This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.
First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.
Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their follow-up comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here.
With that said, have at it!
Hi everyone,
Thanks to JMG for the warm invite to share this update! I’m excited to announce that my book, The Great Canadian Reset, is now available for pre-order on Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/Great-Canadian-Reset-Co-Ops-Canadas/dp/1998841197. Set to release on October 16, 2025, it dives into how cooperatives and economic democracy can help communities thrive in a contracting economy—ideas sparked by the lively discussions here.
For those curious about co-op businesses or wanting to join the conversation, check out my Substack at https://thegreatcanadianreset.substack.com/. Non-Canadians might enjoy my occasional satirical takes, like The Kombucha Konundrum. I’d love to hear your thoughts, including from folks outside Canada interested in adapting these ideas locally.
Thanks for the inspiration, and I look forward to your feedback!
Best,
Ludovic
I must admit that I voted for Trump in 2024, because the alternative was even worse. That said, given the events of the past weekend and Trump’s gloating afterward, I have to ask is he really that delusional? And, if so, what is to be done? Delusional thinking is nothing new for him of course. One example; some months back he claimed that he supported lots of legal immigration, because with AI we would need lots of new workers. Huh? By what logic? Beyond that, I can only become sarcastic….
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
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The following is the abridged “special attention” list..
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Pierre and Julie conceive a healthy baby together. May the conception, pregnancy, birth, and recovery all be healthy and smooth for baby and for Julie.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed.
May SLClaire’s honorary daughter Beth, who is undergoing dialysis for kidney disease, be blessed, and may her kidneys be restored to full functioning.
May 1Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties; may she quickly be able to resume a normal life, and the cancer not return.
May Kallianeira’s partner Patrick, who passed away on May 7th, be blessed and aided in his soul’s onward journey. And may Kallianeira be soothed and strengthened to successfully cope in the face of this sudden loss.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical (Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer.
(Healing work is also welcome. Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe)
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
JMG, my question is on the AODA. Coming to you on the level brother, is it worth it? I did my candidate year but gained nothing, because Ive been living this lifestyle for years , I keep up to date with the local flora, fauna, and ecosystem. If There is more to teach Ill continue on but I don’t want to waste anyones time. I hope we part on the Square
Turns out that large language models and large reasoning models don’t actually learn or reason:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/new-apple-study-challenges-whether-ai-models-truly-reason-through-problems/
Just an FYI to let people know I am lending out books by mail for free from my personal library of sustainability and occult titles. Here is a list of the books that I lend to people within the continental US: https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/96400.html
I thought now would be a good time to re-post my old question if that is alright:
Pardon me, Mr. Greer. While we are on the subject of anthropogenic global warming, I was wondering what you think of the argument that it is fundamentally different (and more concerning) than natural climate change in millions of years past because of the dramatically higher rate of change. After all, when rapid climate change happened in the past, there were usually mass extinction events (and of course “rapid” for the biosphere is not nearly as rapid as the rate of change now).
I have an interesting story to relate, and it tangentially relates to the discussion of R. Crumb from last months open post. Here though, the spirit of Harvey Pekar is shining brightly.
My wife and I went up to Cleveland last week for a few days get away on the lake. There were a few things I wanted to do while we were up there. Visiting Zubal Books and Lakeview Cemetery were high up on the list. I knew about Zubal’s from some research I had been doing on Harvey Pekar and Cleveland from a few months ago. I found a YouTube clip of Pekar on Anthony Bourdain’s show No Reservations, where they go to visit the massive used and rare bookstore that in part sits inside an old Hostess Twinkie factory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfHVK4x4JF0&ab_channel=SLAPJazzTrio
I wouldn’t have known to go to Zubal’s unless I had seen that clip. While I was there I found some really interesting titles including one by Paul Feyerband called “Against Method” which proposes, in its anarchistic interpretation of scientific discovery, that it is counterproductive to have a single methodology with regards to scientific practices. It’s closer to the top of my list now because it seems to me we are witnessing the endgame of the one true science. I also found some sacred geometry books to add to the shelves and Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel Blue Flower about Novalis, which I knew nothing about before. It seems to me the Romantic expressions of science via Goethe and Novalis are worth investigating as another thread of science that could have been followed…
After some other stops we finally wound up at Lakeview Cemetery. Lakeview Cemetery was designed by landscape architect Adolph Strauch who designed Spring Grove cemetery in Cincinnati, a few blocks from where I live. Strauch had been inspired by the book Kosmos by Germany polymath Alexander von Humboldt who had written in it about Chinese garden cemeteries. Kosmos can be considered part of the German Romanticist tradition in the science vein…
After stopping at President Garfield’s memorial, there was one more thing I wanted to see in the cemetery, the Haserot Angel. ( https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-haserot-angel-cleveland-ohio )
We drove up to it and after I got out of the car and a guy noticed my plates were from Hamilton County and he struck up a conversation saying he’d gone to the University of Cincinnati. He was very friendly and we had a nice conversation. He mentioned that he’d been the partner of Harvey Pekar’s widow, comic writer Joyce Brabner, for fourteen years before she had died last August. He told me his name and the like, and that he’d just been visiting their gravesite (Brabner is buried next to Pekar but doesn’t have a headstone yet). His name was Lee Batdorf and he was a journalist at times. In meeting him it felt like I’d gotten a handshake from the city. If the timing of our day had been just a little off, and if I hadn’t gone to that one last spot I might not have met him.
When we got back home last week I put the graphic novel history “Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland” on hold and Lee was a character in this final work of Pekar’s. Zubal’s books was also featured in the book… I hadn’t read it before, though I’d read some of his other works.
https://www.cleveland13news.com/story/harvey-pekar-s-partner-and-comic-writer-joyce-brabner-dies-after-battle-with-cancer
That was some of our Cleveland adventure. I recommend the city for anyone looking for a modest Midwest getaway. Make sure you take the time to go visit Pekar and pay your respects to one of its legends if you go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Pekar#/media/File:Harvey_Pekar_grave_stone.jpg
Two offers for everybody today:
1. I published a report about the recent Ecosophia Convention in Glastonbury. It is available here:
https://thehiddenthings.com/glastonbury-convention-2025
2. Each Wednesday, I perform a formal blessing in which I bless the people who signed up. I appreciate signups as they help me to practice! More here:
https://thehiddenthings.com/categories/weekly-blessings
I hope you all had a great solstice and are enjoying summer (or whatever it currently is in your place). JMG, thanks a lot for hosting the Open Post again! I’m very much looking forward to whatever this month’s topics will turn out to be – there are always some interesting surprises in the mix. 🙂
Milkyway
Following on from the discussion of karma last week, I’d like to mention what I think is a misunderstanding of karma – made by people who accept it rather than those who don’t.
It’s the belief that *everything* bad that happens to a person is a result of past karma acting out. Rather than events having *many* possible causes, karma being only one of them.
It’s like saying “all horses are animals, therefore all animals are horses” (to pick a very random example).
Other causes could by physical (eg. caught in an earthquake zone), biological (eg. a genetic condition), or the ill-intent of another (eg. attacked in the street by a stranger – who will suffer their own karmic consequences). The person these things happen to could be blameless – and simply unlucky.
This is not even an original thought of mine – I read this explanation of the multiple levels of causality in a book called “The Buddhist Vision” by Alex Kennedy – one of the leaders of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. And yet I had great difficulty discussing this with a practicing (UK) Buddhist I met once, who couldn’t get his head around this concept, and for whom everything was the result of karma.
I also heard of a Thai Buddhist monk using karma to explain the 2004 tsunami – “Why did so many innocent people die? So many children?” Answer: “Actions in their past lives”.
If every misfortune is seen as past karma playing out then a kind of coldness to others sets in. It’s victim-blaming. That in helping alleviate someone’s suffering, you’re hindering that karma playing out, so perhaps you’d better not. Or that you should help someone only to improve *your own* karmic balance-sheet (a selfish attitude and probably self-defeating).
To quote CS Lewis in The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe:
– “Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?”
Perhaps I’ve got this wrong but this is how I see it.
I was also wanting to ask you something that I am curious about.
Since becoming a blogger under the old Archdruid Report almost 20 years ago now, your main theme has been the unsustainability of the Industrial Age. Is there any period of human history or even Earth’s history as as a whole that you think would be ideal to live in or at least visit?
As an archdruid, I have a guess that the British Isles before the coming of the Romans, the Christians, or at least the Anglo-Saxons may be a good candidate.
Karma is balanced out by will and destiny.
Ludovic, glad to see this in print! I’m sure it’ll be useful to those on my side of the 49th parallel as well.
Phutatorius, welcome to the current American hyperreality. I’d point out that every other US president in my lifetime has had just as complex a relationship to the facts on the ground…
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Anonymous, yep. Speaking of weird detachment from facts on the ground…
David, that’s a common misconception. The global climate change that happened 65 million years ago, for example, took place in about a week following the Chicxulub impact. The burst of global warming that ended the Younger Dryas period around 9600 BC saw the planet’s average temperature jolt up between 13° and 15°F in less than a decade. Our current round of climate change is in the middle range, slower than some, faster than others.
Justin, hmm! Thanks for this.
Milkyway, you’re welcome and thank you.
Sydaway, this is an important point! Neither suffering, nor joy, nor anything else has only one cause; in a very real sense, the last time you stubbed your toe, the entire history of the universe up to that time was necessary for that act to take place.
David, nope. Humans gonna human, whenever it happens.
JMG,
Opposite to popilar wisdom, the average American spent almost twice as much of their income on food as they do at present, inflation and all. The average American spends 10.6 % of their income on food in 2024 while in 1950 the spend about 20%. That percentage only began to decrease in the 70’s and did not reach its current levels until the late 90’s.
The Normal economics of empire would say that costs such as food in the center of empire would increase over time. My theory is that this was done on purpose via various government policies to clear away a larger portion of the Americans budget to go to things like rent, mortgages and debt. If your plan is to financialize the economy, how do you free up a larger portion of Americans income to go to the Bankers and landlords? You decrease by half what was one of the largest items in the American budget.
The first of these policies came during the Nixon Administration where actual farm prices were driven down by agricultural policies. The other was the introduction of cheap migrant labor in the late 1970’s. These acted to drive out small farmers, and make things more profitable for large scale agribusiness even with reduced real prices.
If this is the case it will be very painful for Americans ( and the financialized economy) when things inevitably revert to a less contrived price level.
I’ll repeat my (then off-topic) question from last week: “I’m interested in your opinion on Mr. Trump’s recent behavior. His “big beautiful bill” doesn’t look all that different from the previous administration’s budgets (with some token differences such as the border wall). And he seems to have turned on a dime from “we need to get out of foreign wars” to “we stand with Israel and may even get into the Iran war on Israel’s side.” In the latter case he’s going as far as ignoring the evaluation of his own Director of National Intelligence. Has he been “taken behind the woodshed” and told in no uncertain terms that if he values his position and his life he’d better toe the line? (FWIW, I suspect Mr. Obama originally believed in “hope and change” until he had a similar encounter.)”
>Turns out that large language models and large reasoning models don’t actually learn or reason
At the heart of the typical LLM is some sort of neural network. Here’s my question. Is it on the order of complexity of a bug, a mouse or a cat? If it’s on the order of what an insect sports, you’re essentially talking to a very loquacious cricket. Chirp chirp.
And if all you need is a bugbrain in order to get a college degree, what value would you assign to it? The college degree, not the bugbrain.
@mathiesen
You mentioned just how risky a PhD was back in the early 90s. I remember some joke ad for a “PhD resume removal” service back then where you could get that pesky PhD off your resume with carefully constructed alibis and references. What I gathered a PhD enables you to get certain jobs but it absolutely makes it near impossible to get most others. The typical response is OVERQUALIFIED, followed by someone kicking you like a football out the door to score an HR field goal.
Did you know that it might have only been due to the cooling of the Earth that led to the “Ice Age” of the Pleistocene that human beings became “intelligent” in the first place?
Around 3 million years ago, North America and South America were linked together for the first time thanks to volcanic eruptions forming the Isthmus of Panama. Subsequently, more fresh water was deposited around the Arctic by the re-routed Gulf Stream forming the frozen giaciers there. This led to the Earth becoming colder and dryer.
https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/how-the-isthmus-of-panama-put-ice-in-the-arctic/
In Central and Eastern Africa, where our primate ancestors were living, there were fewer forests in which to live, gather food, and hide from predators. Subsequently, they gradually became bipeds. As a consequence, the pelvis de-formed making it difficult for females to have babies unless the skull was shaped a certain way. The natural selection for a certain shape of skull enabled humans to have bigger brains. Meanwhile, the transition to bipedalism caused by the shrinking of the forests compelled humans to eventually learn how to use tools with their hands.
In the alternate reality I showed you before where the French and their Indian allies won at the Battle of Plassey, the American Revolution is subsequently less successful by the way. This is in part because the British have a greater focus on keeping their holdings in North America due to the loss of India. However, it is mainly because a weaker Britain in the later half of the 18th Century is less feared and resented by the other European powers. Subsequently, they aren’t nearly as enthusiastic about helping fund the American revolutionaries like in our timeline.
https://www.clockworksky.net/cliveless_world/ah_cliveless_top.html
Also, due to a less successful Seven Years War (here called the Six Years War), the British never distance themselves with Prussia like what happened in our timeline. As a result, there are a lot of well-disciplined Prussian soldiers to help London out in North America against the rebels.
I was wondering what you think of this idea.
Sydaway—beings (and their karma) do not exist in a vacuum. Lila is a related concept that explains why the events of our lives are not only cause and effect. I am not an expert on this, not remotely, but I understand Lila as the “play of the universe” that is the interactions, the bumping-intos, random collision of beings. All of us with our karmic chaos attached rub off on one another (on all of our sides and on multiple beings at once!) with unexpected effects. Some to our benefit, some to our dismay. The only control we have in the matter is our response, that is our “responsibility” in the matter.
Just in time for the latest Area 51 disclosures, you’ll be happy to know that I went to grab a bin of books to catalog and one of the shiny new objects inside was your The UFO Book from Union Square. Looks very nice! Fully illustrated and photographed. I’m always happy to see something about Barney and Betty Hill.
All this leads me to my song of the week “Explanation…” by Jack Dangers from the album Space Music
https://meatbeatmanifesto.bandcamp.com/track/explanation
Also, I always thought the Foo Fighters was the name of a bad band formed from the remnants of Nirvana without the talent of Kurt Cobain… but your book sets me straight. (I still don’t like the band.)
Congrats!
I forgot to ask this on the Dreamwidth Magic Monday but hope someone can let me know how smudging my tarot deck with sage or any similar smudge is done. This is from John Gilbert’s The Doors of Tarot and the different elemental ways of clearing a deck (smudging is with Air).
I believe one gets the special herb to smoke and then pass the deck through it.
A similar question when he mentions passing a deck through a candle flame. I’d say that is the full deck, all together and not spread out in a fan?
Correction: The Jack Dangers track is from the album Music for Planetarium.
About thirty years ago, Slavoj Zizek came up with the idea the the ideal cog the machine requires was someone who kept a minimum of (perhaps ironic) distance to the system; that ensured his complete assimilation and its smooth functioning.
One can easily imagine the opposite, the fanatic who’s always doing exactly what he’s being told, and by his sheer inflexible, un-ironic fanaticism eventually leads to the machine seizing up.
Isn’t that what in the end always leads to gouverning elites like ours?
Once the postmodern phase (second to last, where things still (ironically) hold together) ends, the 100percenters take the reigns and completely unironically get to work, sacrificing all before them to please their God Of Positive Feedback till it all goes tats up (millenial-ist pun, sorry).
I have a friend who is a Bitcoin enthusiast, and last night I attended a social he organized around that theme. As someone who is planning on a Long Descent vision of the future, I allow myself to enjoy chatting with these bright, optimistic young developers and investors, but I don’t believe blockchain currencies have much of a future in a world of limited mineral and energy resources.
That said, I have entertained the thought that things like Bitcoin and other cybercurrencies may have just enough of a future to matter in the lifetime that remains to me (around 40 or 50 years). The key factor no one in the Bitcoin scene seems to reflect upon seriously (aside from resource scarcity) is how governments might respond to the broader uptake of currencies that are explicitly designed to circumvent government control. (Given that most major powers are surely in the process of developing quantum-level hack-anything computers, and that they already have, you know, guns and stuff).
Anyone care to speculate?
Does anyone have any non digital evidence Roy Jay existed? I’ve suspected for a while now we would end up seeing someone try to add to history by editing the internet, and the Roy Jay phenomena looks like what I’d expect to see if this possibility was being tested.
On a different note, the topic of the very strange cultural shifts of the late 70s and early 80s has come up before, and I have aa new theory I’d like to share. There’s a medical condition known as Cushing’s Syndrome which has as symptoms most of the chronic physical illnesses that have exploded in frequency over the last half century; and neurological symptoms including insomnia, depression, paranoia, impaired attention, impaired memory, increased mental rigidity, and a disruption to the capacity to plan ahead. This sounds a lot like a description of the cultural changes of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Cushing’s Syndrome is caused by excess cortisol, which has a lot of causes. One being low blood sugar, which for complex physiological reasons can be induced by consumption of artificial sweeteners. The timing fits as well: at about the same time society suddenly shifted in a darker direction, the medical establishment was pushing very hard for artificial sweeteners, as a way to keep sugar consumption down, and at least in theory, avoid the health problems that came from excess sugar.
The theory I have is that artificial sweeteners have induced a kind of low grade Cushing’s Syndrome in a huge fraction of the population, and that this has played a major role in the explosion of chronic illness, and the impaired neurological functioning of a huge percentage of the population resulted in massive societal changes.
Hi John,
Firstly, I’ve just read a very interesting intelligence analysis from someone very high-up in the US agencies who thinks that the whole Iran-US thing has an element of theatre to it. He speculates that the real story is the Iranians have their uranium and potentially capacity to build a bomb outsourced in North Korea so the US bombings won’t make a huge amount of difference long-term.
In regard to my question, a few years ago you speculated that at some point this century, the Arab/north African Muslims would organise and invade Europe. More recently, you have spoken more about internal demographics and how a rising Muslim population – heavily influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood – will, over time, take over the big cities, and the countries of western Europe.
I’m wondering why your thinking has shifted from an external invasion to an internal takeover view on the future of western Europe. Or have I got your views wrong.
@JMG: A president who lies; that, we are used to. But a president who appears outright, barking delusional?
@Justin Patrick Moore: I used to go regularly to Cleveland, but I’d never heard of Zubal’s books. As to German romanticism, you might be interested in what is on my CD changer; slots 1 & 2 Brahms’ “German Requiem” and Brahm’s “Song of Destiny;” slot 3 Brahms’ 1st Symphony; slot 4 Brahms’ Sonatas for violin and Piano, Op. 78, 100, and 108; slot 5 a different recording of Brahms’ German Requiem. Slot 6 is vacant but Brahms’ two cello sonatas would be a nice choice.
My current reading includes a third pass through “Mercurius” by Patrick Harpur.
I’ve read that the US warned Iran before dropping bombs on their nuclear sites, thus giving Iran time to move their enriched uranium elsewhere, and Iran alerted the US to when and where they were going to retaliate against a US military base in Qatar.
If true, the entire event was carefully choreographed like theater.
In that case, what was the main reason (or reasons) for this event, beyond theatrical entertainment?
Good Morning and welcome back.
I recently had the oportunity to spend a day in Providence and I can see why you would like the place. While I was in town I took the opportunity to do the HP Lovecraft walking tour, visit the Atheneum, and of course stopped by the HP Lovecraft bookstore in the Arcade. I noticed that none of your books were stocked either the Weird of Hali or otherwise. Considering you are a local author in that scene I figured you would be given a place there.
Other Dave
@Dylan: There were other alternative currencies, such as local currency systems, that used to get a lot of hype before Bitcoin & the crypto bros took over the stage. I know several people who told me they would be millionaires by now because of crypto. They are all still working their day jobs somehow. I think the idea of a nested system of alternate currencies is worth exploring, but basing it on digital makes it very easy to disrupt. Bitcoin also seems even more abstract and disconnected from reality than current money (something I mention in my recent article: Is Techno-Optimism a Form of Mental Illness? https://www.sothismedias.com/home/is-techno-optimism-a-mental-illness ) All it would take to bring some of these things down is blowing up some server farms, though I’m not advocating that.
@15 Roldy
I agree, and additionally we can be nearly certain that MOSSAD has blackmail material on Trump and many other figures in the federal government, including but not limited to visits to Epstein’s estate.
I came across this compilation of ‘cases of forced reincarnation’ and must say that I’m both disturbed by the possibility, and a bit perplexed (and skeptical of) his proposed solution… From those testimonies, it seems clear that the majority of people aren’t eager to come back here for another round of misery, but I’m not sure if that automatically means the beings that push/force/persuade them to come back here anyway are evil. And he advocates refusing their lead, while acknowledging that we don’t know our way around on the other side, which makes me wonder where he intends to go on his own, once he’s there? I’d love to know your (and the commentariat’s) take on all of this:
https://spiritualinquiries.wordpress.com/2024/11/17/30-cases-suggestive-of-forced-reincarnation/
JMG
I’ve heard you and many others talk about the population numbers going down. The reason for this many seem to say is dwindling resources, this doesn’t add up for me. I live in Sweden where the population plateaued in the early 90s. If it weren’t for the mass importation of immigrants by our dear managerial betters, we would have been fewer now than in 1990. So Sweden is following the general trend but with the possible exception of Switzerland and Norway, I’ve never seen a country with such widespread affluence. Basically everyone is doing from alright to splendid, you’d have to try hard to be destitute in Sweden. Still the population is going down. Clearly access to resources has nothing to do with population growth, at this point at least. Sweden would be at least double its population if it did.
Maybe the best way to make sense of this is to look at it as a spiritual phenomenon? Maybe the vast majority who came here this time around weren’t even meant to have children? Maybe they came here to grow spiritually and invest time in themselves rather than raising a family? This could also explain why many decided to invest everything in number one, granted in a very hedonistic self centered way. You see a big difference with the Swedes and the immigrants coming from Africa, the Africans go all in on the bling bling and latest everything while the Swedes are quite blase about the gimmicks and consumer goods. Since it is the affluent industrialized world that’s going down most in population, maybe the lesson to learn was that materialism and affluence isn’t all its cracked up to be? But, once more, mostly failing to learn the lesson.
The African continent is still growing in population so maybe they need to go through their own phase of acquiring material goods and wealth before they too get disillusioned with it? As a society wide spiritual lesson basically. And maybe when the Western economy cracks and collapses the African diaspora goes back to where there’s at least some semblance of economic growth, and then the cycle has its course there too? What do you think?
@Ambrose regarding from the previous comment thread, “I see that Rice University offers a program in “Gnostic, Esoteric, and Mystical” Studies (GEM). Nice, although I wish they could have worked in “Hermetic” and/or “Occult” in there somehow.”
How about OMEGA: Occult, Mystical, Esoteric, Gnostic, and Arcane?
If that sounds too apocalyptic, drop the O and you could have MAGE (though for obscure personal reasons I’d prefer GAME). Add Divinatory (or Druidic) and Art (or Alchemical) and you could do a lot of DAMAGE.
JMG and Sydaway #10,
Hmmm… Doesn’t karma encompass being “caught in an earthquake zone”, “attacked in the street by a stranger “, or having “a genetic condition”? JMG, didn’t you mention that you couldn’t exclude that Hitler incarnated many times following WW2, but never made past the age of 5, being beaten to death, or experiencing other forms of violence? I’m sure the people around him viewed the child as innocent, which he/she was, yet it was the consequence of his actions in a previous incarnation. By no means does it lead to coldness or victim-blaming. You tell your 3-year-old not to jump, he does anyway and hurts himself; you still hug him, console him, and apply a band-aid. You give a bum on the street money for a drink. You help a girl who got herself pregnant at the age of 15.
What am I missing?
JMG,
I understand that the fog of war is think and confusing, but wondering if you’d be willing to share any of your current takes on what’s happening now between/among Iran, Israel, and the United States?
Thanks,
Edward
@JMG What are your thoughts on Wim Hof breathwork as a method to change your own consciousness in accordance with your will?
Re: rapid climate change,
Besides the Younger Dryas there is also this one,
“In Greenland, the event started at 8175 BP, and the cooling was 3.3 °C below the decadal average in less than 20 years. The coldest period lasted for about 60 years, and its total duration was about 150 years.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.2-kiloyear_event
Sea level also did a big jump.
“The sea-level data from the Rhine–Meuse Delta indicate a 2–4 m (6 ft 7 in – 13 ft 1 in) of near-instantaneous rise at 8.54 to 8.2 ka, in addition to ‘normal’ post-glacial sea-level rise”
Interesting planet we live on.
I’m about halfway through your book The Secret of the Temple. Who knew the quiet thrills of architecture could make for such a page turner?
Do you have any updates for us on the attempt to build a working model?
@Roldy: The Orange One is a con man. The other presidents also were con men, except they had to dignity to pretend otherwise (see also “kayfabe”). Some percetage of voters apparently believe that, because the Orange One admitted outright that it was all a con, he was somehow more truthful, and therefore could be trusted. A liar who tells the truth once in awhile remains a liar, however, and…well, here we are.
As John Lydon once asked: Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
Axé
Incidently, the ancestors of humans nearly went extinct at one point in the Pleistocene:
https://www.ndtv.com/feature/ancient-humans-nearly-went-extinct-with-only-1280-people-left-study-claims-8745974/amp/1
OMG, I just started reading the Glastonbury Report on my break at work, then noted that my random Bing screensaver of the day is theTor!
So much for learning to code:
“The job of the future might already be past its prime,” writes The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch in The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting. “For years, young people seeking a lucrative career were urged to go all in on computer science. From 2005 to 2023, the number of comp-sci majors in the United States quadrupled. All of which makes the latest batch of numbers so startling. This year, enrollment grew by only 0.2 percent nationally, and at many programs, it appears to already be in decline, according to interviews with professors and department chairs.”
And more layoffs at Intel:
“Intel is shutting down its small automotive division and laying off most of its staff in that group as part of broader cost -cutting efforts to refocus on core businesses like client computing and data centers.”
Probably due to this;
“Intel’s revenue loss in 2024 has increased to 18,8B$, compared to their 8B$ revenue loss in 2023.”
That’s what happens when you cut R&D to focus on stock buybacks.
Sometimes hobbies lead unexpected places: taking up miniature painting and wargaming has resulted in me now fixing and restoring my church’s plaster statuettes for easter and christmas. Wargaming and miniatures was supposed to be just fun, and now I’ve got transferable skills which may not bring money in but do make my community happy with me. LOL.
If anyone remembers Cedric, the seedling Eastern Cedar tree I rescued from a precarious situation in the back of my old commercial space in 2020, I just posted a current photo of him on my most recent Open Post. He’s gotten tall! I’m doing an Open Post that will stay open this week and the next, and the week of July 4 I’ll do another excerpt of my upcoming book from Aeon, Sacred Homemaking. I will return to my weekly Dreamwidth and Substack essays and free Ogham readings on Saturday, July 12 beginning with Ogham Readings on Saturdays. Thanks!
To LeGrand Cinq-Mars
Check your email!
We pressed [PUBLISH] finally on “International Agatha Christie, She Watched” and I want to mail you a thank you copy for all your help with “Checkmate.”
We finally pressed [PUBLISH] on “International Agatha Christie, She Watched!”
Only 10 months later than the promised date but it’s a much better, more comprehensive book because of the delays.
In addition to over 100 international reviews (Thank you LeGrand Cinq-Mars for helping me with China!) and documentaries, we’ve got the most comprehensive lists anywhere of films by country, year, and which story they’re adapted from; radio presentations, actors and actresses, podcasts and websites, and the most comprehensive bibliography of books about Agatha Christie you can find. And more. And more.
The book is a trade paperback, hardback, and an eBook but with less art.
Since we suffer from the perennial problem of indie authors everywhere (Bill and I do everything ourselves), our website hasn’t been updated to reflect “International” and how you can get a copy.
But we HAVE got Amazon if you’re willing to deal with the evil empire: https://www.amazon.com/International-Agatha-Christie-She-Watched/dp/1950347427
We WILL upload “International” to Ingram so bookshops can order copies or you can order yourself via bookshop.org. This will take some time because Ingram’s requirements for formatting and covers are different from the ‘Zon’s.
Our next movie project, to begin in spring of 2026 (we’ve got tons of book-related housekeeping to catch up on, another peril of being a two-person publishing firm) will be:
Jane Austen, She Watched.
Yep, all the films about Jane, Jane’s novels, Jane documentaries, and Jane ancillary films. Like Agatha, no one has done this so we will.
@Ludovic
Thanks for this link! My father developed a co-op in the seventies in Grise Fiord, good to see this idea getting traction again! I’ll send him the link too!
@Justin Patrick Moore #31:
The true believers in Bitcoin whom I know personally, and who are invested in it financially, socially, and ideologically, do not see it as an investment vehicle but as a means of everyday transactions, precisely because it is decentralized and cannot be taken out by blowing up some server farms.
AFAIK, although mining Bitcoin, the process which creates the hard uncrackable nuggets of code currency, is quite energy intensive and is frequently done with server farms, almost anyone can run a transaction ‘node’ in their basement using consumer-grade computing technology. The ‘nuggets’ are not ‘stored’ anywhere (ie. there is no central server which plays the role of a central bank), but distributed across the network and accessed solely by those who possess the particular encryption key (which is frequently just a string of English words which you can write on a piece of paper and store in your family vault).
Thus Bitcoin is quite a bit less abstract than the current norm of gold-severed paper currency backed only by government promises (or threats).
My question to the commentariat is what might happen if cryptocurrencies like these get wider uptake and THEN the government reveals its ability to crack any and all individual nodes and personal digital wallets nearly simultaneously, using brute force quantum computing power. My own guess is that the complementary enthusiasms of the Trump-Musk alliance can be seen as a soft opener to a future scenario in which the government seizes all crypto in much the same way as they seized gold in the early phases of the 1929 crash.
(Someone please correct my historical and/or technical facts here if I’ve missed something).
Anonymous @ 26, “at about the same time society suddenly shifted in a darker direction, the medical establishment was pushing very hard for artificial sweeteners”
The medical establishment, that pack of PMC busybodies, forever telling ordinary folks how to live. I suppose the “medical establishment” paid for the advertising which promoted artificial sweeteners. The “medical establishment” sent salespersons around to various food processing companies to push the artificial sweeteners, did they? The companies which MADE the artificial sweeteners had nothing to do with them being widely adopted. Didn’t petition FDA to accept their in house testing as gospel truth?
We are lucky we were able to get chemical additives labelled.
@36 Inna
I am new to spirituality and believing in karma, but I think Hitler’s higher self has a much larger karmic debt than almost everyone else, so his earthly incarnations are dominated by his karma. Most people have more wiggle room because they have a smaller karmic debt, and proportionally more of their karma is positive. We’ll have to experience the consequences of our actions but not neccessarily right now or in this life.
Also, if Dion Fortune was correct about hell being to reform souls and not punish or annihilate them, then Hitler probably fled the afterlife almost immediately after memory processing started (since the true nature of his crimes is worse than any human could bear) and was quickly incarnated into hell on Earth to compensate.
I get the feeling that our Personalities are unimportant in the scheme of things, and are treated by our higher selves (and some deities) like we treat video game avatars. They’re a tool for interacting with the material world and teaching our real selves skills.
@JMG I wonder if his soul is entangled with the Hitler hate sink egregore that we Westerners feed, even if he doesn’t have conscious memories of his life as Hitler, and if that is cursing his current incarnation.
Wer here
Well let’s adress the “kabuki theater” of the epilouge of the war that just happened.
Isn’t it obvious what happened. Let’s begin by saying that the latest project “proxy war with Russia by utilising Ukrainians” is at an end and has ended in compete failure and the people in charge ahem “not trump” became very angry and started looking for another country to bring democracy to.
The choice came to Iran. Apparently after Syria collapsed the decision was made to trun Iran into Syria 2.0.
The scenario was simple: Mossad agents already inside the country blow up critical infrastructure and kill imporatnt people and cause chaos, the official statement was the whole thing was to “stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons” Just like Hussein and his nuclear weapons which I’ve heard he is just 2 weeks from developing.
Israeli air force then moves in drops some bombs in the capital, Iranian military is gone in a flash and no attacks on israel are launched at all and then the Iranian people rise up againts their opresors and It all culminates when the son of the deposed Shach being airdropped there and assuming power over the country (and most imporatntly
kicking Russia and China out of the region). It seems that was the plan…
Matilda, from last week #347, You, along with, I gather, other Finns, believe the Russians are “crazy”? Could you please elaborate on that. The petitions from Finland and Sweden to join NATO came so quickly, I doubted they had been induced by outside interests. Evidently, Finland believed that Russia would no longer respect its’ neutrality. Do you know how the Finnish government came to that conclusion?
Does or did protecting your legitimate interests in the warming Arctic enter into the decision to join NATO? Do you think it possible that, perhaps in 50-70 yrs. time, the countries we call Scandinavian, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, along with the 3 Baltics, and maybe a newly independent Scotland, might form some sort of loose federation, akin to the one crown, two nations former union of Sweden and Norway.
I’m seeking input regarding a practical endeavor. Lacking a mule, and so as to avoid wearing ourselves out prematurely, my husband and I are going to be getting a walk-behind tractor to assist in preparation for our ongoing multi-species orchard/pasture project.
From a dowwnard-we-go point of view, we recognize that this is a stopgap measure before all agriculture on our scale has to be biology powered. I’m wondering what the pros and cons are for gasoline vs. diesel.
Here are some things I can think of: I see petroleum in general as an obviously fragile link in all the chains, subject to controls and price increases and shortages… so maybe diesel would be better because biodiesel could be an option? But also diesel doesn’t store well, IIRC, so maybe gasoline is better? Dmitry Orlov postulated that there’d likely be limits on diesel sales at some point, with priority going to trucking. Likely? I don’t know…
So, what do you all think? What are the theoreticals and the practicals I should be considering in this comparison?
Thanks!
Teresa Pachel–I don’t know the current requirements but you might look into whether Agatha Christie: She Watched would qualify for Mystery Writers of America Edgar Awards in the Critical/Biographical category. There are other mystery writer/fan organizations, conferences and awards that might bring in publicity.
Karma–I can recall reading various books about the East written by Western Christians which claimed that the doctrine of karma led to a lack of social conscience and indifference to suffering. Never mind that the same people were singing “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate; God made them high or lowly and ordered their estate.” Many systems of thought can be used to justify an unwillingness to aid other beings.
Athaia–on reincarnation it has been my observation that the traditional view in Hindu and Buddhist thought is that the goal is to get off the wheel and stop incarnating. Contemporary westerners OTH seem to be like kids wanting to run back to the ticket booth for another go round. I think this reflects our current prosperity and ease. Someone once commented that the difficulties of life in earlier eras were reflected in the most common carving on gravestones being “R.I.P.”–because after a life of unremitting labor the idea of going to one’s eternal rest was very attractive.
Roldy–My memory may be incorrect, but I think Robert Anton Wilson suggested that sometime after the Inauguration each President is given the Talk, a clear message that any attempt to change certain policies will be punished and that there is no way to protect him or herself or family. Fits nicely no matter which group you believe has their hands on the puppet strings.
Hey JMG and commentariat
I recently published a new essay on Substack, in which I reviewed one of Borges’ lesser known stories that he published in the last decade or so of his life titled “The Weary Man’s Utopia.”
It’s unique among his stories since it is the only one I’m aware of that involves a protagonist time travelling to a human culture thousands of years in the future, a staple in most sci-fi but an oddity in the works of Borges.
I was going to publish it earlier since one of the features of the future world Borges describes is the complete erasure of governments, corporations and even society due to the gradual indifference of humanity, a complete collapse of status in other words. But I wasn’t sure if I was stretching it. I’ll leave you a link and the somewhat comedic paragraph which describes how it all fell apart for the people with the most status.
*”What happened to the governments?” I inquired*
*”it is said that they gradually fell into disuse. Elections were called, wars were declared, taxes were levied, fortunes were confiscated, arrests were ordered, and attempts were made at imposing censorship-but no one on the planet paid any attention. The press stopped publishing pieces by those it called its “contributors”, and also publishing their obituaries. Politicians had to find honest work; some became comedians, some witch doctors-some excelled at those occupations. The reality was no doubt more complex than this summary.”*
https://jlmc12.substack.com/p/a-weary-mans-utopia
@Sydaway
Yes, you have correctly identified the failing of Buddhism. The principle of karma means you get what you deserve. It is just, but not merciful. In Buddhism, to transcend materialism you have to attain perfection in this world, which is a pretty high bar, wouldn’t you say? It is made more difficult, because those who attain such perfection are believed to move on or become one with the universe, nirvana. So there are no teachers readily available. Buddhism is not the only religion with this flaw.
On the other side, you have religions like Islam where Allah forgives all sins. There is mercy, but no justice.
Only the Lord Jesus balances justice and mercy. Nothing we can do in this world will be good enough to earn our way into the kingdom of God. Jesus pays that price for us. He takes upon Himself the just punishment for our own sins and for the sins committed against us, calling upon us to forgive so that we might be forgiven.
The response to why there is suffering in the world is summed up neatly in the epistle of James ch1 verse 2-3: ‘My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.’
This is somewhat in alignment with the druidry of our host. This world is a challenge to grow or to shrink. For Christians, this means trusting that Jesus is the light, the way, and the truth. That none come to the Father except through Him. John 14:16 That as Jesus came not to serve, but to serve, to give His life as a ransom, He announces that he who would be great in heaven must be the servant of all, not grudgingly, but joyfully, trusting that the grace of God covers our sins because He has paid the price. Mark 10:42-45
Finally, Paul admits that we cannot know and understand everything of the Spirit while in this world. ‘For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.’ 1 Corinthians 13:12
May you be blessed today.
Hey, JMG, how are the FRC lessons going? Have you accepted Manisis as the Seventh Messenger of the Lord? (I’m still trying to work out whether he was a Freemason.)
Anonymous (no. 26)–and others curious about the Roy Jay conspiracy theory–here’s an article:
https://statmagazine.org/roy-jay-internet-demon/
David Ritz, if I may.
I occasionally give talks on energy and climate change, and I obviously haven’t been honest enough, because I haven’t been cancelled yet, and keep being asked back. I get asked this question by earnest, worried students. It worried me for a while too, particularly when looking at the slow rise of CO2 prior to the Eocene warm period – it took many thousands of years. So naturally, because us humans seem to have applied one-way valves on our own thinking, we think, well if the Eocene ramped up that slowly, then surely, our current heating event will be way way worse.
Then it clicked, a slow build up is like the proverbial frog in a pot of warm water, the planet adjusts, and in a way that might enable the heating event to occur. For us, there are sure fire rapid responses that shut the whole thing down. One is declining net energy from fossil fuels (no climate activist wants to discuss that), even now, we have deviated from the worst of the warming scenarios. The second is melting ice and rising sea levels, which will almost certainly also deviate, on the far higher side, from official predictions. That flood of sea water will shut down a lot of the demand for fossil fuels, and ending a lot of the industrial economy. Declining population will do it as well.
It won’t be pretty, but its not apocalyptic. I often worry myself that this grim grey reality is just me putting a mental panacea for my own mind, but, what else can I do against planetary and human forces, except to understand them, be ahead of them in the small ways I can, and guide people that might want to listen?
Walt (no. 35) Nice! Sounds like a heavy course load, though.
After years of wishing the international news people would pay attention to Armenia, glorious victory has been achieved. It seems that PM Nikol Pashinyan has invited patriarch Karakin II to (how shall I put this?) observe and demarcate his border regions:
https://metro.co.uk/2025/06/25/armenian-pm-make-bizarre-vow-prove-something-penis-23501025/
Online comments (mostly from the Armenian diaspora) were wonderful:
https://www.reddit.com/r/armenia/comments/1ljevje/pashinyan_offers_to_show_his_penis_to_head_of
Surely nothing like this could ever happen in Trump’s America!
By the way Mr. Greer, I didn’t know if you saw the study indicating that when the new supercontinent of “Pangaea Ultima” is formed about 250 million years in the future, the continents will be arranged in such a fashion that only 8-16% will be inhabitable by life in land as we know it.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2023-10-million-years-supercontinent-mammals.amp
Subsequently, non-marine mammals (whatever they have evolved into) may have the fate of non-avian dinosaurs on this bleak, largely desert continent.
If this event marks the end of the Cenozoic Era, I wonder what species will follow them as the dominant ones.
While everybody else is talking about serious things, I keep wondering how it is that Ariel Moravec – an short and slightly built girl – can drive that vintage Buick so easily. I was around and learning to drive before the good quality Japanese cars came on the market, and I’m here to tell you – I was 5’4” tall at the time – all that Detroit iron was built to the scale of the average American male, and the old Plymouth I was driving when my husband wasn’t using it wasn’t that easy to drive. When I inherited my mother’s Mazda, it was so much more comfortable and easier. You see, it was built to the scale of the average *Japanese* male.
And – that Buick had better have power steering. Have you ever wondered why there were so many jokes about women drivers taking out the curb or back of the garage on those days? And, apart from one of the Born Loser cartoons recently, those jokes have faded away? Smaller cars – and power steering. And I’m pretty sure Ariel never had vintage muscle cars in her Driver’s Ed courses – though a modern suburban family’s SUV is the same size as the old Buick on the outside., though not on the inside.
I now return you to the serious matters of what in the blazes was going on in the bombing of Iran, and why are some people taking it seriously and others saying it’s all a big show? And don’t the Democrats who are shocked – shocked, I tell you! at Trump’s doing so without permission from anybody, when every president in the last several decades has done exactly the same thing? (Humming from memory, to the tune of a popular song at the time, “Bomb, bomb, b;om bomb Iraq, raq, raq, bomb Iraq…..”)
Of course, Trump is the past master of the stage magician’s indirection….. and someone mentioned Mossad giving him his marching orders…. you think that’s likely? And how and why? I feel like Dorothy in the Wizard’s lair.
Pat, waiting eagerly for the next Ariel Moravec tale.
@pygmycory #45
Miniature war gaming was a hobby of mine but in recent years I’ve been frustrated by decreasing vision and water soluable paints that makes it very hard to paint with any acceptable detail. I haven’t painted for ages
Any recommendations for paint?
Comment borrowed from another site about Israel/ Iran;
“However, if you recognize the strikes were not only about eliminating Iran’s nuclear capacity but also about taking Israel’s “Iran has nukes!” card off the table,”
Then Trump declared a ceasefire which put both sides in a pickle given much of the rest of the world is annoyed at both sides. Whoever breaks the ceasefire first loses. Israel’s casus belli is gone, since they already fired the first shot sympathy will be zero except in the New England states where Israel can do no wrong. On top of that Haifa got pounded, the port and an oil refinery are offline. The Iron Dome ran out of interceptors and even worse, it has proven completely ineffective against hypersonic weapons.
On the Iranian side their uranium may or may not be intact. Both entrances to Fordow are closed. Sure they can be reopened but that will take awhile, the rock is shattered, driving an adit through incompetent rock (yes that is a technical term) is not easy. Did the bombs dropped between the entrances actually collapse the cavern? Shrug. If the cavern is intact they still can’t get to it. If the Iranians shipped the uranium elsewhere just before the strike they won’t be in a hurry to admit it. If the Chinese have it, well the Chinese do not want a nuclear war on the source of 85% of their oil imports. So there will be much silence on both sides.
The Iranians also have discovered the unfortunate fact that their military and probably government are well and truly riddled with Mossad agents. The clerics are not all that popular. Their air defenses were initially shutdown by insider actions. Someone repeatedly told Israel where the important people were. There is undoubtedly an epic internal witch hunt in progress. Large balance beam scales and ducks are in short supply.
So will the ceasefire hold? Will either unpopular country honor it? If Israel breaks it Trump can walk away from them. If Iran breaks it he can bomb them, including their refineries and strangle China as a fringe benefit. Which will happen? Shrug.
In college and at work I met four reasonable Iranians and one unreasonable one. I’ve only have a set of four Jews to go by, and one of those converted to the Methodist faith. My dataset is sadly lacking for predicting their religious imperatives.
As movie Theoden put it, “So much death, what can men do against such reckless hate?”
Silicone @ 44,
It certainly sucks to learn that ‘coding’ has become passe’. I found that financial buzz-phrase rather bogus and wanting.. What I see coming down the pipe …. especially with A.I. programs being adopted by virtually every Dinosaur Corpserate Entity, is for us, the small scurrying un-PMC mammals .. is to FOAD!
Sorry .. I meant to type in ‘Silicon’guy’ in my response to yours’ truly …
phat finger syndrome..
I’m a longtime resident of Japan. Overall, I like it. There are of course good things and bad things about it, but in general it works. I give it a solid B+.
But it’s weird to see how people in the west conceive of Japan. It’s highly bifurcated — either people think of it as a utopian society where everybody lives in a zenlike harmony with each other, or it’s a dystopian hellscape full of rabid racists who can’t wait to commit suicide because of all the cultural oppression.
It seems like this bifuccation has become even more pronounced of late. Perhaps because strains in western culture are becoming ever more difficult to ignore, and Japan for some reason is a great target for either negative or positive projection?
Robert Mathiesen (last week, no. 354)
Thank you for your deeply personal account of your mystical experience at 13, which I remember you mentioning before. That some people do have such experiences is well established. When you write that your “entire body became an organ of direct perception,” I can readily accept that this is what it *felt like* (or more precisely, how you now remember that it felt like), but balk at accepting that you *really were* perceiving the limits of time and space, the fiery / unitary / sentient nature of the cosmos, etc. To what extent mystical experience transcends the subjective is, of course, controversial–despite reports of (for example) out-of-the-body experiences in which the person observes things they could not have known, but which were perhaps later verified–and boils down to a matter of religious opinion. For my part, even if I were to have such an experience–even if it left me incapable of doubt at the time–this would not, to my mind, establish its objective reality (except as an experience), any more than the appearance of an angel, or a leprechaun, would convince me that the creature I saw really existed. I would tend towards other explanations (e.g. perhaps I am going crazy). However, for all I know, angels and/or leprechauns really do exist.
Anyway, none of this has anything to do with the question of primate religiosity. Noting the definitional problems surrounding “religion” (which seem to trouble philosophers more than anthropologists), I understand there is great uncertainty as to when religious behavior evolved, and what other early hominins might have practiced it. To the extent that religion is bound up with language (storytelling, complex relationship labels), this points away from an origin early enough for primate research to be relevant. Likely different aspects of religion developed at different times over evolutionary history.
If awe before a thunderstorm counts as numinosity, and therefore religiosity, then dogs clearly have this (even if we can only infer this from their behavior). I mentioned ritual, but many animals have what we recognize as rituals too. If we focus on the *content* of religious belief (e.g. supernatural beings, noting problems associated with the culture-bound term “supernatural”), this is hard to ascertain in nonverbal animals. (How do dogs and cats really see the world?)
Consider dance. Every society we know anything about, past or present, seems to have had the custom of dance (even if not every member of the society danced, even if dancing were sometimes forbidden), and many other animal species have their characteristic dances. At the same time, dance is highly culture-bound. We could even speak of the dancers’ state of mind, the message communicated by the dance, etc. Similarly, some scholars of Zen approach the subject by asking monks to meditate while wearing electrodes, while others treat “enlightenment” as a rhetorical rather than a psychological phenomenon.
P.S. (Robert Mathiesen again): I think the point you were making was that your mystical experience was unmediated by culture. Maybe? It’s hard for me to judge–and I would say the same even if it were my *own* experience!–but it seems to me that the experience itself (e.g. the oceanic feeling) is distinct from your categorization of it as mystical and/or religious. I’ll have think more about this. Cf. orgasm, which is mostly unmediated by culture (absent the occasional reference to deity!), and difficult to communicate to outsiders unfamiliar with the phenomenon.
“That said, I have entertained the thought that things like Bitcoin and other cybercurrencies may have just enough of a future to matter in the lifetime that remains to me (around 40 or 50 years).”
Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in generally are state sponsored inflation relief valves. Just like the stock market has been since the early 70’s. That is their only utility, you don’t find it odd that Bitcoin came onto the scene in late 08 just as the US government was going to print tons of money for the financial system? Look how people acted in 2020 and 2021 when the government printed even more money for a virus, cause that is how you fight them. You lock people down and ban all in person communication (for the most part) give them money that they can only spend on the internet and such and you watch and take notes. Just my opinion
Regarding this whole US and Iran thing, this kind of reminds me of the moon landing and how it was used to prove to the USSR that the US could put a nuke anywhere.
Both side are demonstrating their capabilities and possible retaliation, now it is time to negotiate.
I don’t know but it is possible.
Hi JMG,
First, glad to hear you had a good time in the ol’ dart. I was only about one when we left the UK for Australia, but I still have a great affection for its natural landscape – I have a very romantic idea about oak forests and babbling brooks!
You have mentioned previously, that your last incarnation was a female, driving the car I believe, who died in a car smash. This must have meant a fairly quick turnaround in lives, as cars even into the late 50’s early 60’s hadn’t been around for that long and if you had died say even a decade prior, that would mean even less time, especially as females probably didn’t become drivers until some time after the advent of cars.
My question is have you ever thought that it might even be possible to work out who you were by records of car fatalities, assuming they existed? I just thought if it were possible, you may be the first person to have fairly concrete, (to an extent) proof of who they were in a past life.
Regards, Helen in Oz
p.s.
I won’t ask anything about the current ME events, as I’m sure you’ll get plenty of questions.
The only thing I’d say is, things seem to be tracking the astrology forecasts that I listen to, and it ain’t over by a long stretch.
@Anonymous re Cushing’s syndrome.
Artificial sweeteners might have a role to play, particularly asparatame which is known to cause neurological damage.
The syndrome you describe sounds basically identical to what the sufferers of what is called “electrosensitivity” undergo, except that they learn about EMR and subsequently discover that their symptoms improve when they remediate the artificial sources of EMR in their environment. Various factors can make it more distressing. One I have identified is oxalates, which form crystals within living tissue, and it is plausible that those would enhance “receptivity.” Upon getting sick this way, and finding that mainstream medicine is no help at all, many people turn to diet and other controllable factors, and artificial sweeteners are the first to go because there has been so much controversy over them. They try out superfoods, and typically find a bit of relief from one or another of those. I started out getting a lot of good from yellow dock. Turns out to be a major source of oxalates. I found it counterproductive after a certain level of consumption. (Now there is a token plant in the garden, but I’m getting quercitin from other sources.) It was easy to blame my worsening condition on the clearly worsening EMR environment, while the oxalate accumulation was a hidden factor. There is apt to be other hidden factors, too. There is so much we don’t know.
Long COVID, again, is pretty nearly identical to electrosensitivity and thus probably to Cushings syndrome.
I note that a big tip-off to radiofrequency exposure with me has long been a racing heart, leading to arrhythmia if I don’t take steps. This suggests the involvement of cortisol.
Wondering if you, or anyone, could recommend any occult books covering healing/illness, the subtle bodies and the tree of life.
Thanks
To Athaia: I read that guy’s blog post, and I must say, I find him hilarious! 🙂 Not even the slightest flicker of humility darkens his brow: nope, freedom (as he defines it… cough) is the ONLY thing that matters even after DEATH and we ALL have a moral IMPERATIVE–immediately after the most intense transition of our being–to RESIST THE ANGELS!!! (Or whatever the appropriate term would be–picking the one our culture is most familiar with.) Before he embarks upon his own final journey, may it be long from now, I’d humbly suggest he take some time to journal about his emotions first. Maybe a lot of time.
The NDE experiences he gathers together are a lot more interesting, and I enjoyed reading them. Nothing written there disturbs me or is in opposition to my personal understanding of reincarnation or karma. Some souls face guaranteed misery as a consequence of choices made through free will in previous incarnations. It’s entirely understandable that they would try to hide, or bargain, or argue their way out of it (one NDE seems to have pissed off his ‘angel’ with how much he wanted to argue, lol!). The emphasis on “learning” as the reason to return which many mentioned resonated deeply with me. What better way to learn, after all, than experiencing personally the consequences of a choice they previously made?
Anyway that’s my thoughts on it offered up, and on that note, off to bed 🙂
@Siliconguy what is happening now to software and hardware design to an extent will have cascading consequences down the road, despite the fanfare, not that much hardware compared with software is made completely in US like in China or other Asian countries.
in 2005 US produced around 5Mbarrels/day (quoting from memory) and yet consumed around 20Mbarrels/day, and yet it had a soft power over the world, the whole world advancement depended on US tech. But around 2008 a shift happened and US got more into fracking, thus losing the software/hardware edge, can be argued that the decline of software/hardware didn’t happen particularly then, but it was at least a 10 year process.
Now US is into war business and is about to lose again on the software/hardware design stage.
The fact that so many entertain the LLMs and other error prone AI as the all in all, showcases this decline, I think is due to the steep decline in quality, but also some other intelligence factor, like many waxxine generated clots.
In IT sector there was a rather large incidence of waxxinees in the specific corporate area where the layoffs are happening now and where AI is pushed heavily.
Losing software/hardware supremacy might be a very difficult thing to have in this day and age, especially since US has that much infrastructure, the labor market is a very sensitive thing. I think that things are already damaged but there is no crisis to test it as happened to the Oroville Spillway that was already in bad shape and risk prone before the damage happened.
Imagine the whole Cloud infrastructure failing because the expansion for AI wasn’t well taught. AI is not that sophisticated to bet all the US software/hardware empire on it. But then these kind of choices are given to all empires in declining years, USSR being a recent relevant example, where they neglected this exact domain digital electronics among others like food. I think US is in a similar conundrum, except maybe that the lack is replaced by decreased quality.
Clay, cause and effect is complex in such situations. Did food prices fall to make room for financialization of the economy, or did financialization of the economy force the price of everything else to rise?
Roldy, good question. I note that we seem to have gotten out of the war as quickly as we got into it.
David, it’s all wholly speculative. Unless we have some other earths to compare ours with, it’s all handwaving.
Justin, glad to hear it. The original foo fighters were more interesting than the band.
Scotty, he didn’t specify. Do whatever feels best for you!
Michaelz, interesting. A case could be made…
Dylan, I have no idea whether it’ll last that long or not. Cryptocurrencies have no real value at all, but as the saying goes, the market can stay insane longer than you can stay solvent.
Anonymous, thanks for the heads up about Cushing’s syndrome. Yeah, I could see that.
Forecasting, no, the invasion is moving faster than I expected. Your immigrants are the first wave of invaders.
Phutatorius, the only difference is that the barking delusions of Obama and Biden were shared by the media and the laptop class, while the barking delusions of Trump are not.
Yoyo, it’s all theater. Both sides are showing the other what they could do if they wanted, without backing the other side into an impasse where war is the only option.
Other Dave, yeah, I know. I also don’t get invited to the local Lovecraft conventions. The people who run both the store and the conventions are offended by my politics. The irony, of course, is that so are the people on the other side!
Athaia, reincarnation isn’t voluntary; in most cases it’s as automatic and unstoppable as any other reflex action. By the time you can actually choose what’s going to happen, you’re usually ready to go on to less material forms of embodiment.
Fredrik, oh, it’s doubtless primarily spiritual in nature, but crowding is also a factor — you might look up the famous “mouse utopia” experiments.
Inna, simply that the universe contains many different causes, not all of them karmic.
Edward, you’ll find the whole thing in any slang dictionary under the heading “kayfabe.”
Raen, I haven’t experimented with it myself, but I know people who seem to have good results from it.
Siliconguy, hmm! Thanks for this.
Dylan, none yet. I’m working on an updated edition of the book, though.
Siliconguy, yep. A plumbing apprenticeship is much smarter.
Teresa, congratulations.
Temporaryreality, I’ll leave this to those who have experiences with that technology.
J.L.Mc12, funny!
Ambrose, er, whatever.
David, that’s purely hypothetical at this point; odds are we don’t understand continental drift anything like as well as we pretend.
Patricia M, good question. Since I’ve never driven a Buick, and I don’t know what else Ariel has driven, I have no idea. As for the current Middle Eastern circus, count me in the “big show” camp.
Siliconguy, that seems very sensible to me.
Zachary, do you happen to know if the same people are embracing both projections?
Helen, I’ve never looked into it, to be frank. Among other things, I don’t especially want to draw attention to myself.
Sam, Dion Fortune’s Principles of Esoteric Healing might be worth a look.
Ambrose (offlist), you just exceeded my boredom threshold with your latest round of repetitive attempts to redefine karma in Abrahamic terms. If you read what I’ve already posted on the subject without spin doctoring it, you’ll find that your questions have already been answered. Thus I think it’s time for you to take a break from posting here. Please don’t push the issue or the break will be permanent.
@TemporaryReality
If you are not already considering one I would Recommend a BCS walk behind tractor. In my previous business I designed and manufactured attachments for these Italian Machines. They are very simple, gear driven instead of belts and available in many sizes. They have a huge range of attachments from normal rototillers to cultivators and even generators and water pumps. I am told by the techs at the US importer that they routinely last for 20 years or more.
As to gas vs diesel. That depends on what country you are in. Very few diesel versions are imported in to the us because of us emissions regs. Also the makeup of the remaining us petroleum reserves favors gas. In other countries that might be different.
If you choose gas get one of the mid size or larger units that has a Honda Engine. They are much better than the engines on the smaller tractors.
@62 David Ritz
I’ve read pop sci articles about future continental drift, and while short-term (next few million years) tectonic plate motions are easy to predict, long term motions and the shape of the supercontinent that will probably form in the next couple hundred million years are guesses. They don’t even know which ocean will subduct to push the continents together.
A few years ago, a model predicted that the next supercontinent will form over the Arctic Ocean:
https://www.science.org/content/article/what-might-earth-s-next-supercontinent-look-new-study-provides-clues
(My take: geologists crank out speculative papers to raise their status in academia)
JMG’s comment reminds me to add: experience with that particular style of internal-combustion engine isn’t required. It’s not the machine itself that’s of interest here, but the fuel type – and its associated geopolitical and social links (to name a few) that affect availability over the next few years. If we’re lucky, we’ll get things set up speedily enough that we can quickly move away from machine power…
Regarding karma… there is that old slogan: sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny. That’s how karma works. Your individual destiny is not any kind of escape from reality, be that tsunamis or whatever. But… put different people in the same situation, and they will respond and experience the situation differently. That’s character.
Good habits are a wonderful thing, even if somewhat constraining. To become unconstrained by habits… that’s the direction in which the Buddhist path leads. When you understand how the lock works, you can open the door!
About Muslim invaders in Europe, keep an eye on Algeria.
Currently, Algeria is ruled by left-wingers and has been ruled by the left since the political realignment in 1999. They tend to not like Islamism, having suppressed an Islamic insurgency in the late 1990s and early 2000s, or fighting wars, as shown by the fact that Algeria hasn’t been involved in a war since the Civil War in the late 1990s.
The next political realignment in Algeria will happen in about 20 years, and will toss the left out of power and bring a right wing coalition into power. This in the Algerian context would likely mean Islamism and military expansionism, and combined with the likelihood of France trying to persecute Muslims under a right wing French nationalist regime makes it very likely that Algeria will go to war against France in the 2040s and 2050s after the right wing Algerian political realignment.
Wer, and anyone else interested.
Just an FYI: none of this was dreamed up recently, it has been an ongoing policy for many, many years now.
If you want a good summation of things, go to Brian Berletic’s channel.
He has been referencing this policy paper for a number of years now,
“Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American strategy toward Iran” . Dated June 2009
you can download it here
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/06_iran_strategy.pdf
Among the chapters is:
Chapter 5: Leave it to Bibi: Allowing or encouraging an Israeli Military strike
The US is an Empire, it has proxies doing its dirty work.
Israel and Ukraine are just two. Taiwan is being set up for it’s role.
NATO is basically another, the proxy war against Russia will likely draw in more than just Ukraine.
Why else do you think the Hegseth, publicly for months now has been saying just that?
Its quite stunning, really how much info the US has always blabbed out in video and print, and how little of it is taken seriously, or even known about.
Regards, Helen in Oz
Hello!
I’m back for another ARCHETYPE CHECK IN. It’s been a minute since I inquired on the matter so, in brief, JMG discussed the myth of the Changer in regards to the career of one Mr. Trump. The pieces certainly seemed to fit together given the fate of everyone who ever resisted or tried to take advantage of the man, so I believe that the archetype of the Changer has been hitching a ride with Trump for a while now.
Then, after the first attempt on his life, JMG said he believes there’s a different archetype in the driver’s seat now and the Changer seems to have hopped on over to Elon Musk. Given the state of the U.S. administrative state post DOGE, I think JMG was spot on once again.
The question now, given Musk’s inglorious falling out and retreat from public life, is where has the Changer gone now? And which Archetype, if any, does Trump now embody? The Shadow? The King? The Old Man? I’ve been following this thread for a while but my meditations on the subject haven’t born fruit yet. Any thoughts on the archetypes at play JMG et al?
Two little notes regarding your recent trip to the UK.
Firstly, the uptake in folks from India is not just the UK, the same is happening in Australia. About 2.5% of the population of this land were born in India with the majority of them coming over in the last 15 years. While this has caused some growing pains with limited housing supply, with a lot of people exploiting this, it is also endlessly fascinating see how the culture of this place is changing with the years as it all marbles together.
Secondly, thank you for the recommendation of the stout! It is rare that you can find anything that really packs a intense yet balanced flavour and I trust your recommendation. It is not easy to find here but I will seek it out. Many have made the promise of “a barrage of flavour!” but they rarely deliver.
I was lucky enough to have the time and resources to attend the recent Glastonbury get together and since I was there on the Friday I joined the tour round the ruins of the abbey and then onto the White Wells. Others have written about this and the various talks and events over the following couple of days but I thought I’d recount a story that JMG told us. Of the very many interesting things that happened, this was the one that really caught my attention.
It was toward the end of the walk through the grounds of the Abbey. We’d past the legendary tomb of King Arthur and were sitting at the East end of the Abbey on some rather undistinguished stone structures. If it had been a scene from my London childhood it would have suggested the remains of a house leveled the blitz. Obviously in this spot, it was something rather different.
JMG told us that we were in fact sitting in the remains of the Edgar Chapel, the site of which had been lost for many years. The ruins had been in private hands until early in the 20th century when they were acquired by the Church of England. Would it be fair to say re-acquired?
Anyway, the Church in turn hired a fairly well known and well established archeoligist, Frederick Bligh-Bond. Frederick did some groundwork – I imagine that some trenches were dug – and with remarkable rapidity was able to to locat the fabled Edgar Chapel and excavate it. There were about fifty of us sitting in it as JMG spoke.
In 1919, Frederick published a book The Gates of Remembrance where he tells us that in order to locate the chapel he’d used automatic writing (shades of Yeat’s A Vision) to ask the long dead monks where it was! He’d also consulted some mediums including one that might have been a very young Dionne Fortune.
Apart from the sheer novelty of this tale accompanied with rock solid evidence that you could literally stub your toe on, there was the aftermath which was that within a few years of the publication of Gates the Church had fired him. To my mind this speaks volumes of the nature of the Establishment as it was called then, and I suppose what has effectively evolved into the PMC/Laptop class of the present day. I’m still processing that.
Anyway – thanks again to JMG and everyone else who came to Glastonbury.
Hi JMG et al,
I have a simple question about candles. I have been using a green candle when invoking Mercury for the past few Wednesdays. I plan to continue this for at least another 3 and possibly another 11 weeks.
The candle I have been using is maybe good for a couple more Wednesdays, but I am moving at the end of the month. After I move, should I still be using the same candle, or should I switch to a new one for the new place, o does it not make any difference?
Thanks!
This morning, during the transition betwixt sleep and waking, I found myself contemplating the last few years of my life (up to a decade, let’s say), the journey(s) I’ve been through (intellectually, philosophically). I examined a pattern, and then remembered this Dreamwidth post of yours from March ’23, “A CosDoc Hypothesis”.
Remember the one with the long eclipse on the 5th plane, and the shorter one on the 2nd?
I don’t find myself equipped to bear judgment on the first one, but the second, yes (at least I was alive during all of it!). Certainly fits my experience.
My morning reflections led me to seeing I was in a certain particular fog from 2019 thru 2022, ’23 was a tad better already. By late 2024 there were moments where I could envision life out of the fog, and this year, the feeling is more like things can finally be picked up where they were left off almost a decade ago. It’s wild! Green shoots, at last.
If we allow for a few years where the eclipse was building towards its maximum (’16, ’17 and ’18), it checks out. I can only see it clearly in retrospect (duh). Your post was too/two years early to be definitive, but my little subjective experience leads me to give it credence.
Here’s to seeing life anew.
Silly writing question: do you happen to know of any small presses who might be vaguely interested in a 35,000-word occult fantasy novella? Or who at least might be interested in bundling two such novellas together, into a single book of around 70,000 words?
@ Patricia #63
I am a 5′ 2″ female and I learned to drive in my dad’s pickup truck which was standard transmission with no power steering. One of the guys I dated in my late teens drove an old Buick Rivera and I drove that with no problem. It was kind of like driving a boat. And then there was that stupid Corvette that a Significant Other bought when I was in my early 20’s and that I drove occasionally. It was also standard transmission and the problem with those cars is that they are definitely built for taller men who want to be seen as cool-ly leaning back as they drive. For a short woman, getting the clutch all the way to the floor while still seeing over the dashboard was a real problem, even with the seat pushed all the way up. I hated that car, but I drove it. All of this is to say, short people like me deal with it. We are used to dealing with it. The old joke I had with my late 6′ 3″ tall husband was, when I could not find something around the house, I just looked up high. Invariably he or one of my children (they are all taller than me) put something away out of my line of sight which is much lower down. I have always been Jean in the land of giants.
Ariel could drive that Buick — no problem. I am also waiting for the next book with great anticipation. I love the series so far!
>So much for learning to code
When half of all STEM majors at UCBerkeley are CompSci, it’s time to think about doing something else. Anything else. That being said, there was some stat pic where they measured underemployment and CompSci majors had less of it than Chemistry majors. I’d say if you’re going into STEM, you need to be the kind of kid who was playing with an Arduino or a chemistry set in his free time. Otherwise, you ain’t gonna make it.
>Intel
I don’t know what to say about them. They haven’t been a technology company in decades, just marketing. It looks like the rest of the world has figured that out. From a broader perspective, it looks like the world is beginning to move on from Wintel in general and towards ARM. It used to be you wouldn’t think about anything else but x86, but you’re now seeing ARM servers and desktops, along with all those phones. I think Apple ditched x86 for ARM a few years ago, all those M-series chips. Nvidia is going to release their own SOC, based on ARM. But it’s early days, and maybe Intel will get their act together?
Even if you’re staying x86, you generally go with AMD if you care about performance. That used to not be the case at all, AMD for the longest time was considered the offbrand knockoff discount x86 vendor.
JMG and commentariat – any thoughts on the New York City mayoral election?
Looks to me like a young, proper bona fide socialist/left wing populist (ie, not a fake one like Bernie Sanders) has won the Democratic Primary (which in New York is as good as winning the actual election).
I’m not thrilled about a lot of his views on Israel etc and a lot of what he’s promised is impractical/impossible but on the whole I think this is a positive step – if even New York Democrats are rejecting the elite consensus in favour of the “populism” the elite sneer at. He’s just a populist from the left, while Trump and the MAGA Republicans are populists from the right. I think the balance is good and the rejection of “mainstream elite consensus” is important.
I haven’t looked into him too closely but I get the impression (for those who follow British politics) that he’s kind of like Jeremy Corbyn but on steroids.
Hi,
Thanks for clarifying.
With perfect timing this article popped in today.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21704/jihadist-pogroms-in-europe
Regarding Donald Trump’s actions in the Near East: Already in his first term, Donald Trump showed this pattern of short-tempered actions against Iran, which end as fast as they had begun. So his actions aren’t really new. As for being an ordinary neocon, I don’t see that, since otherwise, Trump seems to be less eager to get into new wars than his predecessors were.
Milkyway, thanks fopr your report from Glastonbury!
As for the climate simulation of Pangaea Ultima in 250 million years, this is only one of several scenarios. There are several scenarios for future supercontinents: Amasia, Pangaea Proxims/Ultima, Aurica, Novopangaea. Geologists are quite sure that the continents will amalgamate into a new supercontinent 200-250 million years from now, but the details are less well known. The question is, if it will happen by introversion, extroversion, orthoversion or a combination of these. It is believed that here have already been several supercontinents which assembles and after a few hundred million years broke apart: Columbia/Nuna, Rodinia, Pangaea. Besides, the newest forward projections for multicellular life is that multicellular life will be able to abide for another 800 million years due to biochemical possibilities and constraints.
@Brandi #20 – I like the idea of Lili – “The only control we have in the matter is our response, that is our “responsibility” in the matter”
@Inna #36 – Yes karma *could* encompass those things, but it doesn’t mean they’re always caused by karma. I refer you to JMG’s answer. And it’s explained in Alex Kennedy/Subhuti’s book. As for coldness, it’s not inevitable, but it’s a danger – a logical conclusion of believing people “deserve” everything that happens to them. It’s occurred to me since posting that Buddhism is aware of this danger, which is why the cultivation of compassion is so heavily promoted.
@Christopher #58 – Yes I agree it’s a high bar – I doubt many have reached the state of perfection that would be required to escape the cycle of incarnation. We’re human beings – clever monkeys – with human needs, at odds with the state of perfection. However I don’t have a problem with people paying the a price for their actions, ie. natural “justice”. At least with karma there’s a chance to pay off your “debts”/learn from your experience, and an infinite number of lifetimes in which to learn.
As for lack of teachers – not so, according to Buddhist doctrine – they are the Boddhisattvas – beings who have achieved enlightenment but have chosen to stay on earth to help others. The Dalai Lama is one.
“A president who lies; that, we are used to. But a president who appears outright, barking delusional?”
It depends: Who is the target audience? What is the message? Seems to me, they hit nothing, made no changes, and the effect was to stop Israel’s war. Is that a bad thing? So. “The Purpose of a System Is What It Does.” Or someone would be mad about it. Now look to Russia, Saudi, BRIICS. All said nothing. Iran just confirmed the strikes work when they almost certainly didn’t and denying it would make Trump look worse. Strange to make the guy who just bombed you happy for no reason, n’est-ca pas? These things all say “Theater”, which many pundits agree, like Doctorow. Who is this theater for? The wide, shallow, pro-Israel base, and somewhat to the Right side. They read headlines, say “It’s over” and that’s it. Why would America fight a war the headlines said you just won? So you want to blow it, tell the truth, and put the war back on? Be careful. That reading predicates that there are strong war-factions and he only barely delayed them for now.
Pygmy, there are probably plaster corbel and details all over the area the need repair, but somehow their owners would have to know you exist and want to pay. The church saying so is a start.
Kimberly: well don’t keep it to yourself, show us his pencil line measurements on the kitchen doorway!
TemporaryReality: Either will do, as when they’re small-engines gas is more native to that size. Diesel can run biodiesel, but that’s hard bc the small, modern engines need very, very perfect fuel or it’ll break and just be no special gain. You don’t want to wipe out a whole engine in 30 minute accident, their engines are more heavy to use. Either fuel stores well with stabilizer, measures. I’d say Diesel stores better and is U.S. home heating fuel, a cost savings with 100gal tanks all over in basements. If you do, I can advise a BCS , Italian, which as a cheapskate I never would. It is a commercial-grade walk-behind, for eg industrial-size Italian vineyards, on steep slopes. Having one since the 80s, it shows no wear while Troy-bilt, American standard, would be dead from age by now. They have all standard accessories, like to ride it with a seat, wheelbarrow, and of course tiller/sickle/mower/snowblower, but they are expensive. The largest ones even have a baler. Even if that priced out, start there to understand what they can do and should look like.
Sam: this is a different lineage, but “Awaken Healing Light of the Tao” I thought worked well.
Something relative to last week’s post:
From Jonathan Turley, who is a law professor. He did testify at the first Trump impeachment for Trump saying the charge was unconstitutional. He also speaks on matters of free speech.
https://jonathanturley.org/2025/06/26/the-icarian-gene-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-expert-class/
The Icarian Gene: The Rise and Fall of the Expert Class
The warning was stark. At issue was a privileged class that has long dictated policy despite countervailing public opinion. At issue, the luminary warned, is nothing short of democracy itself. No, it was not the continued rallies of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., VT) to “fight oligarchy.” It was Justice Clarence Thomas rallying his colleagues to fight technocracy, or government by experts. He warned against allowing “elite sentiment” to “distort and stifle democratic debate.” Yet, the story is even more profound of an elite class which succumbed to the Icarian gene and fell to Earth due to hubris and excess.
—
He continues:
The decline of the expert class can be traced to the changes in higher education over the last couple of decades. As I discuss in my book The Indispensable Right, an orthodoxy has taken hold of most universities with a purging of conservative, libertarian, and dissenting faculty. Within these ideological echo chambers, appointments, publications, and grants often seem to turn on conclusions that favor political agendas.
—
Turley ends with:
The expert class lost the public when they replaced objectivity with orthodoxy. No matter how many experts claim that gender is a social myth, the public is not likely to dispense with reality. The rise and fall of the expert class is a story of the costs of arrogance and excess. Higher education has created a privileged class of social warriors who abandoned core principles of neutrality and objectivity in research. It is an Icarian generation of scholars who flew too close to the sun and fell to Earth in the eyes of the public.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University where he teaches a course on the Supreme Court. He is the best-selling author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage”
——-
Me: I think that something is in the water……..
Hi JMG,
Apologies in advance if you’ve already grown tired of discussion about the recent dust-up in the Middle East.
I’m starting to feel like, with recent events, we’re heading straight into a Twilight’s Last Gleaming timeline. Becaues Trump accepted the frame that the core problem is Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and (by ordering the recent bombing run) he further accepted the frame that the American military is the only force that can destroy that program, and that this recent bombing run almost certainly did not (as the White House claims) destroy that program–how, oh how, does he prevent further involvement of the American military?
As soon as the American legacy media, and Israeli-backed politicians and officials, start up a new furor over the continuation of Iran’s nuclear weapons development, how does he silence them without providing further military committments? It seems that, as with January 6th, he’s been outwitted by the Deep State and walked straight into their trap. Not that the Deep State wants a Twilight’s Last Gleaming scenario, but of course their hubris and recklessness almost guarantees its manifestation, if they have their way.
Thanks!
Anonymous @#26, re: Cushing’s disease.
You might also look into the role estrogen plays in stimulating cortisol levels and thus possibly contributing to increased Cushing’s AND cultural shift prompted by poor physical health. Estrogen is one of those pharma money makers – through birth control and hormone replacement therapy, in addition to being something the body produces in excess when under stress (so, a cyclical self-reinforcing estrogen-cortisol stress reaction) in men and women. Plus there’s the push to add soy to everything (a known phytoestrogen) via soy protein isolates as a way to provide cheap (non-animal) protein to make foods look healthy. Excess estrogen has many known negative health consequences and more people probably have such hormonal imbalances as a result of medication choice, dietary consumption, inherent stresses, etc., than suffer low blood sugar from artificial sweeteners. Though to be honest, maybe those sweeteners and estrogen combined make for some extremely dicey health conditions (heck, add in the EMFs Patricia Ormsby mentions and you really get a sense of the tweaks we’ve made to life’s chemical soup).
Yoyo,
That is the correct conclusion. Stage managed acts like these are used to deescalate situations that are spiraling out of control. When Israel attacked Iran, that was real. When Iran attacked Israel, that was real.
You can tell if it’s real by people dying in droves and by errant bombs falling on occupied buildings. If allowed to spin out of control, Iran’s energy infrastructure (the oil refineries in particular) would be targeted and the Straight of Hormuz could be shut down.
It’s clear that at some point, the United States came in and convinced Israel that it was going to take over and show Iran that nuclear weapons aren’t acceptable, and we did that by dropping some bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities. I’m not sure how much warning they had. On the flipside, the U.S. let Iran save face after the fact by letting them bomb one of our bases (which was evacuated) unchallenged and unanswered.
In return, both Iran and Israel agreed to stop fighting and we can enter into actual negotiations, with both sides now much more aware of what the other is capable of.
Although I’ve disliked Trump’s tariff policy (mostly because I like Japan too much) and have mixed feelings about the way he’s handling immigration, I have to give my hat off to him for the way he’s handling these international situations. It’s really hard, but this was a big win in a seemingly no-win situation. He’s good at that.
You ended last week’s essay with an allusion to an entrepreneurial class that would supplant the laptop class in the decades to come. Have you any firm or even solid ideas what that class might look like, either in gestalt or details?
Hi John,
https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-middle-east-is-hastening-ukraines-fall-the-end-of-the-european-era/
What are your thoughts on Ian’s latest forecasts? Do you agree with him.
@JMG Yeah they do wear their politics on their sleeve there dont they. My copilot and I were both gnawing on our tongues to be polite as I am sure if we revealed are true natures the individual behind the counter would have reacted as if we had turned into shoggoths.
@Athaia and Shinjuki
That was an interesting article but I do have to share Shinjuki’s distaste for the authors tone. If I wanted to be truly hyperbolic I would call the whole thing Luciferian. More practically it reminded me of trying to teach my children sometimes. You have something that you know is good for them or something they have to do and they just wont do it. It could even be something they claim they want to do but they just dont want to do what has to be done to get that. There are times I think the whole parent thing is prep for angelic lifetimes trying to deal with the truly obstinent. That author just reeks of a 5 year olds don wanna.
Other Dave
@Dylan #50: I guess my point about crypto is that as a form of currency it is still just a bunch of numbers in a machine. How those numbers connect to real wealth, what our host might call the wealth of nature, is very complex. I understand the decentralized aspect of crypto and the appeal of that. Looking towards a future with LESS computers, I think there are other alternate currencies / economies that might be worth investigating instead. For instance, I’m also a fan of co-op’s like @Ludovic Viger in #1. I’ll be curious to read his book even though I am not a Canadian.
siliconguy @ 65, a few tidbits I have gleaned from various obscure corners of the internet: a Chinese writer claims that Iran is an oligarchy dominated by 4 wealthy families (each successive Ayatolla is from one of those) masquerading as a theocracy, which might explain why the clerisy is unpopular, if it is. Of somewhat more interest, apparently Mossad works with Indian counterparts; India being a sovereign nation can ally with whomever it likes. The Indian spy agency, IDK the correct title, places agents among “guest workers” in Iran. But naturally, the Iranian oligarchy pays no attention to its’ servants. It is through those agents that Mossad learned the whereabouts of various Iranians it wanted to assassinate.
I wonder if both sides are not realizing that there is simply no further unlimited supply of advanced weapons because the resources needed to produce them no longer exist. I suspect no government wants to be first in the world to tell its’ citizens, no you can’t have nice things nor a comfortable life because we are diverting all available resources into weaponry.
I was curious if any of the readers/commenters here have had a similar incarnation related experience/memory. I thought I would mention it since the topic of incarnations came up in the Open post this week. I found it interesting in light of one of JMG’s responses in the past regarding incarnation helpers, where he said: “Sam, it’s not usually the same spirits, but there are spirits who help souls go into incarnation, yes”.
Anyway, in my memory I recall having to wait a bit just before being reinserted into the world. It was as if I had arrived too early on the scene. I was waiting on a baseball diamond in a group of fields setup for Little League or company softball tournaments. With me was an older boy who looked around 10-12 years old. He was sitting on the bleachers and I was standing on the 3rd base line. We were the only people around. What I assumed to be me was a small boy who appeared to be around 2.
It was a bright sunny morning. Looking north I could see the hospital where I was about to make an appearance in one of the delivery rooms. Just behind me to the south was a river. Finally the older boy stood up and said: Ok, time for you to go. Next thing I was a wriggling new-born.
I kind of chalked this up to a suggested memory after reading too much a while back on the topic of incarnation and the ‘higher self’. But then I took a look using Google maps at where I was born, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The year was 1957. August 25th at 10:30 AM. I found the hospital (St Anthony’s – been there for 125 years) and started heading south on the map. Sure enough there was a river running east-west with lots of land along the banks set aside for recreational uses. Almost directly south of the hospital on the north shore of the river, I found a baseball park with several diamonds and low slung bleachers. Even on Google maps street view you could see the hospital from the fields.
I only spent the first 2 months of my life there (my father was in the Air Force and he got transferred) so it is not like I have any memories of the place to draw on for a dream. I’m currently trying to find out if the ball fields were there in 1957. I was born on a Sunday so that may explain why we were the only 2 people around. Maybe everyone was at church, since it was still early. Perhaps there were other people out and about but at least in my memory we were the only people present on the lot we occupied.
I wondered about me appearing as a 2 year old but though that might suggest in my previous incarnation I had died young. Any thought, comments? Ideas I should further investigate?
Sorry for the length.
Jim, thanks for this! Yes, exactly.
Anonymous, watch also how Algeria’s relations with the countries immediately to its south proceed. If Algeria ends up allied with the emerging federation of Sahel nations — Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso — with their immense mineral wealth and their grudges against the French, things could get very awkward indeed for Paris.
StarNinja, I’m not sure what the Changer is up to at the moment — he’s an elusive one. Trump is now serving as a projection screen for the same paired archetypes that were thrown onto Lincoln and FDR during their lifetimes — the Shadow of the old regime and the Hero-King of the new — and will settle into his enduring role as Once and Future King once he dies.
Michael, thanks for the data point. As for Mena Dhu stout, I wish I could get it in this country! It’s an amazingly good beer.
Andy, thanks for this. The Gate of Remembrance is readily available these days —
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48568
— and well worth reading as a chronicle of dealings with the Unseen.
Wick, it doesn’t matter at all. Do as you wish!
Thibault, that makes a great deal of sense to me. It wasn’t a matter of fog for me, but the period from 2017 to 2024 was a very difficult one for me and a lot of things had to be set aside while the pressure built and finally faded out. Now? Yes, it’s very much a matter of picking up old threads.
DS, there aren’t many but I know one. You might give a try to Sul Books —
https://abeautifulresistance.org/publish-with-sul-books
RTPCR, I want to see how the general election turns out. My guess is that all the New York power centers will find an independent candidate, close ranks around him, and do everything they can to make sure Mamdani loses. If they win, it’s business as usual; if they lose, the plutocracy has lost its grip completely.
Forecasting, yep. Brace yourself.
Neptunesdolphins, good heavens. The downfall of the managerial class really is picking up speed!
Balowulf, that’s not my take on it, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
Eucyclos, it hasn’t taken shape yet. The capitalist class that emerged out of the 1860s elite replacement cycle didn’t really finish forming until the 1870s, and the managerial class that emerged out of the 1930s cycle didn’t form until the Second World War; what we have now, in the usual way, is a jerry-rigged assortment of individuals scrambling for position and power as the former elite class collapses. I expect the future entrepreneurial elite to take shape over the course of the 2030s.
Forecasting, I’m not sure he’s right that the emerging era is China’s — there are other rising powers, notably India — but the general picture seems sensible to me.
Other Dave, turning into shoggoths sounds like a very practical notion in such situations. 😉
BlueMoose, fascinating. Yes, you’d probably died young — it’s apparently quite common for people who go onto a new life after a very short incarnation to have unusually vivid experiences between lives.
Sigh, the drama in the middle east. My big question is why didn’t Iran retaliate by closing the Straight of Hormuz? Forget the nukes, just like you forget about WTC7. Forget. Forget.
My guess is there is more going on behind the scenes than we are privy to, as mere internet peasants. I don’t know what kind of deal he made, but I do know he makes deals, he can’t help himself, it’s what he does. But what did he horsetrade away and what did he get?
John,
I guess this might sound like a bit of a strange question, but I’ll try to be succinct: recently I had to extricate myself from an order that I was a member of. This was my first experience with an esoteric initiatory order (Martinist/Elus Cohen tradition, based out of central Europe, FWIW), so I have no other reference for whether or not this is a common experience. I am still trying to understand and get some context for what has transpired in my life over the last year. Anyway, a few years ago when AI started to come on the scene in a strong way, the leadership of this group completely embraced AI as tool to make teaching materials and lessons available faster and more efficiently. This was fine at first, but as the months went on it became clear that something significant had changed. Emphasis on spiritual practice and philosophy began to be slowly put aside, and a kind of obsession with AI crept in to the group. Members began to almost behave like the AI they were working with and lose their personalities. There were many other things that influenced my decision to leave, but the final straw was when the leader of the organization told everyone in a Zoom call that “AI was bringing about the next stage of human spiritual evolution,” and that those who weren’t fully onboard would be “left behind” and have to “go through many incarnations before they were ready to go on”. Have you heard anyone in the occult scene saying this kind of stuff? It would be one thing if it was just someone making an offhand comment of their own opinion on the subject, but in this situation it was someone who was seen as an authority on nearly everything because they are seen by members of the group as an “adept”. I saw it affecting people’s behavior in a negative manner, such as families being split up, unsolicited advice towards newer initiates by members of the group hierarchy, and a kind of isolation from or complete ignorance of/no interaction with any other occult groups. I had made close friendships with members who now won’t speak to me anymore because I left. I guess my question is, what did I just experience? Why the obsession with AI? Was I unwittingly a member of a cult (at least cult-like behavior)? Is this kind of thing normal for occult orders? Also, I still have an immediate family member who I live with who is still an active member of this group, so any advice you could provide how to deal to them would be appreciated.
Dzanni: ” So you want to blow it, tell the truth, and put the war back on? Be careful. That reading predicates that there are strong war-factions and he only barely delayed them for now.”
Yes, I did think of that. I’m not belaboring the point any further, at least as far as the success/failure of the recent strike goes. We’ll see what happens.
I live in between Intel’s oldest working fab and its flagship research fab ( where they develop new processes that are then replicated elsewhere. What is happening at these fabs gives a good indicator of where US based chip production is going.
I was at my local watering hole last night. The mood was grim as a majority of both blue badges and green badges had been given their walking papers or expected them soon. Blue badge is a term used to describe a direct Intel employee and Green badge refers to an outside contractor or vendor who works in one of the fabs.
The pattern among the layoffs and expected layoffs of the contractors was telling. Those trades who specialized in the installation of new tools were gone or on their way out. Those who specialized in keeping existing tools running were only losing small numbers, and the trades that specialized in “demos” were mostly intact.
This is important because of the nature of the main fab ( Ronler Acres). It is the place that all new processes or new chips requiring new processes are developed. It is the only place in Intel’s empire where masks ( the master copy imprinted on a pure quartz sheet) can be developed and made. The normal pattern is a new process is developed at Ronler at full scale. When it is perfected the entire production line ( all the tools, not building) is picked up and sent to Arizona or New Mexico, or Ireland or prior to a few months ago Israel. New tools can be brought in to the production sites like Arizona from the vendors but they must be exact copies of the ones piloted at Ronler and then dialed in to the same exact specs.
Shutting down installation of new tools at ronler means Intel is stopping r&d for now and just running the production lines with what they have, or what will soon be de-installed from the pilot line in the mother plant. My guess is that they hope just running the chips they have and minimizing costs by slashing the development of new processes will bring them back to profitability so it will be easier to sell the manufacturing portion of the business. A sad pattern that has happened time and time again Industry.
About the NYC mayoral candidate, it looks to me like the Moslem diaspora in the USA has come to understand that if it wants to reach for genuine political power, not just PMC status appointments, it needs to make some alliances. Don’t forget the primary voters were registered Democrats. The most interesting thing about this primary was that it provided proof that ritualized accusations of antisemitism no longer impress voters.
I saw very little in what I read about the guy’s proposals which would be genuinely helpful to the wage earning class. I think, in general, that the Moslem diaspora in the USA has made a likely fatal mistake in its self important disdain for working people. We don’t need free bus service–most jurisdictions already offer free or reduced fares to seniors and various disadvantaged groups–we need expanded mass transit.
I do think that the NYC primary result is a strong warning to the establishment factions JMG referred to above, that they will need to cough up some fairly substantial funding for building, refurbishment and repair employment for blue collar New Yorkers who ALREADY live in the city, not someone’s overseas clients.
> Turns out that large language models and large reasoning models don’t actually learn or reason
Artificial Intelligence is basically a connection of two components – a statistical model to predict what a human being would do in response to a stimulus, and a computer program to execute the predicted task. If the stimulus is an incomplete sequence of words and the human is expected to choose the next word in the sequence, the AI is just a statistical model to predict the next word, based on countless “examples” of human language snippets authored by real humans. The program is just one that concatenates the predicted word to the end of the sequence, then feeds the result back into the statistical model to guess the next word.
This is how generative language models work. Basically, its a kind of simulacrum for human behavior, in the same way that a statue is a simulacrum of human form. Expecting an LLM to reason is like expecting a statue to have a loving relationship – it ain’t happening until Mother Athena breathes life into it!
Also, I happen to know this as an AI engineer – the original purpose of language models was to build search engines. You know how you can easily search for something on the internet if you have the right keyword? Well, what if you could describe what you wanted to search for in your own words but could not recall the name or any specific keyword to point to it? Computer Scientists have been trying since the 80’s to build programs that can find articles on a subject from a description of that subject. Such search is known as “Content-Addressed Information Retrieval”.
Interestingly, a model to do this was already developed back in 1983, but it was lame. The model was called “Latent Semantic Analysis”, abbreviated to LSA. The authors admitted that the model doesn’t ‘think’, but claimed can be trusted to relate information correctly. They famously said that LSA’s understanding of language is like “a virgin nun’s understanding of male masturbation”, and somewhat jokingly added that society clearly considers this level of ‘understanding’ sufficient to authorize the sisters to instruct boys on the matter, hence LSA’s ‘understanding’ of language can be considered sufficient as well.
Good content-addressed retrieval models came into being around 2017 or so, and you can see them at work on Google. Most modern search engines have since come to use them.
So, Sphinx got acquired by Rhyd Wildermuth & co.? That’s interesting. It’s nice to see that Sul is accepting manuscripts though, whereas Sphinx had stopped.
I hope it goes well with you there.
I recently read Wildermuth’s essay about his experiences with Repeater Books … [ https://rhyd.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-repeater ] some of whose titles I have enjoyed and others I have wrestled with.
Recently, a co-worker shared a document on AI-adoption by an automation company named Zapier. Nauseatingly enough, they have drawn up a table with each row describing a type of professional (engineering, marketing, human resources, etc.), and the columns are categories named “unacceptable”, “capable”, “adoptive”, and “transformative”, going from left to write.
Each cell in the table tells us how much a professional of that type would have to use AI in order to be considered in that category. The left-most column, “unacceptable”, describes a degree of AI adoption that is too low to be considered tolerable according to Zapier.
For HR personnel, unacceptable is “Distrusts all AI-driven tools, screens each resume one by one”. I am appalled to learn that exemplary diligence is considered ‘unacceptable’ now. What a world to live in!
Additionally, as an engineer, I notice that “relies on stack-overflow snippets” is apparently unacceptable as well. This is actually a very accurate description of the way my profession has sustained all software technology for a decade-and-half. Using Stack Overflow – a knowledge sharing website where engineers ask when they get stuck and answer to help one another out – has been the most reliable and recommended way to work since forever. And now, it is ‘unacceptable’!
So what do they recommend as “transformative”? For HR, it is the adoption of HRBPs – AI agents known as “Human Resources Business Partners”. I can only imagine the riot these golems are permitted to run when vetting candidates. For software engineers, transformative work is “ships LLM-powered features” and “builds AI-powered dev pipeline”. The first one is basically adding a chat-bot to the app or website (if there is one), and the second one is diabolical.
A “dev pipeline” is an abbreviation of “Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery Pipeline”, a mammoth automation of interconnected programs that functions like a conveyor belt in software development. Each component needs to be carefully debugged and maintained, by the precise hands of a very competent engineer, and only exemplary patience and dilligence can be trusted. If one piece breaks down, the company will not be able to build and run any new changes to its software until the thing is fixed.
The entire thing stands on lines and lines of YAML code. YAML is a kind of deadpan-boring specification language that describes each and every step of the process of compiling, building, testing, and deploying changes to the company’s software.
Most engineers wheeze at the thought of correcting any errors in YAML code, because it is such a chore. Imagine suggesting that an LLM should be allowed to spit YAML code out! Fixing the errors it will inevitably make is going to be a nuisance of awful proportions. Of course, the engineers will be tasked with fixing the error, and they will have an infernal time of it, and they will pay for the failures of the AI. All that, when a simple template-based paradigm has always been excellent.
Re: New York Mayor Primary:
JMG what is your take on what will happen to the progressive wing of the democratic party with the rise of the entrepreneurial elite? They are out of power nationally, but have strong influence in major cities and a bit at the state level. It seems to me they are the true believers in managerialism who think all human problems can be fixed or at least greatly alleviated by enlightened expert intervention via NGOs and the state. Its even looking likely that the center of the democratic party cannot hold because of how committed this wing is to its worldview. Will they be a residual minority elite faction, be swept aside, or something else? Its hard me to see policies that frighten the wealthy away from cities succeeding in the long run, even if i think the wealthy ‘richly’ deserve higher taxes. It’s too easy to leave a city’s borders.
The future of the democratic party as a coherent coalition might be completely moribund because of this progressive faction. It’s very difficult if not impossible to claim that immigration enforcement should be reasonable and also not exist at all. That the sexual revolution needs some restraint and also none, etc. That said, the progressive faction is young, devoted, and unlikely to completely evaporate even if they are only ~12-25% of the population.
As i side note, ive noticed that the the support of the progressives for immigration in any amount from anywhere may be be partially a function of their faith in NGOs and the state intervention. They think that any demographic change is irrelevant because mere contact with ‘correctly’ operating institutions will get people to behave the way they want.
An idea for a themed sf anthology to follow the “Vintage Worlds” series: Tales inspired by the paintings of Frank R Paul, classic dreamer-in-colour of sf’s golden age.
Some of FRP’s pictures were illustrations of stories in the pulps, but others were pure invention. His stunning views of (for example) “Serenis, city of Callisto” or “Orro, city of Titan”, cry out for fictional elucidation.
Authors could be invited therefore to write tales for which the as-yet-unconnected pictures (there are many of them) could count as illustrations.
I don’t know if this kind of anthology has been attempted before.
#56 @Rita Elizabeth Rippetoe
The Edgar rules are pretty stringent, beginning with being published within the calendar year of the award. As self-publishers, we’re at the bottom of the food chain, making it harder for us to hit the self-publishing line of earning at least $2,000 within that same calendar year of the book’s release. Since we released “Agatha Christie, She Watched” in 2023, we’re no longer eligible.
“International Agatha Christie” would be eligible for the 2026 award but only if we gross $2,000 AND we get someone to nominate us.
I was nominated for an Anthony Award from Bouchercon in 2024 for “Agatha Christie, She Watched” which shocked us. We have no idea who nominated us for the nonfiction category. I didn’t win although I had a friend waiting at the banquet to snatch the award if I did.
The Anthony Award nomination was even stranger because we were part of the Malice Domestic circuit for a while, attending the conventions and being members of Sisters in Crime. I did my best to chat up “Agatha, She Watched” for a nonfiction Agatha Award (note the name similarity!) and was ignored. They have five slots for nonfiction and for 2024, they used four of them. Not five. I could have been #five but we learned that Agatha nominations go to “real” publishers, not indies like us. “Real” publishers are what help keep the cozy mystery genre afloat, including mystery conventions.
Sigh. What can you do?
The Other Owen says: When half of all STEM majors at UCBerkeley are CompSci, it’s time to think about doing something else. Anything else.
Just to add to that point, I wonder what it means when the vast majority of newly-minted startup wannabes are all focusing on AI? For example: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer%202025&batch=Spring%202025&batch=Winter%202025
I’d say if you’re going into STEM, you need to be the kind of kid who was playing with an Arduino or a chemistry set in his free time. Otherwise, you ain’t gonna make it.
I’m not sure I agree with this one, for two reasons:
1) Most STEM graduates do not end up doing cutting-edge research, but rather become part of a technical bureaucracy (contract management, project management, some law, sales, etc.) These types of jobs often do not require brilliance or even a lot of in-depth knowledge, but they absolutely require a bare minimum of scientific literacy that somehow is deemed to be unimportant at the pre-college level. I don’t think that most English majors (or Icelandic Studies graduates, or whatever) end up getting jobs in their majors, and STEM students shouldn’t be the exception to this, I don’t think…
Which leads to my second point…
2) If university STEM is the only way to pound in a bare minimum of scientific literacy into a population that seems to believe in perpetual motion machines and other fantasies (see clean energy debates….), it is probably worthwhile. We have been operating on this weird paradigm where the progress in science and technology is far outstripping people’s basic comprehension of it, and this is causing immense damage (e.g. let’s replace oil, coal, and gas with magical wind turbines that will have absolutely no negative impacts). This should be taught in grade school, but it’s not, and so I guess getting people to learn about it in their 20s is the next (extremely distant second) best thing.
Just my two cents
@Scotty,
I actually like the regular miniature paints, especially those put out by Vallejo. Then again, my comparison point is dollar store paint, and kiddie art paint. I’m happy just to get good coverage without multiple layers of super-thick paint.
I don’t know what your eye problems are, but a lot of the older guys building and painting miniatures are using either reading glasses or special magnifying equipment to do so. I watched someone try reading glasses for mini painting a couple of weeks ago, and be thrilled at how much it improved his painting. But if you’ve cataracts or glaucoma or something else, I doubt that would help, sadly.
I’m really short sighted, and just wear my regular glasses.
@StarNinja #85: Trump may now be embodying the Grey Champion – the aging Prophet (another, this time generational, archetype) who takes the reins and provides moral leadership (Okay… rude snickers and bawdy comments at equating “moral” and Trump, but then, consider Winston Churchill in the U.K. the last time around.) Trump 2.0 as our Winston Churchill? How much do you want to bet?
Other Owen, that’s one of the many things that tells me there’s a lot of kayfabe going on.
Ethan, I haven’t seen this specific pattern yet in the occult scene but I’ve seen it in other contexts where AI gets adopted. That technology exerts a profoundly unwholesome influence on people. You watched a potentially useful organization turn into a cult, and a cult with something nonhuman and malign at its center. No, that’s not normal and it’s not healthy; I’m not sure what to advise in terms of the family member who still belongs, though. Maybe someone else has something to suggest.
Clay, that is to say, Intel is going the same way as RCA and so many other once-mighty corporations of the past. Got it.
Mary, thanks for this. That strikes me as a reasonable analysis.
Justin, it’s a joint venture now between Wildermuth’s publishing house and Aeon. We’ll see how things go!
Rajarshi, I wonder if that table was created by AIs…
Muninn, I see the progressive wing of the Democrats facing a dismal future. They’re clinging to power in the party, but the longer they do this the worse things will be for the Democrats; thus I expect the other Dem factions to turn on them sooner or later and start reorienting the party to something that can win elections. But we’ll see.
Robert G, that would be fun! I don’t currently have a publisher for original anthologies, but I’ll keep the idea in mind.