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.
On the question of intelligent life throughout the universe:
A fair amount of the discussion here rests on an unexamined premise that intelligent life, if it exists elsewhere in the universe, is subject to the same patterns of response to its environment that our species is. In humans, as in very many other terrestrial life-forms, the response to hard ecological limits is to expand into new territory. This isn’t the only theoretically possible response to ecological limits. There is at least one other theoretically possible response: curtailing growth and consumption. (There may be other possibilities, too, that haven’t occurred to me.)
What I wonder is to what extent that response of ours to limiting situations is “hard-wired” into the “operating systems” of terrestrial life-forms, and might be wholly absent from the “operating systems” of life forms on other planets. Just as birds have flying hard-wired into their nervous systems, and similarly squirrels have climbing, so humans (and most other terrestrial life-forms) seem to have territorial expansion hard-wired into theirs.
If that is so, perhaps intelligent extra-terrestrial life forms (supposing that they are out there) feel no inherent need to expand their reach in the universe, no need to explore it. In short, the “Fermi Paradox” seems to assume that intelligent life elsewhere shares the common impulse of terrestrial life to expand its territory, to reach out and explore. That may be a deeply flawed assumption.
Inspired by the 2025 Glastonbury Ecosophia conference, and with the prodding of Erika Kitten Lopez, I’m going to try to organize something similar for the summer solstice 2026: Adocentyn Providence!
Tentatively 3 days, Friday 6/19 to Sunday 6/21.
Ideas, offers to present, and offers to help organize are all welcome. Otherwise it’ll be me and Erika dancing in the street.
I have a post on Dreamwidth for any and all of your thoughts.
Talk of Frank Drake made me think of the Arecibo Radio Telescope ( of which Frank was is 2nd director) as a symbol for the collapse of empire.
The telescope was originally built in the early 1960’s as a way to take missiles in the ionosphere and funded by the military ( kind of like the origins of the space program), but quickly modified to do research by its designers and managers at Cornell. All the way until the 2017 it was the largest radio telescope in the world and a symbol of American Prowess and power. Then after some damage from a hurricane in 2017 it needed extra work and funding. Cornell, which managed it, asked the National Science foundation which owns it for more funds. This is like our countries physical infrastructure which ages and becomes too brittle to handle disruptions. As other priorities had squeezed the NSF budget the denied the extra funds and awarded the contract to manage the telescope to the low bidder ( SRI). This research consortium did little to improve the maintenance of the telescope and by some accounts siphoned off much of the money ( corruption phase). When the money and usefulness of the telescope was finished being siphoned off by SRI it was pawned off to a patsy bag holder ( the University of Central Florida) Eventually the lack of maintenance combined with the age of the telescope caused it to unexpectedly collapse in on itself. Ironically it was replaced by a much larger radio telescope in the new imperial power, China.
It followed the same pattern as empires or organizations everywhere. Dominance at the height of Imperial Power, the looting phase where value is siphoned off to politically connected actors and the patsy phase where the husk is left to unwitting dupes to take the fall.
The only reason our actual empire has outlasted the telescope is that unlike a country a complex physical object can not be propped up by narratives, propaganda, handwaving and bullying. It phases the forces of reality much earlier in the cycle.
@David P, I had dealings with the mental health end of the health system in the mid 2000s, well before the current crop of social media were big. There was definitely talk about mental health then too, if yours was problematic enough to be seeking help.
John Michael Greer, do you have any advice for young people in the US surviving in a declining economy or possibly moving somewhere else to avoid it?
Also what do you think about a deindustrial future in the great plains, I think a nomadic culture will return but i’d like to hear your thoughts.
In a previous blog post, I believe I mentioned Stanislav Petrov as a fellow who may have single-handedly averted full-scale nuclear war in September, 1983 by not over-reacting to a false alarm. Given the troubles that will come about this century from climate change, population decline from over-urbanization, increased inequality, resource shortages, etc, do you think in hindsight that things might be better if there was a sudden, apocalyptic event in the Northern Hemisphere that gave the surviving human population time to adapt to things like peak oil and climate change?
https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/1983:_Doomsday
You made a comment a while back to another reader about how technological progress reached its pinnacle in the late 1880’s. I was hoping you might expand on that thought a little bit, or maybe point me towards a book so that I can explore the idea further. Thanks!
Tony @ 22: “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.”
If this is true, and I suppose that it is, then it’s hard to make any sense of our attempts to export as much LGN to Europe as possible and to prevent Russia from doing the same. It’s the most short-sighted and improvident sort of geopolitics I can imagine. Worthy of “Idiocracy” at its most idiotic. And we aren’t supposed to notice?
Second, that thread on MM regarding souls from other planes inhabiting the earth is the longest thread I can remember seeing; must’ve struck a nerve!
@Chuaquin #4. I’ve done it before (and intend to continue the practice again when my circumstances permit). I found a short little book called Liquid Gold by Carol Steinfeld to be a handy reference for getting started, if you’re interested.
@JMG,
I seem to remember you telling me a few years ago that one of the things you were keeping an eye open for was either infant mortality or maternal mortality starting to rise. Here’s an article about rising infant mortality in Mississippi I just ran across:
https://time.com/7312122/mississippi-infant-mortality-public-health-emergency/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Is this the sort of thing you were/are watching for?
“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.”
Sometimes I’ve wondered if that is a sideline of amusement for consciousness wider than this realm:
Cosmos TV Ratings through the roof:
“You simply won’t believe what the humans are trying now!” says distant relative of great Old One.
‘Earth – The Reality’ pulls in record applications for visitor visas – but remember, there is only a limited window for plane shifting – get too immersed in sensory intoxication and you’ll be down there longer than you might like.
You mentioned that you could see a mass suicide event happening as the believers in the Religion of Progress lose their faith. Could there be a Jonestown type cult leader who initiates that, eg, Elon Musk when he finally realises he won’t conquer Mars? I find it hard to grasp this as I lost faith in the Religion of Progress in the 80s so I don’t understand the mindset. My sense is that these believers have lots of coping mechanisms to protect themselves from reality so most will die naturally without ever losing the faith. The latest fad, AI, will be used by them to show how everything really is getting better and better! There’s always something. Can you elaborate on why you think a doomsday cult might get going?
Peter Ward also dislikes the Gaia Hypothesis and wrote a book arguing that the activities of life (“Medea”) make the planet less suitable for life over time, cummulating in the premature extinction of all life on Earth. His arguments revolve around all the major and minor mass extinctions arguably caused by “life” (the Snowball Earth events & the greenhouse events that turn parts of the ocean into havens for only sulphur reducing bacteria), and claimed that the sheer amount of biomass peaked around a billion years ago.
The Medea Hypothesis isn’t popular, and it’s probably because Ward’s arguments strengthen the case for Gaia. None of the extinction events tip the planet into a state where it becomes a barren rock, indicating that the planet does indeed act like a superorganism trying to maintain homeostasis.
Once upon a time I wanted to believe it, because the Gaia Hypothesis makes atheists uncomfortable, including of course Peter Ward.
JMG,
No, I am not Blue Sun, but I was thinking along the same lines as Blue Sun when I asked that question, ethnic conflict as something like Yugoslavia / Bosnia or Lebanon.
Hi, John, Lazy Gardener and Guillem…Thank you for your answers about using human urine for fertilizing trees. There’s a book in towns public library about this interesting topic, so I’ll read it ASAP…
Well, indeed the book title is “Urine, liquid gold”, and it’s written by Renaud de Looze, for your information. It’s a spanish translation from the original in French.
I hope I don’t sound like too much of an apple-polisher when I say that I would like to use this month’s AMA to say that I appreciate you and that you’re still at it almost twenty years later. The Internet would be a rather less illuminated place without you!
@Anonymous (#3):
No! Indeed, fierce conflict may well occur in the next twenty years or so, but if it does, it will be a conflict between classes, not between races or ethnicities. The mass media may well try to frame it as a racial or ethnic conflict but that will be just one more media lie.
Climate note, the Pacific Northwest is having a large inflow of monsoonal moisture.
That translates into overcast skies and light rain in the Columbia Basin.
Monsoons and the western US are reasonably common though not particularly wet this far north, but this is a good one.
Jerry D @6 and JMG
One issue with the smaller crowds in CA parks is that the prices have gone up, the booking has been privatized and is more difficult and people make multiple bookings hoping to later sell them on line for a profit. The authorities are trying to limit the latter, but not having much success with it yet.
In general too everything is more expensive and people have less disposable money. The fires probably also affect peoples decisions.
I’m sure there are other reasons, but those are ones that spring to mind.
Stephen
Still no word from/about Princess Cutekitten?
I finally came around in studying the Eliphas Levi’s masterwork of the Doctrine of High Magic. Studying in my native tongue, French, and being supplemented by alternative viewpoints, yours and the Ecosophian commentariat, in English makes it take some dimensions I was not expecting (eg. the utilized French “verb” vs its translation “word”). This is leading me into many meditations about the true language and that the unlocking of many understandings, original/archetypical narratives and the source of magic(k) would be the rediscovery of the true pre-babel language.
I am starting to perceive many works of fictions as clear attempts into corrupting language, myths and understanding of our reality. Am I looking at it right?
An attempt at that corruption that I would have like to find in your tutorial (you allude to it very briefly in the introduction when you discussed the Tarot de Marseilles vs the Rider-Waite deck) was your take on why Waite decided to flip the 8th and 11th arcana (Strength vs Justice). Was that just a misguided attempt at changing a narrative or a deliberate attempt at perverting meaning (Might is Right?).
If you already answer that question feel free to ignore this ham-fisted attempt at topic necromancy but I think it is an important aspect reflective of this Newspeak age where nothing means what it seems and attempts to pervert nomenclature are relentless to scramble our perceived reality.
A wild and possibly irresponsible speculation inspired by some comments today:
The Axial Age religions, and especially the most otherworldly like Gnosticism and Buddhism, have at times insisted that only men are able to be liberated/enlightened, and women either are incapable of this, need to wait until they are reborn as a man, have a man help them, etc.
In addition, unlike current stereotypes, it was more common over most of the past two thousand years for cultures to teach that that it’s women who are unchaste and obsessed with sex, while men are more naturally suited to chastity than lust and have to be tempted into the latter by women.
Could this be in part due to a gender imbalance in the 6th-planar souls? What if those who made the trip here millennia ago have something going on with their subtle bodies where they are more likely to incarnate as men than women, or maybe just feel more affinity for male bodies.
It was also brought up on the Magic Monday post that the 6th-planers could be the source of the insistence by so many religions on superhuman levels of virtue. I hope the connection here is obvious: if they’re a primary source of many of the more puritanical taboos about what counts as licit vs. illicit sexual activity, and if what I speculated above is correct, could that be why sexual freedom and women’s rights are bound up together in practice?
@JMG #30
Yeah when I was starting to ponder this I saw your other comment about the alternating attitudes toward sex itself and wondered if there was indeed a relationship. Gee I guess I was hoping for something more highbrow, y’know ? Maybe that’s it, it’s just… Sex.
300 000 years and our biological drives still get our panties in knots.
To widen the scope a bit (but beyond my abilities), I think there are astrologers out there that could parse the data and find signatures and patterns accounting for this. The danger is starting from conclusion and force-fitting whatever findings to match them of course.
Robert, granted, but developed versions of the Fermi paradox take that into account. Unless you’re prepared to argue that the life of our planet is the only version of life ever evolved anywhere that seeks to expand into new territory any time the opportunity emerges, and human beings are the only intelligent life form anywhere in the cosmos that has the same drive, the paradox still works. Assume that only 1% of all planets with intelligent life on them have the same passion for expansion that we demonstrate, and after 14 billion years, you still have a fully colonized cosmos…unless intelligent life is really astonishingly rare, or interstellar travel isn’t an option.
Great Khan, huzzah! I’ll be there, of course, but I want to watch you and Erika dancing.
Clay, it’s a fine microcosm of the decline and fall of the American empire.
Subotai, I do have some advice. The first is to avoid going to college no matter what — you will never recover financially from the burden, and the things you learn there will make you unfitted for life in the real world. Learn a skilled trade instead. Plumbers, pipefitters, electricians, and many similar jobs make good money, and many of their apprenticeship programs can’t get as many applicants as they would like. Having real-world skills means that you’re much more likely to earn a living than if all you can do is cater to a dying bureaucratic state.
Second, learn to live on less than you make. The entire system of control and oppression directed at Americans these days works by getting people to want to spend more money than they have, and using that to dominate them — if they go into debt, that’s one kind of control; if they commit crimes and get sucked into the justice system, that’s another, and there are more. The less you need, and the less you want, the more freedom you have, and the less likely you are to be trapped in a bad situation.
Third, if you want to relocate that’s going to take a lot of preparation. You’ll need some way to support yourself that doesn’t take jobs away from the locals, and you should plan on getting good at the local language and culture before you move — ignorant gringos who expect everyone else to cater to their American cultural habits are not welcome in many countries and will be a lot less welcome in the years ahead. If you want to do that, get busy now, choose a place, and make the preparations you’ll need.
Finally, you’re quite correct about the Great Plains. They can be expected to dry out as the climate changes, turning into desert and semi-desert on which the only option for survival will be nomadism. The desert nomads of the plains will become a constant threat to the future settlements of the Ohio valley — and out of the interaction between them, a great civilization will one day arise.
David, it really doesn’t matter. How much actual difference did the Black Death make in world history? Catastrophes are transitory — the long slow cycles are the things that matter.
Joshua, I don’t have the references right now, but a study of patents has shown that the 1880s saw the peak of practical patents. Think of how many technologies we still use today — automobiles, internal combustion engines, telephones, electronics, and much more — that had their start in that decade!
Phutatorius, it’s a familiar stupidity. Most people, including national politicians, literally can’t get their heads around the possibility that we could run out of fossil fuels.
Pygmycory, yes, I saw that, and yes, that’s exactly the sort of thing I was watching for. Brace yourself — we’re heading into crisis.
Earthworm, oh, granted — I bet we keep ’em in stitches on Zeta Reticuli.
Bridge, to some extent it already exists; it’s just wrapped in bland rhetoric about “medically assisted dying” and the like. What would be necessary to turn it into a mass phenomenon would be a sudden shock — say, the collapse of the current tech bubble, or some famous pop culture figure committing suicide after announcing that life is hopeless and there’s only one way out. But we’ll see. You’re right that there are many methods of evasion, but suicide is after all just another method of evasion…
Patrick, that’s fascinating. You don’t often get to see the modern cult of biophobia so visibly on display!
Anonymous, duly noted.
Mister N, thank you! I’m starting to put some thought into what I’ll be posting this coming May, when my blogging hits its 20-year mark.
Siliconguy, good heavens. Thanks for the data point.
Stephen, thank you for the data point.
Jennifer, not as far as I know.
Rashakor, no, Waite got his reorientation from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and they did it because if you use their set of correspondences between the Hebrew letters, the Tarot trumps, and the paths of the Tree of Life, the change really does make things make more sense. I can understand your concern, though. It interests me that Cabalistic systems are so dependent on language — there are very distinct French and English traditions in the occult Cabala, and they differ in crucial ways. I don’t think one is right and the other is wrong, any more than it’s right to call the four-legged animal barking at you “un chien” and wrong to call it “a dog.”
Slithy, hmm! An interesting speculation.
Thibault, and in another 300,000 years the same thing will happen. Were you under the mistaken impression that human beings progress?
After returning to the ideas of peak oil, global warming, resource depletion, and taking into account the coming demographic downturn and a belief that consumerism has essentially sold itself into a corner, I’ve decided that there is not much for me to try to do to “build a better tomorrow,” or some such. I didn’t have kids, so my carbon footprint is way low and I also don’t have a “future” to build for. I’ve decided instead to just enjoy what we have left of the current fading order. I’m not turning down my A/C, not driving less, and I’m keeping my hot water heater piping hot 24/7! I know that nobody else is really going to do anything to live a more sustainable life or reduce their energy use, especially the current PMC/ oligarchs/ lizard men world rulers or whoever, so why should I? Not going to be total hedonism, but why make yourself uncomfortable, physically or with worry, at this point? I need to start a “Do-Nothing” fraternal lodge or something. Peace
@David Ritz #2
I would say life like ours is probably extremely rare. Could there be other forms of life that require very different conditions? We don’t know. IIRC, silicon is or was a popular contender for another chemical basis for life (along the lines of how we are carbon-based) that might be suited to conditions very different from ours. And beyond that we can’t even really speculate.
I will say that I do doubt that all the extreme coincidences that needed to line up to produce us are actually coincidences. To quote the characters on the show Sherlock, “The universe is rarely so lazy.” Rather I think the intelligent design folks got this much right, at least: we’re a product of both natural processes and supernatural ones.
“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.”
It may be worth noting that in Classical Times (certainly after the start of the Crisis of the 3rd Century), Britannia was very much considered the buck private province of the Roman Empire. Early in its history as a Roman province, it supplied a lot of tin and other metals but after things first started going for the empire, Britain’s main export to the rest of the Roman Mediterranean world was usurpers! As the Roman soldiers dreaded being assigned to Britannia (actual surviving letters from ordinary soldiers in Britain confirm this) due to the difference in weather and general instability of the island, they were quick to rally around any wannabe emperor who would march on Rome with his Britannic legions. This would in turn caused more civil wars that weakened the (especially Western) Roman Empire. Yet only one of these British usurpers succeeded; his name was Constantine!
If someone told a Roman that one day, Britannia would host the largest empire in history and be the progenitor of the most widely spoken language, it would be like if Americans in 2000 would hear that, say, Puerto Rico had that status c. 3400!
“The desert nomads of the plains will become a constant threat to the future settlements of the Ohio valley — and out of the interaction between them, a great civilization will one day arise.”
That sounds an awful lot like much of Chinese history.
About the supposed need of women to reincarnate one last time as a man in order to attain enlightenment. I was for many years a student of a wonderfully masculine (Westerner) lama of Tibetan Buddhism (Karma Kagyu). We used to tease him that because enlightenment is beyond gender and he was so attached to a very masculine role (including much protector energy), in his case, he would have to reincarnate once as a woman in order to attain enlightenment.
The problem with any solution to Fermi’s Paradox (and I prefer Robert Mathiesen’s notion that advanced intelligent life wouldn’t feel the need to blindly turn the universe into endless replications of itself) is that all it takes is one exception. The one theory that I think avoids this problem is the theory that we are living in a simulation. In that case, the details of the rest of the universe have simply never been fleshed out.
Blue Sun #39: Thank you for your information! I’ll take note of it…
JerryD@6 and JMG
Just to add to my previous comment, the national forest near me has been closed till next Feb. because of two major fires and the ongoing risk.
Stephen
Hi JMG and Everybody,
Some here will remember a discussion a year ago on the sacramentals and ritual traditions of the Catholic Church and the Christian faith more generally. At some point in the discussion, I brought up a series of blog posts I’d written on the re-enchantment of the Liturgical Year, and wondered whether a publisher might be interested in a book based on the posts.
Well, I’m now pleased to report that not one but two books resulting from that discussion are now available for pre-order from everyone’s favorite occult press, Aeon Books. From now until they are published, readers will be able to use a discount code to get 20% off of the listed price; I’ll provide those at the end of this post.
The first is called The Book of Sacramental Magic:
https://spirit.aeonbooks.com/product/book-of-sacramental-magic/95371
UK link: https://spirit.aeonbooks.co.uk/product/book-of-sacramental-magic/95371
This book presents a complete system of ceremonial magic, based on the traditional sacramentals and sacraments of the Western Christian tradition, but available to anyone, regardless of ordination. It also includes a Neoplatonic re-interpretation of Christian mythology; an in-depth discussion of magical philosophy; a guide to magical strategy, and– as the commercials say– “much, much more!”
The second book (which was the first to be written) covers the seasons of Advent and Christmas:
https://spirit.aeonbooks.com/product/sacramental-magic-of-advent/95376
UK link: https://spirit.aeonbooks.co.uk/product/sacramental-magic-of-advent/95376
This book focuses on the beginning of the liturgical year at Advent, and continues through Epiphany. The structure of the book is based on the weeks of Advent and the 12 days of Christmas, and it includes chapters on traditional celebrations of the saints days and other holy days, and suggestions and how to re-work them to fit a contemporary American home life. It also covers magical philosophy, a discussion of the esoteric meaning of Christmas, and also includes guides to magical practices such as the use of the sign of the cross as a banishing ritual; magical applications of fasting and almsgiving; consecrating sacramentals; prayer and meditation.
The two books are part of the same system but are designed to work independently of each other. Readers who are part of one of the larger churches are more likely to find the Advent book appealing, while independent practitioners might get more out of The Book of Sacramental Magic. That said, my approach is always non-dogmatic: When I present ideas that are outside of Christian orthodoxy I say so, and point out that the focus of these books is practice, not opinion.
The discount code for The Book of Sacramental Magic is BSM20; it will be valid until Halloween. The discount code for The Sacramental Magic of Advent is SMA20, and it will remain valid until November 30th, which is both the first Sunday in Advent and the feast of Saint Andrew (both topics covered in the book).
Anyway, I wanted to thank you, JMG, and the others in this commentariat who encouraged me to contact a publisher back in 2024. There will be more of these, too, if people are interested. The Easter book is at the publisher now, and I’m working on the fourth. After that, we’ll see– I’m having a great deal of fun writing these, and I’m going to continue as long as someone is willing to read them!
pygmycory #34: Sure, I didn’t want to imply anything to the contrary. “[I]f yours was problematic enough to be seeking help” is the important part here; to me it feels like any and all amounts of stress or even just not getting your way might fall under mental health nowadays. And I’m not claiming this in the spirit of “kids these days are just to coddled;” I am a Zoomer myself.
—David P.
Just a quick question for the gardeners in the commentariat:
Has anybody here run into the problem of Grazon (aminopyralid) contamination in manure or on straw damaging your vegetable garden? What did you do about it?
I think everyone here agrees that this A.I. bru-ha-ha is a bubble, but does anyone have any idea what to do about it?
We’ve scrimped and saved and are finally about to have the mortgage payed off, which means… well, it means the money that was being shoveled into the gaping maw of the mortgage monster is going to go somewhere else. It’s not going to get spent on lifestyle inflation, so where do we put it to be safe from rampant inflation and the soon-but-know-not-when bust? Money under the mattress is both uncomfortable and all-too-quick to become worthless.
There are real-world places to put money (tools, home insulation) but I’m not worried about that right now. I’m thinking of the dread word “investment”. Does anyone know a good source of historical data so I can get an idea of what sorts of things held value well during the dot-com and 2008 crashes? I don’t want to get rich, though I would not object to modest returns, I just don’t want our hard-earned lucre to vanish. (As it happens, I am a Canuck, so if any of my fellow denizens of the dominion have data, I’d be especially happy– but our economy is so closely tied to the USA that American data will make a good proxy.)
To Milkyway on relocating:
I am planning on moving away from my home state of Utah. The decision has been tough, but the conclusion that my wife and I have come to is that we simply can’t live the life we want to live here. It’s almost as expensive as California here, and you have a snowman’s chance in hell of finding a house that costs less than half a million dollars. After we came to that conclusion, we began looking far and wide for other places to live, mulling over our options. After a couple years of looking, we landed on the Nebraska Sandhills. The cost of living is relatively low in Nebraska, my wife already had experience living there for a year, and the sandhills are beautiful. This year, we purchased 3 acres of land within a town in the sandhills with some of our savings. The land cost less than some people pay for a car, and land doesn’t run away, so even if we renege on moving there we can always sell it.
I’m not an experienced occultist yet, but I am currently more than halfway done with John’s book ‘Learning Ritual Magic’. So I understand some basic theory and practice. I used some simple divination methods to inquire about whether it was a good idea or not and got very positive indications.
We haven’t moved yet, there’s still more stuff we have to get out of the way first. I need to finish school, we need to save up more money to build a house on the land, etc.
I wrote a blog post on my personal blog about our decision to buy land in the sandhills, here’s a link if you would like to read it:
https://rainersbookofhours.blogspot.com/2025/07/our-little-piece-of-nowhere.html
Okay, I’ve read your Weird of Hali series along with the associated books set in the same world: “A Voyage to Hyperboria”; “The Shoggoth Concerto”, “The Nyogtha Variations” and “The Seal of Yueh Lao”. I particularly enjoyed the acknowledgments where you mentioned the stories and other sources that provided inspiration. My question is do you have plans to release a “Book of the Old Ones: stories, poems and letters that inspired the Weird of Hali”?
This gem of a line from Coffee & Covid captures the mood of the mood of the times; “how hilarious is it that the deep staters trusted each other so little that they all kept the burn bags instead of incinerating them?”
Evidence disposal is an important part of modern life, and just as important is collecting the exculpatory evidence you need to trade to the prosecutor to stay out of jail. I once had a fundamentally dishonest boss and yes I took measures to cover my behind. I also got out of there as soon as I could also taking measures to prevent retribution.
That was 25 years ago so it’s not a new concept. It probably goes back to the start of writing. Somewhere there is a cache of cuneiform tablets with “interesting” information.
@JMG (355):
Thanks; it’s good to know that others have taken this line of thought further than I did. I wasn’t assuming that we were the only life-form that evolved to expand, just that it was one out of a myriad possibilities, and thus very rare.
Underlying my thought was the existence of a few human cultures here and there that seem fundamentally to try to expand inward rather than expand outward. (The small group of Indigenous Pueblo cultures in the American Southwest might be a good example.)
@ David P,
What is really worrisome and fascinating is how mental illness, therapy, and taking psychotropic medications have been normalized, especially among young women. It does bode well for healing the rift between the sexes.
@Chuaquin #4: I’m also doing it regularly wih good success. I use urin for vegetables as well: in that case I fertilize the land (soil) on which I want to grow them in the winter; that way you don’t have to do much fertilizing during the growing season. One caveat though: I wouldn’t use urin if the person its coming from is on heavy medication for some reason or other.
greetings
Frank
@Subotai (#35):
I’d like to echo what our host said in reply, and add one thing he did not happen to mention.
As a retired professor, I recommend avoiding a college or university education like the plague (an engineering degree might be the one good exception). These days what college mostly gives you is paper credentials, not knowledge useful for survival over the long run. (If you’ve already gone, don’t count on those credentials having much value.) Apprenticeships, or good trade schools, are the way to go. Practical physical skills rather than intellectual agility are always in demand. That wasn’t the case when I was starting out my adult life, but it’s definitely the case now.
Also never go into debt. It’s better to live on a spartan diet of legumes and grains — peanut butter and crackers, for example — than going into debt. This means learning to do with much, much less than your less prepared age-mates, and not trying to be part of any crowd. Get really, really good at needing very little in your life.
Fly under everyone’s radar, as much as you can. Safety lies in not being noticed.
And cultivate wisdom and compassion. These two will carry you through many rough passages in life.
Speaking of the Black Death, I thought you may be interested in this recent finding that its origins may have been around a lake in Kyrgyzstan.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/15/health/black-death-plague-source-identified-scn#:~:text=The%20researchers%20involved%20in%20this,He%5D%20died%20of%20pestilence.%22
Ok, lots of talk so far about the conundrum of whether intelligent life is common or rare throughout the universe, and the implications thereof…
I would like to point out something our host has apparently been too modest to mention… And that is that his own novel, “Star’s Reach”, is a very readable and enjoyable treatment of this very conundrum. (And yes, I’ve read it twice in the past 6 months, with great pleasure both times).
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/22020374-star-s-reach
(mild spoilers ahead, beware…)
The plot touches on actual radio contact that has been established with intelligent beings inhabiting a different planet on a different star system… and (in my humble opinion) does a great job of imagining beings that are truly alien in every way… such that even learning to interpret one another’s bog standard mathematical assumptions is a real undertaking… while making it clear that, due to basic physics, neither type of being is ever going to be able to visit the other in person.
This is a very good treatment of the subject (with great characters, a rollicking plot, and all the other things that make for a good read), that, I think adds a thoroughly different perspective to the question, as normally posed.
Of course, YMMV… 🙂
I just checked my chart, and assuming I stay in the Lower 48 states, I can choose within the range of having my Mars in my eleventh, twelfth, or first house, Saturn in my seventh or eighth house, & Jupiter in my fifth, sixth, or seventh house. Should I always avoid moving to a place that puts a malefic conjunct an angle?
I was wondering if you would offer your opinion on Numerology. Numbers and mathematics have always fascinated me, although I am not very good with either.
Hi John,
Regarding ancient civilisations millions of years ago, do the occult teachings have any insights?
Hi JMG,
What are your thoughts on various succession movements in North America? In the USA, places like Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon are looking to join Idaho and counties in Illinois are looking to join Indiana. Now the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manetoba are making rumblings about leaving Canada. In some of these areas, petitions and voting have already begun. Thanks
@David Ritz #2, regarding apparent absence of intelligent life in the universe, already has a lot of responses.
(1) There was a really good 2019 series, entitled “One Strange Rock,” narrated by Will Smith, previously available on Netflix (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7651892)/. I highly recommend it if anyone gets a chance to see it. It introduces an plethora of *quite* unique aspects about the earth and the evolution of life here, most of which I’d not heard discussed anywhere before, and haven’t seen mentioned here, so far, either.
I will just mention ONE: *ALL* multicellular life on earth has an “organelle” inside each cell known as “mitochondria” and, per the series, ALL mitochondria in all organisms can be genetically proven to have come from ONE — and only one — common “parent”. So, that seems to imply that in 6 billion years only ONE time did the “accident” of a mitochondria occur. But if it only happened one time in 6 billion years, it is an exceptionally unique event . How exceptional? Well, let’s just say that would make the event so unique that, at this time, there is no way to assign statistical “odds” . . . no way at all. Think about that!
(2) But there’s another way to view the absence of evidence of intelligent life.: We are being “domesticated” by a much more advanced, space-faring, alien race. I ran into this hypothesis, by surprise, rather recently on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-k8faOgT1I. The universe is likely full of alien life | Adam Frank and Lex Fridman. Before you dismiss that, consider: What would HUMANS likely choose to do if they stumbled upon another, juvenile, highly toxic, and highly GENOCIDAL species on another planet circling another star — going from horse-and-buggy to rocket-ships and LLMs in just over 100 years? There would really be only two choices: genocide them; or strictly quarantine them, and try to manipulate them toward domestication and, maybe, a lot more wisdom. That ought to give you something to think about.
There are probably some other ways to interpret the seeming absence of other intelligent life in the universe we can see. John would probably say the earth is actually *swarming* with other intelligent life. But we can’t see them. Maybe they don’t want to be seen. And maybe it is best that way?
A good strategy for a young person with some mechanical or electrical aptitude is to become a factory technician repairing and maintaining complicated equipment in the field. To do this what is most commonly needed is tech degree from a community college or 2 year technical college. Then the companies will complete your training in house if you are hired.
The world is filled with the type of equipment that needs to be installed, repaired or maintained by factory technicians. The list would include MRI’s, surgical robots, machine tools, industrial robots, semiconductor tools, assembly line equipment, cranes, power generation equipment, water purification etc.
As this type of equipment becomes more complicated it must be serviced by the factory. The manufacturers have a hard time finding people who want to commit to a life on the road, which is what this requires. But this also creates a great opportunity for the strategic and frugal person. It also means these jobs are abundant and available.
When on the road, servicing the equipment the employee is housed and fed by the employer as well as getting a wage. One of the largest expenses these employers have is flying the employee home for the weekend. It is cheaper to just keep them on the road and pay for extra meals and hotel days. So the strategic person can just stay on the road on the companies dime and save their entire paycheck. Or share a local crashpad with several other techs. I knew a guy who traveled all over the world installing gas turbine generators for GE and had a cot in a house in Schenectady he shared with 6 other guys. Then once you save up enough money you can settle down in a locality and practice the skills you have learned with you own business, or have a self sufficient farm or something. No need to spend your life on the road.
JMG (#12),
Thanks for explaing your “metaphysical relocation method”. That’s a rather neat skill for a partner to have! 😉 About the astrological charts, if I may, since it was the two of you as a couple: Did you do anything besides casting charts for both people and settling on a place which worked reasonably well for both?
I’m thinking of couples or families with two or more people involved in a relocation, who are in some way more than the sum of their parts – just because a certain location works well for everybody involved doesn’t mean it would work well for them together, i.e. for their partnership or family relations. Thus besides checking the relevant houses in everybody’s charts, is there anything one could do to factor in the future of the relationship(s) as well? Certain comparisions or relations between people’s charts, maybe?
Although I suppose weighing all the details for more than one person will be complicated enough as it is…
@Hereward #23, thanks for the data point from Britain!
@Chuaquin #4, others have commented with much more practical experience than me. But if your garden doesn’t consists of separate garden beds, but is one big ecosystem: Martin Crawford has written a lot of books about forest gardens, and he runs a large forest garden and nursery in Britain. I recall from one of his books that he factors urine into the overall nutrition supply of his forest gardens.
Iirc, he says that in a well-functioning forest garden, the nutrition is distributed by various means to where it is needed, at least to some extent. I.e. his solution is simply to pee into his forest while he is outdoors anyway (not always in the same place, and obviously not on stuff he’s going to eat soon, like berries or leafy greens). Obviously, this wouldn’t work if you’re trying to fertilize two separate raised beds or so. But for a larger, well-connected site, it might be an option which keeps things simple. (Come to think of, it might also not work well in a backdoor garden in a crowded city with neighbours all around… 😀 )
Milkyway
One of my favorite “solutions” to the Fermi paradox is one of the least likely, but the most fun: the Dark Forest hypothesis. It says that there are a lot of other worlds out there but they’re smart enough to stay quiet because there’s something out there and gods help you if it takes notice of you.
The name is from a thought experiment: if you’re lost in a dark forest at night, do you turn on your flashlight so help can find you, or do you leave it off so whatever else is in the forest with you can’t?
I would guess that simple microbial biospheres are for swarms of Individualities that only need a little experience in the material plane before they move on to conduct the bulk of their evolution in the etheric plane (including developing the first sentient Personalities not entirely dominated by instinct).
I watched an Anton Petrov Youtube video the other day that discussed evidence that the Dwarf Planet of Nurturing Ceres used to have “habitable” conditions beneath its surface, and that organic molecules are still being delivered to the surface in occasional cryovolcanic eruptions.
Frank #71: Thanks for sharing your experience with urine fertilisation! Greetings
Kevin Andersen #70: Interesting. Intellectually, I know that women are more affected by the (real) mental health crisis so it would also make sense for them to receive more treatment (regardless of how effective that treatment is). However, all of the people of whom I know that they go or have gone to therapy are male, with one exception. That’s probably just a matter of being closer to more men than women though.
—David P.
No, the question about ethnic conflict wasn’t me.
I’m surprised you didn’t say anything about war in Britain because I thought you had an astrological prediction of war. Maybe I’m misremembering.
Aside from “a Mason” ( 🙂 ) what is the best option to order your books as new, JMG, for your readership living in Ecnarf ? Ethically and economically fairly for you as well?
Independent bookstores here won’t order books from the US book market, even as a single item for an identified customer.
So I was thinking of Amazon and of a tip into the cookie jar.
Abebooks is after all an Amazon subsidiary, and your books have the same price there when they are sold as new. But it also profits a small independent seller, unlike Amazon…
I want to get the books of yours that interest me, so as to be able to both move on to other things in life, while actually working through the ideas you have so generously shared through your blogs.
A gruesome subject, but something I’ve mulled over the last couple of years: I don’t think all abortion is murder (I used to call myself pro-choice and I haven’t significantly changed my views on the issue since then), but I’ve noticed that the rhetoric around abortion from the pro-choice side has become jarringly reckless in its disregard for the question of whether it a fetus is a person.
Then you have the recklessness with which programs like MAID are run. Look, if people of sound mind want to off themselves, that’s no business of mine, but there’s obviously something seriously wrong with how these programs are being run, especially the Canadian one.
Both are justified in ways that often amount to screaming “But how else are we going to avoid the consequences our own actions???” Then sometimes it ventures into quasi-dystopian territory like reducing healthcare costs, freeing up resources, combating climate change, etc.
Put it all together, and it’s hard for me not to see us as having finally reached the human sacrifice stage of civilizational crisis: propitiating the dark “gods of the market-place” by killing the unwanted to keep the system going a bit longer. Even if it is not always technically murder, it might as well be because the people performing the sacrifices genuinely don’t seem to care if it is or not.
Mother Balance,
Oof. Grazon and other persistent herbicides in the garden are no joke. If it’s bad enough, about the only thing to do is remove and replace the topsoil or wait several years. You can test by trying to germinate legume seeds in the soil; they’re among the more sensitive, so if they do well, you’re probably good to go with most vegetable crops. More biological activity generally helps things improve faster, so applications of innoculating compost or compost tea, humic and fulvic acids, Effective Microbes, etc. can help. But composting alone is often not sufficient to neutralize persistent herbicides in organic materials, so don’t assume that just because something contaminated with persistent herbicides has been composted, it is safe to apply! Many have lived to regret that assumption.
JMG,
I’m not at all sure what to make of the set of visionary experiences, weird dreams, strange divination results, and intuition that you, me, my brother, and various others have had either. It bothers me that it explains a lot, because quite a few of the implications are profoundly troubling: some of which heads in directions I do not think wise to share with anyone. I almost did not share the murder-suicide concern as well, but I felt like I needed to for some reason, and I’ve learned to trust these weird gut instincts.
On another note related to this, I saw SlithToves comment about this being the interlopers hell, and so as weird as it might sound, this might suggest an explanation behind the odd bit of lore about how demons are always trying to steal the souls of those who deal with them. The standard teaching is that it requires a great deal of effort on our part to make the connection, and according to some, it requires active effort to hold it open once the connection is made. I could understand why some people would be willing to establish contact, but it never made sense to me why anyone would hold the connection open, but if someone had loved ones on the other side, from say, spending a few centuries or millennia incarnating there, it might not be easy to let go.
And those loved ones left behind might also be fairly desperate to bring their loved ones back as well, which might look like trying to drag the souls that returned to our world back to their world; or, from our perspective, trying to drag human souls off to hell…..
WatchFlinger, your choices are your business. I live frugally, not because I think I’m going to change the world by doing so, but because I expect the price of energy and everything made with it to go apeshale in the years ahead, and expensive habits are burdens I don’t want to pick up.
David, Puerto Rico is very well positioned to be the center of a maritime empire in 3400 AD or so…
Jessica, yes, and Chinese history is one of the models I have in mind. As for Fermi’s paradox, if in fact technological progress is self-limiting, there will be no exceptions. Thus I argue that it’s the most parsimonious explanation for the absence of any evidence for spacefaring species.
Steve, delighted to hear this.
TylerA, do worry about that right now. No investment anywhere will make you as much money as weatherizing and insulating your house. Investing in skills is another fine idea that will yield robust returns. Given the bubblicious state of the global economy right now, I’m not sure I know of anything else to suggest.
Moonwolf8, I’m delighted to hear that you enjoyed them! Unfortunately a single book wouldn’t be anything close to adequate for what you have in mind. It would have to include the complete collected works of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, most of the stories of Arthur Machen, and more than a thousand pages worth of other stories by more than two dozen authors. Lovecraft in particular became an obsession of mine while I was writing my tentacle stories — there are only three or four stories of his that didn’t contribute significant elements to my work. During the period that I worked on the Weird and its related novels, I read very little but fantasy-horror of the Weird Tales era and its predecessors, which is why there are bits of imagery and verbatim quotes all through the stories!
Siliconguy, it’s also evidence that nobody thought they could actually lose. The people who tucked those burn bags away in back closets all probably intended to burn the contents if they had to, but then one morning they discovered that they’d been locked out of their offices by Trump’s appointees. I bet some of them have been excreting bricks ever since.
Robert M, oh, granted! And I think it’s quite possible that there are planets where life has taken that turn, and intelligent species that have gone the same route. It’s a pity, really, that we’ll never meet them.
David, I thought it was universally accepted that it came from someplace in central Asia.
Scotlyn, thanks for this. I try not to flog my books too hard! That said, I retain a certain wry pride in the fact that Star’s Reach got me fist-pounding tirades from more than one mainstream SF author. It used to be a cliché in science fiction that the genre is all about “What If?” — but “what if we aren’t going to the stars?” is not a question today’s SF authors are willing to ask. It shows the decadence of the genre that it’s gotten stuck on so narrow and ultimately boring a future theme as interstellar expansion.
Patrick, get the malefics into cadent houses — 3rd, 6th, 9th, or 12th — at least five degrees from the cusp of the next house. That weakens them considerably, and can weaken the negative factors they indicate — Mars in the 12th will reliably cause your hidden enemies to get clumsy and reveal themselves, for example. Get benefic planets into an angular house, as close to the angle as possible.
Joshua, you might find these posts interesting:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/tag/numerology
Forecasting, it’s a common theme in occult teachings that our species is neither the first nor the last intelligent species on this world. Everything humanity was, is, and ever will be makes up just one incident in the long, long history of this planet.
Lee, the current boundaries are absurdly irrational. Alberta has much more in common with Texas than it does with Ontario; New England and the Maritime Provinces have more in common with each other than either has with the nation to which it officially belongs; the proper division between two states in what is now Washington-plus-Oregon runs north and south through the Cascades, not east and west along the lower Columbia, and so on. One way or another, that will sort itself out eventually.
Milkyway, the way it worked was that I cast relocation charts for both of us, and we sat down on the sofa and spent an hour or two talking over the details. I experimented with our marriage chart but didn’t get useful results from relocating it.
Slithy, funny. It’s a good reminder, though, that the universe may not be friendly…
Blue Sun, I’ve noted in several astrological posts that there are indications of severe unrest in Britain due to the idiotic behavior of the government. That could tip over into sustained violence, sure, but I haven’t seen obvious signs of it in the stars.
Neaj-Neiviv, I don’t know the French book market at all! Those of my books that come from Aeon, which is British, might best be ordered directly from the publisher, but that’s just a guess.
Slithy, I know. It’s pretty horrific.
Moose, hmm! Maybe so.
The Fermi paradox is based on the idea that if an interstellar colony is possible at all for some species, that species would spread exponentially. It’s true that if each colony in turn produces more than one additional colony (on average) within a few millennia, then within a billion years (or possibly much less time) the whole galaxy would be occupied. But if each colony produces on average less than one colony of its own, no such thing happens.
My take on the Fermi paradox is that the task of successfully building colony at another star, including not only crossing the distance but then establishing a whole new industrial base almost from scratch on a different world in a different solar system, is difficult enough that it requires two things: extreme devotion to the goal despite the massive effort and resources* required that could be used for other purposes; and extreme adaptability at every stage of the task to be able to accomplish it. It’s possible for a collective of intelligent beings to have both attributes simultaneously for a time, but it’s not possible to maintain both attributes for the time required to go through the presumed colonizing cycle even once.
The usual hard-SF vision of a galaxy-conquering force (when there’s no warp drive or wormholes or other contrivance to make the trips easy) is something like an AI that is “programmed” to relentlessly spread and colonize, or cultish aliens devoted to an unalterable dogma that commands endless expansion. But no fixed set of instructions can dictate how to accomplish the task successfully. The species needs the ability to evolve and adapt to solve the problems of colonization. Couldn’t they have that, while still under the control of some unalterable “master program” or “first commandment” to continue colonizing? No! That’s a contradiction. Adaptability acts against single-mindedness. For instance, to beings early in the stage of developing a planetary industrial base from scratch in a novel alien environment, the drive to work on the next colony ship instead is a disadvantage that would either make the colony’s survival unlikely, or would be selected out.
Here on Earth, how devoted have human colonies remained to the goals of their parent civilizations (or even those of their own early colonists), after a millennium or two?
*For instance, to accelerate a million metric ton ship (possibly big enough to be viable for a centuries-long journey followed by founding a colony) to one tenth of light speed (to make a crossing in a few centuries), with engines that are 100% efficient at converting their fuel’s potential energy into kinetic energy, assuming the fuel itself has no mass, requires an amount of energy equal to the amount the human species currently uses per year, times a thousand.
Dear JMG,
I hear quite often that death and sex are quite closely related in our consciousness. From the point of occult view, how could this be explained ?
Thank you,
My monthly wrap up of the most interesting and informative long form content is out again on the Zero Input Agriculture blog.
Also I am planning an AMA episode of the podcast in coming weeks, so send me your questions about post industrial agriculture and anything else that interests you.
https://open.substack.com/pub/zeroinputagriculture/p/the-long-forum-september-2025?r=f45kp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
@JMG
Thank you for the advice. I can move my Jupiter to a succedent house by moving a few hours’ drive east (i.e. Appalachia) while keeping Mars in twelfth house & Saturn in seventh. Or I can move to the West Coast if having a first house Mars is worth having Jupiter in seventh and Saturn in eighth. The former seems a lot more appealing.
@JMG,
Oh, granted!
“I’m not worrying about that right now” because I’m pushing ahead in that direction as fast and far as I am comfortable with right now– granted, once some of that mortgage money piles up I could speed up the winterizing by hiring out work on the house, but then I lose the skill-building element of doing it myself. There’s probably some things I can reassess about that, though.
I suppose there’s always the option burying denarii.
Pygmycory and Bridge – US longevity peaked in 2014, then fell further than other developed countries during the initial Covid onset, and beyond. Compared to peer countries (except some UK parameters), longevity, chronic illness and disability rate for US working age adults are discouraging. This is especially seen in young and middle aged adults.. Childhood parameters are not measured as much in the US, but soft data is concerning IMO.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/national-scandal-us-excess-deaths-rose-even-after-pandemic-far-outpacing-peer-countries
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/25/1164819944/live-free-and-die-the-sad-state-of-u-s-life-expectancy
Also important is declining fertility, which has been well documented before immigrants, or anyone who looked like them, were exported. Sperm counts have been declining since the 70’s.. Population decline…
(Hagan interview Jeremy Grantham)
Are celebrities controlled?
Jasun Horsley, a Brit living in Spain, has written books and podcasted about what he claims is the capture and control of major celebrities by dark forces including the CIA, in service to various covert agendas of the ruling class. One of his books on this topic is 16 Maps of Hell: the Unraveling of Hollywood Superculture. If Horsley is to be believed, we should withdraw our admiration from and look askance at famous persons like former Beatles and the late David Bowie, as well as songwriter Leonard Cohen.
I would dismiss his claims out of hand, but have found that they are taken seriously by Dr. Peter Mcullough, who seems like an individual with considerable integrity, and who appears to be far from stupid. Podcaster James Delingpole has hosted Horsley more than once and seems to believe him wholeheartedly.
So what are we to think? Is there some element of truth in Horsley’s claims, or is he a conspiracy nutter committing unwarrantable character assassination against famous people while exhuming the ruins of the Great Tartarian Empire?
JMG,
One of the most intractable problems in urban America is Homelessness. More so in the blue cities, but to some degree a problem anywhere. As we know the main problem is that the housing market was financialized and juiced to act as the collateral for the entire financial house of cards that supports the modern American economy. In addition there is the closing of state run mental institutions , drug addiction and poor entry level wages. The establishment seems to have no solution to this problem that actually works, other than moving homeless populations to other places.
How do you think this will eventually resolve itself? ( I didn’t say solve). Or will it be a permanent fixture of America in the future?
Dear Archdruid and Ecosophers, what to do if I find myself completely disillusioned with the mainstream and the entire counter-mainstream as well? It is all just grifters manipulating reality to corral their followers, except it is more bureaucratically organized on the left and more DIY and decentralized on the right.
I get that the obvious answer is some kind of neo-Stoic “stick to what you think is true, focus on yourself and deal with your reality as it is”, but is there no other way? Being alienated from society because you can find nobody to agree with has some side effects. If nothing else, it makes you very cynical and contemptuous of people, because you feel they are all wrong and being taken for a ride.
Is there such a thing as being too sensitive to bull****, manipulation and corruption? You’ve been part of many small institutions. Although they seem relatively pure (compared to e.g. the behemoths like the Catholic Church or the two US political syndicates), there must have been some kind of black sheep in each of them that you had to tolerate on some level. How do you know to what extent you must tolerate an institution (or e.g. a toxic person) with its flaws? If one finds himself at odds with and doubting the truthfulness of everything established around him, at one point do you know your scepticism goes too far? Any answer, including validation or severe criticism is welcome.
Dear Mr Greer,
I’ve been contemplating your essay from last week on stories. One of the things I have been struggling with in my own life is finding harmony between Brain (Logos) and Heart (Eros). I can see you in my mind’s eye saying “When a binary is encountered, looking for a third option that will turn the binary into a ternary”. I’m really struggling to do this. My job and most of my life is Brain centered with my Heart (feeling, emotion etc) coming in second.
Would you be able to provide some guidance on how I might be able to find the Third way between them?
And a bonus question, are you aware of any stories that deal with characters facing the same issue?
Thanks as always for your time.
@JMG,
any idea what aspects of the crisis are likely to be prominent in the near term? I’m assuming the crisis you are talking about isn’t just in the USA, given some of the other stuff happening round the world.
My guesses: Economic in lots of places certainly, we’re already seeing that one having impacts and we’re still in bubble zone on an awful lot of stuff, from housing to AI silliness. Probably not energy prices until we start trying to exit the other side of the economic hard times.
The UK in particular seems about to explode with immigration and economic related tensions in tandem. The Ukraine war seems to be winding up mostly in Russia’s favor though at a high price to it, and europe is in rough shape economically and has just committed to spending a lot more money on defense just when a lot of people are already unhappy with their governments. I think europe’s next ten years or so are likely to be hard, and its a possible major center for the crises of the next few years.
Canada seems pretty unhappy with itself, largely for economic reasons, but also immigration levels and other stuff. It could explode, but I don’t think we’re quite as close to exploding really messily as somewhere like the UK. And at least Canada is large enough, one should be able to get away from fighting without leaving the country entirely. The UK is so much smaller and more crowded. I’m kind of worried about my relatives – almost my entire extended family is there.
And parts of the middle east and areas like Sudan and Ethiopia are either at war, have just been at war, or are about to go to war.
So there’s an awful lot of things and places that could go kablooie in one way or anther. Target rich environment; I don’t know what’s going to happen first.
Hi JMG and @Gerry O’Neil,
In regards to Gerry’s mention of the Spotted Lanternfly in comment #8, something similar seems to be happening in north Georgia regarding the Joro spider. Native animals and insects seem to be adapting to it as a new food source and everyone is hopeful that in a few years it will settle into a niche and not be so problematical as it is now. It’s a terrible nuisance to people at the moment as it shows up in neighborhoods and covers everything in huge webs that are a pain for homeowners and businesses to remove. There is now evidence that birds, small mammals, and some parasitic wasps are beginning to feed on them. So, yay for that as I know people who spend half their time in the spring and summer removing webs so they can get out their front doors or access a storage building.
Yes, Fermi’s Paradox is a powerful hard to explain anway interpretation of a non-observation. The UFO/UAP observations fit either the secret government aircraft explanation or manifestations of the angelic/demonic/faery other dimensional beings realm – beings/manifestations that always have been part of the realities we know here on this earth.
Bits and pieces:
Northwestern Nebraska is prettier than I thought. I was there to visit the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument.
Tone deaf award for the day for Business Insider.
“The economy has a boy problem. Helping workers with disabilities or enrolling in technical school might help.” By Juliana Kaplan
Great way to frame the problem. If boy then disabled.
But there is some interesting news, “The analysis found that young men’s enrollment in vocational schools jumped from 2022 to 2023, the highest share of young men’s enrollment since data first started being collected.”
In keeping with the Narrative she also finds it necessary to state in an article about young men in the workplace that “women still contend with wage gaps and are more likely to leave the labor force over caregiving. Estep said that addressing labor market concerns — like those of men eschewing work or women getting shortchanged on pay — is not a zero-sum game. Things like funding toward affordable, high-quality childcare that would mean women can work would also help keep the labor market staffed.”
In the “The stock market can stay insane longer than you can stay solvent” category the S&P 500 set another new record today, it’s 28th of the year.
@JMG re: “On and outside the freeway corridors….” I had direct experience of that over last year’s holidays, when the drive down took us through corporate/freeway blandness, especially around Orlando….. the drive back on State Road 40 made me feel I was seeing the REAL Florida as opposed to the monoculture of the drive down.
P.S. I reread “God is Red,” and understood it a lot better than I did the first time around. He had a lot to say about Christianity as it exists in today’s America, but a lot of what he was attacking was Faustian culture pure and simple. I think you wrote once that it was on its last legs, too. I hope so.
Lee & JMG
There is a movement in NE CA to secede and probably then become part of the greater Idaho.
Greetings ADJMG! Hope u r well.
I’ve been thinking about the occult roots of the sciences. Everyone is familiar with the roots of chemistry and astronomy. But also geometry, probably math, definitely physics, both Newtonian and quantum.
My question is: if Spengler is correct and these sciences are culturally bound and will decline as the West declines, an occult revival should spawn the sciences of a future age, sciences that we can’t imagine now.
Do you think this is accurate?
David P. #84 says: “Intellectually, I know that women are more affected by the (real) mental health crisis so it would also make sense for them to receive more treatment…”
Given that the male suicide rate is 4 times higher than the female rate, I’m not sure that women are more affected by the mental health crisis; I think women are just more likely to talk about their problems and seek help: https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html. Another explanation for that statistic is that women tend to have more mental health issues overall, but their issues tend to be less severe (e.g., mild depression rather than severe depression).
Tyler A With population and available energy decline, financially lucrative options seem unlikely. Perhaps consider investment of time and effort connecting with family, developing constructive relationships, healthy habits and/or supporting your local library or independent producers. Having a duplicate set of quality essential tools, or setting up a side biz/nonprofit for resale/repair of non-computerized and/or hand tools (including helpful physical books in good condition) may make sense. Financial repression historically seems common in declining societies, yet the patterns vary a lot. Some suggest a mix of assets beyond monetary ones. Not advice, just some ideas…
To our esteemed host and comentariat: I rent dual plots at the local community garden. Over the last couple of years, I’ve added raised beds, a trellis on the west side, and .. as of this spring .. two greenhouse toppers that can be placed over said beds. In both I planted starts from seed that I started at home, then transplanted into each, in early May .. two types of heirloom chillies. I have now harvested one type so far, whereby I now have approx. 100 strung and drying at home! So when I wake up every morning .. the first thing I’ll see is .. Chilli Heaven!!! …. and THAT’S only the first variety harvested.. then there’s the Squash.. Mexican gerkins.. Sikkim Cucs .. endless Tomatillos (of which I’ve used in canning my most tasty green chilli salsa, not to mention cropping endless amounts of garden sage and New Zealand spinach! Did I mention the Loganberry jam I canned .. from the same plot? All this within the confines of a 12′ X 18′ plot. That’s what I’ve been engaged in, when not ranting about ‘current events’ …
Whoo! I’m tired just thinking about it all .. well, not really ….. ‘;]
As someone who, if the weird set of visionary experiences and intuition that people have had about the sixth plane souls is accurate, is almost certainly one myself, I think there’s a sound reason why such souls would tend to find sexuality problematic, and find the feminine human experience even more deeply unpleasant than the masculine one. According to these visions, most if not all of these souls know at some visceral level we do not belong here, and further that a lot of us have assumed that this is true of all humans. From this perspective, every single time a new human being is born it is another soul trapped here, and this is deeply problematic for so many reasons. Since women tend to have a desire to reproduce that is biologically hardwired and stronger than what men have, from this perspective women have to fight against their nature much more than men do.
Oh, and another thing .. said garden plot contains a tiny courtyard .. whereby I fashioned a smallish stand (from gleaned & fabricated parts ..) to hold my 6′ Tommy Bahama umbrella. What I really need to do to complete the scene .. is patch over the Tommy Bahama logo with a Bob/Slack! facsimile .. to put icing on the cake, as it were..
Please say more about Pygmycory’s mention of the upward trend of maternal and infant mortality. As a harbinger of what?
Hey JMG
I thought I would start with a bit of interesting news. The Australian government has expelled the ambassador of Iran after it was discovered that the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was behind at least two arson attacks on synagogues last year, along with harassing Iranian immigrants in Australia, kind of like how the CCP harass Chinese ones. It’s interesting that the Australian government have done this so soon after deciding to recognise Palestine, some have suggested that they want to appease Israel after the backlash it caused.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/aug/28/australia-accused-of-not-acting-on-2023-warnings-iran-was-harassing-and-surveilling-diaspora-ntwnfb
My dear Clarke aka Gwydion,
Thank you for all that you wrote back to me on last post.
(Smile)
X
A question for JMG and everyone discussing relocation:
How do you decide what books to keep? I think I may be giving up on ever relocating all these bookshelves.
Also, my first thought on how to investigate the relative rights of women would be to look at the economics of the time. For example, the late 1800s was characterized by increasing mechanization of things like textiles that used to be a source of employment for women.
When I am in a pessimistic mood, I consider that a small ruling class of people may feel that if they can limit the rise of all the other classes, they will have less competition, and can count on using the brightest and hardest working of the oppressed classes to support them in their ruling. (ex, Jeeves and Wooster, only more so and less funny.)
Walt, that’s certainly one possibility. It includes the claim that limitless progress is impossible, and then suggests that the barrier to interstellar colonization is statistical rather than absolute — which is entirely possible, of course.
Foxhands, all basic biological realities are linked in the same way. Consider the way that food and eating link with both sex and death!
Shane, thanks for this.
Patrick, is there any way you can make Jupiter angular? He’s a potent benefic.
Kevin, “controlled” seems extreme to me. “Influenced” is more like it, and ruling classes have exerted influence on celebrities for a very, very long time.
Clay, oh, it’ll resolve, all right. No bubble can inflate forever. Once depopulation forces the real estate market to crash — if the real estate market lasts that long! — the value of real estate will implode, probably dropping to zero: i.e., if you move into an abandoned house and keep it neat and intact, it’ll be yours.
Sarhaddon, yes, there’s such a thing as being too sensitive to ordinary human evil. It really is ordinary, and present in all of us, including the oversensitive! It’s always a challenge to find the point of balance between accepting what cannot be changed and tolerating what should not be tolerated. I find that regular spiritual practice helps more with this than anything else.
CrayonElite, there’s never just one possible third factor to turn a binary into a ternary. In terms of the binary you’re facing, some people find the third factor in Body. Others find it in Spirit. Still others find it in Nature. Only you can decide what will work best for you. As for stories, er, half of post-medieval Western literature deals with that!
Pygmycory, that’s a helluva question. My guess is that the wheels will fall off the economy first, but here in North America the crisis could as well be political, or environmental. In Europe? A wicked witch’s brew of political, economic, military, demographic, and cultural blowback. You’re right, though, that it’s a target-rich environment for prophets of doom.
Chronojourner, glad to hear it. For many carnivorous creatures, large spiders are good eatin’!
BeardTree, that’s certainly my take.
Siliconguy, thanks for the data points.
Patricia M, that’s common enough that I’ve considered it as a theme for a fantasy novel.
DaShui, wholly accurate. What’s more, the occultism of the near future will pick up chunks of today’s science and make use of them, preserving them for the future, the way the occultism of the Dark Ages picked up Roman astronomy and mathematics for astrological use.
Polecat, delighted to hear this!
Anon, yeah, that makes sense.
Brandi, it’s potentially the first sign of significant human dieoff — but we’ll see.
J.L.Mc12, interesting.
Sylvia, for me, it’s a combination of the books that I’d have the hardest time replacing and the books that are dearest to me.
I had a truly troubling interaction with one of my sisters in the wake of the 2012 phenomena. She was adamant in the lead up to 2012 that the world would change, and when I talked to her again in early 2013, she told me that the world had actually ended, and that once we died, we would all see it: the world was over, and we were free from this prison. She chose to end her life a few days after that in order to free herself earlier. I now can’t help but wonder now if this means that the crossover for souls leaving to return to the sixth plane started in 2012.
@JMG #30 re: Therapy, Especially Jungian
I’ve been seeing a therapist since a few months after my mom died in 2018, and the experience seems helpful, but I’m open to the idea that it may be less objectively helpful than it “feels.” What I found interesting about your comment is this: she follows a fairly mainstream (for today) Cognitive Behavioral Therapy approach, which I was familiar with before I started, and in fact, matched pretty closely to how I managed my own emotional life beforehand due to a combination of trial and error and familiarity with the Stoics. Most of the value seems to come from having an intelligent and compassionate person who knows me about as well as a friend, but with whom there aren’t the social constraints that friends bring on topics of discussion, with whom I can talk candidly about the things that matter to me (for example: if I have a friend that I’m having issues with, I can talk about that, without worrying about the negative impact doing so might have on mutual acquaintances, or my own relationship with the friend).
All that said, given the weight that Jungian concepts have had in my own self-understanding (as mediated through occultism in more recent years), I’ve found myself thinking “I wish we could talk about things from more of a shared Jungian framework.” So I found your news that Jungian therapy seems not to have much impact somewhat confounding. To be fair, she’s been open, in a noncommittal way, as therapists tend to be, when I’ve brought up Jungian interpretations (of dreams, for example), so I suppose there’s that.
Anyway, in a larger sense, I suppose I’d summarize by saying that that I think the idea that therapy will “fix” you or your problems “on its own” is largely false, as you imply in your answer, but would add the nuance that it can be a helpful supplement to working on yourself, and that Jungian theory can help, but perhaps more on the self-work side than the therapist’s.
Cheers,
Jeff
1. What’s your all’s opinion on destroying old journals? I’m now old enough to recognize that I’ll never be anybody important, that I haven’t done anything important, and yet I chronicled unimportant-ness for a while when I was younger. I’m thinking of getting rid of my old journals because really, what’s the point? Then again, is the point that I recorded what life was like for an individual in late-industrial-culture? I have a soft spot for the suffering young-me, but I’m not a super nostalgic person, and so I’ve kept several of the journals mostly out of respect for who I was and what I went through…
I’ll, ironically, journal about it to figure it out, I suppose, but just wondered what others’ experiences might have been. Pros and cons?
2. This month I decided to combat internet-use from my phone by substituting moments of “down” time with a book called “How to Calculate Quickly: Full Course in Speed Arithmetic” by Henry Sticker. I’m quicker than I was (not exactly quick, quick, though) and will keep on until I can do basic math mentally with ease. Anybody else learning a new skill these days?
I‘d like to share a theory on how democracy works, and why everyone hates politicians:
In the modern world, the population is raised into irresponsibility: schools reward obedience, the standard way to make a living is to be employed as a replaceable cog in a machine, etc.
As a result, we’re unbearably infantile, with the intensity of the problem varying somewhat along a gradient from white to blue collar work.
Now, the politicians are supposed to represent us, so of course they are just as inept at acting like responsible grownups as we are. That explains why politicians with initiative (think Orbán or Putin) are so hated by the PMC: they remind us of what we should be, but aren’t. That‘s uncomfortable. On the other hand, irresponsible, infantile politicians remind us of what we are, which we hate, but there’s a surprise positive function to that:
By acting as public projection screens for the electorate’s self-loathing, the politicians absorb destructive energy from society. They’re the scapegoats for our self-inflicted misery, and once we‘ve piled enough hate and loathing on them, we sacrifice, that is, un-elect them.
I like to imagine that in earlier times, we would have thrown them into volcanoes or fed them to the lions. Nowadays, a symbolic procedure seems to suffice. (At this point I‘d like to point out that in my native Germany, the ballot boxes are actual garbage bins with a slit cut into the lid, which always amused me.)
This theory answers all my questions about representative democracy, and it casts a stark light on a recent phenomenon: in the West, more and more heads of state don’t last for the period of legislature – Biden and Scholz stumbled towards the end; in France, Macron has only clung to power through some very sketchy coalition building; and most notably, the UK has somehow squeezed 11 prime ministers into 4 election cycles.
If the pressure valve for collective self-hate doesn’t suffice anymore, what will happen?
This overlaps concerningly with the warnings of a prof. David Betz about civil war in Britain.
@JMG
If I move to the West Coast, I can get Jupiter conjunct my Descendant & Mars angular but several degrees from my Ascendant. It’s not an option for me anytime soon, but I’ll keep it in mind if an opportunity comes up after the economy “corrects” & Democrats lose power.
Whomever pointed to M Scott Peck’s book on evil, PEOPLE OF THE LIE, I’m listening to him reading the audio book version and it’s his ode to The Devouring Mother in case studies! He was having sooo much fun reading their bitchy parts, it was a dead giveaway.
It’s a real hoot when you realize the title’s a disguise.
Hello JMG,
It has been a while since I last commented here. I am reading your essays regularly though. I was part amused and part intrigued while reading the comments in last week’s post. The decline is indeed picking up speed. A lot of things that were unthinkable earlier are now commonplace realities; a lot of things that were considered commonplace are now vanishing fast. I think this accelerating pace of change is messing with many people’s minds.
It doesn’t help that it is in the interest of the actors on all sides and their allies to create smokescreens on all directions to obscure the reality as much as they can, so that they can do things in it’s cover that couldn’t be done easily otherwise. No wonder even the usually sane and grounded people are getting more than a little perplexed.
I am doing tolerably well otherwise. I have been fighting some personal battles in the past few years (I don’t want to reveal the details right now on the internet, may be never). Curiously, the trajectory of those battles happened to closely follow the trajectory of events that are happening in world politics (particularly in North America and in the Eurasian plains). I have no doubt that the planets have played similar roles in influencing both. This has led me to think that the gaps between personal astrology and political astrology isn’t very wide.
My personal battles have moved into a decisive phase in the past few months. Things are steadily looking up for me, and I can sense that the end is approaching fast and will be in my favor. I have already incurred some significant losses in this fight, but fortunately nothing big enough to make me stop fighting. Even in the worst moments, I was in no doubt that this a fight I must fight all the way to the end. It doesn’t hurt that I have been reading your writings from 2006, so I have been reasonably prepared to expect life to get progressively tough as the years go.
I will pop in a few weeks or months later with an update. Thanks!
Ramaraj
“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! ”
It’s more than a little hard to tell how seriously the people presenting this are, but have you ever seen the theory that the world did actually end in 2012, but we just haven’t noticed yet? I just came across a reference to it, and while I’m not sure anyone I know believes it, it appears to be a thing. Whether this is ironic posturing on the internet, or social stress is actually intense enough that people are wigging out like this is a question I don’t really have a good answer to right now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/abovethenormnews/comments/1j0cgu1/what_if_the_world_ended_in_2012_and_we_just_didnt/
https://megaphone.upworthy.com/p/conspiracy-theory-world-ended-in-2012
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/11/30/fact-check-no-black-holes-created-cerns-large-hadron-collider/10802547002/
Gerard O’Neil (#29),
That’s an excellent example of the sort of thing my friend was talking about. I’m not old enough to be able to talk about what it was like before 1996 personally, but it does seem like media concentration has had some disastrous effects on society.
Hi John,
Besides the cycles of debauchery and celibacy coming once every century. There is one more issue people are now like big kids, even going into their 20s and 30s or even 40s going at Disney Land in costumes and being excited of meeting Goofy.
And then there is the decrease in testosterone in males every year.
Andrei Martyanov give a interesting tidbit about this in Russia:
« We have a unique situation now, when some men are fighting and acquiring that very “strict mask of face”. When they return from the war, they will be met by “big children” with demanding bright faces and bold speeches. Honestly, without any malice, I will say that when these two worlds come into contact, I will not envy the “world of children”.»
This is a thing that happens in US and Europe too, but the economic hard life make people look older.
Where do you see things going?
While being a child at heart and childlike and playful in creative endeavours might be desired, being childlike as an adult is not a good think, there might be also esoteric aspects to this, that demons or other entities could feed more on these naive adult childs…
What’s your take about the esoteric aspect?
Given that a certain protein in a certain treatment affects even more the sexual endocrine of adults we are going even deeper into this big children thing as a society.
@Milkyway
My relocating has been a bit more of the “leaf in the wind” variety, but there are some metaphysical things I did:
1.) First when the opportunity presented itself to move to this state I got a clear message to do so by visionary experience. I was JMG literate at the time, but not practicing.
2.) Later, as I became JMG practicing over the years, when the string of synchronicities that landed us with our home came along, I was fortunate to have a prayer practice in place, I asked One of Those I pray to if He did this. He did not take responsibility, but did approve of it.
3.) When at last we moved I used astrological election to set the time, with dare I say mostly positive results. In hindsight I would highly recommend astrological election, but going over the chart now it does show, that I have a better understanding of the placements and would shift my perspectives accordingly.
@JMG
If I may pester you with a MM format rapid fire;
1.) I have looked into amateur radio as of late and have found out that the local technical university offers a beginner’s course. If it takes place I shall attend. Any tips and words of wisdom?
2.) Recent events have me hopping, but I have been keeping your advice in mind about distillation s a long term prospect. As I recall you had some distillation tips over the years, including solar powered distillery, and peach and apricot spirits/brandy. Do you still remember where saw those options? and do you have any words of wisdom regarding spirits and alcohol in the comming times?
Best regards,
V
Let’s assume for a moment that your vision is accurate and a large number of non-human souls are presently stuck incarnating as human beings. On Magic Monday you said that Progress could be a reflection of the desires and dreams of these souls; prompting a comment about how inhuman Progress has been, and that it makes sense if it’s aimed at appealing to these alien souls, most likely by trying to make our world more like theirs.
Progress has, of course, been pushed very, very hard by governments worldwide, which means that if this is an accurate read of things, then there is a very real sense in which the really strange conspiracy theory that claims that the world’s governments have been taken over by aliens engaged in a massive effort to engineer us into something more like them is actually accurate.
Re Kevin #98, about celebrities being controlled:
If you want to see for yourself you should look into the eyes of these celebrities. Don’t look at how beautiful they are, forget their smile, just the eyes. A picture works best, as there is less distraction, but video also works. Don’t forget to look at the difference between the eyes.
Do you see a human being at the top of their game, enjoying themselves, living their dream, or do you see something else?
Then you decide for yourself if the book you mention may have some merit.
–bk
When I sit to do the healing breath meditation (as part of the order of essenes work) I experience really uncomfortable energetic releases in my body (often my heart space). I’ve been on the spiritual path for 5-6 years now, and a lot of it has been characterised by similar sensational releases. But I just want to know if it ever ends? Once upon a time I could meditate into a state of deep bliss, now it’s just so uncomfortable and whenever I feel myself sinking deeper the energy starts to build…
@JMG #55
Thanks for a hearty laugh. The myth is insidious, isn’t it ? You think you got it all washed off and then look at an armpit and “Oh, missed a spot.” I was born a hopeless idealist and there may still be part of my subconscious that WANTS humanity to show progress. It’s taking me longer than some, and there’s a certain amount of gried involved, too.
Hi JMG, Commentariat,
Slight ramble/sharing of life updates/asking for ideas:
I am about to begin a masters in Cognitive Science and my history with undiagnosed ADHD (now thankfully diagnosed and in treatment) and the self-percepion traumas that come with it had me feeling quite insufficiently competent for it. This feeling had me look up note taking methods and study workflows, and I stumbled across the Zettelkasten method, and the book How To Take Smart Notes by Söhnke Ahrens.
It’s basically a workflow that allows one to make notes in an effective way, and over time collect enough bits of (properly fleshed out and referenced) knowledge, which in turn allegedly makes the writing of non-fiction works a matter as simple as laying out the relevant notes, filling out the gaps, and transpose it into an actual text. Of course, the catch is that you can only get as much as you put into it, but I’m excited of having learned about it a month before my studies. I’m even trying to prime the pump by using that same book as my first source, and I’m going through it with this method in mind. It’s been quite fun!
I was wondering if you (and fellow commenters) have written anything on writing itself. This method has been feeling like THE way to leverage my ADHD into the open-ended goal of writing.
Finally, I am not yet too sure of what I would like to focus on in this masters, but one of the things that interest me is the cognitive aspect of ritual. Especially since the faculty is focused in a perspective called Embodied Cognition, which from what I’ve looked sounds quite interesting as a framework. I am wary of scientistic dogmatism, but I’ve looked into the institute’s output and it had quite a bit of borderline-woo stuff that was reassuring. Do you (y’all) have some ideas that you would like to see some research on? I don’t think it’s much too likely that something actually comes out, but as we say in mexico, maybe it’s bubblegum and it sticks!
All the best from Berlin
JP
JMG via #30 “The short version is that in the vision, I was shown that the old dualist Gnostics were right, in a certain sense. There are souls currently here on Earth, a billion or more of them, who didn’t come from our evolution and don’t belong here. They arrived maybe six thousand years ago from a world on the next plane up, the sixth or etheric plane,”
That is a fascinating idea, but as you say, it’s just a vision’…still, an interesting rabbit hole to consider. Might go some way to explaining how groups of people decide that they are the soi disant chosen ones and everyone else is sinner, infidel or cattle.
I’ve often wondered about the origins and drivers of the religions of sand (dry, gritty and lacking in humanity)
Just been reading Manly P Hall’s ‘The Ways of the Lonely Ones’ and found it fascinating that he wrote those when he was just 21 years old. Of the 8 stories, I found 7 of them very rewarding but one left me cold – The Glory of the Lord – which came across as an anti story compared to the others such as the delightfully rich mishmash of ‘The Last Shamen’. I’ll need to re-read it again to try and fathom what he might have been alluding to, in what, to me, was the anti-story’ of the collection. Any ideas?
I seem to remember you writing somewhere about the concept of the Tree of Life having a history that scholars acknowledged was longer than its more modern adoption and use – Is there any indication of it’s original structure, uses and users? An egregore could change a lot over 6000 years!
This from Paul Brunton’s diaries:
*****
(a) Not until the fourth century when one Christian party became successful enough to be armed with worldly power did the persecution of Gnostics begin.
(b) In the attempt to eliminate unpalatable tenets, no less than seven Councils were held in those early centuries. Here such tenets were branded as heresies and arrangements made to exterminate them thoroughly. Especially at the Council of Nicea (325 a.d.) and the great Council of Constantinople (381 a.d.), rebirth was pronounced a heresy, all the books teaching it were ferreted out and destroyed, and its advocates threatened with severe punishment.
(c) Yet not only had several Christian sects believed in reincarnation but some of the early Christian Fathers, too. The Fathers who held metempsychosis to be true included Origen, who flourished about 230 a.d., Justin Martyr, 140 a.d., Clement of Alexandria, 194 a.d., Tertullian of Carthage, 202 a.d. The sects who held it included Basilidians, the second-century Marcionites of Pontus, the Valentiniens of Egypt, also second century, and the Simonians. Moreover, all Gnostic sects held it and they were once more numerous than any other group of Christians. This is important, that most of the early Christians believed in this doctrine.
(d) The Manichaeans also taught rebirth and, together with the Gnostics and Samaneans, formed a considerable part of the early Christian world.
(e) Where the literature was not destroyed it was so adulterated or interpolated as to make it appear either quite ridiculous or utterly erroneous. The historians among the later Fathers even accused the Gnostics of eating children!
(f) The early Gnostics came closer to the truth, but the later cults which sprang up among them departed from it by intermixing it with nonsense and corrupting it with falsehoods.
(g) Philo, himself a Jew, explicitly states that the Essenes got their knowledge from Indian Brahmins. Everyone knows that rebirth was an essential feature of the Brahmins’ faith, so it is fair to assume that it was taken up by the Essenes, too.
*****
So if the idea that the Essenes got knowledge from the Brahmins has any merit, Does anyone know if the Gnostics used the Tree of Life or whether it (or an analogue) appears in Indian writings?
Dear all,
I just found out that Global Grey e-books, who provide a lot of interesting free titles, are selling off their entire back catalogue of over 2600 titles for $35 or so depending on your currency.
In there are Plato’s dialogues, the Tarzan novels, folklore and mythology, history, dozens of books on occult teachings and traditions (including WW Atkinson and Dion Fortune titles)… not all of which are going to be retained on the site in future.
https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/ebook-categories.html
I thought it was too good an opportunity not to mention to everyone here.
Best wishes, and thank you JMG for the genteel places of online interaction you continue to provide.
PS to that last: So if your vision suggested that souls shifted planes from more rarified plane to lower material plane where reincarnation is a thing, might that be an explaination why souls from a plane beyond this one (and hence beyond the wheel of life) might have no desire or use for such a doctrine?
Brunton: “This is important, that most of the early Christians believed in this doctrine.”
Ooooh it makes one wonder what is actually locked away in darkness in the vaults of the Vatican!
Those fellas have a lot of questions to answer… we don’t need DOGE for this, how about ‘The Department Of Religious Enlightenment (DORE) – Opening the Gates to Suppressed Ideas’…
If I may be slightly obtuse, and ask a question about casting relocation charts AS IF born at the same time in a different longitude.
For the sake of argument, my birthtime (on my birthday) in Boston (71°5’10″W) was 15:45:00
Given the date in question, this renders as:
Local Sidereal time 07:49:46
Greenwich Sidereal time 12:34:07
Let’s say I want to recast my own chart for the actual move I already made, to an Irish location, longitude 8°26’43”, am I aiming to cast the chart for whenever the local sidereal time on that date was 07:49:46, even if this is a different GST, or should I match this chart to whatever the local equivalent of a GST of 12:34:07 would be?
Or, am I overthinking it, and I should just cast the chart as if I was born at 15:45 on my birthday, but at a different location?
@ Sarhaddon #100
What I would add to your observation (being at odds with people who appear – to you – to all be “wrong and have been taken for a ride”), is this.
Being at odds with other people is normal – each of us has a unique set of purposes, experiences, values and interests that shape us. None of us are born knowing everything already, and so learning – which takes time, many lessons, many tests, many challenges – is slow.
The thing I strive to remember is that the opposite of deference is contempt. Loneliness can be hard, and that is actually a reason that many people seek out these comment threads and take part in them. 🙂
But just as we do not NEED to defer to any other person, we do not NEED to fall into contempt for any other person. Both can get in our way, and distract us from the small, but real, powers that WE (each) have, and which only WE (each) can exercise. Other people have their own stories, and they will tell them in their own way.
Be well, and may your intentions be blessed. Stay free!
Hi JMG and all,
Recently a friend of mine had an experience I would like to share.
He woke up from a mild nightmare and saw a floating creature that he described as like a jellyfish with small golden orbs on it, moving with a light bobbing motion. He left the room, and could no longer see it, then returned and it was still there.
He dug around online and other people have had similar experiences. It has been speculated that these are non-material beings which feed off of people’s dreams.
If anyone has anything to add to help illuminate this experience, that’d be great :-).
Is it okay to modify Christian prayers so that they fit in a polytheistic worldview? For example, the following prayer to Saint Michael with “God” replaced with “the Gods”:
Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May the Gods rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of the Gods, thrust into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.
You’ve written about relation between sex/gender and mental illnesses. Well, I’m a long time “customer” of mental “health” services, so I could say something about this topic. I’ve usually seen more women than men at the psychiatrist waiting room, but they usually have lesser severe problems than ill men (mild depression or anxiety). In the severe mental illnesses like schyzophrenia I’ve seen more men than women. I don’t know this is a general trend in my country or your countries, though it seems a general trend in my town…what could be the causes? I don’t know. Opinions please?
@Lazy Gardener
In civilised society there’s another reason numbers could be worse there’s report of fraud people that are no longer with us and still pick up pension and other welfare.
We al saw during DOGE, how many people were over 130 years of age, that’s ridiculous.
Given how many homeless people are and the age they day and other things like overdose, also now infant mortality, real numbers could be way worse
Hi John,
Would you like to explain how do you use astrology as a daily divination?
I have a little knowledge of astrology.
Thank you.
I have been reading a book called “Answering the Call of the Elementals”, by Mayer. The book is fascinating for a number of reasons, not the least is the care he takes to explain the inner workings that led him to his world view. He in turn credits his understanding to the works of Steiner, whom I have not studied. The foundation of his work is the firm belief that Yetsiric world that underlies the Assiatic world, is comprised wholly of elementals, and in regard the natural kingdom, plants, animals, and minerals, these elementals amount to the land of fairy. I am impressed; he talks from experience. Many of the things he experientially describes are also in my experience, but a key point is that he sees the elemental that oversees the body and mind of this incarnation as someone he calls, “The Cinnamon One”. While he hasn’t said so far, this has the earmarks of the “Guardian of the Threshold”, which makes sense, when you consider that when the soul peels away from the Astral body/mind, what is left behind has all the characteristics of what an elemental. Now there is something, I have noticed for most of my life, is that certain phrases in my mind are repeated. This led me to connect this echo to my version of the “Cinnamon One”, and at the same time to the Roman version of the Greek story about Narcissus. The Romans added “Echo”, and I think that it was a veiled reference to the Guardian of the Threshold. Two of the important tasks that the Guardian does is first to separate the current incarnation from previous, and second to aggregate all the elementals throughout all the incarnations into a sort of Comet’s tail (in Mayer’s description) of all the elementals spawned throughout all the incarnations by every word, thought, and deed. A sort of book of life. Anyway, I recommend Mayer’s book to anyone looking to understand why they feel certain ways in certain locations. Meyer’s belief is that elementals convey emotions and that what we think of as inside and outside is a false dichotomy.
JMG, Have you put your idea of maybe living in Glastonbury on the back-burner? The UK is getting more dysfunctional by the day. Don’t know if the bad cat has been at the catnip again, but here is el gato malo’s take on the state of UK society: “if the response of your society is to arrest this girl, who harmed no one, and to act as though the man following and harassing her is the victim here, then your society has ended. you are not a real people anymore. you are food.”
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-flower-of-scotland
SNAFU and FUBAR – I don’t know if there is an acronym beyond those but I guess it isn’t going to be good news if there is. If UK society were a volcano, it’s getting much harder not to conclude that this monster is going to blow – societal ground is deforming and cracks are appearing everywhere – an emotional firestorm is building as infrastructure collapses and institutions and establishment reveal themselves as ever more corrupted. It feels like we approach a precipice… on the plus side, this incremental ratcheting has been going on for years with occasional steam vents releasing pressure.
It’s strange to consider being in the middle of a society so polarised in so many areas and there is nothing to indicate that the establishment have any clue whatsoever. Hope I’m totally misreading things; if not, then it seems that the Predicament Express is picking up steam.
Some of the memes being made of the Scottish girl are rather good.
Stephen, good gods. How horrible. It’s actually a fairly common response to a failed apocalyptic prophecy to insist that it happened anyway, in some manner that’s not subject to disproof. Not many people take it the final step that your sister did — please accept my condolences.
Jeff, oh, there are definitely approaches to therapy that help, mostly by providing a sympathetic listener who will take what you say seriously — a very rare thing in ordinary human contexts. It’s psychoanalytic theory that is being rejected wholesale due to zero evidence for its efficacy.
Temporaryreality, it’s entirely your choice, of course. Delighted to hear that you’re learning mental calculation — I’ve been expanding my range of radionics skills recently, for whatever that’s worth.
Eike, hmm! That’s uncomfortably plausible.
Patrick, so noted.
Ramaraj, good to hear from you again. May the battles go well!
Moose, yeah, that’s a common dodge. The Jehovah’s Witnesses did that when the world failed to end in 1914 — they insisted that the Second Coming really did happen, but invisibly, and any day now it will become manifest. Cognitive dissonance is tough, and people will go to the most absurd extremes to avoid it.
Archivist, when societies get too burdened with overgrown children, hard times come and slap some sense into them. The 1920s were a good example — lots of commentators at the time talked about how weirdly juvenile everybody was. Then the Great Depression arrived, courtesy of the wishful-thinking habits of all those overgrown children, and a lot of people were forced to grow up in a hurry. I expect something similar this time, too.
Vitranc, (1) have fun, and learn as much as possible from the old guys who still know how to use personal skill in place of fancy circuitry. (2) The solar still I read about was made by Augustin Mouchot in the late 19th century; it was discussed in several old histories of solar power. More generally, if you can produce decent booze, you have a guaranteed income even — or especially — in the worst of times, and also an effective disinfectant that can make contaminated water safe to drink and kill bacteria in wounds. What’s not to like?
Anon, I suppose that’s true. That makes me less likely to believe the vision, though, as it echoes a theme in popular culture.
Sammy, there are two factors there. First, you may have a lot of stuff that has to be released. Second, we live in a very toxic and challenging time, and that’s going to give you a share of our collective crud to process. Yes, it gets better, but it’s hard to say when.
Thibault, I know. I still have to watch myself from time to time.
Churrundo, glad to hear it. No, I haven’t written anything on writing. As for your masters thesis, that sounds fascinating, but I don’t really have any suggestions, just a certain amount of interest.
Earthworm, the oldest version of the Cabalistic Tree of Life known to me is described by Celsus in his 2nd century book attacking Christianity, which survives in quotations by his opponent Origen. It’s pretty clearly from Gnostic sources, and from there it’s not too hard to trace it back to Platonic and Pythagorean traditions. I talk about that in my recent book Revisioning the Tree of Life.
Kallianera, thanks for this! Global Grey’s a great site.
Earthworm, if the vision is correct, it certainly explains why so many mystics disliked the idea of reincarnation — they wanted to get out of material bodies once and for all, since they aren’t native to this plane!
Scotlyn, you want to cast the chart as though you were born at the exact same moment, but in a different place. Thus I was born at 10:07 am in the Pacific time zone, so I cast my relocation chart for Providence for 1:07 pm Eastern time — because at the moment when the clocks showed 10:07 am in the hospital where I was born, clocks in Providence read 1:07 pm.
Russell, the universe is a very crowded place, and that includes its nonphysical dimensions. Your friend saw one of the many critters that lives in the (usually) Unseen.
Mark, experiment and see!
Chuaquin, interesting. Myself, I offer no hypotheses.
Sergi, I check the movement of the planets against my natal chart and see what aspects they make, then I interpret the aspects as indications for the day.
Ben, hmm! Thank you for this; I’ll give it a look.
Earthworm, I certainly won’t be moving there while the current government is in power. I suppose I could immigrate illegally and then belong to a protected class not subject to the laws, but otherwise, it’s simply not safe.
@Jeff Russell
If I may, In reading your comment I agree with your sentiment around therapy ‘fixing you.’ The difficult part of recieving therapy is applying the practices and techniques in daily life, which equates to self help.
I think the most concrete example i have is in teaching an anger management class with rather large biker looking men. I don’t think it would be called anger management anymore. A good deal of the class was encouraging the participants to catch themselves when their mind started certain thought patterns that led to violence. ‘Catching’ was the hard part; identifying the signals in your body, change of tone of voice, tension, thoughts Etc. Without willingness to build self awareness the behavior pattern would repeat itself.. The concepts were generally understood and the feeling was always ‘good’ by the end of the class, but nothing in the student was changed by the teacher. In the field it is understood that counsellors can’t really fix.
As a side note, I would love to see an exploration of discursive meditation as a treatment reccomendation for ADHD. Daily practise has been effective way to manage the difficultues associated with a distracted mind in my own life.
“Revisioning the Tree of Life”
Ha – fancy that – I see Aeon books doing it in the UK on preorder for delivery September 2025.
What I’m interested in are the underlying principles predating Abraham religions; is there a table of contents online?
It could be just what I am looking for.
Introducing the I-want-to-be-alone-osaurus.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/jaw-droppingly-weird-dinosaur-morocco-035623400.html
“The armor of Spicomellus is jaw-droppingly weird, unlike that of any other dinosaur – or any other animal alive or dead – that we’ve ever discovered,” said vertebrate paleontologist Richard Butler of the University of Birmingham in England, co-leader of the research published in the journal Nature.”
“Not only did it have a series of sharp, long spikes on each of its ribs – unknown elsewhere among animals – but it had spines the length of golf clubs sticking out in a collar around its neck,” Butler added.”
The picture in the article is great. Mating must have been a delicate affair.
JMG “if the vision is correct, it certainly explains why so many mystics disliked the idea of reincarnation — they wanted to get out of material bodies once and for all, since they aren’t native to this plane!”
The idea that the purpose of coming into incarnation is to spend all on’s effort decrying it as illusion and in attempt to escape from it, well it kind of misses the possibilities that there might be other opportunities of development that make it worth being here (unless one is a visitor from the 6th plane!). If your vision is representative of something going on re a bunch of souls coming here to do their work and messing up, I do hope they bugger off without completely trashing the place. Surely there must be a story in this somewhere?!
I haven’t had any visions like that – but if you remember what I said about being on the edge of ‘4th space’ and the limit of personality in guiding the process, an interesting turn of events occurred after that – another shift in practice but also a simultaneous turn back to making the most of time in this world – sort of like looking in two directions at once when that is not actually the case at all. Like trying to find a dynamic balance point that employs the inner work with the outer work… Now just need to make the most of that idea and see where it leads.
Looking back at the last few years work (or quest as brunton put it) – I feel as though more has been achieved in the last 5 years than the last 50! I couldn’t exactly say how or what, things just seem different.
JMG: “I suppose I could immigrate illegally and then belong to a protected class not subject to the laws”
Funnily enough I’ve seen that put forward as a retirement /unemployment option for the indigenous – go to France unemployed and homeless and come back in a dinghy as it apparently comes with better perks than available or offered to the people already living here… free accommodation, clothing allowance, phone, food allowance and prepaid card with spending allowance.
It is a sobering thought that:
“The UK currently produces about 60% of its domestic food consumption by economic value, part of which is exported.”
“The biggest medium to long term risk to the UK’s domestic production comes from climate change and other environmental pressures like soil degradation, water quality and biodiversity. Wheat yields dropped by 40% in 2020 due to heavy rainfall and droughts at bad times in the growing season. Although they have bounced back in 2021…”
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/united-kingdom-food-security-report-2021/united-kingdom-food-security-report-2021-theme-2-uk-food-supply-sources
Just for arguments sake, lets say the UK could, without imports provide 70% (rather than 50%) of food given the current population (say 70 million). Again just for giggles, wouldn’t that mean to be self sufficient, a rather steep decrease in population would be called for? That’s a lot of millions. I wonder if Soylent Green is actually that far from the menu… IIRC it was an orc in the movie saw another Orc get killed and called out “Looks like meat is back on the menu, boys!”
Yesterday, I did two tarot divinations with my Waite-Smith deck. In the second spread, I asked if, assuming JMG’s vision be accurate, if I am one of those foreign souls.
I am not the best shuffler, and one card appeared in both spreads, but since that card is the potentially relevant World, I didn’t reshuffle and ask again. So I am not sure if I should trust the divination at all. I am not sure if I want to know the info, so maybe I unconsciously botched the divination on purpose. The spread was:
The Devil
Four of Wands
The World
all upright. This spread might be claiming I am one of the rare foreign souls that will remain on Earth, but I can interpret the spread in other ways. (For example, maybe the first card notes my question and the other two answer NO, I belong here.)
“Anon, I suppose that’s true. That makes me less likely to believe the vision, though, as it echoes a theme in popular culture.”
For a general vision, I’d say you’re right to disbelieve it if it mirrors popular culture; but if this particular vision is right, then a huge number of people will naturally have intuitive and visionary senses that come out of it. I could see, for instance, the various claims being made about how the world’s governments are being run by aliens trying to make us into something more like them being visionary experiences that someone (or multiple people) had, interpreted in a boneheaded literal fashion (which is a common risk for misunderstanding these experiences) and resonated with a lot of people due to an intuitive sense that this was true (again, interpreted in a boneheaded literal fashion; which is also a common risk with intuitive senses). What makes this particular vision so complicated is that because it implies this is one of the most powerful factors shaping human life right now, all human lives, it would naturally end up being mirrored in pop culture due to the fact it powerfully shapes the background of nearly every human life on Earth right now.
Having said that, I think I have come up with a related implication that I consider to be a fairly sound reason to at least consider dismissing this vision: it would also seem to echo the theme common in popular occultism that there is some sort of way to avoid the karmic consequences of our actions. That has very human roots (I think most people have at least once tried to run away from the consequences of their actions), but it is reflected on a very large scale in this vision.
Further, since certain aspects of it seem to imply that the lives who are doing the most to create the horrific future are more likely to be among the ones who leave in the near future, it seems like to me that there is a good case for this being nothing more than a reflection of the desperate effort on the part of a large number of people to come up with any excuse why they get to avoid dealing with the consequences of their own bad decisions.
“I think this accelerating pace of change is messing with many people’s minds.”
That’s a lot of the issue. “Learn to Code”, the solves employment problems for today’s youth mantra for aa least a decade went poof. The only thing AIs can arguably do is boilerplate code generation and that is 80% of the coding jobs. Oops.
Now what? There is this, but it’s not an air conditioned office job.
https://www.bigbend.edu/post/big-bend-launches-new-agriculture-mechanics-certificate-program/
On that note the local apple harvest is underway. Job openings there. If you are looking for a future compatible skill consider fruit tree grafting. It’s mandatory for apples since they don’t breed true and widely used for everything else.
Vocabulary, sanitized.
SNAFU, situation normal, all fouled up.
FUBAR, fouled up beyond all recognition, considered worse than a SNAFU as the latter has a connotation that it can be untangled with a few tugs at just the right spot.
Clusterfoul. Everyone is running aimlessly around flapping their arms and squawking. Very high entropy, all inputs go directly to low grade heat.
Circle jerk. An organized clusterfoul where everyone wants something from their neighbor and won’t provide anything to anyone until his or hers needs are met first. The circle jerk is organized by the Pivot Man (or Woman).
@Earthworm #134 – Hi that is a very large number of illegal aliens. It caught my attention because Ra in “The Law of One”, speaks of souls arriving from Orion. Orion is interesting because it is a nebula and on the Galactic scale holds a position similar to our asteroid belt in this solar system. That is, it is like a Daath plane of existence where unity is shattered on the way down into incarnation and unified on the way up. I have often wondered if the arrival was like an infection that God can’t get rid of, or if having been infected God has tried to make use of the pathogen. If Ra is correct and this current evolution is standing on the threshold of a choice between left- or right-hand paths, label as “Service to Self” or “Service to Others”, the invasion may have actually been of assistance in forming the crucible needed for the polarization of mankind. In Ra’s words, “The harvest is small”, the majority having refused to take a side remain in that large porridge of the profane. The thing to keep in mind when thinking of STS and STO, is that it is all service to God. So however, this influx managed to evade the quarantine on this planet, they still serve God. Which means that God values them, and their existence does not negate the need to follow the Christ mandate to “love your neighbor as yourself.” A point that the STO and the profane like to quibble. Another point has to do with the Qabala Tree of Life. I think indeed that the tree has been corrupted over time as in Dion Fortune’s words, “The pristine stream flows ever down to the ocean gathering much on its way.” (paraphrased) However there is enough of the truth their hidden in blinds to see a different view. If we forget the pathways, because those are clearly wrong, since they do not match the inherent structure of the Hebrew language to the TOL structure, and look at the 3 veils (AIN, …) as the required precursor to manifestation, Kether as the unmanifest, then Adding Daath back in we see a template for every octave of manifestation in the planes that follow like this:
#1 Chokmah and Binah
#2 Daath
#3 Chesed and Geburah
#4 Tiphereth
#5 Netzach and Hod
#6 Yesod
#7 Malkuth
Then as D.F. says, Manifestation begins with duality, and no matter what octave one examines we can know something about it metaphorically from this template. We can then see manifestation looking up or down in an infinite series of octaves, matching, the sentiment, “within every acorn is a tree…”, and we see the same pattern then in the Bible in Gen. ch. 1 where God describing Himself to shepherds and farmers uses a metaphor appropriate to those times where a “day” is one of the 7 planes of manifestation.
Charles Hugh Smith is still at the top of his game, this time mostly agreeing with our host about A-1 from a slightly different perspective.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
earthworm @ 145, I read the article to which you linked. I don’t mind admitting I am shocked to learn how widespread is the abuse of young teen girls. When girls 14 and younger have to go about armed, yikes!
I notice that attitudes in your country have a kind of generic resemblance to the ongoing coverage of the doings of, and favoritism for, your countrywoman, La Maxwell. Media over here lately is going out of its way to emphasize that she and the late Epstein preyed on “vulnerable” girls. In other words, they were just skanks anyway is the unlovely subtext. “Nice people” like you readers would have had nothing to fear. Wasn’t it the faction currently in power who used to lecture the rest of us about how tolerating depravity in a few would infect and degrade the whole of society?
Re: Invasive Species,
Well, as far as I can tell, the armadillos that came here in the last 10 years or so are not an invasive species, but a full on invading and conquering army. A few days ago, one came to the open door off my wood shop, looked in at me like, “Hey pal, wanna keep the noise down?” Then casually sauntered off as I took a step towards him to frighten him away. No fear there, the confidence of someone who belongs (they should all be eradicated in this area, though, ask any cow, soybean farmer or someone who doesn’t want to catch leprosy.
Re: Homeless People
Someone mentioned the homelessness problem earlier. Here in flyover country, I’ve noticed people doing some practical if out of the ordinary things to stave off homelessness. First is the RVs. Seen plenty of people pull up rather nice RVs into their brother’s/parents’/grandparents’ yards and obviously live out of them with things like clothes drying on the line and people repairing their cars next to the RV. Not a bad way to get a quick, cheap house after a layoff or a divorce.
The other thing, and I’m actually doing this, is families pitching in together to literally build houses. I’m seeing more and more where dad and grandma are out cutting boards for a barndominium while the young ones install the light switches and pick up the trash. These are not professional builders either, just people that decided to take their housing into their own hands.
Last thing on the working class front I’m noticing is the “perpetual yard sale.” This usually happens at a corner lot or smaller shopping center parking lot. Various people sitting on their tailgates with a pile of old sport memorabilia hoping to make a buck or two.
@Vitranc #128,
Thanks for sharing! The part with the visions in particular might be a bit hard for others to reproduce, alas… 😉
About the astrological election, since I’m sure this will come in handy to some people, and if you don’t mind spelling it out: With what you have learned from your experience, what is it you’d focus on in your astrological election, or what is it you’d avoid?
@JMG, I find it quite fascinating how many people bring up the same topic in your comment section recently, in very close proximity to each other but clearly unrelated, sometimes in two comments right after another. Not just here, but also on MM. I can’t recall such a largish pile of topic synchronicities in the comments from your less recent posts (or maybe I simply didn’t notice, or have forgotten?).
Siliconguy @ 149 ..
Or .. perhaps ‘Fafosuarus’ ‘;] … Of course, the above paleontological description puts a new twist to the phrase ‘ falling onto one’s own um, sword. As for ancient copulation? there’s the sticky question of sex and death: you attempt to mate, but you don’t dare touch it!
You have written previous articles on how the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain was far from inevitable and how as late as the 1930s, there was a potent divide in the US between the Anglophilic Northeast and the Anglophobic hinterland (especially Irish, German, and Scots-Irish Americans)
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2012/04/america-eagle-and-lion.html
You have also noted how there was a good probability between the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and the first half of the 20th Century that the German-speaking lands had a good probability of being one of the main (if not the main) powers in the 20th Century (particularly in the event of an alliance like a power with the US)
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2015/06/an-affirming-flame.html
I would also add that in the 1860s, President Lincoln was in the process of building an actual alliance with Russia under refomer Tsar Alexander II. It was thanks to this alliance why the Americans got Alaska in 1867.
https://hilo.hawaii.edu/campuscenter/hohonu/volumes/documents/Vol10x19TsarAlexanderIIandPresidentAbrahamLincoln.pdf
Tsar Alexander II was unfortunately assassinated in 1881 similar to Lincoln and the reformist era was halted. This very much helped paved the way for the revolutions of 1917 (along with the Russo-Japanese War of 1905). This was an awful shame as Russia was actually on the verge of a massive demographic expansion at the start of the 20th Century before the World Wars, Russian Civil War, massacres, purges, famines, Generalplan Ost, forced urbanization, and the post-Soviet birth rate collapse from dispair. Furthermore, much of Russia’s talent was exiled or sent to the gulag. Hence, Russia was robbed of much of its potential by the contingent fact of one group of radicals seizing power amid the chaos of 1917.
In the 19th Century, Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that the United States of America and Russia would be the main powers of the future as other powers had reached their natural limits.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1265628-there-are-at-the-present-time-two-great-nations-in
To what extent do you see it being most probable in most divergent realities that the US, Germany, and Russia form the main powers in the world thanks perhaps to a defeated Britain/France in a war? Here is one interesting reality where that is the case (click “World in 1935):
https://www.alternatehistory.com/decadesofdarkness/
@Russell Cook
I once had an experience very similar to your friend. In my case I met two people in my dream who told me that their job was to “harvest” from the dream realms, and then attacked me. I got the impression that what they wanted to find was people who were unaware that they were dreaming. A conscious being accepting the dream world as real was titillating to them. At some point I became aware I was dreaming and woke up shortly after to find a spiky, glowing creature that looked like a cross between a lionfish and an insect hovering next to my head. It faded away after a few seconds.
@Sergi Mind if i ask you if you are Catalan? I don’t see this name very often around here… 😉
Guillem.
Yavanna #109:
I was thinking of and somewhat misremembering the statistics analysed by Jon Haidt (see, for example, https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-new-cdc-report, there are other pages less focused on teens but that’s the demographic I was thinking of). Men and boys of all ages do indeed commit more suicides than women and girls in the corresponding age groups, but the male increase was lower than the female increase. In other metrics, women do “win”.
I don’t think that invalidates my claim. I said that “women are affected more” and not “more women are affected” and I’d argue that higher relative increases means that they’ve been hit harder, even if the baseline is low enough not to show it in absolute numbers.
Either way, I don’t want to give these numbers too much power. No matter which gender has the questionable honour of being worse of, I fear that these comparisons both serve to fuel this pointless gender conflict and remove space for the concerns of the statistically less affected—which isn’t great if you’re one of the individuals who do happen to be affected.
—David P.
Anonymous #112:
Thank you for this perspective. Having never felt like I entirely belong here (I’ve never been quite sure myself what exact “here” I mean), I was beginning to wonder whether I might be one of those souls myself. I now know that I am not; I have always found these antinatalist ideas to be utterly alien and to some extend even upsetting. This is not to say that I judge you if you do hold them: if you genuinely are in some respect an alien, I can hardly blame you for that!
—David P.
Hi JMG, a question about the vision of souls coming on earth from a planet in another plane keeps bugging me. I know you warned to take it with plenty of salt, but still.
The coming over happened apparanty 6,000 years ago (which would bring us close to the 4,004 BC date that some Christians see as the date God created the earth). Scientific estimates say that around that time about 7 million humans lived on the planet. We crossed the 1 billion mark only in 1810-1820 AD. If it is indeed a billion souls that came over, we wouldn’t have enough human bodies on the planet back in the day, not even if they came in over the duration of a few centuries. What do you think?
TemporaryReality #121:
As to 1, I’ve pulped some older journals and haven’t regretted it so far. It was mostly just rambling, some quite incoherent. For the future, I’ve adopted the rule that journaling in the “dialogue with self” sense will get destroyed but the results recorded in my GSF practice record, which will be kept. I say practice record but over time, some other events that weren’t immediately connected to any occult work have made their way in there, so I suppose it might become more of a general diary. After all, once you do a daily divination, pretty much everything has the potential to be on-topic, at least in retrospect (or over time—today I met somebody who featured in a GSF-unrelated entry a while back. I’m fairly certain that today’s DD foretold this, so I had to talk about them and was glad I could had the first time recorded for reference).
My hope is that, even if I’ll remain unimportant in the greater scheme of things, this record might be helpful to people in my own life, perhaps my future children. Perhaps not directly—I’ve tried to be relatively honest, which makes some passages a little awkward to share—but even if I could refer back to it myself and figure out how exactly I’ve overcome specific difficulties in greater clarity than what I remember, that might help me give them better advice.
Though perhaps I’m just being overly romantic here and it’ll be quite useless to everybody.
For 2, I’m finally taking the time to properly learn astrology and how to cast charts myself.
—David P.
Eike #122:
The garbage bin ballot boxes might be a regional thing. I’m fairly certain we just use a box over here, though I admit I’ve never paid much attention to it.
—David P.
Anonymoose Canadian #126:
2012 is roughly where Jon Haidt claims where the mental health crisis begain (see, for example, https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness-epidemic). While it’s not the end of the world, I wonder whether this really is a coincidence.
—David P.
Churrundo, you might also look for Scott Scheper’s version of Zettelkasten, as described in his book “Antinet” – he’s got YT videos on it as well. He’s a bit gung-ho on being a techbro kind of guy, and loves him some “human progress” and “evolution” but he does improve (in my opinion and his) on Söhnke Ahrens’ version by focusing on handwritten rather than digitalized notes. I disclose that I copyedited his book but couldn’t convince him to be more succinct and cut repetitive sections (author’s prerogative!), so you’re forewarned. 🙂
I use the method periodically but since I’m not actively engaged (yet?) in writing a nonfiction text, am somewhat haphazard about it. I still think it’s a potentially useful tool.
@Earthworm #145, et al.
I have read about the Scottish girl. I honestly cannot fathom the attitudes of the police and the Government here.
Ordinary psychopathy, I am used to. I am accustomed to the idea that “power does what it wants,” and that rich and powerful people want what they want, and don’t particularly care who they step on and hurt to get what they want.
However, punishing a young girl for protecting herself from rape is something I have a hard time getting my head around. I see this as demonic. We know that the Devil and his fallen angels hate mankind, as such. Why Starmer, et al. cannot see that the Devil and his angels hates them as much as they do that Scottish girl is hard for me to understand.
JMG,
I want to ask a clarifying question about your hypothesis: the beings are form the 6th Cosmic Plane, not our etheric plane, right?
This is why they can’t just use the Second Death to reincarnate from their mental sheaths directly back on their home world (since the mental plane isn’t much concerned with such trivialities as “space” and “time”). Instead, they’re completely outside of their original set of minor planes, and having to painfully use our planes’ substances as rather shoddy substitutes of their own.
Does that sound about right?
Dear John Michael Greer,
I have been suffering from a weird condition for as long as I remember, it is that my legs feel not as if they are part of my body. Sometimes I can forget about it by working, sporting, studying, traveling or what else really hard, over the top, really till the moment I end up in a burnout (that happened about two years ago).
This disorder is labeled over the past years under different names but currently it is referred to as “Body Integrity Dysphoria” (Bid). Fortunately there seem to be only a small amount (that is compared to other disorders) of recorded cases. There does not seem to be any medicine or treatment to take the disorder away, the only reported successes have been through amputation, which is a highly controversial route. Nevertheless, the stress and pain, can drive sufferers to finding ways to self amputate or go to a clinic in a foreign country.
Lately there have been some studies explaining the disorder with a neurological explanation of seeing certain difference in brain tissue at the parts which have to do with the body mapping. I guess this is aligned with the materialistic worldview of current medical practice.
To fold my legs and not walk, or use a wheelchair, does give a lot of relief, and actually my therapist has been telling me to do that more to manage the condition. The relief is really nice, however for me it is a very inconvenient, shameful and awkward way of having to appear in any social setting. And honestly currently my life is not set up around having to use a wheelchair constantly. Maybe I should go that direction and search for self acceptance.
Reading through the FAQ of the “Magic Monday” blog I read about your view and a possible explanation for people dealing with gender dysphoria and similar conditions that this might be due to: “…the extremely high human population on Earth just now, souls are reincarnating before they’ve had the chance to process the experiences of their last lives, and so a lot of souls are ending up in one body while they haven’t yet worked out the patterns absorbed from their last body…”.
Do you think this might be the case here. Could it be that in an earlier life I had lost my legs? I was born in 1978. Could it be that my former incarnation was a war veteran of perhaps WW2, or so, who just passed away in the 1970’s?
If so, or if not so, what could be ways to deal spiritually with this issue?
I have wanted to ask this question to you already for quite a while, but since I am dealing with shame and acceptance issues I did not reach out until now. I carry this burden of, my legs feeling alien, constantly every day, hour and minute, with me (over 40 years now). Today when I was doing a divination by way of the Ogham, after the regular three fews I decided to take another one solely focussed on my “Body Integrity Dysphoria” and got Muin, I saw that as a sign that it was time to ask you this question.
Thank you very much if you can have a look at this. If not, thank you anyway for your amazing inspiring work!
Best regards,
Merman.
@JMG To change the subject – this came up in passing on a Dreamwidth post, when, IIIRC, you mentioned offhand that Americans were barbarians. I wanted to pursue that, but you answered another person that the topic had been amply covered by Spengler. I found myself wondering what it was about us – not the bi-coastal copycats Spenger and you covered in detail, but the American people –
The masses. The Heartland. Flyover country. How are we different? You did give one detailed answer when you noted the prevalence of all sorts of religions of every kind here, as opposed to the discomfort with serious belief among our elite. and my observation, from attending two high school graduations, that the sons of the elite do not play team sports, whereas team sports loom very large among hoi polloi. (God, country, and the Gators….) And flag-waving patriotism and “bless our armed forces.” Differences in dress, manners, tastes, etc….. ?Plaid shirts and baseball caps? Eating with our hands? I noticed the one European resident here, given a sandwich, will deconstruct it, then take a knife and fork to it. Oh, and guns – Florida is about to authorize a black bear hunt becasue they’re becoming a nuisance. Bragging on disreputable ancestors?
I’ve lived in many different regions over my life time, and fond it easier to pinpoint things by region. The hills around Pittsburgh in the early 1940s, quite unlike the suburbs of New Haven, CT in the late 40s-early 50s, and totally unlike Indianapolis, which was unlike San Francisco, then Las Cruces, NM (a suburb of El Paso, TX!), then Albuquerque, NM, the heart and soul of Mexamerica-north of the border, then…..Borth Florida. Not to mention Klamath Falls (visited there) vs the Willamette Valley. And Alaska! Depends on whether you’re look at Alaskan natives of various tribes, or White Alaska (a.k.a. the eastern Rockies North) Still and all….. I’d love a discussion of the many things we have in common that cause the elite and Europeans to sniff and lift their noses, being heirs to 1000 tears of civilization. (I note -from reading – Australia is another set of barbarians. )
Anyway, the Spengler stuff and discussions thereof more or less summed them up as the sullen, resentful masses when they were seeing them as in contrast to the bicoastal copycats.
@Chuaquin #141
What you see as far as distribution by sex in your town seems to be the way it works in the places I have been. When I worked in that field, schizophrenics were predominantly male, anxiety and minor depression trended female and borderline personality disorder also trended female. Men also tended to have more severe illnesses. Nobody knew why.
What I am seeing now in women and girls is an up tick in mental health issues. Opinion? It seems to correlate to social media consumption but that is just a hypothesis.
Vitranc-
I applaud your efforts to put “rubber to the road” with regard learning about ham radio and distilling alcohol. Both useful skills in an environment of decline and degradation.
If you haven’t already had the pleasure, I would recommend you read: “GOOD SPIRITS-A NEW LOOK AT OL’ DEMON ALCOHOL” by Gene Logsdon. Published 1999 by Chelsea Green Publishing Company.
Kind regards,
Courtney
Back when I was reading more widely in radical political theories, I ran across the notion that the criminal justice system and the mental health system perform similar functions. The criminal justice system is for people who break the written rules. The mental health system is for people who break the unwritten rules. Combine that with the fact that the vast majority of individuals who come to the attention of the criminal justice system are male, while the vast majority of those who come to the attention of the mental health system are female. The second wave feminist explanation for this discrepancy is because standards are higher for women and girls, because we are expected to be angels, while boys and men are allowed to be merely human, but now I’m wondering if it doesn’t have something to do with the difference between feminine informal power and masculine formal power.
Regarding locational astrology, is https://www.astro.com/free/free_locational_e.htm a good resource?
I know I’ve been mostly presenting arguments and further evidence for taking the visionary experiences about the extra souls seriously, but I have two counterarguments to taking the visions seriously that I have not seen discussed yet: the first is that there is another possible explanation for the sense of being in a strange world: agriculture. For most of our evolutionary history we were hunter-gatherers, and the life of a typical hunter-gatherer is radically different from the life of anyone in an agricultural society. This could explain the phenomena; and it could also explain the sense that our bodies are wrong, because deprived of certain key inputs and experiences, it’s likely our bodies are not going to function in the same way as we evolved to expect that they should.
The second is that as Anonymous (#129) points out, some of the implications of these visions lead directly to suggesting that the conspiracy theory that aliens secretly run the government is on some level true, and this leads to some very bizarre places. One I find remarkably hard to accept is that this implies that the TV show V was probably born out of either an intuitive sense or a visionary experience, and thus needs to be considered as containing possible symbolic evidence. I find anything that suggests V is anything other than evidence that sometimes the people who make TV shows have brain farts rather hard to accept, but that may just be me.
What house or planet represents ethnic minorities in mundane astrology?
Hi JMG,
I have been looking carefully lately at global oil production over the past 25 years. Specifically I’ve been examining conventional versus unconventional oil production. A lot of people act like unconventional production has put an end to peak oil concerns, but, of course, the devil is in the details. If you examine unconventional oil production for 2024, for example, you see that it was 10 to 15 percent of the total. On the other hand, conventional oil production has been flat since 2005. This, of course, means that the only thing causing oil production to grow is the increase in unconventional production, which itself has definite limits that we are fast approaching, because not all oil fields are suitable for fracking and fracked wells decline and close relatively quickly, etc. But the fact that we are flat in conventional production should really scare people who want to depend on fossil fuels, because It means that we are in the midst of the hump at the top of Hubbert’s Peak. I want to note here that I reach this conclusion because I am aware that most fields are pumping as fast as they can. Yes, a few are not, but by far most are. This hump at the top of the peak pretty large as it took us nearly 150 years or so from the beginning of oil production in 1859 to get here. But, the hump has its limits. By every estimate I could find or calculate for myself, it should end in the next 5 to 15 years (2030 to 2040). What nobody in the fossil fuel camp seems to understand is that when that happens, the year-over-year declines in conventional production will outpace any amount of fracking we are capable of. No amount of fracking we can do will stop the decline.
My sense is that some of the powers that be, prior to the current administration, either understood this or sensed it in some way and their efforts at green energy weren’t so much trying to move us away from fossil fuels as they were to provide additional sources of energy for when the decline begins in earnest. Even if they had succeeded in their efforts, they would have failed, of course, because there are not enough resources to build out such a system and maintain global economic growth, which is what the current system requires, not to mention the fact that the EROEI doesn’t work out along with a host of other issues, but at least they were trying.
On the other hand, the current administration and the other denialists on the right will happily continue down the fossil fuel path without a second thought, certain in the knowledge that all they have to do is “drill baby drill.” Which will fail also — probably as soon or sooner than the other guys.
Am I off base in thinking all of this? I’ve gone over it many times in my mind and I cannot escape the conclusion that we are all in for a world of hurt sooner rather than later. I can’t see any mistakes I’ve made, but I would value your input. Thanks!
Hello JMG
Some anecdotes from the UK. I’m seeing a number of graffiti st George’s crosses appearing on road signs and the centres of mini roundabouts (which are already painted white), this in a prosperous liberal southern England town. Other parts of England are seeing numerous St George’s flags appearing, with councils taking them down when they appear on public
property getting significant criticism. There is a stirring of English working class conscious.
With reference to the last but one post, the sexes incompatible fantasy’s of one another, some men are opting out and moving out (from parents home). To wit, a cousins
two sons have bought a house together, and a few doors down my road again two brothers have bought a house together. These are all young men, in employment. Two data points though do not make a graph. I expect men’s fantasy’s to go with the loss of the internet when energy depletion gets serious. As for women’s fantasy’s, they will last longer if the way romance novels are trade between my aunt’s is anything to go by. Good comments on life ways choices JMG and the commemtariat. Thank you
#64 Mother Balance
5 or 6 years ago we got older (spoiled) hay from a local who used Grazon. We used it to mulch around husky potato plants and in several other spots in the garden. I remember the potatoes vividly. Because they started wilting within hours and were dead black the next day. Baffled, we considered some kind of mold or fungus in the hay .. ended up quizzing the hay guy if he had other reports. He mentioned Grazon as an afterthought, but figured it couldn’t be, because that was supposed to dissipate after a year. The hay was 3 years old and had been rained on several times.
Other garden plants were also affected, some worse than others. When we read up on Grazon, it fit the problems we were seeing. If you feed Grazon hay to animals, don’t plan on using their manure, either, as it remains there, as well. And what about the milk, meat, and livestock health?
Hey Sylvia
On the subject of “pruning” book collections for relocating purposes, I do have some suggestions.
The most obvious choice is to get rid of books that no longer interest you, or are just “mid” in your opinion. Secondly, consider getting rid of any “classics” since they are the easiest books to replace on account of their being so many editions or secondhand copies of them. Thirdly, consider checking the library closest to where you are moving to. If they already have a copy of a book that you have, then you could just get rid of your copy and borrow the library one as wanted.
Hi John Michael,
I’ve been considering your plight of late, and wanted to chuck this idea out to you: Compromise is an antidote to expectations. No two people are completely alike.
It’s sort of odd, but reading last weeks comments, kind of left me with the impression that as a society, we’re not much good at negotiating and compromising any more. Those are skills, and they apply as equally to the most fleeting of relationships, as to the larger ones between nation to nation. Instead, just reading in-between-the-lines with the comments, there were examples of hectoring, badgering, capitulating, escalation and failure. All signs of a break down in basic communication skills. Gives a person pause for thought, huh? 🙂 You have mentioned in the past the effect that having so many human souls walking around now may have, and it is possible that all this stuff is part of that story. And does that not suggest possible avenues you should take?
Talk about droughts and flooding rains… This week has been rather damp here, and the annual rainfall deficiency is fast being eliminated. At this stage the coming spring forecast suggests more damp weather. That’ll be good.
Cheers
Chris
Earthworm, not that I know of, but that’s easily remedied. Here’s the table of contents:
Contents
Foreword 5
Introduction: a Cabala for today 8
Part One: Principles of the Cabala 19
The Tree of Life 24
Numbers and archetypes 29
Pillars, worlds, and paths 35
The religious dimension 43
Macrocosm and microcosm 49
Awakening to the inner worlds 58
Part Two: Symbolism of the Cabala 67
Correspondences of the spheres 72
Correspondences of the paths 84
The tarot as symbolic synthesis 96
Part Three: Practice of the Cabala 104
Stage one: discursive meditation 109
Stage two: the sanctum ceremonies 125
Stage three: active imagination and dreamwork 153
Stage four: the Tree of Life in the body 166
Stage five: the bridge of light 175
Stage six: sphere workings 182
Stage seven: the magical images 197
Stage eight: pathworkings 202
Bibliography 212
Index 216
Siliconguy, that’s so improbable I’m starting to wonder if nature is playing games with us, making up fake species and leaving them in strata for us to find!
Earthworm, the notion that we’re in incarnation for the sole purpose of getting out of incarnation seems silly to me, too.
Patrick, it’s always chancy to interpret someone else’s tarot spreads, and tarot isn’t that good for yes/no questions anyway. That’s why I use geomancy!
Anon, maybe so, but I distrust on principle any vision of mine that seems to echo popular culture, as that can contaminate visionary perceptions all too easily. We’ll just have to see. If the vision is correct, certain very specific consequences will follow, and those can be used to judge matters.
Mary, thanks for this.
WatchFlinger, get used to it. There’ll be lemon trees growing in the Ohio River valley in a century or so.
Milkyway, it’s gotten a lot more common recently. I’m not sure what to make of that.
David R., I don’t have the time or, really, the interest to chase down alternate histories. Sorry.
Boccaccio, of course they didn’t all enter incarnation at once! They had to wait their turn like the rest of us. I’m far from sure how reliable those scientific estimates are — they’ve varied extensively over the years — but surely there were much less than a billion people on earth in 4000 BC; this may be why it took them until the beginning of the Axial Age (c. 600 BC) to get homesick and create religions fixated on escaing material existence.
Slithy, that’s correct. I phrased things sloppily in the comment I linked to.
Merman, that seems quite likely. If that’s true, the next time you get a strong sense of body dysmorphia, try to recall what your body should feel and look like — not just the absence of legs, but the rest of it. What shape is it? How does each part of it feel? Become as clearly aware of that as you can, and then remind yourself that you used to have that body and now, awkward as it feels, you have a new one with legs. Affirm the reality of your feelings but let them find their proper place as memories of the body you used to have.
(For what it’s worth, I was female in my last life, a Swedish-American woman with large breasts; I remember what they felt like — including the backaches! If those memories had come crashing in before I knew what they were, I might have ended up with gender dysphoria; as it was, I realized at once that they belonged to a body I don’t have any more, so it’s never been a problem.)
Patricia M, that’s really a topic for a whole post. You might bring it up the next time there are five Wednesdays!
Joan, that makes a great deal of sense! As for locational astrology, I don’t know the methodology they use, so can’t judge — and don’t really have the time this evening to look into it.
Moose, so noted!
Anon, Uranus governs any subculture within the larger culture, ethnic or otherwise, and the 12th house can represent any group not assimilated into the larger society.
Chronojourner, if you’re off base, so am I — these are the conclusions that I’ve drawn as well.
Philip, thanks for the data points!
Chris, thanks for this. Yes, I already have some notions along those lines.
“For what it’s worth, I was female in my last life, a Swedish-American woman with large breasts; I remember what they felt like — including the backaches! If those memories had come crashing in before I knew what they were, I might have ended up with gender dysphoria; as it was, I realized at once that they belonged to a body I don’t have any more, so it’s never been a problem.”
Did you live in the Midwest per chance (especially Minnesota or North Dakota)? It has historic Scandinavian settlement.
@Lazy Gardener,
Your ideas aren’t bad ones, but I’m afraid they won’t help me. I have a little extra money to put somewhere, once the bankers are satisfied. That does nothing for the number of hours in my day! I’m also not sure why you think the dangerhairs who turned the local library into an internet cafe slash drug injection site would react with anything but shadenfreude if the wolf came to my white-privilaged, heteronormative, settler-colonialist door.
Mr. Greer, with regards to your response to David R. .. What?!! .. U no like the Multiverse ???
… don’t take offense .. I’m just playin with ya …
On a high note: looks like RFK Jr is hitting fly balls all over the static medicos.. what’s not to like. Honestly, between he, & our venerated head of DNI, St. TULSI of the Imaculate Deep$tate Deflation, I don’t know what to say .. except YES, can I some moarrrrr?
Also, may Bolton receive a very • close • shave .. too close!
@Everyone thinking about JMG’s vision:
If I might suggest something, maybe we should spend some time injecting some good old fashioned pragmatism into this and “consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have.”
That is: what does the vision predict we should to see, not just in the future but right now? Do we see that? What does the vision predict we should not see? Do we see it anyway?
Then to take a page from William James: what does the vision imply we had better do about it?
On the last question, for some people, I suppose it implies reconciling themselves to leaving this world and some/all of their loved behind soon, adopting appropriate religions like Christianity or Buddhism, and the like. For others, it suggests moving toward forms of spirituality that focus on the immanence and involvement of the divine in this world. (Immanentize now and avoid the rush!)
I learned something with great explanatory power the other day, with regards to the impression that humanity is being manipulated into sabotaging its own interests.
For those who do video/podcasts, here’s a fascinating interview with prof. Dani Sulikowski, who follows the implications of female intrasexual competition the their hair-raising, civilization-bending extremes.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sRY_1JRRcNU&t=1271s&pp=2AH3CZACAQ%3D%3D
In a nutshell, which doesn’t do it justice:
Since men have a theoretically unlimited number of possible offspring, their best chance at making their bloodline successful is to build high status for themselves, so that many women sleep with them, and they can afford the upbringing of the resulting many babies. In practice, that leads to civilization with a high living standard, because ultimately, the status of a world-builder is higher than that of a warlord or a thief.
Under those circumstances, it is in the biological interest of women to find a high-status mate, because since their number of possible offspring is biologically capped, and what counts is the survival of a good proportion of the kids, more so than how many they have.
While a civilization is in its growth phase, this is the norm, but once the living standard has risen to the point where infant mortality is down across the board and women have fewer kids, a fascinating development sets in: since there is no way to have more children survive than other mothers, women start to manipulate each other out of motherhood, or try to make procreation for each other difficult.
That takes all kinds of forms, from recommending less attractive haircuts to each other, to ostracizing housewives, to glorifying male roles (most of feminism, really), and it goes so far, in my opinion not least because of the amplifying effects of a high-energy civilization, that this process itself can explain the downturn of birth rates in the world, and even the destruction of load-bearing cultural frameworks, such as gender roles, family models, etc.
Women entering the workforce is part and parcel of this: on the one hand, by crashing wages and robbing women of time, it makes raising a family relatively easier for those women who can afford not to work; and, since women are highly represented in regulatory functions in society, it opens the flood gates for all kinds of regulations to make life, and therefore procreation, difficult for everyone, which, in turn, also benefits the better-off. Mandatory children‘s car seats which don’t fit in older cars are a great example i heard in another place.
I learned some years ago that the northern pike is such a successful predator that most bodies of water that contain it have practically the whole upper story of their food pyramid occupied by pike eating each other.
We‘re less direct in our intraspecies competition, but the effect is the same, and after listening to this interview, I find that the attitudes about abortion and assisted dying that have been alluded to in this month‘s comment section (as well as the common attitude about contraception) are absolutely in line with the effects of regular human one-up-womanship, so to say.
Please don’t make the assumption that i somehow dislike women because of this. Every system needs its regulations, and that human population should expand through the masculine drive for status and contract through feminine manipulation seems just elegant and logical to me.
The St George flag thing in the UK seems to be a good example of “raising up” what you want to promote and ignoring your opponents – I wonder if there are occultists behind that?
@Chris at Fernglade (#184):
Among the undergraduates I taught at my university in the late 1990s and early 2000s, compromise was almost a dirty word, and to compromise on some major political issue was regarded by many almost as heinous an offense as sexual assault.
Even to predict a future resolution of some political issue that differed from what the other side demanded, was met with cries of “Why would you wand such a future? An answer of “I don’t want it, but I see it coming fast on us all anyway” was viewed as a sort of moral betrayal.
This does not bode well for the future of the USA. Compromise is the very soul of any enduring polity, since there will never be a universal set of values or morality that all people everywhere will always agree on.
“Earthworm, the notion that we’re in incarnation for the sole purpose of getting out of incarnation seems silly to me, too.”
I’ve long been of the camp that the meaning of life is to live, that is, to experience and do things, to grow and learn, and it occurred to me a couple of months of ago that this fits with the maxim “The purpose of a system is what it does”: experience, action, and their consequences are the “revealed purposes” (what actually happens rather than what’s supposed to happen) of reality.
Indeed, assuming that we come from an infinite source like many traditions say we do, the only thing it could possibly lack without squeezing itself into the limitations of incarnation is… to experience incarnation.
David R, no, if my memories are anything to go by, I was born in a farm belt state — I think it was Kansas, but I’m not sure of that — relocated to Los Angeles at the beginning of the Second World War, and lived there for the rest of my life.
Polecat, I gulp down a multiverse every morning with breakfast. Or is it a multivitamin? As for RFKJr and Tulsi, so far, so good…
Slithy, an excellent point. One practical issue is that if the vision is correct, the price of real estate (and other things buoyed up by high population) may drop sharply in the years immediately ahead. Readers who decide to take the vision seriously might have this in mind when it comes to investment options.
Eike, you know, I could see that…
KAN, it’s quite possible. It’s certainly a very clever move.
Slithy, I’m with you. Strictly speaking, I don’t think existence has a purpose; as Sri Aurobindo wrote somewhere, from one perspective the entire cosmos is just an eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden. Certainly the notion that the point of the game is to take your ball and go home is dubious at best.
@Patricia Mathews (#173):
Part of the answer to your question is that until fairly recently “civilization” was defined (by Americans) in European terms, as a particular European phenomenon, not a universal human one. And the immigrant ancestors of very many of us, until recently, immigrated here because they disliked — sometimes,. actively hated and/or feared — Europe, or more narrowly the particular European country from which they were fleeing.
Almost all of my own immigrant ancestors (English, French, Dutch, German and Danish) from 1620 to 1868 quite happily left their various national heritages, languages and cultures behind when they embarked on the ships that carried them westward across the Atlantic, and gladly embraced their new lives, wholly free from the traditions and demands of civilized life in Europe.
Geomancy report/question: over the past few weeks I have been mulling over significant-but-not-major purchase. I have cast a chart three times now about it and every time I got a chart where the figure in the either the house of the quesited or the house in company with it passes sextile or trine to the first house but also square or opposite the first house. No other mode of perfection is evident
The most recent reading has Fortuna Minor in the 1st house, and Populus in the house of the quesited, and Fortuna Major in company capitular with Populus.
Am I right in regarding this as saying, essentially, “Make up your own mind; it could be good or it could be a waste of money (presumably depending on me)”?
“…as Sri Aurobindo wrote somewhere, from one perspective the entire cosmos is just an eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden.”
That’s curious. In one of his talks, Terence McKenna attributes the following statement to Heraclitus:
The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls.
Someone even made an album of it.
https://arxyz.bandcamp.com/album/aeon-is-a-child-at-play-with-colored-balls
@Patrick #151
I’m not much good at Tarot specifically, so take this with a grain of salt, but the spread you used is one also used in divining by runes, which I have a bit of experience with. If you had cast it using runes, I would say this: You asked a yes or no question, so interpret it that way. You have two cards (Four of Wands and The World) strongly indicative of “No.” Two no’s beats one yes.
Zooming in on the details, I’d say: the first card is your Past, and one of the ways it can relate to the reading is as a past factor that leads you to ask the question. The Devil is the card of self-imposed chains: especially addictions, obsessions, and vices of every kind. It could be that in the past, in this life or a previous, you got yourself into a really bad way, and longed for release from it. This is a mistake of the same general sort that the hypothetical 6th-Planers made. You may have some lingering psychic baggage from this and JMG’s vision poked at it.
But then the second card (Present) says: that’s over now and you are able to enjoy this life and this world. The third card (Future) follows up with: you belong here and your destiny is here.
Again, take this with a grain of salt; I’m going by some very basic, little-white-booklet level understandings of the cards and some cross-over skill from another divination method.
The vision of the swarm of souls from the Etheric plane that JMG has mentioned (and repeatedly warned about it’s possible inaccuracy) lines up very closely with my own visions/experiences over the years, so I was compelled to do a bit of divination on the matter. From this, an interesting possibility came about:
The Earth’s turbulent astral environment may taken them by surprise and gave them a proper walloping. It’s possible that a good number of them couldn’t/can’t make their way back home due to being too injured and/or too affected by the Earth’s ongoing astral weather.
What gives this some credibility, in my mind, are the many different religions – spiritual and secular alike – which seem to have a obsessive focus on the demonization , and subsequent purging, of “bad” emotions, and an equal obsession with cultivating a protecting a “pure” heart full of “good” emotions. It would also make sense that Satyrs, the very spirits of uncivilized, bawdy nature, became the image of pure evil.
All that being said, when you imagine a group of people trying to drive home but their attempts keep being stymied because their neighbours are repeatedly getting into sprawling , drunken fist-fights (among other things) in the middle of the road…it’s hard not to have some sympathy for them.
@JMG
“Strictly speaking, I don’t think existence has a purpose”
I’m tempted to pull out the Thomist doctrine of analogy: no, it doesn’t have a purpose, but it has something analogous to a purpose, and that is, basically, to do the thing it does. I think the old-fashioned word telos covers this sort of pseudo-purposiveness.
“as Sri Aurobindo wrote somewhere, from one perspective the entire cosmos is just an eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden”
That’s more or less how I think about it. The divine is a child telling itself stories; and since it’s the divine, those stories count as real.
About compromise in personal matters, for many of us nowadays, one’s few hours of personal time are the only space one has for pursuing and enjoying whatever are one’s own interests, hobbies, etc. If you have, for example shivered through workdays where all the larger people keep the temp. at freezing, participated in organizations where one “leader” shouts down everyone else, been harassed on your way home because someone doesn’t like “something about you”, unspecified…me, I just want to be left alone. I stopped dating altogether after my husband died, partly because I had my girls to raise, but also because I had had enough of everyone’s else’s taste and opinions except mine were consulted.
Yep, men tend towards schizophrenia and autism and women towards depression and anxiety. Poor gals, they’re depressed over past male craziness and anxious about what men might do next.
@John Michael Greer
I might be too late to the party, but I wanted to invite you onto my podcast (formerly Zero Input Agriculture, soon to be relaunched in its second year as Recombination Nation). Past guests include David Holmgren and Ugo Bardi.
All through September and October I will be recording interviews with people who fall under to scope of biological and/or cultural experimenters working in response to the challenges of the 21st century. I would love an opportunity to converse after you have been so influential on my life. I am particularly keen to explore the idea of how culture could react to the steady and/or sudden loss of the internet as a viable technology, but open to all and any ideas.
Siliconguy 154 Vocabulary, sanitized.
Yeah – all good terms; I was wondering if there was a term beyond FUBAR but on thinking about it, because these terms originated in the military, perhaps beyond FUBAR means one is likely dead or working in an office but with a shiny uniform as a peper-pusher not a grunt amongst the dirt, oil, blood and guts. I don’t know.
Ben 155
The numbers were not illegal aliens but overall population – nontheless, a drop of some 25 to 30 percent could be up around 20 millions people – that’s an awful lot of soylent green.
II’ve seen the term but am not familiar with The Law of One
Ben: “Another point has to do with the Qabala Tree of Life. I think indeed that the tree has been corrupted over time as in Dion Fortune’s words, “The pristine stream flows ever down to the ocean gathering much on its way.”
Now that is interesting – I’ve always had ‘an inner voice’ so to speak that has directed me away from the tree of life and while I don’t have any sensible idea why, the way it came into mind is that the egregore was tainted – hence being interested in JMG’s new book if it goes back to first principles before the Abrahamic religions took it on.
I’ll need to re-read and consider what you’ve written there but STO and STS sound like terms of polarity.
Mary Bennet 156 and Michael Martin 170
The establishment are playing a very deep game – it almost seems that by enabling the rape gangs a deliberate engineering of emotions is underway. If they can deftly deflect attention to the ‘bad people’ of their choice, perhaps the hope is that their own deep misogyny may continue while the proles fight amongst themselves. A fish rots from the head – look up the current aristocracy in relation to names like Savile and Epstein.
This has been going on for a long long time but there is a risk that the gaslighting of the establishment could catch a spark and end up burning them. The clean-up job needed in the UK is on the order of an Augean Stables job. At this point I am not sure if it is possible as the corruption may have ‘progressed’ itself so far that, in the immortal words from Aliens: “I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
@ Ben #155
“The thing to keep in mind when thinking of STS [Service to Self] and STO [Service to Others], is that it is all service to God”.
This is incredibly helpful, thank you. It fits right in with the meditations I am currently having on meanings connected with the First Sphere, Awareness. (in accordance with JMG’s “Revisioning the Tree of Life.”)
@Milkyway
Regarding my experience with the election; I did it according to V. Robson’s instructions concentrating on getting beneficial aspects to our (me and my partners) respectable radical chart and 4. house rulers, and minimizing the bad aspects. One never can get the perfect chart, so I worked out the best influences I could make.
I would repeat it since I got good results, but would mirror the advice of JMG further up and make mundane chart interpretation to understand how those influences will tend to express themselves. In order to more seamlessly express them.
@Courtinthenorth
Thank you for this. Gene Logsdon looks like an amazing resource.
@JMG
(2) There are also herbal and medicinal applications to consider.
Best regards,
V
JMG 185
Thank you very much for the contents listing – very helpful
Going back to your vision:
JMG “if the vision is correct, it certainly explains why so many mystics disliked the idea of reincarnation — they wanted to get out of material bodies once and for all, since they aren’t native to this plane!”
At the same time, after a lifetime of watching and living amongst humans, it does not take a great leap of imagination to see that if this realm is the place where humans learn how to be human (or, not, as the case may be) one may grow towards other interests than emotional storms and animal desires – no need to be from another plane.
I like the idea of your vision though – it indicates that the stupidity of beings is not limited to this meatworld – the idea of transitioning to a ‘lower’ plane from a ‘higher’is plane is reminiscent of missionaries patting themselves on the back for bringing civilisation to the savages and looking down on them in smug self-satisfaction.
A billion male and female ‘Karens’ AKA Missionaries slumming it by coming to meatworld to educate the ignorant and ‘ugly bags of mostly water’, or if really stupid, build an empire – like an old sci invasion story ;).
The whole idea seems too crazy, but as you said about the dinosaur and nature having a laugh, I cannot escape the feeling that as implausible as it initially sounds, it does go some way as an explanation of the state of things. A billion bloviators come to earth and underestimating their capacities, have drowned in the world of desire and sensation, forgot their origins and circled into decadence and corruption as they sit atop a reflection of a reflection of a reflection. If so, may they return to where they should be and let this place recover some balance.
Hi everyone,
Is there an aspiring astrologer in the crowd, who would like to help me pick the best time to sign the deed for an apartment I’m about to buy? It can be for your fun and practice, or (if it’s something you’re already experienced with) for payment. Thanks!
@ Slithy Toves #190
” For others, it suggests moving toward forms of spirituality that focus on the immanence and involvement of the divine in this world. (Immanentize now and avoid the rush!).”
Well, yes, but also… indignise now and avoid the rush…
I cannot help thinking that we cannot and will not be “at home” on a planet. It is a very big place, and we are (each) very small. To be “at home” is to listen to the land speak in THIS place where we actually are, and where our feet touch the earth, and our eyes see the trees, and the bees (or whatever), and our ears hear the birds and the sounds the weather makes… and then to let that listening turn into useful communications with THIS place, THIS land, THIS ecosystem, both its biota and its theota*, in such a way as to guide our participation thereof. If we cannot step into the living dance, as it is being danced in our locality and at our own doorstep, by everything that lives (including every human being, but also including every non-human being) we will always, in some sense, remain alien there.
I have to reiterate what Mister Nobody said. As you know, I’ve been around since the early Archdruid days.
I have to thank you for all the advice you’ve given over the years on how to prepare for the Long Descent (i.e., to “collapse now and avoid the rush”).
My life is much better than it would have been had I not been exposed to your advice. And I’m sure I’m not the only one here who can say that.
* [re ‘theota’ in last comment] this usage was once, very usefully, suggested to me by JMG in a long ago comment, and I have never forgotten it.
One reason why we haven’t met other intelligent species is because they are so far away. It is difficult to imagine just how empty space really is. For instance, if you shrunk the sun to a tiny ball one millimeter in diameter, the nearest star would be another ball one millimeter in diameter, 29 kilometers away.
For the metrically challenged, if the sun were one inch in diameter, the nearest star would be one inch in diameter, 455 miles away.
(Incidentally, AI is terrible at math. As a check, I asked Google AI the distance for a 1″ sun. It told me 563 miles, which I knew was wrong, so I asked it again. This time it told me 792 miles. Some machines will never learn.)
Re “compromise” mentioned in comments by both Chris at Fernglade and Robert Mathiesen, I am often reminded of the vision of Ian Paisley thundering “NO SURRENDER”. He made any attempt at negotiation and compromise look like betrayal, to his followers. Watching his antics, many years ago, it struck me that this will always be the case when a conflict is framed in terms of principles.
Because, in a way, a principle is an important guide to many people, and to compromise one’s principles certainly feels like a betrayal to oneself. The real kicker is this – can I be the upholder of my own principles without insisting that everyone else uphold them with me? Because if I cannot, then I will never be able to negotiate, in good faith, with anyone else.
The only way to negotiate in good faith, is to reframe any conflict as a matter of [potentially, but not necessarily] conflicting interests. If both sides can plainly see the shape of their own and each other’s interests, well, all of a sudden the field of potential compromises available to us, opens up, and we find that we can probably accommodate one another’s interests to some extent, and if we can do so to an extent that makes it possible to share a space, a household, a community, a polity, then we have negotiated successfully.
PS. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but Bernie Sanders increasingly reminds me of Ian Paisley, particularly when I saw him in ranting mode during RFK Jr’s selection hearing.
Ha
“underestimating their capacities” should of course have been “overestimating their capacities”
Guess I overestimated my capacity to quickly put thoughts into words!
Overestimating self and underestimating the world of sensation and desire.
A fine reminder to self – check what I’ve written before posting!
Please excuse the other typos.
@Philip at Bushcopse #181
Re. the recent outburst of Saint George crosses and England’s national flag, I was reminded of comments by Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole after the Brexit vote in 2016.
“England seems to be stumbling towards a national independence it has scarcely even discussed, let alone prepared for. It is on the brink of one of history’s strangest nationalist revolutions. When you strip away the rhetoric, Brexit is an English nationalist movement. The passion that animates it is English self-assertion. And the inexorable logic of Brexit is the logic of English nationalism: the birth of a new nation state bounded by the Channel and the Tweed.
Over time, the main political entity most likely to emerge from Brexit is a standalone England. After Brexit, an independent England will emerge by default. This is a revolution that has scarcely spoken its own name. The English nationalism that fueled it was not explicitly on the table — it was cloaked in talk of Britain and the UK, as if those historically-constructed entities would be unshaken by the earthquake of Brexit.
The key word in the pro-Brexit rhetoric was “back” – take back control; take back our country. Insofar as there is any vision behind the revolution, it is nostalgic. There is the illusion that England will now go back to the way it used to be — a vigorous world power with a secure sense of its own identity that stands defiantly alone. It’s a used-to-be that arguably never was and that certainly is not going to be restored. In looking for security and stability, the English have launched themselves into one of the most unstable and uncertain periods in their modern history.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/18/england-eu-referendum-brexit
http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-brexit-is-an-english-nationalist-revolution-1.2697874
========
Otherwise, these suddenly appearing St. George’s crosses remind me of the crop circles phenomenon of the late 1980s. After bamboozling us for a while, the circles disappeared. Some of the public had ascribed them to extraterrestrials sending us messages. Maybe those same ET’s have now returned and are behind the current rash of Saint George’s crosses. 😉
There is a lot of squabbling over narratives in the UK right now. The establishment are shook by the closure of some asylum hotels due to local protests and even some local Labour politicians has backed this. So a completely inorganic response is needed via social media to demonise the protesters. It’s a cut and paste job that people are spreading on Farcebook and someone on my feed (a PMC woman who lives in rural Wales without an asylum hotel in sight) posted this which she obviously got from someone else who got it from someone in a Home Office PR office probably. I am only posting half of it because it’s very long as these round robin PR spiels always are:
“And here’s the thing no one wants to admit: once the “migrants” are gone, it won’t be done. You’ll just be handed the name of the next “enemy.” That’s how this script always plays out. If it’s not them, it’s Trans people. If not them, it’s women. The list never runs out. It’s not about saving the country. It’s about keeping you scared and angry enough to keep marching in circles while they profit.
So let’s call this for what it is. Britain isn’t being destroyed by migrants or minorities. It’s being destroyed by people too stubborn to see they are marching to somebody else’s drum. A drum we heard in 1933.
And that’s the part people keep dodging — this isn’t just some new, angry moment in British politics. It’s recycled. It’s borrowed straight from the same handbook used nearly a century ago, created by men I was told to always stand against. We all know how that story ends. Flags in the windows, marches in the streets, neighbours turning on neighbours. Entire races of people deemed subhuman.
And if we don’t wake up? We’re lining ourselves up to play the exact same roles all over again. History does repeat itself. And right now, we’re just before he invaded Poland.
THINK FOR YOUR F*****G SELF.”
So the protesters are all Nazis and laughably the migrants will be ‘gone’ somehow. However even this shrill nonsense is being questioned by the Guardian, sort of. The columnist calls the protesters ‘far right’ but then acknowledges that the term sadly isn’t shaming the protesters into submission anymore and even Starmer is making right wing noises on X even if it means nothing in reality but it shows he’s rattled. He then lies and says these unvetted migrants are no more likely to commit sex crimes than natives are. Musk tweeted out some very interesting stats about the huge increase in sex crimes in recent years in Europe, way ahead of population increases. I wonder what might have caused that?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/29/asylum-hotel-fascist-asylum-protests-politicians
@Siliconguy, @JMG
If we have those bipedal humanoid reptilians, maybe these unlikely dinosaurs were their pets, genetically selected for their interesting features… if someone in the future finds a Mastiff and how unlikely is this to be outthere in the wild, they can say is a nature’s prank in the archeological strata.
Why we don’t find thos humanoid reptilians fossils, burial ritual could explain, just imagine they had cremation or sky burial or also the ordinary burial who heavily degrade the body when we talk about million of years preservation.
Also
Completely random astrology question–
I know you’re familiar with Planet Narnia, the book which discusses the planetary symbolism in the Narnia series. The author’s webpage associates the planet Mercury with boxing, hence the boxing capabilities of Prince Corin in that book. But it’s the only source I know to link Mercury with boxing. Are there other sources that link Mercury and boxing that you know of?
Greetings all
JMG wrote: “Revisioning the Tree of Life.”
Presumably the practices are compatible with the Golden Section Fellowship?
Regards
Hi again!
On many occasions you have mentioned that the US global hegemony is in serious trouble and that Trump could well have been voted into office to manage a re-organisation and a down scaling of this hegemony.
According to you
(1) What are the main factors driving the US hegemony into the ground?
(2) How well is Trump managing the down scaling?
(3) Since Trump will leave office by 2028, do you think he will have accomplished much along those lines?
(4) I guess we were all surprised by the Israeli attack on Iran in June, yet, how likely would you say that another attack is on its way?
(5) Now note the following is not a trick question but rather a tricky one! To the best of your abilities, what do you think will be the state of the US around 2030 and then 2040?
(6) Given the critical phase world politics appears to be in now and its paramount importance for many of us, would you consider a post on the matter of the decline of the US empire and the concurrent rise of BRICS nations?
Thanking you in advance for your co-operation.
English – a prosaic poem-ish meditation
English is, like most languages, an unvarnished mongrel
Made of parts from Greece, Germanic tribes, Latin, plus
Norman French and later French, Arabic, various tongues
from what is now called India, and so on, which has made
It perfect for international misuse. If Americans and
Other native speakers have difficulty in getting it right,
Imagine how difficult it must be for those for whom the
Master Mongrel Language is their second tongue. And yet,
And yet, communication is possible even when the syntax
Is mangled, unlike in, say, Polish, or Russian or Japanese.
So we hear notable individuals from around the world say
Things that would embarrass a six year old native speaker.
Talk about your rough beasts slouching to Jerusalem, waiting
To be born! What of English as the world’s lingua Franca?
Dominic Cumming’s latest post had a link to an intriguing story (or stories) about antimemes that is worth having a read and made me think about some of the vision talk above: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
Re: distilling alcohol:
In my experience, the magic is in the cutting and blending. If you do a careful cutting run, you can blend an end product of superior flavor, with fewer unpleasant side effects (since you have removed the poisons). It is very hard to get this level of quality in purchased alcohol, because they do not want the costs of careful cutting and blending or the loss of product from discarding poisons and off flavors. The heads can be used as a household cleaning product or in your windshield wiper fluid reservoir (although this might be bad for the car somehow, I’ve never noticed a problem).
An interesting example of controlling the narrative in recent days; JHK’s blog today pulled no punches in discussing the Minneapolis shooting and the transexual who did it. I’d recommend reading it. The MSM, however, plays down the trans part of the story (if they mention it at all) and make this out to be all about guns and gun control. Nobody wants a discussion of transexuals, their mental health, or the not-so-wonderful effects of psychiatric meds.
JMG, why would moving to another part of the universe (another plane, …) wipe out existing karma? Karmic ties I get, but the karma of one‘s own actions? Why would karma as a balancing force not work across the universe, but instead be limited to our solar system?
Milkyway
I think there’s another very important practical implication of the set of visions we’ve been discussing: if they are true, this might be a really, really good time to form a relationship with the local gods of wherever you happen to live. There’s been some discussion that certain initiations might make souls that ought to leave get stuck; while religions like Druidry wouldn’t do it, there’s a whole panoply of pantheons which were once worshiped in specific places; and even more local gods of various sorts in most polytheistic pantheons. I think establishing a link to a specific place has a high chance of trapping souls, so it would make sense to try to minimize these risks.
The vast majority of these local religions have been flattened in the past few centuries by religions focused on a non-local set of gods (i.e., ones not bound to specific places), which makes perfect sense if the gods are trying to avoid trapping souls who don’t belong here. These local gods have still been active, but they’ve been far more selective about who they reach out to, and they’ve allowed (and maybe even caused in some cases) many of their initiatory traditions to be destroyed. This makes sense in light of the visions, because the simplest way to ensure no human who does not belong here gets those initiations is to make them much, much harder to get.
As these souls leave, these local gods are likely to want to rebuild: whatever impulses they have that made them want to work with human beings in the first place is likely still there, and so they are likely to come back into much stronger contact with us. This would seem to suggest that if the visions are true, one of the massive shifts in the years ahead we should see is a huge resurgence of religions tied to a specific place, with a lot of initiatory traditions suddenly becoming far easier to access, at least for the people who call that part of the world home.
This would also seem to suggest that right now there would be a lot of local gods looking for humans who want to help them rebuild their traditions, and they are likely to be far more willing than normal to give very powerful teachings when approached by someone who is in a position to help them rebuild what they once had before they shut things down to avoid trapping souls who do not belong here. For anyone interested in spiritual growth, this suggests that it would be wise to look closely at the traditions of where you live and see if any of the gods seem to call to you, because if these visions are true, it’s likely that a lot of those gods are stirring and looking for humans willing and able to share what they have to teach us.
Notes on hydrocarbons,
HOUSTON, Aug 28 (Reuters) – Global demand for natural gas will rise more than 20% by 2050 from last year’s level, as it displaces coal to power industries and meet higher electricity use in developing countries, Exxon Mobil said on Thursday in an annual outlook.
“Global oil demand will plateau after 2030 but remain above 100 million barrels per day through 2050, Exxon projected, consistent with its previous outlook.
Oil and natural gas will account for 55% of the global energy mix in 25 years’ time, down 1 percentage point from 2024 levels, the company said.”
As for humanoid reptiles, that would certainly be a case of parallel evolution. The split between what would be mammals and what would be reptiles, dinosaurs, and therefore birds happened in the Carboniferous period, considerably earlier than the Permian as had been thought. The other line seems to have been more evolutionarily creative but the mammals are certainly tenacious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapsida
@JMG re 5th Wednesday long post: October 29th?
Robert Mathiesen has a good point about our ancestors fleeing their civilized, hidebound homelands (or in some cases, being kicked out, though a lot of those went to Australia instead. Eric Hoffer had a lot to say about that!
@ Earthworm #205
“Now that is interesting – I’ve always had ‘an inner voice’ so to speak that has directed me away from the tree of life and while I don’t have any sensible idea why, the way it came into mind is that the egregore was tainted – hence being interested in JMG’s new book if it goes back to first principles before the Abrahamic religions took it on.”
I can confirm that I, too, have always had that “warning away” inner reaction to mentions of the Cabalistic Tree of Life. I received JMG’s new book two or three weeks ago (from an Aeon press pre-order I made back in June, so apparently thunderbirds are go, already), and have been able to read and start to work with it without getting that “warning”. FWIW. 🙂
Once again, I’m being deluged by spam — 76 posts in the spam filter just now, nearly of them from the same moron in Germany I mentioned in the opening post. If your comment didn’t get through, it may have accidentally been flagged as spam; please resubmit it.
Slithy, nope. The answer is “no, don’t do it.” An aspect isn’t enough to perfect a geomantic chart by itself, and neither is company capitular.
Kevin, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Heraclitus and Sri Aurobindo were tapping into the same reality.
Little Toad, I get the impression that they had no idea what they were letting themselves in for, and our astral environment is certainly part of that! I do feel sympathy for them — they came here with some great purpose in mind, and only in retrospect discovered that they’d made a dreadful mistake.
Slithy, I characterize arguments like that bit of Thomism as evasive philosophy. In what meaningful sense does “existence has something analogous to a purpose, which is to do what it does” differ from “existence has no purpose, and just does what it does”? You could as well claim that existence was squamous, rugose, and tentacled, and then go on to insist that of course “squamous,” “rugose,” and “tentacled” aren’t to be taken literally — oh, no, existence just has certain otherwise undefined properties analogous to these! In that case, has anything actually been said?
All of it, furthermore, rests on a false understanding of the nature of analogy. When Robert Burns wrote “My love is like a red, red, rose,” he didn’t mean that his girlfriend of the time had objective qualities similar to those of a rose — she didn’t photosynthesize, for example, and didn’t have green skin and thorns. He meant “the reactions my love evokes in me are in some ways like those that a red, red rose evokes in me.” To say that “existence has something analogous to a purpose” thus says nothing about existence; what it says is that when Thomas Aquinas contemplated existence, his subjective reactions were akin to those he experienced when contemplating something that had a purpose.
Ahem. Yes, I’ll take off my horn-rimmed philosophy nerd glasses now.
Mary, and that’s a valid choice. Just keep in mind that not everyone feels the same way.
Shane, it’s never too late for a podcast. I’ve sent you am email.
Earthworm, oh, granted. For souls native to this world, this is exactly the place where we grow toward modes of existence that extend beyond the merely animal — and indeed beyond the merely human — not by rejecting these, but by embracing them in a higher synthesis. For what its worth, btw, I don’t think of the souls from the 6th Cosmic plane as bloviators. As I noted in the comment about the original vision, they had some kind of grand project in mind; they were motivated by high ideals and a mighty hope; it turned out that they were disastrously mistaken and ended up paying a ghastly price, but that doesn’t erase the nobility of the original project. If certain occult writings are anything to go by, furthermore, their arrival here catalyzed changes in the native population of souls that will eventually be of great and positive importance.
Blue Sun, thank you! I’m delighted to hear this.
Martin, exactly. The problem with interstellar travel is that all the evidence suggests that no energy source available on any solar system is vast enough to permit manned (or alienned) travel from star to star, given the real distances involved.
Archivist, you know, that might almost explain it. The Leavemealone-osaurus might have been the equivalent of one of those really bizarre goldfish breeds created by exotic breeders…
Random, it’s a reach, and one of several weak points in Ward’s theory. Mercury rules athletic activities that are not competitive in nature. Here’s a couplet from the Orphic Hymn to Mercury:
“Great life-supporter, to rejoice is thine
In arts gymnastic and in fraud divine…”
But boxing is always competitive, and always Martial in nature. My own guess is that Lewis thought of assigning the books to the planets when he was around halfway through the whole process, as the latter books fit the planets much better than the earlier ones do.
Karim, yes, the new Cabala book is compatible with the GSF. As for your other questions, er, it would take more than one book to answer those. Fortunately I’ve written two of them — my book Decline and Fall is devoted to your first question, and that book and my book Dark Age America discuss the framework of your fifth question. I’ll consider posts on the others.
Clarke, I like the claim that English isn’t one language, it’s three or four huddled together inside an oversized trench coat. It’s frankly an appalling language, and I hope our descendants have the good common sense to scrap most of it and either create something clearer and more functional from its remains or use Mexican Spanish as the armature on which to build the language of the North American future.
KAN, huh? There are no antimemes and there never have been. 😉
Phutatorius, Jim’s not the only one. The entire populist Right has jumped on this.
Milkyway, it doesn’t erase existing karma, it just breaks karmic ties. The souls who return to their own plane will still be what they have become during their sojourn here.
Moose, that’s a good point, and also a rather spooky one, because certain initiations have in fact become much more accessible just in the last decade or so — not all of them involving obviously local gods, but all of them (that I know of) with a focus on immanent spiritual power and its effects.
Siliconguy, demand will doubtless rise, but supply? That’s another matter.
Patricia M, yes, that would be the date. As for people ditching the traditions of their former homes, that’s certainly true in my family — once the Greers got here from Scotland, most of them seem to have dropped everything Scottish like a hot rock and busied themselves becoming as American as they possibly could.
JMG, could you share what you are working on with your radionics right now?
Random thing to share from a rabbit hole I went through recently.
The Xiongnu were definitely related to the Huns, and the language they spoke was related to the present day Yeniseian languages in Siberia.
Linguistic evidence: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-968X.12321
Genetic evidence: https://www.medievalists.net/2025/03/new-study-links-huns-to-xiongnu-through-dna-evidence/
Study on the genomic history of early mediaeval Europe: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08275-2
I think some commenters either on this open post or one of the earlier posts this month were talking about how the Germanic invaders didn’t spread much of their genes into Italy, I think this study shows that there was actually substantial Scandinavian DNA found in Langobardic burials, but the modern Italian samples cluster pretty much in the same cluster as the Bronze Age and Etruscan Era inhabitants of Italy (but even in the Etruscan era, there were minor genetic components that cluster closer to Scandinavians).
I’m pretty sure I have one of these sixth plane souls, and my sense is that what happened is that we saw that human beings have various abilities which we lack, and we thought we could come here, use these abilities to improve things on both of our worlds, and then go home as soon as that was done. The problem is that we did not take into account that the human form has a radically different set of intellectual abilities than what we are used to, and so despite us finding this dirt simple in our natural forms, even the brightest human beings cannot understand whatever it is we thought we could do, and so it’s impossible. In order to do it, we have to be human, but while human we cannot understand it…..
@Patricia Mathews (#229) and JMG (#231):
Australia was more accessible for English-speakers than for other Europeans. Lots of lawless folk from other parts of Europe ended up here.
My father’s ancestry was Danish, and all four of his grandparents were born there. Two of his grandparents (sisters) came from a rather well-off family in Denmark, but they and their parents gave up on the country and its culture in the wake of the Second Schleswig-Holstein war, when Prussian and Austrian troops occupied about 3/4 of all Denmark and the brand-new King (Christian IX) then seemed to be a reactionary bumbling incompetent. So they left Denmark and all its heritage for good in 1868, right after we had cleaned up much of the wreckage from our own War between the States. A third fled Denmark with money obtained under false pretenses from the father of a girl whom he had made pregnant; he continued to be just as unscrupulous a person on our side of the Atlantic. The fourth was a sailor on a whaling ship back in the age of sail, who jumped ship in San Francisco (where there was already a large Danish community) in the late 1860s, and never looked back toward Denmark again..
And their stories were typical for immigrant Danes in the USA. Most of them actively resisted the efforts of some immigrant elite Danes (mostly clergy from the Danish National Church, as far as I can make out) to establish strong overseas bastions of Danish secular and religious culture in the USA.. This was in strong contrast to how some other immigrant communities, for example, Italians or French-Canadians in New England, worked hard to preserve as much of their ancestral culture here as they could manage.
@JMG,
“The answer is “no, don’t do it.” An aspect isn’t enough to perfect a geomantic chart by itself, and neither is company capitular.”
Good to know! Did I misread you in The Art and Practice of Geomancy or is this something you’ve changed your mind about since writing that book?
With regard to my clumsy attempt to invoke Thomism:
I must admit I see the force of what you’re saying. But let me dig into my (implicit) attempt to invoke Aristotle instead: the concept of telos as he understood it includes the ends to which natural processes are directed, inasmuch as both an intentional purpose (arising from the mind of a rational agent) and an organic “purpose” (arising directly from nature) are ends to which motion has been ordered. So an essential feature, arguably the essential feature, is shared between the two concepts.
“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.”
Please write this book JMG!
@Scotlyn #210
I kind of see what you’re saying, but I think you’re making the mistake of setting up an impossible ideal and insisting that anything less than perfection won’t cut it. I can make a similar argument that no child is ever at home with their family because sometimes they’re going to disobey and argue with their parents.
To take a page from Aristotle: sometimes we need to be content with “more or less.”
@Slithy
Thank you. I was already convinced that the tarot spread was indicating that I am to stay in this world, but your interpretation makes sense of the first card.
@Anonymoose
Re: Souls getting “stuck” here: I imagine that demons are targeting foreign souls to get them to pursue warped substitutes for transcendence so they can be trapped here or even transformed into Luciferian spirits wandering the “outer darkness” of our universe. I am thinking of what the bent eldils did to Wither’s mind following his initiation into the Inner Ring of the N.I.C.E. in That Hideous Strength. He liked setting up a persona to manage his daily affairs while the rest of his mind wandered around as one or more ghosts instilling fear into his underlings. Maybe the coming years will see the mainstreaming (and high water mark) of demonlatry.
JMG, thanks for clarifying, that’s what I thought – I might have misunderstood some of the earlier comments then. 🙂
@Vitranc #207, and thanks to you, too! 🙂
Milkyway
JMG, after a decade or so of reading your writing, you’ve finally managed to make me clutch my pearls with this one!
“It’s frankly an appalling language, and I hope our descendants have the good common sense to scrap most of it and either create something clearer and more functional from its remains or use Mexican Spanish as the armature on which to build the language of the North American future.”
English to be scrapped! Gods forbid our exuberant kludge of a language goes the way of the dodo (although admittedly even that bird might outdo it in grace).
@TylerA
I know some people who have been working for many years on turning ordinary middle class exurban houses on a few acres into what I privately think of as pocket doomsteads. I have learned that there is a lot you can do with a house you own free and clear, far more than most people realize. If you are in an area that gets enough rainfall for firewood to be produced locally and the reason you need insulation is to keep warm, you could put in a wood-fired backup furnace that can eventually become the main furnace when the price of fossil fuel takes off for the stratosphere, or there are dual-fuel furnaces that don’t require any conversion. If conditions permit, a solar greenhouse on the sunny side of the house will get you lots of free heat even if you don’t also use it to grow things. If you have a couple of acres to dedicate to a woodlot, coppicing/pollarding of appropriate species can provide you with firewood more or less indefinitely.
On the other hand, if you live where hot weather is the issue, some sort of cooling roof might be a good idea. I have a really low opinion of asphalt roofing shingles. Their useful lives are short, they don’t insulate at all and they contaminate any rainwater that falls on them. Asphalt is a petroleum by-product so its one virtue, its low price, will also be going away once petroleum is no longer cheap. A roof that will not need replacement during your lifetime, will help to regulate your indoor temperature, and will give you fresh water is one of the best investments I can think of.
If someone in your household is open to developing post-oil cooking skills, the possibilities range from solar cookers and hayboxes through rocket stoves and outdoor ovens (pizza!) to the modern low-smoke wood-fired cookstove. You could expand food storage potential by, for instance, putting in a root cellar. I’m not even going to start on household-scale food production. There are lots of books out there.
There’s also household generation of electricity using either muscle power (a piece of exercise equipment such as a treadmill hooked up to a car alternator that turns the movement into juice and puts it into a battery) or the thermoelectric effect.
I know that household biogas generators that turn human and animal waste into burnable methane (the main component in natural gas) are a thing, but one of my friends’ attempt to design and build her own didn’t work out so well. If you decide to try it, I recommend that you research thoroughly.
Finally, if you plan to live in this house for the rest of your life, then you’ll want to set up the infratructure for when you aren’t so able-bodied as you are now such as ramps and grab-rails. One of my aunts, after she began to need a wheelchair but could still stand for a few seconds at a time, had what we now call a stripper pole installed in her living room at the corner of her recliner. She could roll her wheelchair up to the pole, use it to lift herself to her feet, then rotate herself ninety degrees and let herself down into the recliner. Most expensive of all and most often forgotten, there’s the guest room that can be converted to a bedroom for a full-time caregiver. You might also, any time you do a home maintenance task, ask yourself “Will I still be able to do this when I’m 90? If not, is there some infrastructure I could put in now that would make it unnecessary?”
Hi JMG,
You’ve stated in the comment section here, and in many other places, that you expect a major civilization to arise in the Ohio River Valley some centuries from now. I’m curious to know from where you derive this notion. Is there a specific occult tradition that holds this to be the case, or is this something you have deduced based on a rational analysis, or do you have any personal visionary experiences that have led you to this conclusion?
Thanks!
@Anonymoose Canadian and others –
with reference to the story about how big companies took over music – I think that’s just one case study of a general phenomenon that has happened across the whole economy in the USA and the West in general.
It’s not the only reason for the decline of society but it’s a big part of the story – changing an economy that was decentralized and with lots of small players to one controlled by big corporations with far less competition.
I highly recommend Matt Stoller’s Substack called Big – which is basically a takedown and analysis of modern US monopolies and the legal and economic ideology that developed to promote monopolies and how regulators basically decided to deliberately not enforce anti-trust laws because they started to believe that big is good and “efficiency” from a monopoly is good etc. Stoller is a Democrat and really doesn’t like Trump but actually everything he says about monopolies and the growth of corporate power is spot on.
Even if you don’t subscribe to his Substack – I suggest going to it and sorting by “Top” and reading a few of the most popular pieces.
His book on the same subject is also excellent and traces the historical evolution of how Americans kept markets competitive and restrained the power of corporations and how those protections were dismantled over decades (his take off point is a fascinating populist Congressman called Wright Patman who was in Congress from 1928 to 1975 and led a lot of good work and how his ouster in aftermath of Watergate was the start of the movement to promote “Big”).
“Clarke, I like the claim that English isn’t one language, it’s three or four huddled together inside an oversized trench coat. It’s frankly an appalling language, and I hope our descendants have the good common sense to scrap most of it and either create something clearer and more functional from its remains or use Mexican Spanish as the armature on which to build the language of the North American future.”
Well, English is considered unusual by the standards of other European languages mainly because it was formed amidst a rougher Dark Ages than most other territories of Late Antiquity with constant waves of conquerors and near-conquerors mangling the language.
https://sjquillen.medium.com/why-is-english-so-weird-748b881ae791
https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages
Subsequently, English has no grammatical gender for inanimate objects (it used to have 3 like in Modern German), quite simple verb tenses (only “-s” for the third person singular in most cases), and no “noun cases” (in most European languages, the endings of a noun differ depending on their role in the sentence enabling flexible syntax).
Since you believe English is an “appalling” language, may I ask what constitutes a good language in your view? Must it be baroque or streamlined? Can you name examples of “good” languages in your view?
Jennifer Kobernick #89 and Elkriver #182
Thank you for your responses. We got in trouble because the only source of straw near us is Tractor Supply. The straw went into the compost bin. We got real lucky, because I stumbled across David the Good on Youtube and his videos alerted me to the problem before we put any of it on our garden. I am starting the bean growth test on it now, but I’m absolutely certain the test will come out positive for Grazon because there is not a single broadleaf weed anywhere in that straw.
I was horrified because I was counting on that compost to improve our really really bad soil. Now all I can do with it is grow corn on it [grass family]. The only other thing we can do now is buy really crappy local grass hay to use in place of straw. We found a guy, it’s way cheaper than Tractor Supply too, but the stuff is just loaded with weed seeds of all kinds, including some we don’t have here. The weeds are proof no Grazon was used, but the weed seeds are going to create a nightmare of their own.
Seems like nothing is ever simple, straightforward or easy anymore. JMG’s writings prepared me mentally that these days were coming, but the real-life of it is just exhausting.
David P., re: ballot bins
I recall acrylic (or so) boxes from the 90s and early 2000s, the bins showed up in Hamburg and Niedersachsen at some point. Where did/do you vote?
@JMG
I read the MM post and the posts here and I find this souls hypothesis intriguing not because I have my own experience with coming from other places. Interesting thing about the souls from the 6th Cosmic plane is that they can inspire and even totally influence the people that feel from here, I also feel from here but I also in a state of deep immanent trance felt we are not from here even before 6000 years ago, but not necessarily from another cosmic space but a dying planet in this Cosmos. 40000 years ago or so, I think we somehow managed to survive many light years the travel in consciousness using a sky map and I think this is one of the reason we are so astrologically bound on this planet because is the origin story of our species. I think our initial swarm was intentional here from a dying planet that’s why these souls might be more life loving and more conscious of environment.
Personally I am fascinated by what these 6th Cosmic plane people come with, but my fascination ends the moment that I cannot heal from the interaction, and then I recoil to nature.
My take is that, because we all came here we think we speak about the same “home” experience but for some home is now here and for others they have a home in other place.
This sould thing might be the way bigger brain mammals work, I wonder how the dolphins and elephants on Earth are situated relative to this whole souls story.
Maybe a few millions ago the swarm that were animating those 2 bipedal, thumbed dinos, had to leave this planet and they just returned. I think the Sun has to do something with projecting these swarms across time.
Your concept of the Outworlder invasion captured my imagination so completely that I expanded on it in this week’s article, and the response has been really good so far. I posted the caveat that it doesn’t matter how accurate the information is, but how useful it is as a myth. To me it’s been extremely useful as someone who was raised by a self-described alien in the liberal martyr cult. That part was omitted because he reads my Substack sometimes and suffers enough already, but I did mention how liberating it has been to be able to finally let go of the foreign programming that I was subconsciously attempting to integrate into my philosophy out of a misguided sense of loyalty. I also compared the agony of the Outworlders to jellyfish who beached themselves on a sharp reef on an outgoing tide in order to advance their evolution, and the fact that they have made destroying traditional gender roles one of their central themes probably means they don’t have sexes and find the concept repulsive. I just want to say a tremendous thank you for sharing this story and let you know it has restored my agency. While I wish this happened back in my 20s and 30s but it’s still better late than never. On the other hand I might never have found occultism and missed out on the profound opportunities of this Lovecraftian slice of history.
https://naakua.substack.com/p/you-gotta-fight-for-your-right-to
Re. the English language
Personally I have a soft spot for it, as a non-native who’s done a fair bit of reading and writing in it. The aesthetics of language are of course as subjective as any other aesthetics, but from my perspective you’re surprisingly hard on it as someone who’s both a self-admitted patriot with a fondness for American culture and as an author who wields it as beautifully as you do. The orthography is a terrible, no argument there, but I wouldn’t say it’s any worse than the likes of French or Japanese. As for whether it’s “clear” or not, I tend more towards the mainstream linguistic position that every natural language can express every human concept, just in slightly different ways, and so can’t be more or less “functional” or “clear”. I know you probably disagree and that’s of course your right.
My problem with the English language is more how it threatens to supplant or at least overshadow my native tongue, but I have no quarrel with the language itself and find it beautiful in its own way. Still, mileages may vary as always…
@ earthworm #150
One of my favorite “doomer”/deep green/whatever you want to call it writers, Chris Smaje, has done some very interesting thought exercises and calculations about how Britain could potentially feed itself it it wanted to. The details are in his book, but you can find a good outline of the argument here: https://chrissmaje.com/2021/06/whats-in-a-number/
Regardless of whether you agree or not, you might find this worth a read.
@ Anonymoose Canadian #227
That’s an intriguing perspective. It also feels relevant to me as a Scandinavian practitioner of the Heathen Golden Dawn. In fact, I’ve been pondering this for a while now, to what extent these Gods could still be said to be “local” here. In one sense the modern Heathen religion feels very globalized, and also with a center of gravity in North America. In another sense, I regularly drive through places in my region that still bear the names of Heathen gods that were worshipped there (just for one example). Either way, I find your theory heartening, and I’d be honored to play some small part in the kind of restoration you mention. That’s an idea I’ve always loved, even back when I was an atheist and thought it was awesome that practicing Heathens actually existed, even if I still counted myself as a materialist back then. Thanks for this.
“Phutatorius, Jim’s not the only one. The entire populist Right has jumped on this.”
It appears to me that the attempts to steer the narrative away from one (unacceptable) track and onto another (acceptable) track is unusually transparent in this case; which makes it especially educational to watch.
Alvin, I’ve recently obtained three sets of vitic rods — one solid copper and zinc, one hollow copper and zinc, and one carbon and rod magnet — and am exploring their effects to get some sense of the technology. I’ve already gotten fairly good at Eeman circuits and of course the Hieronymus machine, and I have a set of Kilner goggles with genuine dicyanin filters on order.
Anonymous, that makes a certain amount of sense.
Slithy, it’s something I’ve learned from experience after writing the book. As for teleology, so noted, but saying “the telos of the universe is to do whatever it does” is an unfalsifiable claim, and arguably meaningless. Have you ever seen a cat do a really clumsy move, pick itself up, shake itself, and put on a ruffled but unmistakable air of “I meant to do that”? The sort of teleological argument you’re offering reminds me intensely of that. Again, if teleology is impossible to distinguish from sheer stupid chance, does the concept of telos really mean anything at all in that context?
Jed, one vote duly tallied. 😉
Jennifer, one way or another, within a millennium or so our current language will be as outmoded as Old English is today. No doubt it’ll survive as a language studied by scholars, probably in India.
Balowulf, the Ohio river valley has already hosted two civilizations — the Hopewell and Mississippian cultures, as they’re called by archeologists these days. Both were successful urban agricultural societies, which developed rich artistic traditions. It’s a good location for an urban agricultural society, and it’s strategically placed at the middle ground between the Great Lakes (with their access to the Atlantic via the St. Lawrence seaway) and the Mississippi valley (with its access to the Gulf of whatever-they’re-calling-it-these-days via the delta). There are occult traditions that predict the rise of a civilization in America around 2600 AD, and yes, I’ve also had visionary experiences. So it’s pretty much “all of the above.”
David R, good languages don’t require spelling classes — they’re written more or less the way they sound — and have clear, straightforward grammar, as shown (for example) in regular or mostly regular plurals. They have an ample vocabulary with adequate room for shades of meaning, without requiring a shelf full of dictionaries. They also make clarity easy and confusion a little less easy — I note, for example, that everyone I know who’s learned an inflected language can think more clearly than English monoglots. (Latin used to be legendary for its effect on thinking, for exactly this reason.)
Archivist, interesting. It wouldn’t surprise me if such things have happened more than once.
KVD, hmm! I’ll take a look at it.
BorealBear, I make my living from English but I can’t claim to like it. It always feels to me as though I’m trying to repair plumbing with a set of tools intended for carpentry, or something like that. I disagree with the mainstream position you cite, btw — to my mind, the Sapir-Whorff hypothesis seems more valid. You might find it interesting to read the thoughtful if whimsical exploration of that hypothesis in Jack Vance’s SF novel The Languages of Pao. As for American culture, we don’t have a language of our own yet; as with so many other things, we’re still saddled with hand-me-downs from Europe.
Phutatorius, granted — and the pushback is also entertaining.
@ Slithy Toves #237
“I think you’re making the mistake of setting up an impossible ideal and insisting that anything less than perfection won’t cut it.”
I’ll admit, at first your reply mystified me. I could not relate it at all to what I was *thinking* when I wrote my comment. 🙂 Of course, then I reread my own comment and quickly realised that its final “if/then” sentence certainly might have come across like that (setting an impossible ideal). Actually, what I wanted to say was already said, and the last sentence could easily be dispensed with.
(That said, I have often wondered about the way in which many of us are being raised to live as perfect strangers to the *place* in which we grow up, and to live there as if we were recently arrived refugees, who cannot identify any plant or animal even if we see it daily on our own doorstep. So that is how that final sentence got there. And having written it, I added a parenthetical qualification, to make clear that I am not conceiving of a “place” as only consisting of the non-human life that dances – or eats – or fights – or whatever – there. “Nature” is not, in my book, “all life other than human life”. Human life is also part of nature. Whatever nature is, we are.)
Still, what I was mostly trying to do was to riff on your totally apt word “immanentise” – which I agree is a direction towards which “home-bound” beings will orient towards – and simply add that “indigenise” – by which I mean get friendly with the local biota, as well as the local theota – also works. 🙂
English is indeed something of a linguistic hybrid, but hybrids often have more vigor and resilience than their pure-stock kindred. English seems to me to have this hybrid vigor.
To get a little more technical about the relevant linguistics, when populations with mutually unintelligible languages live together in the same territory, ad-hoc means of communication develop out of necessity, and eventually become systematized as a new language. At first this new language is nobody’s native language: all the people who use it have other languages as their native languages. Such new languages are called “pidgins” by linguists. In many cases, with the passage of time, some families (usually of mixed parentage) use this pidgin with their own children, and those children have it as their native language. When that stage comes, linguists call the resulting languages “creoles.” Eventually it can become the dominant language of some region, as for instance in Haïti. This is a fairly common phenomenon when populations mix, which linguistic anthropologists have carefully observed as it is happening over time. This, obviously, is a wholly different sort of process than when a language simply borrows individual useful words from other languages. Individual borrowed words don’t change the grammatical structure of a language., but creolization has its most striking impact on the grammars of tits several ancestral languages,
The classical model of linguistic history, originating in the 19th century, works with the descent of several languages from a single common ancestor, as for example, Spanish, Catalan, Provencal, French, Italian, Romanian, etc. are all descendants of Latin. During the second half of the 20th century, however, languages with multiple ancestors came to be studied more and more, and which led to the development of theories about pidgin and creole languages.
Modern English clearly has multiple native languages as its direct ancestors (Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, French) as well as a sort of “zombie” ancestor in Medieval Latin. It’s a fairly extreme and recent example of the development of a creole language in Europe, that is, a hybrid language.
The process by which a creole language is formed is not at all like what happens when a single language borrows individual words from other languages. Borrowings have little or no impact of the language’s grammar, whereas the processes that yield a creole language usually has a large impact on the grammars of its several ancestral languages, often (not always) in the direction of simplification.
Apologies for all the technicalities, which I know will bore some of the commenters here, but it strikes me as useful (though uncommon) knowledge.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/wfwz6a/number_of_cases_on_nouns_in_languages_around_the/
Regarding your comment on inflected languages, I suppose that means that the Uralic, Mongolic, Koreanic, Japonic, Caucasian, Andean, Basque, and Australian Aboriginal languages allow one to think most clearly according to the map above.
Old English of a thousand years ago used to have a lot more inflections on nouns and verbs.
What do you think of tonal languages like Chinese and Vietnamese?:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/w6kywr/tonal_and_pitch_accent_languages/
Greetings JMG,
I am thinking that the immediate threat faced by Western countries is not peak oil or global warming, it is economic competition by China and South East Asian countries: the share of industry in the economy in China, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam is around 38 % ! , while it is only 18 % in the USA , France , the UK , and workers do longer hours there (which I am not advocating for ) .
Also, Japan and South Korea will not join the next NATO summit as they are strengthening ties with China.
There is still lots of abundance left in G7 countries, but it is getting much harder and the mood is not good at all. I actually think being all negative and unpleasant to others only makes it worse. Let’s do the decline with dignity 🙂
JMG,
I will say that trying to explain certain aspects of English to my toddler is rather dismaying! I must also agree with you about spelling; I remember finding both Spanish and the Japanese syllabaries almost suspiciously phonetic when I learned them (although Japanese receives major demerits in terms of readability and transcribability for the kanji, fond though I am of them in some ways). I hope those future Indian scholars of English have fun! (And also a high frustration tolerance.)
Hey JMG
On the subject of languages, it’s been my suspicion that any future languages spoken in Australia will most likely be heavily based on English or Indonesian, with much influence from the various immigrant’s languages such as Chinese or Hindi. There may be aboriginal influences as well but I’m not as sure, since most aboriginal peoples seem to be on their last legs culturally.
A little known fact is that a handful of English creole dialects are already spoken in Australia, called “Kriol”. They are used by many aboriginal communities around central and the northern parts of Australia, and are heavily influenced by the local aboriginal languages. I consider them all a glimpse into what a future Australian English-derived language could sound like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Kriol
And on the subject of creating a better, clearer language, have you heard of the conlang “Lojban”? It was created to be as unambiguous and logical as possible, and based on the six major world languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
@JMG (#251):
Many thanks for mentioning the sadly neglected Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. My own work with languages — I have studied about a dozen in some depth — has convinced me of its basic truth: the structure of a language’s grammar strongly influences the habitual thought of its speakers. (Note the emphasis on “habitual” here.)
IMHO, any serious practical work across widely varying cultures — for instance, practical diplomacy, or theorizing about geopolitics or economics on a global scale — cannot succeed unless it takes into account how habits of thought in different countries with different native languages differ significantly.
(I have posted PDFs of Whorf’s two most important papers on this theme to archive.org for whoever may be interested. Their titles are “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language” and “Language, Mind, and Reality.” Like Jung, Whorf was a life-long occultist as well as a scientist, so his second paper will be somewhat hard going for non occultists.)
Addendum to my most recent comment:
Whorf’s second article that I mentioned was first published in The Theosophist, a journal put out by the Adyar branch of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. The version of his article that is more widely available, in Whorf’s Selected Writings (1956), was subject to silent editing that mildly distorts what Whorf was saying. (This was the work of the volume’s editor, John B. Carroll, who was not an occultist.) What I posted on archive.org is the original text of the article.
Let’s continue with the implications of the interaction between the two souls, because it leads in a somewhat interesting direction in light of the Lemurian Deviation. Taking the Lemurian Deviation at face value means that it is possible to establish a semi-permanent connection between two planes. The billion or so souls from the sixth plane will have acquired karma with the souls native to here; if these visions are right I am almost certainly one myself, and I have loved ones here; and others in my family are almost certainly from this sixth plane as well, and I have no doubt they will be cheering as the leave; but they will be leaving behind friends and family here. This seems like a recipe for creating a strong bond between the worlds; but the evidence seems to suggest that it will be a fairly clean break.
It is worth asking how a clean break can happen, given the evidence found in the Lemurian Deviation. Well, the removal of initiations in order to ensure souls that want to go can would help; so too would a method for souls that are too tied with the other group to be able to let go to stick with the “wrong” world: the small number of human souls leaving and a small number of alien souls staying then would help avoid karmic ties crossing between our planes, and avoid intense longing which might make further interactions more likely. As I see it though, there are at least two other necessities: the first is a method of burning off the karmic ties between those souls that will remain and the ones that will leave, and the second is a way to convince the souls remaining that they will be better off without the souls leaving, to avoid a situation where the souls remaining try to reopen contact to reestablish contact with loved ones who’ve left.
The horrors of the last few centuries make a lot of sense if they are in part intended to burn through large amounts of karma as fast as possible; while the fact that the world has been powerfully reshaped into alien forms by ideologies that seem inhuman would serve to convince a lot of the souls remaining that without this influence, things will be better because they will be more human. It may be that part of the process to avoid a repeat of the Lemurian Deviation was for the gods to temporarily allow the souls who don’t belong here, and especially the ones who really can’t deal with it, a great deal of latitude to try to remake Earth in the image of home, because this way when we leave those who remain will not mourn for their departed loved ones, but instead breath a collective sight of relief that we’re gone.
Just checking in to let everyone know I’m still around. I’ve had a very busy, eventful couple of months here, and am hoping things can calm down a bit so I can participate more in these wonderful comment festivals that JMG hosts. I will say that I especially found the past month’s posts (since July 30) very thought provoking and if I had more time, would have been all over them in the discussions.
Now with the intro out of the way, onto the continuing roll out of societal collapse.
Stores continue to shutter, and not only in mega cities. Is a retail desert developing on South Bend’s west side?
https://www.wndu.com/2025/08/28/is-retail-desert-developing-south-bends-west-side/
South Bend’s County City Building is falling apart, necessitating local government moving into different buildings: the county offices looking at former Studebaker buildings and the city into what was originally the school corporation’s headquarters. The school corp. had to move as they couldn’t afford it anymore with more students being withdrawn by parents and sent to better schools elsewhere. The County City Building was ranked #63 on the US ugliest buildings list.
https://www.wndu.com/2025/07/14/st-joseph-county-officials-debate-selling-county-city-building-moving-into-former-studebaker-building/
https://www.wndu.com/2025/07/24/renovations-nearly-complete-south-bends-new-city-hall/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/south-bend-one-ugliest-buildings-085614955.html
Even small town Indiana has problems maintaining public buildings. Kosciusko County Justice Building is temporarily closed due to damage.
https://abc57.com/news/kosciusko-county-justice-building-temporarily-closed-due-to-damage
Local governments impose more taxes to qualify for more state dollars. Can’t pass up the bucks; have to pave those streets somehow.
https://www.inkfreenews.com/2025/08/29/evansville-approves-wheel-tax-tell-city-delays-decision/
https://www.inkfreenews.com/2025/08/28/wheel-excise-taxes-taking-effect-for-goshen-and-plymouth-drivers/
And data centers continue to be built. “Leaders hope to lay the groundwork for safer and more sustainable development.”
https://www.inkfreenews.com/2025/08/29/st-joseph-county-signs-water-sewer-agreement-for-data-center/
Plus, I saw a comment about Princess Cutekitten. I know she, like I, had cut back on how often she posts. Has she been totally absent for a while? This is what I miss when I can’t get through all the comments each month!
Joy Marie
And now on a more whimsical note….
If rings of mushrooms crop up on your turf, is there something magical going on?
https://www.inkfreenews.com/2025/08/28/is-there-something-magical-going-on-in-my-lawn/
I knew someone who had rings of darker green grass pop up in her back yard once. She had city water and sewage, so it couldn’t have been from, say, a septic tank. (Was it columnist Irma Bombeck who had a book titled ”The Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank”?) So why do these rings appear? Notice the article doesn’t give a reason. Guess science doesn’t know everything?
Joy Marie
Mr. Greer wrote –
“everyone I know who’s learned an inflected language can think more clearly than English monoglots. (Latin used to be legendary for its effect on thinking, for exactly this reason.)”
An astonishing claim that I have heard before, but it is probably impossible for you to produce any objective evidence for this. I write as somebody who learnt Latin aged 13 at an English grammar school and loved it. But does that mean that I can’t think properly when I’m speaking my own language (English)? Of course not.
Yes, English spelling is quite bizarre. Logically, “bomb”, “comb” and “tomb” should rhyme, but they don’t, and in any case none of them is pronounced with a “b” sound at the end. Then there are all those silent “e”‘s, as in “definite”, “rhyme”, etc., and other silent letters in “would”, “should”, “douGH”, “deBt”, etc. And why do we need to spell homonyms differently? “Do YOU see that EWE by the YEW tree?”
Then there are the variant spellings of the “ee” sound: we, see, sea, key, ski, receive, believe, people, phoenix.
English spelling of proper names and demonyms often irritates me: Portuguese; Kyrgyzstan, Czech. And the English often choose to spell their children’s names weirdly: Johnathan, Aisleyne (pronounced “Ashleen”), Aoibh instead of Eve, etc.
English does not always differentiate between a noun and its related verb, meaning that I cannot always understand a headline straight off, though it is good for puns: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana”. But the lack of inflected forms in English, where it does not cause ambiguity, does make the language easier to learn.
As for Mexican Spanish, a Spanish person once told me that his language’s use of the same word for “his”, “her” and “their” (su / sus) was “stupid”.
JMG, I am quite well aware that most others don’t feel, or think, as I do. I have after all been a certifiable weirdo for going on 6 decades now. Howsomever, about the umpteenth time someone just can’t staand something I happen to like–classical music, jazz, reading about history–after I have patiently participated in their preferences and obsessions, I do begin to wonder if there is not something else going on besides dislike of compromise.
I like writing English sometimes in its more Germanic spoken form, so like German you can write it as one word things like Girlscouttroop , Semitruckdriver, and Touristsoffice. It can get a lot of fun and suddenly English looks far more like German and Dutch.
I think that’s where some of the problems arise, in that the vernacular English spoken is mostly in its original Germanic way, whereas it’s written in a Romance fashion.
@Alvin #232: Thank you very much for the link to the Scheidel et al. paper on early medieval genomics! It was well worth the read. I was especially struck by the clear separation of the Scandinavian, British and Italian samples from the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, while all individuals from Portugal to Slovakia were quite similar to each other.
Just one point: the 6th century AD burials they call Longobard were from modern Hungary (p. 122), i.e. from a region that historians suppose was mostly settled by Germanic-speaking groups at that time – Langobardi, Heruli, Rugii and others. A part of these Longobards then invaded Italy at the end of the 6th century AD, at a time when it was quite decimated after the Gothic wars.
Their Italian samples show a lot of variation (Fig. 3d), with some admixture from what they consider Scandinavian DNA already in the first centuries AD, so probably slaves, veterans or civilian immigrants from Central and Northern Europe, and some more people with Scandinavian admixture, but still clearly a minority of all Italian samples, in Late Antiquity and early Middle Ages, none of them predominantly Scandinavian. Those traces have basically disappeared from modern Italians.
It is also fascinating how Scandinavians became miscigenated in the Viking Age, doubtless from slaves brought home!
PS: should have read “the clear separation of the Scandinavian, Eastern European and Italian samples from the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, while all individuals from Portugal to Slovakia and Britainwere quite similar to each other”.
@Joy Marie,
mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi that are there the rest of the time. From time to time, often after rain, the fungus fruits, and you get mushrooms. Certain species like to do this in rings. If they’re present in people’s lawns, then that’s where they’ll leave their ring.
JMG, I’m curious about your experience with Eeman circuits. Have you tried both copper and silk? Did you use the original pattern (with squares under head and hips, connected to hands, plus something at the feet) or the final version that just has hands crossed to feet (and maybe something up the spine, I can’t recall)? I’d be curious to know what you perceive. I’m not sure I got more (from an “original-pattern” screen) than I’d get from just lying down for a little while anyway, and haven’t gotten around to trying either the 2nd variation or the silk version.
David P. yeah, I’m leaning toward something similar (chuck the old things, keep the distillation) … still mulling it over, though. Good luck with the astrology!
Jennifer Kobernik – not sure why it came as such a surprise to hear your technical advice about distilling, but that wasn’t a skill you’d ever let on about having! – sounds like you know what you’re talking about, so I wonder if you can point to some good sources for learning. Beginner level – because I honestly wasn’t fully sure I understood what you were talking about (specialized vocabulary), but maybe it’s a good thing to pick up.
Also, thanks for the heads up about Charlotte Mason -based homeschooling. I’m rather intrigued by it (my daughter is intending to homeschool and based on my reading of one or another of Mason’s books and my poking about online at Amblesideonline, I suggested it. I wonder if you decided to go in that direction.
@ Karim #221
I don’t know about Trump managing the decline of US hegemony but he certainly is presiding over it.
The NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia has failed. The US carrier group in the Red Sea got chased out with its tail between its legs by the Houthis. The US provided a lot of support for the Israeli attack on Iran to no avail. The Iranian counterattack did so much damage to Israel that they had to beg for a cease fire.
Things have changed.
Robert M, oh, granted! English is what happened when a Germanic-Celtic creole called Old English creolized with a Germanic-Romance creole called Norman French, gobbled up a lot of medieval Latin, and then became the language of a global empire and absorbed loan words from some very large fraction of the other languages on Earth. In the words of one of Kipling’s dialect poems, it’s “a sort of a giddy harrumphrodite” of a language.
David, that’s a generalization I’m unwilling to make. All I know is, again, that the people I know who’ve learned an inflected language seem to think more clearly than those who just know English.
Tony, where do you get the idea that we’re only facing one immediate threat right now?
Jennifer, I suspect that if you happen to visit Mumbai or Kolkata in 3600 AD, and go to the right quarter of town, you’ll find old stone buildings where the members of the Angrejee Vishvavidyalay (English academies) meet over endless cups of strong sweet coffee to discuss, in vast and courtly detail, the use of adverbs in the novels of Jane Austen, and equally abstruse topics.
J.L.Mc12, the attempt to make artificial languages is a classic Faustian fantasy — real languages are organic creations, not manufactured artifacts. Still, a lot of work and some real genius has gone into some of the artifacts.
Robert M, oh, agreed. It’s possible for someone who has a powerful intuition of some meaning not well expressed in his or her language to wrestle the language into submission and say something improbable with it — that’s one of the ways that a language grows. Most people never do this, however.
Anon, all of this seems quite reasonable.
Joy Marie, good to see that you’re still with us. Many thanks for the data points!
Zemi, I don’t know of any way to prove it, either, but it reflects my experience. Based on what I’ve witnessed, btw, the fact that you learned Latin likely changed and clarified the way you think, and not just in Latin.
Mary, granted. I tend to negotiate such participations in advance — if somebody likes something I don’t, I may arrange to opt out, and cheerfully allow them to opt out of something I do that they don’t like. But your mileage may vary, of course.
PumpkinScone, quite possibly so! I think also of the weird way we turn adjectives into nouns — submarine, for example, from “submarine boat.”
TemporaryReality, I haven’t tried silk. My set is copper, and it comes with enough screens and copper grips to do both patterns — I prefer to do the original pattern with crossed ankles, but have experimented with both. I get more relaxation and a noticeable improvement in minor health issues (sniffles after being caught in a rainstorm, etc.) from using them from just lying down.
“Jennifer, I suspect that if you happen to visit Mumbai or Kolkata in 3600 AD, and go to the right quarter of town, you’ll find old stone buildings where the members of the Angrejee Vishvavidyalay (English academies) meet over endless cups of strong sweet coffee to discuss, in vast and courtly detail, the use of adverbs in the novels of Jane Austen, and equally abstruse topics.”
I’d be surprised that such cities would still exist then and not be underwater.
Do you think those areas of India will be relatively wealthy and “civilized” in the post-industrial world of then? How would they describe the British Isles of their time? Perhaps they will regard the period in history when India was ruled from that part of the world as an amusing aberration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_ring
I have those. The mushrooms will show up when the fall rains start. Some of them are edible, some are not, or maybe I should say only edible once.
A mushroom test kit would be very useful.
@JMG#271 and Homer – well, gymnastics can be pretty competitive, but no, it’s not martial. I’d also figure Mercury for running – track & field in general?
On the kludgy nature of English – the go-to book is McWhorter’s “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.”
My older brother, who graduated from High School in 1960 was required to take Latin. My mom, born in 1921, also had to take Latin in HS. She never forgave them for making her do it. She said they used to say, “Latin is a dead language and it’s killing us.” Me? I graduated in 1965. No Latin requirement; not even available as an elective. There are also people who don’t think teaching math/algebra is of any value. I disagree with them.
The mingling of topics on this week’s post is reminding me that there are a dedicated, albeit small, group of people maintaining the Anglish project; That being English with much of the Latin, Greek and French influences stripped out. As they describe it: “Anglish is how we might speak if the Normans had been beaten at Hastings” and
“Anglish is a sheerer tongue, free of outborn sway, with English words being more worthy and upheld over outlandish words.” I don’t see it ever being fully viable, functional alternative, but it certainly has it’s charms.
This also serves as a reminder that there are an uncountable multitude of forces and influences -past and present- pushing and warping our cultures. It’s tempting to put the brunt of the blame on foolhardy Etheric outsiders, but alas, sometimes it’s The French
I couldn’t code at all in my early twenties. Then I went to Japan, learned Japanese, and in my thirties, I somehow end up being the top student in all of my coding classes despite going to a top tech school and being surrounded by engineers ten years my junior.
So I definitely think learning languages heavily influences the way you think, and not just in the target language. It rewires your brain.
Building off my comment in 260, if the world is in such a mess right now because we are rapidly burning off karma in order to minimize ties across the planes and the gods are allowing the interlopers who can’t cope with Earth free reign to try to remake this world into the world they come from, then this suggests the coming population decline is going to be very, very steep.
Not just are some billion souls leaving incarnation, but if the gods are arranging things to minimize karma crossing the boundary between planes and trying to show the souls remaining why mourning this alien influence is a bad idea, then a very large percentage of the souls remaining behind have to experience this mess. This means that a very large number of humans need to exist right now, because they need the experiences happening now; but once the alien influence leaves, then they won’t need to remain incarnated.
Given that a lot of pathologies today seem to plausibly relate to souls having been incarnated too often without proper gaps, it stands to reason that as soon as the need to keep so many souls in incarnation vanishes, a lot of human souls are going to leave incarnation in a hurry, and likely for quite some time.
I admire you for writing with such clarity in English if you find it uncongenial for hard thinking! I can only say that most of my favorite prose writers, and some of my favorite poets, wrote in English, and that is why it has my affection.
At university, my classmates and me all preferred to buy chemistry and biology textbooks in English or translated from English, since they were much clearer than the German ones. We had the impression that the German authors of textbooks wanted to impress their colleagues, not teach students.
On the other hand, it is so easy to write convoluted and ugly German that if somebody manages to avoid those traps and to write sentences that are both straightforward and beautiful, they will probably be well thought out, too.
I am not sure Latin is particularly suited to philosophy by nature since it is difficult to form new abstract terms in it. It had to be wrangled. But at least it sounds beautiful, more so than Attic Greek, the language most suited for philosophy that I know of.
@Little Toad #276 re Anglish: Most of the Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings is quite near to that ideal, though with notable exceptions for certain characters, especially when courtly love is involved. I am not sure how many imitators noticed that.
Hey JMG
True, pretty much all Conlangs are doomed to failure in terms of getting used by more than a handful of people. Nonetheless, I do have a soft spot for them since, as you said, much work and genius sometimes goes into them. It can be amazing to see what people have created.
For example, are you familiar with “Ithkuil”? It was created by John Quijada to be the most complex, unambiguous and information-dense language he thought was humanly possible. What would require a sentence or two to say in English, can be said with a word or two of Ithkuil. Of course, the language is so complicated that it is unlikely that most humans could learn it thoroughly, or use it to its fullest potential.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil
Also, I may as well ask if you have a favourite conlang? I assume maybe one of Tolkien’s creations?
I actually read Three Worlds, the book which set out the Jehovah’s Witness claims the world would end in 1914, years ago, and just had a very, very, very weird thought about this. The book predicted judgement would come, and a “Day of Wrath” in 1914 because God would find the nations of the world lacking; so he would clear away the world’s leaders. Once this finished, the Kingdom of Heaven would be established here on Earth. Well, 1914 saw the start of World War I, which would destroy the majority of the world’s leadership. Meanwhile, if the weird parts of this vision suggesting that both the Christian idea of heaven and the Progressive ideologies which dominated in the aftermath are being driven by these alien souls, then in a way these progressive states might be The Kingdom of Heaven.
In a truly weird way then, this prophecy may actually have been fulfilled, but in a way that looks radically different from what anyone would have expected from the surface reading of the prophecy…..
Good day all!
Reading the comments, I have inferred that JMG recently had an interesting “vision”? If so, could somebody link me to details; I’d love to hear about it. If I’ve got the wrong end of the stick, apologies for the time wasting 🙂
TemporaryReality: for distilling I recommend both https://homedistiller.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page and the youtube how-to videos (as opposed to his click-bait videos) of “Still It”
In other news, Charles Hugh Smith has just published a book called, “The Myth of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century”. I have no idea if it’s any good, but at least someone is willing to call Progress a myth out loud.
Hi JMG,
Thank you for your reply
Well ‘immediate threat’ may not have been the right choice of words. I meant that I think this is the cause of the economic decline of the West. In essence we have to share resources with another region of the world, which in a sense is more just.
I came back living in Europe last year, after 20 years of being mostly in other places. I thought yesterday that the state of consciousness has degraded a lot in people and society. There are more animal-states, hostility, closed-mindedness, mental-health problems.
I think many people still believe in the myth of economic growth, and progress, and this is disapointing to most now.
We would need to create more useful myths.
To mention a fun one, we could all believe in the myth of eating delicious food, making intellectual discoveries, helping other people for free 5 % of our time, living sustainably with little material resources.
Kind Sir,
interesting discussion about the vision reported by anonymoose canadian.
I had a few thoughts myself.
1) it has a bit the taste of scapegoating. We did alright until those billion yobbos from another plane turned up and messed it all up. When they finally pull up stumps we’ll be alright again.
2) a bit like the baby boomers? again a billion souls turn up from nowhere. At some point in their lives they have grand idealistic plans and will make life better for everyone. Turns out they are not as smart as they thought they were. So they change plan, create an unholy mess and everyone will breath a sigh of relief when they get back to wherever they came from and leave us with to clean up after them (for the record this is not necessarily my opinion of baby boomers. Some of my best friends are boomers. Just something that seemed to lurk in the discussion).
3) If the vision is correct, this would explain the “into this world we’re thrown” attitude of existentialism. A philosophic position that never made much sense to me. I was not thrown into this world. I grew out of it and am a tiny part that has every right to be here and enjoy this truly amazing thing we somewhat unimaginatively call reality until I am absorbed again. I never felt out of place in this world. The natural one that is. I felt exhausted, mystified, humiliated, humbled, bemused, amused and all other kinds of mused, overwhelmed by its sheer beauty, scared by its sheer power, disgusted by its sheer brutality. But never out of place. How could I? I am here.
Different thing with society. This i can take or leave, but that is both spatially and temporally so small it hardly matters in this context.
And if existence has no identifiable purpose and is mostly incomprehensible to me, I still greatly enjoy it.
In fact, I’d go as far as saying existing is the best thing I ever did.
Scotlyn 230
That is very interesting too – thank you.
I’ve spent the last few years exploring a few metaphors and it has led me in some unexpectedly fascinating and seemingly rewarding directions. My plan at the moment is to use the table of contents for the book as a meditation/divination – hold it like an object in mind and see what comes out of that.
JMG 231
“For what its worth, btw, I don’t think of the souls from the 6th Cosmic plane as bloviators.”
Indeed that was perhaps too harsh but coined on the basis of where we are rather than where we might have been. And obviously I don’t exclude myself from that – I’ve often thought that humanity seems to be a very poor mammal adaptation for this world – no proper fur, very easily damaged, no proper teeth or claws and young that are helpless for a long time; maybe the billion souls turned out to be humanity.
“…but that doesn’t erase the nobility of the original project.”
Granted; but it’s a venerable story arc that has its own cliche: ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’. Like those driving the covid response – ‘for the greater good’ and ‘we thought we were doing the right thing’, a noble idea does not necessarily make it a good one, especially if through the shift from one plane to another the ‘translation’ of the noble idea or Ideal gets distorted through reflection and then hit with the intoxicating intensity of this realm and the limitation of meat body perceptions. Add getting sucked into the wheel of reincarnation for 6,000 years and ending up here and now seems like the icing on the cake of a tough lesson.
“furthermore, their arrival here catalyzed changes in the native population of souls that will eventually be of great and positive importance.”
As they say, all roads lead to the Absolute.
‘Eventually’ for an eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden could be quite a while; but I keep coming back to the prosaic – choose what to do and make the effort now – beyond that it is the hands of the Divine.
Aside – just read Rasselas Prince of Abbysinia and it almost seemed in the style of Sufi teaching stories; do you know if Samuel Johnson had any occult connections? One tale is that he wrote it in a week to pay for his mother’s funeral or something – now, even if he got some of the ideas out of translating a travel guide, it struck me as having more to it than one might have expected.
JMG #271 wrote…
“.L.Mc12, the attempt to make artificial languages is a classic Faustian fantasy — real languages are organic creations, not manufactured artifacts. Still, a lot of work and some real genius has gone into some of the artifacts.”
John, What do you think about Esperanto language? Do you have any view or opinion about its future?(if there’s any future for such and artificial language).
By the way, I’m not a native English speaker so excuse me for my possible mistakes writing here.
BorealBear 249
“how Britain could potentially feed itself it it wanted to.”
Yeah, there’s the tricky bit: ‘if it wanted to’
The UK’s trajectory over the last several hundred years and specifically recent decades do not indicate (to my mind) that the establisment has any interest in the ‘biological units’, or should I say human resources.
Perhaps lab grown meat is just a cover to hide the expected future processing requirements of soylent supermarket ready meals.
Thank you for the link – I’ll check it out.
@ Zemi #263
Homonyms: “Do YOU see that EWE by the YEW tree?”
Of course, if you were in Donegal (northwest coast of Ireland) you’d know that EWE is not a homonym for YEW, but for YO… 😉
Yes, it’s a crazy mongrel of a language, well able to promiscuously pup, and I’m rather fond of it…
@ Robert Mathiesen #258/9
Many thanks for these articles, and also for your frequent sharing of other articles via archive. I have been working my way through your own “cosmographica” notes… many thanks 🙂 🙂
Hi JMG,
Thank you for hosting an open discussion each month! I look forward to reading your book on the Jungian branch of the occult. In a way Jung’s work was my gateway (or one of them) into Druidry and the Occult, and his ideas and work are still foundational in my mind.
Apologies in advance if you’ve already answered this question somewhere else – and if that is the case I would appreciate anyone who can link me to that! My question is this – You’ve talked in a lot of places about what you expect to happen over the next few decades and centuries in the US as western civilisation declines. And what some of the best ways to survive and thrive in the coming conditions of society might be. I’m wondering what you see happening in the UK over the same span of time. Will the civilisational decline in Britain roughly mirror the US and other western countries, or do you think it will be different? What advice would you give to someone living in Britain right now about how to weather the coming decline?
Bright Blessings
Little Toad,
The problem is that the people working on Anglish didn’t go far enough. You remove the Norman / French / Latin / Greek influence and you still have the Viking / Norse / Scandinavian influences on English. (e.g. York instead of Everwick)
Regarding English, our “magnificent bastard tongue,”* I’ve been told that the English words for an animal derive from Anglo-Saxon, while the English words for meat derive from French (e.g., “pig” vs “pork,” “sheep” vs “mutton,” or “cow” vs “beef”). That makes sense if the Normans were the upper class for some time after 1066: the Anglo-Saxons would have been raising the cows, while the French cooks would have been preparing “boeuf en daube” for the conquerors. (It’s not universally true though, since the English words for “lamb” and “rabbit” are the same for both the animal and the meat; maybe that mostly applies to animals that had to be raised or herded.)
*Thank you Patricia #274 for the book recommendation!
Burning textbook warning;
https://www.earth.com/news/evidence-that-earth-is-inside-a-colossal-structure-big-galaxy-ring/
“LIn a peer reviewed analysis of quasar absorption data, researchers report a nearly circular assemblage of galaxies, called the Big Ring.
This colossal structure has a diameter of about 1.3 billion light-years and a circumference of nearly 4.1 billion light-years.
The structure sits roughly 9.2 billion light-years away, at a similar distance and position in the sky as the previously identified Giant Arc.”
The problem is;
“Cosmology rests on the cosmological principle, the idea that matter becomes evenly distributed when viewed on sufficiently large scales.
Many cosmologists estimate a practical upper limit for coherent structures near 260 megaparsecs, which converts to roughly 1.2 billion light-years for common values of the Hubble parameter.
The Big Ring comes in above that rule of thumb and lands near a second giant feature in the same slice of the sky. Together they raise fair questions about how smooth the universe really looks at the very largest scales.”
All the fancy theories are based on an assumption of large scale uniformity that is now found to be untrue.
JMG, I have been spending way too much time on YouTube recently and one of the videos that came up in the churn was about how the Catholic church shooter was influenced by the Order of the Nine Angles. Wow, a group I had heard of back in the ’90s and forgotten about. (Could have been the early aughts.) I sort of wrote them off as the old Terry Pratchett saying that if you empty yourself, something nasty will move in. A kind of occultist Boogaloo Boys, too fringe to really worry about as I probably have a greater chance of being stung to death by bees than of ever even meeting a member. What do you think? Are they scary or are they losers?
Unrelated, I scrubbed my SCA blog of drama (except for the Wistric story, since I’m in another kingdom, so it’s not “my” drama) and hid a Lilith charm (one with as many of Her names as possible) at one of their event sites. A charm against child abuse, or so I hope, though no charm could fix all of the issues with the organization. I feel like the SCA egregore is angry with me, but also losing its grip. How peculiar! I on the other hand stalk SCA news like, well, like a stalker. But Observation and Not Participation is my motto for now.
On the relationship between language and habitual behavior:
The Asia Times just ran a fascinating article on how the use of language in US Marine Corp boot camp deeply alters the habitual behavior of new recruits, and is designed to do exactly that:
https://asiatimes.com/2025/08/kill-talk-how-us-military-lingo-turns-recruits-into-killers/
I would like to put in a plug for Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga. Not only is it an excellent introduction to the practice of meditation, it also contains a copy of Patanjali’s Yoga Aphorisms with Vivekananda’s commentary. I know there are people on this forum interested in magic. Chapter 3 of the aphorism is an overview of what might be called yogic concentration techniques for attaining various magical powers. I was never interested in learning magical techniques but found that the yogic concentration techniques did have various side effects that might be considered magical. So yes, this stuff works. The only disclaimer is that not many people would probably be interested in sitting for hours a day concentrating over a period of months or even years to attain these magical powers. These days, anyone can use technology to do things that used to take miagic, like communicating or seeing at a distance or do harm to others. Cell phones drones and satellites cover communications and remote seeing and listening. Who needs magic any more.
https://www.vivekananda.net/PDFBooks/RajaYoga1920.pdf
A link to a pdf of Raja Yoga
David R, I have no idea. It was a passing comment, not a formal prediction.
Patricia M, yes, running would count. In ancient Greece, gymnastics weren’t competitive in any formal sense — they were exercises, like jogging or aerobics today.
Phutatorius, the curriculum has been dumbed down embarrassingly over the last century.
Little Toad, it sounds like a fun little subculture and I wish them well.
Dennis, hmm! Do itashimashite for the data point.
Anonymous, that’s further than I’m willing to speculate, but I suppose it’s at least possible.
Aldarion, thank you. It’s possible to write well in English, and easier than in some languages — I’m not sure what the curse is on German that makes it so easy to write ugly incomprehensible slop in that language — but it takes a sustained effort to get past the vague grammatical relationships and the proliferation of vacuous abstractions in which English abounds, and make sure what you’re writing actually means something.
J.L.Mc12, I don’t really have a favorite conlang. If I had one, it would probably be the incomplete but interesting Hyperborean language I worked out for my novel A Voyage to Hyperborea (with considerable help from regular commenter Robert Mathiesen, a professor emeritus in Slavic languages); it has some nice lurid profanity and some other interesting features.
Anonymous, granted! Many prophecies actually do turn out to be correct in some metaphorical sense. It’s just that so many people insist on a literal reading.
Russell, it’s cited further up the comment stack. It’s not a recent vision — I had it late last summer — and have been brooding over it ever since. Here’s the link:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/327162.html?thread=55464954#cmt55464954
Kfish, glad to hear it.
Tony A, oh, no question, there’s a massive rebalancing of wealth away from Europe as south and east Asia regain their historical role as the world’s economic center, and as Africa frees itself from European exploitation. At the same time, fossil fuels cost much more than they did a quarter century ago, and Europe exhausted most of its own fossil fuel supplies long ago and so is on the losing side of that trade. The same is true of most other resources. Thus resource depletion is also an important part of the story. As for your comment on myths, yes, very much so — the world in general is still stuck on the old myth of limitless progress leading to utopia, even as progress in most fields shifts into reverse. The resulting cognitive dissonance is causing a lot of mental stress and weird behavior everywhere.
DropBear, I don’t find the scapegoating aspect congenial either. One of the things Dion Fortune points out in The Cosmic Doctrine is that influences from star systems on other planes are essential because they provide the new stimuli that keep evolution from grinding to a halt. In the occult view, furthermore, each solar system has spiritual beings and forces managing it, and presumably they would have been able to slam the door on the attempted intrusion unless they decided it was worth accepting. As for existing, granted! It amuses me that so many people insist that life must have a purpose, when we all know that our happiest hours are those in which we have no particular agenda at all, but just sit back and enjoy the moment.
Earthworm, hmm! No, I don’t happen to know much about Johnson’s background, and I haven’t read Rasselas. So many books, so little time…
Chuaquin, I include Esperanto in my general comment on invented languages. BTW, your English is better than most Americans’.
Scotlyn (if I may), from listening to some of my late wife’s favorite Scots music, I know that “ewe” in at least some parts of Scotland is pronounced “yow,” rhyming with “how” and “cow.” That’s close to the ancient pronunciation — “ewe,” “cow,” and “sow” have related origins, as shown by the old plurals of the last two, “kine” and “swine.”
Bard, Britain is in a prerevolutionary state. Discords within the population, made much worse by the inept behavior of recent governments, are reaching the point that I woukl not be surprised to see something like the Northern Irish “Troubles” breaking out there in the near future — and of course there are plenty of hostile countries that would love to fund and supply any such struggle. If Britain can get through the next decade or two without falling into that, it faces a ragged decline, made worse than what we can expect over here by overpopulation and a much more depleted resource base. If civil war does break out, a fast plunge to Third World conditions is very likely — and in that case, getting out is probably the best option you’ve got.
Siliconguy, fascinating!
Kalara, “losers” and “scary” are not mutually exclusive categories; the ONA qualifies as both. Yes, I’m familiar with them; they’re a clear example of what happens when you take magical techniques and harness those to the worst impulses of brittle, dysfunctional egos. As for the SCA, all this goes right over my head — I haven’t been involved in the Society since An Tir was a principality.
Lobo, thanks for this. I’d point out that there are many things that meditation will do for you that no technology can match, and stunts like communicating over long distances are exactly the sort of thing that serious teachers of meditation discourage students from obsessing about.
There have been plenty of factors which would push the tech companies towards tying to forcibly identify everyone (there business model is, after all, targeted advertising!), but why are they now not resisting or even trying to push for such things as the UK age law, YouTube’s new age identification rules, or the Australian law requiring search engine’s identify the age of their users?
It just occurred to me there is a very simple reason. Ad-blockers don’t interfere with their business model as much as they look like at first: sure, they mean we don’t exposed to the advertisement there, but the tech company gets enough money off our data anyway that I suspect that the lack of a large scale war against ad-blockers by Big Tech is because they think they’d lose some fraction of their users, and the data they collect from the people using ad-blockers is still worth it.
If they were bothered by the advertising, then I’d expect they’d go to war with adblockers first; not try to blow up the ability of people on the internet to be pseudonymous. In fact, this marks a major change: until fairly recently the tech companies actively fought any effort to make it easier for them to identify their users, so what changed? The standard tech company answer is that they are trying to protect children; the standard cynical answer is that they realize they need to clean up their act or face harsh regulations. Neither of these seem plausible to me: the tech companies have given a lot of indications they do not care about protecting children; and their response to harsher regulations has been to fight them tooth and nail before, not try to get in front of them.
I see a third possibility: they are busy pushing technology (which shall not be named) that is supposed to be able to create things that look real. This is a massive threat to their business model, because it means that someone could, in theory, set up such systems to browse the internet; and in fact, major websites have long faced the problem of bots trying to trick their systems into thinking things are more popular than they really are. If these systems are being set up on a large scale, and fooling the online monitoring systems, then the internet is no longer tracking human activity.
I wonder if the reason that there seems to be a push to forcibly connecting everyone’s internet activity to their identity is that the tech companies have realized there is too much noise in their data, and that therefore the data they sell is no longer actually meaningful. If so, then this might suggest that the collapse of the current internet business model might be a lot closer than most people think: I know for a fact that I change my behaviour dramatically when I feel I’m being monitored, and that once I identify myself online, I get that feeling in a much stronger way than I do when browsing “anonymously”. I know on an intellectual level everything online is monitored, but subjectively it’s very different if I had to provide my identity. If enough people think like I do, then there might not be enough people left willing to use any part of the internet that’s no strictly speaking necessary, and that right away gets rid of most of it.
At least English is in the process of correcting its lack of distinct singular and plural forms of the second person pronoun. I hope y’all appreciate it, and that all y’all agree.
Ugh, sorry JMG, I posted that last comment before I was finished, this is the version I meant to put through:
TemporaryReality,
Heh, well it is a felony some places—not anywhere I’ve ever done it, of course! I wish I could recommend something, but I learned in person, so don’t know of anything in print or online. If you have questions you are welcome to email me at jenniferkobernik at gmail dot com and I’d be happy to help you troubleshoot. Mostly as long as you avoid seriously poisoning yourself (no lead in the still, and at least a basic separation and removal of the major poisons at the beginning and end of the distillation) you will be fine, have a passable product, and will master the finer points by frequent repetition and experimentation. Those basics should be covered in any resource out there, I would think. Very briefly: You will make a wash (the wine or other fermented thing you are distilling from). Then you’ll do a first distillation called a stripping run to make the “low wine” which is not a finished product. You then distill the low wine a second time in the cutting run (some I think call it the spirit run), where you separate the heads (poisonous compounds at the beginning), hearts (the stuff you want), and the tails (poisonous compounds at the end). These vaporize at different temperatures so you separate them out by observing the timing and speed of the condensates dripping out of your still. It will make more sense once you see it happen—basically the dripping will ramp up, slow down, and sometimes pause between different compounds, and you capture each in a different container so you can separate them and discard what you don’t want. More fiddly cutting and blending is most useful for making a really nice brandy (or whatever liquor), even from a crummy wash, but you can make something safe and fairly drinkable with just a reasonable attempt at separating heads, hearts, and tails. (Also, I said you could use the heads as a cleaning product/windshield fluid, but I meant the tails. Different compounds. Sleep deprivation is a real bugbear.)
Dear JMG,
That is a harrowing prediction indeed, but thank you for being honest with me in your analysis.
For those of us lucky enough to still have EU passports, do you think Ireland or any other country in Europe / EU might offer a safer alternative to hole up and weather the decline? Or is there anywhere you might suggest as a viable option?
Thank you as always for your time.
Bright blessings in dark times
@ Scotlyn #290, I’m a Geordie who grew up on a council estate in Newcastle upon Tyne, so I’m well used to unusual pronunciations!
@ Walt #302 “hope y’all appreciate it, and that all y’all agree.” Yous guys might think so, but what about the New Yorkers? 🙂
Mr. Greer wrote – ‘ “ewe,” “cow,” and “sow” have related origins’. As a student of German, you’ll also know of Gipfel, Wipfel and Zipfel, in terms of shape and position. As for farm animals, a friend once complained to me that his work colleagues were using him as an “escape-goat” (instead of scapegoat).
As for English spelling, it continues to morph. Often enough, I have read e.g.: “He lead me astray”, “I had to reign him in”, “He made me loose my temper”, “I need to chose a present for a friend”, “The forward to a book” (instead of foreword), etc.
Then there is the weird grammar: “twice as big than”. And even worse, “equally AS good THAN”.
As for English spelling being misleading, as a teenager I would read words or phrases that I had never heard spoken, e.g. plover, which I would rhyme with over and clover; “sleight of hand” I would pronounce as “slate” instead of “slight” and “prowess” as “proh-ess” instead of rhyming the “prow” with “now”. And I used to think that “askance” came from “ask” in the way that “clearance” came from “clear”, so I pronounced it as ASKance, and thought that “I looked askance at him” meant more or less “I gave him a quizzical look” – which does kind of work – almost!
You’ll have heard Marc Bolan’s rhyming lyric, “Oh Deborah, you look like a zebra!” Except that zebra used to be pronounced “zee-bra”, and that is how my father pronounced it (and maybe Americans still do). Marc’s lyric is a great chat-up line, though, and I’m just sorry that I never found the right girl to use it on. 😉
I could go on. “Forehead” used to rhyme with “horrid” and “Edwardian” with “Guardian”. But time marches on and language morphs with it.
@Walt (#302):
Is there much of y’all in the old North yet? It’s always been one of the most widely known linguistic dividing lines in the USA.
@Anonymoose Canadian (#301):
All that massive, newly collected identity data can also be sold for enormous sums of money to governments and quasi-governmental entities. It’s worth its weight in gold to any such entity seeking — as they all are — to increase its power in the world today.
Since it lived through the end of the roman empire, I wonder if the Catholic church has useful contributions to make in our current Western civilization decline ?
Thank you,
Tony A
Chronojourner @180, Siliconguy @228, and JMG
Some petroleum data from Wikipedia (yeah, I know, but Sicky Wiki has handy tables and charts)
The petroleum amounts are from crude oil and lease condensate, not biofuels or natural gas. The top 5 producers and their consumption rates are as follows: production data is from 2024, consumption is 2022; amounts are bb/day
Production Consumption
1. U.S.A. 13,401,000 21,000,000
2. Saudi Arabia 10,815,700 4,500,000
3. Russia 10,750,000 3,600,000
4. Canada 5,500,000 3,300,000
5. China 4,715,000 16,000,000
According to Sicky Wiki, the US is a NET petroleum exporter. But how can they be a net exporter when they use 7,559 billion barrels more per day than they produce?
What is interesting is the amounts from Saudi Arabia and Russia. Russia has a much larger population and is far, far more industrialized than S.A., but Russia uses less oil than S.A. Granted, Russia also has large amounts of coal, natural gas and uranium, but the difference is still striking. Russia with 7,150,000 excess bb/day would be the world’s largest petroleum exporter.
I am certain that the PTB in the West are aware if this, why else would they push Ukraine to start a war with Russia. And they have their eyes other places–accusing Venezuela of trafficking drugs (really, that’s the CIA’s job), but knowing that Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves (apparently) of petroleum.
Also, most of US production is fracked oil which depletes very quickly. Not too many years ago US production was around 15,000,000 bb/day
3.
r
At this page 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 (printable version here, current to 8/30). 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.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May HippieVikings’s baby HV, who was born safely but has had some breathing concerns, be filled with good health and strength.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May Mary’s sister have her auto-immune conditions sent into remission, may her eyes remain healthy, and may she heal in body, mind, and spirit.
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 Jack H’s friend Sheima, a Sudanese refugee in the UK, find a favourable resolution regarding her right to stay in the UK, which has been imperiled over a technicality. (8/30)
May 5 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Patrick’s mother Christine’s vital energy be strengthened so she can make a full recovery from the hysterectomy and follow-up issues and resume normal life.
May MindWind’s father be completely healed of his spinal, blood, and cardio infections; may his continual and immense back pain be lifted, and may he be strengthened to bear what cannot be lifted.
May J Guadalupe Villarruel Zúñiga, father of CRPatiño’s friend Jair, who suffers from terminal kidney and liver damage, continue to respond favorably to treatment; may he also remain in as good health as possible, beat doctors’ prognosis, and enjoy with his wife and children plenty of love, good times and a future full of blessings.
May DJ’s newborn granddaughter Marishka and daughter Taylor be blessed, healed, and protected from danger, and may their situation work out in the best way possible for both of them.
May 12 year old Sebastian Greco of Rhode Island, who recently suffered a head injury, make a prompt and complete recovery with no lasting problems.
May Marko’s newborn son Noah, who has been in the hospital for a cold, and Noah’s mother Viktoria, who is recovering from her c-section, both be blessed with good health, strength, endurance, and protection, and may they swiftly they make a full recovery.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis‘s fistula heal, may his body have the strength to fight off infections, may his kidneys strengthen, and may his empty nose syndrome abate, so that he may have a full and healthy life ahead of him.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Jack H.’s father John continue to heal from his ailments, including alcohol dependency and breathing difficulties, as much as Providence allows, to be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Audrey’s friend’s daughter Katie, who died in a tragic accident June 2nd, orphaning her two children, be blessed and aided in her soul’s onward journey; and may her family be comforted.
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 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 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.
* * *
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.
Walt #302: “At least English is in the process of correcting its lack of distinct singular and plural forms of the second person pronoun. I hope y’all appreciate it, and that all y’all agree.”
I see what you did there! Although some Southerners do have a distinct plural form of the second-person pronoun: “all y’all,” as when addressing a group and making it clear that you mean all of them: “All y’all coming over tomorrow?”
There have been many discussions about the fall of Intel. It is an important topic because up until recently Intel was Americas most important manufacturing company. An example of an US based manufacturing company that was a leader in both technological prowess and sales throughout the world, in a time when we had fallen behind or lost out on everything from steel to automobiles.
Most of the analysis about Intel’s decline revolve around either technological complacency, or the debilitating effects of stock buybacks. But it occurred to me that something else may be very important. All the way back in the 1980’s Intel had made the decision to spread its facilities out all over the world. Headquarters in Santa Clara, Research and pilot production in Hillsboro, and then production in Arizona, Ireland and Israel .
This may have made some kind of political sense back in the 80’s and 90’s when energy was relatively cheap. But as we pull in to the 2010’s and all forms of energy get much more expensive. Intel’s successful rival TSMC ( up until recently) had all of their facilities clustered together on the small island of Taiwan. Employees, parts, supplies and knowledge can move between their fabs at low cost. But Intel has to move things around over great distance.
This struck me when I was out watering my garden today and the twice a day ” Intel Express” flew over head. There is at least one charter ( 737 size) jet a day the travels back and forth between Hillsboro ( where I live) and Arizona and another one to Santa Clara. This is just the tip of the costs involved with maintaining such a far flung empire.
Intel made the mistake that the entire American Empire has also made in developing a structure that ignores or discounts the cost and availability of energy. We are already learning ( though many don’t recognize it) that the cost of energy and its effect on us is the most important thing.
Eike #246:
Nordrhein-Westfalen. I’m fairly certain we’re using simple white, cuboid boxes. I never looked at them for longer than the few seconds it takes to insert the ballot, so I don’t know what material they’re made of—for all I know, it’s acrylic too. Our next Kommunalwahl is on September 14th; I’ll see what the box looks like then and, if I remember, keep you updated.
—David P.
“The Soviet Union was the Kingdom of God” is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen come out of taking a visionary experience at face value…
Hi John,
I hope you have been keeping well.
I wanted to apologise to you in a strange way. What it is, as of late I started to question the reality of the Long Descent. I thought to myself that “hey ChatGPT is here and we are marching towards some sort of singularity! ”
Yet my faith once again was broken. After we were promised by Sam Altman that ChatGPT 5 was the equivalent of the Manhattan Project, it ended up being a total flop.
After that, I started to ask some questions. “Why are we in 2025 and we are still using gas guzzling vehicles to get around? Where is the flying car I was promised as a kid? Or the moon base? ”
Then I realised. “JMG was right all along. We really are living on the fruits of 20th century industrial innovation and we are not progressing to anything else…aside from a few new toys from the toy shop….”
I mean let’s be realistic here. It IS 2025 and rather then new great technological breakthroughs, the main news topic is potential civil war in the UK….
If you went back to the 1980s and told people that, they would be utterly confused. They thought the future was supposed to be like Terminator or Blade Runner right about now….
I think I have an explanation for this phenomenon.
Saturn.
From what I have learned, Saturn is the Lord of this world. Sure, he will allow some technological advancement but for the balance’s sake, he will stop any major break throughs unless it is absolutely part of Humanity’s spiritual evolution.
So I think it is Saturn as the reason why the Mono future or Singularity will fail. It would break the balance too much and interrupt true spiritual growth and evolution.
Just my take anyway.
See you soon and hope you are keeping well.
JMG #300: Thank you John!
Moose, that makes a good deal of sense. The “dead internet theory” — the theory that very little internet traffic these days is actually human users, and that most advertising statistics are therefore wildly distorted by bot traffic — is getting a lot of discussion, and all sides may have decided that it’s essential to find out who, if anyone, is still online. Yes, that may crash the internet, but it risks crashing anyway if advertisers decide that nobody but bots is seeing their ads…
Walt, you might be interested to know that in some parts of the northeast, the second person plural is “yinz” — a contraction from “you ‘uns.” In others, it’s “youse,” and in much of the north, “you guys” is starting to fill the same role. That is to say, English is beginning the schismogenesis phase of language development, separating into distinct dialects which will eventually evolve into different languages.
Bard, Ireland is in much the same shape as Britain and may go up even sooner. In your place, if things shows signs of getting out of hand, the smaller countries of central and eastern Europe might be good options; if you choose one now, start visiting, and get a certain basic fluency with the language, that might help.
Zemi, oh, I know! I grew up thinking that “misled” was pronounced “mizzled.” Zebra in American is indeed pronounced zee-bra, not zeb-ra.
Tony, only if it gets over its enthusiastic embrace of the Modernist heresy and finds its way back to what worked a thousand years ago. Right now it’s far too centralized, and far too burdened with abstract theories, to accomplish much. Mind you, ordinary Catholics in Latin America and other poor countries will doubtless get along just fine, and give rise to the folk Christianities of the third millennium, but the hierarchy may not survive long enough to witness that.
Annette2, the US is a net crude oil importer; it’s a very slight net exporter of refined petroleum products. That distinction has been finessed endlessly by people trying not to notice the corner we’ve backed ourselves into.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Clay, an excellent point.
Ksim, welcome to the Long Descent. 😉
@Robert Mathiesen, thanks a lot for putting all these texts up on archive.org, and for mentioning them here! 🙂
@Zemi #305, funnily (or embarassingly??) enough, I distinctly remember using “to reign it in” in an email just today. Although I want to stress that it was a simple spelling mistake and not an attempt to clandestinely reshape the English language… 😉
Milkyway
Peerless Druid;
Just FYI… a book recently brought to my attention, and since the subtitle includes both the words “writer” and “genius” I naturally thought of you. Here is the link:
Perhaps it of interest here on… All y’all be well now.
Hey JMG
I remember reading that language in “Voyage to Hyperborea”, though I never took it to have any Slavic connection. Have you considered expanding it, developing it further?
A good and easily observed indicator of the societal decline of the US is the number of people parking on the wrong side of the road. This is illegal most places, but it is rarely enforced outside of the fanciest neighborhoods so it is a good proxy for civic decline.
Parking on the wrong side of the road can be more convenient for the culprit , because they avoid going around the block, or making a u-turn. It also puts the drivers door next to the curb so distance traveled on foot is reduced. But its main effect is on traffic safety as a whole. A person pulling out from a wrong way park goes straight in to oncoming traffic and is unexpected. Many people parked the wrong way can lead other drivers to believe the street is one way.
So the benefits accrue to the parker while the costs accrue to society ( and public) safety at large. Thus more wrong side parking indicates a general collapse in societal cooperation and conformity.
Up through the late 2000’s it was very rare to see wrong-side parking. In fact it was so rare it usually indicated some kind of emergency such as delivering an injured person or intervening in a crime. But starting about 2015 I started seeing this type of scofflaw behavior more and more frequently. Now it seems to be slowly increasing as societal cohesion winds down.
Ksim,
I think what a lot of us didn’t appreciate when we first started reading JMG’s work years ago is the astrological factor: we’re in, or shortly will be in depending on how you time it, the Age of Aquarius, co-ruled by Saturn and Uranus, two planets as opposed to each other as Mars and Venus.
What I expect is that we’re in for a long war between limits (Saturn) and schemes for pushing past or circumventing those limits (Uranus), fueled by a combination of nostalgia (Saturn) and willful futurism (Uranus). Limits will always win in the end, in the same way that the Age of Aquarius will eventually give way to the Age of Capricorn, rules exclusively by Saturn, but in the meantime there will impressive shows of clever ingenuity, dogged persistence, and reckless enthusiasm by the various Uranus-aligned factions, many of which will leave their mark for some time to come.
Progress isn’t going down without a fight, and in some ways, that’s a good thing. No doubt it’ll make the descent a lot rockier than it needs to be, but the dream of a brighter future might inspire innovations and actions that, incidentally, make the bottom of the curve a little higher. A number of technologies which are unsustainable in their conventional forms also have less grandiose forms which have a chance of making it through collapse and making life a bit better on the other side. Radios are a good example.
If I can make a couple of comments on language–
Where I grew up in Western PA, the second person plural was youns. We were about 50 miles east of Pittsburgh, where it’s yinz. Yinz shades gradually into yous, which is the preferred form for my extended family and in-laws in Philadelphia and New Jersey.
I’ve read that the various American dialects are, contrary to what one might expect, growing further apart and not closer together. I can believe this. Where I grew up, people said words like “cuzzint” (cousin), “crick” (creek), and “Stush” (a shortended form of the name Stanley, a variant on the Polish nickname Stosh. As far as I know, only Western Pennsylvanians are named Stush). This shows no signs of abating. The highlands of Western Pennsylvania are one of those odd borderlands where multiple cultures come together; in the future it will be the border between the enduring pseudo-Faustian Northeastern civilization, the emerging Ohio valley civilization, and the barbarian tribes of the Appalachian mountains. As it is already.
More generally, though, I love the English language– or at least, I respect it. I respect in the same way that I respect the sculptor who makes a statue out of mud: It will never have the beauty of the statue made of marble, but, my, the effort he had to put into it! A melodic language like Spanish can produce Garcia Lorca far more easily than muddled English can produce John Keats, and that’s reason enough to admire Keats.
On inflected languages, though, I think your comment above is spot on. I began studying Latin seriously a few years ago, and one of the first things I noticed was its effect on thinking. When everything is denominated by its role in a sentence, the result is precision in thinking. Early on, I noticed that, when I was feeling confused or depressed, I could switch over to thinking in Latin. Even with a limited vocabulary, the effect was akin to a cerebral banishing ritual, as though someone had gone and traced pentagrams in my brain. I suppose it’s too much to hope that the yinzers of the future will actually be yinz, yinzie, yinzos, yinzum, yinzo, yinzei (or, more likely, “ey yinz!”), depending on their role in the sentence…
>Yes, that may crash the internet, but it risks crashing anyway if advertisers decide that nobody but bots is seeing their ads
You might be surprised. Some of that ad-bot fraud is money laundering (or pencils out to it) from what I’ve heard and if that’s the case, this dead internet could shuffle on for quite a while. But it does bring up a more general point – just how much of the economy is real and matters? You get the feeling it’s less than half, but I don’t know.
>English is beginning the schismogenesis phase of language development, separating into distinct dialects which will eventually evolve into different languages
Already happened. I challenge all native English speakers to understand what this guy is saying. You can tell it’s English, I think.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z660sool2L4
Walt and Yavanna, 301 & 311 respectively, I think ‘you all’, both words clearly pronounced, with ‘all of you’ as a more formal usage and ‘yous guys’ and variations the familiar informal, is a perfectly useful expression. It is certainly preferable to the British ‘you lot’, and I think, better than the Southern American usage as well.
The UK flag business is…complicated. Yes, it is being stirred up by far right influences. Yes Farage is shooting his gob off to enhance his grift. (He’s supposedly a true Englishman, yet lives abroad, like so many of them. He’s just another cog in the oligarchical machine.) Yes, it is intimidating immigrants. And it raises questions – questions I have put to some of the participants in the genuine spirit of discussion: if you love your community – if that is what is driving you to do this – what positive contributions are you making? Where do you volunteer? What youth groups do you help with? Do you help at a repair cafe? Do you even pay tax? Do you understand that the NHS is kept afloat only by migration? Etc. (crickets, incidentally.) There are huge amounts of misinformation muddying the waters.
And yet. It does underline – as did Brexit – the fact that both left and centre-right have, in recent decades, forgotten about the workers (or rather, actively discounted them). The populist right is transparently a pro-oligarch/pro-capital/anti-worker endeavour. And as tempting as it is to see the whole damn applecart overturned, Reform would be a disaster for the economy (see: the rank incompetence in local government and large number of resignations as they started to realise just exactly what was expected of them). But maybe there is space for a more working class left populism. I can see the emergence of this in trade unionists such as Eddie Dempsey and Mick Lynch (both, I believe, pro-Brexit, staunchly left-wing and eloquent, articulate, no-nonsense debaters). Political enfranchisement in this way is infinitely preferable to the alternative. Re-awakening a sense of community and solidarity with one’s fellow men.
The discussion does bring a lot of very valid points to the fore: why ARE we stripping other countries of their medical professionals? Why HAVE we allowed wages to stagnate so badly – and for employers to become hooked on government subsidy – that the only people who have willingly done these manual tasks are immigrants? Why have we allowed corporations to massively hike their prices and report record profits, while people struggle to feed themselves? That also steers us towards the question of wage compression. The minimum wage has risen steadily, but other wages have barely nudged upwards. Why take on university debt and loads of responsibility for £3k pa more than you would get doing shelf-stacking in a supermarket?
Why have successive governments – especially the pre-Starmer Tories – completely failed to fund more medical training? Why has Britain become a rentier economy in which everyone’s money is sucked up by the property owning classes and thus does no other, better work in the economy? Why on earth are we not addressing the huge wealth gap? We are careering towards a neo-feudalism.
Lots of questions, precious few concrete answers.
If you are an English speaker, who learns a more regularly grammatical language as a second language, it is easy to think it is more regular than it really is.
This could be because you are comparing the variety of English you know and hear and read around you, in all of its irregular inconsistency, with textbook German, or Czech or whatever. The actual speakers of those language won’t be speaking with textbook-perfect regularity all the time.
Hi John Michael,
🙂 I made that suggestion, because on a balance of probabilities, and after long and careful consideration, that is the most likely place where ye shall find what ye seeks. Journey forth young man for an adventure awaits!
You know, I’ve been considering the implications of the negative immigration rate in your country of late. Did you know that corporate debt is right up there with your government, and also household debt? Few people consider what might happen should economic growth (basically now a mere reflection of the expansion of the money supply) slips into negative territory. Candidly, it’s one way to settle inflationary pressures. But the bond market generally works the way it does today, because of the growth program.
Humour me for a second, but if net immigration is into negative territory for a long enough period of time, my gut feeling suggests the possibility that many in the what you may call the ‘laptop class’, may soon be downgraded to more basic and lower status work. However, on a brighter note, serious wobbles in the bond market (and reduced artificial pressures on prices) can only but bring down the cost of housing, making such things cheaper. Of course there may not be much left over cash for other things for many people… Still, this outcome was baked into the cake long ago. It’s truly been an amazing experiment, which I would never have attempted, mostly because of the risk of the outcome.
Cheers
Chris
Greetings JMG,
Do you think it is a good idea to pray that fascistic or chaotic elements in governments lose power ?
Are there risks doing that ?
Regards,
Thanks KAN and Jennifer. I think my interest stems from a general interest in medicine making and an herbal perspective, but still a good start.
(and Jennifer did you see my question about Charlotte Mason? 🙂 )
@Zemi, Robert, and all y’all:
I live north and east of New York, but I have family south of the Mason Dixon Line. It’s true that “y’all” and its variations aren’t commonly used here, but at least in my town (which as I’ve mentioned is unusually culturally balanced for this general region) no one bats an eye or has any trouble understanding when I use them. I don’t think “yinz” and “youze” are as widely known (I could be wrong), but yeah, if the polity fractures these usages will diverge regionally. (That’s the usual mechanism genetic variations turn into separate species, after all.) As for “you guys” and “you all” they’ve been around for a long time and do address a group (second person inclusive) but they’ve never seemed as close to becoming a single word, in speech, as “all y’all” has.
An even newer feature of English could become something really remarkable, in my opinion. A pronoun representing a distinct (fourth?) “person” in discourse. Instead of the person speaking, the person spoken to, or the person spoken about, it’s the person who broached the topic being discussed. It’s currently used only in text and is spelled “OP,” but I can imagine it evolving and generalizing further.
JMG/DropBear,
I think the set of visions of these alien souls has the potential for scapegoating, but I also think it has the potential for dramatically improved empathy and compassion. I know a few people who, if these visions are accurate have sixth plane souls (with levels of certainty if these visions are right ranging from about 50-50 up to 100%); and I find that the idea that they do not belong here and are doing the best they can in an utterly alien and to them inhospitable environment where nothing works quite right really helps me accept who they are. One of them is my brother, the person I feel closest to out of anyone in the world; but sometimes it is challenging to have him for a brother because he sometimes has what seems like a very inhuman way of thinking; if these visions are right, this is natural, because he is not strictly speaking entirely human.
I also note that the most nasty, evil person I have ever had the misfortune to meet is almost certainly, even if this vision is true, a human soul. Her evil was a profoundly human evil, so blaming the interlopers for all evil in the world, while some might find it tempting, would, to my mind, be extremely inaccurate.
I think it’s also worth stressing that even if assume that every single soul is incarnated, and we use a population estimate of 6 billion (which is either circa 2000 or assuming an overestimate of about 1 in 4), human souls outnumber these alien souls by a minimum of 5 to 1: which means that if we are talking about any kind of global phenomena, then it requires at the very least the acceptance of the human souls, and probably our active cooperation. So while a lot of people may be tempted to interpret these visions in a fashion which downplays the human agency here, I do not think they should: we always had, and still have, the option to choose how to relate to the alien souls, and what we are willing and unwilling to accept from them.
David (168):
What I’ve noticed is that an awful lot of things changed in quite dramatic ways starting out in 2012. I’m not all sure what to make of it, but I do wonder if something major changed on the inner planes on that winter solstice and has been working its way down since.
Patrick (238):
My brother who, assuming the visions of alien souls is accurate, almost certainly is one of them, can walk through areas infested with demons without any issues: they seem utterly indifferent to him. We’re both fairly sure that a family member who was admitted to a psychiatric hospital when we were kids was under demonic influence, if not obsessed by one; and a lot of the metaphysical nastiness that occurred whenever we spent any time near him simply slid right past my brother. We’ve both come up with a galaxy of of a galaxy of possible explanations for this, but we’ve added at least two related to him having a soul from the sixth plane: either the gods are making sure demons can’t drag them even further from where they belong, or demons are only interested in human souls for some reason.
RTPCR (243):
Thank you for the suggestion to look into Matt Stoller. I’ll take a look when I have a bit more time for deep thinking.
BorealBear (249):
Now that I think about, it looks like the old pagan gods are stirring all over the place: a lot of people have found the old Greek gods are becoming more active; the Heathan gods are waking up; using my extremely rudimentary ability to read Japanese, I’ve found some articles about how more miracles are happening at the local Shinto shrines; I know someone who lives on Hawaii who’s said Pele seems to be stirring; and I could go on.
This is all anecdotal, but it does look like a lot of the old gods are stirring in weird ways….
Robert Mathiesen(307):
This still leaves the question of what changed: all that data would have been just as useful to governments say 10 years ago, or even more so 5 when governments around the world went mad about trying to control a disease. So why has the opposition from the tech companies to forcing people to identify themselves online collapsed so abruptly over the last year or so? I suspect that it’s that someone noticed the datasets are too contaminated to be useful.
For reasons that would require crossing the line and discussing the forbidden technology, it seems quite likely to me that this is the case, and that the only way around this is going to turn out to be so draconian that it will render the internet utterly unrecognizable.
Hi JMG and all – I’d like to float an idea – half baked ‘cuz it just popped into my head. I’ve had problems with my intestinal system for a long time and tested positive for SIBO (Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth) several years ago, so my gut health is always a concern. The vagus nerve is supposed to connect your gut and its bacterial colony to your brain, acting as a unit to think and feel with, you know, trusting your gut. The motif of the Lotus, with its root in the mud (gut), the stem (vagus), the brain (flower), could be a symbol for the pathways of the human feeling – thought process.
Aldarion, regarding Latin and new terms, I think that’s really a legacy of the classicizing Humanists who rejected words that weren’t found in the few decades of “Classical” Latin (from Caesar to Virgil) but prefer to come up with circumlocutions instead.
The actual Romans themselves and later on the mediaevals seemed to be quite alright with coining new terms or taking on loanwords as they needed. Cicero himself created a new Latin philosophical vocabulary based on Greek, but distinct from it. The word “Ave” itself apparently comes from Punic.
Later on, mediaeval Europeans adopted a rich vocabulary for topics ranging from astrology to philosophy by translating Arabic texts.
I guess I can see the point of the Humanists, if you want to maintain Latin as an international language rooted in Roman texts, rather than splitting off into regional languages, you need some standards. However, they may have gone too far
I was just checking the CBC to get a sense of what the Canadian establishment is thinking, and found two articles I think are well worth sharing: the first* is talking about how parts of Canada are now warm enough for cold tolerant pines and citrus trees. I wonder what the Pacific Coast of 2125 will look like, because I did not think it would be warm enough now for this.
*https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/canada-plant-map-1.7594348
The second is more troubling. It is talking about how Sweden and Finland have heavily militarized, and suggesting that maybe Canada should follow in those footsteps. Given how closely tied together the CBC and the Canadian political/cultural establishment are, my guess is that unless there is massive push-back, we’re now at most six months away from seeing conscription, and possibly a lot closer.
Link 2: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/finland-sweden-canada-defence-lessons-1.7621502
To add to my previous comment – the human body is composed to up to 75% water, so it is the body of water that is the habitat of the Lotus.
Tom, the link didn’t come through. Can you simply include it as text?
J.L.Mc12, it didn’t have any Slavic elements — I just wanted to check with a professional linguist to make sure I wasn’t making stupid mistakes. I used Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborean stories as a guide to phonology — every name he gives in those stories is fully pronounceable in my version of Hyperborean — and then deliberately made it odd, with an object-subject-verb word order and a great many grammatical prefixes. Thus you get sentences like —
Da’pyed miqqun an’djeq ish’mirhastu, “I think he wanted me to wait there for a long time,”
— in which mirhastu is a jussive construction, “it is to be thought,” from the verb mirham, “to think,” with the first person singular prefix ish’ making it approximately “It is to be thought by me,” and da’pyed is the verb payam, “to wait or dawdle,” which becomes pyed, “the delayed, that which is or can be postponed,” and da’ is an emphatic positive prefix. See what I mean?
Oh, and if you drop something heavy on your toe, one proper outburst is Iqqun sh’tas! Tas is from tasam, “to waste,” and the words mean “my waste” (so to speak) “all over the place!”
So, yes, I did some further development of it, beyond what was needed for the novel, but not that much.
Other Owen, maybe so, but then why crash the money-laundering system, as online identification will?
Chris, oh, I know. It’s likely to be colorful, one way or another.
Tony, always, always, always focus your prayers on what you want to build up, not on what you want to tear down! Forget about what you want out of power — what exactly do you want in power? What does your positive future look like?
Dana, that’s very likely one of the things that symbolism is meant to indicate. Have you tried regular meditation? Some people find that this helps gut health via the vagus nerve.
Moose, ouch. Yeah, it looks as though Canada may be turned yet again into another source of cannon fodder for the Empire.
“>English is beginning the schismogenesis phase of language development, separating into distinct dialects which will eventually evolve into different languages
Already happened. I challenge all native English speakers to understand what this guy is saying. You can tell it’s English, I think.”
From the English movie Hot Fuzz, possibly exaggerated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc
Something I noticed too on some interview, Claudia Jessie often has the same cadence in her voice as Maisie Williams. It turns out they grew up like ninety miles apart. Languages are shifty little things. Britain is particularly good at that. BBC English (Received Pronunciation?) is nearly an artificial construct. The US equivalent is something midwestern as if there was only one midwestern accent. (Wisconsin is not equal to Missouri.)
Hi JMG – I haven’t tried meditation. I have radically changed my diet. I am a fanatic of the SCD – Specified Carbohydrate Diet. I have bored countless people by rambling on about how much it has helped my gut problems, my sleep, my weight and my emotional state. I’ve been on the SCD for 3 years now, I kind of astonished myself that I could do it, because resisting the temptation to lapse into old eating habits requires willpower. I think that reading your writings have helped with the will to resist bad habits, so thanks for that. Does contemplating my daily Loteria card draw qualify as meditation?
JMG, is it possible to get the source for the Kilmer goggles? I’d be interested in ordering a pair!
To J.L.Mc12 on JMG’s Hyperborean language:
No, there’s no Slavic component in Hyperborean. JMG asked me to look at it after he’d sketched out the basics of its grammar and vocabulary, which he did very competently indeed. I had only a very few relatively minor comments on what he had done. It reminded me of some of the indigenous languages of the Pacific Northwest (where he grew up), and also of the Inuit/Aliut family of languages. He would have made a fine anthropological linguist if he had chosen to go that route. Yet it’s good that he chose the path that he did. Academics, even linguists, are a dime a dozen. Scholarly (and practicing!) esotericists, on the other hand, are much less common, and will matter more for humanity than most professors in the long run.
Hey JMG
To my mind, Hyperborean looks similar to Inuit or Sumerian in terms of how it is written using English alphabet. It is probably just as complex in terms of grammar also. Does it count in decimal, or does it use some exotic base such as Base-20 or 60?
Hey JMG and commentariat
I have recently published another short story on my Substack, titled “The Octagonal man”. It is essentially an expansion of a brief idea, or rather a paragraph, that I thought of a year or so ago.
It is what most people these days call a “Drabble”, only a page long. I would not mind any criticism of it as I am unsure about how well I write stories.
https://jlmc12.substack.com/p/the-octagonal-man
Mary Bennett @326 et al
I hear you lot more in Oz than UK as a second person plural.
As to communicating in another language: I spend half the year in MX, the other half in CAL. I am 85, and even though my Spanish is far from perfect and my English declining somewhat, I find it does tend to keep my brain a bit more active.I am amazed at how many of my expat peers have no, or almost no, Spanish, and some almost feel that the Mexicans should speak better English, which disgusts me.
It is funny: I have two Quebecois friends with whom we end up speaking some conglomeration of English, French and Spanish. one of whose English and Spanish is very rough, but he is one of the best communicators I have ever known. He just goes for communicating and doesn’t worry about the grammar. my mother, on the other hand, had a masters degree in French, but could never speak it because she knew how it was meant to sound and couldn’t match it, so didn’t speak at all and counted on me in francophone situations..
I took a French class in college with a very proper exchange teacher from a German private school. She gave me a B for the class and told me ” Your grammar is execrable, but you are the only person in the class who believes it is a spoken language.”
Stephen
Dear JMG,
Thanks for your advice! Well, I have always wanted to visit Slovenia…
Bright Blessings
Re Anonymoose #301
I don’t know the specifiics (and don’t care either, as I use a different browser), but google has changed something in their browser engine that makes adblockers much less efficient. If you’re interested, do a search for manifest v3.
(I assume this will let adblockers hide the ads, but leave the tracking code in place, but I could be wrong)
Their engine is used not only in chrome, but also in microsoft’s browser and quite a few others, so they have the majority of (human) internet users covered.
–bk
I can tell you my life experience with languages: My native language, if you haven’t guessed until now, is Castilian Spanish, but I’m more or less fluent in some other languages. I have big respect for English language, although obviously it isn’t my native tongue. I can tell you (all) I started learning it since I was 10. I went to a private school, the teacher was a pretty and clever Welsh woman. I’ve watched Star Wars in English 20 times…At primary school we studied French, so sometimes it was a bit difficult for my mind to separate the 2 languages. In addition we had access to public Catalan TV at home (in the late ‘80s), so my sister and me can understand some Catalan…and there were Grandpa and Grandma, who sometimes spoke some strange words at home (time later, I realized they were speaking a near dead language called “Aragonese”). When I started High School, I studied Latin and some Classical Greek. So I can say you I’m an imperfect “polyglote”.
Greetings,
Chuaquin
#301 There is a big at least psychological difference even between having a pseudonym or even your real name if that’s a fairly common name, and someone being able to link your online profile with reasonable certainty to a real world person, to actually having to provide government-issued ID documentation to Google/Meta/Microsoft/Elon Musk.
I think the reason that some of the Big Tech companies are going along with it, is that they have realised that even if it is inconvenient for them to comply with the Online Safety Act or whatever elsewhere in the world is pushing them in the direction of mandatory identity verification, it is even more so for any upstart competitors, for example something as a small organisation or local community running an old fashioned online forum like in the early 2000s, to be independent of Fakebook. Thus they can use it in an attempt to pull up the drawbridge.
As an aside, a little while before they became Meta, they made their company name ALLCAPS, as FACEBOOK, which I no longer parsed as an English word, and instead read it as Fakebook.
I think the worst problem when you learn as a native spanish student, another Romanic language, derived from Latin, is the “false friends”: a lot of words are similar in both languages, but some of them have a different meaning. Too many students are lazy enough for not to taking in seriously that “dirty little” problem…
————-/——/—-/——————-
Another topic…Yesterday I went to my town streets to watch a bike race (La Vuelta ciclista a España); there were a heck of Palestinian flags. And some of the public shouted when the Israeli team ran next to them. They were angry, and only a few were Arabs. I wonder what’s going to happen with this Arab/Israeli mess in the future. John, do you have any vision of your own or reasonable idea about this topic?
@Jason
Not a brutal reversión but a timid comeback for now.
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/10/religious-young-people-christianity-rise
For my part, I have many questions, but I’ll wait for another open post to filter out the ones worth asking.
Greetings to the illustrious host and the rest of the commentators
Somebody I can’t remember now and John have written about the future of Catholic Church. Well, as an “unorthodox” Christian myself, I can say some words about this topic. I think Leon XIV Pope seems a good and smart man, but I agree with John that Catholicism is too centralized in Rome. Rome probably will have serious trouble with new heresies or mere new world visions, because it’s too centered in the Faustian world. I think however that Christianism won’t disappear easily in the next centuries, because it has some beliefs suited for hard times beyond our current hedonist trends…When the myth of endless Progress fall finally, there will be doubtless the return of old gods and goddesses, but the “Christ Christianism” too.
There’s been some comments on the subject of problems in UK nowadays and probably in next future. OK, I’m not a Brit so I can’t opine in detail about that topic, but there’s a common topic between British and current Spanish situation. I mean, the migration topic. Well, irrestricted immigration has been the elephant in the room for European politicians, except the far right ones, of course…Working class people across European Western countries have seen their life standard levels lowered thanks to our beloved immigrants, or better said, to our politicians. So when the only dissident voice is populist far right, you can do the math…
I can say there’s not an answer to illimitate illegal migration in Spain now, except the right populism of Vox (spanish equivalent to Farage, more of less).
Left in my country is kidnapped by politically correction, it’s the same like in UK, I’m afraid…
I think limited migration is good for the countries because it brings “new blood” for local population, but when there’s too much it’s bad because it lows work for local poor people. And migrants sometimes have customs against local education and human rights.
You can’t criticize irrestricted migration here in Spain without being called fascist. It’s too sad. I consider myself an unorthodox socialist but I recognoze there’s a big problem in it..,
However, I’ve been told by another spanish webs that there’s a party in Germany which is center-left centered and it’s against illimited migration. It’s interesting, don’t you think?
Cheers
Chuaquin
@TylerA:
On the one hand, advice about “what to do” can be hard to give, because so much depends on personal circumstances. Much as I enjoy this blog, I would be wary of accepting, or basing decisions on, the commentariat “consensus” (if there is such a thing). One has to survey the lay of the land from one’s own vantage point.
Having said that, as someone who’s given this question a very good deal of thought, I’ll tell you my answer, which is essentially to hedge. To do a bit of everything.
E-ignoramuses will sometimes confuse “hedging” with a “lack of conviction”. You can usually tell that these folk have never worked in anything resembling professional risk management, in which all contingencies need to be accounted for.
So if you were to ask me what I do, here’s what I do, based on my holistic assessment of the likely future scenarios:
-minimizing debt
-holding some investment in the current fiat currency, in case we’re all wrong about the imminent economic implosion (after all, “the market can remain irrational longer than”, etc etc)
-holding physical precious metals, which are still the best answer to “what to keep in a crisis”, notwithstanding all the issues
-paid-off, well-maintained home
-figuring out how to live-with-less if/when that becomes necessary
-investing time and effort into skills
-investing time and effort into community-building so that there is a network of people to rely on (there’s zero question in my mind that churches will make a comeback for this reason)
-living in a place where all this is maximally feasible in the first place
There you go, that’s my personal blueprint. I work on all of these. I don’t think there’s anything else one can do although I’m always open to novel ideas.
@Kan #192
What a splendid comment. Having just finished the Dion Fortune book about her magical battle with the Nazis, I think you’re squarely on-target.
We’re doing the same thing in Canada with the Red Ensign: it’s a celebration of who we are and a re-building of ourselves, not a tear-down of others.
@JMG – let’s put this out there. As you know this isn’t meant to be an inflammatory comment, but let’s put it on the table.
“the notion that we’re in incarnation for the sole purpose of getting out of incarnation seems silly to me, too.”
I would be leery of adopting views based on “what seems silly”. The reincarnation stuff has always seemed extraordinarily silly to me – but more than “silly”… it’s offensive.
To be frank, it’s tough to imagine anything more offensive to one’s sense of “self”. Believing that one “used to be a woman”, or someone of a different heritage, or what have you, is a sledgehammer to one of the core aspects of what makes us feel psychologically whole and healthy, which is to have sense of who we are and where we belong. In fact, it provokes instant horror.
I’ve never understood how to square what you believe with that instinctive recoil that just “feels wrong”. I would be interested in your view on this.
An additional take on the cluster**** of recorded history and the irrational craziness on earth vis-a-vis the 6,000 years of possible incarnation of a cohort from another system. Someone asked Ven. Thrangu Rinpoche about the apparent breakdown of society, and he said that it was his opinion that so many human bodies were being made available that a great many beings from animal cohorts who were not otherwise ready to take a human incarnation were taking advantage of the opportunities presented.
As the population declines take hold, I assume this will no longer be the case, or at least to the current extent.
This being a kind of reply to the vision of a large cohort from another realm coming into incarnation that has been under discussion of late. I suspect it’s a both…and situation.
Re: Leavemealone-osaurus being a joke or the product of breeding:
Deers‘ antlers are pretty cumbersome, and given that dinosaurs have a much higher proclivity towards flamboyance than mammals (think of the peacock, or birds of paradise), I don’t see why their large, horned browsers wouldn’t have taken the whole „horns as weapons and display“ game a step further, too.
Given the bizarre shapes that nature cranks out all by herself, I find this spiky sensation completely believable as a wild animal. And a gorgeous one, too 😊
The mention of Latin in education is interesting. My own husband attended the local, private (one teacher/owner, two classrooms) secondary school from ages 12-15, at which point he dropped out to avail of the plentiful work opportunities of a then busy fishing port.
During those years, Master O’Rourke taught many things, including Latin, Irish, Irish mythology, along with higher maths, history and other things. My husband’s uncle paid part of his fees in coin, and my husband paid the other part by staying after school once a week to perform any chores Master O’Rourke needed done.
According to himself, it was the logarithms that ended his connection with schooling. He was coming home to do farm chores, and then doing his homework on the dark winter’s nights lit only with oil lamps, and the logarithm tables were just too tiny to make out. However, even though his formal schooling ended forever at age 15, he has never been averse to deep reading and deep thinking.
All of this is by way of introducing an interesting article on the “hedge school” phenomenon in the Inishowen peninsula of Donegal (a good bit to the north of us). http://donegalgenealogy.com/inishowenhs.htm
The tl:dr of the article is that it is widely attested by scholarly and educated visitors, that the people of this area, who were very poor, and materially deprived, never denied themselves the home-grown delights of music, dance, learning and literature/story, and were willing to go great lengths to obtain learning for their children. The hedge school was a method of educating young people into these and other intellectual arts, which often had to go “underground” – as the ruling Anglo-Irish aristocracy considered Gaelic educational traditions to consist of “the “Popish Schoole Masrs”, who teach “the Irish youth, trayning them up in Supirsticion, Idolatry and the Evill Customs of the Nacion”. ” (An offense for which, in the 16th and 17th centuries, death was considered a suitable penalty).
However, the schools persisted, often extremely secretly, supported entirely by the resources of the people who patronised them, and the high standard of learning of the individuals who taught in them. According to the article:
” It is difficult to assess the standard attained in the Hedge Schools in the more popular subjects [naturally they operated outside of any bureaucratic standards body, which might have recorded such matters], but in classics we have the testimony of Dr. Alexander Ross, Dungiven, Co. Derry. He says: “Even in the wildest districts, it is not unusual to meet with good classical scholars; and there are several young mountaineers [meaning mountain-dwellers, not mountain-climbers] of the writer’s acquaintance, whose knowledge and taste in the Latin poets might put to the blush many who have all the advantages of established schools and regular instruction”.”
Given the lengthy interest that Irish peasants maintained in learning the classics as well as their own diverse mythology, it is perhaps not too surprising that what my husband attended in the late 1960’s turns out to have been, quintessentially, a traditional “hedge school” which no longer had to hide.
In which, Latin was indeed one of the subjects. 🙂
… and along the same lines, providing some counterpoints for the more fanciful theories here, I‘d like to state that as intriguing as the vision of the billion alien souls is, I do find it pretty far-fetched as an explanation for things that can just as well be attributed to much more mundane concepts, such as healthy human tendencies growing into perverse forms due to our unusual energy supply (every creature wants a comfortable life, but that usually doesn’t involve air travell, TV, or food deliveries); the debilitating effects of a civilized environment on biological and mental feedback loops that you, JMG, explored so beautifully some years ago on your blog; or the feminine intrasexual manipulation I mentioned in that earlier comment here.
As with the porcupinekylosaur, I like to expect ordinary nature to deliver extraordinary things. And given what a weird, young, overpowered, and yet unadjusted species we are, why shouldn’t something as momentous as the crossing of the peak of our global population and resource consumption come with some fireworks?
Now, I‘m not going to be disappointed if it turns out that there were actually a billion etheric aliens here, but to me, that story has more power as an allegory than a hypothesis about the real world.
>my guess is that unless there is massive push-back, we’re now at most six months away from seeing conscription, and possibly a lot closer
0. As I understand it, your average Canadian Boomer is happy to throw just about everyone else under the bus at the drop of a hat. And enjoy it while doing so.
1. It would be deliciously ironic, if young Canadians were fleeing to the US to escape the draft.
2. I wonder how all those many many migrants will feel about getting drafted?
2a. If it’s just for the native white men, I wonder how they will feel about that?
Hello Mr Greer and everyone,
I have a couple of questions related to esoteric practices.
Several months ago, it has been suggested that some of the benefits associated with undergoing psychotherapy could be obtained by doing the work of the Order of Spiritual Alchemy (OSA). The material on the Octagon Society website looks extremely interesting, however, I have one concern. According to previous discussions here, some of the Western esoteric practices are incompatible with qigong, which I am studying and practicing daily. Would there be any risks involved with practicing OSA work and qigong simultaneoulsy? Also, could practicing both qigong and discursive meditation bring about unwanted interactions?
A question regarding tarot: I am currently using a beginning tarot readings system presented in a book The Doors of Tarot by John Gilbert and edited by Mr. Greer, with very satifying results. I would like to take things a little bit further while still keeping it all simple by introducing reversals, but I am getting stuck with the reversed cards interpretation. Could someone offer a pointer? Let me give an example.
Upon asking a question: “How to choose in which country to live?”, I drew a Two of Wands reversed. The Two of Wands here means “Remember your career”. What additional meaning is conveyed by the reversal? Are there any general rules for interpreting reversals in this system?
Finally, the way I introduce reversed cards is by arranging all the cards the same side up, splitting the deck into two, turning exactly one half of the cards upside down and shuffling. I then do readings for several weeks before repeating the process. Does this method make any sense?
Thanks a lot!
@Bofur (#356) wrote:
“To be frank, it’s tough to imagine anything more offensive to one’s sense of “self”. Believing that one “used to be a woman”, or someone of a different heritage, or what have you, is a sledgehammer to one of the core aspects of what makes us feel psychologically whole and healthy, which is to have sense of who we are and where we belong. In fact, it provokes instant horror.”
It’s not true of everyone, and definitely not for me.
My very earliest memory — a very frightening one — goes back to the very first months of my life, before I understood any language, and my parents’ words were just meaningless noise that conveyed only emotions, nothing else. At that point in my life I was nothing more than a tiny body with a strong desire to feel comfortable always –nothing else, no sense of being anything more than that.. (I am not able to think in sentences and narratives, but rather I think in mechanisms, diagrams, charts and other such non-verbal things. So memories, for me, are always sensory, not verbal. Non-verbal memories don’t need either words or a sense of “self.”)
As I grew older, I never developed any sense that I had a single self, which defined who I was. Rather, at some point well before I turned 10, I realized that "I" consisted of multiple "selves" or "personalities," which traded places smoothly with one another according to the situation I happened to be in and had to deal with competently — much as a chameleon changes its color to match its current environment. Insofar as I differentiated myself from other people, I did so partly by my unusual (for a young boy) interests and partly by the stories I had heard about my rather odd family and their ancestors.
So I don't need the same sort of things you say that you do to have a sense of who I am and where I belong. They're not universals of being human.
Official news (Daily Mail and Weser Kurier):
German city of Bremen and parts in the Netherlands are rationing electricity for big industrial customers, because of grid instability since this Summer.
I don’t remember this being loud in mass media – but it is official media.
Seems like finally some cracks in this ominous wall are to be seen.
I hear Hungarian and Polish workers in Austria i.e. butchers may soon go home. It’s almost better in their homecountries already save for a few things (holiday payment).
Does the european East have better cards in the upcoming game?
Austrian media criticized the idea of the government to subsidize food prices.
Austrian representatives of the food industry complain about higher wholesale prices for smaller countries in the EU.
Possible further crack to be?
Siliconguy, my take is that the canned US media accent is West Coast; people in coastal urban Washington, Oregon, and California talk the way people on the TV talk. Most Midwestern accents are broader and more nasal.
Dana, no, you’ll have to do better than that! There are many systems of meditation; you might consider trying one, and seeing what results you get.
Celadon, sure thing. I got them from an outfit in Tennessee:
https://www.museumoftarot.com/product-page/dicyanin-aura-goggles
Robert M. (if I may), yes, there’s definitely Native American linguistics in my Hyperborean language — I studied Coast Salish when I lived in Seattle and Takelma when I lived in Ashland, OR, and found both of them elegant and interesting; Sara and I also used to use Chinook jargon, the mostly native trade pidgin of the old Northwest, as a private language in public places. Mostly, though, I took all the languages I was acquainted with and thought, “Okay, what’s something none of them do?”
J.L.Mc12, I never worked out Hyperborean mathematics — it never came into the story, though I know they could handle large numbers. If I had to guess, they’d have used a 5-and-20 system like Mayan and many other Native American languages: “one, two, three, four, five, five-and-one…three-fives-and-four, twenty, twenty-and-one…”
Bard, it’s an option I’ve considered; by all accounts Ljubljana’s a lovely city, and I’m familiar enough with the basics of Slavic languages that I ought to be able to pick up the local language easily enough.
Chuaquin, which puts you about twelve parsecs ahead of most Americans! As for the business with the Palestinians and Israelis, my take is that ethnoreligious groups in the Middle East have been murdering members of other Middle Eastern ethnoreligious groups since about fifteen minutes after the beginning of time, and I see no reason to think they’ll ever stop. All the groups in question insist that the atrocities they’ve suffered justify the atrocities they commit, and none of them seem to be able to imagine any endpoint except the extermination of their enemies. That being the case, my take is that the best option for the rest of us is to walk away and refuse support for any of the squabbling sides.
Bofur, I find it odd that you’ve taken my offhand comment as though it was a philosophical argument, and ignored everything else I’ve ever said on the subject of reincarnation. Clearly I’ll have to restate things at a little more length here. There’s a difference between accepting material incarnation as part of the process through which the soul matures, until it eventually outgrows material form and goes on to other things, and insisting that material incarnation is evil and icky, and trying to run away from it. Dion Fortune liked to use the metaphor of a sailing race, in which each sailboat has to round a buoy out there in the ocean before it comes back. The people who insist the only point to incarnation is getting out of it are like people who turn back before they round the buoy. Do you recall my lengthy discussions of the distinction between Luciferic and Ahrimanic evil? The refusal to learn the lessons of matter is Luciferic; it rises out of the ego’s insistence that it deserves a world more to its taste than this one, freed from the annoying limits and burdens of material reality. (Its opposite, of course, is the Ahrimanic insistence that matter is all there is and wallowing in sensory pleasures is the goal of life.) Is that a little clearer?
Clarke, good heavens — I didn’t know anybody else was teaching that. I’ve been talking about that for the last decade; it seems obvious to me that the explosive rise in the number of human bodies needing souls, and the drastic decrease in the number of bodies of other large mammal species needing souls, means that we’re getting a lot of souls who would otherwise have been, say, buffalo. It makes so much sense of our current collective behavior!
Scotlyn, I’m delighted to hear that the old hedge-school tradition survived! I’d read about it in historical contexts, of course.
Eike, as I said, I have no idea whether the vision was accurate, or a metaphor, or a brain fart. By all means take it however you wish.
Soko, no, both of those are fine. The difficulties come if you combine qigong with the Western energy work included in some ritual magic. As for the reading, I’d take that to say, “Where you move is going to be sharply restricted by the opportunities you need to continue your career.”
Curt, hang on tight, here we go — wheeee!
Given the almighty mess that is English spelling, you’d think it would have been reformed long since. Not an easy matter, of course. However, a simplified system of spelling was taught to some British primary school children in the 1960s: ITA, Initial Teaching Alphabet. They were meant to switch to standard spelling afterwards, though, which could cause problems. My younger cousin was taught it in the late 1960s. I remember his mother showing us one of his ITA books with those weird spellings , e.g. “gaet” instead of “gate”.
The Guardian recently published an article about the experiment:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jul/06/1960s-schools-experiment-created-new-alphabet-thousands-children-unable-to-spell
Letters from those who experienced ITA:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jul/11/recalling-a-reading-initiative-that-went-awry
As explained by Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet
Thought that just popped into my head while reading the comments here about Catholicism:
Religions have two destinies: hostile schism and amicable divorce. Religions which insist on doctrinal purity (Catholicism, Theravada Buddhism) will be prone to the former while religions which tolerate a high level of disagreement (Protestantism, Mahayana Buddhism) will experience a lot of the latter.
Not to say there are no hard feelings among Protestant denominations and Mahayana traditions, but it’s nothing like the historical animus between the RCC and the EO, or between either and the Oriental Orthodox. Theravada doesn’t have an example on that level yet, because it reinvented itself in the 18th and 19th centuries and hasn’t had time to foment the kind of world-class schisms we’ve seen in Christianity. (But some are already brewing.)
Either way, people being people, splits are going to happen.
Meditation – I need an instruction manual with the title of “Easy Meditation for Absolute Beginners” Any suggestions? Anyone?
Bofur,
The way I look at reincarnation is that each of my lives is a character my soul is playing. My soul is something over and above those characters. Similarly, there are traditions like some strands of New Thought and Vedanta (and Kashmir Shaivism) which say that the soul in turn is a character the Divine is playing in a great game or drama.
What happens to these characters at the end of the process (death, reunion with the Divine)? There are two basic lines of thought: either they vanish, replaced by your soul and ultimately the Divine; or they remain as aspects within the greater whole. I suspect the latter is true in both cases, just as characters never truly die within an author even after their stories are finished.
@JMG
The reason why I care about the Jew-Arab war is that my country and its vassals are propping up the otherwise impotent Israelis. If the conflict had been sustained without outside interference, I wouldn’t care about it. If a geopolitical rival of the USA was propping up the Israelis, I would be gleeful (in the way liberals are gleeful whenever the media finds something to bash Trump with, because it’d make THEM look bad not US.
Moreover, I would argue that the real reason far leftists support Hamas, Palestine, & Iran is not compassion but because they love to hate America, and don’t realize that their political ideology (including the equality of man) is throughly Faustian and will probably be rejected when the White Empire they think they despise so much collapses.
There are also antisemites spreading absurd claims that Jews owned most of the slaves in the pre-Civil War South. Those types obviously are opportunistically using the current conflict to popularize antisemitism, and their concern about enslavement is fake too– when I argued with one last year, pointing out that a Jewish civilization in the 19th century South would leave lots of architectural evidence behind (i.e. synogogues converted into other buildings), he changed his tune and argued that slavery was good after all.
well… at least until the 1960’s… after that I cannot say. Certainly available school options were quite different when my sons came along.
Still, I do want to point out the other quite encouraging message that the history of hedge schools bears witness to… which is that severely straitened material circumstances do not *necessarily* make it impossible to participate in a rich living culture and enjoy a high quality of the life of the mind.. (They may, of course, but still, it is good to known that they may not).
Since many of our material comforts are dwindling, and bound to go away, the prospect that quality of life is not the same thing as quantity of material goods, and is not *necessarily* equally threatened by their lack, is a thought to hold onto. And it reinforces the view that there are practices worth cultivating, including, of course, all of those perennially encouraged here. 🙂
@356 Bofur
I don’t think our personalities are designed to last forever, or even for a very long time. We become too jaded or set in our ways in mere years to decades. Our personality not being replaced by a fresher one would be like a year that goes through spring, summer, autumn to an endless winter that is never renewed by spring, or being forced to stay awake indefinitely because we lack the ability to sleep.
Ooops… forgot about ‘links’. The link was to a free pdf book; “A Course in Demonic Creativity – A Writers Guide to the Inner Genius”, by Matt Cardin. [- www dot demonmuse dot com -] I’m neither a writer nor brilliant, but I noticed Lovecraft and Zen mentioned in the text and that the author had done some horror fiction; which I haven’t read. So anyway, of possible interest to ya’ll readers/writers…
The internet is not as good as it used to be, I think. It was already going downhill before AI, but it seems to have picked up speed with the AI bubble. What to do… some people want to build open source distributed everything, but I haven’t had too much luck actually using such things and getting them to be useful a lot of the time. Getting deep into trying to open source save the net is not my path. I don’t have the skills, and find using the open source things to usually be a pain and often not get me what I want.
What I am trying to do (the past couple of weeks) is spend less time on the internet. I’m not cutting myself off – there’s still a lot I get value from, from this site to youtube videos, to alternative and mainstream news, to a place to post fanfiction and read some of the better ones. Thus far, I think I am benefiting by cutting down. I’m getting more stuff done offline, from writing to reading physical books to planting stuff in the garden to playing recorder to cleaning my home to going kickscooting. I’m not sure how this will last once colder and wetter weather sets in and sets off my fibromyalgia, but so far so good.
“…my take is that ethnoreligious groups in the Middle East have been murdering members of other Middle Eastern ethnoreligious groups since about fifteen minutes after the beginning of time… That being the case, my take is that the best option for the rest of us is to walk away and refuse support for any of the squabbling sides.”
That is what I also have come to think. Whenever I encounter news items or opinion pieces on the topic, my eyes glaze over and I move on, and the faster when they try to engage my interest in supporting one side or the other. I’ve been hearing people shrieking about it since around 1967, and I have no further interest in hearing any more.
Patrick #372 – that is a comment for which I have enormous sympathy. 🙂
I do not have memories of any life before this one, so, lacking personal experience, I reach for a pragmatic perspective. IF reincarnation were true, how would I live THIS life, compared to how I would live if it were not true.
That said, I can see the seasonal cycles – birth, growth, gathering (decay), storage (death) – happening around me, all the time, at every scale that I can see, from breath/heartbeat to daily, monthly, annual rhythms, to the span of a human lifetime, to the span of a civilisational lifetime.
And so for me the question is more like – if everything in nature is undergoing these periodically refreshing and replenishing cycles, why wouldn’t we humans undergo them, too? For me, the usefulness of this idea is the way it takes away the fear of growing old, of becoming decrepit, and of dying. Sure, like the Cailleach of Beara, at this time of year, I am getting old and limping around as I swish my broom and raise storms… 😉
But… this happens every year, and every year, in the spring, she recovers her youth.
Although, sometimes, she needs to be kissed by an attractive, and daring young man, motivated to appease a harmless old woman… his reward being to witness her transformation into the beautiful young Spring… and how is that for a “reconcile the sexes” story… 😉
In any case, for me the “what if reincarnation were true” result is… the abolition of existential fear.
I’m not quite sure if it streches so far as nation-states, but I know the local land spirits have decided opinions on who they tolerate around their locations.
I wonder if that has some causitive effect on both the crowding into cities and the general anti-immigrant sentiment that appears to be global, as well as the more mundane economic and climate concerns. Not sure how one would tell: here, at least, ethnic origin seems to have very little to do with the land spirits’ concerns.
Several friends have relocated in the last few years because “this place doesn’t like us”, and on discussion, they mean the place they left itself, not the people there.
Influencing human feelings is well within the land spirits’ capabilities, so influencing anti-those-people feelings would certainly be an option for them. Are they known to coordinate over larger areas, or do they maintain their relations with just their own neighbors, or do we not know?
Do they have any abilities to take direct material action to aid their goals? Send storms to sink boats, as in Japan and England’s histories? (Or do they ask the storm spirits to intervene? Or are those events something else?)
Patrick et al re: reincarnation
Your comment reminds me of something Deepak Chopra (not usually a source I’d quote but credit where it’s due) said in his book Life After Death: “How does the personality survive death? My answer is it does not survive living.”
Announcer voice has also been mutating.
https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/announcer-voice
https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/announcer-voice-explained-78221/
Mid-Atlantic to General American to NPR voice which allows a little more variation.
I wonder which accent I have now? I still get occasional odd looks if I answer “what time is it” with “a quarter to three.” Apparently that’s not common outside the upper mid-west. (It’s 2:45 for those not familiar with the idiom.)
@Zemi, I went through the ITA program in the US starting in 1966 at five years old, for one year. (It was called “i/t/a” in all the US printed materials at the time.) Mei speling iz ekselunt! Probably because I did so much reading subsequently.
It did lead to some strange memories. Learning to write, I remember being told by a teacher to put spaces between words. Somehow I hadn’t figured that out by myself, so I was separating words using big slash marks instead. I think the early start on writing might have been a bigger benefit than early reading, but it was heard to recognize that when the physical act of writing legibly was so difficult and slow at that age. (Left-handedness didn’t help either.)
Precocious reading made me a bit of a terror to my elementary school teachers, but I don’t know if I/t/a can be held responsible for that. (One of my siblings taught herself to read at a younger age.) I also mispronounced (much to my family’s sometimes cruel amusement) a lot of “big words” that I encountered reading, that I’d never heard said aloud, and misused words that I got wrong trying to learn the meaning from context.
Experimental teaching methods were pretty much a constant through the 60s in the public school I went to. I’d walk into class and all the desks would be in a circle now, or missing completely. (Roll eyes and reach for the paperback SF novel.) “New math” was no longer new but was still considered newfangled and weird by Greatest-gen parents. A lot of topics were taught and tested that never seemed to connect to anything else. For instance, set notation (sets and subsets and all that). It’s true that mathematics has been reformulated with the axioms of set theory as its fundamental basis, but the connection is super abstract. Even to get to how set theory defines integers (1, 2, 3…) is beyond any grade school math curriculum (a math or comp. sci. major will encounter it in college), so dealing with curly brackets and the difference between cardinal and ordinal numbers in second grade seems kind of jumping the gun. It’s like deciding to teach the mathematical quantum basis of covalent bonding before covering, say, acids and bases…. which, come to think of it, my first college chemistry course also did.
I just read a short science fiction story that also had as its premise that the Cthulu mythos was real. In its case the various entities and shrines (some being portals to areas on earth and off it in this story, in addition to being ways to contain or summon entities) were being weaponised and used in the cold war, in addition to nuclear deterrents, between nations. I found the story disturbing and had trouble reading it. Not because of any references or descriptions from the mythos, which were very sparse in any case, but because of the actions and thought processes of the human characters in the story. I would have stopped reading it if I werent already done. Of course sci fi is often used as a medium to explore the good and bad of (some) human behavior. I will say that I prefer your modern take on it ! Enjoyed the books, never got the local libraries to get any, I had thought Shogoth concerto would have a been a good one….. Maybe I’ll go re-read it as a cleanser to the dystopian future in the other ( it did not end well)
About the US newscaster accent: I remember reading many years ago that it started with the coincidental usefulness of the “Scandinavian singsong,” the exaggerated rising and falling of tone over the course of a sentence that characterizes the Scandinavian languages and, often, the English of people who grew up speaking a Scandinavian language. That “singsong” happens to greatly improve the comprehensibility of English heard over a static-plagued radio connection. The result was that men from areas with a history of immigration from Scandinavian countries came to be preferred as early newscasters, although once it was established as a standard, aspiring newscasters of other backgrounds soon learned to imitate it.
Those Scandinavian settlers, farming in the “upper tier” of Midwestern states that border Canada tended to produce large families and consequently lots of settlers who headed further west because they couldn’t get land to farm at home. I grew up in Michigan. When I spent time on the left coast I found that white locals spoke pretty much exactly the way I did.
Well, we didnt have ITA, so far as I know, I dont recall any of my early elementary learning, But, in 5th and 6th grade we did have an experimental literacy program, which basically consisted of the teacher reading us stories, we did not have spelling or grammar those 2 years at least. Then I was in a pullout program for the next three years as part of the MGM program, so no regular english or social studies, we were a double period humanities program. a few of us were a little worried, as we had to change to the high school for 10th grade and the rest, we wondered if we should know grammar terms. So the teacher did tell us what an adverb and adjective was, and a few other things, of course we had been using them and using them well, we just had never had to memorize the definition of the terms. We had written many essays and reports and any errors were corrected, as well as copious amounts of reading good books.
@JMG, @Bofur, @Patrick, @Slithy and others: I want to echo Patrick’s sentiment here. Speaking personally, I’ve always found spiritual resonance with the concept of reincarnation rather than resurrection. The thought of being locked into my current personality for all eternity strikes me as deeply unappealing—not out of self-loathing, but from a recognition that any single identity would eventually become constraining. Even more fundamentally, the prospect of experiencing existence through a human lens forever feels limiting rather than liberating. I can envision how even the most enthusiastic soul would grow weary of the same perspective after a few centuries at most.
This is why reincarnation feels intuitively right to me—far from being a silly notion, it offers something resurrection cannot: renewal through transformation. Where resurrection promises endless continuation of the self, reincarnation offers the possibility of growth through fundamental change, of experiencing existence from countless vantage points rather than being forever bound to one. It acknowledges that consciousness might benefit from periodic fresh starts, new perspectives, and the freedom to evolve beyond any single incarnation’s limitations.
Zemi, there was an earlier project along those lines, headed by an organization called the Simplified Spelling Board (founded in 1908). It was rather less idiotic, and some of its reforms actually got accepted — they’re part of the reason we write “hiccup” instead of “hiccough”, for example. I mostly know about them because one of the occult schools I’ve studiend adopted SSB spellings in its documents — I have a large poster setting out the cosmology of the school that’s entirely in SSB spellings: “One world is not above another, altho that is a fraze sometimes used.”
Dana, go to your local public library. Odds are you’ll find a dozen books on the subject.
Patrick, the US is also propping up Israel, of course, for reasons that are entirely a function of domestic politics. The US has a larger Jewish population than any other country on the planet, and Jews vote as a bloc on matters affecting Israel; thus no US politician can ignore them, as (like other well-organized pressure groups) they can easily swing a close election. Of course the US also has plenty of other commitments to what’s left of its global empire, propped up by pressure groups of various kinds, and all these are helping to drag the country down. I can’t change that. What I can change is whether I give the mindless bloodshed over there any of my emotional energy.
Scotlyn, it’s an excellent point, and one that I’ve considered as a model for the deindustrial future.
Tom, thanks for this.
Pygmycory, glad to hear this. “Less time on the internet, more time in the real world” strikes me as a good rule to follow.
Kevin, exactly. Not my circus, not my bloodthirsty monkeys.
BoysMom, those are fascinating questions to which I don’t happen to know the answers.
Siliconguy, fascinating. That was also standard in Seattle when I was growing up, at least.
Atmospheric, was that Charles Stross’s “A Colder War”? If so, it’s extremely well written but harrowing, and yeah, I also prefer my version of the Mythos.
Joan, that might explain it. Seattle had a big Scandinavian population — it has lodge #2 of the Sons of Norway, for example. (I’ve eaten lutefisk and lefse at their lodge hall.)
I have worked with young children alot, my own and also I did home based daycare for many years.
While nothing is universal, I have noticed that precocious spellers use constanants and often just constanants and no vowels, as the phonetic pronunciation of the constanants sounds enough like the words. So, “DG ET DNR” for dog eat dinner might be something written. “SN” sun, WTR for water and so on. SOme words may have vowels. As they are taught the nuances of getting a better match on the words they are going for, the spelling improves
@379 Siliconguy
Supposedly there are people in my sister’s college class who did not learn how to read traditional clock faces– they only know how to read digital clocks.
I had learned how to tell the time in kindergarten.
JMG
Yes, it was “A Colder War” and it is harrowing. And it was meant to be, so he did a good job of me being scared of the thinking of the humans ! Maybe not so good for a bedtime story ! I had picked up an anthology hardback at a used book store, best sci fi short stories of the year for whatver year that was.
Re: “Jews vote as a bloc on matters affecting Israel”
… from what I can see this “bloc vote” presumption may not hold up for much longer, and is already fracturing…
John and other people, about Middle East mess: I understand your opinion, but actually I see American and EU countries de facto supporting ongoing Israeli massacre against Palestinian people. That support worries me, because there are a lot of Muslims in Europe now…
I also see that Israeli politics fuel Antisemitism paradoxically.
Acritical support of Palestine by the Left is also worrying for me, because yesterday victims will be perpetrators tomorrow, it’s a pity but it’s a historical truth.
I’d like to see western countries more neutral in this conflict too, but I’m afraid there are a lot of interests in this thing…
By the way, some months ago there were massive pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Morocco. I thought then if Moroccans had the same sympathy with their Saharaui people (whose land was occupied by Morocco decades ago).
Finally, I’ve been told by sports newspaper that ironically, some Israel bike team aren’t israelis, and they’re scared.
Patrick@387
Jared Diamond tells of going to a remote village in New Guinea, where everyone was fascinated and staring at his watch. He wondered if they had never seen a watch before, but then realized they had never seen an analog watch.
Maybe you will know that Putin has travelled to China for meeting with Chinese and Indian leaders. Any thoughts about it?
Bofur #356:
I myself had similar objections, though just intellectually, never as emotionally as you. In fact, it just “feels right” to me; I only intellectually adopted reincarnationist ideas when, during a conversation, I found myself unconsciously rejecting one particular vision of the afterlife because it was incompatible with reincarnation.
I would liken it to dreaming. We experience most dreams as their own reality, so, in a sense, we “slip into” a restricted self that has whatever form the dream needs it to have and will have its own experiences as the dream unfolds. When the dream ends, we leave it behind but integrate the experiences into our current self.
The same seems to be true for our “real” lifes. I, the version of me that is typing this comment, am a real entity with several characteristics that are indeed integral to this notion of me. To use your example, I am a man, not a woman. I do not know what being a woman is like and I suspect that I cannot know. But the same is true for the various dream-Davids. When one of them, shortly after this me had been rejected in a particularly messy way by a girl I had a crush on, ended up with her, he never lived through the heartache and, having never experienced it, would not have been able to understand it. On the contrary, the happiness of their relationship was an integral part of his life and thus his identity. Why can’t it be the same with our lifes? We restrict ourselves but eventually return back to something bigger that can encompass what we perceive as contradictions.
I just hope that, when this life’s alarm rings, waking up won’t be as painful as on the morning after that dream.
—David P.
Soko #362:
I don’t read Tarot but that’s also how I reverse the Sacred Geometry Oracle cards and it seems to work tolerably well. I use several repetitions of the overhand shuffle and turn the top cards after every shuffle. I don’t pay much attention to how many cards I’m reversing but it should average out to about half of them.
—David P.
Dana #368:
Might I suggest Foundations of Magical Practice: Meditation by none other than our illustrious host?
https://www.ecosophia.net/blogs-and-essays/the-well-of-galabes/foundations-of-magical-practice-meditation/
—David P.
Siliconguy #379:
Fascinating, that’s how I’ve been tought to say it in school. Perhaps because we use the direct translation, “viertel vor drei”, in German?
—David P.
Hey JMG
I also think that kind of counting would be likely for such an exotic culture. And if you decide to make a writing system for this language, I suggest that for the numerals you use something similar to the “Kavtovik numerals” used by the Inuit, since they are designed to not only represent Base-20 exactly, but facilitate easy addition and subtraction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaktovik_numerals
There is a website which shows projected temperatures and ice cover around the world with +2C and +4C increase in average global temperatures in combination with AMOC collapse scenarios:
https://amocscenarios.org
@ Walt #380 – I never knew that “i/t/a” had reached the “u/s/a”. 😉
@ John Michael Greer #385 wrote: I have a large poster setting out the cosmology of the school that’s entirely in SSB spellings: “One world is not above another, altho that is a fraze sometimes used.”
Interesting. That is still barely phonetic, though. “One” could be read phonetically as “oan-eh”.
Here’s my attempt.
“Wun wurld iz not abuv anuther, aulthoe that iz a fraez sumtiemz yoozd”
Which just goes to show how tricky, verging on impossible, such a project is.
TemporaryReality,
I actually got into distilling in order to make herbal tinctures; the price of organic neutral spirits was shocking, so I bought a still (also rather shocking in price, but at least reusable) and asked an excellent distiller I knew to teach me. I am pretty sensitive to chemical compounds of all sorts, so the ability to make a very “clean” high-proof alcohol without all the trace poisons is very valuable to me, even for the small quantities ingested in a tincture. I don’t drink much, but for those who do, the really high-quality spirits you can produce for yourself greatly reduces any hangover symptoms or general malaise after drinking. I also like having high-proof alcohol on hand around the farm for wound disinfection.
As for Charlotte Mason (thanks for the reminder–I had indeed forgotten), I am using some of her ideas as a framework for early childhood habit formation and attempts to discipline such that the child’s will is strengthened and rightly formed rather than subjugated (not an easy task!), but our oldest is not quite two, so I haven’t started homeschooling proper. I think I will very likely use at least a mostly Charlotte Mason approach when we do. I don’t know if I’ll buy curriculum, but there’s one called The Children’s Tradition which looks rather appealing, although not cheap.
Scotlyn #376
On the topic of “if reincarnation is true…”
To my mind, it’s like asking if impermanence is true. In my own life, while I have experienced Buckaroo Banzai’s famous adage: “wherever you go, there you are” to a hearty and occasionally wearying fullness, I have also observed that at least a dozen different “me” images with all the seeming of entire lifetimes, have arisen, dwelt a while, and disappeared, leaving behind a residue of…something or other. A tiny smidge of insight, perhaps.
Why that wouldn’t happen on a larger scale, given a sort of spiritual principle of parsimony, such that no impulse of (mind?)/spirit is ever truly lost, escapes me. Is that reassuring? Horrifying? Best to aim to (however imperfectly) achieve a state of dynamic equanimity in this life, and let the rest take care of itself, as it is like asking (and as futile as asking): “what is in the minds of the gods?” Saying “I don’t know” is preparatory to engaging the great fourfold admonition at its highest level, imnsho.
@Walt #380 –
That reminds me of the common refrain that “you aren’t ‘really’ ever touching anything.”
True, if I touch an object, the nuclei of the atoms in my outermost layer of my skin do not directly collide with the nuclei of the atoms composing the outermost layer of the object (and good thing, too, otherwise that touch would be nuclear), but the electron clouds of my finger interact with the electron clouds of the object in such a way as to have observable effects on both me and it that would not occur if our electron clouds were spaced further apart. One of those observable effects is the nerve impulse that my brain parses as the sensation of touch; another is the visual illusion of there being zero space between me and the object that is generally recognized as signifying “touching”; therefore, I am, for all intents and purposes, “really” touching the object.
But yes. Just because something is technically “more fundamental” doesn’t necessarily mean that it needs to be covered first. I don’t need to know what “2,” “4,” “addition,” and “equality” “really” mean in order to understand conceptually that 2 + 2 = 4. It’s not relevant.
This distinction between technicality and relevance is, I think, also how you get people thinking about whales and dolphins as “fish.” For biologists it makes sense (and is necessary) to define “fish” cladistically, but most people don’t do that; for them, “fish” means “those creatures that live in the water and that look more or less like the prototype fish I have in my mind, which is probably something on the order of a salmon”. Outside of biology class, trivia night, or specific allergies that apply only to fish proper, it’s not relevant for them what whales and dolphins technically are.
Bofur,
It’s interesting that you feel that way about reincarnation! I feel no such horror, more like relief. I have no particular objections to any of the immutable aspects of my current self and don’t especially want to be anything else, but I also don’t quite see how having once been something else damages one’s current sense of self. I am a mother now; it is central to my identify. Having once not been a mother doesn’t make being one less real or important. Likewise wife. Those identities seem more important to me in most ways than my skin color or sex (only because they are very, very important–not because skin color or sex are trivial.) Your view seems to imply that an identity has to be immutable in order to be legitimate, but I don’t see why it should be so.
For a little variety of opinion on English versus Spanish and other Latinate languages, here are some thoughts from a man who was fluent in both languages, and a distinguished writer in at least one of them. From “Firing Line,” from years or yore:
JORGE LUIS BORGES: I have done most of my reading in English. I find English a far finer language than Spanish.
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. : Why?
BORGES: Well, there are many reasons. Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language, those two registers. For example, for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example, if I say “regal,” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.” If I say “fraternal,” it’s not the same thing as saying”brotherly;” or “dark” and “obscure,” those words are different. It will make all the difference speaking, for example, of the Holy Spirit. It will make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine dark Saxon word, while “spirit” is a light Latin word.
Well, and then there is another reason. The reason is that I think that… English is the most physical of all languages.
BUCKLEY: The most what?
BORGES: Physical. For example, you can’t… “He loomed over,” you can’t very well say that in Spanish.
BUCKLEY: ¿”Asomó…”?
BORGES: No, not exactly the same. And then… in English you can do…almost anything with verbs and prepositions: for example, “to laugh off,” “to dream away.” Those things can’t be said in Spanish. “To live down” something, “to live up to” something: you can’t say those things in Spanish, they can’t be said. Or really, the Romance languages…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NJYoqCDKoT4&pp=ygUlam9yZ2UgbHVpcyBib3JnZXMgb24gZW5nbGlzaCBsYW5ndWFnZQ%3D%3D
A lot of discussion out there about “demonic posession” after the latest unfortunate atrocity.
What is your take, JMG?
Hi John Michael,
any of my emotional energy
Those words are an outward expression of the way you choose to direct your free will. I’m genuinely surprised that the leaders of our various nations exert so much effort at directing peoples free will away from anything which challenges the system which keeps them in power. It’s quite extraordinary to observe. And the stupid thing is, the effort has diminishing returns because it’s rapidly chewing up resources and energy.
I’m baffled that few people are talking about this. Oh well…
Cheers
Chris
Related to the topic of the current conflict in Israel and Palestine is the following old post on the Archdruid Report:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2012/11/in-twilight-of-empires.html
Atmospheric, it may be more than chance, then, that alphabets with no vowels are older than alphabets with vowels. As for “A Colder War,” the thought of that as bedtime reading gives me almost as many chills as the story!
Scotlyn, we’ll see what happens come election time. It’s quite common for some pressure groups to make all sorts of noise between elections, and then fall meekly into line when the voting booths open.
Chuaquin, I still have no particular interest in getting emotionally involved in the bloodsoaked rivalries of the Middle East. As for Putin’s latest summit conference, it’s hardly his first with those leaders — we’ll see what comes out of it.
J.L.Mc12, Clark Ashton Smith described Hyperborean writing as “runes,” so I described them as looking like Norse runes even though there’s no historical connection between them. I’d guess, though, as with so many other ancient alphabets, the Hyperboreans practiced isopsephy and made each letter do double duty as a number; the Kaktovik numerals are the creations of a wholly numerate society, while isopsephic form-value numerals are much more common among ancient societies that are still in the process of becoming numerate. (Keep in mind that in the fictive history of the Haliverse, Hyperborea was inhabited before the last ice age, so it’s very ancient indeed; its inhabitants were hominins but not Homo sapiens…)
Anon, thanks for this.
Zemi, oh, they weren’t trying to do a wholesale phoneticization. They simply wanted to take 300 very common words with awkward spellings, and replace them with simplified spellings.
Kevin, good heavens. Well, I can hardly argue with Borges!
Phil, it’s always convenient to blame demons for humanity’s own robust capacity for evil. I haven’t looked into the specific case, though — such things sicken me — so I won’t pretend to judge.
Chris, if leaders didn’t do that, their regimes would go down like houses of cards in a good stiff breeze.
Anon, yes, I’ve been thinkin of that post recently.
@Patrick (#43)
As one of Peter Ward’s former students, I can confirm that the Medea Hypothesis was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. It started as an interesting spitball, got to the “maybe I can get a whole book of this” stage, and then he threw it out there and forgot about it. Intended as food for thought rather than making a definitive statement.
I can also offer as a bit of conjecture that I don’t think it was motivated by any kind of concerns about religious implications or lack thereof. In the years I spent with him I can’t recall him ever once even mentioning that sort of thing. He seemed pretty fond of Lovelock too. (As an amusing aside, at one point he was accused of being a crypto-creationist because of the presumed privileged position Rare Earth assigns our planet — he didn’t say much when I asked him about it, but looked more than a little amused.)
BTW, Bofur, despite being pro-reincarnation, I really do get your point. I have sometimes asked myself, “Does it really count as me surviving?”
For the others who’ve commented about this, can I recommend you read the story “An Egg” by Andy Weir? (Yes, that Andy Weir.) It takes the idea of reincarnation to an extreme that does unsettle me, and it might help others appreciate (what I think is) Bofur’s point.
Whoops, looks like the title is actually “The Egg” by Andy Weir, not “An Egg.” The latter is how CreepyPasta.net refers to it for some reason. Here’s the link to the story on Weir’s website:
https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
Anonymous #3
The vision of a race war in the United States is just another example of moral apocalypse that animates the Western mind which cannot conceive of any alternatives to progress and apocalypse. To them, if the racial utopia imagined by the moral mythmakers of modern America is impossible, then the only alternative is eternal race war. In reality, such a thing, like all other predictions of apocalypse, is very unlikely to actually happen in the United States.
JMG,
About “the 12th house can represent any group not assimilated into the larger society”, in your astrological predictions using Trump’s inauguration chart in 2025, you wrote
“The Moon is also significant here as she is an element of a powerful aspect pattern: a T square that includes her, Mercury, and Mars. The T square is an indication of stresses rising toward dramatic change. T squares are like drawn bows, and the empty fourth corner of the square is the direction toward which the arrow will fly; in this case, the 12th house of institutions is the target, and significant institutional change will be needed to resolve the stresses. This will almost certainly occur during Trump’s term in office, for reasons to be explained later; the timing will have to be read from ingress charts and other indications.”
https://www.patreon.com/posts/us-presidential-119787448
If the 12th house also represents any group not assimilated into the larger society, then unassimilated groups will also be targeted by the T square in the chart, and likely there will be significant changes between America and its relationships to unassimilated groups to resolve the stresses in American society.
Dana #368
My two cents.
Inspiration. Person. Buddha.
Meditation individual. Teaching. Dharma.
Meditation social. Sangha.
Being a meditator for fifty years, for me, it is just as important to sit meditating by myself as it is sitting meditating with others who are doing the same as me. Close the eyes. We close the eyes.
I started with the Transcendental Meditation Program® (TM). I even became a teacher. I haven’t recommended THAT ‘sect’ since 1977. Speaking from personal experience, TM officials are a bunch of money-grubbers, power-freaks, and arrogant-SOBs.
I find various Tibetan Buddhist groups’ meditation practices and local groups the best bet.
It depends on where you live and if there are meditation groups around.
In the 1970s, TM was IT in the USA. There was (hardly) anything else available.
Now, with so many Asians in the USA (are you in the US?), there are more choices.
I lean towards Mahayana Buddhism. I like it.
It depends entirely on the people around you who are guided to follow a particular genre of Buddhism.
Vietnamese Zen is a mixture of both Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism, although opinions differ.
💨🧘🏼💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Phil,
Having briefly looked into the case just now, yeah, it’s probably a case of demonic influence. I’d say 99% based on his drawings and journal entries. Poor dude even experienced time lapses where he was suddenly at places without a recollection of how he got there. I’m leaving the 1% open that he was well informed about such cases and lied to match details.
It’s a really good example of why you should do daily cleansing rituals and adorn your house with protective items (Anyone got any good suggestions for that btw?). Demons are weak and can’t really do much other than chatter at you, but once a person becomes convinced that they’re crazy and it’s their own thoughts, the demons usually are able to take control over that person’s thinking and therefore their actions. That’s what happened here.
I’m also convinced that they operate in groups and follow trends, and ever since Columbine, there’s a group of demons out there that encourage these things, for a few reasons. First, demons like to target children as they always have (children are a wellspring of energy in a way that old people are not). Second, they like to prod people to hurt people in a way that exposes them to demonic influence, which mass shootings do quite effectively as it traumatizes survivors. Third, it encourages copycats.
Fourth, and it’s really important to understand this, the original Columbine was a failed bombing attempt where probably a bit of divine intervention was involved in stopping the bombs from going and murdering hundreds of people. Up until that point in the 90s, there were a lot of bombing attempts (WTC, Oklahoma, Atlanta), and when the Columbine bomber’s tactics failed, they switched to guns and got a lot of media attention. So, in my opinion what happened was that the demons encouraging bombing attempts switched to school shootings as a direct result.
Try not to pay it too much heed. Nothing a daily cleansing ritual and practicing ethical behavior can’t fix.
Scotlyn #376
> Cailleach
Man, am I glad I knew about The Cailleach before a couple years’ ago. I found myself in a fierce spiritual battle with my mother-in-law (call her “Komodo dragon”), whereby over a month, I let my inner Cailleach and banshee become manifest. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. (I, the scorned.) Since ‘this happening,’ I have tried to make sense of the whole episode, and Cailleach is the closest I can describe as to what exploded inside me and what reared up outside me. The inner Cailleach and outer Cailleach, adding a teaspoon of banshee, were mustered into a cake-batter, coalescencing (is that a word?) into a tidal wave. It was Cailleach vs. Komodo, a battle to the death. I held tough. It was demon vs demon. I didn’t get my demon out until I encountered her demon. Now I KNOW demons exist — demons ain’t no joke. ‘Secular’ folk know nuttink (nothing).
I am a good deal Scottish and a good deal Irish, so it felt like the months’ long episode came partly from my body’s cells.
💨📣🦎💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@JMG and @Dennis #277,
The sub-conversation on language has been lively on this month’s open thread. My own (not particularly controversial) take is that what language(s) you know definitely influences how your thinking is organized.
I’m a software developer by profession. As Dennis mentioned learning languages allowing him to learn coding, one thing I noticed very early on is that the quality of one’s e-mails directly correlates with the quality of one’s code. i.e. if one writes clear, concise, precise, well-organized emails, his code will tend to be clear, concise, precise, and well-organized. If one is prone to writing verbose and flowery emails, I’d usually see long and elaborate code from that person. Then, if one tends to write poorly-formatted emails with incoherent paragraphs full of spelling and grammar mistakes, I hope I’m not going to be reviewing (or worse, maintaining!) his code. And, finally, if someone heavily uses ChatGPT or whatever to write their business correspondence, I’d expect to see boilerplate code that looks very nice but (if it works at all) fails in a spectacular fashion at even the easiest of edge-cases (and that person won’t be able to explain to me neither what either his emails or his code does, nor what he was intending them to say/do).
It doesn’t matter whether the person is a junior developer six months straight out of college, or a senior with fifteen years of experience. If your emails look bad, your code is bad.
I can also tell when a person is “monolingual”, coding-wise. When I started my career, Java and all these “strongly typed, object oriented” languages were the hot thing. From rookie Java-only developers, I’d often see things like the implementation of a lookup-table using a double-nested loop iterating over two arrays – instead of using a Map, which is a standard Java library not but a first-class construct of a language (meaning to say, the language has that feature, but it’s not embedded in the syntax and semantics). Then I’d know if they were writing JavaScript on the side, if they write things like
if (x != null && x != “”)
instead of
if (x)
^^for non-coders, the above could be expressed as “if X is a variable that contains a text value”. In Java, there could be multiple states of that variable that could mean “there is no value”, such as null or a blank text. In JavaScript, you could simply ask it “does X value exist?” which would cover all those possibilities. There are weird pitfalls to both approaches which I won’t cover here, but the bottom line is that each language, or people who are programming in them, “think different” as those 90’s/00’s Apple ads would say.
P.S. lest this comparison sound Greek to all non-coders, let’s say Java is related to JavaScript the way French is related to Haitian Creole.
Going away from computer programming now, I’m natively bilingual myself – I speak Filipino (Tagalog) and English. Many commenters here have already pointed out English’s various peculiarities vs. other languages, but here’s a few from the Filipino point of view that stand out to me:
Clusivity. In English, you say we-us/our-ours without distinction as to whether the speaker is including their audience. In Filipino, you say tayo/atin to speak inclusively, i.e. my group including you/y’all whom I’m speaking with; you say kami/amin to speak exclusively, i.e. my group that doesn’t include you/y’all. I find it puzzling that this feature is absent not just in English, but apparently the majority of world languages! It seems a pretty obvious nuance to embed in a language, but it seems that it’s not THAT obvious.
Grammatical gender. Tagalog and other Austronesian languages completely lack gender. Many other languages embed it in their grammar in a more fundamental way than the way English just swaps pronouns. The whole pronoun engineering thing in the Anglophone world is bewildering to me; I can assure you that Filipinos (along with Turks, Iranians, etc.) can be totally sexist without having “sexism” in the grammar. It’s also amusing how wokesters are trying to flatten Spanish with the “Latinx” crap, which is not only ugly and cumbersome but also impossible. Not surprisingly, the latter seems to me as mostly a thing among primarily English-speaking people anyway. I also note the contradiction in the woke movement in the attempt to abolish gender in the language, while also multiplying the number of gender pronouns. It’s all just weird to me!
Finally, in Filipino, the closest thing to gender in the grammar is the ability to mark a noun as being a person. Formally, this is used to refer to named living things (humans, animals, spirits, God(s), etc.). So you say “ang aklat” to say “(the) book”, “ang manunulat” to say “(the) writer”, but “si John Michael Greer”, the “si” particle denoting “John Michael Greer” as a particular named person (as in agentic-actor). In colloquial speech, you can even use this for “artificial persons”, i.e. countries, corporations, and the like. So one could say “ang Toyota”, by which you could mean either the Japanese carmaker, or one of their products, or (informally) “si Toyota” to specifically refer to the company as opposed to that thing sitting in my garage.
P.S. as we are speaking about both human and computer languages, I remember an article from a while back by JavaScript expert Douglas Crockford proposing spelling reform in English.
I don’t think it’s going to fly, nor does he seem to be (very strongly) pushing this forward as a serious proposal, but his is one example if one is curious about such things: “Nuspelynh” (new-spelling) https://www.crockford.com/nuspelynh.html.
I said I was going to jump in early this time, but given a good load of work, and incredible blueberry harvest that goes on and on, and the interminable extreme heat, oh goodness it looks like it’s Monday already.
@Silicon Guy, #49, I haven’t paid attention to the northeast Pacific , thank you for your comment on the monsoon there. In the past I’ve seen how the stationary front that gives Japan its “rainy season” in June, can extend all the way across the Pacific and seems to be at least one reason Seattle and Vancouver get so much fog and rain, except around August, when it seems to break up normally.
In most of my 40 years in Japan, it produced a persistent cool drizzle for about a month around June, the ending of which was announced by a thunderstorm, after which the front seemed to break up. During the rainy season, this front would gradually move northward, but it never reached Hokkaido.
This year, it delivered heavy rains to Japan, and persisted as it pushed northward resulting in deluges in Korea and Hokkaido. Every so often, it would attempt to migrate back southward in some kind of massive battle against the high pressure systems that formed east and southeast of Japan, so we did not get the persistent easterlies like we did the last two Augusts. It normally reappears in Japan in September under a different name and with less persistent rain.
The persistent high pressure we’ve had in eastern Japan, with very little wind and record-high temperatures seems to squash any form of rain-making event, except inland over the mountains, where thunderstorms would form up and dump their entire load in the same area. The meteorological agency says it’s going to rain in our area, but we know it isn’t. And sure enough. We get the sense the forecasting algos do not really take into account how strong the high pressure systems over the Pacific are. This is new, but I am looking at this from JMG’s speculation of a two-Hadley-cell system under a warmer climate regime.
There was a typhoon that originated just to the west of Kyushu (westernmost Japan). I think that’s a first. And it dumped even more rain over a recently deluged area, and we got up our hopes that it would mosey our way, but barely had it crossed Kyushu when it disappeared from the weather charts, devoured alive by that high pressure system.
So this is the question I was going to put forth and apologies for being late. It relates back to the discussion two weeks ago. I wrote a real Mary Sue novel about 20 years ago, long before I’d ever heard of the term. I had a great time, but had this feeling that not so many other people would enjoy it.
My question is, especially to any women writers here, but to anyone including our host: How do you escape from Mary Sue?
One idea I have is to grab one of the other characters and write his or her story with a bare mention of Mary Sue as this weird sort of girl.
OK John, we aren’t going to argue more on the Middle East topic, because we won’t solve it as individuals from our home…it’s a very difficult situation.
There’s a book titled “Pereira Maintains”(I’ve read it as “Sostiene Pereira”), whose author is Antonio Tabuchi. Well, I don’t know really if it’s related with the self and reincarnation topic, but in this novel appears a psychiatrist, who tells Pereira that “soul” isn’t a single thing. It can be two or three souls in the same human body, fighting between them to dominate the person. This bizarre psychoanalitic view (?) is very interesting IMHO. Then Pereira begins to think about it and tells it to his confessor (he’s a not very good catholic, but indeed a believer in Christ), but the priest dismiss them as “heresies”.
I think this point of view could be relevant for you all.
Regarding English, just my 2c, but I think there is a fundamental difference between English as used by old stock Anglo-Saxons and pretty much all other English speakers, including the majority of Americans. In my experience, the English have this native “wit” in English that I don’t really see in other speakers of English. I find it hard to describe precisely, but I find that it spans class, with examples like Churchill and Enoch Powell on one hand, and regular working class Cockneys or Yorkshiremen on the other. A vaguely remembered anecdote: I don’t even remember the exact words, but I remember I was in the UK and an elderly man made some quip involving some idiom, the people around were mostly immigrants and didn’t really get it. Actually that wasn’t the only time, I remember similar situations in Asia too. I got it, but could understand why the immigrants didn’t get it, but he was a bit bemused that no one got it. I know I’m making a hash of describing this phenomenon, but I’m curious if anyone recognizes this.
On another point on learning languages, as to what limits people from speaking: Maybe some commentators are aware of Stephen Krashen’s work on language acquisition. To sum it up: acquiring a language is not the same as learning it — you acquired your first native language, you not only think in it, it shapes your thought; if you sit in a classroom and study it, you are “learning”, and the results will not be as fluent as your acquired language. What really helps you acquire a language is “comprehensible input”, input that starts from where you know, but is just a little bit more difficult. n+1
Recently I discovered the “ALG Method”, which takes Krashen’s thesis to real life.
Krashen writes a lot about linguistics and language acquisition, but AFAIK, he never actually taught any languages.
ALG was created by J. Marvin Brown, an American teacher in Thailand, who went through the best language training the US Army could provide during WW2 and the Cold War to learn Chinese and Thai. He was the best student, mastered all the drills to learn the tones in Chinese and Thai, he could read decently and understand the spoken language, but when he had an assignment in the US to accompany some visiting Chinese generals, he could barely say a few phrases to them. After WW2, he went to Thailand, created programmes to teach Thais English based on drills very much like what he went through; the programmes were highly applauded, the students drilled like crazy and pronounced words in drills exactly like in American English, but when they were in situations outside, they reverted back to their thick accents and bad grammar if forced to speak in English.
For decades, he thought this was the best that most students could do, after all, it was similar to what he went through, until he could spend time in Thailand to master Thai in its native context. He could think in Thai. However, he started to see more and more that plenty of gardeners, cleaning staff and so on who worked around the expat community managed to learn English with excellent accents and grammar without any formal classes.
He hypothesized that Krashen’s “silent period” should be vastly expanded — Krashen advocated a 10-hour or so silent period where the student shouldn’t try to produce any output i.e. don’t speak or write; Brown said, just like a baby learning to speak, you need a few hundred to a thousand hours of pure input before you speak. Bar girls in Thailand who were forced to speak English early on never managed to change their way of speech, whereas gardeners who weren’t obliged to speak much English but observed a lot could speak quite well.
Anyway, after decades and some time back in the US, he rethought his entire approach to languages, and started classes where the teachers spoke only in Thai and no student output was expected until a few hundred hours in at least.
I’m summarizing his autobiography which you can find here:
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED501257.pdf (abridged)
https://bradonomics.com/brown-autobiography/ (full)
Reading it has changed the way I approach language learning. I can see a lot of what he mentions in my own learning — I have quite a few languages that I “learnt” instead of acquired that while I can understand pretty well, I am hard pressed to find the vocabulary off the tip of my tongue, I can see that in many English learners as well. Brown puts it like this: “When I speak Thai, I think in Thai. When I speak English, I think only in thought—I pay no attention to English.”
Maybe you will say, so the ALG guys just want to sell you their classes in the end. It’s true that they offer classes but for Thai they have over a thousand hours of free YouTube classes for free, which is enough to get an intermediate level of understanding. There’s another channel called Dreaming Spanish created by an alumnus of ALG but offering it for Spanish that has just under a thousand hours of Spanish comprehensible input. I’m not super interested in learning Spanish or Thai, but I found watching the Spanish videos has helped me get quite a lot of passive knowledge of Spanish, of course, I also studied Latin in a more textbook-based approach too.
I guess for more literary languages like Latin, Ancient Greek, Classical Chinese, there’s no way around it, there’s just not enough material to do this approach (even so, there are more people creating comprehensible input materials for Latin recently), but for modern languages, I think searching for materials like this might be better if you actually want to “acquire” the language.
Kevin #404…
Although Borges considered English better than Spanish in these aspects he says in his interview, however he wrote a lot of good literature in spanish!
Hey JMG
A runic writing system makes sense in that context, since presumably they could only write via carving onto wood, bone or stone.
On the subject of fictional languages, I have recently begun rereading the “Requiem for Homo Sapiens” trilogy by David Zindell, which includes some interesting fictional linguistics in it.
For instance, in the world that this trilogy depicts very few people read anymore on account of the prevalence of mind-computer interface technology. The closest thing to writing is a complex system of colourful 3D ideograms called “Ideoplasts”, which you “kithe” either via seeing them on a screen or having information encoded into them transmitted wirelessly into your brain. Furthermore, Ideoplasts are essentially an example of the kind of “universal character” that 17th and 18th century philosophers such as Leibniz and Wilkins attempted to create. Each Ideoplast not only represents a concept, but something about their structure allows you to intuitively see their connection to similar concepts, which makes it easier to perceive connections between seemingly unrelated philosophical, mathematical, or theological statements. I’m pretty sure I mentioned this to you a few years ago in the comments section but I thought I may as well mention it again. I always thought it was one of Zindell’s best bits of world-building.
Another interesting use of language is the creation of words for concepts that don’t exist in English. In the common language used in the world of this book (it’s just called “The Language) there is a noun “Shih” that means the ability or skill of organising facts and knowledge in an elegant and aesthetic manner, in order to create a way of seeing and understanding something. I guess that technically this is just what we are doing when we are thinking with the techniques of philosophy, but I can’t think of an English word for this on the top of my head.
As far as I know, government retirement handouts have been shrunk indirectly in Austria, if I got that right.
Via higher rates for (state) health insurance, as I heard.
Little surprise.
Another very relevant item: short range flights from industrial city Linz to major international aviation hub Frankfurt am Main in Germany have been erased! As I heard, France has banned short range inland flights.
One thing I wondered since a long time:
How is airplane travel so extremely cheap in Europe compared to railways or even buses.? OK bus travel tends to be cheap, but still – you pay less for 1000 kilometers travel in the air than for 100 kilometers on railways.
How is that possible?
Are railways more efficient, at least for things like freight, due to decreased friction of wheels on rails versus rubber tires on asphalt?
Are metal rails and wagons cheaper at large than asphalt and combustion engines, or otherwise airplanes on kerosene?
I hear from our state health system (once not so long ago on of the best globally) people need to wait for so long, their right to treatment is a moot point, and costs for patients are on the rise.
Interesting to note, Burkhard Heim the german physicist (* 9. Februar 1925 in Potsdam; † 14. Januar 2001 in Northeim)
who postulated several dimensions of existence with our thoughts (and feelings? Not sure) existing on a separate plane than the physical.
He suggested reincarnation. I think independently of any eastern influences.
He was mentioned in Giuseppe Filotto, Systema.
I find it wildly interesting (logic of self defense, movement, psyche up to esoteric and energetic aspects), someone invested and aquainted with Vasiliev himself criticised that “somebody uninvoled and inexperienced will understand his writings the wrong way” as some things cannot be taught via textbooks.
@ Clarke #401 “given a sort of spiritual principle of parsimony, such that no impulse of (mind?)/spirit is ever truly lost” – yes, thank you, that strikes me as exactly right…
And on the same idea of “spiritual parsimony” I tend to think – “whatever I am, it is of a piece with whatever there is.”
Although, of course, “I don’t know” is the most reliable presumption to make about life, the universe and everything. 🙂
Siliconguy<
Quarter to/quarter after was standard when I grew up on the east coast. Never thought of it as special. Quarter after can also be quarter past.
You might find it entertaining that in Danish, not only do folks say quarter to and quarter past, folks also say things like five to seven thirty (five to half eight). I think I have occasionally heard the likes of five to quarter to eight.
Joan
As far as I know, the strongest Scandinavian sing-song is restricted to the southernmost part of Sweden – the part next to Copenhagen. That sing-song is what I grew up on the east coast thinking of as a Swedish accent. From the maid on a TV sit-com of the 1960s. I was surprised by how flat Swedish sounded to me the first time I was in Sweden, though after being in Denmark a bit, Swedish did sound a bit sing-songy by comparison.
I believe that it is characteristic of Skåne (å sounds like long o), the southernmost part of Sweden (Malmo, Lund, and environs), which Sweden took from Denmark in the 1600s. The people there were ethnically Danish and their spoken language long retained Danish influence even as Swedish was enforced by schools. That area economically fits better with nearby Copenhagen than with distant Stockholm so as a part of Sweden, it long languished behind. As a result, it produced a large share of Sweden's emigrants to the US.
In 2024, yes last year, I met a man in Copenhagen who considers himself a Skåner, not a Swede. For him, Skona is "us". Swedes are "them". Not sure how widespread that sentiment is, but particularly since the Oresund bridge between Copenhagen and Malmo was built, the formerly Danish part of Sweden is increasingly integrated into the Danish economy.
I hope not to be too boring to you all with my comments, but I’d like to remark a phenomena I’ve been watching since some years ago in my country. I think the leftism isn’t for the lower worker classes anymore, but Left has being becoming a middle and upper classes “business”. The obsession with LGTBI “beings of light” and pro- massive migration topics and the oblivion of social class problems are related to this, me think…And I can add to the basket the slow decline in absolute terms for progressive or liberal votes in Spain since some 5 years ago.
I’m afraid lower class votes are being transferred to the populist Right, “Vox”, which is a pity, but true.
Do you have the same trend in your respective countries. John and kommentariat?
Oh, I’ve read recently this maybe off topic event, or maybe not so off topic. Judge the ‘sign of the times’ by yourself…
https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2025/08/29/transgender-woman-arrested-in-madrid-for-allegedly-groping-teenage-boy-while-offering-to-perform-a-sex-act-on-him/
OK, I won’t blame every transgender person for this isolated incident, but frankly, not all trans people are untouchable”beings of light”, cough cough. This person was also foreign migrant, he/she has double value for Liberal people, if you don’t mind my wry irony…what do you think about this melodramatic story?
Hello JMG
Another data point for you. One of the mini roundabouts painted with a st George’s flag I mention before, has been over painted with a Rainbow flag. Battle lines are being drawn. PS pretty brave of the Rainbow painters, as it’s a busy junction, and it takes much more time to paint a rainbow than a simple red cross.
Some Economic musings. With reference to your book “The Ecotechnic Future” where you demonstrate that an economy would double in size in 14 years at a five percent growth rate, got me thinking. As 99% of our money is debt issued by banks, if you double the size of the economy, you have to double the size of the outstanding debt. That is you cannot reduce debt by growing the economy, you need the debt to provide monetary liquidity for financial transactions. So economic growth makes debt problems worse not better. Further the debt is not evenly spread across society, it is concentrated in three areas; government debt, middle-class debt (mortgages, college debt, auto loans), and financialised corporations. These are already heavily indebted areas, how much more debt could they take?
The housing and corporate sectors have had regular busts, but usually the banks (and the debt) put at risk by defaults are baled out by government, who borrow the money in turn which thus maintains the debt level (and avoids a slump due to the lack of monetary liquidity).
So how to get rid of the debt load? The tentative solution I have come to so far is to not grow the economy. As the principal of debts is paid down the government prints and spends money to replace the lost liquidity. I would treat interest payments as a transfer payment, assuming the recipients: bank staff, share holders and depositors would spend the money on goods and services. Further by reducing the debt load (and it’s interest payments) wealth would be transferred away from the wealthy to the middle class and government (who may or may not pass some wealth on to the poor). Expect such a policy to be hated by the financial class. Of course the quick and dirty way to get rid of the debt is to not bale out the banks the next time boom turns to a bust, and default on the national debt on the same day. As they say never let a crisis go to waste. Of course you would end up with a 1930s style depression, but we are going to end up there eventually if we keep growing the economy. Lastly, yes we could inflate away the debt, but you inflate away it’s value for monetary transactions, leaving you in a similar situation to a debt default depression. Though hyperinflation events have been regular events historically, and more easily recoverable from as they leave the banking structure intact.
That’s my musings for the day.
Thank you JMG for your postings, I have read them for many years. Your updates on the decline of industrial civilization are much appreciated. I have been following the LESS strategy for many years, and am living comfortably on a low income, and NO debt, my contribution to slaying the beast of economic growth!
It seems that there has been a recent surge in moon landing denial. I have come across more new ” the moon landing was fake” blog posts and videos in the last couple of weeks than in the last few years.
Is this because Musk’s Starship seems to be floundering and the Artemis program treading water that people are looking for an excuse to maintain their belief in the religion of progress. Or does there seem to a renewed popular skepticism with the lack of improvement in peoples lives lately.
Hi JMG,
Thus far, Eastern Europe has resisted migration from Africa and the Middle East. As an example, Albania, in spite of its Mediterranean location and large native Muslim population, has left than half a percent of its population represented by migrants from those regions.
Do you expect Eastern Europe to maintain that status quo? Or, as food insecurity increasingly drives large waves of migrants out of those regions, even European nations that have resisted mass migrations will find themselves in the pathway and unable to resist it?
Thanks!
Curt #426:
You’ve written that in your country your state health system was one of the best globally (in past tense, I see it), and nowadays people has to wait for so long…
Well, spanish National Health System isn’t better now than yours…It’s been a lot of budget cuttings, less public money is being transfered to public hospitals and “health” centers and attention to the people indeed is worsening. Leftist newspapers blame it to Right and Far Right regional governments, I think it’s partially true, but Madrid central government isn’t doing very well lately. What a mess we have!
I had lunch with my New York Times reading, retired- academic friend. All he could talk about was Trump taking over the FED. I found this odd, because the Fed has been a creature of the banks and financial elites and is very far from being some kind of democratic institution.
Then this morning I caught a glance at the New York Times front page, from where it was being sold at the local supermarket ( I was aghast, that the weekday issue costs $4.00 now, I could go a few feet further and get a fine Oregon IPA for less). The headline story was how the world was going to end because Trump was going to take over the Federal Reserve. How horrible, Jamie Dimon, Larry Fink and the Rockefellers will no longer be in charge of fiscal policy and instead a democratically elected leader will be the boss. What are the poor oligarchs going to do when they can no longer longer rig the financial system to benefit themselves.
A very strange battle for the democrats to be fighting .
Hi John,
I’m interested in your take of the Dicyanin Aura Goggles from the Museum of Tarot. I’m drawn to energy healing and at time see auras and beings but have not worked to develop it.
Have you worked with them? Do they increase the ability to tune into auras even when not wearing them?
@Patricia Ormsby,
I avoid Mary Sues by remembering that a viewpoint character is a person, and should make mistakes and have flaws. It also helps if one or more mistakes actually have problematic consequences for them in-story. A character who is always right, and never struggles or messes up and has to fix their mistakes isn’t very relatable or likeable to most readers, and can be boring to write after a while.
Greetings JMG and commentators-fascinating discussions as always.
@J.L.Mc12 #344
I enjoyed your story very much. It was reminiscent of Melville’s story ‘Bartleby and the movie “Office Space” two of my favorites.
Chaquin @ 430, in the USA for sure, just as you described. Many have been trying to make the Democrats understand for At Least the last quarter century that lower middle and working class citizens are fed up with high levels of migration, without being able to penetrate leftist invincible ignorance. Just this morning I read on a leftist website that Americans are divided between Trump voters and people who want a multicultural society with a strong social safety net. The policy of Affirmative Action has added injury to insult. That policy was supposed to be a help to the genuinely poor, African American and Native American citizens especially. Instead it became favoritism for rich kids from East and South West Asia. The new darling of the privileged left is the Moslem rich boy–parents are college professor and successful filmmaker–running for NYC mayor.
Clay Dennis @ 432, I expect both are true. Elon being “one of the good guys” his organization would not, perish the thought, be, er, paying anyone to gin up the moon landing was fake would they? The guy does own icks, must have his army of influencers posting whatever they are told to post.
“Is this because Musk’s Starship seems to be floundering”
The last test was quite successful. Several previous tests failed, welcome to rocket science. Artemis does seem dead, the NASA bureaucracy has reached the point it can no longer succeed in spite of itself.
Over all though, I have been seeing an uptick in moon landing denial as well.
Even now philosophers/ theologians try to shoe horn the wild living theos of the Bible into neo-platonism or some other system. The use of the Bed of Procrustes comes into play to stretch, ignore or cut off the troublesome bits found in the Bible that don’t fit the chosen system. This also includes the various Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox theologies. As Emerson said, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”.. Just using this venue to blow off steam.
If the term Bed of Procrustes draws a blank for anyone- https://www.britannica.com/topic/Procrustes
And that troublesome theos of the Bible is quite alive to me!
Carlos,
I also noticed that better e-mailers make for better thinkers and better coders as well. It’s interesting what you said about Java. I’m pretty much a Python guy these days so I think the way is write code for all languages is warped by that.
Well, this is…interesting. Also, a bit alarming. https://www.rt.com/news/623853-muslim-official-belgians-get-out/
Can someone from Europe give us some back story? In particular, did her pushback remarks include any suggestion that others not of her religion can also wear whatever they want? Looks like not.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/man-found-dead-burning-man-sparks-homicide-investigation
In other symbolic esoteric news, a symbol for Orgy was blown by high winds. Blown down, I mean. Forget the dead man, he isn’t the first to have died there. That’s not news. Almost brings a sea shanty to mind – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6yHE7oep-g
—
And in other strange news stories “Gee, it’s summer and it sure is cold”. Temperatures have been running significantly below what they normally do. Not only that but it’s now raining when it’s (relatively) cold and (relatively) dry. You’ll never hear the media types talking about this though, the only stories they run are “Gee it’s summer and it sure is hot” or “Gee, it’s winter and it sure is cold”. And they wonder why nobody cares what they have to say anymore.
So apparently, the God Emp. Of Orange just today threw down a golden gauntlet .. ACTUALLY QUESTIONING the Biggly Warpdrive of the grait.. the hellpful.. effn-caciousnous janky Convid mRNA!! He gots the DemOs by the shorthairs now.
This is quite delicious!
>It seems that there has been a recent surge in moon landing denial. I have come across more new ” the moon landing was fake” blog posts and videos in the last couple of weeks than in the last few years.
Remember, Dead Internet Theory. It could be a botnet flogging the story on you. The part of the internet that is real is less than half. I’ve noticed bots on here, even. Some people interpret a request like “Please don’t sloppost AI garbage” as “I’m challenging you to a game of wits”. Which it isn’t and I don’t interpret it that way but some people do.
Perhaps, as a result of that golden gauntlet thrown, a new national Holiday would be in order .. we could even name it: JANKY $CIENCE REPUDIATION DAY!
JMG #30: I’m not surprised at all that the 6th Cosmic Plane world is not material in nature. I’ve had the distinct impression from certain other people that all they ever wanted was to be a spirit-being in a spirit-world, prancing around in a field of astral daisies, or some such thing, and living as a human in the material world is like an iron cage for them. The idea that they are alien souls from an etheric world perfectly explains this, as well as the otherworldly nature of the Axial religions during the Piscean Age. Personally, I’m happy for those who are able to catch a ride back to their native fairy-land, and I’m grateful that they embarked on their mission here — even if it ended up being a blunder, they still contributed an interesting, original element to our world.
JMG #55: I’ve read that on Lewis & Clark’s famous expedition, they assumed that the Great Plains were inhospitable for settled society. They would’ve been correct, if not for technologies like artesian wells & railroads, which made it possible for Faustian culture to conquer the frontier. I recall reading in Toynbee that if not for this, there would’ve been a limes (frontier border), with Sioux/Apache/Comanche/etc as the barbarians challenging us from the other side, which would’ve sent American history down a different path. But it seems that with the warming climate, our technological advantage will be overwhelmed, and this scenario will come to life under different conditions. I wonder if the future nomads will have significant Native American ancestry, and represent a resurgence of conquered peoples. Perhaps that Native American prophecy, that the “eagle landing on the moon” will reverse their fates under the “people of the cross”, will be fulfilled even moreso.
Beardtree: “This also includes the various Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox theologies. I take it you are an expert on all of those? I would guess we here do know of Procrustes, the most famous of the Labors of Theseus, which were deliberately promoted by the Athenians to associate their culture hero with the famous Heracles.
I respectfully suggest that the only thing the making of sweeping statements accomplishes is to make a person look foolish. Don’t ask me how I know that lol.
Richard,
In contrast, race / ethnic conflict / war is very common when empires and civilizations collapse, as John Michael Greer himself describes in this old essay from the Archdruid Report:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2014/09/dark-age-america-cauldron-of-nations.html
@chuakin
@chuakin
Not a political party but a small fringe contracultural movement they may sound akward ( i think maybe because our social porgramation )
The links are in spanish
https://www.virtudyrevolucion.org/numeros-de-la-revista/numero-28-julio-2025/2589833_migrar-no-es-un-derecho
https://youtu.be/zp4hK54e-Cc?feature=shared
Mary Bennet #439: thanks for your answer to my question! I take note about it.
JMG,
How do you expect Asia/Africa/,the BRICS will do over the next 10 to 20 years as the west implodes?
Hi John Michael,
Did you spot the news that Modi and Putin went to China? Such meetings are usually of a symbolic nature, rather than anything of practical value.
You guys in the US are really returning back to your isolationist policies of old. Not a bad idea given the short to longer term energy and resource outlooks. It’ll be interesting, and somewhat alarming, to observe how a fall in living standards plays out. Frankly, I’m a touch nervous about that (from the perspective that many folks will possibly lose their marbles). What’s your take on how that will play out?
Cheers
Chris
I disagree with you on many things. But I almost always find you’re analysis of the extant leftwing spot on. https://www.ianwelsh.net/looking-to-healthy-cultures-review-of-one-disease-one-cure-by-whip-randolph/
A quote
”
There is no organized ability coerce in these societies. No police. Leaders can’t make decisions without community support for each decision. Those who violate the society’s norms are corrected, and if they can’t be corrected are ostracized or killed.
”
It’s a fascinating mask off moment.
The discussion of JMG’s vision of invaders of sorts from the 6th plane has me fascinated. Yes, I’ve noticed a strong tendency among certain sects of the religions that arose two or three millennia ago, seemingly in reaction to the excesses of centralized power, to reject this world and the older religions such as shamanism and Shinto which celebrated this world, and were favored by the corrupt elite. They seem to be “in this world, but not of it.” The words “just passing through” do come to mind.
Jodo Shinshu, the Buddhist “Pure Land” sect I was schooled in in my childhood, held that we should pray to Amida to be reborn in the Pure Land, where it is easier to meditate and achieve enlightenment, and have faith in that. To the average non-elite, it was much easier to practice, incorporating a very short prayer “I put my faith in Amida,” into daily activities. I think this was so similar to Christianity, which my father was fleeing, that what was stressed to us instead was Zen philosophy, or other non-faith Buddhist thought, such as to seek the middle path, enjoy this world, pity the gods if you believe in them at all, and use your own powers to seek enlightenment.
The Fuji Faith has a “pure land” of its own, out west of Mount Fuji. I can go there any time, and if that becomes impossible, the liturgy brings that whole areas clearly to mind. No need to die!
@Alvin #423,
I have been learning Spanish through the Dreaming Spanish service for about a year and a half now, and have logged 660+ hours of input both through their content and outside content. I can vouch for it. I can’t _speak_ much Spanish but I’m at the point where I can understand quite a bit of non-learner-oriented content. At the very least, I know enough Spanish that I’m now distracted by Spanish content that has English subtitles on it, as the subtitles would tend to be literally correct but didn’t quite catch the nuances of what was originally said.
I tried using Duolingo for the same purpose a while back and managed to even complete the entire Spanish tree. Mind you, this was in 2015 or so before the service got over-monetized and encrapified like it is now. I got to know a lot of vocabulary words, but none of it was useful when listening to my Spanish-speaking colleagues (mostly from Costa Rica, Spain, and some from Argentina). Using the DS method, I could now understand them just fine, except for those guys who have really unusual accents or use a lot of colloqualisms! The odd times I try to say something in Spanish, my grammar gets corrected but get commendations for my Spanish-speaking accent.
Right now, I’m doing no formal study of Spanish. No memorizations of conjugation tables or fill-in-the-blank exercises on whether the correct verb is “ser” or “estar”. So I can’t tell you for my life what tense a verb is, but I can tell you what was meant and (more or less) whether it “sounded” correct. I learned to read English very early – in fact, I don’t remember a time that I could _not_ read, which meant I can read at least basic stuff before 4 – and the skills I’m acquiring via DS reminded me of how I got by English lessons in grade-school: I picked the answer that “sounded” correct and learned the grammatical explanations post-hoc.
DS has its devoted cult following and also more than its fair share of detractors; the ALG method and anything based on it is generally quite controversial. You will see debates going to the moon and back about whether it’s “efficient” or not, but I can personally attest to the fact that *it just works*!
One thing I like about the method (ALG generally and DS specifically) is that it’s just *impossible* to lie about the time and effort it takes to acquire a language, as the method is inherently based on you getting dozens, hundreds, and then thousands of hours of exposure to the language. This is in contrast to all those scam ads claiming you can learn (insert language here) in 5 days, 21 days, 90 days, just subscribe to our program for the low low price of $299 (or sign up for the monthly subscription of $29.99).
As for Duolingo, I’ve concluded that it’s really a language-themed social media game than a serious tool for learning, with the added feature of being able to brag to friends about 1,500 day streak while you thumb your nose at them for their Candy Crush guilty-pleasure addiction.
@David #442
Java is a “legacy” tool nowadays and the kids consider it unfashionable, so I rarely see the examples above anymore. I did recently come across a piece of Ruby code done by a Bash/Perl scripting guru; I don’t have the code at hand but it’s a long, single line that does three things:
1. reverse a string
2. do some regex magic substitution
3. reverse it again and return the output
I was staring at the thing for a good 15-20 minutes trying to figure out what it was for, when I thought to feed the code into ChatGPT for an explanation. The chatbot returned a couple of lines saying something about formatting a numeric string and suddenly the thing became obvious: it reversed the string because the regex step was inserting commas every three places from right-to-left, and so the result needed to be reversed again. Of course, Ruby has several ways to do this more nicely, but the original author was probably “thinking in Perl” while writing in Ruby.
Incidentally, this anecdote leaves me with one of the very few actual, real uses of an LLM: iterate through well-established patterns and return different variations. Which is, of course, the entirety of what a LLM fundamentally is: a pattern recognition and iteration tool. Whether that’s worth sinking a couple of trillion of dollars worth in computer chips, electricity, water, salaries of “AI talent” and so on is of course another matter.
There is an official weather station only 2.5 miles away. It says it’s 91 F. My outside thermometer says it’s 82. In the kitchen where the oven has just been turned of it’s 84.
This sort of thing can make you distrust the official numbers.
Has anyone else seen a consistent mismatch between official temperatures and what you read it your house not explainable by something obvious like your house is on a lake?
Here’s an amusing tidbit having no connection to anything previously discussed herein.
I recently saw a photograph of the gravestone of actor and erstwhile film star Jack Lemmon. It reads like this:
JACK LEMMON
IN
Beneath the word “IN” lies the plot of grassy ground whereunder Mr. Lemmon now presumably resides. One can’t say the man didn’t have a sense of humor.
Achille # 451: Interesting, thank you for the links…
Hey Wyatt317
That is high-praise, being likened to one of Melville’s lesser-known stories! Nonetheless, I must ask if there was any fault at all in my story, in terms of style and execution?
Well, Achille, I’ve started reading these links you send here in JMG blog, and I can say I won’t necessary agree 100% with its authors, but it’s always good having new perspectives, different from canned media opinions. Thanks a lot! Gracias
@Patricia Ormsby,
I never had any problems avoiding to write Mary Sue stories, because I can’t believe for a second that I’m special enough to have the whole (story) world and all its characters revolve around me, and I’d be too embarrassed to write such a self-insert. In fact, my female characters are all as different from me as I can make them.
As for language acquisition, I couldn’t talk to people in English at all after six years of learning it at school. But then the internet appeared, and I’ve always been a voracious reader, and all the interesting stuff was in English, so I read that, not with an eye to learning the language better, but because I was interested in the content. You also could order dvds from amazon, and as an avid Star Trek fan, I spent way too much money on buying and watching the series in its original language. Then I started chatting with people on the old forums, and finally, talked to them in English via video chat. It was a fully immersive experience, and nowadays I even dream in English sometimes.
Omen
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/man-found-dead-burning-man-sparks-homicide-investigation
“Orgy Dome” was destroyed by high winds one man died.
Curt
I was interested by your telling of some domestic and short haul flights being cancelled within Europe. It reminded me of a story from the other end of that process.. In the 70s before the high speed rail most people traveled from Paris to Brussels by train. I don’t remember the exact time, but lets say 4 hours. With the TGV the time was reduced to under two hours, and was very convenient for business people, but too expensive for almost anyone else. The regular train had to be rerouted to not delay the rapid train, and now took about 8 hours. The result was that most people then took the bus, drove their own cars or flew.
I am seeing a version of that now in California, where the train service is actually quite good, but too expensive to use for commuting. My daughter and other friends would like to use it for commuting, but it just doesn’t work out. Also both the train and the bus make it difficult to take your bike. The average bus here only has a rack for two bikes.
Stephen
I would add that the train service is quite good “where it goes” There are many places that are impossible to get to by public transport.
Well it looks like Amazon have given up on building a datacentre in New Zealand – rising power prices have scuttled them: https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/09/02/amazon-aborts-construction-of-west-auckland-data-centre/
“[The original announcement they would build] was when the spot price of electricity was less than $100/MWh. Since then it’s peaked at nearly $900/MWh, before hovering around the $200/MWh mark this winter. Energy-starved manufacturers, such as pulp and paper mills, have shut their doors and laid off hundreds of staff, citing the high prices for gas and electricity.”
Excuse me for falling on the news “vortex”, but I wonder if Von der Leyen airplane was really jammed in its electronics by the bad guys (Russians), or it was a conventional media BS distraction. Is it casual or not? I mean, news about supposed jamming were broadcasted when Putin was going to meeting with Modi and Xi…What do you think about such an opportune coincidence? I distrust mainstream media, but I don’t want to fall in paranoia…
————————————————
Another German woman working in politics, now I remember her name. Do you know who is Sahra Wagenknecht?(I hope to write correctly her full name, dear German kommentariat!). She rules a German party which is no doubt democratic socialist, but OMG they are against unllimited migration and against supporting Ukraine government in war against Russia. For the legacy EU media, they’re evil incarnated, of course, because they break the fatal consensus both Left and “moderate” Right are defending. However, I think Sahra’s party is necessary for smart people at the center-left trend, who dislike populist Right and Liberal fake socialist parties. I wish there would be a Sahra in my country, but there isn’t (yet).
@Carlos, thanks for sharing your experience with DS.
I actually agree with the point some critics raise about efficiency, with the caveat that it depends entirely on your goals for learning the language.
David Long, the successor to the ALG Method, mentioned straight out in an interview that they were approached by some diplomatic and businesses services about providing language training for their staff. For the needs of these organizations, ALG was not the best fit. They just wanted their staff to speak in a set context, be able to greet, ask directions, and maybe have very simple conversations. Spending 1000 hours to get to the passive understanding level of a young child is not an efficient use of their time.
For literary languages like Latin, Ancient Greek, Classical Chinese etc, there might not be too much point in doing this either, if you want to get to read authentic texts as quickly as possible.
For people who really want to acquire the language to the level of a native, the way you know your own native language, IMO there really is no alternative to massive comprehensible input.
>Java is a “legacy” tool nowadays and the kids consider it unfashionable
It was always unfashionable, after people stopped using the browser plugin. Sun had one chance to get that right and blew it. Write once, debug everywhere. I find it amusing that WebASM is essentially the JVM reinvented and integrated into the browser. And that you can write in whatever frontend you want, it’ll all compile to WebASM on the backend. You’re not forced into writing for some person’s *cough* Gosling *cough* pet language.
Java these days is Cobol++ and should be called H1B and has the distinct odor of curry and B.O.
All the AI kids find python fascinating for some strange reason. The language itself is OK, what I find offensive about it is all the venv bailing wire and duct tape because the people maintaining python have very weird ideas about backward compatibility. That makes me not want to touch it any more than I have to.
And I’ve encountered some python fanaticism too. Not as bad as the Macolytes but annoying. Take your old time religion / And shove it up your
>Has anyone else seen a consistent mismatch between official temperatures and what you read it your house not explainable by something obvious like your house is on a lake?
“Offishul” weather observations are usually (almost always) located at an airport and are very useful for someone who needs to use that airport for things. Mainly it’s the wind and altimeter setting you care about but temp/dewpoint can give you some idea of how foggy it might get. For everyone else, not so much, as you’ve noticed that temperature off the airport can vary quite a bit. In the end, a weather observation is a snapshot of what was going on at a specific place at a specific time.
Sometimes those observation stations break down too and due to the ongoing collapse, they are getting slower and slower about fixing them when they do. Although the thermometer part tends to be reliable, it’s the lightning detection that tends to go first.
Dagnarus,
Also in that article is
“The Zapatistas are a good example: when they took power they let everyone out prison except for rapists, murderers and drug trafficking bosses. (If you want the details of how this works, well, read the book.)”
This is in contrast to the current left wing in Britain, who are imprisoning everybody and their grandma and letting out nobody except for rapists and murderers and drug traffickers.
@Other Owen,
I am not a professional software engineer. I did actually study machine learning and I use Python for various side projects. I used to hate managing environments and versions. Recently I discovered uv by astral, I found that it helps a lot with managing packages and venvs. It’s not completely painless but it’s a big improvement over the old way of venv, pip, conda etc
Last week, Lathechuck mentioned the Situationist work “Anti-Mass: Methods of Organization for Collectives.” I’ve finally been getting around to reading it and this quote stands out:
“Of course, people will put down the collective as being exclusive. That is not the point. The size of a collective is essentially a limitation on its authority. By contrast, large organizations, while having open membership, are exclusive in terms of who shapes the politics and actively participates in the structuring of activities.”
Link for those who want to read it:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-red-sunshine-gang-anti-mass
Anonymous, that’s a very plausible interpretation.
Carlos, fascinating! I’ve long wondered myself why the languages I know don’t differentiate between “us, including you” and “us, excluding you” — it seems very sensible to me that Tagalog makes that distinction. The distinction between particles is interesting, too; some African languages do something not that different with prefix particles (thus, for example, Kikongo is the Congolese language, but Bakongo is a Congolese person).
Patricia, there’s a fine resource on that subject, though its creator was bullied by Mary Sue-ophiles until she disowned it: the Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test. You can use it to check your characters for Mary Sue-ness, and then start changing things to de-Mary Sue-ify the character:
https://springhole.net/writing/marysue.htm
Alvin, I’ve seen the same thing with the very different American sense of humor — a lot of people whose English was learned in adulthood don’t get it.
J.L.Mc12, inventing nouns for concepts that don’t have English equivalents is a good habit for worldbuilders. I did a milder version of the same thing by giving Hyperborean three unrelated words for love between members of a couple: aqqat, which is familial love, the desire for family and children and a place in the iqqibal shalsholi, “the thread that binds the generations together” (an important Hyperborean concept); nen, which literally means “wetness” and is sexual attraction; and ilul, romantic love, love at first sight. One of the great weaknesses of English is its wretchedly poor vocabulary for emotions; I decided to give the Hyperboreans something a little better.
Curt and Chuaquin, many thanks for the data points.
Philip, interesting. Your argument concerning debt is backed up by an interesting bit of historical data: during eras of decline, debt is demonized. Dante put moneylenders lower in Hell than heretics and murderers!
Clay, yes, I’ve seen the same thing. I think it’s a desperate last-ditch attempt to salvage what’s left of the myth of progress. If we went to the Moon and can’t get back, then Tomorrowland has fallen and it’s all over for Man the Conqueror of Nature.
Balowulf, the mass migrations of illegal immigrants to western Europe have been not merely permitted but encouraged by ruling elites who are desperate to prop up real estate prices — the foundation of the global banking system — and drive down wages. They’re not a natural process. So long as eastern European societies refuse to go down the same ruinous path, they should be fine.
Clay, the Democrats became the party of the laptop class years ago, and have profited hugely from the Fed’s mis-, mal-, and nonfeasance. It’s hardly an accident that the shutdown of a range of federal grift programs such as USAID has been followed by a massive financial crisis for the Democratic party! At this point they’ve got their backs to the wall — they’ve lost control of the federal cash spigot, they’ve lost control of the illegal-alien pipelines that flooded the country with cheap labor and fake voters, and they’ve begun to lose control of what’s left of the mass media. Expect a lot of strange battles as we proceed.
Llewna, I haven’t gotten my pair yet! I’ll post something, probably on Dreamwidth, after I get them and have the chance to work with them.
Other Owen, yep. As James Watt showed a good long time ago, if you insulate a heat engine, it does more work. The global climate is a heat engine, the work it does is called “weather,” and CO2 is a form of insulation. Expect even stranger weather as we proceed.
Polecat, I saw that. I was astounded — in a good way, of course. Hang on, here we go…
Excalibur/djs, the American settlement of the Great Plains is already collapsing — check out the number of ghost towns in states like Kansas. Yes, there’ll be nomads there again in due time, and they may well have a large share of Native American ancestry, if only because so many Mexicans are mestizos.
Team10tim, that’s a subject for an entire post, or more than one post, since Africa, Asia, and the BRICS include a large number of countries, many of which can expect very different destinies even over the short term. How much, really, does Vietnam have in common with Lesotho?
Chris, a return to isolationism is the only thing that can spare the US from political collapse at this point — we don’t have the resources to support our former empire, and we’ll be hard to it to patch the cracks here at home. The economic debacle on its way will be epic, but if the US reshores as much as possible of its economic activity, that will put a safety net under the working class and make for a less traumatic time here (though worse conditions in the countries that have gotten used to manufacturing for our market, to be sure).
Dagnarus, good heavens, yes, that is a remarkable bit of revelation.
Patricia O, interesting. Yes, I’d also thought of the Western Pure Land in that context.
Siliconguy, many weather stations are poorly located and poorly maintained, and will likely become more so as things proceed.
Kevin, ha!
Archivist, yep. When the Burning Man festival shuts down, we’ll know that the reign of the laptop class has ended once and for all. That may not be too far in the future!
KAN, that’s another wave of the future.
JMG,
“the American settlement of the Great Plains is already collapsing — check out the number of ghost towns in states like Kansas. Yes, there’ll be nomads there again in due time, and they may well have a large share of Native American ancestry, if only because so many Mexicans are mestizos.”
Also climate change means that the Great Plains will turn into desert in the next century and destroy what’s left of agricultural settlement in the Great Plains. You’ll end up with desert nomads there.
JMG,
“the mass migrations of illegal immigrants to western Europe have been not merely permitted but encouraged by ruling elites who are desperate to prop up real estate prices — the foundation of the global banking system — and drive down wages. They’re not a natural process. ”
If current mass migration of illegal immigrants are not a natural process then why do you predict that they will take over Western Europe in the next two centuries and turn Western Europe into an extension of Islamic Africa and Arabia? As opposed to the immigrants simply leaving Europe for better pastures when Europe’s economy collapses and anti-immigrant nationalists take over Western European countries?
I found a really interesting thread from a finance guy about the impending peak of US shale oil production:
https://xcancel.com/ekwufinance/status/1962165137206284540
Some highlights:
“Every basin except the Permian has already peaked. Now the Permian is flashing the same warning signs.”
“Why does it happen? Because of incentives Let’s go back to the years of the shale boom. Producers weren’t rewarded for capital discipline or long-term thinking. They were rewarded for production growth. So that’s what they delivered…. ramping up faster than anything in history.”
“The Permian was the last shale basin. There is no other.”
Patrica O #456
Funny enough, I think if JMG’s vision is correct Japanese Pure Land Buddhism will weather the transition better than most: at least in America, where Shin Buddhism got secularized and psychologized, the idea seems to have developed that the Pure Land is not a place but a state of consciousness achievable in this life through shinjin. I say this as an outsider, but that strikes me as an idea that can easily be incorporated into a more robust and supernatural version of the faith that is more this-worldly.
—-
Re: the Java conversation
I’ve also thought recently that Java is the new COBOL, and used largely by the same industries. To me it’s a cautionary tale of embracing a hot new technology that solves the problem of the day. I suspect the rush to adopt Rust will end up the same way and a decade or so from now the programmers of the future (there will still be some, despite decline setting in) will be cursing the decision.
>I used to hate managing environments and versions.
No, keep hating them. I’ll explain.
>Recently I discovered uv by astral, I found that it helps a lot with managing packages and venvs. It’s not completely painless but it’s a big improvement over the old way
The fact that you need such tools to begin with points to what I would consider serious flaws in how the interpreter and language are managed. This doesn’t happen in other languages, you know. You can take a well-written Perl script from 20 years ago, and it still runs, untouched, unboxed. Same thing with C. Heck if you were careful with how you wrote your C code, you could probably still compile a 30 or 40 year old program. No need to box it, although you might need to specify -Cansi instead of -C99
I understand, you need to get stuff done and some of that involves dealing with Python scripts. But please, don’t start thinking “This is OK, this is good, this is normal” when dealing with Python, because frankly, it’s not.
>This is in contrast to all those scam ads claiming you can learn (insert language here) in 5 days, 21 days, 90 days
I call those courses “airport-hotel courses”, in that they’ll get you just good enough to emit enough of the language to get you from the airport to the hotel and back. For some people, that’s all they’re looking for and that’s all they need.
As far as being a furriner living in a land where the people speak strangely, you’d be surprised how far you can get by with 1.) knowing how to count and 2.) using 2 word subject-verb sentences. All you have to do is expand how many two word sentences you can put together. Learn one new word a day. It won’t make you fluent but you can limp by.
File this for later if you need it. And oh yeah, someone mentioned that a foreign language can rewire your brain? Yeah, you can really start to feel the changes the closer you get to fluency, the more exposure you get.
The Other Owen #470:
I’ll have to disagree with that characterisation. Java might have a lot of legacy cruft but it’s still actively developed, steadily gaining new features, _after_ much deliberation. To me, this seems ideal: let all the young languages experiment and figure out which features work and which don’t and then, when everything’s settled, pick up the good parts and leave the rest. I honestly wouldn’t mind working on a new project in Java, as long as I don’t need to deal with Enterprise™ frameworks and their obsession with design patterns.
The fascination with python comes, as I understand it, not from the language itself but from the library ecosystem.
—David P.
Alvin #473:
No doubt there’s yet another tool that fixes most of the problems. In a couple of years, there will be another one. And then another one. They will all be incompatible and nobody will know which one to use in which situation.
—David P.
>they’ve begun to lose control of what’s left of the mass media
I would say that it’s more of everyone has stopped paying attention to mass media rather than them losing control over it. More like the mass media has lost control over the populace. From what I can see, CNN is still putting out the same tired old government propaganda they always have. Here’s a prediction. Just like Intel, CNN will at some point be back-door nationalized.
Meanwhile, I get most of my news from forums and funposters these days. Zerohedge is about as normie as I get. If it’s not worth funposting about, it’s not worth knowing.
“Excalibur/djs, the American settlement of the Great Plains is already collapsing — check out the number of ghost towns in states like Kansas. ”
As early as the 1990s, the state of Colorado had a department of depopulation. (Don’t remember the exact name.) Eastern Colorado is what many people think of Kansas being like, only a bit drier.
This part of the US west should never have had the prairie dug up to grow crops. That caused the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s. Much of the last phase of prairie destruction was driven by financial speculation and a kind of “margin call”. As the price of wheat collapsed, new farmers had to dig up even more (and less promising for crops) prairie in order to pay off the loans they bought the land with.
The equivalent in the 2030s may be electricity.
>All he could talk about was Trump taking over the FED. I found this odd, because the Fed has been a creature of the banks and financial elites and is very far from being some kind of democratic institution.
If you think the Fed is independent and politically neutral you probably also believe that the BLS produces accurate unbiased statistics. I would question what else do you believe in at that point? Sanny Claus? The Tooth Fairy?
Basically Trump is dropping long existing pretenses and I guess pretentious people are now offended by that? Ok.
—
I hear that Trump and Bessent are going to declare a housing emergency. I don’t think that’s such a bad thing, although I wonder how they plan on providing lower priced affordable homes while maintaining the overall bull market in housing. Because the moment that bull market even pauses, the banking system stops being able to pretend that it’s still solvent. Notice I said pretend, it has been insolvent for a while now.
@The Other Owen
venv sucks, I have solutions to go them if you are interested I can provide some suggestions.
I like python because you can do pretty much anything with it. fast.
But the fact that is now associated with the AI bros could be its demise. Like the .com bubble took Perl with it.
Anything Oracle touches turns to a shirt. Imagine Oracle wanting to create a cancer mRNA therapy waxx, Oracle single handedly destroyed MySQL, their own SQL, Solaris and destroyed Java to be frank Sun left it a bit bad, to begin with.
>Java might have a lot of legacy cruft
One rough rule of thumb I use to judge a language by is how easy (or hard) it is to do this: open a file in text mode, and read it out line by line. As I understand it, they’ve managed to make it less verbose these days but there was a time when what would’ve been 2 or 3 lines of C exploded to 15 lines of Java to accomplish that task. In Perl, you can probably squinch it all on one line of pure line noise. Python passes that test with a reasonable 4-5 lines, last time I looked.
And if you think Java is bad, you should look at Haskell. Before you even begin to open and read from a file, we first need to explain to you what a Monad is and finger wag at you as to why you need it. I’m not even going to begin to explain that here, I’ll just warn you “Here be dragons” and leave it at that. Unless you were playing with Arduinos as a kid, you’re honestly better off not knowing what a Monad is. Seriously.
Anonymous, Jessica et al
apropos the collapse of the great plains: in addition to climate change, land degradation, etc, almost all irrigated crops are on ground water. As the water depletes and has to be pumped from deeper and deeper, and available energy declines, most of that will become unaffordable.
Stephen
@ The Other Owen #480,
“The fact that you need such tools to begin with points to what I would consider serious flaws in how the interpreter and language are managed. This doesn’t happen in other languages, you know.”
Oh, thank goodness. I thought I was the only one who felt this way. The insistence that you absolutely, positively must keep around a completely different installation of the language for each project because some dependency might be broken in newer versions has never sat right with me.
Unfortunately, your last sentence isn’t quite correct: Python is the main example of this pathology, and the worst, but unfortunately it has crept into pretty much every major language since. Ruby, Clojure, Go, and Swift all have “beloved” version management and virtual environment management tools. Even Java has some issues with this which is why it’s common to have JDK 8 installed next to the latest version.
A lot of this stems from the way third-party libraries are approach in those languages: instead of linking against a handful of shared libraries installed by your system’s package manager and verified by your OS distribution, it’s now common to depend on dozens or hundreds of beta-quality (or wosrse) libraries pulled from unvetted GitHub repos and prone to API changes breakage between minor versions. (And heaven help you if one of the repos is closed down because the developers got mad; look up “npm left-pad incident.”)
The discussion about the current political and economical conditions in the United Kingdom leads me to share my own impressions from the United Kingdom: I was for a week with my father and a few friends in Penzance, Cornwall. The city, at least the parts that we saw, seemed to be relative well off, maybe due to tourism. We didn’t see panhandling or homelessness, with one exception. The people were mostly friendly. At the supermarkets were the usual tabloids like Sun and The Daily Mirror, and looking at them, you wouldn’t think much of anything extraordinary is going on. This leaves the question if a crisis is building in a way which is invisible to the casual visitor.
@JMG in re:
“[T]he US is also propping up Israel, of course, for reasons that are entirely a function of domestic politics. … I can’t change that. What I can change is whether I give the mindless bloodshed over there any of my emotional energy.”
I just saw this hectoring, screeching rant by Caitlin Johnstone here:
Dear Western Liberal
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/08/30/dear-western-liberal/
“We are all morally obligated to do everything we can to oppose a live-streamed genocide that’s being facilitated, supported and defended by the western power structure under which we live. Nothing besides tooth-and-claw ferocious opposition satisfies that moral obligation.
Don’t tell me about your feelings. Don’t tell me what political positions you support. Don’t tell me what thoughts you privately think to yourself. Do everything you can to stop the genocide that’s being facilitated by your government and its allies.
Nothing else qualifies. Nothing else is defensible. Nothing else will satisfy the questions you’ll be asked by younger generations about what you did during the Gaza holocaust.”
Ar-r-r-rgh!
This is another example of an AWFL attempting to wield moral authority she has not earned. She can go pound sand! I will decide where to invest my emotional energy. Hint: I will only invest said energy into issues where I can realistically make a difference. If this screeching twit wants to define me as “evil” for so determining, that is on her, not me.
@JMG #475
I would add to your comment on mass migration that while propping up real estate and driving down wages are important, the primary purpose is to destroy the peoples of the country’s they are sent to. To erase what it means to be an Englishman. To erase what it means to be American. Instead of a nation you end up a piece of land occupied by people from all over the world with no shared culture,history or language. A place like this is easily controlled.
If there is anything in programming languages that is symbolic of the current cumbersome bureaucracies in the American federal government it would have to be the C++ governing committee. Rust is currently taking a huge bite out of C++ usage in the industry because C++’s governance by committee is currently one of the most ineffective and incompetent at maintaining its language and adding new features (see the latest fiascoes over safety / profiles, contracts, and C++ modules). It is currently so incompetent that the major backers of C++ in the industry are turning away from supporting C++ and instead supporting their own alternative programming languages (Rust, Swift, C#/.NET, Go, Carbon, Kotlin, etc). If the C++ governing committee doesn’t reform itself soon, C++ not Java will be this generation’s COBOL, with only legacy codebases supporting development in C++ and greenfield development done in other programming languages.
@ Pygmycory #437
” A character who is always right, and never struggles or messes up and has to fix their mistakes isn’t very relatable or likeable to most readers, and can be boring to write after a while.”
Dear Pygmycory, you have just cleared up for me the thing that I have consistently found most annoying about the modern mainstream Middle Eastern narrative.
And it is this. Among the nations, Israel is a Mary Sue.
Fascinating. 🙂 And thank you.
JMG et al
Following up on the issue of the decline/collapse of the US plains, does anyone have any idea how far north this trend will go in the Canadian prairies. I know there have been major fires earlier this summer in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but I know very little about the plains/prairies climate factors.
Thanks
Stephen
“Burning man” is the ceremony of Faustian minds unleashed (no limits for people who can afford it…). I’ve read these bad news for their business too. I agree: omen, or sign of times, or whatever you want to name it…
@JMG
I would like to read a then-mainstream book on U.S. history written in the 19th or early 20th century so I can contrast it with the U.S. history I learned in 2000s/10s public school.
Do you have any recommendations?
J.L.Mc12 @461
It seemed well written to me: nice pace, held my interest and excellent ambiguous ending.
@The Other Owen #486,
I think you might be confusing cause and effect when it comes to the FED. The fed often does the bidding of the US government, not because the voters decided to motivate their elected leaders to manage the fed, but because the same group ( Bankers and Financial interests) control both entities.
The Fed is not some kind of independent entity, it and the US government are run by the same powerful forces and their actions are aligned for the benefit of those forces.
Accusing Trump of taking over the Fed is just Kabuki theatre because even if he appointed every member of the Fed’s board the whole thing would still be run by the same people.
It is the NYT’s that thinks its readers are naive and believe the FED is some kind of altruistic independent organization that Trump is trying to take over to benefit his wealthy buddies. Which is misleading because Trumps wealthy buddies already run the place.
In the intersection between TSW and “wait, what?”… apparently hypnosis might be able to induce breast growth:
https://xcancel.com/G0ADM/status/1962862297354772862
Hey JMG
I agree utterly that creating words for things that English can’t easily express is a worthwhile exercise, but not just for worldbuilding I think. Funnily enough, I recently read a book titled “How to be weird” by Eric G. Wilson, and one of the 99 exercises he listed for developing “weirdness” is creating one’s own lexicon of words nonexistent in English.
I have noticed a few things that don’t seem to have English words for them, so I will probably fix that myself. One wordless phenomenon I have encountered happens when I try to perceive something that may be moving very slowly, or a faint sound. There are occasions when it becomes hard to tell if you are really seeing something move very slowly or hearing a faint sound, or if you are essentially deluding yourself into thinking that you are perceiving this, in a similar way to “pareidolia”.
“I would say that it’s more of everyone has stopped paying attention to mass media rather than them losing control over it. More like the mass media has lost control over the populace. ”
They did an own goal in that regard. In 2004 they turned off the long range analog transmitters and shifted to shorter range digital signals. Half the range means you cover 1/4 the area. Plus there isn’t cable available outside of town. Perceiving that they had a monopoly the satellite services jacked up their prices and added more commercials and people bailed. I don’t know if the existing satellites will be replaced when they breakdown.
Propaganda doesn’t work if no one hears it.
All programming languages are going to be legacy programming languages in the future when most businesses in your country can’t afford computers or electricity anymore.
Peter #494,
I see what you’re saying with this but the difference is that C++ doesn’t contain a virtual machine that needs to stay updated for security reasons. If you don’t like where the committee is going you can just set your favorite compiler to use an older standard and it will. None of them implement any standard past C++17 fully anyway.
Last I checked C# had a similar problem with feature bloat, and Swift’s feature bloat is legendary.
Of all of the ones you listed Go is the least bad IMO.
What on earth has happened to the United Kingdom??
https://x.com/SpeechUnion/status/1962823252465565803
The country that produced George Orwell is now making his predictions come true…
Anonymous, indeed we will. Desert in the belt of states closest to the Rockies and semidesert from there to the Mississippi — fine territory for nomads, since nothing else can be done with it. Between the Rockies and the Cascades/Sierras, on the other hand, will be as dead as the eastern Sahara, a sun-blasted wasteland that might receive an inch of rain every century. Las Vegas will be a legend, the buried city of the sands full of gold. As for immigration, it doesn’t have to be a natural process to become irreversible. The Saxon invasion of Britain wasn’t a natural process — the British ruling class brought the Saxons under Hengist and Horsa in to defend them against their own people — but once it proceeded far enough, the Saxons carved out defensible zones on the coasts and invited plenty of their fellow-countrymen in, and the fall of Britain followed prompty. Sound familiar?
Slithy, glad someone’s noticed. Depletion never sleeps, and the faster you drill, the faster you run out.
Other Owen, granted, but the legacy media still appeals to some people, and even there they’ve started to lose their grip. It’s fascinating to watch.
Jessica, exactly. The entire belt is hollowing out, and will become desert, where the few holdouts will become the ancestors of tomorrow’s nomads.
Booklover, I can think of several tourist towns in the US where you can go and see no trace at all of the bitter discords that have riven American society.
Michael, yes, well, screechers gonna screech. There’s a real endorphin rush to be had from furious self-righteous rage, and a lot of people these days are addicts.
Kevin, for what it’s worth, I don’t think that’s the primary purpose. My take is that the ruling classes these days aren’t that smart, or that clued into what’s happening. They’re so far removed from reality on the streets that it never occurs to them that the people down there matter at all.
Stephen, I don’t happen to know. I’m pretty sure, though, that the Mackenzie River basin is going to be one of the great breadbasket regions of the 22nd century, once the Arctic Ocean becomes blue water and Canada’s north coast warms to a temperate climate. Russia has half a dozen major river systems that will be similarly blessed.
Patrick, here are a few tens of thousands of them — take your pick. Archive.org is great for this — go to advanced search and specify a date range.
https://archive.org/search?query=%28history+of+the+united+states%29+AND+date%3A%5B1800-01-01+TO+1920-12-31%5D&and%5B%5D=mediatype%3A%22texts%22&and%5B%5D=language%3A%22English%22
Slithy, that was known in Frans Anton Mesmer’s time! Historical amnesia is quite something…
J.L.Mc12, taking pareidolia as a model, the word for that would be parecholia: “eidos” means “image,” and “echos” means “noise, sound, rumor.”
Siliconguy, lying blatantly on the air, in situations where many people could doublecheck the claims on social media, probably didn’t help.
Yavanna, welcome to socialism. It always works out that way sooner or later.
Peter,
The C++ committee being so incompetent and ineffective just means that when the C++ committee collapses in the near future, you return to the late 1980s and early 1990s era before the C++ committee became a thing and end up with a different dialect of C++ for each C++ compiler.
@ Michael Martin #492 –
“…Nothing else qualifies. Nothing else is defensible. Nothing else will satisfy the questions you’ll be asked by younger generations about what you did during the Gaza holocaust.”
Ho hum. Hum-de-dum. What is the price of waffles today?
Ms. Johnstone used to seem to me like a journalist with some guts and integrity, but she’s really run off the rails. My guess is that our posterity will care a lot more about what we did to provide for their future. What did we do to ensure that they’ll have enough to eat? Did we restore the soil for their crops or plant food forests? Will we take actions designed to ensure that they’ll live in adequately built and heated homes, or will half their kids die of consumption and pneumonia? That’s what they’ll care about. In the West, only historians will bother to remember what happened in the Middle East this year.
I’m not saying it’s good, what’s happening in Gaza. In fact it’s ghastly. I just don’t see what use it is to exhort us to save the world and its peoples from their own obsessively cultivated enmities, and berate us for not pouring our energies into that hopeless task. I’m done with that, just as I’m done with worrying about overpopulation. These are Twentieth Century concerns, and that century is over. We’re no longer in a position to act as paternalistic hegemons trying to solve the insoluble problems of the world.
>Rust is currently taking a huge bite out of C++ usage in the industry because C++’s governance by committee is currently one of the most ineffective and incompetent at maintaining its language and adding new features
What I see, Rust is pretty much tied to Firefox and that’s it. That’s where it started.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-developer-survey-most-used-languages/
Powershell and Go are more popular than Rust and frankly, after having played with Rust a little, I’d rather use both of them over it. Yeah, you heard me. Even Powershell. Rust does things in a rather weird and not-at-all straightforward way. Simple things, (try zero-ing out a struct sometime) they make unnecessarily complicated. In Rust, you can’t just. There’s an old phrase – “Bondage and discipline language”?
Yeah, people have been complaining about C++ being bloated since time out of mind (and then there was a time when everyone had a different compiler that only partially implemented the C++ standard) but none of the other languages you mentioned (aside from Objective-C which you didn’t) are really all that backwards compatible with C. Almost all of them require you do some sort of stub generation or FFI hokeypokey before calling any C library function. Except for C++ and Obj-C. Declare/include, compile and link.
If C was the first gen, and C++/Java/C#/Objective-C was second gen, and Rust/Go/Swift is third gen, whoever makes a 3rd gen language that’s actually backwards compatible with C will rule the world, IMHO. I know I’d switch to it.
As far as memory safety goes, well, I’m sensing another fad developing here, much like the exception throwing fad of the 90s. Notice everyone’s quietly abandoned try-catch these days (or at least toned it down)? I wonder why.
Stephen Pearson @ 489 Do you think dryland farming might be possible in parts of the Great Plains? I have never lived there, so I am asking out of curiosity. If a farmer were able to capture the snow that falls on his or her land, by means of swales, for example, would that provide enough moisture to grow some crops. I think I have read mention in passing of research into new and old varieties of grains and pulses which might require less water than what is being grown now.
Scotland @ 495 ..
So, does that mean that ‘Mary Sue’ finally gets, um .. Buried?
Huge straw in the wind: The September 2025 issue of Harper’s had an article on Arizona’s ESA (Empowerment Scholarship Account) program, and what the writer, Chandler Fritz, calls “microschools” that resulted. #1: The program has already enrolled 80,000 students, at least half of them from public schools, the rest from private schools. There’s a long description of one of the better ones, most of whose students were working-class kids with horror stories to tell about their public school teachers., triggered by the fact that the class was reading “To Kill A Mockingbird,” and Scout’s first day in school. Now, a lot of the other schools were Christian conservative, teaching “creation science,” but that’s to be expected too.
Interesting is the cover headline “The End of Public School As We Know It. The actual title was The Homemade scholar.”
So .. it appears that Bernie ‘bluebird of yappieness’ $anders .. is all-a-‘tither’ .. over Our Director of H & H services, the most honorable RFK Jr. …. of the banishment of the likes of those fine BDMS folks the Centers for the Diseased CONtroll-ers. How Bernard has sunk to such lowly levels..
I’m reminded of a quote at the end of the, gasp!, BBC’s 1970’s production of the series ‘I CLAVIVS’ ..whereby Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus .. this .. that .. and whatever … hath stated, before his ultimate familial demise: “May All the Things That Lurk & Squirm In The Mud – HATCH OUT!
Folks … We • Are • There!
Hyperborean love actually maps quite well onto the Greek concepts of “Storge” (what you feel for your home and family and the rest), “Eros”, and “Agape” which doesn’t quite fit, but has things in common with “ilul.”
RE: Rust
Personally I hate the fact that Rust has a separate macro language that you need to know before you can program in Rust. If Rust were like other languages in only being one programming language than maybe I might enjoy it more.
@The Other Owen #510,
“What I see, Rust is pretty much tied to Firefox and that’s it.”
I wish this was true, but Linus Torvalds recently OK’d the inclusion of Rust code in the Linux kernel. No, I don’t know how they’re going to work around Rust’s unstable, C-incompatible ABI.
“As far as memory safety goes, well, I’m sensing another fad developing here, much like the exception throwing fad of the 90s. Notice everyone’s quietly abandoned try-catch these days (or at least toned it down)? I wonder why.”
Exactly. In addition to exceptions, remember the fad about functional programming and how it would solve all our problems with parallelism and monads are just monoids in the category of endofunctors so what’s the big deal? And now nobody talks about that anymore? Mark my words: Rust is the new Haskell.
(Nitpick, though: Exceptions are still common in interpreted languages because the interpreter can handle them as part of its normal operations and the cost of doing so is isn’t much above what the virtual machine itself imposes anyway.)
Jennifer, I saw and appreciated your latest reply. I’d forgotten your oldest is still so young 🙂 I like that there isn’t much curriculum to buy (books mostly, and maybe something for numeracy).
“Do you think dryland farming might be possible in parts of the Great Plains?”
Based on what I see here in Eastern WA is that dry land farming works on the Waterville Plateau where the get about 12 inches of rain a year, mostly November to April. It also works from Hartline to Davenport on US 2. They plant winter wheat in the autumn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterville,_Washington
The climate data is on that page.
I live just off of the plateau about 1000 feet lower and get 8 inches a year. Irrigated agriculture only. Look on a satellite view map of the Moses Lake area. Climate data below,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Lake,_Washington
Pullman or for that matter Spokane are in the 20 inch a year rain band and they can grow at least some spring planted regular crops like canola, peas, and lentils that will be harvested before it completely dries out in August. Trees can also start surviving there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman,_Washington
The onset of trees is pretty sudden. On US 2 east bound they start at Creston.
JMG- This is a carry-over from MM’s discussion of dietary salt. The “conventional wisdom” for a couple of generations is that “we” eat too much salt, but that’s based on assumptions about who is eating the salty highly-processed foods that line the market shelves. If one works at it, it’s not hard to practically eliminate salt, and (as noted elsewhere) we actually need about a teaspoon per day. “But you’ll get more than that from your potato chips, and canned soups, and ham sandwiches!” you might hear, but not everyone eats those things. Those of us who buy food without labels (potatoes, onions, fruit, bulk grain, etc.) have to pay attention to add enough. I’ve recently heard doctors admit, somewhat sheepishly, that the best beverage after heavy sweating is NOT plain water, but water with some salt, and perhaps some sugar. (I guess they can’t say Gatorade(r).)
From “Chronic Hyponatremia Causes Neurologic and Psychologic Impairments” in PubMed: “Hyponatremia is the most common clinical electrolyte disorder. Once thought to be asymptomatic in response to adaptation by the brain, recent evidence suggests that chronic hyponatremia may be linked to attention deficits, gait disturbances, risk of falls, and cognitive impairments. ”
There’s a lot of cognitive impairment going on around us, and it might be the same people who listened to the expert advice to “eat less salt” (and don’t dare go out without sunscreen). You know the type.
Mary Bennett
I would think swales and any kind of water capture would help. I also think that selecting for the most drought tolerant grains, and working on geneticlally modifying grains for drought tolerance would all help. Good it is so late in the cycle or someone would probably jump on me for advocating GMOs. People will also have to be prepared for more yearly variation. I think it will also depend on where in the region one is and when in the decline cycle. What may work 20 years from now will probably not at the nadir of the cycle. If there is some form of government or organization to support farmers through the dry years will also make a difference. By and large I would think herding would be a better bet in most of the region. Small garden plots for root vegetables like carrots, onions, potatoes, etc would help. I can remember in rural Ireland in the 70s when one never saw imported or out of season fruit and veg..Different climate of course, but just sayin. I certainly hope there are people working on these scenarios now.
I wish I could be of more help, but, I think, beyond the general trend there is a lot of unknown territory.
Stephen
A confluence of events has prevented me interacting here much recently – I find myself on the verge of a very welcome retirement from my day job in IT. Oddly enough my newer preoccupation as a bookbinder/publisher has given me heavy exposure to one software package written in Rust. The Typst typesetting software is a delight and blazingly fast.
I’ve made promises to various people here and elsewhere for early examples of my work. Bear with me please. Winding down one professional existence while negotiating all the usual family obligations and ramping up my training in preparation for my new life is taking at least as much time as I anticipated and then some.
Andy
In the mid section of my part of the Central Valley before the invention of the electric pump that enabled all sorts of year round crops and a massive drop in the water table winter wheat was the thing and on only 10-14 inches of winter rain. The area was a major American wheat producer. This was over a 100 years ago. There was summer fruit growing at the base of the Sierras from ditch water from the snow melt and mountain spring fed streams. Of course this type of arrangement with associated grazing with sheep, cattle, and goats can only support a light population along with managed selective timber harvesting in the mountains.
It’s a bit late in the blog cycle, but I wonder if there’s a cultural niche for a hedge school of the arts? Sort of like a Waldorf school, but more unrespectable. It might be fun.
Rust is terrible for anything that needs hot loading / rapid prototyping, such as game dev and front end web dev, because Rust compilation speeds are so slow thanks to the SAT solver inside the Rust compiler for memory safety. Those domains are going to remain dominated by C++/C# and Javascript respectively for the foreseeable future despite all the effort from Rust proponents to push Rust into those domains, because rapid compilation speeds are far more important than memory safety in those domains.
Where Rust will probably succeed the most are the places such as embedded and safety critical domains such as defense and the automotive industry where memory safety is a critical issue, but even there it’s competing with Ada/SPARK and MISRA C.
@The Other Owen
what do you think about Pascal, I find is a great language especially for standalone software, it wouldn’t surprise me if the paradigm of software as a service, and all these HTTP APIs and all this shirt goes to the dust bin, Pascal will see a resurgence.
@Anonymous
Going totally without electricity, will not be the norm in all the World, there will be pockets, one thing that amazes me in collapsenick thinking is the supposition that global economy will still work, it will not, that means that some countries will have no electricity problems, some will have a few hours a day and some none.
For me the conclusion that computers will disappear totally is a mystery. You have to look at what is bloated now, datacenters (cloud, social media, ai, and software as a service). A return to computers and software you own might be possible at some point, mini desktop computers and routers for basic networking could survive on minimum amounts of solar.
The problem is the datacenters and the fact that the new IT since 2004 start depending on them.
Re Kevin Andersen #493
“I would add to your comment on mass migration that while propping up real estate and driving down wages are important, the primary purpose is to destroy the peoples of the country’s they are sent to. ”
I believe french author Renaud Camus calls this (paraphrased) the ‘airportification’ of countries. They become places that look about the same wherever in the world you are. Nobody lives there: they are all just passing through.
Countries loose their own character and become a bland soup of nothingness, but it also makes the migrants loose their connection to their homeland. They become people that belong nowhere.
To people that think nationalism is bad, this might look like a good idea, I guess..
–bk
Re learning languages.
My home language is English. In school, Afrikaans was a compulsory subject. By the end of school I could read it okay, write it a little, and speak it not at all. A few years later as an engineer I was posted to a rural Afrikaans community where no one spoke English and was forced to learn to speak it in a hurry. By the end of a year people would ask me, are you English- or Afrikaans-speaking? I could not tell you what language I thought in.
My theory is, unless you are very motivated, you will only learn as much as you have to. Children who change countries learn other languages fast, not because their brains are still developing, but because they’ll have no friends if they don’t learn another language. They learn their home language because of tremendous encouragement and support from their parents who reward every beginner step, plus of course they need to learn to express their wishes.
I also learned Latin in school, which helped traveling around Italy and Spain, and mathematics came in handy in decoding Greek road signs because I could pronounce the Greek letters.
@ Jennifer #400 – given that your children are so young, and you are highly invested in their education, I would draw your attention to the 30-odd page trivium article – “The Lost Tools of Learning” – penned by Dorothy Sayers in 1947, and shared here by Robert Mathiesen – https://archive.org/details/sayers1948losttoolslearning/ (Presuming you have not already seen it).
The article explores ways to incorporate the medieval “trivium” concept to the education of modern children. On page 14 (as the article itself is numbered) she names learning stages she remembers herself going through as a child – Poll-parrot, Pert, and Poet, and gives (to my mind) a really excellent outline of how, precisely, to feed each of those stages the food it wants and needs the most.
Just as a taster, the Poll-parrot wants lots of everything without necessarily needing (yet) to make sense of it or structure it. Lots of new words to feel in the mouth, lots of stories, lots of colour, lots of names for plants, seashells, etc. She calls this the Grammar curriculum.
The Perts want to argue back and make things make sense, and this is when you introduce logic and the proper way to structure an argument, and critically examine the arguments of others, and so on. She calls this the Dialectic curriculum.
And finally: “Towards the close of this stage, the pupils will probably be beginning to discover for themselves that their knowledge and experience are insufficient, and that their trained intelligences need a great deal more material to chew upon. The imagination—usually dormant during the Pert age—will re-awaken, and prompt them to suspect the limitations of logic and reason. This means that they are passing into the Poetic age and are ready to embark on the study of Rhetoric.”
You may find this a very useful way to consider the overall structuring of your educational plans…. 🙂
@Lathechuck #520 – THANKS for this! I’ve been keeping a lid on the salt I eat because of water retention etc, and my cardiologist has on water pills, and, guess what? You hit that nail on the head. Yes, we humans are like Martin Luther’s drunk villager on horseback, we are.
>Exceptions are still common in interpreted languages because the interpreter can handle them as part of its normal operations and the cost of doing so is isn’t much above what the virtual machine itself imposes anyway
Performance isn’t really what I hated about them, it’s that they absolutely destroy readability of the code. You have to read several times as hard to understand code that’s liberally peppered with landmines, er, try-catch blocks. Flow control jumps all over the place if an exception gets thrown. And then you have to pay attention to what does or doesn’t get unwound when that happens too. It was a mess. As much as I don’t like Rust, they do get some things right. One of those is returning a universal error code along with whatever else you want to return, so checking for failure is standardized and straightforward. And instead of catch()-ing the world, if it’s truly an unrecoverable error, just panic() instead. That’s common sense error control right there.
And all of that never really stopped a bad lazy programmer from just catch()-ing everything and then doing nothing about it anyway. You can’t legislate morality, you can’t mandate good practice. If someone’s going to behave badly, they’re just going to behave badly. Watch and see with all this “memory safety”. Watch and see.
>If Rust were like other languages in only being one programming language than maybe I might enjoy it more.
That’s sort of like saying “If she was just using whips instead of whips and chains, I might enjoy it more”. Sorry, not a fan of bondage and discipline languages.
>venv sucks, I have solutions to go them if you are interested I can provide some suggestions.
Nah. I’d prefer to use a language where you do not need venv to begin with.
>I like python because you can do pretty much anything with it. fast.
Fair enough.
>But the fact that is now associated with the AI bros could be its demise. Like the .com bubble took Perl with it.
Maybe. Who knows.
>Anything Oracle touches turns to a shirt. Imagine Oracle wanting to create a cancer mRNA therapy waxx, Oracle single handedly destroyed MySQL, their own SQL, Solaris and destroyed Java to be frank Sun left it a bit bad, to begin with.
Yeah. Oracle is an extra special magical place where unpleasant things happen. But I wouldn’t blame Oracle for killing Java, Sun happily flubbed that up back in the late 90s. Granted Oracle hasn’t really helped Java but most of the damage was done before they got their paws on it. Once the market concluded it was “write once debug everywhere”, it was finished. They managed to wedge it into the server space but honestly, what makes it technically better than writing in nodejs or perl or python or (god forbid) PHP? And if you notice with programming language popularity, that nodejs has won? The other languages aren’t even close. Brendan Eich with his 5am overnight hack session mutated into something nobody could’ve foreseen.
@JMG,
My apologies for unloading a massive can of worms with all this programming language talk! It was an accident, honest… at least it’s not LLM talk! 😉
@Alvin #469,
You make very sensible observations regarding the effectiveness of ALG and other related methods and programs. I think a huge part of the controversy is simply people talking past each other. This is especially so because people on both sides of the debate appear to be hazy on two particular areas: the purpose for learning a language, and what it means to be “fluent”. For regular people who want to learn a language for general regular-people purposes, the ALG style is probably the best. For narrower purposes, other ways are faster. If you’re a tourist, just pick up a phrasebook and bring an Internet-connected smartphone if you’re not averse to the latter. International business? Basic business English + some form of pidgin will probably be fine. I’ve read testimonials of diplomats learning via some intensive language course being able to discuss the finer points of geopolitics in the target language, but could not tell you the names of the furniture in their living room. Over here, it’s common to have courses specifically tailored for call-center agents wanting to make (quite a bit) more money handling bilingual accounts.
A nice side benefit is that I find the DS to be quite fun. YMMV on that one, of course. Since it’s almost completely replaced my YouTube scrolling, I get to learn about random topics that the YouTube algo will never think to serve me. I try to watch literally just everything that’s up to my level of comprehension if I’m bored. I don’t think I’ll ever have a use for knowing the word “maquilla” – my wife isn’t heavily into that – but who knows, maybe the Internet collapses tomorrow and I need to reinvent myself as a makeup artist for wealthy octagenarian ladies here in Manila!
The Other Owen,
RE: “That’s sort of like saying “If she was just using whips instead of whips and chains, I might enjoy it more”. Sorry, not a fan of bondage and discipline languages.”
Just put unsafe everywhere in your Rust code and ignore the unsafe haters and you won’t have that problem.
>what do you think about Pascal
Only time I ever used it was in college, nobody out in the real world ever used it for anything. The few Pascal toolchains that you could use back then cost $$$$ and in the era of gcc and linux 0.99, the choice was clear. Or at least cheap. As far as the language goes? It’s OK. Nothing about it as I recall ever offended me. I haven’t tried doing anything practical in it though, so maybe there’s something boneheaded in there that might. Don’t know.
The Other Owen #488:
A Monad is a burrito, obviously. Or was a burrito a Monad? I never really got the analogy. Or Monads. I do know what burritos are and that’s enough for me.
That said, while I never managed to learn Haskell, I have a bit of a soft spot for it and other weird but usable languages. I used to be an avid Common Lisper, for example. I think that Sapir-Whorf holds much more for programming languages than for natural languages. In a sense, that means they’ve achieved the goals of conlangs like Ithkuil or Lojban (or even the weirder, two-dimensional ones whose names escape me), the only difference is that they’re meant to communicate with programs rather than humans.
Slithy Toves #490:
It’s almost a metaphor for Western civilisation. We moved away from the dependable values of system package managers because, it was argued, they held the library ecosystem back and, if only we could move faster by managing libraries ourselves, the faster development would create so many new amazing things that the old package managers would never have gotten around to including. What have we gained from this experiment? A pile of rubbish whose creators play pretend at rivalling their predecessor’s achievements while everything around them collapses due to the ever hollower foundations.
The Other Owen #510:
Have you looked into Zig? The build system can build the stubs for you, last I checked even handling macro “functions”. No complete memory safety either, though there are bounds checks that are enabled by default but can be turned off manually in functions that need them or, if you want it the other way around, disabled globally except in functions that specifically enable them. They also have a rather elegant solution for generics and memory management handles custom allocators by convention. There are also some quality of life features like a defer statement. It’s still in beta though and updates can (and will) introduce backwards-incompatible changes.
I’ve been told that D has also recently gained the ability to automatically import C headers but, well, D is a mess.
I think that you’re right and easy C interoperability should be considered table stakes for new programming languages. You get so many well-maintained libraries for free. If I ever make my own language, that’ll be one of the most important features I’ll design it around.
Slithy Troves #517:
They don’t really need to work around the ABI given that the function at interface boundaries can be declared as C-ABI functions from the Rust side. The bigger problem is who has to maintain the Rust bindings of the C interfaces; a problem that has already (repeatedly?) led to blows between the Rust in Linux team and the other kernel maintainers.
Lathechuck #520:
As the one who’s started this week’s salt discussion, I told a friend about my hypothesis. He replied to me that a human actually only really needs a single salt crystal per day.
Kevin #524:
Unrespectable by whom? I assure you, Waldorf schools are already considered unrespectable by the PMC. For what it’s worth, knowing several people who’ve gone to one, some implementations of the system don’t deserve respect.
Matt #525:
As I understand it, Rust compile times are dominated by generics and codegen inside LLVM. The borrow checker is quite fast, at least relatively speaking.
Martin Back #528:
A confounding factor here is that language may just be taught very poorly in school. I recall hating English in primary school and going out of my way to have as little of it as possible at the start of secondary school. Now, more than half my thoughts are in English (now that I think about it, I have no idea which language I dream in). What’s changed? Well, in primary school, we didn’t differentiate between different skill levels. So, after two years of English, we were still sitting in a circle, drawing wooden animals from a bag that we passed around, and naming them (poorly, at that—we were taught that turtles and tortoises were the same thing, presumably because we don’t usually differentiate between them in German).
—David P.
A quick thank you to Pygmy Cory, Athaia and JMG for their helpful advice. Athaia, I’m like you in that I don’t think anyone would be interested in my own dull days. My Mary Sue is based on a couple of childhood friends one of whom was uncannily mature. She is an avatar and does what I could never do.
I was surprised to see there are Mary Sue aficianados. But two of the people I’ve shown my work to like mine, so there’s that. I think taking a step back and looking at her from other characters’ points of view may be worthwhile.
@Silicon Guy, I’ve not seen that form of breakdown occuring in Japan yet. The weather bureau is still very competent. I’ve noted over my 40 years that when the monsoon stationary front gets established, they struggle in vain to predict what it will do. Infrastructure is to Japan what military adventurism is to the US. It is a monetary pipeline for the corrupt and a major drain on everything else. Japan faces bankruptcy now, and we will see what happens after that.
If we’re not tired of discussing the migrated souls, there was a couple interesting comments recently, on Magical Mondays and posts here, that might fit together rather neatly. Of course, this is all unverifiable speculation on the basis of a vision whose accuracy we cannot yet determine (and, arguably, never will while in material incarnation—even a mass die-off at a convenient time could just put the affected souls out of incarnation for a while on our planet rather than having them return somewhere else).
The first comment pointed out that the Christian god prevailed over all other gods. The example given was that some South American (?) cultures were shocked that their magic simply did not work against the European invaders. I’m not sure if the comment outright stated this or merely implied it in my mind, but this seems to have been a major contributing factor to Europe’s (now declining) global dominance over the last few centuries.
Secondly, somebody speculated that the gods might have collectively decided to not intervene in the 6th plane souls’ construction of the modern world in their image to help ease their return.
Then there were a couple of comments stating that the pagan gods were beginning to get more active in recent years.
Suppose that all of this is true. Might we then be looking at a rather longer game than just the last 1.something centuries? Since the Myth of Progress is just a Christian apocalypse in secular drag, perhaps the gods decided to let Christianity spread unimpeded to help create the conditions for our particular flavour of collapse, which was necessary for a clean break with those souls? Now that we’re in the endgame and the process cannot be stopped, it would be time to build bigger followings again.
—David P.
David P,
Zig’s problem is that it’s not stable yet. The Zig devs just completely redid their reader / writer libraries in the standard library in their 0.15 release breaking a lot of existing code.
Hi again, JMG
I am reading this article about a modern perspective within cog-sci called Embodied Cognition, and it reminds me of the four worlds of kabbalah. My understanding of them, respectively, can be summarized as “whatever is out there” (atziluth), “whatever’s in here *pointing at skull*” (Briah), “their interaction” (yetzirah), and “the subjective manifestation of that interaction” (assiah).
Now, reading through the article and it’s characterization of EC, doesn’t it sound like it’s describing the world of Yetzirah? It basically says that cognition does not take place strictly within our brains, but rather, it is a distributed process happening along a chain of systems that connects the perceptual information (and implicitly, the outer-world source of it) with the organism’s perception processing systems, and from which a specific behavior is output.
I feel like these two perspectives are quite harmonious and I wanted to know if you can see it too.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3this article 389/fpsyg.2013.00058/full
Hey JMG,
My copy of *A World Full of Gods* has finally arrived. As usual, you even answered questions I didn’t know I had. I did, however, walk away with two new questions. I’ll save one for tomorrow’s Magic Monday but this one doesn’t really fit there:
In the chapter on ethics, you argued that some people are better suited to monogamy, others to polygamy, others again to agamy (which I’m pretty sure is a word, despite my spell checker not recognising it). Yet, in the comments of A Few Notes on Matriarchy, you sounded as though you didn’t approve of polygamy.
Am I misunderstanding your position either in *A World Full of Gods* or in the comments? Or have you changed your mind on the matter since writing the book? Is there some third option that I’m missing that squares the two positions?
—David P.
David P,
You might want to wait until the next Open Post to ask that question since JMG won’t be responding here anymore.
Anonymous #543:
Ah, I see. Thanks for telling me. I had naïvely assumed that JMG would respond for as long as the comments are open but I suppose he leaves us to discuss among ourselves once the next post is up?
—David P.