1. And Azâzêl taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals 〈of the earth〉 and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all colouring tinctures. 2. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways. Semjâzâ taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armârôs the resolving of enchantments, Barâqîjâl, (taught) astrology, Kôkabêl the constellations, Ezêqêêl the knowledge of the clouds, 〈Araqiêl the signs of the earth, Shamsiêl the signs of the sun, and Sariêl the course of the moon. And as men perished, they cried, and their cry went up to heaven…” Ch VIII
They are roughly the Watchers, Angels meant to caretake earth(‘s people), but instead become the fallen Angels in rebellion. Then bound in body at least for “generations” maybe 5,000 years. That’s in Milton, which was written when Enoch was supposedly unavailable.
So would they be a god and a devil?
@ new order,
there is cctv footage of someone leaving a backpack next to a stone column at night time, running away and then the explosion.
@JMG, Funny that the authorities decided to push the other two stones over with a dozer when they weren’t damaged, and they were standing fine on their own. Maybe the county thought they were more trouble than they were worth?
Also, I saw a post that claimed they were exactly 666 miles from the UN headquarters in NYC. I haven’t confirmed this myself, but from the attached map, it looked accurate . Adds to the conspiracy aspect of it all.
Personally , I’m glad they’re ruble.
JMG,
Thanks for this. My first reaction to the destruction of the guidestones was a simple, ” ’bout time the Georgia boys got their act together”. Much like others, these stones, and their message made me sick to my stomach. Too bad we couldn’t have strapped them and Klaus together with one of Elon’s toys to test out the lunar navigation equipment. No oxygen needed since it’s a one way trip.
Good job whoever did it, 1st class scouting of the camera locations and explosives work too as laid out by Big Country. Happy to see that the townspeople didn’t waste any time finishing the job with dozers after. Downright creepy to live next to something like that, no matter how many tourists it drew. Probably had a line of volunteers to drive the dozers. Good riddance although your idea to replace them is an excellent one. Do you think they’ll (WEF, etc…) try to rebuild them since they clearly endorse the message?
Patricia #23, My condolences to you and your family.
Siliconguy @ #52,
How about an inscription that might be timeless: “And now for something completely different.” A good heads up for any era.
@Walt F #45 – I used to see cartoons like that from The New Yorker all the time.
Hi John Michael,
Yeah, do as I say, not as I do, was at the very forefront of my mind when I read about the apparent patron of the guidestones. Did he do as he implored others to do? That is the question. It’s all very well to make nice well meaning pronouncements, and it might even have made him feel good. But it’s another thing altogether to set hard limits upon yourself. Clearly, it’s not for everyone.
You got me thinking about this story. Hmm. As someone who has to work, I don’t ask other people to do things that I myself would not do. Of course, there are some things which need doing, that for all sorts of reasons I am unable to do (lack of skill / competency in an area), and of course there has to be an agreed upon exchange for that thing to take place. Here’s what’s weird about the Guidestones. The dude is just commanding, there is no reciprocal agreed upon benefits being offered to do what he is commanding. That’s a bigger problem than it first appears to be. An inability to explain a coherent vision and lay out the costs and benefits for going along with the thing, just doesn’t get any air time nowadays. Mate, if you asked why people are doing what they are doing, I hold strong doubts that they’d be able to provide a response. Maybe I expect too much?
It’s something I’ve been contemplating over the past few years. The folks at the top have confused strategy for being the end point. It’s merely a beginning, because afterwards comes: implementation; feedback; correction; communication; consequences etc… There is danger in such fixation upon strategy alone.
Anyway, it’s the prescriptive nature of the commandments which gets my heckles raised. And I must say, number seven could get a good airing. And may be a hint at who done what to the thing. 😉
Note to self: Don’t annoy Thunor. 🙂
Mate, I have my interests and desire to share stories, it’s enough for me. You take us on the proverbial road to Damascus – for much the same reason that incident took place all those long years ago. It’s a job that needs doing.
Cheers
Chris
JMG, I find myself at a bit of a loss here, and feel incredibly stupid since everyone else here seems to have instinctively grasped that the ‘commandments’ on the destroyed guidestones are inherently elitist and evil in the bargain. I can see how some might be twisted that way — the “living language” rubs me all kinds of wrong way. But isn’t five hundred million people a reasonable carrying capacity? Is there something evil about courts as opposed to bombs and bullets? Balancing the personal and the social? Leaving room for nature? Yeah, we’ve failed at all of this, because money corrupts everything and everyone it touches, and yes, that makes us colossal hypocrites, but all that need be added to the stone is “we didn’t do any of this, and look where it got us.” Are you suggesting that when the good people of Elbert county inscribe new words on the new stones, they’ll counsel for war, exploitation, and apathy? I can’t see that happening — but somehow that makes me prejudiced against rural folk…
@ Jasper, RE the Book of Enoch
Wasn’t Semjaza the name of the space alien who supposedly contacted Billy Meier?
I remember, long ago, hearing about the Georgia Guidestones and having mixed reactions. Part of me liked the thought of a stone structure erected in modern times that could potentially last millennia – as opposed to the practically ‘disposable’ buildings (domiciles, institutional buildings, high rises) that litter the landscape around most of the ‘developed’ world. But as soon as I learned that they were engraved with ‘commandments’ in various languages, I thought ‘vanity project / ego trip’. Sigh.
The Imp in me thinks that if a grand stone monument were to be erected in Canada in the year 2022 (perhaps somewhere in the windswept prairies of Manitoba), and if it needs to be engraved with pearls of wisdom to enlighten future generations, my humble recommendation is to carve into the stones in English, French, Cree and Inuktitut the following three gems: “Honk, honk!”, “Hold the line” and “Frack Trudeau!” The deep mysteries embedded in these three brief commandments should keep scholars two millennia hence busy pondering and theorizing and debating for a few centuries, at least! Who knows? Maybe it could become the equivalent of an ‘Emerald Tablet’ for some future cult!
Archdruid,
This was a really interesting take, thank you very much. On your comment that conspiracy is a hidden language, I’m reminded of this quote from Dune:
“In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding – symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol – secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub – languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our Imperial Security Forces must be ever alert to the formation of sub – languages.”
– Lecture to the Arrakeen War College by the Princess Irulan
Regards,
Varun
@ Walt F #45
> “Wash your hands.”
I think “Clean your room” has some traction in certain portions of the internets 😉
@ Ahriman, looking for places to live.
This may sound silly, but the solution is probably the suburbs (like where our host lives). James Howard Kunstler has raved about how they are not a living method of the future, but more subtle thinkers such as David Holmgren have looked at them and have seen potential. Not just city suburbs either, large rural towns follow the same development patterns. The best land for gardens and small farms will be on the fringes of small cities and towns, ideally close to a river (most towns are anyway) as the cost and effort to transport food will be less.
Humans tend to adapt in situ unless there is war/plague/famine, and there is enormous amount of building stock, vacant land and high residual soil fertility due to lawns and ornamental gardens to be utilised for food growing in the suburban living patterns. There is also lots of roof space that can be used for catching water if that is needed.
As you say, transport costs are lower than living fully rural, and farms will probably become more populated anyway, taking on a sort of village feel to them. Without cheap oil, human labour becomes vital and more numbers will needed. The key is making cities and towns more wild and rural, and making farms more like villages.
Many years from now, a boy’s mother was very sick. The boy was crying next to his mother’s bed, and asked his father why does his mother have to die.
The father though for a second, and then said, “You know, your grandfather once told me the story of the evil necromancer Fauci. One day, Fauci promised the king he can prevent people from dying. The king was very impressed, and built Fauci a castle. In order to build the castle, he had to raise taxes, and many people staved to death, but everyone accepted that Fauci needs corpses for his magic.
Then, after 2 years, Fauci came out of his castle with a magic potion. He said everyone should drink the potion, and anyone who does not, his grandmother will die. Some people refused to drink the potion, and the king sent his knights after them, but some survived by hiding in the woods and eating fruit and hunting rabbits. In the next full moon, anyone who drunk the potion turned into dust.
It is said Fauci took the kingdom’s riches and ran away, nobody knows where. He is still looking for corpses for his wicked experiments”.
Yet another masterpiece: you provide a perspective on events that can’t be found anywhere else!
@SiliconGuy:
> Although “HELLO SWEETIE” would also be good as it would include the other classic British Science Fiction/humor Institution.
More appropriate might be to inscribe “NO MORE” in large letters and spray paint “BAD WOLF” next to it.
Kyle #41: on my Facebook feed, somebody suggested that we could solve all the world’s energy needs if only we cover 1.2% of the Sahara with solar panels. I assumed it was yet another piece of random idiocy floating down the sewer pipe which is Facebook, but it appears at least a few of our best and brightest have contemplated doing this.
https://futureu.europa.eu/processes/GreenDeal/f/1/proposals/725
Several scientists have raised objections that covering large chunks of the Sahara with hot solar panels might change the climate. I find it interesting that none have objected to this scheme based on the fact that there ain’t no way in Hades we’re going to build 100 billion square meters of solar panels. And if we do there ain’t no way we’re going to be able to ship them out to the middle of the Sahara and maintain them. They can calculate the albedo changes from covering the Sahara with panels, but they never gave a thought to the practicality of the plan.
Ken Breadner #60,
The population of the world until fossil fuels hovered around 1 billion, there’s a reasonable carrying capacity without any fossil fuels. Talking about it in this context gets you into useless eaters and other eugenics concepts like forced sterilization. As always, who decides? One man’s wisdom is another man’s brain fart.
Better to fight it out than depend on the courts, who don’t exactly fulfill anyone’s idea of justice these days. Personally, I’d bring back pistols at dawn…duels would solve things better than the courts do. Contrary to the foolishness of the song Imagine, if there is nothing worth dying for, there is truly nothing worth living for either.
As far as preserving nature, you’re talking about a group that never deals with it except in the abstract. I wonder how many animal rights activists would freak completely if a coyote or bear snacked on their prized poodle in front of them. Nature is brutal and uncaring, nothing is special. Roll up your sleeves and get in the mud before talking about nature. Our elites certainly consider themselves too good for this although I’d pay real money to see how they react to a hungry wolf or bear in an actual forest.
As far as exploitation, most of those who lecture the rest of us, got their positions by selling others down the river. Hard work doesn’t get you in those circles. Ol’ Soros himself is an admitted nazi collaborator. How many did he, a Jewish man, personally send to Dachau? By all accounts, he was pretty enthusiastic about it and profited very handsomely from selling his people out.
These people believe our only purpose is to serve them, probably eventually as biodiesel. This type of language has been weaponized most of my adult life (30+ years) by peoplewho want nothing less than absolute power. Thankfully, as JMG notes, reality eventually catches up to such clueless fools.
Hypocrisy is apparently as infinite as human stupidity.
Pixilated @39,
I seem to recall a fiction by a certain Michael Crichton regarding a particular ‘sphere’ ..
I wonder if perchance some empty Smokehouse Almond wrappers were found within the vicinity of any of those orbs?? ;]
I’ve posted some book corrections for you on your Dreamwidth site. I just didn’t want you to miss them.
OT: But Blankenhorn cites the (PMC) gerontocracy, due to advances in medical technology for those who can afford it, as part of the reason for the childishness of people in their 30s. “A generation of Prince Charles’,” he notes. I think he may well have a point.
ttps://www.danablankenhorn.com/2022/08/side-effect.html
Daniel, that seems like a reasonable approach.
Your Kittenship, prayer strikes me as a very good idea just now.
Syntax, and of course that’s also an option.
Cliff, ha! I hadn’t encountered The Sword before — nor, for that matter, any other doom metal band that has its own signature brand of hot sauce — but you’re right, they’re singing what I’m saying:
“The people of the old world
Growing fat and blind
Exalted thieves, fools and liars
Ignoring every sign
Then came days of darkness
Then came nights of flame
They knew their world was ending
And they wept in fear and shame
Hammer of heaven!
Hammer of heaven!
Hammer of heaven!”
Luciano, it’ll be interesting to see what the Chinese do in response. I hope it’s not a kneejerk invasion of Taiwan — they’d probably win, but the human cost would be horrific. There are better ways to mess with the US imperium.
Kyle, fascinating. That’s a good sign.
Michael, oh, granted, but the Antichrist-of the-Month Club has been a going concern for nearly 2000 years now and it’s still got plenty of subscribers. Do you recall when Saddam Hussein was supposed to be the Antichrist?
Violet, glad to hear it. Many thanks for the bridge info.
Walt, I’m sorry you can’t draw. That would be a hilarious cartoon.
Sardaukar, I suspect Lewis got the idea from Tolkien, since they talked shop constantly during the Inklings years and there’s a lot of Tolkien’s linguistic input all through Lewis’s fiction.
Kimberly, I like the idea of a garden around the stones. If I ever have the chance to set up a stone circle it’s going to have flower beds around it.
Jastin, of course not. That’s why they’re tearing down statues and banning books — they can’t bear the thought that people in previous generations were better artists and writers than they are.
Siliconguy, I heard about that. Just when you think elite cluelessness is already epic, somebody like Daly comes along and raises the bar.
Sardaukar, our puppet on a stick-in-chief doesn’t seem to be able to do anything but fail at this point.
Karl, what I read is that the other stones looked fine superficially but the whole structure was badly damaged.
BobinOK, I doubt the WEF has even heard of them, but we’ll see.
Chris, Kersten had four children, so he had no business telling anybody what to do about overpopulation!
Ken, er, did you read my post? I explained in quite some detail that it’s the context, not the content, that explains the justifiably hostile reception the Guidestones got.
Ron, I hope you start a crowdfunding project tomorrow to erect such a monument. If you do, I’ll contribute, and encourage others to do so!
Varun, hmm! Where in the Dune saga is that from? I don’t recall it in Dune itself.
Bakbook, I could definitely see stories like that being told.
Blue Sun, thank you.
Jon, got ’em and thank you.
Patricia M, there’s something funny going on with the gerontocracy these days — all these old politicians with faces like stiff leather. I wonder if whatever they’re taking has had any long term testing…
I’m STILL mad about the U.S. government going after Saddam, who was one of the very few secular leaders in the Middle East at a time of ascendant religious fanaticism. The authors of that train wreck should all be tried for sedition. 😡
“Don’t write naughty words on walls if you can’t spell” is what I would inscribe on new Georgia Stones.
“That didn’t work out very well for them, did it?” The other raises an eyebrow and says, “I’m reminded of one of their proverbs: ‘do as I say, not as I do.’”
Reminded me of….
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
It’s easy enough to get conservatives to not listen to Schwab and other Davos types. It’s much harder to get them to think about the possibility that the brightest future we can possibly have doesn’t involve drilling and burning more and more oil. As you pointed out, the Club of Rome produced one glittering diamond (LtG) and then a giant steaming pile of counterproductive poo. All that poo makes it very easy to ignore the diamond if doing so aligns with your preconceptions.
On the related topic of climate change, I find it most helpful to point out simple yet surprising things: I’ve lost count of the number of intrigued nods I get when I point out that squirrels’ tails are less bushy than when we were kids. A few months ago, you posted the USDA hardiness map from 1980 vs today, which is something I’ve been meaning to assemble for my own use for a while (thanks, BTW).
Dashui #15: “Somewhere the Bible says mankind in the ancient past was taught metallurgy, cosmetics, sorcery,, psychedelic drugs by non human entities.” I think you’re thinking of the latter half of Genesis 4 (two chapters before the bit about the Nephilim). It actually implies that music and metallurgy were human inventions, rather than being stolen from gods or given as gifts from them. Genesis doesn’t paint a very pretty picture of humanity, but this bit is surprisingly humanistic.
BobInOK (no. 70) ” Ol’ Soros himself is an admitted nazi collaborator.”
Nonsense. He was 14 at the end of the war. This shameful talking point comes from Lyndon LaRouche and the alt-Right:
https://www.vox.com/2018/6/11/17405784/george-soros-not-a-nazi-trump
https://momentmag.com/no-holocaust-survivor-george-soros-was-not-a-nazi
Dear Americans and John Greer. I am a simple Russian woman from Siberia.
I have a lot of respect for you, dear druids. Me too, for 30 years – in close relations with one birch grove and a pine forest. They speak with me, smile me, healing me and my friend.
I fell in love with you for your light soul, for reasonableness and care for our Mother Earth.
Unfortunately, we do not divide people in all nationы – into good men or bad.
Now the Russians consider all Americans – the enemies, and the Americans and Europe consider us terrible.
We are indeed different, but there are deep historical and spiritual reasons for this. But the forces of evil want us to hate each other, but me and my friend will speak well of you, people of the West as hard workers, very responsible, high educated.
The future was predicted by Oswald Spengler: the Russian-Siberian culture will be next. But we will not build it without you, without your organization, experience and responsibility.
God bless you. Believe me – you are loved in faraway Siberia.
Thank you for sharing your perspective on this! I’d heard of the guidestones, but I previously had thought of the messages on them as pretty innocuous at worst and didn’t see the hostility to them as having much basis. Considering them alongside the sorts of things our current “elite” often say and comparing them hadn’t occurred to me.
Thanks also to Conan #18 for providing a Christian perspective here; I’m not and have never been one, and your explanation further informs me about at least some of the reasons for the hostility.
I think I just hadn’t considered the guidestones very deeply before in general.
Re Rod #5: In case you don’t know this site:
https://ourfiniteworld.com/author/gailtheactuary/
Gail has been talking about energy prices (oil and so called alternatives) and how it affects our industrial civilization. She’s a professional actuary and doesn’t waffle around like the Greens do.
This is the most incisive put down of Schwab and his friends that I have ever seen. Beautiful.
Very interesting.
R.C. Christian could just be Roman Catholic Christian? At least that is what jumped out at me while reading, but it may be too simple.
The Guidestones strike me as both banal (yes, indeed, it is better to be wise than unwise!) and hopelessly utopian – a curiously common combination. I do think it is an interesting reminder that the Schwabs of the world are not the only ones capable of putting forward such ideas. I imagine there must be quite a few poor utopians with similar ideas, but insufficient resources for monuments or reset guide publishing.
Hey JMG, interesting post. It’s a mind bender to think about the future, and what humans will think about their ancestors, in spite of the extensive discussions on the topic in your writings. If I was 25 or 30, I would probably think the guidestones had some good ideas, since I’ve been concerned about overpopulation since the early 1970s.
Now that I’m 60 and seeing some of my concerns unfold, it’s difficult to wrap my head around how much my life experience and understanding of human nature has changed. What I thought was OBVIOUS at 25 (don’t breed like yeast, we’re all gonna die in the waste!) is now viewed more of how the inevitable end to the fossil fuel bonanza will play out. It’s a Long Descent, collapse, and a lower bounce back up unless aliens or fusion come to the rescue.
The good news is that the suffering ahead will in part only be suffering relative to our current standard of living. The will be plenty of misery, but also the future world will in many ways be an improvement over what we’re seeing today.
Hello, JMG.
I’ve just watched a take of my favourite divulgation chanel on the issue of ‘experts’. Briefly, it said that there are four conditions for becoming a real expert:
1. Repeatable.
2. Non randomness.
3. Immediate and clear feedback.
4. Deliberate practice.
The key is that for becoming an expert, the person has to learn patterns and these patterns must exist. There are no patterns in randomness. It’s impossible to learn patterns unless you watch the process again and again. You can’t say if the pattern you are learning is right or wrong without adequate feedback, and that feedback has to come fast so our brain can make the association. And finally, repeating the easy and familiar stuff does not lead to a better understanding of the patterns because we aren’t looking at the big picture.
These conditions exclude from expertise a whole bunch of self-proclaimed experts, like:
– Policy makers (not enough repetitions)
– Gamblers (randomness), stock brokers are essentially gamblers.
– Economists, human resources, (delayed feedback)
– Comfy workers. They don’t increase their level of expertise if they keep working on the already familiar stuff.
So here we have the Guiding Stones, from self-proclaimed experts, talking about a field where expertise means nothing. Why half a million people? Who did the math? It looks too arbitrary, too round a number for being the right answer to overpopulation.
Nature impose her commandments more than anything we could dream for. If we could talk her language, maybe we could understand what the real limits are, but her language is obscure. It cannot be expressed in human language, so even if a blessed being is able to see where the limits are, he won’t be able to express it in a way that everyone else understands.
A commandment in a stone cannot solve it.
Archdruid,
It was a chapter header in Children of Dune.
@Kyle #41
I currently work on a project with an electrician who told me that his company is currently building a large storage building to counter the material shortages due to global supplychain issues. Funnily, I observed the opposite trend within a company I worked for 7 years ago. They closed their storage back then as trucks became some kind of mobile storage in Germany. Would be interesting to know whether they are also reversing their decision.
@JMG and commentariat
Regarding economic viability of alternative energy resources –
What’s your take on the concept of Enzymatic Fuel Cell tech? From my (admittedly limited)reading of the literature on the same, this seems to me to be another one of those options which can work, but only on a small to medium scale. As scaling happens in a nonlinear manner, I’m rather skeptical about whether this can power, say, a steel mill, but I do think that a low tech version of these could be used to power a small bakery of biscuit factory which uses small, light, intermediate complexity, non-electronic machinery in the deindustrial future. However, I’m open to the idea that my assessment could be wrong, so I’d like to know your thoughts on this.
On the Guidestones I would leave the words of GK Chesterton as a remedy to chronic chronological snobbery-
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
JMG, you say,
“…the Davos set is incapable of believing that nature can do anything to us. They’re stuck in the mindset of triumphalist anthropolatry, convinced that Man is the Conqueror of Nature and that they get to tell Man what to do. The thought that we’re in the middle of a head-on collision with hard natural limits that they can’t manage is literally unthinkable to them; the ecological language they fling around is pure empty rhetoric — as can be seen by their enthusiastic carbon footprints.”
I agree with this sentiment. However, I’m having trouble reconciling your sentiment here with your enthusiasm for the ideas in another book from the Davos set, Club of Rome, Limits to Growth. It is presented on their website, as I’m posting this comment, as the oldest of their featured publications. As I look back through your comments on the book, I haven’t found any explanation regarding the bona fides of the authors, why you think the work might be an exception to similar publications, etc. Could you explain this apparent contradiction, at least in the way you think about it, please?
I’m already planning my equivalent of the Guidestones, which is a Leechbook or archaic medical text. One of the best known examples is the Leechbook of Bald, probably compiled in England sometime in the ninth century. My Leechbook will contain details of how to cultivate and use specific medicinal plants for the purpose of making general anaesthetics. These were widely known about in ancient Roman and medieval times, but this knowledge was lost by the time of the Napoleonic wars, with the result that if you needed a limb amputated, your anaesthetic would most likely be a piece of wood to bite on. I think it would be knowledge worth preserving, and who knows, someone in the far distant future may even be grateful for it. So when I have finished my Leechbook, I will solder it into a metal box, bury it six feet deep and hope for the best.
Conan says,
“Maintaining a global population of less than 500 million goes against his command to be fruitful and multiply.”
A text is best understood in whole, rather than in part. In many translations of Genesis, the text is, “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth.” It doesn’t say, “rip it to the bone, burn it, then toss the ashes in the sea.”
The “replenish” part implies some degree of what in modern secular talk would be called “sustainability”; this requires some limits.
Many texts have “replenish” absent. Nonetheless it says, “be fruitful and multiply” (while the “replenish” is replaced with “have dominion over” or “subdue” the Earth). But if the Earth’s resources are finite, then there is some upper limit to population at which it will no longer be “fruitful.”
There are many readings. This is of course the reason for the immense historical popularity of the various books of the Bible (Old Testament or Torah, and New Testament both, as well as Koran etc). If a text has only one very clear unarguable meaning, it will only appeal to a minority of people. If it has a million possible meanings, it can appeal to lots and lots of people.
@Patricia Matthews #73
I had to look up Dana Blankenhorn and seriously, I wish I never did! Just out of curiosity, why cite this prime example of the pmc here, of all places? I don’t get it.
BobInOK #70
” Ol’ Soros himself is an admitted nazi collaborator. How many did he, a Jewish man, personally send to Dachau? ”
When Dachau opened in 1933, George Soros was 3 years old. When it was liberated by the US military in 1945, he hadn’t yet turned 15. How exactly did he send other Jewish people to this place?
It’s interesting how often facts get in the way of conspiracy theories.
I’m not defending Soros in any way, he’s no different than any other greedy, selfish elitist.
I was thinking that physical markers of legend, lore and intent like the Guidestones have lost a lot of their allure in the era of the internet and cell phones with online photos, geomarkers etc. I went to college in the a time just before the onslaught of the digital age on a large old campus spread across hills, creeks, waterfalls and woods. It was chockablock with little hidden plaques, engraved rocks,and carved symbols in out of the way places. These held a lot of mystery and allure when you had to find them by word of mouth . Most of them would seem trivial today when they pop up in selfies on Facebook. But as you have mentioned, we will soon be leaving the era of online photo sharing and entering a time when physical records tell our story to future generations.
Each county erecting its own monument is a thrilling idea to me. The country was pretty much run at the county level until the turn of the 20th century when pressure began to centralize and efficiently manage every aspect of live (points at Pluto). I’ve enjoyed watching how during covid everything got broken down into the county level reporting. Was getting 1800’s vibes from much of the crisis.
Returning to a form of governance where people can actually see and speak in person with those that wield power over their lives would be very welcome.
In terms of local county monuments, I’d like to report that a decade ago Clearfield County in PA rebuilt the log cabin where their resident killed federal marshals looking to round up Union Army deserters. And Westmoreland county started a celebration of the Whiskey Rebellion a few years back. While not stones, I think they indicate the values that matter to the residents now.
JMG, excellent essay. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to Wednesdays when your new issues come out.
One comment regarding your proposition “I don’t think it has entered their darkest dream just how deeply most people despise them.”
I’m not so sure. I had the dubious honor of going to school with some of the scions of the wealthy. My sense of it was that they not only knew how deeply they were loathed by the hoi polloi, but they actually relished it. It signified to them that they were indeed in a different class than the masses, and class is where that whole game is played. Not only that, but the ire of the rabble means they KNEW they were in a different class. Mission accomplished! And the most gratifying part? They also knew that the masses could despise them as much as they liked, but there was nothing they could do about it. That’s power!
Thanks again, sir, for doing what you do!
This discussion of the stones and what happens next reminds me of “A Canticle for Leibowitz” by Walter Miller Jr. and “The Book of the New Sun” by Gene Wolfe. Complete with religious – Christian overtones.
I wonder if these folks like Schwab actually have a Christ-complex of sorts. They come to bring the message of the Coming World and how the Old World will pass away unless we heed these silly people with their silly ideas.
As for the leathery faces, it is a known fact that Pelosi and Kerry both use Botox extensively.
This discussion reminds me of the time my husband and I drove a 1000 miles inside Virginia tracing Grant’s Route to Richmond. Everywhere, there were a monument to a fallen Confederate general in fields, at lawns, beside roads. About the only general who did not have one was A.P. Hill who got a laundromat named for him at the place he died. I wonder if the statue breakers will go out into the countryside and destroy all those including the laundromat?
During the same time, Virginia was also establishing a Civil Rights Trail for people to follow. They even marked stuff about Nat Turner’s Revolt. The statue breakers did not take to this trail since it was not controversial except for Nat Turner.
An aside, Nat Turner brought to mind about what people remember long after everyone is dead. People still shudder at the name of Nat Turner and how he went on a rampage killing white people. As for me, I never learned about any of this until the locals told me. (I am after all from Northern New England.)
Hello, Mr. Greer,
Love the proposal to Elbert County and love James/Jimmywood’s message, too! I agree the stones and their demise leave a vacuum waiting to be filled.
On the subject of the stone’s final commandments, which seems to place humanity into an odd paternalistic relationship with nature, I say we would all do well to remember who’s really “in charge” here, so to speak.
Coincidentally, I just took on this subject myself, prompted by our once-again onslaught of record rainfall and resulting flooding here in the Midwest: https://www.brunettegardens.com/2022/08/flood.html
By the way, the encounter I describe with a pair of barred owls in that piece – I’m convinced it grew out of my own work as an ovate in the Celtic Golden Dawn practice. This strip of nature is where the tree grows that I’ve chosen for my tree working. One of the owls flew down onto a branch inches above where I usually stand for my tree working, right as I was walking toward the spot.
So thank you, thank you, thank you for that.
I actually considered this yesterday, but decided to sleep on it before I posted here.
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/peering-dimly-through-the-wreckage
I think that this particular column by a new writer (Aurelien) ties in well with JMG’s long term project, of which this weeks Ecosophia post is just the latest installment.
The future is going to be different, but only the people we will be in the future will understand that.
What I think is an appropriate quote:
“The future is there,” Cayce hears herself say, “looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Thanks again to JMG and the Commentariat for everything.
As the Great Drought of South Western USA continues over the next years. We will see many giant infrastructural structures abandoned across the desert South West.
I can imagine carving into the faces of freeway abutments, dams and other large concrete slabs.
What to put there ?
Massive reliefs showing our cultural heroes and Gods.
Words of wisdom to last for the ages.
Or just bizarre graffities to play with the minds of those who come after.
An aside:
After doing the math with the information that I have available, I find that if the drought continues for one more year, 30 to 60 percent of the people who live in some large metro desert cities are going to have to leave.
My calculations are in no way definitive and are most likely wrong about the date that refugees start leaving for a number of reasons.
That said, It will happen, the south west will depopulate.
Re: Sword – wow. As someone with a few semesters of Anglo-Saxon/Viking mythology & poetics under my belt, all I can say is, that is the exactly the same thing in spirit, but totally American in style.
Re: the gerontocracy’s stiff leather faces (a touch of Parkinson’s?) – and then there are the great big wide smile-for-the-camera smiles of the youngest candidates I’ve seen photos of. Gaah. And that’s just the men. (Great big wide smiles seem to have been obligatory for women about as long as I’ve been alive and noticing such things.) sigh. Well, I’m not about to knock things about old folks that might be physical in origin. But, yeah. Struldbrugs.
JMG: The quote was from “Children of Dune” Loved it then, love it more now.
Guide stones written by farmers would be fantastic. I’m not a farmer, but I work with a number of them at my factory (few people realize that most farmers need to work a second full time job in order to get benefits and makes ends meet… yes, we actually make the people who feed us work an entire extra manual labor job just so they have the privilege of then working one of the hardest and certainly most necessary of jobs…). Having observed these workaholics in their natural habitat I feel like their whole ethic would boil down to 1) work hard 2) be honest 3) treat people right and 4) if in doubt review rule number 1. Oh, and by the way, did we mention work hard? Too add insult to injury, if we reigned in Wall Street with just a couple simple rules governing commodities markets the prices would reflect sanity and the imbalances between the labor class and the upper classes would go a long ways towards equity.
And the anger continues to grow. Various parts of South Africa, including Madagascar, Tembisa are now witnessing riots, violence and blockades due to high prices for food, fuel and electricity. The Plebs continue to voice their frustrations at those in charge. What is interesting is that a recent Poll taken shows that more Americans have now heard or read about the WEF and Klaus Schwab. That might not bode well for Lord Schwab.
Glenn Frey: The Heat Is On.
@ Mateo #91: the limits to growth analysis is regarded by JMG as solid. Their subsequent reams of prescriptive output as to what to do is vapid and self serving and techno-narcissistic. And this seems to be objectively the case. Much like modern science, great on analysis and details, worse than useless on what it all means.
@Ecosophian #76, in the same spirit I’ll nominate “Let not the sands of time get in your lunch.”
(For the references, see “Tom Lehrer Be Prepared” and “Deteriorata” respectively.)
@Ecosophian #76
“Don’t write naughty words on walls if you can’t spell”
I very much enjoy reading the comments of such a classically educated commentariat 😉
– Lothar
Thinking about adages and laws suitable for guidestoning (including the Scout Oath and “Desiderata,” parodies of which I just mentioned) reminded me of a list I complied many years ago as part of an online discussion. It’s a random sampling of rules, adages, and “natural laws” from enumerations of rules and laws from as many different sources as I could think of, ranging from The Kybalion to Romper Room. I must not have known about, or not remembered, the Georgia Guidestones when I compiled it, or I certainly would have included a selection from it. I made no attempt at completeness, internal consistency, or consistent agreement with my own views.
I hadn’t thought about carving them on a monument, but that might be a pretty good way to convey to the future, “yeah we had a few ideas but you’re going to have to figure it all out for yourselves.”
1. Energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system.
2. He who hesitates is lost.
3. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
4. Liquor is not sold on Sundays.
5. Do not covet anything that is someone else’s property.
6. Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.
7. Look both ways before crossing the street.
8. Everything that exists can continue to exist only by being in balance with itself, with other things, and with the whole system of which it is a part.
9. It is attachment that causes suffering.
10. Keep yourself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.
11. Social harmony results from everyone accepting their place in the natural order.
12. If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye.
13. It is what it is.
14. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
15. An object will remain at rest or in uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force.
16. The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
17. Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.
18. Do be a plate cleaner. Don’t be a food fussy.
19. Do what ye will, and harm no one.
20. Do not tell your troubles to others unless you are sure they want to hear them.
21. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
22. In a right triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the adjacent sides.
23. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try one more time and then quit and binge-watch House of Cards.
24. Only Nixon could go to China.
25. The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
26. Almost all processes that are not obviously simple can be viewed as computations of equivalent sophistication.
27. Never use a tool that’s more intelligent than you are.
28. Luminous beings are we. Not this crude matter.
29. Like causes like; and things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.
30. Nearly all energy used by plants and animals comes directly or indirectly from the sun via photosynthesis.
“There were giants in the land in those days, and after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. The same became mighty men which were of old – men of renown.” Gen. 6:4.
This narrative (among others) illustrates how early farm communities had to contend with wandering hunter-gatherer tribes that constantly raided crops and killed livestock, as though they had little regard for the new-fangled institution of civilization. Fossil evidence has revealed that wild humans were, on average, quite a bit taller and more robust than even their contemporary settled cousins; this being due to their protein-rich diet and their healthier, more natural lifestyle. (Farming was brutal on the physical frame, and the mostly grain crop-yields, meager in nutrition.)
It’s no wonder, then, that the ancients were in a state of ambivalent awe of their ‘giant’ cousins. We see shadows of this motif in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Garder of Eden stories as well…Apparently this mythic relationship with the past can go in a number of different directions.
I have always found it very interesting that Thanos’s “evil” plan was to disappear half of all humans in the universe because we have destroyed it and become out of balance with nature. (For those like our host who don’t watch Marvel. Thanos is the main “bad guy”.) He is beaten by Hi-Tech and “magic” and violence. Thanos, at the end, after irradicating half of humanity is found in a “Garden of Eden” where he is beheaded. (Of course, the plucky heroes, again using tech and magic, are able to save the day by going back in time to change the outcome.)
Thanos’s vision for the future is actually very similar to the messages on the stones. (And, honestly, not too different from the final outcome that will be forced upon humanity over the coming century if we are lucky! Although I don’t agree with the method involved mind you.) These movies, in my mind, are the best propaganda propping up the myth of progress right now.
I would love to have JMG see the movies and then do a writeup!
Pretty please!? (and yes I know you don’t watch the flickering images on the TV but…. Wow that would be interesting!)
Eric in MD
As some readers might already know, I have lived in my house in northeastern Illinois for about six years. When we arrived, the tiny house (not built that way on purpose, it’s a hundred years old) was a hot mess and the yard was a blank slate of waist-high overgrown lawn, no trees except for two mostly dead elms that I sadly had to have taken down and a Rose of Sharon bush that I moved to a sunny spot in back where it seems much happier.
My obsession over the years has been geometric path gardens. I have possibly one of the handiest husbands on Earth, so when he asked what I would do the yard in my ideal world, I drew him a picture of a classical garden. He went to work. Now I have two geometric gardens: one in the front that is the Double X form, whatever that is called, and an herb garden that is a circle with a cross bisecting it into four quadrants in back. Everything else is patches of grass (working on entirely getting rid of those, including the city owned part in the front) and groups of hardy perennials.
It’s really odd how the energy of that yard has changed. The feral cats’ favorite part of the yard is definitely the herb garden. They sleep in the monarda, daylilies, and yarrow. The back has drawn quite a few dying animals who seek it as a final comfort. The geometric parts of the garden focus etheric charges in their centers especially.
I think the new Georgia Guidestones should be surrounded by gardens, preferably with some geometric gardens in the periphery focusing etheric energy by pointing towards the main attraction. From my experience, gardening of this sort is not only healing for the gardeners and the people and animals walking through but for the land itself. When I look at stone circles, it seems to me they are an obvious way of focusing etheric plane energy much like a campfire attracts people and bugs to its warmth and light.
https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/tag/garden
Here we go again.. *MONKEY POX has been officially declared a scourge to be vaaaxxed against!! All the while moneypox continues to RE-INFECT our vaunted .gov rep$/Big$cience/BigHARMa/$ickcare industry/msm-$illyCON klaxons, with their own special form of herd immunity, free to enjoy their supposed terminal ‘enhancement’…
Oh Joy!
I suggest that we erect monuments in every town square with this simple but direct message inscribed: the word NO!
Ecosophian, funny. It would be even better if it was misspelled.
AV, it’s a classic!
Anthony, oh, I know. As usual, I find myself in the awkward position of seeing the problems with the claims of both sides, and having to choose which one is slightly less wrong. You’re quite correct about the squirrels, though.
Zarina, спасибо for this!
Reese, you’re most welcome. Hannah Arendt wrote a thoughtful piece many years ago subtitled A Report on the Banality of Evil — I think she needs an update in which the subject of discussion is the sheer blandness of modern totalitarianism.
Patricia, thank you.
Daniil, the combination of banality and utopianism is indeed common — indeed, it’s hard to be utopian these days without falling into the blandest sort of conventional thinking.
Drhooves, I ain’t arguing.
Abraham, thank you for this. That’s a very cogent summary — and a relevant one.
Varun, gotcha. I was never a great fan of the sequels.
Viduraawakened, oh, for small scale uses they’re potentially great — if they can get a version into production that’s cheap enough in terms of resource and energy inputs to have significant net energy. That I know of, that hasn’t been discussed yet in the literature.
Dave, ha! I like that.
Mateo, you haven’t grasped the basic strategy of the modern Left. They always take a real problem, inflate it to gargantuan scale, and then propose a bogus solution that gives them unearned power. The history of Communism is a classic example. The real problem was the poverty and maltreatment of working classes in heavily class-ridden European societies during the industrial revolution. Marx et al. inflated that far out of proportion — read the chapter of Capital on “The Working Day” sometime if you want to see a fine example of sob-story yellow journalism taken to the extreme — and offered a bogus solution, which was handing over control of the economy to a bunch of unelected Marxist cadres. In exactly the same way, The Limits to Growth states a real problem: unlimited growth on a finite planet eventually undercuts the basis for growth itself and results in decline. The corporate media duly inflated that far out of proportion — “we’ll all die of global warming by next Thursday if nothing is done!” — and their bogus solution, of course, is handing over control of the economy to a bunch of unelected managerial cadres. The problem is real — it’s essential for them to be able to point to it, in order to try to justify their inflated rhetoric and bogus solution.
There are genuine solutions to the problems of environmental overshoot that don’t involve giving more power to a bunch of clueless bureaucrats. They all involve giving individuals, families, and local communities more power over their own lives, and tools to reduce energy and resource waste while still maintaining a decent lifestyle and the possibility of profit for those willing to work for it. That’s why the corporate “green” pundits never, but never, mention such things: if ordinary people can deal with the crisis themselves, where does that leave the bogus solutions pushed by the WEF?
Toxic, by all means bury it, but first post it anonymously on a website somewhere and encourage people to download it, make their own copies, and bury at least one of them somewhere. That way you’ll have a much better chance of having copies reach the future.
Clay, exactly. The return of the monumental age is approaching!
Denis, I’m delighted to hear this. Yes, going back to county level government for most routine activities is a very good idea.
Helix, oh, I know they know, and relish, the fact that we hate them. I don’t think it’s occurred to them that we recognize just how clueless, feckless, and detached from reality they are — and it certainly hasn’t occurred to them that their power depends on the willingness of the masses to play along, which is waning fast.
Neptunesdolphins, I suppose Botox might account for it.
Brunette, you’re most welcome! That must have been magical indeed.
Degringolade, thanks for this.
Valiant, it will indeed happen. Half a dozen large southwestern cities are within a decade at most of the kind of water restrictions that won’t provide enough for survival in very hot dry weather.
Patricia M, the Sword is seriously cool. If I ever do a world tour I want them for my front band. 😉
Degringolade, thanks for this.
Stephen, oh, granted, but those few simple rules would also keep Wall Street from battening on productive economic activity, and the rich aren’t exactly in favor of that.
Rod, interesting. Can you give me a link to the poll about Schwab? That’s important.
Walt, myself, I think “Yeah we had a few ideas but you’re going to have to figure it all out for yourselves” would be a great thing to put on a monument!
Greg, that’s an interesting theory, to be sure.
Eric, er, I’ll pass. It’s embarrassing enough to watch my fellow Boomers revisiting their childhoods so obsessively that they insist on rehashing the comics they read as kids — that’s what all those superhero movies are about, you know. Senility bringing on a second childhood…
Kimberly, you might consider seeing if enough people are interested in the project of building a stone circle somewhere in your area. People do that nowadays, you know!
Polecat, lots of people are disappointed that their beloved pandemic fizzled out, and so they’re running after the next candidate. Bleah.
Some signs of the time:
The Russians are equipping their infantry squads with anti-drone guns. These are essentially handheld ECM devices that target the frequency bands used by drone control systems. Sounds a lot like a portable version of the maser cannons the Lakeland Republic was experimenting with in Retrotopia.
https://www.snafu-solomon.com/2022/08/does-every-infantry-squad-need-counter.html
The Chinese are conducting live fire training drills near Taiwan, using their equivalent of the late Cold War era Pershing II MRBM. These are precision guided missiles with large conventional warheads. It appears they are practicing using massed salvoes against point targets from dispersed launch sites.
https://www.snafu-solomon.com/2022/08/is-it-just-me-or-does-that-really-look.html
The backlash against liberal bail and criminal justice reform efforts has already begun, and is likely to get even more intense.
https://www.snafu-solomon.com/2022/08/stick-fork-in-themliberal.html
Regarding The Sword, their first four albums are among my favorite music.
The quality drops off severely after that. My theory is that one of the band members converted to Christianity, and they switched to a generic hard rock sound with a side of subtle preachiness.
In my opinion, someone concerned that the Cold War was about to end with nuclear war commissioned the guide stones as an instruction manual for building a better world. Other than the nom de plume, R.C. Christian, the sole reason one might be suspicious of Rosicrucian involvement would be the Rosicrucian notion of utopia that is still prevalent in certain Pansophic circles. But even that connection is conjectural and conspiratorial at best.
Eric #113
Since I’ve been reading JMG’s blogs for a number of years, I’m not surprised that he declined to spend hours watching movies he wouldn’t like. I’ve seen most of those films. My own take is that, sure, they’re partly cheesy comic-book fantasy, but they also reflect the current Zeitgeist. The first Avengers movie, in 2012, was about an unlimited, clean energy source. Iron Man insists that humanity must have this energy source! It could save our planet! But we don’t get it. So the films muddle along, getting deeper and deeper into conflict, until we have Thanos with his idea of really brutal population control. He doesn’t succeed, whew. But it shows an awareness that we’re overshooting our resource base.
The latest film, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, while it has a remarkably stupid plot, is about two beings with practically godlike powers, Dr. Strange and Scarlet Witch, neither of whom is able to get what they want. And they’re very personal wants. Scarlet Witch is willing to bend time, space, whatever it takes to get her children back. Dr. Strange really wants his ex-girlfriend back, the one he loves. At the end, both of them have learned that no matter how powerful you are, you may have to accept your losses and move on. To me this was really telling. We may not be able to get what we want.
Given my name, I feel I must style myself
The Dread Pirate Karen
@Stephen DeRose #106
This reminds me of a rueful joke from my days in Idaho:
Q: What’s the definition of a successful rancher?
A: A guy whose wife works in town.
JMG, I didn’t save the link and now I don’t remember where I saw it, my bad. So for now just forget I mentioned it until I find it.
UNESCO is hard at work to tell us that conspiracy theories are dangerous. Get your free media pack here:
https://en.unesco.org/themes/gced/thinkbeforesharing
Geez, I don’t use the internet much anymore – I had no idea about the stone bombing. It is kind of a shame, simply because they did make a great monument to hubris.
As for a future message I don’t think I am the person to make that decision. Anything I write would surely be misinterpreted with enough time.
I am kind of fond of the message on this glacier from Iceland. A little preachy, a little ignorant of our predicament but acknowledges the people’s actions of today and the impacts on the people of the future.
https://priceofoil.org/2019/07/22/a-letter-to-the-future-from-a-glacier-that-is-no-more/
“In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”
Bei Dawei, #79
Perhaps you’d prefer to hear the man himself admit it. Plenty of 10 year old Ukrainians are fighting the Russians and in those days boys as young as 8 were riding horses cross country, some lying about their age at 16 to enlist in the armies. Only 14 is no excuse to be a traitor to your own people.
https://youtu.be/OT1Qn6COp6Y
JMG,
My apologies but I needed to point out that the truth is out there.
Hi JMG,
I thought this might interest you:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/08/01/pdqc-a01.html
Thanks,
Johnny
Wer here
Well JMG I have to confess I ‘ve never heard about these stones and I could not belive what the person erecting them thought, that is like the most braindead idea ever. No thought whatsoever what would the reaction of more conservative rural population will be to this.
I have to confess similar idots are here in Poland erecting EU flags on everything (especialy if the EU had nothing to do with institutions) and wondering why they are getting vandalized or covered with spray saying “Nazi” and “Go ….. yourself Schwab”
Meanwhile the ultranational politicians are thriving and uniting agains everyone not of Polish descent here in the local area ( something tells me that after the shortages in Autumn thay will gain traction) want to hear a joke
“Polish ultranationalists are not racist they hate everyone equally”- Ukrainian, Russian, Israeli and EU flags are being burned in the same pile on the street. Screeds like this are getting more and more popular.
https://gloria.tv/post/8Go8v1iFxJop3wBdwBx3BfHdj#205
https://pl-pl.facebook.com/pg/STOPUkrainizacji/posts/?ref=page_internal
Our goverment is doing everything do dodge responsobility at this point. So much for enlightened elites ha
I want to strees that I don’t hate outher nations they are people who had been involved in machinations of the US and NATO and ended up in flams, ordinary citizen probably did not want any of this nonsense, but now I don’t see an easy way out if there is such a ting like a way out this mess. And decline does not sleep (the most important part and overlooked by everyone)
JMG are we cursed. I read the scripture at the church gathering last Saturnday ( at the local church we had a tradition like that) and it was the proverb about Lazarus and the rich man and I could stop thinking about that especially after the rich man finds himself in hell and begs for a Rehash……
Stay safe everyone Wer
Hi John Michael,
Yeah, credibility is a bit of an issue.
Words are interesting things. It’s not unknown that I’ll say to people: “Yes, I hear your words, but the message you’re giving is this…”
In less polite terms it’s known as calling people out on their BS. Always scores and entertaining response.
And what that Guidestone guy was saying was: ‘I’ve had mine, mate’. I don’t need to be convinced that we’ve been in decline for about five decades now. I’ve experienced doors slammed in my face, and just told to put up with it – and that’s getting worse too. It does not surprise me at all that younger folks than I, are quietly disengaging.
Where will it end? 😉
Cheers
Chris
I hope I can post a link to Chris Martenson’s just released epic interview with Michael Yon and Pepijn Van Houwelingen regarding an inside view of the Dutch Farmers Revolt and what is at stake. Thankfully not to provide any spoilers in the 31 min interview (lets see how long YT allows it on their website) that the farmers movement has now spread, as Polish, Italian, German farmers have joined forces with the Dutch farmers because they are “hip” to the WEF machinations and what the end goal is. Which is “you will own nothing and you will be happy”.
We are without question seeing two sides drawing the battle lines in the sand. On one side the WEF wants complete global control and the farmers know what it means for them and their families and their freedom. I guess one lesson that has been constant for the human species is that they don’t like being coerced or controlled by force. My impression from watching this video is that farmers around the world are now connecting the dots and they see the evil intent by the globalists who make up the WEF.
Here’s the video link: https://peakprosperity.com/fighting-for-farmers-michael-yon-and-pepijn-van-houwelingen/
I believe the Soros story is actually true. He used to go around with his uncle (?) in the war, finding Jews as a claim on their belongings. Yes, he was very young at the time and can’t be entirely responsible. Here’s the thing: he’s on film interview as fondly saying it was the best time of his life. Funny thing to say on camera. So look for that interview if you can find it, shouldn’t be hard.
What to put on a stone? Who am I to say? Leave the stones alone. If you hand your children the forest they came with, perhaps they will be happy.
Yes the gas consumption for rural people is a problem. And you need a pickup truck! Bad roads, bad weather. But the solution is painfully simple: don’t drive. Don’t go to town. People never did before, didn’t have the time, didn’t have the money. You go to town once a month for feed and groceries and otherwise stay put. If not, you’re not a rural person at all: you’re a suburbanite. Use less. Grow more.
@Cliff #37 and JMG #74 re: The Sword Heavy Metal Band
Oh man, I love the Sword. Maybe my favorite current band. Any band with a song called “Dying Earth” based on Jack Vance’s stories and a concept album of 70’s-style time/space-travelling sci-fantasy that sounds like a harder-rock ZZ Top is hitting a lot of my buttons. I’ll put it this way: I went to a show where they opened for Blue Oyster Cult and left after “Don’t Fear the Reaper” – The Sword was the bigger draw for me and my friends.
“Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzephyrians” is another song set in the future ruins of our earth, though with more of a typical “post-apocalyptic” vibe, but still with a heavy dose of hubris.
“Our legends tell of weapons
Wielded by kings of old
Crafted by evil wizards
Unholy to behold
We seek the fire lances
That slew the ancient race
The world where they were masters
Now lays in waste”
Cheers,
Jeff
Walt F (no. 111), can I play?
31. Buy low, sell high.
32. Don’t touch the poo.
33. Do your job.
34. Cover your backside.
35. No matter where you go…there you are!
36. Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.
37. Two in the pink, and one in the stink.
38. The price of infinite precision is infinite verbosity.
39. 15 gets you 20. [Narrowly beating out “Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed”]
40. If pigs had wings, they could fly to the moon.
41. The devil is in the details.
42. All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
43. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
44. Be a winner, not a wiener.
45. It’s not the size of the boat, but the motion of the ocean.
46. Water always finds its own level.
47. Step on a crack, and you’ll break your mother’s back.
48. Where we go one, we go all.
49. Infinite diversity in infinite combination.
50. Assume good faith.
51. One guy’s poo is another guy’s breakfast.
52, Don’t poo where you eat.
53. All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
54. Breathe from the diaphragm.
55. You create your own reality.
56. I believe that children are our future; teach them well, and let them lead the way.
57. Left is right and right is wrong.
59. Do your own research.
60. [For you Dune Messiah fans] “Every civilization must contend with an unconscious force which can block, betray, or countermand any conscious intention of the collectivity.”
Sardaukar, thanks for this. As for that last point, Florida Governor DeSantis just sent police to remove a Soros-backed state attorney from his office…
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/desantis-suspends-state-attorney-violating-oath-refusing-enforce-laws
Cliff, thanks for this. I’ll keep it in mind when I go looking for albums.
Dana, er, did you read my post? We know who erected the stones, and why.
Rod, no prob; I’ll look for it also.
Jon, I wonder if they have any idea what the Streisand effect is…
Michael, I wonder if any of the people involved in making and talking about that plaque did one single thing to cut their own carbon footprints.
Johnny, thanks for this. I expect to see many more examples, as overpriced art schools that provide no training worth the name run into the hard reality that more and more students are turning their backs on the credential mills in question and going someplace where they can actually learn to paint, draw, etc.
Wer, the Guidestones got similar graffiti before the guy with the bomb rendered the whole point moot. I hope your country can pull out of its current mess — I hope my country can do the same thing.
Chris, the more people disengage from a failing system at this point, the better.
Rod, thanks for this. Things are definitely heating up.
Jeff, thanks for this. I’ll definitely give ’em a listen.
Archdruid,
Yeah that series didn’t hold up past god emperor, but there were a few really good pieces for meditation like the above. I think it’s an accurate quote, the lower classes are developing ways to talk about power that is allowing them to gather power.
Archdruid,
Out of curiosity, what would you carve on standing stones to leave to the future?
John, I did read the article, and I thank you for setting the record straight, because I still hear people pushing the R.C thing and it gets a bit frustrating. Thank you.
Who would have thought that a set of stones from the early 80’s inscribed with 70’s platitudes would end up having such – admittedly highly indirect – relevance for today’s world? Thank you, JMG, for highlighting the nature of that relevance.
For all the wackiness behind their origin and the foolishness of their admonitions, this world is a lessened place now that they are gone. I hope that a suitable replacement is in the works, with of course input from the residents of Elbert County.
@ JMG, with reference to comment # 135
That’s awesome news! Smart move too; the vast majority of Americans are heartily sick and tired of Woke activists, especially Soros installed DA’s who have trashed the rule of law and let criminals run rampant in so many Democrat controlled cities in this country.
More and more, I think DeSantis is going to be the torchbearer for the populist conservative revolution in America going forward. Trump started the ball rolling and for that, I and many others will be eternally thankful, but even the King in Orange has acknowledged that the movement is much bigger than him. It’s time for someone else to take the helm and that someone is almost certainly Governor DeSantis.
Incidentally, here is Sol’s take on DeSantis, from the current open comments page on SNAFU.
DeSantis is just Trump with less bluster, a bit more cunning, able to operate in the shadows and knows where the bodies are hid. he also knows how to do the dance without getting caught up in the racist wing of the Republican part yet still appeal to the law and order conservative types of all races.
he is Trump with brains. they’re gonna burn him down.
Personally, I think DeSantis will be a lot harder to take down then Sol is assuming. He’s smarter and more disciplined than Trump and he hits all the right notes. If I had to place a bet on who will be the next president come 2025, my money would be on DeSantis.
(If repost please delete)
RE: Urban vs rural living
Having spent a lot of my life living both in rural areas and urban, I felt it important to point out the lifestyles are not the same. One benefit I had being a Jehovah’s WItness for some time was going around talking to many people, and a few of those many people were old timers who remembered well life in the 1930s-1940s in rural Northeastern Minnesota. They didn’t get around in automobiles, If they went to town, it was once on the weekend.
In both environments, you find ways to fulfill your needs within the area that you live. Needs in both areas are the same but are met differently. In more rural areas for example, food and shelter are often more easily provided from your land, although if you lack the skill sets then that requires trade, while in urban areas food and shelter require trade.
So if you chose to live in a rural area, you have to find ways to cut back on your need to run into town every day. That includes work. Stock up, find ways to provide your needs from the land or from neighbors. That will likely require you developing skills that are useful to them, and also skills useful to your needs.
You know if they do rebuild they have an opportunity to make it a bit more fun. If they stuck a big sword in a stone (or massive hammer, a big spade stuck in manure, a big lost key that supposably inacts something, a tree waiting to bloom)in the centre, the stones will probably breed mythology and attract a lot more interest to the area lol.
@JMG “I wonder if any of the people involved in making and talking about that plaque did one single thing to cut their own carbon footprints.”
I would place all my money they would have done nothing!
As for a monument idea. Use the Church of sub-genius line. “Don’t let them take your slack!”
Although I do love the proposed one that just says “No!”. The Monument of maximal statement of futility.
Rod #107
In the mainstream media, there has been absolutely no hint of riots ANYWHERE in the world. Nothin’. Thanks for leaving a note apprising us.
Incidentally, I watch the mainstream media as entertainment. Before I sit ye down to watch, I say, “Okey dokey, let’s see who has been trying to kill the out-group today?” knowing full well that anything they do show is bunk. Today, the media piled it high implying “you’all betta panic now cuz moneypox is rampant, is gonna kill an’ maim ya fer sher, and ya betta knock down sum doors and pay big $$$$$ get dat vakzine fast.” I had a good hoot and holler.
😁🙄
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
how about ’42’ as the message for the rebuilt monument (in 10 different scripts) ? lol ! It only occurred to me that this was not Adams poking random fun, until i turned 42. Suddenly and all at once i could perceive the certainty of my own death with vivid clarity! And my new-found perception worked mathematically! Prior to that i had no real inkling re the profound impermanence of my residence in this ol’ body of mine. Ok maybe i was late to the table re such realizations, but i’m guessing there may be many (present and future) at my stage. love to all Greg
I feel bad about this every time I ask him to find something. Probably where the phrase “Catholic guilt “ comes from. 😄
https://babylonbee.com/news/saint-anthony-asks-god-what-he-did-to-deserve-an-eternity-of-looking-for-everyones-car-keys?utm_source=The+Babylon+Bee+Newsletter&utm_campaign=b301f2491b-Sponsored_Newsletter_8%2F4%2F22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_62f636e998-b301f2491b-39937936&mc_cid=b301f2491b&mc_eid=a65c705ee0
Well, back in the 1960s Simon and Garfinkel wrote that
“The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence”–so, archeologists of the future may find an undisturbed subway tunnel or a section of public housing walls to tell them what the common people of our era were thinking.
California tried to ban cash bail in 2020 but the proposition failed. Bail bond companies pointed out that, among other things, the cost of apprehending people who do not show up for hearings or trials would fall to the taxpayers as city or county law enforcement officers would have to do this job that is currently handled by the bail bond agents who want to protect their investment. Calif. already has OR provisions, “own recognizance” which allows a judge to consider the employment history, community ties, family situation and other factors that make an arrestee a good candidate for release on their promise to return for trial. It is not a matter of “no cash bail for anyone” vs. “cash bail for everyone” being the only options.
I believe the Los Angeles DA has also stated that he will not seek the death penalty in murder trials, claiming that his election gave him a mandate. I personally feel that the death penalty is administered unevenly, that prosecutors are careless in not seeking evidence of innocence, as the Innocence Project has demonstrated. It is ironic that the same people who don’t believe the government is capable of delivering mail or running schools seem to find it so competent in matters of life and death. Nonetheless, the voters of California have confirmed the death penalty several times. However, I wonder whether the Dept. of Corrections is serious in wanting to administer the penalty considering the sloppy job they have done in putting together execution protocols. One proposed set actually required prison chaplains attending the prisoner before execution to submit a report to the warden. You can imagine the reaction of Christian clergy to a rule that appeared to require them to violate their right to privileged communication.
Rita
I suspect the Magic Monday Bingo card would make a good list for a monument …
“I find that if the drought continues for one more year, 30 to 60 percent of the people who live in some large metro desert cities are going to have to leave.”
In CA 50% of the water goes to environmental purposes, much of it to keep the snail darter alive. 40% goes to agriculture. 10% to the cities. Of the agricultural water 10% of that goes to grow rice of all things. Another 19% goes to grow alfalfa for cattle feed. 8% goes to grow cotton. They will cut agriculture before cutting the cities off.
https://sites.uci.edu/energyobserver/2015/04/21/california-water-usage-in-crops-and-the-water-value-of-almonds/
They can keep the more profitable produce, but rice ships easily as does the cotton, and the beef can be raised elsewhere too. Dairy might be an interesting call. Cheese ships well, but fluid milk does not, so keeping part of the dairy industry in CA may make sense. Of course, food prices in CA will go up, but SF Fed President Daly has already said she has enough, the price rise won’t bother her.
CA will have to choose between its cities and agriculture, and the cities always win those fights.
JMG @117
> Senility bringing on a second childhood
At 70, I keep checking to see if I am senile. Comic books are nice to revisit, but I am looking forward to solving an age-old sewing question: what are the mechanics of making a garment “fit”? I never did learn at home or at school, and it drives me crazy that I don’t know.
Clothes fitting is the purview of a sewing-pattern fitter. There is actually a “classics” to how to create garments that fit, a lost-art taking a 3-dimensional human body and putting it on paper so one can cut cloth. It uses geometry and is quite complicated. I want to know the innards of this process to see if I can delve into The Dark Crystal-like secret of how to make fitting simple.
Five years ago, I had thought in terms of learning how to make a jacket fit nicely, but now I am thinking more in terms of medieval garb, along the lines of “renaissance faire” peasant garments. Garments like tops and bottoms, in olden times (prior to 1920s), were non-stretch fabrics like muslin (except for knitted sweaters, hat, mittens, and such). Plain woven loom fabric was in. Dyeing with a limited number of colors was in. Gathering was in: I love blouses/shirts with gathers because not only do those garments look good, but they let one work and not rip out the seams. Like a pirate’s shirt. And work we will have to do. Like hoeing and hoisting sails. What sorts of clothing are we going to rely on, after the junk-clothes at Walmart are gone?
I want to learn the classics of sewing pattern-making but with an orientation of what will be things people will actually want to wear in a few decades. Cotton, linen, wool. No silk — too posh for me. People must wear something‼️What happens after there are no more garbagy clothes to be had from the likes of Thailand and Philippines.
As long as I focus on pattern-making and don’t sew over any fingers with a sewing machine needle, I know I am not senile.
——
As an aside, I am curious, not that anyone knows: what is the interior experience of senility? If it is the infinite passing before ones’ eyes, staring into space, I have had that since age 20. What is it about Resident Biden that gives the impression he is getting senile?
Tr… Tru… Trum… is definitely getting senile: he keeps saying the same things over and over, over and over, over and over, in slightly different idiot-language; maybe repetition is his specialty.
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
For the new guidestones:
BEWARE SMUG LITTLE TRUISMS (INCLUDING THIS ONE)
Another one for the stones:
DON’T GET INVOLVED WITH JEALOUS MEN OR JEALOUS GODS
@ Toxic Plants – I really hope that *in addition* to burying your Leech Book, you will also give it some wide *current* circulation among people interesting in using the information NOW, especially young people. Whether that means publishing it (I, though no longer young, would most certainly wish to buy this!), and/or teaching/ apprenticing, etc. Remember that usage is what perpetuates knowledge, including usage passed on directly from one generation to the next.
Who knows how useful this information would be to a purported finder from the future who lacked the context or related skills to use it, or even the language skills necessary to read it?
JMG, I don’t think this is what I saw but it’s a hint that people are beginning to wake up to the WEF.
“Rasmussen Poll: Most Voters Oppose the Great Reset”
https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/heartlandrasmussen-poll-most-voters-oppose-the-great-reset-and-esg-scores
Here there isn’t destruction against monuments or flags, but there is a growing social unrest, as inflation and unemployed people are going up in numbers.
Meanwhile, I am told by other people that this week, Ukrainian ambassador in Spain complained to the spanish government because there was a “poor ” help in armament for Ukraine; meanwhile RUssia had a plethora of missiles and so on.
Maybe the government here is going to choose between the old dilemma guns or butter? Soon.
I didn’t think the chinese were imaginative either…
https://warnews247-gr.translate.goog/pagkosmiopoiisi-tis-sygkrousis-kinezikes-dynameis-sta-synora-me-ntonbas-pairnoun-to-vaptisma-tou-pyros-stin-oukrania-vinteo/?_x_tr_sl=el&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en
Globalization of Conflict: Chinese Forces on Donbass Border – Taiwan War Preparations Via Ukraine (Video)
Preparations to counter NATO tactics in Taiwan
04/08/2022 – 21:16
( not related to this week’s post but i thought you guys would like to know)
Have you read Balaji’s The Network State book yet? https://thenetworkstate.com He starts with a short thesis, a longer thesis, then the chapters. I haven’t read it myself and perhaps I should dive in and see if I can write something see how your theses interact with his.
I believe that what he is proposing rests on a solution to the energy crisis, meaning small scale nuclear most likely. It’s the reason I haven’t rushed to read it – if he isn’t starting on the same foundation, why spend time in techno crypto world? But then I wonder if building online networks of like-minded people and operating them as countries would be worthwhile. Sure forums and discussion boards are useful, but this is the next level with people investing money and time into a country with set values and advocating for its citizens.
There is something to be said for the Amish approach “we see the world in a completely different way then you and you (state) have no authority in our world”. All I’ve seen the last two years is there no compromise with anyone with any authority and a huge desire to wield more and more power over people.
Maybe we should start collecting all these pithy sayings for when a monument to common sense is erected.
never buy a cheap umbrella.
never turn your back on a bull moose.
don’t talk to strangers unless you know them
let’s go so we can come back.
Princess Cutekitten #75, if you weren’t already mad enough about Iraq, this is what happened to their education system: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2011/The%20University%20at%20War.pdf.
@Bei Dawei #134, of course you can play! The diversity of sources from which forms of rule, law, or adage can come only becomes clear when you try it.
In my list I tried to lean heavily on items that are one of an enumerated list or body of rules, or something analogous, like an advisory verse from a poem that also contains a number of other advisory verses. But a few of 1-30 don’t quite fit that criterion. And it’s not alway obvious some of them do. A few more lists I didn’t represent are Polonius’s speech to Laertes in Hamlet (e.g. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” or “To thine own self be true”), Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard” epigrams (e.g. “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” or “Fish & visitors stink in 3 days”), Steve Martin’s “Grandmother’s Song” (e.g. “Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant” or “Put a live chicken in your underwear”), the Three Laws of Robotics, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the rules of any game, the axioms of any system of mathematics, the laws typically posted at public parks, Robert’s Rules of Order, The Hávamál, rules of grammar, spelling, or written style, and of course there are countless others.
A number of your list items illustrate a different interesting category, the singular overriding principle of some group or field of endeavor, often seen as a slogan or motto, or described as the “one rule of…” or “the central principle of…” something. Or the “first law of…” something when there isn’t a second one, or the second one just points back to the first. (“Rule #2: If the boss is wrong, see Rule #1”)
Northwind, for basic pattern drafting, that is, the everyday clothes most of us wear most of the time, I use either or both Dorothy Moore’s Pattern Making and Dressmaking and How to Make Sewing Patterns by Donald H McCunn. Those are especially good for skirts and trousers. For above the waist fitting, I find the instructions rather complicated and prefer to use a basic commercial pattern, any shell top off the cheap patterns rack, or from thrift stores will do, and follow the instructions in Pattern Fitting with Confidence by Nancy Zeiman. All Zeiman’s books and videos are excellent, how ordinary sewers using ordinary equipment to make ordinary garments can obtain superb results. The most important piece of equipment a sewist can have, after good scissors, is a tape measure. Measure everything, and decide how much ease, that is, how much moving and breathing room, you or the client wants, and then measure the pattern.
Don’t forget that preindustrial fabric tended to be heavier and more loosely woven than what we have now. Garments made from those fabrics must have hung far better on the wearers than do our present day clothes.
The textbooks used in fashion schools start on the Big River at around $90. Ouch! Not in my budget.
Does anyone happen to know what person(s) or entity owns the land on which the stones were set? Does any person or entity pay taxes on that land? In addition to the factors mentioned by JMG, could the damage have been in connection with a real estate deal? Knock down the stones, which it seems plenty of people resented anyway, and then buy the land for cheap?
Oh, my goodness gracious. The PMC fight back, with a vengeance! Yikes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O9FFrLpinQ
This is a podcast, not a video, on the subject of five laws of stupidity. Here I thought hm… might find some good ideas on how to avoid playing the fool. Nope, this piece of horrifying ideology is how to once and for all decide who can be dispensed with. “Stupid people”, one learns, are “more dangerous” than criminals. Why? because they do harm to others without benefitting themselves. I hope you all can see what this could mean for anyone practicing any form of self reliance.
Just wait until your local school guidance counselor, social worker, CPS agent, gets ahold of this ideology. Remember just how precarious those person’s jobs and status rankings really are.
Cold eyes of the future indeed, if not in the way our host imagined.
@toxic plants – I think Culpepper’s herbal is still in print. It’s enough of a classic that everyone who knows rosemary from thyme has heard of it.
I know our host generally doesn’t do video, but for anyone who is interested, here is the Ron DeSantis press conference where he announced the suspension of Soros backed State Attorney Andrew Warren. His explanation of why he took action was a brilliant indictment of not only Warren but other Woke DA’s who have gutted the rule of law and tried to place themselves above the law in the course of enacting their own extremist agendas. We need more people like Governor DeSantis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmdqdO8wZdI
I carefully listened to the link BobinOK posted in comment #126, paying special attention to Mr Soros’s justification for both his market moves (however destructive to individuals) and his role in assisting his adoptive godfather to confiscate property from Jews being sent off to camps…
To wit: “if I didn’t do it, SOMEBODY would have done it, therefore I did not do it”
So, now I have him pegged. Mr Soros, being so completely distanced from the effects and consequences of his actions, is a bureaucrat.
Who just happens to pack a big wallet.
@ #164 I agree with Desantis as I live in Florida. He’s a really good governor and I hope he doesn’t run for POTUS.
I was eager to read your take on the Guidestones and this post did not disappoint.
I live just a couple hours away from Elbert County and made a visit to the Guidestones back in early 2021. It was a rather strange experience to be driving through beautiful bucolic rural Georgia and then to drive up the harsh looking rocks that seemed so out of place on this setting. Visiting the Guidestones themselves was a fairly underwhelming experience. The monument itself was fairly bland and ugly and the rules banal. Being surrounded by security cameras was the most disturbing part of the experience. I expected the site to feel “off” in some way or to leave me disturbed but I left feeling nothing. The area didn’t feel “alive” or eerie or anything at all. I was pleased to leave and go off into the county elsewhere to find a charming little place to eat. That part of the adventure was more memorable than the Georgia Guidestones themselves.
Varun, duly noted! It’s a great quote, but then Herbert was a very canny observer of politics and religion. As for what I’d carve on standing stones — why, nothing at all. One of the great virtues of a proper stone circle…
…is that it’s wholly nonverbal. It communicates, but it doesn’t lecture!
Dr. Coyote, agreed — I’m hoping that the people of Elbert County put up a replacement, and that people in other places do guidestones of their own.
Sardaukar, the Dems and the mainstream GOP have been trying to take out DeSantis for a while now, with a notable lack of success; if anything, their efforts have strengthened his position. Meanwhile one of the big populist news sites, Red State, has been floating the prospect of a ticket pairing DeSantis with Kristi Noem of South Dakota. My guess is that the movers and shakers in the GOP have decided to go with that ticket, and they’re running up trial balloons to lay the groundwork for that. Watch for DeSantis to start setting up his campaign early, in the summer of 2023, and to hit the ground running hard.
Rose, I like that idea!
Michael, maybe the SubGenii will feel inspired by this. I’d like to see a SubGenius monument with nothing on it but weird SubGenius graphics.
Greg, I could see it!
Your Kittenship, funny. Seriously funny.
Kerry, also very funny.
Northwind, I don’t have any interior experience with senility, but I’ve seen a lot of it; back before I started getting published, I worked in nursing homes for a while, and the experience inspired me to take a lot better care of my physical and mental health.
Yorkshire, good. Very good.
Rod, thanks for this! That’s useful fodder for an upcoming post.
Chuaquin, thanks for the data points.
Chola3, hmm! I’d like to see that confirmed by another source, but if it turns out to be true, yikes.
Denis, no, I haven’t read it. That whole end of gizmocentric futurism bores me to tears. You’re right, though, that the Amish approach works.
Neptunesdolphins, and the list gets bigger! They’re going to need a lot of stone slabs…
Mary, thanks for the heads up. Keep in mind that this is simply the ideology of the managerial class stripped of all camouflage: we’re smart, you’re stupid, do what we tell you! I doubt it will go over well.
Scotlyn, didn’t Eichmann say something similar?
DaisyPaisy, thanks for this. I’m not surprised — next to nobody these days knows how to find a proper site for standing stones. They need to talk to some Druids… 😉
Just as a small reminder that not all initiatives from Greens in government positions serve to favor the wealthy: a proposal to reduce fossil fuel consumption by continued subsidy of monthly train tickets (on slower, regional trains) and to finance this by reducing or removing tax privileges for company-provided cars (usually big Audi, BMW or Mercedes for managers): https://www.zeit.de/mobilitaet/2022-08/9-euro-ticket-nachfolge-gruene (in German, but can be translated).
Now I think that instead of subsidizing trains, people should, over the next years, move house or move work so that they work closer to where they live. However, in the short run, subsidized train tickets may distribute the pain of reduced fossil fuel consumption away from the lower income ranks.
Wer here
I am officialy concerned a lot of people are starting talking here with enthusiasm about the Dutch and german farmers protest, JMG once said that the important things are thoose not talked about in the mainstream and this qualifies. My biggest concern is that the rising tide of anger and disillusionment will not cripple what is laft of EU
(Thoose bastards had It comming for all the problems they caused on our continent and the lives they harmed)
My concern is that a radical political movement like the ultra nationalist or no rules free market people will surf the movement to power the just had to say things like death to EU or something. The mess we are in is not something to be solved and people might give unearned power to someone shady that will say the right things.
Perhaps not in stone, being so very long, but the Evil Overlord List would be very good modern advice to preserve, our time’s equivelent to The Prince, I think. (http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html)
Perhaps inscribing the Preamble of the Constitution, being something of the guiding principles of this country, generally failed to live up to, and containing a fair variety of words, and doing so in as many alphabets and languages as can be reasonably inscribed on a single rock, more in hopes that it could function as a future Rosetta stone, or to inform historians, and be thus useful in one way or another.
There are, I think, quite enough Ten Commandments monuments floating around already, and I think our Jewish friends are pretty practiced at preserving those anyway. I think the epistles of John would be worth preserving, as far as how best to live instructions.
JMG, I hope I am overreacting. What I fear is that what this Italian professor did is to give our own PMC types, especially the lower level little tin gods (and goddesses), justification (however flawed) for criminalizing what they are pleased to define as “stupidity”–If you defy me, you are of course harming society and yourself.
Sardaukar, et al, there is a bit more happening with the removal of a State Attorney than at first appears. I don’t quarrel with what the governor did, as I don’t live in Fl. I note he was careful to say that there can be discretion in individual cases. In other words, don’t worry rich donors, your wives, kids, cousins still won’t have to pay traffic tickets. I have also not forgotten that Fl. was the state where the sweetheart deal was made for the late and unlamented Epstein. I suppose State Atty. is an appointed position? Former Congressman, and thorn in the side of the great and good of both parties, Alan Greyson, is running for the Senate in Fl. He will have to make some kind of statement about this, and whatever he says will probably lose him the election, especially since the Democratic central committee can’t stand him.
Kristie Noem governs a state which has 3 is it, electoral votes? I suspect the Republicans will go with Nikki Haley, who is attractive, fashionably non WASP, and can be relied upon to say nothing but soothing bromides. If the Democrats have any sense, a dubious proposition, they will run the governor of New Mexico, a Hispanic woman who, from what I can tell, has been surprisingly effective.
@Jeff #133:
We are in complete agreement. I get amped up just reading the lyrics.
Article from the Atlantic, Excerpt, I assume it’s paywalled, It showed up on the Apple Stocks app.
“The Billionaire’s Dilemma
Marc Andreessen says he’s all for more new housing, but public records tell a different story.”
…
The town of Atherton, California, is America’s most expensive zip code and is primarily reserved for very large homes (the minimum lot size ranges from one-third of an acre to 1 acre). The planning department proposed to modestly increase the zoned capacity of Atherton, legalizing the construction of smaller, multifamily properties in a few places—just a little more than 130 units total by 2031.
…
Andreessen and his wife, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, a philanthropist, apparently submitted this public comment via email to the mayor and city council expressing their opposition, a portion of which reads:
Subject line: IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development!
I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton … Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.
The proposal that so outraged the Andreessens (and the majority of their neighbors who commented on it), was submitted to the California Department of Housing and Community Development for review. And as a result of the overwhelmingly negative feedback, multifamily-housing zoning overlays were stripped from the proposal entirely. This showcases just how nefarious these NIMBY complaints can be: As a result of a few hundred ultra-wealthy people, the town will remain exclusively for the elite.
(end excerpts)
Paraphrasing, we need more houses for the rabble, but not here. Anywhere but here. Her philanthropy only goes so far and does NOT start in her neighborhood.
The image of Cersei on the wall from Game of Thrones occurs. Tyrion was yelling up “You hate them and they hate you.” or something like that.
Johnny, in my world that is Richter scale news, a real shocker. Yet I can’t say I’m heartbroken; I didn’t like the aesthetic coming from the San Francisco Art Institute. Also, the photo in the article reminds me how ugly much of the campus is, despite its stellar location.
Long ago I once visited the campus to check out the possibility of studying there for an MFA. I wound up deciding, as I told one employee there, that I wasn’t too sure I could afford to pay off the loan for tuition. She answered, “What makes you think our current graduates are paying it off?” Or words to that effect.
You have to give Pelosi credit where credit is due. How many other American politicians can say they single handedly provoked a major diplomatic crisis and military confrontation with a rival superpower? Not bad for a senile, drunken old biddy…
Hi John Michael,
I reckon the disengagement is happening, it’s just taking a very strange and unexpected form. And yeah, the Great Resignation is one of those forms.
Had to laugh about those Guidestone commandments, its been my experience that when some people pay for good advice, they’ll cherry pick the bits they’re interested in, and then – here’s the fine joke – wonder why the outcome is not right. I reckon the Guidestones would produce that sort of effect. Anyway, trying to get people to understand that they can’t pick and choose is easier said than done. Of course there are people who will follow advice to the letter. Something for aspiring wizards might wish to consider. 🙂
Dunno whether you’ve noticed, but the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) folks have a prescription for dealing with inflation. Is it being followed? Nope! A good example of cherry picking advice right there. Incidentally, I’ve been dubious about MMT (not a fan, you may have noticed 🙂 ) as it looks to me more like a cloak of intellectual respectability for something that they really, really, want to do. And here we are today. What’s your take on that theory and the possibility that the powers that be will follow the MMT guide for dealing with inflation?
Cheers
Chris
On the Guidestones, years ago I noticed that two of the principles seem vaguely Baha’i inspired (nos. 3 and 6, the universal language and world court). However, they are not phrased the way a Baha’i would put it (it’s complicated), and combined with other stuff they wouldn’t emphasize (the Paul Erlich type stuff). Also, a Baha’i would not be permitted to be a member of a secret society (as “R.C. Christian” was said to have been), let alone support David Duke (as Kersten is said to have done). Back in the 1970s, the Baha’is were a bit better known than today due to the counterculture and music scene, so I figured that Mr. Christian had been exposed to them through that. If he had gone to slightly different meetings, we might be reading about the flat tax or something.
Walt F (no. 160), yeah, I did notice that these blend epigrams from a number of different categories. There are situational maxims (“High to low, let it flow / low to high, gonna die”), basic but pithy scientific / natural observations, broad philosophical or religious utterances (“It is what it is”), quotes that depend on missing context (“The Aristocrats!”), etc. I favored ones that would be easy for future generations to misinterpret (“The devil is in the details”). Obviously none of this would be much use in instructing them, but it might at least puzzle them–the sheer randomness of all these apopthegmata is much like what one would find in a religious text! Heh, if we really want to mess with people, we should have entries like
61. The following sentence is true.
62. The previous sentence is false.
and the like.
BobInOK (no. 126), Jasper (no. 131), all this is addressed in my links at no. 79. It’s a nothing-burger.
Eric in Md (no. 113), in the comics, Thanos had a very different motivation–he was literally in love with death, personified as a hooded female figure (hence the “to court death” line in the stinger from Avengers 1), and wished to destroy all or part of the universe and its population as an offering to her, in order to be judged worthy of dying himself. As his name may suggest (also that of his brother Eros, who appeared in the stinger of Eternals), creator Jim Starlin had taken some kind of night course in psychology, which covered Freud.
Avengers 3 depicts Thanos as being motivated by ecological concerns, but this makes zero sense–he has been killing half of all life, in every ecosystem on every planet (in theory this should have killed half of the whales mentioned in Avengers 4). And does this extent to cellular life? People should have lost half their bodily mass.Anyway, killing large numbers doesn’t really solve population problems in the long run, you have to go after their food source (or other necessary resources). Great Reset enthusiasts, take note!
Jastin,
Riffing on your comment about rebuilding the monument, I had a little aha moment earlier this week: What we cultivate in our lives that is good for us is probably more important than what we shed that is “bad.” Getting rid of the “bad” consumes us Western folk so completely.
“My life would be so much better if I could just banish X.”
That kind of thinking leads to atrocities, as you probably know.
I live under a lot of Christian guilt from my upbringing, and this was HUGE for me.
Followed on the heels of my first couple of days of ebike commuting, btw.
Interesting—has anyone read Unmask Alice?
https://quillette.com/2022/08/02/go-ask-beatrice/
I wonder how many of the books we assume are solidly non-fictional will have been debunked 50 years from now?
Aldarion, that’s good to hear.
Wer, and of course that’s a serious concern. Just because the current system is bad doesn’t mean that its replacement will be any better — and it could be worse.
BoysMom, ha! I definitely like the idea of carving the Evil Overlord Memo List into stone monoliths.
Mary, you’re not overreacting. I firmly expect that sort of thing to start happening — but I also expect it to call up an epic and very effective blowback.
Siliconguy, but of course.
Sardaukar, I’m still waiting to see if the claim that Chinese troops are heading for the Donbass turns out to be true. If it is, why, she’ll also go down in history as the politician who lost Ukraine!
Chris, I think the MMT people are delusional if they think that anybody in power is actually going to listen to them. Borrow the label as an excuse to spin the presses? Sure, but that’s all.
Bei, that’s certainly a possibility. I knew a Baha’i guitarist most of twenty years ago; he sang like a cow stuck in a mud wallow and played the guitar as though he had hooves instead of hands, but no question, the guy was earnest.
Your Kittenship, I hadn’t, but I know that another book by the same author, Jay’s Journal, was blatantly fictional, a ripoff of pop-culture notions about occultism, so it doesn’t surprise me.
Wasn’t somebody looking for other worshippers of Apollo? Also interesting on its own.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/when-i-celebrated-summer-solstice-with-ancient-roman-gods-and-goddesses-180980528/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20220805-daily-responsive&spMailingID=47202219&spUserID=MTI5NDA1NTk4NDY1NQS2&spJobID=2300556045&spReportId=MjMwMDU1NjA0NQS2
Sardaukar (no. 176), as the saying goes, “Only Pelosi could go to Taiwan.”
JMG said
Sardaukar, I’m still waiting to see if the claim that Chinese troops are heading for the Donbass turns out to be true. If it is, why, she’ll also go down in history as the politician who lost Ukraine!
Wouldn’t that be a kick in the teeth for the American Empire! Sending Chinese troops as “volunteers” was a gambit that worked quite effectively for the PLA back in 1950, so I could see them dusting off that strategy again. If so, we could see the era of American hegemony crash and burn in very short order, leaving many of America’s satrapies in Europe and East Asia high and dry and desperately scrambling to make new arrangements in a hurry.
PS – Have you seen the Chinese equivalent to the HIMARS rocket artillery systems the Biden administration has been providing to Ukraine? Meet the SR5 modular rocket artillery system, which has already been battle tested by Chinese client states in Africa. After all, people forget the Chinese invented rocket artillery more than a thousand years ago, centuries before the Europeans ever heard of gunpowder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-q7RPvatHw
I had not heard of Jay’s Journal, but it’s discussed in the article.
Given that future generations might be illiterate, pictorial guidestones might be more useful.
My suggestion: Top row, one stick human figure, many stick cow figures.
Next several rows: human figures increase exponentially, crowding out cow figures.
Second last row: All figures are human, except for one cow figure.
Last row: All human figures are dead except for one, plus one cow figure.
@Mary Bennett #162:
I first encountered this idea some years ago, and remembered it a bit differently. Key, I remembered that the place I’d read it listed one of the laws as something about stupid people cropping up at similar rates _in all groups_. No declaring the PMC the Smart and the Deplorables the Stupid; each has their lot of each.
I set out to locate the version I’d read, which had some distinctive comical illustrations, in the process noticing a number of much more recent pieces of the matter — apparently without said illustrations. On finding what I _think_ was the right page, or at least a page showing the same version, I encountered this note cutting off all but the very beginning:
“Update: Prof. Cipolla retired from UCB in 1991, and died on September 5, 2000, in Pavia, Italy. Unfortunately, his former publisher has demanded that his writing be effaced from the WWW, threatening lawsuits. While the work is in the public domain, and cannot be retracted, defending that would cost.”
Fortunately, the Internet Archive came through:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040225133818/http://www.cantrip.org/stupidity.html
There may be more recent versions, but this is the farthest-back version they appear to have — and it appears to be complete. And it does indeed contain the line “The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.”.
It also, however, includes this _gem_ which I had _not_ remembered, right down at the end:
“In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of stupid people is still equal to å; however in the remaining population one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity (sub-area B1 of quadrant B in figure 3) and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals (area H in basic graph, fig.1). Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the å fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell.”
Hmm. Now, I _wonder_ whyever our current brilliant elites might not like a version of the hypothesis which mentions the effects of bandits and the incompetently destructive in the halls of power…
(JMG, sorry if this came through twice; there was an error the first time, and I wasn’t sure if it went through at all.)
“It’s hardly my place to tell Christians what to believe about the Antichrist, granted, but I have to admit if the Antichrist were to show up in person and proclaim some commandments, I’d expect to see much more in favor of sexual depravity and the other six deadly sins and a good deal less about truth, beauty, and love. The ten precepts on the Guidestones sound a lot more like what you would expect from an educated twentieth century American with a bee in his bonnet about overpopulation and environmental causes—a man, that is, very like Herbert H. Kersten.”
I very much expect the AntiChrist to promise world peace and Harmony under his World Government with himself as World Emperor.
Its exactly what I expect the Anti-Christ to present himself as:
2 Corinthians 11:14
“And no marvel; for even Satan fashioneth himself into an angel of light.”
One can hardly expect the Anti-Christ to appear as a horned Baphomet looking obviously evil.
The EU laws that exempted private planes from the green tax also exempted them from certain health related rules, which is much harder to forgive. Your blog shows how you can illuminate some hypocrisy while staying polite. It also shows how to mitigate anger by thinking about alternative texts to write on the slabs.
Just this week I managed to steer a discussion out of yes-no style by focusing solely on the financial aspect of elite made rules. When I was lying awake due to worry about population reduction goals, I managed to steer my thoughts to what I would write on a stone slab, and fell asleep in short order. Thank you!
Greetings all!
JMG wrote: “I’m not surprised — next to nobody these days knows how to find a proper site for standing stones. They need to talk to some Druids…”
That’s interesting! Can we have some details please? Or may be a future post.
Thanks!
I know next to nothing about Pelosi, but I gather she is widely despised. What do her detractors think of Newt Gingrich’s trip to Taiwan?
And a sincere question of ignorance: can a speaker of the house take such a decision on their own?
Aldarion, I suppose Fancy Nancy’s importance re Taiwan is that the Speaker of the House is third in line to assume the presidency should both president and veep die or become incapacitated while in office. I suspect this detail might mean a great more to Chinese, with their (what seems to us) fixation on the mysterious concept called ‘face’, than it does to us. To us, it merely means she might possibly become a temporary, unelected figurehead who could never win a national election. For much of the Republican Party, she is a demoness to rally their voters–Nancy this and Pelosi that. The implied subtext is that because of “Feminism” harridans like her are allowed into places where they should not be. This Republican pretense of analysis says nothing about what social trends might have given us Gingrich.
For the Zionist, PMC wing of the Democratic Party she is poster girl for having it all, etc. etc. It is of some interest to note that she seems to check all or most of the boxes for Republican alleged family values. One husband, no reported personal scandals, kids grown up and doing well by PMC standards. My personal opinion is a. she ought to have retired about 20 years ago when she was still admired and respected, and b. she is a Zionist shill.
The Speaker of the House does not take orders from the executive. However, the executive does have means to encourage cooperation of the Speaker. I doubt this trip would have happened under Obama.
Reese, there has been some quite interesting research recently on the subject called ponerology, which I gather is study of sociopathy and psychopathy. What struck me about the You Tube videos is that this research is to be apparently summarily dismissed and overlooked; requires too much actual thought and observation for our PMC betters, so much easier to simply designate undesirables as “stupid”. I was shocked to hear–OK, so I am naive–that “stupid” is more dangerous than criminality. It would seem that the PMC is finding the principle of Rule of Law a bit inconvenient. Fiat justicia, ruit caelum.
Slightly off topic, but is peak oil back? The podcast called Modern wisdom just dropped a episode with Nate Hagen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMqlBI3Zg1M
Not the kind of quest i expected too see on Modern Wisdom. The guy behind modern wisdom was recently on Joe Rogan.
The guy who put up the Georgia Guidestones seems to have expected them to last past the end of our current civilization (accounting for one or more languages becoming irrelevant, if not extinct), yet it only took one crank with a package of explosives (followed up by a municipal maintenance crew) to erase them. If you really want your message to survive, you need a self-sustaining organization of people (a monastery, or Foundation, perhaps (or two?)) who keep the message alive.
Sardaukar, there’s now a claim doing the rounds that Kim Jong-Un has offered Putin the assistance of 100,000 “volunteers” from the North Korean Army. I have no idea if it’s true or not, but if it is, heaven help the Ukrainians.
Martin, never underestimate the ability of human beings to misunderstand. They’ll probably take it as a warning that if you don’t sacrifice enough cattle to Thunor, he’ll send a plague.
Info, so noted.
Thinking-turtle, you’re most welcome.
Karim, I’ll consider a post on the subject.
Aldarion, of course not. Biden could have refused to authorize the air force plane to take her there and told her not to go.
Heian, hmm! Glad to hear this.
Lathechuck, either that or talk to some people who actually know something about making a monument last for the ages.
Reading the post again along with watching the old BBC documentary Connections which focused on threads of human progress, and I’m left feeling like we are in real liminal moment right now. There’s activity, but no grand message most believe for the future.
I was thinking “what will the world look like in 2035” based on what I’ve heard in the media and in movies and books, and came back with not much.
It feels like collectively we are waiting for *something*. Does anyone else feel this?
The best I describe it is the moment feels very pregnant, like something will be born and then this liminality will make sense.
@Sardaukar, @JMG
I’m finding it amusing that there still seems to be a perception that America can’t possibly lose (let alone be losing) a war against peer adversaries. The justification for this belief seems to be some combination of either “Look at how much bigger our military budget is!”, “Look at all this shiny technology we have!”, or “Our troops have recent combat experience and yours don’t.”
To point 1, how big was Rome’s military budget compared to the Germanic tribes’? How big was the Mongols’ compared to that of the Song dynasty? For that matter, how big was 2021 Afghanistan’s? Because I’m pretty sure they weren’t spending trillions of dollars to kick us out.
To point 2, sure, but almost all of that technology is inherently dependent on the satellite network to remain functioning. In a full-fledged WW3 scenario, Earth orbit could become a theater of war and that may no longer be available. (Granted, one risk of dropping the GPS/spy sats is that you’ll inadvertently Kessler-syndrome your own out of the sky.)
To point 3, Right. Against insurgents and insurgent tactics in the context of Afghanistan. Not necessarily against near-peer armies in the context of the Eastern European plain or Taiwan / southern China. Moreover, during WW2 the Germans and the Japanese had “recent combat experience” in the form of invasions off various Eurasian nations, whereas the Americans were comparative greenhorns. Who won that war?
…But the most salient point, I think, is point 1, because it touches on a lot of the factors this week’s post is making, and with that in mind, my nomination for a quote on the new Guidestones: “Just because you spent a lot of money on something doesn’t automatically mean it’s great.”
If this is true https://www.eutimes.net/2022/08/north-korea-may-send-100000-troops-to-ukraine-to-help-russia/ then the US has some truly mental giants working as strategists at the federal level. Here they wanted to isolate Russia from the world and now all it’s doing is uniting the East against the West. Then they gifted the Chinese an excuse to invade Taiwan on a silver platter. That’s pretty amusing as well as the South Korean Leader wanting NO part of Pelosi’s visit to their mainland, he wink, wink left on a scheduled vacation/trip.
History will write how the 21st century version of the Keystone Cops ended their reign as Global Superpower with some amusing muck ups.
@JMG, Scotlyn,
about the fictional world rulers addressed in the guidestone commandments
It strikes me that this line of thinking is wrong in the same way as modern ideas of space travel: ruling the world is to running a company what Star Trek is to sailing.
To me it seems as if living entities such as species or large colonies (bee hives, corals, herds of cattle, etc.), are directed, or manage themselves, at a level that is incomprehensible to the individual animal. There is an over-mind, or collective soul, to the whole group, and even if there is a clear hierarchy within the group, the overall dynamics that make the group’s behaviour fit with the leading chimps’ or the queen bee’s intentions, are in their nature of that collective level. The way things are going is determined by the sum of all parts, and if the group in question is hierarchical, the “commands” from the collective level manifest themselves through that hierarchy.
If a boss chimp gets cocky, or if a national leader lets himself get carried away with delusions of grandeur, they’re removed. That fact that corporations can actually sustain the numbers of employees that they have, or that countries are as populous as they are now, is largely thanks to their respective managments roughly directing people to do what they’d do anyway, and, on the other hand, employees and citizens retaining enough liberty to interpret the rules and orders from “above” in a way that suits them, and empowers them to achieve what they themselves consider useful. Which, in sum and in turn, is interpreted by the rulers as what they had intended.
You can try to manage a small-ish company as an eccentric madman, and, hey, if your 20 employees dig your personal taste of strangeness, and go along, good for you! But to assume that one can just willy-nilly decide on the way a society (let alone the world!) is supposed to work, and not expect it to punch back, is just plain bonkers.
If I try to imagine what kind of incomprehensible reasoning may be happening on the level of mankind’s over-mind, or between it and other parts of the living world, and then recall that stupid phrase about the 500,000,000 population level, it just makes me chuckle.
@Wer,
that’s a very profound point about the popular uprisings in Europe and elsewhere potentially being usurped by malicious entities of one kind or another. You might say it’s what usually happens. The most useful reaction to that problem might be to involve oneself with this movements and do one’s level best to keep them on track.
Regarding a monument of a different sort. It appears – from gleening that great lib’tarian aggregator of the news (begins with a Z..) that Death Valley National Monument, courtesy of this thing called the ‘Weather’ .. sluiced from the heavens a great downpour of H20, thereby causing various kinds of discomfort to a rather large contingent of hominids .. of whatever hued posterior. Typical reaction quote: “I’ve Never experienced such an Event as this!” .. Palm trees (hotel) auto-unmobiles (tourists+staff) were put threw Nature’s demolition derby!
Does ANYONE with two firing synapses even Look at the Landscape and make a connection to said event?
Now THAT’S a monument for ya.. Chisled by the powers of Gaia, the word is “Heads Up, you d@mned (s)oiled apes-“
@Brendhelm,
” Moreover, during WW2 the Germans and the Japanese had “recent combat experience” in the form of invasions off various Eurasian nations, whereas the Americans were comparative greenhorns. Who won that war?”
The Soviets.
Not quite on topic for this week, but recalling questionable Science and the crapitalization of so much of modern society:
“Blots on a Field?” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35862524/ # This appears to be behind a paywall.
https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease u# This in-depth news report should be widely accessible.
It is an example of science attempting to correct itself, through the investigation of prior results that now appear to have mislead Alzheimer’s Disease research for over a decade. Favorable research results on the “amyloid theory” of AD development appear to have been fabricated in dozens of research publications.
“So much in our field is not reproducible, so it’s a huge advantage to understand when data streams might not be reliable,” Schrag says. (From the 2nd reference, above.)
A bit off topic, but perhaps of general descent interest: in CA with the shortages and supply chain issues, theft of catalytic converters has become endemic. I know someone and of other people who have had theirs stolen off their parked cars. My daughter has had a wire cage welded over hers.
Also on the depopulation of southwestern cities in the continuing drought :I was talking with a friend who is quite knowledgeable about water issues. He reckons that Las Vegas will be the last to go. They have so much money that they will buy everyone else’s water rights. I guess they have not only lots of carrots, but lots of sticks as well. Probably the first to go will be the irrigated cotton and alfalfa in AZ, followed by Phoenix. I am not sure if Tucson is on the Colorado river water system or not, though I am sure they are roaring through their ground water. Monterrey in Mexico, the third largest city in the country, has run out of municipal water, though they still have managed to keep some for industry.
However, in the short run, subsidized train tickets may distribute the pain of reduced fossil fuel consumption away from the lower income ranks.
Aldarion,
Public transportation subsidies don’t assist low incomes, they enable low incomes. Were it not for subsidized transport the employers would have to pay wages that would permit closer housing.
This is a really good summary article on the Great Reset and why it will fail. They even referenced the movie Soylent Green.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/cult-globalism-great-reset-final-solution-useless-people/5784969
“People and certain governments are awakening to the fact that a group of globalists are working against them on every level, and they are starting to fight back. We do not want to be ruled by a centralized power telling us what to do or how to think. The concept of the Great Reset has failed in many ways, but there is still work to do.“
@Lathechuck #194 – to really keep a message alive, have it form the sacred scriptures of a widespread and very old religion, whose every holiday commemorates some part of that message which is up close and personal.
Martin Back #186
Stick humans and stick cows. Brilliant!
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
How to preserve your religion’s teachings for posterity:
https://tonyortega.org/2013/08/31/the-history-of-scientologys-weird-vaults-the-bizarre-battlefield-earth-connection/
Hi John Michael,
And yes, I tend to also believe the MMT folks provided a cloak of respectability for a very dodgy path. At any time, we could have gotten to work. As a civilisation, we’ve been lazy.
Oooo. A little flash of insight hit me. The Guidestones were an act of magic, which failed utterly because the form was wrong for the desired outcome – unless of course the dude wanted to breed dissension and an explosion.
It’s a bit idiotic really, but then there’s a lot of that going around these days. I expect the outcome won’t be an explosion, but more of a whimper.
Cheers
Chris
Bei Dawei @134 “[Narrowly beating out “Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed”]”
Everyone else here is too smart to feed the troll, but for the sake of having it said: so not cool, dude. In my country most girls start at 12 or 13, so that hilarious little quip is advocating pedophilia. Apparently I’m alone in this here, but when it comes to pedophilia, No Mercy, No Quarter. You all can put that on your freakin’ Guidestones.
What sgage (#201) said!
And if Hitler hadn’t been such a fool as to invade Russia, Germany would quite likely have won WW2.
Denis, I certainly feel it. We’re approaching the ending of several historical phenomena — the end of US global hegemony, the end of the ascendancy of the bureaucratic-managerial class, the end of the religion of progress as a major social force — and what will replace them has not yet taken shape.
Brendhelm, no argument there. I’d argue, in fact, that at this point the US can’t win a war against peer or near-peer adversaries. Our military is in desperate straits right now.
Rod, I ain’t arguing.
Eike, that’s an excellent point.
Polecat, I read about that. Yikes.
Lathechuck, I read about that too. I wonder how many more things like this will go public before trust in institutionalized science implodes for the long term.
Stephen, thanks for the data points.
Rod, thanks for this.
Bei, just the kind of bizarre delusional fantasy I’d have expected from Xenu — er, Hubbard.
Chris, hmm! Yes, I could see that.
TjandtheBear #204, completely agree with you. People need to take the pain of high gas prices into account when buying a house and when negotiating salary. However, there needs to be a short-term distribution of the pain, e.g. of those who have already bought houses too far away from their jobs. The alternative is violent unrest.
The U.S. couldn’t win a war against Afghan tribesmen in a fleet of pickup trucks. And if you and I have noticed this, so have various governments, and of course, no matter how trashed, the U.S. is still a nice piece of real estate. A serious, grownup government could probably have most of the infrastructure restored within 10-20 years.
Which is harder to learn, Chinese or Russian?
@sgage (#201)
In regard to Germany yes the Soviets did do most of the work.
With Japan though they did not. That was a brutal slog. US and British ships littered the ocean depths. Then the war turned and Japanese carriers littered the ocean depths.
The war played out as Yamamoto expected. “In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”
Their hope of winning was to inflict a major defeat in a single decisive battle setting the stage for a negotiated settlement. They actually had two decisive battles, Midway and The Philippine Sea, They lost them both.
The US had the industrial output to replace its losses. We built 24 Essex class carriers to replace the Lexington, Hornet, Yorktown, and Wasp. Japan built the Taiho, sunk on it’s first mission, the Unryu, launched in August ’44, sunk in December, Amagi, launched in August ’44, sunk in July 45, and Katsuragi, Launced in October ’44, but never quite got an air group or went into battle. These were supposed to replace the Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu, Soryu, all sunk at Midway, The Shokaku, sunk at the Philippine Sea, and Zuikaku, sunk as a sacrificial bait ship at the Battle of Leyte.
And while all those carriers were being built we were simultaneously building the cruisers and destroyers and submarines to support them.
The Japanese were buried by steel production. Now today? Now that they have the bugs out of the construction process the Navy claims it can build Ford class carrier in four years. Compare that to 24 carriers in four years it took to win again Japan. Even adjusting to tonnage (3 Essex to one Ford) There is not enough construction capacity left to build two carriers per year. The next naval war will be brutal and quick.
Any one into details can with this,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooSCxED5MDs
There is a part two covering the cruisers and destroyers.
Actually, you know what? I’m not done. My best friend started her period at age eleven. ELEVEN. Anyone who thinks an eleven-year-old is fair game needs a couple more holes in the head–and in deference to forum rules I won’t finish that sentence. I also know for a fact there are survivors of childhood sexual assault on this forum (statistically there were bound to be), and joking about what they endured, right in their faces, doesn’t fail Human Decency 101, it fails the basic remedial course.
Have a nice day.
I get “Invalid security token.” when trying to reply on my laptop. Tried with both Firefox and Chrome. What gives?
Used my Android phone for this comment.
@JMG. Drat! I thought any idiot could understand my stick-figure guidestones. But you correctly point out that they could be misinterpreted. As they say, just when you think you’ve made something foolproof, they invent a better fool.
Another thing that endures through the generations is a nursery rhyme:
Little Joe Biden
Gave Russia a hidin’
By giving war weapons to Zee
But the fight over Ukraine
Led to a nuke rain
And left only you folks and me
Personally, I think the best hope of avoiding WWIII would have been for the Americans to shoot down Nancy Pelosi’s plane, claiming the old lady had gone rogue. That would have signalled to Putin and Xi that America was serious about avoiding confrontation. But it seems that America is looking for a fight. Sigh.
[Re “Invalid security token.” error message. It seems to be the html & n b s p ; (close spaces) which I originally used in my comment.]
Greetings JMG,
we spent this year’s vacation in my wife’s hometown of Split, Croatia. One remarkable thing about Split is that Diocletian’s palace is integrated into the city proper. Rooms of the palace serve as shops or even living quarters. However, I doubt that this can be done with today’s buildings in the collapse we witness today. The Romans knew how to built for eternity. On a side note, Diocletian retired as emperor to tend to his beloved cabbage fields, the locals claim that the current cabbage fields go back to his planting.
While spending some time on the beach I read the Illiad and the Odyssee. One thing I hadn’t noticed at school was that Homer mentions Hephaistos the blacksmith having created automata that assist him with menial tasks. Perhaps another example for knowledge about a distance past with more developed technology?
I will conclude with a musical recommendation. Recently I learned about the band Heilung. Heilung | LIFA – Alfadhirhaiti is a stunning live performance of Iron Age 2b metal. Well worth a listening.
Best wishes to all readers and commenters.
Thank you JMG for confirming the liminality. Some days it hits harder than others. It feels as if there is both competing forces and something pressing down and dampening everything. I’m just trying to journal about what I’m experiencing and feeling, figuring that in a few years it will make sense.
Since the Nine-Euro-Ticket was mentioned, a little heads-up for those not in the know:
In reaction to the self-inflicted fuel price spikes earlier this year, the federal government here in Germany decided (relatively spontaneously), to offer a ticket for € 9,- (nine, as in, less than ten) that will allow a person to use every piece of local rail and bus transport in the entire country for a month. This was intended to last for the months of June, July, and August. The rail network is such that this ticket allows for travel all over the country, albeit at a slower pace than the high speed rail connections.
Now that August has started, the politicians are discussing how to transition out of this unusual scheme, and what’s supposed to come after.
Two things strike me about this:
a) This looks like perfect proof of our leadership having lost its mind:
In the middle of a disastrous recession and inflation crisis, the entire public transport sector is practically deprived of income for a whole quarter, while excessive use puts its fleet under exceptional strain (broken toilets, doors, upholstery, Wi-Fi, reduced down-time for repairs).
If the resulting deficits are to be filled, it’ll certainly be done by money printing, the very policy that gave us the inflation in the first place.
Many customers who got used to the artificially lowered cost of living will have a hard time adjusting once it stops.
The result is: either a continuation of this bogus scheme (the 39 oder 79 Euro Ticket is being discussed), with the according extension of QE and inflation; or a much harder bump in the road than the one we’ve dodged in June, in a few weeks, when the rest of the fuel price crisis hits.
Since one of those options will raise stock prices, while the other will destabilize the political landscape, I’ll wager a guess.
b) almost nobody I talk to about this sees anything wrong in this policy. To them, it’s just wonderfullly convenient, and that’s it.
But remember, keep the population below 500,000,000 😀
Re Lathechuck’s comment 102, some doctors have pointed out for many years that growing amounts of ‘medical research’ are apparently, er, doctored. The percent affected now is higher than 50 years ago. See, e.g.
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2022/08/06/vaccines-how-did-they-come-about/
and I enjoyed his 2014 book ‘Doctoring Data’.
The process of bodies like the General Medical Council trying to censor him tends to illustrate the truth of what he says, including his allegation that the UK NHS has become a top-down dictatorship. One consequence of it being run from the centre, like the USSR, was this yesterday
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/08/06/nhs-patients-unable-to-obtain-emergency-medication-as-cyberattack-triggers-computer-failure/
All countries need more medics. like Malcolm Kendrick.
Quick comment – about California’s crops and the drought. Jean Lamb from up in eastern Oregon near the CA border notes that the rice is grown in the Sacramento Valley, with water from the Sacramento River, hence appropriate to the region. And that, re: cities vs agriculture, the agriculture lobby has a lot of money and power, so don’t bet on the cities getting theior water cut off last.
Re: keeping religious memes alive – in a vault, failure. In the living memory of every child old enough to sit at a Passover table, alive and well.
Sister Crow #210,
No, you’re not alone in this here – I’m with you on “No Mercy, No Quarter” with regard to child abuse. Thank you for speaking up.
EIke, I admit that I haven’t been to Germany for a while. I do remember the Wochenendticket of the 90s, which at least served to show the enormous demand for public transportation if it was accessible.
The sweet point is a price that encourages people to not buy cars or at least to leave them at home, but does not encourage too high an increase in total travel. Nine Euros is certainly too low. 79 might be nearer the sweet point.
@JMG, Oh I wasn’t arguing either and I hope you didn’t take it that way. I was actually agreeing with you and tried to add a little bit extra.
What Sister Crow and Yavanna say!!
About Ford Class carriers. I live across the harbor from the shipyard that builds them. I know military and civilian people that work on them, They are a total techno “Charlie Fox” Over budget, way behind schedule, too many “new improved” things that weren’t tested. Ive heard them called “Floating F-35 Penguins” And yes I know pilots who refuse to fly in those
Havana and Sister Crow,
I’m also with both of you on this. I think it was meant as a throwaway comment, but I can see how it would be very upsetting to survivors of childhood sexual abuse. And to young girls forced into early marriages, which still happens here in the USA. Thank you both for speaking up.
About the liminality – Also, it’s August, when it feels like all ordinary daily business has been suspended, but that everybody with any changes to make is doing it now.
Your Kittenship, well, there’s that! Russian’s a lot easier for Indo-European speakers to learn, since it uses an alphabet and doesn’t differentiate words by tone.
Martin, I don’t think our species will ever reach Peak Fool. As for the “invalid security token,” hmm! That’s certainly possible.
Engineer, a valid point. Our architecture will have disintegrated into heaps of rust and shattered glass in a fraction of the time Diocletian’s palace has been there. Yes, I recall Hephaistos’ robots, and it’s one of the many details that suggest dim memories of a technological civilization in the distant past.
Denis, I know the feeling!
David, thanks for these links. Very timely!
Rod, no, not at all! “I ain’t arguing” is an Americanism for “I agree completely.”
Marlena13, people have been making jokes about the Ford class carriers since they were named. Those old enough to remember Gerald Ford, who famously wasn’t bright enough to walk and chew gum at the same time, will know why.
Aldarion, nothing to disagree about your comment, but may I ask you to have another look at my username, please? This is getting silly.
Pumpkinscone,
You, and Holmgren, are probably onto something about retrofitting the suburbs/small towns. Towns pretty much always grow up organically, incrementally, and the 1st settlers always take the choicest spots – best soil, springs, waterways, sun, etc. Obviously the first farms in the area would be shopping from the same list, too. So it logically follows that these places would potentially make a great place to settle in for the long haul.
My household is a case in point: when we first moved here in 2012 we were freaked out by what we saw coming, so we bought a patch of forest in the middle of nowhere where we could “hole up.” Long story short, there was no sun, no soil, and no water there. We worked hard on it for 7 years and ended up with a little sun, a little soil, but still no water…
Fast-forward to early 2019 and we bought a house right downtown, in a small rural town in N. Georgia (not Elberton…). We only have 0.2 acre of land, but we have sunshine for days – probably 10 hrs+ per day, fertile soil, and a fine community spring within walking distance. Not to mention 2 rivers meeting in town, though neither is navigable.
I produce more food here than I ever did at our “homestead.” The roof is just itching for some solar panels and a solar hot water heater. I live within a mile and a half of my job – my daily circuit is about 4 miles, and I’m about a week into making those daily rounds on an ebike. (Which I plan to charge on solar very soon.) I’ve barely been in my truck this week, and one of the trips would have been done on my bike if I had a lock for it! Something else that will be remedied soon.
Cheers,
Grover
Sister Crow says: #216
August 7, 2022 at 2:43 am
Assuming that the platitude submitted refers to women is just as sexist as assuming that it refers to men. With reference to women, it is clearly unacceptable. With reference to men being of military age (given that the submitter was a man) is probably but not necessarily something the blog’s readership assumed. From the perspective of it referring to women, of course, to repeat myself, it is unacceptable. But I think in an understandable eagerness to squash anti-feminine expressions, you have made an error.
This was, speaking as a man who was subject to the draft and who served in our nation’s military (US Navy) not a joke about women who have had their periods being acceptable objects of mistreatment. It seems to me that it referred to men being of an age to serve in the military and to repeat myself about that point this was likely the understanding for most if not all the readership here. But, to repeat myself a third time, from the perspective of it being about women and with the idea that it excuses abuse, of course the statement was not okay.
Have you read this blog? Have you read the commenters here? I am fairly outraged that you would leap to the negative conclusion about our commentariat and by extension our moderator, who would have excluded that post had he thought it referred to what you have interpreted it as meaning.
@Aldarion #213,
I actually think we’re well overdue for violent unrest *everywhere*. Too many people are comfortably ignorant of what’s going on around them and need to be shaken out of it. Yes, not something you’d really wish for but necessary nonetheless.
@ Collapseaware Engineer re #219
In ancient Greece they had a simple steam engine called an aeolipilae. A description of it can be found on Wikipedia. So, steam technology was understood at that time as well as clockwork mechanisms such as the
Antikythera device. Heron of Alexandria designed a steam device which would open temple doors using a fire altar and a hydraulic system. It’s even possible the Greeks had clockwork automatons similar to the ones made in the 1700s by Swiss watchmakers since they had gears. Sadly, anything they did build has long been lost. So far there’s only the Antikythera device to tantalize us about what the ancient world was capable of.
It wouldn’t have taken much of a leap for the people of those times to speculate that the god Hephaistos would have had a god’s version of steam robots much the same way we ourselves speculate on what future technology would look like.
I also second the Heilung music group. Listening to some of their work makes my hair stand on end (which considering it comes down to my waist ain’t easy).
I remember Jerry Ford being described as “The Miasma with Charisma”
@Siliconguy #215
“In regard to Germany yes the Soviets did do most of the work. With Japan though they did not”
Well, many historians think that was the USSR attack on Manchuria with the extremely fast and complete destruction of the Manchukuo army, the invasion of Sakhalin and the Kurils and algo the threats of a soviet invasion of Japan mainland was what finally decided the end of the war.
The japaneses knew the russkies were not afraid of manpower losses as the yanks, and a Japan under soviet rule is the worst outcome for the emperor and the imperial army…..this, even more than the 2 atomic bombs, seems to have decided the fate of Japan in WWII and save thousands of american and japanese lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria
Cheers
David
Sister Crow (#211), in my memory of my (admittedly distant) high school years, “Old enough etc.” was a caution. In those pre-legal-abortion days serious messing around could end up in marriage (and if you were an honorable fellow was expected to do so). See “Mr. & Mrs. Bo-Jo Jones.”
Hi John,
The original “Planet of the Apes” movie (1968, starring Charlton Heston) is an excellent cinematic example of a cold-eyed future, especially in view of what we had done to ourselves. I can’t help but wonder, though, if the cold eyes also have a touch of envy in them. If you can’t replicate the ruins, it’s more comforting to tell yourself the ruins are from a more evil society than yours, rather than a more competent one. (Heh, maybe one that is both.) Sure, your Dark Ages society is not as destructive, in the same sense than an impotent man is not as promiscuous. If you, Dark Ages person, who’s about to duke it out with a neighboring warlord, had been the one to win the (virtually) free-energy lottery, do you think you would’ve spent it any better?
In fact, taking that question to be non-rhetorical, I want to propose what I dub ‘The Fossil Fuel Tragedy.” The only way for all that FF to be useful for a major portion of humankind is if it can be widely deployed in transportation, climate control, communications and all the other ways that, for the first time in history, saved a lot of us from lives that would have been “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” But the infrastructure needed to deliver these goodies takes a tremendous amount of fossil fuel to build and maintain, not to mention the infrastructure devoted to extraction, refinement, etc. And we haven’t even mentioned “eating oil” or the FF used in warfare. So if the FF Tragedy is right, it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that either you hardly use the FF bonanza at all or you spend it on a few centuries of living lives that are not constantly being ass-kicked by nature.
One of the things I admire about “A Canticle For Leibowitz” is the pervading sense of cyclical tragedy.
Mr. Greer .. apologies if I come off as somewhat trollish .. (I’m not well versed in the attributes of ‘article linkage’ .. That said I’ve read that an aid to a Demoncrat senator had been busted for impersonating a (F)ractous (B)latant (I)mp !!
So the punk gets time served whilst an investigation ensues .. AND a glorious probation! An offer by his, Ahem! .. ’employer’ an added plus: ‘resign’ or be fired..
Now if twas You or I .. or any other non-connected bloak or bloakess, it would be (with only slight hyperbole) the immediate clapping of irons .. followed by a thorough thrashing by those vaunted Klaxons we know and hate .. eventually to be pitched into a dark cell with Bubba!, for All Eternity.
signed,
A seething citizen
Okay good. I’m new here and didn’t want to step on any toes. 😀
@Sister Crow (#210 and #216), @Yavanna (#224), @marlena13 (#227), and @Heather (#229)
For what it is worth, I’d like to note that Bei actually REJECTED the maxim about “Old enough to bleed” from his list, and replaced it with the maxim “15 gets you 20.” The literal meaning of “15 gets you 20” is a strong injunction to AVOID any kind of sexual contact whatsoever with anyone under the age of consent. Since Bei opted for this one over the other, I think we cannot accuse him of any support for pedophilia.
Of course it is still possible that readers might be angered by being reminded of the old saying in the first place. So it might have been in poor taste. But at any rate I see no evidence to accuse him of sympathy for offenders.
@sgage re: #201 –
Point taken re: the Soviets in Germany, but I concur with Siliconguy (post #215) with respect to Japan.
@Princess Cutekitten re: #214:
Harder? Definitely Chinese. The grammar may be fractionally more English-like than Russian’s, but the writing system and tone-dependent pronunciation aren’t. Meanwhile Russian, besides actually being an Indo-European language, has a lot of loanwords.
Sister Crow (no. 210), this was simply a list of well-known and often dubious adages, not necessarily principles that I endorse. (Notice the conflict with “15 gets you 20.”) I was aiming for a collection of sayings that reproduces the kind of problematic mix one finds in the Bible, e.g. I am sorry to have triggered you.
Greg, oh, I’m well aware of that. It’s still amusing to me to contrast the egotistical assumption of modern people — “They’ll think of us as gods!” — with the colder reality of historical examples.
Polecat, er, does this surprise you? The privileged classes are, after all, privileged…
No Mr. Greer. Not in the least. What I find so galling is just how so flippantly ‘in-your-face’ obtuse DC.gov has become.
The Ok glacier plaque:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okj%C3%B6kull#:~:text=Prior%20to%20the%20ceremony%2C%20NASA,an%20elevation%20of%201%2C114%20meters.
Was placed where the Ok glacier used to be with the following inscription:
“A letter to the future
Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.
In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.
This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done.
Only you know if we did it.”
It is fairly clear what the future is going to think about us.
Grover & Pumpkinscone
David Holmgren was definitely thinking of the older Australian inner suburbs that were compact and served by train or bus. He even suggested the possibility of tearing out the back fences of a suburban block and having one large communal garden and orchard. I talked with him quite a bit about the idea back in the day.Another person who was very much into that concept was the late Toby Hemenway in Oregon. I think most of the far flung, car dependent American or Australian outer bedroom suburbs would be hopeless. They don’t have the infrastructure or community to become towns. Most have water issues. They are ghost towns waiting to happen.
On the notion of monuments and buried books. Has anyone considered a time release opening?
It would not be too difficult to rig up a mechanical system to open a secret door after a few hundred years. You would just need a very slow mechanism as the trigger. Something like the famous pitch drop experiment.
Patricia Matthews
Yes, the Sacramento Valley is a huge rice growing area. When I lived in W. Sacramento, there were always Chinese or Japanese ships in the port loading rice.
You are right that agribusiness is very powerful in CA. Wealthy cities can pay them to not farm or can buy them out. I am not sure what the procedure would be for their allocations from the state water system. Poor rural towns and unincorporated rural communities are pretty much fracked without government assistance, which is not always forthcoming. This is an ongoing issue which will only become more acute with the drying climate and overdrawn ground water. i hear the population has actually started to decline though.
What about the latest possible exploits of the ‘clueless rich set’ manipulating data to create an instant ‘rosier’ now?
At least some within their ranks have sussed they’ve kind of run out of time for any of thegoodstuff™ to happen in the future. Obviously we’ve had all the government/pharma covid untruths bubbling away for a while but the below story really caught my eye this morning:
‘Some oil pundits are now claiming that the Biden administration has been fabricating low gasoline demand data in order to drag prices lower.’
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Dodgy-Demand-Data-The-Oil-Price-Collapse-Conspiracy.html
A new level of clueless?
Are you enjoying the flurry of think pieces telling work-from-home office workers to get their rear back into their cubicle seats? Comcast in Philly just laid down an ultimatum that all working have to return 3 days a week. Someone posted key fob data from a large commercial real estate company and the number of office workers has been flat for 4 months.
I’ve been laughing at all the tactics the media are using – shame, guilt, pride, community, competition. And people are not falling for it. It’s the biggest game of chicken I’ve ever seen.
It’s what you said – people realized how miserable their life once when they slammed us into covid quarantine. It sure looks like a lot of people aren’t interested in returning to it.
discussion on comics, comic book movies, etc.
hehe. yes, boomer rehashing youth. My thought is that comic book movies are a masked indulgence in stories about Gods. Movies about actual Gods would be taboo, so comic book movies are a safe way to watch a movie with Thor and not really Thor. The Hulk Smash routine is a repressed need for divine story-telling about God’s wrath. eh.. mebbe?
Reminds me of a great song; https://youtu.be/DqTeGt6ZHQs
@polecat says:
August 7, 2022 at 10:50 pm
No Mr. Greer. Not in the least. What I find so galling is just how so flippantly ‘in-your-face’ obtuse DC.gov has become.
—————————————————————————–
When you view DC government as a “Crime Syndicate” it all makes sense. That’s what governments around the world have truly become. I still remember the 1980’s bumper sticker which read: “Don’t Steal The Government Hates Competition”.
The PMC loonies are waking up to their own bland version of prepping, it seems:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/06/change-is-coming-meet-the-englishman-prepping-for-climate-apocalypse-in-an-old-german-barracks
This paragraph in particular is incredible:
“Coronavirus is not a cause for concern – partly because Green is twice vaccinated, *in spite of one what one may assume from his enthusiasm for herbal remedies,* but mainly because he lives on his own in the middle of a remote spruce forest in Saxony, whose exact coordinates he keeps secret, and rarely receives visitors.” (emphasis mine)
This is the (Gates-funded) Guardian’s idea of an acceptable prepper: yeah, ok, he might be into those *wacky herbal remedies*, but don’t worry, he’s not some right-wing anti-vaxxer nutjob; he’s double-vaxxed, vegan, and most *definitely* supports the Current Thing.
And for just a few thousand Euros, you can get a non-guaranteed spot in his compound, potentially contaminated by toxic military waste (the former Communist bloc didn’t exactly have a model environmental record, after all).
I do wonder how long his “Vegan!” tattoo will stay relevant with those three fat, tasty pigs running around, though.
@polecat “‘in-your-face’ obtuse DC.gov has become” would be an upgrade. The National Archives in DC still has a vaccine mandate in place to go and view their public records. Anyone questioning it, will be banned from this public building. Library of Congress had one too. There’s also a mask mandate in place for everyone. DC is actively anti-everyone and only those who are most loyal to their schizo rules are welcome.
Hi JMG
It seems that the french government slowly is informing the population that the problem with the nuclear power plants (caused by SCC: Stress Corrosion Cracking) will not be solved easily, and France will suffer an electric “gap” during 15 – 20 years, now they are importing more than 7 GW, and normally they should be exporting 8 GW:
https://www.eqmagpro.com/frances-troubled-nuclear-fleet-a-bigger-problem-for-europe-than-russias-gas-eq-mag-pro/
The electricity price will skyrockets next winter.
France was “the model” to imitate with his “low emmissions” nuclear plants, and I think is the country that will have more problems in the future, for example to dismantle +20 nuclear plants is not easy, nor cheap, and forget about build + 20 new ones.
Cheers
David
@Ahriman #46, since you’re bringing up transport as a primary concern, have you weighed the pros and cons of living by or near navigable water? There have always been plenty of both (pros and cons). With likely sea level rise, changing weather patterns and more extreme weather events, there may be more of the latter than before, but it’s still an option. Water transport will be a necessary option for goods and people wherever it’s feasible. Seafaring, warehousing, shipbuilding and a host of other supporting trades are possible employment if farming isn’t your (or your offspring’s) thing. It’s probably impossible to plan far enough ahead, though, to acquire New Hampshire land by the shores of Manchester Bay.
After much contemplation I’ve decided on my official contribution to the Ecosophian Slabs of Smartitude. (We’re going to build some of those, right?) It’s very practical well-tested advice, if a bit specialized in application.
“Worm and parcel with the lay; turn and serve the other way.”
I just listened to a fascinating interview between Gonzalo Lira and James Lindsay (sorry – no transcript!):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVj9qMblrvs&ab_channel=GonzaloLiraII
At the 1:32:00 mark, Lindsay asserts that the Western Overclass has been motivated by a “mystery religion” which he describes as a mash-up between 2nd-3rd Century Gnosticism and alchemical Hermeticism, the latter being used as a means to achieve the former. The “Gnostic” aspect is the Utopian ideal which states that the world of matter (the “world as it is”) is evil, and that it is possible to “alchemically” overcome this evil world to create a Utopian paradise. Lindsay says that this idea dates back to the 18th Century (primarily Rousseau), and he cites Giambattista Vico as a distant philosophical predecessor. He further states that “scientism” (thanks to Karl Marx) is the modern form of this idea.
I think he is off base with Vico, but the general idea makes a lot of sense to me. Lindsay also emphasizes that Gnosticism (which has been around for millennia) always tries to attach itself, like a parasite, to some other religion or dominant worldview, be it Christianity in the 2nd Century or “science” in contemporary life.
Food for thought!
Eike @ #232
If I don’t have my reading glasses on, the dot over the ‘i’ blurs into the bottom part of the ‘i’, making it look like a lower case ‘l’.
I don’t think people are messing it up deliberately. I also don’t think it will get any better. In English there’s a beautiful giant majestic deer called an elk. That word predisposes the brain of English speakers to see the e-l-k pattern even if it isn’t there, sort of like Rorscharch in reading.
I’m not trying to be mean or anything. But if it was me, I would just come up with a different user name, just to avoid the gnashing of teeth and heartburn. JMG has tens of thousands of readers, actually, it could be hundreds of thousands. Is it really worth your time and bother to fight this battle over and over, every time someone’s brain pictures a glorious set of antlers instead of the letter ‘i’? Maybe spare yourself the aggravation. Reduce the irritation load- life is too short. 🙂
Eike , I have just made a test, and it’s the autocorrection that changes your name. Sorry anyway, I will try and slap its fingers next time.
Stephen Pearson,
To borrow a germane Americanism, I ain’t arguin’!
That’s why I moved into the downtown area of a small rural town instead of somewhere lost in the ‘burbs along GA (USA) Hwy 20 southeast of us. I drive it once a week for work (have to wash the creepy-crawlies off me as soon as I get home), and it’s easy to tell that this stretch will be a ghost town one day, ruled by local war lords. But our little town is definitely not like that.
Cool that you’ve sat and chatted with David Holmgren. I have a high respect for him, like I have for JMG. Different, but roughly equal. I’ve practiced permaculture, to some extent, for 13 years now. And David was the one who delivered my very first big mental shift, back in early ’09. We actually named our now 12-year old son Oliver, after his son.
Cheers!
Jay Pine,
That just seems like garden-variety demand destruction to me, although I’m sure they’re playing it up as some come-to-Jesus moment on the part of the thoughtful Left.
The climate of Georgia isn’t great for anything long lasting anyway. Whatever you put up will get washed away by the gentle acids of rain, er, time. If it wasn’t one thing it would’ve been something else. If you really wanted to build a monument that would last the next 1000 years, better to build it in the desert.
Maybe that’s the real indictment of the Guidestones – vapid statements that were never going to stand the test of time, all forgotten in a few centuries hence.
I remember the first time I read about the statements on those stones and thought “Hmm, the devil is in the details, and there are a lot of devils…”
So I got it, we put up a big rock make it all very nice to look at, and we carve the following lyrics into it.
Gather all the young ones and listen as we tell
Of days of old when the earth was whole
Before the hammer fell
Once there were cities
Of steel, glass, and stone
But now lie all in ruins
Of dust, ash, and bone
The people of the old world
Growing fat and blind
Resolved to be as fools and liars
Ignoring every sign
Then came days of darkness
Then came nights of flame
They knew their world was ending
They wept in fear and shame
Now we few remain
To keep the fires alight
All is as it should be
All is set to right
Now there are no cities
No tyrants and no slaves
The old world lies in ruins
A new one in it’s place
Gather all the youngs
And make them listen well
Of days of old when the earth was whole
Before the hammer fell
It will be called the Sword in the Stone.
Right on cue the US Gov’t has sent the FBI and raided Donald Trumps home and broke into his safe where he supposedly had classified documents. I honestly have never seen a former POTUS subjected to that. For the record I am pro/con anyone as I have never voted and never will vote for any politician. The point I made earlier is that the US Gov’t has become a crime syndicate. If they want to rub you out, they will find a way to do it.
This story is on Zerohedge, and other MSM news sites, including the BBC.
Re. California water and agriculture. Since burning off the stubble in rice fields was banned due to air pollution concerns, i.e., the state capitol was downwind from burning fields and influential people didn’t like to breath smoke every fall, the post-harvest fields have become important bird habitat for many migratory species in the Pacific Flyway. The real concern of water use are the vineyards and almond orchards, which keep increasing in acreage. Unlike annual crops such as produce and even rice, trees and vineyards cannot be left fallow and unwatered in dry years. If you don’t water your orchard or vineyard you lose years of investment. Complaints about water flow in rivers being maintained to keep some tiny little fish alive (the smelt) ignore the fact that the tiny fish support populations of larger fish, some of which are important to the off-shore fishing industry. And that is just the monetary argument, not the ecological arguemtn. However, the state has been slow to impose watering limits on landscaping this year and other conservation regulations. One of the heads of the state department resigned in protest that the Governor was not doing enough. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-07-28/california-drought-official-blasts-newsom-administration
Calif. water is complicated. Before white settlement much of the Central Valley was seasonal wetlands, only drying out by the end of summer. Farmers built levees and canals to drain huge areas (Tulare County, for example, used to be a huge shallow lake most of the year) and converted the former wetlands to farms. The southern end of the Valley is technically desert due to lack of precipitation, but the snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada made irrigated farming possible. As the climate warms the snowpack is less predictable and hence the current situation of artificial lakes below normal levels. But unpredictable is a key word here. The dams that catch the runoff are managed to provide hydro-electric, irrigation, water for cities, recreation, and flood control. Hold back too much water early in the season because of drought fears and you may end up with catastrophic flooding if there are late rains or heavier runoff. No one is happy every year.
Brief note on the “old enough to bleed—” controversy. I had always heard it as applied to sex with young women. However, there are many societies in which the danger and labor of giving birth was seen as a contribution to the society from women equal to the danger of men endured in going to war, so I could see the other interpretation as valid. This attitude has diminished due to the greater safety modern medicine provides birthing women. But never forget that giving birth has risks–in fact one could say that statistically speaking it is more dangerous to be a pregnant woman in the US, than to be an active-duty police officer in the US.
Rita
stephen pearson, if suburbs don’t have the infrastructure or community to become towns, that is because of zoning restrictions. Once those can be removed, or safely ignored, I think retrofitting for downsized lives could be done, at least in some areas. Here in upstate NY yards are huge. There is room for gardens and fruit trees.
Martin Back #218, that sort of misinterpretation is the bane of those trying to design warnings to keep future people away from nuclear waste storage sites. Apparently it’s nearly impossible to create a cross-cultural sign that means ‘this will kill you’ that can’t also be interpreted as ‘this raises the dead’. 🙂
Well, great minds are thinking alike again. Alastair Crooke’s newest post lays out how the utter failure of our elite technocrats is leading to political convulsions globally. He traces many of the historical underpinnings for the failing ideologies of our European worldview to the age of empire under Charlemagne. Pondering what breaking those collective psychoses may entail, he writes, “What happens when people awake to the deceit of Totalitarian-Lite posing as liberty and individualism (let alone democracy!). The question then becomes: To what other ‘image-idea’ will the people collectively migrate?” Thankfully, it looks like the Georgia Guidestones won’t be that image-idea.
Surprisingly, Crooke’s quoting from a piece in the Daily Telegraph reads like someone cribbed extensively from Ecosophia. Lines like “Nor is there any explanation for this fiasco apart from decades of failed assumptions and policy missteps by our governing class” and “It is clearer than ever that the emperor has no clothes and has no more stories to distract us with” aren’t the usual fare for an Establishment rag. As usual, Crooke introduces a bit of classic mythology as an antidote, closing with, “It does let us address directly the ‘Beast of ideology’, who through ‘his’ own ineptitude, has inadvertently stripped Pandora of her masque, thus opening her box. Who may say which masque she will don next!” Somehow, I don’t think it will be our beloved technocrats who get to make that call.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/08/08/the-masque-of-pandora/
Grover@266
In less ‘manipulative’ times I’d straight out agree and I’m sure some of it is demand destruction, but was the temptation to play the figures down some more taken too? As ever, it’s rarely one thing or the other.
Straws in the wind from today’s Gainesville sun: the State of Florida has quietly shelved the proposed vanity project of a big turnpike running north to Georgia through some prime agricultural land which is in use. They announced they’d be focusing on fixing up I-75, which also runs to here the turnpike was supposed to go.
The Biden administration pushed some long-awaited sensible items through the Senate: allowing Medicare to bargain for pharmaceuticals prices, capping insulin at $35/dose, and paying for it with a 15% minimum tax on big corporations, many of whom had been paying no taxes at all. The vote was a hard 50-50 along party lines, and… from the news online – some North Carolina voters are giving their Senators what-for, for opposing the $35 cap on insulin.
I also note the bill is loaded with climate change measures amounting to everything the PMC sincerely believes to be “green” and isn’t. Now it’s headed for the House.
@Walt F #260 –
Thanks for that link! As a Canadian just across the way I envision a someday Greater New England union but hadn’t realized that rising waters would create a literal island.
As for the original issue of water transport, and with respect to PumpkinScone’s reply, it’s funny how your brain can miss what’s right in front of you. There is a river nearby my homestead, and for a while I’ve been wondering how long the hydro generating station will continue to be operable. Never clued in till now that the greater utility might be transporting stuff.
Grover Mary Bennett
Suburbia in NY might very well be adaptable to become towns with its different climate, water, geography. The areas i am familiar with are in the US west and parts of Australia, and they definitely aren’t.
David Holmgren is a really nice person and very pragmatic. He lacks the evangelical edge one sees in many permaculturalists.
Rita Rippetoe
I wish I had more time to talk about the CA water situation before before this post cycle ends. It is both crucial and fascinating. I do cringe at people who say about the snail darter that it all that water wasted on one little fish without acknowledging that it is an indicator species for the health of the whole delta and bay.
to all here on the old enough to bleed
On the whole “old enough to bleed…” debate: The phrase may have changed meaning in later years. Many words and phrases do. However in the 1950s and early 60s it was most commonly used leeringly by groups of teens or young men on street corners about any attractive young girl who passed by. It was commonly used with butcher, not breed, the implication being that any girl post puberty was fair game for them sexually. It was disgusting then, and it is hard for me to not see it as so now.
Darkest Yorkshire #272, I hadn’t considered that some cultures read left-to-right, and others read right-to-left.So if the LTR sequence ends with someone lying dead on the ground, a RTL reader would assume it depicts the raising of the dead. Awkward.
It reminds me of the Peking-Paris race of 1907 which followed the telegraph route. At each telegraph station the operator would have to read the incoming message then manually re-transmit it onwards, the range being limited by the technology of the day. A Russian operator received a transmission from Peking written in French. He had no knowledge of any language apart from Russian, but knowing the message came from Peking he assumed it was written in Chinese, and he knew that Chinese was written vertically. So he obligingly read it vertically then transmitted it horizontally in the European style, garbling the message completely. Amazingly, the people in Paris managed to figure out what it said.
Eike @ #232
I read it as Elke too, as in Elke Sommer. She was seriously cute.
Stress corrosion cracking is an old enemy of mine. We worried about it in the Navy, we worried about it in mining, and we worried about it in producing solar panel grade silicon. What’s especially bad is the most common stainless steel, type 304, is the most susceptible to SCC. If you want resistance to regular corrosion (which you must or you wouldn’t pay for stainless in the first place) and SCC then you have to increase the nickel content of the alloy and that gets expensive fast.
Denis @ 258
Yes, I wholeheartedly agree – with President Snowjob doing his demential damnedist to make sure all the badmedicine go down.
and Rod @ 256,
Yeah ..with the FIBies sporting their ‘tommys’, chortle got with a collective E.G. Robinsonesk voice, uttering “See! SEE! as they open empty, orange safe..
@ Ray Wharton #268
That is a fierce “sticky” rhyme that made me feel like singing it out loud.
Have you set it to music? Because if you have, a recording would be lovely, to get us all humming along.
And if not, I know just the musician who can get this tune rocking – Ms Kimberly Steele!
edit: ‘as they” chortle .. no ‘got’ .. open ‘an’ empty, orange safe..
*once again, $pell-Heck is trying to work it’s babelspeak magic upon my aggreived self. sigh!
Team10tim, it occurs to me that in 500 years or so, when Iceland is a thriving country with most of its currently ice-covered landscape a patchwork of forest and pasture, the people there may think, “Thank goodness they didn’t do anything to stop it!” As for time release opening, hmm — have you by any chance read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation?
Jay, that’s practically old hat these days. Back in the 1970s, in his book Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, Bertram Gross pointed out that economic indicators had become economic vindicators, massaged or blatantly faked as necessary to make the status quo look better than it ever was.
Denis, no, I missed that — thanks for this! I’m delighted to hear it. The Onion was ahead of the curve on this one: in 2015 they published an article titled Health Experts Recommend Standing Up At Desk, Leaving Office, Never Coming Back.
Jastin, quite possibly, yes.
Travis, not quite my style of music, but whatever floats your boat.
Luke, that’s a story worth noting. If media marketing flacks have noticed that so many managerial-class people dread the future that you can sell them prepping supplies, then we’ve definitely passed a watershed.
DFC, the nuke fans are going to have a core meltdown in short order. France has been the example they always cite about how we can have a wonderful glow-in-the-dark future powered by nukes, and this won’t exactly help feed that fantasy…
Michael, if Lindsay means that metaphorically, he has a point. If he means it literally, he’s been eating way too much fruit bat stew or something — and he’s completely wrong about Vico, of course. Vico saw through the scientism of his own time and made a decent first pass explaining how civilizations wreck themselves.
Ray, I’m in favor of it!
Rod, I just read about that. Oh, they’re going to regret that…
Christophe, I was wondering when that set of ideas was going to start creeping into the media. One of the amusements of being a fringe thinker, as I’ve noted before, is that the mainstream is so devoid of new and useful thinking that sooner or later they end up dipping into the fringes. I’ve had several of my concepts picked up without attribution and reused that way.
Patricia, good to hear about the turnpike. The other — well, it’s got more pork than a sausage factory. We’ll see what comes of it.
stephen pearson, I can’t say about Australia, but in the USA, this is what happens when we allow real estate interests to dominate local governments. We are all complicit; there ain’t no virgins here.
Christophe, the Strategic Culture website is inaccessible from my computer, being from them Russkies and all. I can still get to Global Research, as the Powers that (fill in disgusting personal habit of choice here) have not yet gotten around to demonizing Canada.
@ Siliconguy #279
Yes I have been fighting SCC in boilers, in this case the problems was due to some water treatment issues and the lack of the right dose of additives with the boiler in stand-by
The problem with the NPP is another thing, in fact are the high Ni alloys what are suffering the SCC, for example the Alloy-600 and Alloy-690, both with very high %Ni (60 – 70%), used to avoid corrosion at high temp in the primary of the circuit exposed to high temperature
The problem with the SCC was seen firstly in the CANDU reactors (that are a quite dangerous design), with the transmutation of the Ni following the next chain of reactions:
Ni58 + n (neutron) —–> Ni59 + gamma rad.
Ni59 + n ——-> Fe56 + He4
Ni59 + n ——–> Co59 + H
Ni59 + n ——–> Ni60 + gamma rad.
It is well known that the He and H cause embrittlement in the metallic crystal lattices, so the SCC in high Ni alloys in the longterm.
The “alchemy” of the nuclear reactors make very difficult to know in advance all the possible problems with the materials, because they change in nature, and it is difficult if not impossible to “repair” with 100% guarantees, a circuit so affected by this change in “nature”, that is the reason they are talking to end the life of the reactors.
Nuclear plants were built to produce nuclear weapons, period, end of sentence, and electricity was a sub-product to convince the populace, and of course they will never be a solution to anything but a huuuuuge risk for the humand kind.
Cheers
David
Stephen Pearson,
Most of Western N. America will be something like the Australian outback soon enough I imagine. For all practical purposes, all of those people are headed back to the eastern shores of the Mississippi eventually. Can’t tell you how many license plates I’ve seen lately from California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Arizona… When we moved here 10 years ago there was none of that. Maybe Alabama, Tennessee, NC, and Florida…this area is kinda touristy.
Where we are, we are also on the receiving end of climate refugees from coastal Florida. “Halfbacks” as we call them; they’re all Yankees. (See Florida real estate boom, c. 1925.) More of them every year. (It’s telling I think, that some of our Leftiest friends are moving to sea level on the GA coast later this year. I mean tidal creeks in the back yard sort of sea level. Such hypocrisy. You can’t even convince yourself apparently. What is all the rhetoric for, exactly?)
Me, I’m good at 1500′ above sea level, in the beautiful, soon-to-be-subtropical N. Georgia Mtns.
The only thing that worries me is that no one in this area ever had much of anything before the Industrial Age. Maybe with a large enough, and diverse enough economy, we can make a better go of it?
We shall see, I reckon.
Grover
Michael Martin @ 262: there IS a transcript! YouTube now has a feature that generates a transcript! I have not figured out how to COPY the transcript yet, but here’s what you do:
• Make sure you’re not in full-screen mode for the video
• Tap/click on the video to show the control options, including “CC” (closed captioning.)
• Select CC
• Tap the down-pointing icon that’s on the same line as the video title (looks like ^ but pointed down)
• Notice that now there’s a blue-highlighted “Show Transcript” button in the right-hand column; click it
• Scrollable transcript, with time stamps! Tap/click any time-stamp once to go to that point in the video, Tap/click the video to start the picture and audio (or tap the space bar), tap the space bar to stop the video
Yeah, lots of steps, but becomes almost automatic once you’ve done it a few times.
Not every YouTube video shows the active “CC” button; I’ve figured out that very recent videos don’t (being generated behind the scenes, I’m presuming), but am unsure why others that are older don’t sometimes. This may be under the control of the content uploader; not sure.
Jay, and JMG,
I’m closing in on the end of “The Great Crash 1929,” and what strikes me about the present is that there’s nothing new under the Sun…
Humans gonna human, I reckon.
Jay Pine,
You’re probably right. Nothing is ever due to just one thing anymore. Too much interconnectivity.
stephen pearson,
One other thing real quick. I’ve never gotten anything but the best of vibes from Holmgren. He’s been a huge inspiration in my life. And I agree, I can’t say the same thing about all of the shining lights of the permaculture scene…(cough, cough, Paul Wheaton, cough, cough)
Patricia Matthews,
Yeah, we need more ethanol in our lives, I’m sure…
The inmates are running the asylum, I’m afraid.
@ Partricia #275
Not all drugs, and not immediately…
The Health and Human Services secretary would be authorized to begin negotiating the prices of 10 high-cost prescription drugs in 2023, and the negotiated prices would go into effect in 2026 for Medicare Part D medications and 2028 for drugs covered under Medicare Part B. The number of drugs whose prices would be negotiated on behalf of Medicare would increase in subsequent years, and by 2029 a total of 60 drugs would be subject to negotiated prices.
Most budgets have so-called “cuts” in the “out years” which — by the time those future dates arrive — magically disappear. I’d be wary of any changes that are supposed to happen years down the road, especially those that have a very entrenched lobby behind them.
Please also note that they’re asking public servants to negotiate better deals… and public servants NEVER negotiate better deals, at least not for the people they’re supposed to represent.
From Scotland – ‘higher’ education self-destructing. (And a sidelight on Stross I never imagined.)
P.S. Stross is responsible for the infamous “Rule 34” – “If it exists, there is porn of it.”
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/08/the-end-of-education.html
Eike #232
A few comments ago, I saw, “Elke” (😤), and groaned. Oh, cr@p is going to hit the fan.
I know you are not trying to be funny, but your two reactions to being called Elke are precious. This second time, I laughed out loud (😂). I don’t know why I am experiencing this interchange as so humorous.
Tell us a story about Eike.
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Grover, I read it every few years when I see a speculative boom taking off, and yeah, that’s my inevitable reaction, too.
Patricia M, thanks for this! I’m familiar with Stross — his novella “A Colder War” is one of the best pieces of modern Cthulhu mythos fiction ever written — and paging through his essays introduced me to a label for the insanely bland mainstream of current SF and fantasy, with its young-adult plots and its fixation on wish-fulfillment fantasies for the woke; the label is “squeecore.” I’m adopting it.
Grover
I reckon some of those Californians, etc had better change their license plates before people start chucking rocks at their cars
Re YouTube transcripts. A decent transcript requires some work.
Three-dot menu > Show transcript > Select all (Cntrl-A) > Copy (Cntrl-C) > Paste into document (Cntrl-V)
And you end up with, for example from the Gonzalo Lira video:
10:39
says for example that we’re going to run out of metal in the year 2000 so like metals like copper and aluminum
10:45
yeah it turns out and that’s going to collapse the whole global system because their argument is that we have basically
10:51
that the carrying capacity of earth is artificially inflated by the systems of technology we’ve created and so when we
10:57
run out of certain key resources like copper then or whatever else then we’re
Delete the times manually or use regular expressions or possibly process in a spreadsheet and you end up with:
says for example that we’re going to run out of metal in the year 2000 so like metals like copper and aluminum yeah it turns out and that’s going to collapse the whole global system because their argument is that we have basically that the carrying capacity of earth is artificially inflated by the systems of technology we’ve created and so when we run out of certain key resources like copper then or whatever else then we’re
Which you need to edit further to get something more readable.
Bei Dawei: apology accepted, although I’m still mystified as to how you could think that and “two in the pink…” were appropriate for mixed company on a public blog.
@ Patricia Mathews, JMG
Re the article you linked above (#294)
I had to chuckle, ruefully, at the one sentence near the end: “Art, by its nature, can’t be conformist.”. Indeed, those poorly-educated, conformist plebes surely can’t comprehend their non-conformist, artfully-educated betters!
Dear JMG and community what are your thoughts on this… (Are we on we steps of a new good system NESARE/GSARA or on the cusp of a new dark age (The great Reset alla the Davos croud) or are we heading for a simpler future more like James Howard Kunstlers History of Nowere what do you think? Best Regards Martin
But, the strongest theory as to why they were destroyed is not because someone wanted man to live in harmony and balance with nature, its blatantly obvious that it was a response to vax-created genocide due to the population-control link. The other theory being that it covered some kind of capsule containing the next set of nefarious plans by the blood-lusting cabal. Love your work JMG, and often recommend it, but you do skirt this subject. Yes, it’s vandalism, and if it weren’t for the relentless climate and population-scaremongering it’s a strangely convenient coincidence that populations are being diminished, pregnant women are miscarring etc. as you yourself said: millions of people can die off, but it won’t be obvious if it’s spread about a population. It seems a little out of proportion to defend a few industrially carved rocks in this context.