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.
(Oh, and a note to whoever it is in Germany who’s spamming this site with close to a hundred attempted comments a day, beginning “Great article!” or the equivalent and finishing with a website you’re trying to push: my spam filter at this point is flagging and trashing everything you send, even when you vary the text and the IP address. You might as well quit, as you’re not going to get any of your crap put through here.)
JMG, thanks a lot for hosting an Open Post again! 🙂
Two offers today, and a question:
1. Each Wednesday, I perform a formal blessing in which I bless everybody who signed up for that week, and I very much appreciate any signups for these blessings. If anybody here would like to be blessed in any given week, you can sign up at any time here: https://thehiddenthings.com/categories/weekly-blessings
2. For people interested in spiritual healing, and in particular in the Modern Ordern of Essenes: I’ve been restructuring and posting the MOE material as an “online course” on my site. We’re currently neck-deep into the first units of the Healer grade, but the course isn’t time-bound. I.e. you can start from the beginning at any time if you’d like to take up the Modern Order of Essenes: https://thehiddenthings.com/moe-course-intro-and-unit-1
3. Finally, a question to everybody who doesn’t mind sharing, JMG included:
There has been a lot of talk here recently about relocating, and about when, and how to decide when, etc. But deciding to move away from somewhere is the somewhat simpler part (note I didn’t say easy!!) – deciding where to move to can be a tad more tricky…
Of course, there are mundane methods to make this decision a bit easier, e.g. by deciding about one’s personal priorities and requirements, doing some research, and then ranking places accordingly. But since there are a lot of people here with somewhat interesting and uncommon skillsets, I’ve been wondering about other, more occult ways to make this decision which you folks might have used successfully (or not successfully!). A collection of such “tools” might come in handy for quite a few of the readers here at some point…
So… Have you ever used any occult, spiritual, or otherwise quirky means to determine the goal of a relocation, and if so, which ones specifically? And how happy have you been with the results? Would you use these methods again, or others?
Milkyway
You like to dismantle the “religion of progress” by noting how many events historically that lead to supposedly “inevitable” progress were actually quite historically contingent.
I was wondering if you have heard of the “Rare Earth hypothesis” developed around the Turn of the Millennium by Peter Ward.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth:_Why_Complex_Life_Is_Uncommon_in_the_Universe
In a nutshell, Ward devoted his hypothesis to refuting the fashionable claims by Carl Sagan, Frank Drake and others that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are common in the universe and even in our own galaxy. Instead, the conditions that allow for even the development of complex (i.e. multicellular) life are far more contingent that previous theories allow. While microbial life may be common in the universe, more complex life (and certainly “intelligent” life) requires a highly specific set of circumstances like a stabilizing satellite to stabilize climates, a large gas giant to prevent excessive bombardment by objects like comets in the outer solar system, etc.
I would like to ask the community the following question:
Do you think that ethnic or racial conflict will occur in America in the next 20 years or so?
Hello JMG and kommentariat. What do you think about human urine use for fertilising trees? Is it safe for humans and plants?
@JMG Noting your essays in the past on time, deep time and myth, would you consider a Fifth Wednesday post reviewing Hamlet’s Mill by De Santillana and Von Dechend? It is one of those works that I cannot understand why I keep returning to it and was curious as to your thoughts.
And if you have done such a review or discussion somewhere, and I’ve missed it in the years of reading your works, please do direct me accordingly.
a few notes:
Was in California (Sequoia and Yosemite). There were crowds, but not like I was expecting. Hard to say if in Central CA things are slowing down — my gut says ‘yes’ but time will tell.
My 4 hens are now 2.5 years old — and the eggs are starting to slow down — 1-2 per day vs 3-4 a year ago. But they are still fun and inquisitive (and way smarter than people give Chickens credit for!)
Happy August!
Jerry
I know that electric vehicles end up producing the same amount of carbon emissions given the amount of fossil fuels that need to be burned (or uranium to be mined and transported) to generate their power. But as an urban pedestrian and cyclist, I’m all for a rapid shift to EVs, simply to move the pollution out of my face and into some remote area where it perhaps blows away easier (hopefully not in the direction of my city) and where far fewer people live and work. Am I being selfish or reasonable?
Just some anectdata about “InVasivE sPEcIes.” Here in Pittsburgh the spotted lanternfly has become another colorful bug, as I predicted. Two years ago, a single block of downtown would be festooned with thousands of splatted lanternflies. Last year that was down to hundreds or several dozen per block. This year, none. Zip. Nada. There’s no way the street cleaning guys are that efficient. Then I thought I saw a sparrow eating a last bit of lanternfly. When I talked to a street cleaning guy, he said they do clean them up, but in the back alleys the birds are eating them. So.
I also noticed that even on the ailanthus-covered hillsides there are very few. In fact, I never see more than one at a time! I also notice way fewer preying mantises this year. Last year I had to deport several from my kitchen. Everyone’s competing for this new food source. So much for “nO NAtivE pREdatORS!!!”…
Gerry
I had a very interesting conversation with a friend a few weeks ago. She was a small scale musician in the 1990s and early 2000s who abandoned that attempted career in response to changes that saw nearly all the money vanish. She has asked that I not identify her any more than this, but what she said killed the ability of small musicians to make a living caught my attention, because I think it applies for more broadly and might be an explanation for the odd way pop-culture has been caught in a seemingly infinite loop since sometime in the second half of the 1990s. Her point is that all the talk of the internet killing the record studios is incomplete: many musicians have turned to the internet despite massive issues (such as barely getting paid, if at all) because the other options are gone for most of them. In 1995, she could count on a few random radio stations all over the United States picking up her music; she was never big by any stretch, but a lot of radio stations played niche things. Since there were limits on ownership and how much programming networks could provide, there were an incredibly large number of radio stations all staffed by radically different people, owned by different companies, and since limits existed on how many stations could be owned by the same entity in any given market, radio stations were also in active competition with each other.
Any dedicated musician could expect to get on at least a handful of radio stations, and so the record labels had an incentive to try to bring small niche artists in: they may only reach a few stations, but that would still be money for the record label. Meanwhile, a lot of their predatory habits were kept in check because these small radio stations tended to be stocked with people who cared about what they were playing: the typical person who would take a job picking music for a radio station would be a serious music fan, likely at least an amateur musician. This meant that they would have a vested interest in how the record labels and other actors in society treated the music world, and as a result plenty of these small stations would choose which companies to work with in part based on how they treated their musicians and the local music stores.
This form of broadcasting dominated by local and small businesses died with the Telecommunications Act of 1996: with the limits on owning radio stations lifted, there was pretty quickly a massive shift toward large companies owning huge swaths of the market; the radio stations and record labels began to coordinate about who was going to get air time in a national way; this meant that the small players, whether radio station, musician, record label, or music store, all got squeezed out by huge players who now held control over the most important piece of infrastructure for music: the radio stations where most people found new music.
Something similar happened with television, because rules that kept the markets competitive and prevented national ownership were repealed there as well; while I’ve also seen claims that rules keeping broadcasting separate from cable and cinema were also removed, but have not verified this claim yet. Meanwhile, the rules which applied to the older media were explicitly not applied to the internet, which has allowed for the massive concentration of power in the internet. Given how central broadcasting and now the internet are to the American mass mind, I’m starting to wonder if the cultural stagnation is because of the dramatic increase in centralized power since 1996.
Some time ago you were in touch with Constantin von Hoffmeister about the book Esoteric Trumpism. Did anything ever come of that?
@David Ritz,
I remember that book. It was very interesting and I think he made an excellent point about the conditions for life being much more widespread than the conditions for multicellular animal life as we know it. I agree that ecologies containing only simple (single celled for now) forms of life are likely much more common than ecologies that also contain multicellular animal life equivalents. For much of Earth’s history, there was only relatively simple forms of life that didn’t fossilize well. The cambrian explosion isn’t all that long ago in terms of earth’s deep past.
However, this book was written before scientists realized how common extrasolar planets actually are. They’re a dime a dozen, and even if only a very small number have the right conditions for animal life, that still adds up to quite a number.
But there has been animal life on earth far longer than humanity has had radio. We’re a tiny blip in earth’s history thus far, and we don’t know for certain what the future holds for us. We don’t know if we’ll continue doing things that will produce radio waves detectable from other star systems.
So on the whole, I think life is likely much more common than technological civilizations, especially when time is considered as well as space. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that ET hasn’t come and said hello.
Milkyway, thanks for this. Yes, all my relocations were based as much on metaphysical factors as any others; a good deal of that was Sara’s doing, as she was a talented clairvoyant and conscious medium who found it very easy to get information from the Unseen about various locations, but I also used my own somewhat more fussy methods. One of the main things I used was locational astrology. Once I had a potential location in mind, I would recast our birth chart as though we had both been born there, using our actual times of birth (adjusted for time zones), and see how the change in location affected house placement. It worked extremely well — on the east coast of the US, for example, I have Jupiter in a very strong position, and my financial affairs have prospered since I relocated here.
David, yes, I’ve heard of it. All these hypotheses are speculations based on a sample size of 1, which is very risky! The rare Earth hypothesis has another subtext, though, because it’s a convenient way to avoid the obvious implications of the Fermi paradox — the argument that given the age of the universe and the number of stars in it, if limitless progress is possible, intelligent species far in advance of humanity should have colonized all of it billions of years ago. Since we see no signs of intelligent species in the cosmos, the obvious implication is that limitless progress isn’t an option and (in particular) traveling across the unimaginable distances from star to star is out of reach. The rare Earth hypothesis tries to finesse that by arguing that we just happen to be the first intelligent species to reach the brink of space travel in the whole history of the Milky Way galaxy, if not the cosmos as a whole; Ward’s arguments strike me as basically handwaving, but he’s at least trying to grapple with that.
Anonymous, depends on what you mean by “conflict.” There’s a lot of low level violence along ethnic lines in America right now, but I assume that’s not what you mean. What level of violence would you define as “conflict”?
Chuaquin, I’ve done it. It’s quite safe — human urine is normally quite sterile, being highly alkaline — and plants thrive on it.
Flagg707, bring it up the next time there are five Wednesdays in a month and we’ll vote on it! I also read it regularly, but I can tell you why — it attempts, with some degree of success, to unpack one of the collections of archaic wisdom stored in mythology, and thus shows that myths aren’t just empty fantasies but a sophisticated information storage technology that most people have simply forgotten how to use.
Jerry, thanks for these. Interesting to hear that the crowds are dwindling.
Michael, “selfish” and “reasonable” aren’t mutually exclusive.
Gerry, exactly. The one thing the people who babble about “invasive species” won’t let themselves grasp is that Nature isn’t static. She’s always changing, adapting, moving things around, playing an infinite chess game with herself in which species are the pieces. Here’s a spotted lanternfly pawn, moving into a strong position; here’s the counter, a sparrow knight supported by a praying mantis rook, taking it right off the board. And the game goes on!
Moose, that makes enormous sense. I know that the only thing that’s kept publishing from falling down the same rathole of monotony is that it’s fairly easy to launch a small publishing house these days, and the big distributors are so tired of being screwed over by the big publishers that they happily distribute books by small presses.
Charlie, we exchanged a few emails and I read his book; I found it interesting but problematic in some ways, and the conversation lapsed by a kind of tacit mutual consent.
Hi, last month I didn’t participate in the matriachy discussion, but in there you slipped a point that you had mentioned before and this time it stuck with me. I appeal to your knowlegde of History and Ideas and the babies these two got together.
Any idea why the female citizens’ rights deteriorated in the 19th Century english speaking world ? Vagary of History or deeper undercurrent(s) ?
In keeping with the action/reaction, pendulum-swings-principle, I got to imagining that it may have been part of a counterreaction to the previous century’s Enlightenment movement but I could be way off.
Thanks!
There is good news to report from the Republic of Turkiye:
Silphium is rediscovered! The health giving plant of the ancients, export of which made the city of Cyrene rich, is not extinct!
https://greekreporter.com/2025/08/21/plant-ancient-greece-rediscovered/
The Turkish scientist and his team have been propagating and examining this plant for about 10 years, so one hopes descent of plant hunters won’t bring about a new extinction.
The Turkish scientists are guardedly optimistic that they have indeed rediscovered silphium. Photos show a plant of the umbellifrae with bright yellow, dome shaped umbels, the color of wild Maximilliani sunflowers and a thick central stalk, as depicted on ancient coins.
@David Ritz
From a practical point of view, it matters little whether intelligent life is common in the universe or not. Space is *big*, and any attempt at interstellar travel is going to end like a spitball smacking into the brick wall known as the “Tyranny of the Rocket Equation”. There is never going to be enough reward “out there” to justify what you put into building a craft with enough endurance and delta-V, if it is even possible to build such a craft at all. And this is not even getting into the horrendous difficulty in keeping meatbags alive for generations across light-years of empty vacuum punctuated only by the occasional deadly space rock or blast of radiation, or the fact that “artificial intelligence” appears to be completely impossible with any actual computer technology, regardless of what Silicon Valley boosters call their latest chatbots. If there are aliens, they are staying home.
Hey JMG,
Your various comments on the effects of transplanting Eastern-style meditation and yoga into the West have me wondering about a different practice that seems to be quite popular within the PMC and adjacent circles: psychotherapy.
I don’t mean to throw shade at the general concept. Jung was, after all, “one of us” and so I’m inclined to believe that psychonalaysis, at least, is quite effective¹ at treating the problems it was designed to treat—I wouldn’t know, having never partaken in any form of therapy. I’ve been rather skeptical about other forms, specifically CBT, though upon further thought, some of the theory seems like a materialist take on affirmations. I suppose it’s the “coping strategies” part that gives me the biggest pause; I don’t associate the word “coping” with anything remotely similar to healing.
Either way, I’ve noticed that therapy seems to have gotten a lot of attention in PMC-adjacent media in recent years. Specifically, a lot of YouTubers seem to be sponsored by the company BetterHelp, “a mental health platform that provides direct online counseling and therapy services via web or phone text communication” (quoting wikipedia). These adverts tend to state that finding a good therapist in person is hard and that an online platform allows you to switch therapists easier until you’ve found someone you resonate with, so at least there’s some better rationale than “online = good,” but the whole concept still fills me with some unease.
Mental health has, of course, been steadily getting worse across most of the general population, so a non-nefarious explanation for this sudden popularity would be that it’s just become more and more needed. But these adverts tend to emphasise that everybody can benefit from therapy, even if there’s not something majorly going wrong. Plus, I just don’t trust a company that’s trying to make some vital (or so they claim) service more accessible but somehow has enough profits to sponsor YouTubers.
I mostly just want to throw my observations out there but to formulate a proper question, would you think it possible/likely/or even simply true that the various forms of psychotherapy applied to people who don’t suffer from the issues they’re designed to treat might have a similar unbalancing factor like yoga or Eastern meditation have on the PMC?
And, as a bonus question: I used the term “mental health” earlier but I kinda dislike it because it’s become so diluted: just about everything ranging from suicidal ideation to feeling a bit off seems to be considered a mental health problem and we have so many “mental health awareness” events that I struggle to see who exactly might be “unaware” of mental health². Putting on my tinfoil hat, could this be an intentional strategy to deflect from the very real ongoing “mental health crises”, loath though I am to use the term, along the lines of “everybody’s just being a little dramatic, please don’t look at the suicide statistics”? Come to think of it, the current use of “mental health” probably originated on social media, the very platforms that seem to be the dominant drivers of teen/YA suicide³.
—David P.
1: I took in a couple of psychology classes at my university. I don’t think any type of therapy was derided as much as psychoanalysis, on the basis that it’s “not evidence-based” or “pseudoscience” because of Freud’s whacky theories. At this point, these criticism have rather the opposite of their intended effects on me.
2: What does that even mean? People might be unaware of (specific) mental health problems but surely not of mental health in general? This strikes as similar to the German word “Klimaleugner”—literally “climate denier”. Yes, that means exactly what you think it does.
3: Though the vision you’ve detailed on the last Magic Monday puts this into a bit of a different perspective…
Still, it is worth noting that multicellular life on Earth only appeared around 600 million years ago in the Ediacaran (in the wake of the Cryogenic “Snowball Earth” period).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran#:~:text=The%20Ediacaran%20(%20%2F%CB%8Ci%CB%90d,Cambrian%20Period%20at%20538.8%20Mya.
Out of the massive number of multicellular life forms since then, only one has developed what might be called “civilization” worthy of “intelligent life”. And even this was quite contingent on the transition to bipedalism that came with the last Glacial Maximum.
I was curious if you have heard of the almost three-decade old book “Children of the Ice Age: How a Global Catastrophe Allowed Humans to Evolve” by
Steven M. Stanley.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Children_of_the_Ice_Age.html?id=ynmAAAAAMAAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y
He notes that a key ingredient that helped transition our hominin ancestors from being “just another ape” was the formation of the Isthmus of Panama about 3 million years ago that led to the formation of the Arctic Ice Sheets and subsequent Glacial Maximum of the Pleistocene. As the Earth became colder and dryer, the once relatively -abundant forests of Africa from the Pilocene gave ways to grassland, savanna, and desert. Subsequently, our ancestors were forced to transition to bipedalism, which in turn caused natural selection for parents who tended to children and pelvises that could grow heads with bigger brains.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/we-are-all-panamanians-14268
Without this contingent event as recently (in geological terms) as 3 million years ago, the ancestors who created the seed for you and me might instead have spawned more hairy, simple creatures like “Lucy”!
This is just speculation and could be unanswerable at our level, but regarding the idea of the purpose of life being to transcend material existence to the extent of denying the reality of reality (Maya – yes, it might be illusion but it is very persistent right here right now) often seems like a sort of cop-out in a similar way to our future is space travel – different perspectives on surmounting limitations and avoiding ‘pain’.
That consciousness would place a limited part of itself as a personality in a limited reflected reality and that said personality should devote all efforts to ‘escape’ has the feel of lacking in imagination in a similar vein to human hubris and mastery of the universe.
At the same time I am mindful of the saying that there are as many ways as there are human hearts; but with so many possibilities (the number of corners in this theatre seems fractal), outside of the usual suspects in the Wrestle Mania that is the world: in the red corner we have the mystics, in the brown corner we have the materialist tech bros, in the white corner we have one set of occultists, in the black corner another set of occultists, in the green corner, well, as many corners as there are hues and labels to fit them, but let’s ignore the rainbow corner just now…
Anyways, here’s something I’ve been pondering:
What is the likelihood that we actually have any grasp whatsoever as to what is really going on, rather than misinterpreted reflections? Like the trickiness of clairvoyance channelling, humans ‘channelling reality’ is subject to similar issues.
Clemens(?) “The problem is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know that just ‘aint so “
One answer I’ve come up with is that it does not matter – it is the process that is important not our interpretation.
The importance of Ideals seems paramount, the nature of the Ideals not so much as they change over time and it is the process that is important rather than a particular destination.
My working idea is that the mystery will begin to unveil itself once we shrug off the chrysalis of the human form that passes as an incubator for consciousness here.
Is it just me or does anyone else think that the extremes of mysticism, religion, journey to the stars etc are just edges of a coin that we don’t quite perceive?
Then again, if reality is the Absolute ‘experiencing’ itself, let the cosmic dance unfold! 😉
In part of the Magic Monday discussion on the set of experiences that seem to suggest some very large number of souls are about to leave for another world (most because they belong there, a few being dragged from ours due to karma and the like), there was a link mentioned between my brother’s sense that he still has some choice in the matter (depending on whether he lives long enough) and the rapture, the lightly veiled fantasy of mass suicide.*
It’s been a dark joke between some of my siblings that our parents are secretly trying to kill him because he was in a couple of really weird accidents as a kid, and his response to seeing this was to say “Oh, that’s why our parents are trying to kill me! I guess they want to make sure I go with them when they leave!” Initially it was meant as an extremely morbid joke, but….
One of the implications of taking this seriously is that there will be a very large number of souls which will lose loved ones in a fare more permanent fashion than is the usual case with human beings. The entire thread was started because someone said that someone who they once loved came in a dream to say goodbye. Judging from the post, I don’t think whoever this is was ready to say goodbye in such a permanent fashion; and I have no doubt I will profoundly miss a few people I think might be leaving if this is true. My brother has also said that a major part of why he wants to stay is that he wants to remain with souls who belong here. This world might feel off and strange to him, but he has loved ones here and he does not want to leave us.
This though raises the profoundly troubling questions for the souls who are going to go, but have ties to the ones who might remain. If, as my brother’s sense suggests, in at least some cases it is as simple as “If you live long enough, you’ll remain”, then timing one’s death becomes weirdly important right now for some small number of people; and other people also have an incentive to try to control the timing. I have no idea how large a group this will be, but if any of the souls leaving have any sense this is the case, some of these potential suicides to make sure they leave might very well turn into murder suicides.
In fact, as I was writing this, I found myself wondering if certain troubling social trends might be part of this process, with things like MAID being a reflection of this dynamic at work….
*https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/338828.html?thread=56759692#cmt56759692
Chuaquin – Human (and other mammal) urine contains multiple nutrients that are helpful for your garden and the soil biome, but can also include contaminants and excess salts. Some references recommend diluting 1:10 to avoid salt damage. Some medications and pesticides convey through urine/manure, so adjust accordingly. Pyradines and ivermectin can be fully intact/functional is excreta. Others (glyphosate) may include breakdown products that are biologically active. PFAS can also be problematic. On the other hand, terra preta gives long term improvement.
https://www.thenewlede.org/2025/08/how-can-this-happen-fight-over-sewage-sludge-on-farms-intensifies/https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoil.2023.1161627/full https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/51513 contamination with pyradine broadleaf herbicides (ie pyralids, Picloram, Clopyralid, aminopyralid, Aminocyclopyrachlor)
Hi JMG,
I am curious about the planet and the transmigration of souls. You mentioned that the planet is not in the material plane. Is there any way to detect the star system and planet, with our present equipment? Do we know how far the planet is from Earth? Nearer than Proxima Centauri?
I am quite happy to say I feel Earthlike, so I don’t think I will be making the jump.
Felix
Greetings JMG, there are sites like worldometer and others that say the US has oil reserves for 10 years , and 15 years for natural gas. It is similar for Mexico.
What do you think the country will do when production enters steep decline ? There is a lot of competition for middle east oil from China India and other countries.
Hi JMG,
Breaking news is that the British economy is going down the tubes and fast, to the point that the government is likely to have to go to the IMF for a loan. This hasn’t happened since 1976 and the state of the economy back then was arguably more robust than now. Predictably, the UK’s economic malaise is being attributed by all the usual pundits to be due to Brexit. Forking over billions to Ukraine, boycotting Russian oil and gas, weaponising the shipping insurance industry etc. had nothing to do with this economic downturn, no, it’s all because the UK pulled out of the single market. So, what’s the cure going to be that Starmer and his hapless crew are going to come up with to sell to the British public? Could it be the undoing of Brexit? That’s my guess. It’s almost as if Sir Keir actually set out to trash the economy just so that the UK could be reintegrated into the EU.
That might explain the British situation, but it doesn’t work for the other large European economies; why are France and Germany also manifestly mishandling their economies? Some hidden agenda, or do I just have to put it down to hubris and incompetence?
Hi JMG! I hope you’re well. Looks like we’ve got some beautiful cooler weather in the northeast at the moment!
On a down note, I wondered what your take is on this article’s prediction? IIRC, one of the astrological forecasts you did in the past year or so had predicted war in the UK. It’s obviously a terrible state of affairs on that side of the pond right now, but that’s no guarantee that a war—even a completely justified war—would make things better.
https://thefederalist.com/2025/08/27/civil-war-is-coming-to-britain/
I did some long drives over the past week from the East Coast out to all parts of the Ohio River watershed and back. I had a lot of time to think and I kept coming to a block on how American civilization was going to develop from the current culture of mass consumption to something in the future along the lines of the tamanous concept you’ve touched on.
I understand that the transition will take lifetimes but along my drive I was just hopeless seeing the same PMC chains stores of the coastal US brand new in the middle of West Virginia (Target, Crumbl Cookie, Chipotle). During my trip a uproar occurred in the online rage industrial complex about a change in the logo/restaurant design for the chain restaurant Cracker Barrel. I mean good points were made about the beige-ificiation of everything which this redesign was an example of. But the online denizens came to the argument like it was the Sistine Chapel being defaced. The idea that a chain restaurant is what passes for our American culture worth defending is just so unsettling .
I returned home feeling so hopeless at a cultural transition/development for America but then I came across the Flotsam River Circus https://www.rivercircus.com/ I group of musicians and acrobats travelling American rivers putting on shows at each towns waterfront. They currently are traversing the Erie Canal and Hudson going from Buffalo to NYC. Absolutely something out of Star’s Reach and a tamanous future. So I guess hope is out there!
@Chuaquin
I’ve heard urine described as a super fertilizer and a slow-acting poison for plants at the same time. The super-fertilizer is because of it’s Nitrogen, Phosporus and potassium content, as well as it’s micro-mineral contents.
The poisoning efect is because if it’s salt content.
My advice, as someone who’s been doing compost every year for a long time, is to use it as a compost activator. In this way, the salt content will be balanced and the nutrients will activate the composting process.
They will also not be washed to the subsoil so quickly, since they will integrate into the compost.
I recommend to you a book, called the Humanure Handbook, which discusses this and similar matters.
Guillem.
“I’m all for a rapid shift to EVs, simply to move the pollution out of my face and into some remote area where it perhaps blows away easier (hopefully not in the direction of my city) and where far fewer people live and work. Am I being selfish or reasonable?”
Both. Dumping your waste products on someone else is selfish, but there is a concept called carrying capacity. The automobile exhaust that would choke you out in town disperses to harmlessness in the country. Find Hartline Washington on a map and ask yourself how much they have to worry about automobile pollution.
As for peeing on the trees, keep in mind you can overdo anything is you are willing to work at it. Too much nitrogen, too much salt, too much whatever and you can kill plants. Oh, and if bees are very interested in your urine get to the doctor for a check for diabetes.
I should amend my comment above to say “hot war” or “kinetic war.”
Obviously, a psychological and cultural—and some would say spiritual—war is already raging over there, as it is all across the West.
Anonymoose Canadian (#9)
Yes. And don’t forget that Clear Channel also bought up, or assumed control, of about 1,000 music venues across the country. They could destroy smaller promoters by calling acts and saying that “if you play that venue, you won’t play any of our venues AND we’ll drop you from airplay.” They killed several of my clients this way in the early 2000s-I provide sound for live events. Nothing ever made it to court to set precedent, except one lawsuit involving monster truck rallies-they would quietly settle if pushed hard, but small promoters can’t afford to lawyer up like that. Later on, they spun off the live concerts part, then bankrupted the radio part. Meanwhile the construction of megacorporate venues is going gangbusters here in Pittsburgh. See also: https://medium.com/cuepoint/the-devaluation-of-music-it-s-worse-than-you-think-f4cf5f26a888
Thibault, there’s an interesting periodicity in all this. In the English-speaking world, attitudes toward sex alternate over a cycle roughly two centuries in length, and the rights of women rise and fall correspondingly. Thus the 16th century featured the bawdy Elizabethan era, when women had a great deal of freedom; the 17th saw backlash, the rise of Puritanism and sexual prudery, and the rights of women were restricted; the 18th saw this give way to the bawdy Georgian era, a great deal of sexual freedom, and more rights for women; in the 19th, in came Victorian prudishness and women lost rights; and in the 20th, things swung back the other way. Exactly what’s causing it is an interesting question.
Mary, I heard about that! If I had a garden and lived someplace where it thrives, I’d move heaven and earth to get some seeds.
David, classic psychoanalysis is falling rapidly out of favor because it simply doesn’t work — statistically, your chance of getting well if you have a mental illness, and go to a Freudian or Jungian shrink, is about equal to your chance of getting well if you do nothing at all. The mere fact that it’s popular says nothing about its efficacy. One exception is that Jungian therapy works tolerably well for middle-aged people who feel a lack of meaning and purpose in their lives, but then so does any other new hobby. I expect Jung’s work to survive solely as a branch of the occult sciences, and have considered writing a book on Jungian occultism with that in mind.
David, we don’t know how many intelligent species have inhabited the Earth. I’ve pointed out more than once that two greenhouse events in the Mesozoic — the Toarcian and Cenomanian-Turonian events — look remarkably like our current greenhouse gas situation, and could well be explained by intelligent saurians who got into fossil fuels; they’re some 180 million and 90 million years in the past respectively, so no other trace of intelligent life would survive, and that’s more than enough time for oil and gas reserves to replenish themselves. Many saurians, please note, were bipedal and had forelimbs quite capable of manipulating objects; the image below is less improbable than most people think!
Here again, building huge towers of reasoning on a sample size of 1 is a bad idea. “We just don’t know” is more useful, and more honest.
Earthworm, a case could be made! I like the idea that material incarnation is the prenatal state of the soul, and we have about as much chance of figuring out what’s going on in the cosmos as an unborn child has of guessing what’s going on outside its mother’s womb.
Moose, that’s a very troubling reflection. I do want to remind everyone that this is simply a reflection of visionary experience, which is an exceedingly uncertain source of information — just ask anyone whose visions insisted to them that the world would end on December 21, 2012! I have no idea whether there’s any truth to it or not, and I don’t advise anyone to make decisions on the basis of that vision!
(For those that are wondering what the ring-tailed, rambling heck I’m talking about, there’s a tolerably succinct explanation here: https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/327162.html?thread=55464954#cmt55464954 )
Felix, in the vision I had — and in the cosmology of Dion Fortune, which underlies the vision — the planet from which these other souls came is not a material world and cannot be detected with material equipment. It may be part of the universe of “dark matter” about which our astronomers argue these days. It belongs to the 6th Cosmic plane, while our world belongs to the 7th; now, as 6000-odd years ago, its solar system occupies the same space as ours, overlapping so completely that souls can pass from our world to theirs, and vice versa.
Tony, we’re tolerably close to finding out. I expect another energy crisis, steep increases in the cost of energy, economic gyrations, and then a renewed stability as some other source of hydrocarbons that has even higher ecological and economic costs gets frantically plugged in to fill the gap.
Hereward, Europe is reverting to the mean, returning to its normal condition as a cold, bleak, impoverished backwater of a subcontinent on the west end of Asia. Its rise to temporary affluence was solely a result of its colonial conquests, and was preserved after the Second World War first by neocolonial schemes in Africa, and then by looting the resources of eastern Europe using the EU as vehicle. The attempt to do the same thing to Russia failed on the battlefields of Ukraine, and now the bill’s coming due. I hope the British people can stay out of the EU and not be dragged down quite as fast; if Starmer manages to force through EU membership, emigration may be the only hope left.
Blue Sun, it depends on whether the political system will permit a peaceful transfer of power to the rising populist movement. If so, they’ll dodge the same bullet we’re dodging right now. If not, I expect something like the Ulster “Troubles” all over Britain within a fairly short time, for starters.
GP, what you see from freeways and on the mass media will always be manufactured corporate pseudoculture. It’s outside the freeway corridors, in odd corners and fringe settings, that the American culture of the future is being born.
Blue Sun, were you the Anon who asked about conflict between ethnic groups? In that case, I don’t think it’s likely at all. The Democrats tried very hard to distract attention from the class conflicts in American society by whipping up racial and gender hatreds, but that seems to be breaking down as they lose power.