Yes, it’s Christmas, and most of you have better things to do today than read the internet. That said, 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 followup 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.
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I’m delighted to report that another book of mine is available for preorder. The Astrology of Nations, my first book on mundane astrology, will be out shortly from REDFeather, an imprint of Schiffer Publishing. It’s a complete textbook of political and economic astrology, intended for anyone interested in practicing that art — the oldest of all branches of astrology and one that anybody interested in politics and economics might want to know. The book covers everything from basic principles to subtle points of interpretation, and also provides a wealth of case studies to show how it’s done. Interested? Preorders can be placed with the publisher here., or at my Bookshop store here.
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With that said, have at it!
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Bill Rice (Will1000) in southern California, who suffered a painful back injury, be blessed and healed, and may he quickly recover full health and movement.
May David/Trubrujah’s 5 year old nephew Jayce, who is back home after chemotherapy for his leukemia, be healed quickly and fully, and may he, and mother Amanda, and their family find be aided with physical, mental, and emotional strength while they deal with this new life altering situation.
May Peter Van Erp’s friend Kate Bowden’s husband Russ Hobson and his family be enveloped with love as he follows his path forward with the glioblastoma (brain cancer) which has afflicted him.
May Daedalus/ARS receive guidance and finish his kundalini awakening, and overcome the neurological and qi and blood circulation problems that have kept him largely immobilised for several years; may the path toward achieving his life’s work be cleared of obstacles.
May baby Gigi, continue to gain weight and strength, and continue to heal from a possible medication overdose which her mother Elena received during pregnancy, and may Elena be blessed and healed from the continuing random tremors which ensued; may Gigi’s big brother Francis continue to be in excellent health and be blessed.
May Jennifer, whose pregnancy has entered its third trimester, have a safe and healthy pregnancy, may the delivery go smoothly, and may her baby be born healthy and blessed.
May Charlie the cat, who has been extremely sick and vomiting but whose owners can’t afford an expensive vet visit, be blessed, protected, and healed.
May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.
May Annette have a successful resolution for her kidney stones, and a safe and easy surgery to remove the big one blocking her left kidney.
May Peter Evans in California, who has been diagnosed with colon cancer, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
May Jennifer and Josiah, their daughter Joanna, and their unborn daughter be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
May Ram, who is facing major challenges both legal and emotional with a divorce and child custody dispute, be blessed with the clarity of thought, positive energy, and the inner strength to continue to improve the situation.
May FJay peacefully birth a healthy baby at home with her loved ones. May her postpartum period be restful and full of love and support. May her older child feel surrounded by her love as he adapts to life as a big brother and may her marriage be strengthened during this time.
May all living things who have suffered as a consequence of Hurricanes Helene and Milton be blessed, comforted, and healed.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be 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 to treat it.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.
Lp9’s hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
By the way, to all who have listings on the prayer list: any prayers older than 3 months which haven’t had an update in that time are coming off the list when the New Year rolls in. Please update old entries by then if you’d like to stay on the list into January.
I hope you are having a Merry Christmas where you are.
I was wondering what you think about messages #119 and #120 from the last post on Islam and Christianity respectively.
Thanks to you and your readers for your answers last month. Now this month’s question: What do you make of all the drone hysteria in the U.S. media this month?
Merry Christmas to all who mark it! Regardless, I hope any here have some time with loved ones and away from the lesser-wanted burdens of work this holiday season.
As for the open post, I’ve often run into the linked ideas of “the good, the beautiful, and the true” as having something to do with one another, however imperfectly. I’d like to look more deeply into this, and I figured I’d ask our resident historian of ideas what the background of this line of thinking is, and what sources might be worth looking into. Of course, I’d also welcome any suggestions from the commentariat.
Cheers, and my blessings to all who will have them!
Jeff
Quin, thanks for this as always.
David, I’m familiar with the history of that period — since we’re in a similar trajectory of decline and fall, it seemed sensible to get some background in what happened the last time around — so I nodded and went on. Since you didn’t ask any questions, I didn’t think a response was necessary.
Neon, the hysteria is more interesting than the drones. Drones of various kinds have been buzzing around the US for some years now; I’ve figured that they’re government-sponsored, since the corporate media has gone out of its way not to fuss about them. The questions in my mind are, first, why are they being publicly acknowledged now, and second, why is the government going out of its way to look so inept about it all? I don’t have specific answers in mind, but it’s entertaining to watch.
Jeff, that’s Plato’s great formula. His philosophy was founded on the claim that what we call abstract ideas are more real than the concrete instances of them we experience with our senses — the current scientific concept of laws of nature is descended directly from that thesis — and he argued that the highest of all these Forms or Ideas is Unity, from which we derive our perceptions of the good, the beautiful, and the true. You can find all this discussed in brilliant prose in his dialogue The Republic.
I have recently been reading articles on fossil fuels actually being generated deep in the earth rather than from ancient biological material. Is this just wishful thinking or can there be some truth in it.? Here is a typical example https://open.substack.com/pub/countmetalmind/p/fossil-fuel-the-great-hoax?r=7gcx1&utm_medium=ios
Happy Solstice. I love dark and cold so much, when the nights start getting shorter, I mourn. Nope, I have nothing “better” to do on Christmas eve and day, by design. Christmas offers me nothing valuable.
December twenty-fifth means time is less than a month until Trump’s inauguration. I am sitting on the edge of my seat—waiting—looking forward to it. Hoping for no mishaps.
As for how I am keeping sane until January 20th, I read. I just finished a love story book about a large female half-housecat/half-wild/part-warrior cat “Masha” and a male writer, a true story, a relationship of 20 years. Both are now deceased, he dying this last May. She predeceased him. Masha beat up a bear, and later, a fisher (related to weasel), surviving both attacks.
The book is “My Beloved Monster” by Caleb Carr.😫💧♥️Highly recommended.
💨Northwind Grandma💨📖🐈
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@JMG #6 re: The Good, the Beautiful, and the True
Thank you! I was pretty sure it originated with Plato, but wasn’t sure which of his dialogues were the best to look to, or if any more recent work had taken it in distinctly different directions. Looks like I need to re-read the Republic!
Thanks again,
Jeff
Hello JMG, Happy Holidays to All 🎅🎁🎄🎄I had a question I would be glad if you could answer it. I think you had a post about Life Energy in Western Culture and if I remember correctly, in it, I think you talked about how priests should direct Spiritual energies outside of social counseling and you were talking about Pre-Reformation Rite books, can you please send the link to that post? I browsed through all 38 pages of your blog one by one but I didn’t notice it, I want to download and read the Rite books mentioned there, thank you.
Mr. O, that claim surfaces at regular intervals. Do you remember when the price of oil spiked to $120 a barrel in 2008? When that happened, a whole lot of oil wells in Pennsylvania and other parts of the US that had run nearly dry, and hadn’t been profitable to keep pumping when oil was $10 a barrel, were uncapped and put back into production. If oil really was spontaneously generated in the center of the earth in any quantity, those wells (some of which had been plugged for most of a century) would have been full again. They weren’t; they all had the same dregs left in them they’d had when they were capped. Thus the theory of abiogenic oil is wrong. Mind you, I expect to see it circulated ever more frantically as the limits to petroleum production squeeze harder — it’s so much easier to pretend that there must be infinite abundance somewhere than it is to deal with the hard reality of a finite world.
Northwind, and a happy solstice to you too!
Jeff, it’s worth a reread. Even if you disagree with it — or especially if you disagree with it! — it’s a fine kick in the pants to encourage serious thinking.
Yigit, I’m not at all sure which post of mine you’re talking about, as the life force has come up quite a bit in these essays. Is this the one you had in mind?
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-neckless-ones-a-historical-puzzle/
Dear Arch Druid:
I am puzled because in the recent floods suffered in Valencia (Spain) seems that the authorities have acted like they’ll be trying to increase the suffering of the survivors ,delaying the humanitarian aid without pretext and making difficult the work of the voluntaries. I know that in
the floods suffered in North Carolina and Germany have happened a similar think. And I ask you if you’ll have some explication for this.
Thanks.
@Jeff #5: You might also consider Plotinus’s moving essay on beauty (Enneads I vi) to be of interest, which agrees with Plato in the main but is, at least in my opinion, much more enchanting. (But then, as you know, I’m not such a huge fan of Plato!)
Mr. O, What I have heard about the abiotic origin of oil theory is that is began with some Russian scientists telling Stalin what Stalin wanted to hear. He had ordered them to Find Oil!–the territory of the former USSR does have some, quite a bit, I gather–which they did, and then dressed up their presentation with flattering rhetoric degenerate Westerners have it all wrong etc. etc. It was American oilmen who found the oil in Kazakhstan after the fall of the USSR, BTW.
Regarding the drones, it looks to me like a setup for disrupting the inauguration either with a drone scare or a drone attack – their ineptitude needs to be demonstrated beforehand so they can wash their hands later and say they did all they could.
I just read the Illuminatus! Trilogy for the first time last week and would like to thank everyone who recommended it.
42 -> 4+2 = 6 = 2 x 3 -> 23
42 -> 4 x 2 = 8 = 2^3 -> 23
A recipe is not a path.
Hello Jeff and All!
Merry Christmas to any and all who celebrate today!
Ok: riffing on the True, the Good and the Beautiful
From the Upanishads: Satyum Jnanam Anandam Truth, Knowledge, Bliss
Buddhism: the Buddha, the Sanga, the Dharma
Human perspectives: “I”, “us”, “it”
Feeling, Thinking, Actualizing
The Self, Our Souls, Spirit
Catholic Trinity: the Father, the Son, Holy Spirit
Yoga: Sattva, Rajas, Tamas…
Thanks for sparking some merry riffing fun today Jeff and JMG!
North wind Grandma- I loved Carr’s book The Alienist (he lived around the corner from me in the East Village when he wrote that – an interesting dude for sure) and I’ll def read this new book on your recommendation. Thank you !
Best
Jill C. yogaandthetarot
What do you think of this message on the subject of empires?:
https://x.com/BiruniKhorasan/status/1779106477413687659
Hello JMG,
This question pertains the hard saturn aspects in a birthchart, more specifically Sun-Saturn. A lot of the research I have done online suggests that alot of the German Pessimists like Arthur Schopenhauer, Otto Weiniger and Peter Wessel Zapffe had Sun-Saturn conjunctions, and the only one to avoid “the void” so to speak seems to be Robert Anton Wilson. A lot of superfical say it suggests bad karma, paracelsus says it is purification, or they suggest it shows discipline. Is it the ‘reversion’ of Saturn against a processive Sun? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Happy Solstice,
Planasthai
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all!
JMG, have you ever written about or discussed Jack Parsons at all? He seems like a fascinating figure—not one I think I’d want to follow the example of (unsurprisingly I presume this is likely to be the case with all thelemites, for the reasons you’ve gone over with Crowley and how his life turned out) but he’s nevertheless just so interesting and mysterious that I can’t help but want to learn more about him and see what other esoteric writers think of him and his ideas.
Yes JMG that’s exactly what I was talking about, thank you so much!!!
There was a time in México, I learned this year, where by presidential decree Santa Claus was replaced by Quetzalcóatl to give gifts to poor children at a time were the Nationalist Revolutionary Party was trying to imbibe local culture in the face of globalized culture. It is said that as a man Quetzalcóatl was a blond bearded man and they used that representation to try to get close to a Santa figure. However, that story is false, which is probably why it failed. It was introduced by friars that were trying to justify indigenous presence and belief –since it was a time where social norms and policy had to face theological scrutiny. Given that Quetzalcóatl didn’t receive human sacrifice, there were attempts even to put him as a saint, particularly St. Thomas, in order to make sense of things and use it as an entry point to conversion (Christians did that a lot). That belief is still held up to this day, but even though it is false, and today it would probably be riddled with loud notes about decolonization, most likely in shrill terms, it makes for a great story. And I, personally, do not feel offended by that, nor were people back then. That wasn’t a thing yet.
What I find most interesting is that people would send letters to the newspapers saying things like: “Are we going to lay down Quetzalcóatl in the Bethlehem manger and pray in Náhuatl?” and, heh, that is exactly what some people are doing right now. Though it isn’t Quetzalcóatl, it would be Huitzilopochtli that is reborn at this time of the year. That would probably be hailed by some willy nilly today (the decree and sentiment of replacing consumer culture and Christianity with indigenous-like things I mean) but at the time there was a quite a bit of resistance, because this was a move from the political party in power to try to unify culture. Mexico being culturally megadiverse, people were upset, didn’t like it and saw it as a form of control. It makes for an interesting read and to me it also shows how complex these things can be, contrary to what the louder and less thoughtful side of the decolonialization camp would want us to belief. Just because something looks indigenous, or even if it actually is, doesn’t imply that it is a good idea. In fact, I would consider it somewhat rude to not get informed about things first before trying to quench guilt. Maybe there are also political agendas behind that, and it makes it a ripe situation for manipulation of people’s good will and the trivialization of meaningful traditions and teachings. Having said all that though, I would love to see Santa being replaced by Quetzalcóatl, though those things can’t come from a presidential decree or an ideological agenda. Politics don’t dictate culture, it is the other way around. Its people that by embracing things, with their own volition and genuine intent, that become part of a culture.
Here is a pic:
https://imgur.com/a/ZbEOBNX
Here is an article in english about it. (I think it has ads, given that some sections where ads would be appear oddly formatted in my browser, but it doesn’t prevent you from visiting with an adblocker)
Dear John,
Thank you for the celestial enlightenment you’ve brought to us. I can’t wait for your new book.
I will always have you and your dear circle of friends, passed on or present, in my dreams and prayers and
I am glad to have the opportunity to thank you for sharing your knowledge. I wish you an everlasting flame for your secret fire.
The tale of Gilligans Space Station continues.
“NASA has delayed the launch of SpaceX Crew-10 to late March 2025 to allow time for processing a new Dragon spacecraft, extending the stay of astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on the ISS to about nine months. ”
As for abiotic oil, no. The carbon isotope ratio matches organic life. Furthermore. It’s too hot for long chain hydrocarbons to be stable in the upper mantle.
After looking at the basic rituals in your Hermetic and Druid writings I decided to devise one of my own. It seems efficacious as I feel blessed, relaxed and energized afterwards. Studying other systems can help someone sort out, discover, express what their own personal heartfelt approach is. Let Freedom Ring!
To all my fellow Christians here, a very merry Christmas to you all.
To all our pagan friends, May your solstice have been a blessed one.
and Happy Holidays to anyone not in the first two groups 😊
Will O
I think I forgot the link! https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/english/when-quetzalcoatl-took-over-christmas/
Mr. O #7: I, too, have heard that argument. Growing up as I did in Texas, and working for 12 years in Houston (Oil-Patch), I never heard anyone who takes that seriously.
However, let us suppose this is correct. What of it? If we use up oil faster than the earth supposedly regenerates it, how does that help us?
JMG – Have you seen Dave Collum’s 2024 Year in Review (Part 1)? I find reading his take on finance and culture to be bleakly confirming of many tales shared in this space. Here’s a link.
https://peakprosperity.com/2024-year-in-review-what-is-a-fact/
While I appreciate his skepticism and pessimism regarding financial assets (and I believe you do, too), he doesn’t give more than a few hints about prudent steps folks like us can protect ourselves. (You’ve inspired me to look for community involvement through skill building.)
Michael Lind on the role of Al Gore in spoiling environmentalism:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/beyond-green-energy-policy
Did you vote for Nader in 2000 out of curiosity?
@Jeff Russel,
Merry Christmas to you as well! I don’t have much to comment on re “the good, the beautiful, and the true” , besides I think that it’s good to contemplate them. I will say also thought, that a couple times of year I like to watch “The good, the bad, and the ugly”. 😉
Best,
Dean
Merry Christmas! Can we do UFO’s, aliens and orbs?
@JMG #11 re: Republic as a Spur to Thinking
Agreed! Digging into Plato’s dialogues more seriously has demonstrated the value of the dialogue as a format for stimulating thinking rather than passive consumption.
As for agreeing/disagreeing, two things have struck me forcibly since reading it the first time (embarrassingly, only a year or two ago): 1) everyone’s insistence that it’s straightforwardly a work of political philosophy, when Socrates says quite explicitly it’s a model for the human soul (which is not to say Plato didn’t necessarily intend it as a work of political philosophy as well, just not <em<only that), and 2) that the most famous work of western philosophy has a lengthy description of metempsychosis right there in the text. Before reading it, I had a vague idea that Platonists had been influenced by Pythagoreans and that metempsychosis had a role in the religious/philosophical views of the school, but I had no idea that it was right out there in the open. After reading it, I’m amused by the knots the political-philosophy-insisters tie themselves into trying to figure out what Plato could possibly have meant by the Myth of Er, what secret allegorical meaning is hidden there? Again, not saying there isn’t allegorical significance to it, but the idea that maybe he was just saying something about how he thought the human soul worked, in a dialogue about how to properly order the human soul, never seems to cross their minds.
Anyhow, cheers again!
Jeff
Hello JMG,
Wondering your thoughts on the recent murder of the healthcare CEO. Comments online are quite un-sympathetic for the CEO. A popular comedian Bill Burr even called the CEO a gangster that got wacked suggesting his murder was deserved. Do you see this as a reaction to living standards? Or caused by some cultural shift? There is some sympathy from the left leaning mainstream news stations.
re: The Good, the Beautiful, and the True
I have long been intrigued and impressed with the Dinè practice of The Beauty Way, which I translate more as harmony or tao, rather than being solely ‘beauty’ in a western esthetic sense. Recently I have begun to wonder about the western concept and practice(s) of Justice and how The Beauty Way and Justice might actually be different cultural views of essentially the same concept; the restoration of harmony and balance to the World.
Any thoughts about different names and faces for the same experience or concept? And what about the human perception of beauty, which seems to be remarkably universal. Is our sense of Beauty simply utilitarian; like color vision for fruit eating primates? Why are rainbows beautiful to everyone? What do we actually mean when we refer to “Justice”? Clearly it’s not simply sanitized (karma free?) vengeance…
Greetings and blessings,
JMG, have you (or anybody reading this) seriously looked into abiogenic hydrocarbon hypothesis – https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2008RG000270 ? Has it been scientifically (in a true sense) discredited? Or maybe the opposite – some new supporting evidence has been found since 2008? Do people interested in peak oil discuss it?
Season’s greetings John.
I’m curious as to why there’s such a long delay between the election of a new President and his inauguration. The current regime is behaving like a bad tennant who’s received an eviction notice and is intent on trashing the house before they leave. During a transition here in Australia, the outgoing administration goes into “caretaker” mode. They can’t pass any new laws, or make any administrative changes. Why doesn’t the U.S. have a similar arrangement?
What is your take on epistemological warfare in the west, in specifically language usage?
I remember reading the beginning of a English translation of ‘on war’, and it seemed the sentence structure was made to force people to think and hold ideas in their mind over a longer attention span. (Or it could just be me, having a hard time reading it.) I am thinking that there something changing about language structure over time that is reflective of how people learn and become intelligent, beyond the obvious of media changes with tik-tok/Social media brain-rot and the like.
Do Wi-Fi hotspots count as liminal places? Why or why not?
A very merry Christmas to all those who celebrate it!
What is your take on the sasquatch, JMG? And the Loch Ness monster? Are these in some sense real, do you think?
Today , in the bottom of an old record crate I found an old Christmas record from the 1960’s. After playing it I came to the realization that while American Industrial and organizational power peaked about 1969 with the moon landing, American social and artistic culture peaked a bit earlier, with the “Charlie Brown Christmas Special”. Listening to the soundtrack now it is hard to believe that a kids holiday cartoon with such a subtle and nuanced soundtrack and non commercial message was ever popular on main stream television.
Hi John Michael,
Well, that may be true, but in the future – where things are intense (a repo man film reference!) – it’s Boxing day. 🙂 I now rest my case and make the claim that yakking away on the interweb as an activity is back on the table. This is of course unlike the food on the table yesterday which was enjoyed with friends! That stuff now resides in my guts. Actually, it was quite hot down here yesterday so I did not over indulge. A fun day.
I’ll be very interested to read your take on the short term economic future. It’s hard not to notice that the bond yields to maturity, which I guess represent the underlying risk and cost of the borrowings, now exceed the coupon rates. And that is playing out across the west. It’s like the existing and previous policy makers have run out of new ideas. And so now we have change as the US moves back to its original isolationist stance. There are reasonable grounds for changing tack, and it’s not lost on me that this end game began in the mid to late 1970’s. To be honest, it’s an impressive achievement that things have run on for as long as they have.
I’m thinking that there is a very possible risk of default on sovereign debts in the future, and maybe the higher bond yields reflect that growing sense risk or nervousness? What’s your take on that?
The thing with ever increasing debt, is that’s only sustainable (as if anything ever increasing is) if the future covers the cost of the borrowing and returns the original capital. To devalue the currency as a way of performing that same feat, will have other different consequences. And trust is one of those things which is hard won, and easily lost – it being a perception thing.
Oh well, this is not how I’d have arrange things.
Cheers
Chris
Jeff Russell, you do know, I presume, that The Republic is an account of a conversation which really did take place. Two Socrates’ interlocutors, Agathon and Glaucon, IIRC, were brothers of Plato. No doubt, the original conversation would have been enhanced and extended by Plato. The Symposium was also a for real event. Never let it be said that philosophy is dull.
Anselmo, yes, that’s exactly what the official response to the floods in North Carolina looked like, too, and I’m at a loss to explain it. Governments that do such things get overthrown.
KNZ, ha! Very Discordian.
David R, he’s right, of course. For that matter, the British Empire was larger and, in the context of the time, more powerful than the American Empire.
Planasthai, I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking. Combine Solar and Saturnine energies in a birth chart and yes, you typically get deep thought combined with a depressive tendency; how that works out in practice depends on the rest of the chart. It’s simply one of the possible interactions of planetary energies in a natal chart.
Alex, I read a bio of him a couple of decades ago, but I don’t find Thelema interesting at all and Parsons did nothing to change that. If he interests you, though, there are several good bios and I think most of his occult writings are available these days.
Augusto, funny. The thought of Santa in an Aztec outfit decorated with quetzal feathers is in its own way rather charming.
Fereshteh, thank you!
Siliconguy, I hope the station holds together long enough. Word is it’s got serious structural problems.
BeardTree, glad to hear it.
Will O, thank you.
Lathechuck, no, I hadn’t; thanks for this.
David R, nope. Nader is a grifter.
Candy, er, what did you want to do with them? Hang them on the tree? 😉
Jeff, good. Sometimes the most important things are hidden in plain sight.
Alex, the US economic system these days is a scam rum by the very rich, for their own benefit, at the expense of everyone else. What’s more, most people are well aware of this. That’s an exceptionally dangerous situation, and if the rich don’t back off and stop exploiting everyone else so callously, Brian Thompson’s assassination will only be the first of many.
Phil, yes, and in fact somebody asked about this already today. You’ll find my answer in comment #11.
Paul, it used to be much longer — presidents weren’t inaugurated until April. Keep in mind that ours isn’t a parliamentary system; the incoming president has a lot of organizational work to do, putting together his team of subordinates and negotiating with the incoming Congress. In the past, outgoing presidents generally did go into caretaker mode, but that went out the window in 2017 and has just gotten worse since then. Laws may need to be passed to regulate it.
Eruption, the use of language is always contested among competing interests. Older works do have longer and more complex sentences, and thus richer thought, but that’s normal in the decline of a civilization — Latin became much simpler and more stupid as Rome declined.
Moonwolf8, depends on your definition of “liminal spaces,” of course.
Robert K, thank you and likewise!
Batstrel, I have no idea. People certainly see them from time to time.
Clay, that’s Vince Guaraldi’s music — fine mid-20th century instrumental jazz. You’re right that the peak of our culture, at least in that cycle, was probably right around then.
Chris, there’s no way the US can repay its sovereign debt, so either default or hyperinflation is in the cards. My guess is that it’ll be worked out via a series of technical defaults and renegotiations, while the US government cuts its expenses below its income by slashing its payroll in much the same way that Argentina’s new president Milei has done. That’s going to set off economic tsunamis around the world, to be sure.
David Ritz A 300, don’t forget that Lind is an ardent proponent of suburbia, considers it a wonderful living arrangement. There are important things we could and should have been doing a generation ago and should still be doing which he does not mention. Some of those, I am sure you can think of others, are enhancing and extending public transportation, stop the subsidies to industrial agriculture, which is a major contributor to global warming and pollution in general, grow and make what we need here, and shut down the 5,000 mile supply chains.
My son-in-law gave me Kin Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry of the Future” for Christmas, I think because I recommended Robinson’s “40 days of rain” and the rest of the trilogy to him.
I’m reading in now, and my gut reaction is to feel sick. Not at what Mother Nature is doing, but at all these top level people haring off after the gods-know-what, and those below resorting to terrorism and assassinations…..and then some solutions right out of the Romantic Era…and…shakes head.
Meanwhile, Christmas resulted in loads of gifts – but both the electric teakettle and the teapot I wanted were both family-size, and high-end. I keep wanting to say “I a a small person without much physical strength, and there is only one of me. I don’t need an 8-cup tea kettle and teapot.” And yet, they’re trying so hard…..
KNZ, my guess, it is just that, about the drones is this is a military op to remind the incoming administration that their oaths are taken to remind Mr. Trump and his grey eminence sponsor/sidekick, that the oath to defend and protect the Constitution is not an oath of personal loyalty, especially not to some foreign born rich guy.
I like to track what I think of as watershed events. I think some call them inflection points. I believe we have seen no fewer that three these last weeks. One is, of course, the fall of Syria. from which I fear, nothing good can come. Another is the assassination mentioned by Alex above, and I think a third is the reopening of Notre Dame, which, may have reminded the French of who they are.
I suggest that what has our betters so upset about the assassination is that the alleged perp is himself a child of relative privilege. What happens when the upper servants and the security staff decide they should have the goodies? As the trial proceeds, look for frantic attempts not to make a martyr of him. The response noted by Alex above has all but ensured that he won’t be suicided in jail.
Dear Mr. Greer,
Thank you for the work that you do. I read your book The King in Orange this summer before the election and agreed with everything you said about the state of socioeconomic classes and political parties in the era leading up the election of 2016. However, I feel that something has changed in the past few years that might explain why the Democrats failed so miserably. This change is what might called the emergence of “hybrid class members.” Whereas before 2020 someone from the salary class was firmly in that one class and could therefore align themselves with the Democrat Party and its policies which disadvantaged the other three classes at their expense, since Biden took office things are not quite so simple anymore. I have personally noticed that a lot of people with salary class jobs also have to work second or third jobs in the wage class (i.e., retail etc.) or the new “gig” class (i.e., driving for a ride share service) in order to avoid something as basic as homelessness or to have the luxury of eating three meals per day. Not so long ago, public school teachers and lab workers at hospitals did not have to bag groceries or stock shelves late into the night after clocking out just to barely survive but the Biden administration let the inflation get so far out of control that a lot of people found themselves in the wage class while simultaneously remaining in the salary class. A lot of people making a hundred thousand dollars a year these days complain that they still have to live in little apartments like they did when they were in college because the housing bubble had to cause every home to be supposedly “worth a million dollars,” leaving the majority of salary class workers priced out of the housing market in just the same way that members of the wage class have been for decades now.
Likewise, I wonder if the Democrats miscalculated their chances of victory by failing to see that a lot of people who are technically to be counted as being “in the salary class” are also simultaneously in another class like the wage or gig class and that they could not count on all these people to turn out for them and carry Kamala to a(n undeserved) second term. One pollster went as far as to argue that this election was only decided by one extremely basic demographic criterion. No longer could race, gender etc. be reliable predictive indicators for how one would vote. Only one very simple question could be asked: whether one were currently “living pay check to pay check.” If the answer was yes, as it is for the vast majority of Americans now, one was overwhelmingly likely to vote for Trump. Do you think this means that that the very distinction among the wage class, salary class etc. is losing the kind of meaningfulness it once had as far as predicting elections goes?
@Ken Wood #35 re: Other Views of “The Good, the Beautiful, and the True”
Thanks for this! I wasn’t familiar with the Dinè tradition at all, but I’m not surprised to hear about a certain amount of resonance. It’s precisely the idea that different folks in different times and places have sensed “something,” expressed in however different ways, that I’m interested in exploring, on the idea that that suggests there’s something real and important about whatever that “something” (Unity, Tao, et cetera) might be, or however imperfectly we might perceive and/or enact it.
@Mary Bennet #44 re: Plato’s Dialogues
Thank you, yes, I did know that the various dialogues are all meant to be based on real conversations, and I think it rather likely they really were, though it’s my impression scholars have and do vary on how much “fidelity” they have to the specific conversations involved, and that it might vary from dialogue to dialogue (I know that one school of thought generally thinks they’re closer to transliterations earlier on, like Apology, and with maybe more “authorial interpretation” for the later dialogues). I tend to assume they were approached in the same vein writers like Herodotus and Thucydides approached recording historically-attested speeches: they and their audiences expected it to stick to the same main points and general outline, but to have the language polished with the benefit of time and thought, with a certain amount of dramatic license for readability and excitement. All that said, however much was reporting versus invention, Plato certainly captured the feeling of active conversations with thoughtful interlocutors, which helps stimulate similar thought processes when reading.
Thanks again to both of you for your thoughts!
Jeff
@Clay #42, I am old enough to remember the sixties well. There was a creative ferment bubbling at that time in all arenas and a common yet diverse American culture. A lively peak we have fallen away from. We are running on the remaining fumes and structures from the past. Hopefully we will have a revitalization.
Can you see China as a superpower even in a de-industrial world where rare earths no longer have the same value?:
https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2024/08/mine-the-tech-gap-why-chinas-rare-earth-dominance-persists/
@Batstrel #41 IMO because of the now decades long ubiquity of the cell phone and its video and picture taking ability, that to my mind is evidence for non presence of the Sasquatch in a continuous physical material sense in the NW USA.. Though as Shakespeare said in the play Hamlet “ There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” The non-material can manifest in peculiar ways and perhaps this is what is behind the Sasquatch phenomena, and for that matter UFO’s.
Greetings all!
A friend told me they subscribe to the Epoch Times and found it to be relatively balanced. What do people here know about it? We’d like to subscribe to some newspaper; is this one worth it?
I’m also wanting to learn more about the occult/pre-Christian origins of Catholicism as I’ve been attending a local Mass on and off recently. Any suggestions on books/podcasts? I feel such a read could shed some light on what is going on in the Mass. I was raised mainline Protestant, drifted away and now find the Catholic Mass more reverent and full of life (so many young families and babies, lots of immigrants) than the local geriatric Protestant churches.
Thanks everyone and enjoy the holidays and New Year!
Ellen in ME
Speaking of wannabe political leaders who would likely disappoint, I very much agree with your old post on Sen. Sanders’s candidacy (https://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-08-13/the-war-against-change/), too many people looked up to the guy with the exact same messianic fantasies as Obama eight years earlier. At best, I viewed the guy as a “protest candidate” against a Hillary coronation akin to Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Yet that in itself is no reason to singularly attribute Chosen One qualities to one guy even though one held those same views about the fellow (then) in the White House eight years ago.
Patricia M, I know the feeling. I consider it a blessing that I don’t get gifts from what family I have left these days, as they inevitably got the wrong thing.
Chad, that’s an important issue. The one thing that any ruling class must do, above everything else, is to make sure that the overseer class — the class that actually enforces the edicts of the ruling elite — is more or less happy. Ignore and abuse them and they’re going to stop obeying you, and everything goes to bits in short order thereafter. Not just the Biden regime but the entire corporate bureaucratic-managerial class has lost track of that. Thus I expect to see an abrupt series of transformations in the years immediately ahead, as the overseer class shifts its loyalties to a new elite and the old elite (and the more feckless elements of the old overseer class) end up out on their collective ear.
David R, it was a superpower back before anyone used rare earths for anything but pottery glazes…
Ellen, I wouldn’t call the Epoch Times balanced, but it’s a nice counterweight to the mainstream media. As for the pagan origins of Christianity, Claude Lecouteaux’s book Christian Mythology: Revelation of Pagan Origins might be worth a look.
David R, messianic fantasies directed toward politicians are always stupid, and inevitably lead to disappointment. I’m not sure why so many people have trouble grasping that!
JMG #56:
“…messianic fantasies directed toward politicians are always stupid, and inevitably lead to disappointment.”.
There doesn’t seem to be an antonym for “messianic”, in the sense that many of my family and friends expect (or hope for..) 47 to be the next mustache man.
“Diabolic fantasies” doesn’t really have the element of fear, in opposition to the Hope in the Messianic fantasy. I tried several online thesauri, but their antonyms are more about lack of enthusiasm (“apathetic “), than any overwhelming fear. Various other iterations of terms for the Devil (Satanic, Devilish, Luciferian) all imply that an evil outcome is to be wished for.
Hysterical fantasies almost does it, but for me it lacks the emphasis on the evil actor opposite to the Messiah.
Merry Christmas, auguri di Santo Stefano, and Happy Boxing Day to my friends worldwide.
Regarding Abiotic Oil, as I understand it that began as Mary Bennet #14 said, with Stalin’s USSR. It was a sort of up to date version of Fourierism; instead of the Socialist Revolution bringing about lemonade seas (as that’s clearly non-Materialist mysticism, Comrades) it would help to bring about limitless supplies of oil. Think of it as Lysenko meets geophysics. It caught on in the west only much later, I believe in the 1970’s, when it became clear that too-cheap-to-meter atomic power wasn’t going to materialize and has returned at intervals since then, stripped of it’s original Marxist framework.
On that note I highly recommend reading 1950’s Atomic Age pronouncements from the (then) Atomic Energy Commission and various energy industry groups, including the petroleum industry at the time. They very openly and explicitly talked about how oil was eventually going to run low and atomic power was a godsend that would free up remaining coal and oil supplies as manufacturing stock for plastics and the like.
Of course even if the Comrade People’s Commissars were right depleted oil wells have not shown any notable increase in production. So if there is an effect it’s a marginal one and we’re sucking oil out at a much faster rate than it could be replaced via this hypothetical mechanism.
20th Communism is such a wellspring for weird, mostly terrible ideas and a lot of people espousing them today don’t know where they originated.
I hope someone found this interesting.
Cheers,
JZ
Right now there’s a Twitter war going on between the Tech Right and the New Right about H1-B immigration. The issue was kicked off by Trump’s appointment of David Sacks as his Crypto and AI advisor and Sacks’ own appointment of Sriram Krishnan, one of his VC buddies, an Indian immigrant.
Both are quite united on illegal immigration of blue collar workers, but the Tech Right wants H1-B engineers.
It will be interesting to see if they can find a compromise, and if not, who Trump will back. I think no one can deny that many companies are gaming the H1-B system, Indian nationals in particular are heavily guilty of ethnic nepotism. For what it’s worth, it seems to me that Trump’s recent victory is due largely to the backing of the Tech Right — the populist movement wouldn’t have gained as much traction and vigor without Elon Musk buying Twitter, spending millions of his own dollars campaigning for Trump. On the other hand, now that he’s in, he might not need them as much, and there’s always the matter of their egos colliding.
Trump’s own wife is an immigrant, Ivanka and Jared Kushner had a business for the EB-5 investment visa in the past, so I kind of doubt he will stop legal immigration. The best outcome IMO is that the H1-B system is heavily reformed, Indian consultancies that essentially operate tech sweatshops get shut down while top talent can still find the opportunity to build in the US, at the same time, investment in “heritage American” talent increases while eliminating DEI hiring.
Season’s Greetings to all!
With the fall of the Assad regime, it appears that there is now an impetus in the west to attack Iran militarily.
(1) How likely is it that war breaks out between the west on one side and Iran and its allies on the other during 2025?
(2) If that happens, how broad a war could that be?
PS: Personnally I believe the probability of war is high and that it may well involve quite a number of countries and last a few years with incalculable consequences for the world economy. Nevertheless, I would appreciate the views of others.
I find that the best time for me to pray is shortly after I wake up. I pray to the planetary gods, and while I’m able to notice their presence, I’m not yet at the point where I can trust that my sense of their answer to any given question is accurate.
Starting in January I am going to need to start some, but not all, of my days before sunrise; and thus my prayers would technically be on the wrong day some of the week. Are the planetary gods cool with people praying to them on what is technically the end of the previous astrological day?
I have found something of interest to readers, in my holiday boredom. The Museum of Retro Technology. There’s some incredible stuff here, things I didn’t even know could exist or people would and could invest money in them, and I rated myself as someone well schooled in odd things. I was wrong.
http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/museum.htm
Forgot to add, my favorite is the ever reliable, always useful and super efficient boiling mercury engine.
http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/mercury/mercury.htm
Hey JMG
Since the topic of last post was Opera, I was going to share this article I found about it, but forgot to do so.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/opera-is-for-everyone
Hello JMG and Kommentariat; What do you think about angels?
RE: drones, I live here in Greater Newark, directly in the EWR flightpath, and yet there are myriad “drones” out nightly. We’re used to traffic in the sky, but it’s been unusually busy up there of late. I make. no claims as to their provenance, as I have no evidence one way or the other, but part of it is hearsay and hysteria…and part of it is based on observed phenomena.
For those interested in the wider geopolitical machinations, there’s a fellow @ektrit on the platform formerly known as Twitter who has some interesting short-form observations as things are unfolding, primarily on the subject of the West’s fragile financialization “empire” and the gradual decoupling of global supply chains from that fantasy. Perhaps worth a read.
Axé, Buon Natale in ritardo, and may the Divine Light find you wherever you are on your path and renew you.
Years ago I read Fred Hoyle’s Frontiers of Astronomy, published in 1955. Regarding abiotic oil, he had this to say:
“The idea that oil, so important to our modern civilisation, has been squeezed out of the Earth’s interior derives an immediate plausibility from Urey’s discovery that the meteorites contain small concentrations of hydrocarbons. The presence of hydrocarbons in the bodies out of which the Earth is formed would certainly make the Earth’s interior contain vastly more oil than could ever be produced from decayed fish, a strange theory that has been in vogue for many years.
“…It has sometimes been said that our civilisation is gobbling up the mineral resources of the world, and that when they are exhausted the conditions that we are now enjoying will never again be experienced. This view is probably incorrect. New mineral deposits will be laid down by the processes we have discussed and new reserves of oil will be squeezed up from inside the Earth. Conditions will again become suited to an industrial civilisation. Yes, but when? Several hundred million years hence. ”
Stick around, abioticists, and your dreams might come true in a few hundred million years.
Incidentally, after speculating that the slow rotation of Venus was due to tidal effects on a vast ocean, he speculates “Now we see that the oceans may well be oceans of oil. Venus is probably endowed beyond the dreams of the richest Texas oil-king.” And regarding the dense clouds of Venus he adds, “we must now add the possibility that the clouds might consist of drops of oil; that Venus may be draped in a kind of perpetual smog.”
Alas, modern science has discovered Venus is hot, dry, and toxic. No triple-breasted maidens either, more’s the pity.
Anselmo #12:
I was puzzled with the delay in the humanitarian aid to Valencia until I realized we are living in a partisan state since some years ago: petty sectarianism, in two words. Spanish government moves are all “tactics”, and Valencian government is other “ideological” color but equally dysfunctional, so they both didn’t cooperate well for spurious motives. I don’t have another “rational” explication for this mess, in other case we would go to the “conspiparanoid” theories…
“The Good, the Beautiful, and the True” Easy: look backwards in time to a smaller and smaller vocabulary. This is Owen Barfield’s thesis, of Lewis and Tolkien fame. As you go back, you may discover they are one word, as the word “Spiritus” means “Wind” “Breath” “Life” and “Spirit”. Because when you have only 20,000 vocabulary words instead of 200,000 or 2 million like we do, then each word is naturally more evocative, metaphorical, and from our mind serves multiple meanings. Really they had the same meaning: OUT of Unity, INTO division. Science, our entire Social force, is bent on defining things ever smaller, finer, more precise. We call this “technical”, “jargon” but really a lot of our vocabulary is having a dozen finer related words that come from that. We’d say someone is “ADHD,” is “Dysfunctional”, “Missing some screws” or is “Melancholy,” all words from sub-specialties.
So I think if you work backwards into IndoEuropean, you’re going to find a word like Logos: that is, the Truth, is the Word, is the Logic, is the Light. And a thing which is blindingly “True”, true to itself, its internal nature, that has no flaw or lie? That would be “Beauty”. Something like that.
I see from the comments, the same from Plato, which is two things: he’s pointing the same direction, toward the Unity of Spirit and language into oneness, but second, he’s thousands of years earlier in language and thought than us, so we can compare our locations.
“If oil really was spontaneously generated in the center of the earth in any quantity, those wells would have been full again. They weren’t; Thus the theory of abiogenic oil is wrong.”
I disagree but it makes no difference: obviously a geological event would occur at a geological pace. They would refill but over thousands of years – still very fast – and not hundreds. The reason this theory would matter though is, how can we find incredible oil at 40,000 feet under the Gulf where no dead dinosaurs have ever been? That’s near the center of the earth, maybe oil is created by magma? (Kidding of course). And other ever-deeper wells as for example, Stalin tried. The oil seems to be there, or proto-oil, something, and it seeps UP into loose sandstone formations we recognize as surface dwellers. Oil is also lavish in the arctic, which again fits no biotic theory, although you can add a totally different problem, of the earth being regularly thrown off its axis if you like, that’s hardly better.
Here’s why none of that matters though: we have tremendous normal, untapped oil. Russia was shut in and is not very well drilled. Iran was completely closed and probably has the wells of Saudi Arabia in 1950. Much of Africa is the same. Perhaps Cuba, who knows? And as said, apparently there is oil and coal at the poles, formerly without means to reach. That means there remains another hundred years of oil. Is just that the West, Europe, won’t get any. That’s why we have world wars right now in precisely those places: Ukraine, Russia, Iran, and Africa. Europe, which has drained their wells, and Texas, or rather U.S. over-dependence, leads us to need to conquer the places with oil, (Bush) and keep it away from China, Azerbaijan, and prevent them from using it instead. They must ride on donkeys while WE use the oil. That is, prevent them from BUYING it, which we could too, on a fair market. How did all our oil get under their sand?
Upshot: Iran is free oil and a lot of Russia too ($25bbl), but the OTHER oil, deep or polar, remains very expensive. Changes will have to be made. Like tar sands, it doesn’t matter if abiotic oil is “There”. There’s still math.
Phil Smith – there was a Japanese scientist that found as you squished water back and forth under mantle pressures, etc, it would create carbon chains, but I don’t have the links. We only now have the material ability to run such experiments. The carbon it’s picking up is in the rock itself and it seems conceptually plausible. There was a recent related discovery that there is quite a surprising amount of water in the mantle, and it’s pooled in layers under great pressures. Not as much like microdrops as you might expect. Makes you wonder where it comes from. But like the furnace of the sun, in these weird conditions, our expectations of physics are very different.
Why doesn’t our nation have an “Administrative” mode? All the guys you need to ask have been dead for 200 years. I expect if you asked them, they would say the voters should keep deadly traitors out of elected office in the first place. If they want to actively sabotage the surrounding administrations, do we really want to vote them back next cycle? That is: 1) we don’t (can’t) change the Constitution for silly reasons, and almost every time we’ve changed it, it’s got worse, and 2) You can’t pass a law to make people behave well, morally, and true. That’s not the Government’s job, that’s your, the voter’s job. I can’t design a system where you outsmart yourselves.
Drones + Hurricane incompetency: “Nothing changes in Washington without a crisis.” Answer, therefore: create crisis. That is, both the good guys and the bad guys, the left and the right all need a crisis. WANT a crisis. So everyone in the nation is all pulling together for a change! Unfortunately, it’s all to make things worse. It sounds crazy, but ask any bureaucracy. They literally do this over and over and a caught for it, like reports on terrorists just before an FBI budget vote, etc.
Messianic Presidencies? Yeah, all of them. There are so many, many reasons, but the only shock should be, no President has done more than be a single man – most not even that – and yet 240 years later we still have messianic fantasies every 4 years for our whole lives. Why. Are we really that slow?
Merry Christmas, Blessed Solstice, Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy Holiday for the season for all!
My question is: with the upcoming 250th birthday of the USA, there is essentially not any big deal being made about celebration, commemoration, or observance of the anniversary (it was mentioned as upcoming, though, during the reenactment of Washington’s crossing of the Delaware). This is a big contrast to the 200th, which was very prominently featured. Why? I assume it’s a combination of things, but which ones, and why? And our betters in the media and our influencers also have nothing to say about it.
And an amusing thought, unless something unusual happens, Donald Trump will be president! The elite’s commentary ought to be hilarious. Although Biden, Harris, or any other Republican or Democratic hopeful doesn’t compare all that favorably to our Founding Fathers, either (or in my opinion to King George III, Lord George Germain, Lord Howe, Colonel von Rall, or Lord North, even – although later when King George lost his sanity, there’s a good match there).
Cugel
Merry Christmas, JMG (and commentariat).
I understand that you’re not a fan of the commercialism that has attached itself to the holiday. (I’m sure you’re also aware that this is not especially new and that C. S. Lewis was writing about the difference between Christmas and Exx-Mas decades ago.)
Of course it would be hard to disagree and speaking as a Dealer-With OCPD and some degree of Anxiety in general, I frequently ruminate on whether I am spending too much money, “are the kids going to grow up spoiled rotten if I buy them that extra gift”, and so on.
I think it’s worth putting out there that many of us, myself included, enjoy expressing our love by giving gifts to the people we care about. Yes, I am outing myself as an appreciator of the Love Languages theorem. Considered from this perspective, not all of the money-spending need be viewed in a negative light.
Anyhow, all of which is to say, I do wish our host and all commenters the very best this season and the coming year. Very sincere thanks for hosting one of the only discussion spaces on the internet where a fella might keep his sanity. (Or insanity, as the case may be!)
The NYT’s posted its first accurate and realistic headline in years.
“‘The Democratic Brand Is in the Toilet’: 4 Writers Dive Deep Into the Party’s Distress”.
Since I don’t subscribe to the Grey Lady ,I only see the headline of the opinion piece, but from what I can gather the actual content is filled with the usual excuses and blame shifting. So it does not look like the times will be shifting its schtick any tie soon, but the headline made me chuckle.
Ellen in ME says:
December 25, 2024 at 10:35 pm
Greetings all!
A friend told me they subscribe to the Epoch Times and found it to be relatively balanced. What do people here know about it? We’d like to subscribe to some newspaper; is this one worth it?
Me: We have been subscribing to them. They lean Conservative and traditional but have a better balance than most papers. One thing though, they are rabid anti-Chinese Communist and always feature at least one or two about the CCP and how they prosecute their religion – Famun Gang (?). But we find the paper as a whole to be worthwhile reading.
Great Khan of Potlucks, that kind of inverse messianism does need a name, doesn’t it? The last two thousand years has bred quite a crop of antimessiahs — prophesied figures such as the Antichrist and the Dajjal, historical-rhetorical figures such as Mustache Man, and so on. I don’t have a moniker to suggest, but one does need to be coined.
John Z, that seems about right.
Alvin, yes, I’ve been watching that. It’ll be interesting to see how it works out.
Karim, I’m pretty sure based on the evidence of 2017-2020 that Trump will avoid war if he possibly can. I also expect the Iranians to go ahead sometime soon and test their first nuclear warhead. The example of North Korea’s got to be on the minds of the Iranian government these days: once you have a nuke, everyone backs off.
Anonymous, apparently so; some versions of the planetary hours actually start the day at sunset of the day before.
Peter W, hmm! Many thanks for this.
J.L.Mc12, glad to see it. Now let’s see if they follow through by making opera productions that are actually aimed at everyone, instead of catering to a tiny minority of recherché critics.
Chuaquin, I’m quite certain that they exist and can be invoked for positive purposes. Beyond that, well, how much can we really know about beings who are, by definition, superhuman?
Fra’ Lupo, interesting. Thanks for this.
Martin, Hoyle was a fascinating figure. I’m not sure there’s a wrong-but-interesting idea he didn’t embrace at some point!
Dzanni, back in the peak oil days I used to hang with a lot of petroleum geologists. They disagreed forcefully with overoptimistic claims like yours about how much oil there is left in the world — and these are people who traveled over much of the planet looking for oil, and drilled many dry wells. The arctic and antarctic, by the way, were in different climate zones 50 million years ago, so there’s nothing improbable about finding oil there — did you know that crocodiles lived on the north coast of Greenland back then? No, that doesn’t require sudden flips of the poles; ordinary continental drift, combined with significant changes in global temperature, are more than enough to explain it.
Cugel, during the last weeks of the campaign, Trump talked about how he planned on having a yearlong celebration of the sestercentennial, kicking off this coming July 4 and ending on July 4, 2026. It makes perfect sense to me that the previous regime would want nothing to do with that — the last thing they wanted was to remind Americans that they have rights and once took up arms against a tyrannical government to defend them!
Bofur, I have no objection to you doing whatever you want to do re: the current holiday, or expressing your feelings about it, so long as it’s done courteously — as of course you did. I simply have a different view, and also consider it worth expressiing. A happy Krampustide to you and yours!
Clay, that’s a very good sign. The fact that they haven’t gotten beyond handwaving doesn’t take away from the fact that they’ve actually noticed that most Americans despise and distrust them.
Patricia Matthews,
I realize this isn’t the point, but one nice thing you can do with a large electric kettle is make other cooking more efficient time- and energy-wise. If you are boiling water for pasta or soup broth, for instance, getting it going in the electric kettle and then transferring it to the pot is a lot faster and more efficient than heating it on the stove.
Peter Khan of Potlucks and JMG
What could be more anti-messianic than the good and biblical term, The Antichrist?
Idea for MOE practitioners:
Gratitude / Thankfulness Walks
This is a possible corollary to the Blessing Walking. A walk of thankfulness for the blessings received. Basically a walk where you internally count your blessings and gratitude.
I will be exploring this and hope to report back.
Really glad to hear about the year long celebration kicking off this Fourth of July!
@ Karim, JMG
Iran’s delayed and very restrained responses to Israeli provocations* shows that its government doesn’t want to go to war.
*In addition to the other events, I suspect that the “accidental” death of Iranian President Raisi in a plane crash was actually an Israeli retaliation for the April missile/drone attacks.
Hello JMG,
I´d like know what you think of the A.E. Waite´s ´´Fellowship of the Rosy Cross´´, on their website it says they are focused only mysticism. Given that one can join the order only upon invitation, are there other orders that share the same focus that you would recommend?
On a different note, what do you think of B.O.T.A. ?
BR,
Marco
@JMG re: inflating politicians to mythic levels (Emperor Palpatine was supposed to be a riff on Nixon?!?!?) – Monty Python had the last word on that. “He’s not The Messiah. He’s just a very naughty boy.”
I gave up on that with Obama’s content-free State of the Union speech and never went back. Trump’s not The Messiah either, but as the sort of Tyrant that regularly arose in the Greek city-states, and later in Rome, that’s Trump, and I’ll take that deal.
Thanks for the comment on inappropriate gifts. I did get a lovely cat-themed tote bag from Bryn (middle grandson) and a lovely hand-woven lap robe from my Gainesville daughter and son-in-law. The Robinson book cover said it was one of Obama’s favorite books, so i didn’t expect too much of it, but, good grief, the “good guys” hauled out every nostrum and cliche of the upper-class “green” thinkers. (Facepalm.)
>As the trial proceeds, look for frantic attempts not to make a martyr of him
IMHO, if I was them, they should’ve quietly buried that news story, blacked it out, tightlipped reported it once and then made it go away. They do that all the time with stories. Hey here’s a distraction! Aliens! And then they should’ve made the shooter quietly disappear too. They do that all the time too.
Instead, they seem well down the path of turning him into a folk hero. Is that a good or a bad thing? Don’t know, but it’s what they are doing.
My personal opinion is he did the world a small favor. Management is (despite what they believe) expendable and interchangeable. They will slot in a new CEO and the megacorp will keep chugging along, doing what it did before. However, I have picked up hints that some of those upper management types are sensitive to risk/reward ratios and they will happily take a smaller reward if the ratio is more attractive. So, he has more or less lowered the IQ of all of corporate management by some amount. Or now they are selecting for management types that do not care about risk at all. Hilarity could ensue, but it will take much time for it to do so.
JMG, did you by chance catch the following story on RT:
” Russians spent as much on Occult services as groceries”. If not here is the link.
https://www.rt.com/business/609951-russian-occult-services-spending/
If it is true, and not some post-soviet clickbait, then I would hope you get a chance to have some of your relevant works translated in to Russian.
Bofur,
We try to strike a balance. My husband and I no longer exchange gifts, but when we did, we tried for one durable, practical, thoughtful item each (our first gifts to each other were a framing chisel and a beekeeping suit). It allowed us to demonstrate our knowledge of the other person and make them feel special in a way that was good for our courtship.
Now that we have a toddler, we as parents will buy one major thing for her per year or per holiday (this year it was a bicycle for her birthday at the end of October; we didn’t actually get her anything other than winter clothes during the winter holidays). We try to direct friends and relatives away from cheap plastic stuff and make it clear that gifts are not expected, and if they are not attached to the whole Christmas morning spectacle, we space their gifts out over the holiday season and intersperse them with other treats as well as any more practical gifts we receive (a piece of panetone or a Christmas cookie one day, a toy the next, decorating the tree the next day, a new jacket after that, then another toy the next day, etc). That way the season still feels very festive without it being a solid sugar and materialism bonanza. Spacing them out also allows us to be more intentional about video calling or filming for whoever gave the gift so they can see her open it if they’re into that, and she pays more attention to each gift and enjoys it more.
For those relatives who really want the whole Christmas morning thing, we do put their gifts under the tree and do that whole thing, but it’s usually just two or three instead of a giant pile. And actually our “tree” is a bunch of prunings of festive greenery like holly and juniper in a large vase, because we don’t like to kill trees. We make ornaments together and paper chains out of her old artwork that I’ve saved up instead of buying decorations, etc.
It helps that we don’t watch TV and read mostly older books where kids don’t get a pile of frivolous gifts, so her expectations are not crazy. We’ll see how it goes as she gets older.
The extended family does a gift exchange with spending limit so that those who really like gift-giving can have fun shopping or making something, but each adult only gets/gives one present. We also give consumables like fudge, jerky, spice mixes, etc. to neighbors.
JMG,
Do you have any thoughts/opinions on the various alternative schooling methods floating around these days? I saw that you were unimpressed with the open concept school you attended but spoke positively of the old one-room schoolhouse model. We are planning to homeschool our children, but I am interested in your thoughts on Montessori, Waldorf (Steiner), Charlotte Mason, or any other methods/philosophies you are familiar with, if any.
Thanks for the reply, I did not know that Rome also had language issues with Latin during its period of decline.
In an older post, you described South America as a potential source for another superpower in the next century:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-10-23/a-pink-slip-for-the-progress-fairy/
Do you still see significant potential from that continent?
@Dzanni #69 re: “The Good, the Beautiful, and the True”
Thanks very much for this! Barfield’s approach is, of course, very much on my mind as I approach this, but unfortunately, I think that the idea “just find the oldest words you can and they’ll be the closest to the Divine Unity behind the Good, the Beautiful, and the True” is not quite enough to get us there, unless Herodotus was right about the ages of man and going backwards really does get closer and closer to divinity (color me skeptical). That said, the core idea that at least some ancient cultures had different ways of looking at things that can be helpful to us now, especially in that many of them were not as analytical and abstract as our current culture is, that is very useful indeed.
Incidentally, and possibly an argument against my skepticism above, Cesiwr Serith has put together speculations on the ancient Indo-European concept that seems to have been the ancestor for some attested ideas in daughter languages and cultures that he renders as “Xártus,” which is something like “divine law/order/harmony/beauty,” which you can find here: https://ceisiwrserith.com/pier/xartusspeculations.htm
Thanks again for your thoughts!
Jeff
A Review of The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve Moore.
It’s probably worth mentioning that I have a distant personal connection with this book. Back in the day I was running a microbrewery and I hired a graphic designer – Jon Coulthart – to produce the images for several of our beer labels. I liked his work then and I still do. Much of the artwork in this book is his (some of it in the Art Deco style of Alphonse Mucha) and I’d buy this book for that reason alone. In fact, I’ve been waiting for it for over a decade. That said however, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this book for everyone.
It used to be a feature of British Christmas celebrations that publishers would make up volumes of comic strips, simple puzzles, and instructions on “things to do” interspersed with illustrated short stories. Occasionally they would contain paper models that could be cut out from the pages and assembled with glue. These books were largely aimed at children and would make handy last minute gifts for distant uncles and aunts who didn’t really have a clue as to the real interests of distant nieces and nephews. They had a particular style and were very common in the post war period. It was easy to come by second hand copies in the 60s and 70s at jumble sales and the like although the industry had moved on to pushing Annuals focused on licenceable IP by that point.
This book, looks exactly like a child friendly post war Bumper book except that it’s subject matter is magic, or magick if you prefer. For example the section titled “Things to Do on a Rainy Day” gives instructions on creating an altar and the four magical weapons of a magician. This is both amusing and serves to signal that it represents an introduction to these subjects. The danger here though is that although the book itself contains a great deal of sexual material, it has been packaged to look like a child’s book. To be fair there is an “Adults Only” warning on the rear cover, but I don’t think that would stop an intellectually curious 8 year old opening it if it happened to fall into the hands of such a child. So if your household contains children this is not the book for you.
The second danger is the suggestion that psilocybin (aka. magic mushrooms) are a handy shortcut to magical enlightenment. I’ve no idea if that’s true or not but my own experience of regular drug users is that it’s fair to describe most of them as casualties. Although the book does suggest there are some dangers I believe they have been downplayed. So if your household contains impressionable individuals who might be tempted into uninformed experimental drug use – this is not the book for you either.
The book itself contains an extremely effective and beautifully illustrated introduction to both the Kabbalah and the Tarot. It has an idiosyncratic description of what magic actually is (no surprise there – they are all idiosyncratic) and its connection with Art. There are also a series of comic strips “The lives of the great enchanters”, fifty short biographies of notable occult figures ancient and modern. Some of the choices are obscure but they are all interesting. There is a longer story about a young woman exploring the occult world and peculiarly, a comic strip about the ancient and obscure sect leader Alexander of Abonotiechus who created the entirely inauthentic mystery cult of the human headed snake god Glycon in the second century AD. It’s suggested here that between them the symbol of a female moon and the symbol of the male snake are sufficient to construe a polar magical universe filled with the usual agencies that others write about.
Towards the end of the book there are several tables of magical alphabets, correspondences, and so on, and finally in what appears to be an extended riff on the Bumper Book approach, a cut out and assemble Egyptian temple. The overall feel is that the book is something of a novelty item but with a complex message embedded in it. It certainly lacks the reverence found in other works but it would be wrong to suppose that it is not entirely serious despite the lighthearted air it displays.
There’s also an explanation about the delay. I’d heard about Jon Coulhart’s involvement circa 2014 and asked if he knew what the publication schedule was; Jon had no idea. It turns out that the plans had been finalized around that point but Steve Moore suddenly died leaving his unrelated but good friend Alan Moore to complete the task. As befits such an author, Steve Moore was seen by his neighbors on a couple of occasions _after_ he died.
I’m sure that there’s a lot here I missed and I’m not qualified to judge the finer points of the text. However I think the book does act as an effective jumping off place for someone who has begun to investigate. It’s possible I may not end up in agreement with the Moores on the nature and use of the Tree of Life but having read the book I find I have no trouble at all remembering the names of the spheres and their meaning. As a result I’m prepared to finally open the books written on the subject by JMG or Dion Fortune, I think I may have a better chance of understanding.
On the off chance that anyone reading this is still in a post-Christmas charitable mood, the book repeats a story about mystic/poet/engraver William Blake who moved into a cottage in the village of Felpham on Britain’s South coast in 1800. At one point he chased a drunken soldier from his garden and was then charged with sedition. It turns out that the cottage is still there and since it’s not too far away from my home I paid it a visit just before Christmas. It’s in a sorry state, covered in scaffolding and tarpaulins for some protection against the winter storms. There’s a charitable trust that’s trying to make something of the site but that have a long way to go, so if anyone is curious about their work you can see some details at their website https://www.blakecottage.org/
Long time lurker here. I have read this blog for about 3 or 4 years and rather enjoyed “Star’s Reach” and “Retrotopia.” Along the lines of observations of a slowing and shrinking world economy, I used to work for a pretty large sensor/semiconductor company. During the CEO’s yearly visit and pep talk to our small branch, he explained why the company was divesting itself of any business in the automobile sector. He said that the world had reached “peak car” which means that a few years ago, the world produced the most number of vehicles and it had been on a decline since. This seems to hold true for the US and Japan for sure and maybe Germany (not sure if this is true in China). This seems to hold up as the bottom tier automakers like Mitsubishi and Chrysler (Stellanis) seem to be surviving by getting bought up by other automakers or venture capital firms, and GM and Ford are not doing well, especially with electric vehicles. This is just one example of I’m sure that many have seen in their own day to day life. However, I would like to tie in the slowing world economy with something I have not seen discussed in this blog before, and that is the demographic crisis. In short, the world population will begin to decline during this century and the aging population will be a drain on productive work with not enough young people to fill economic roles deemed necessary for the global economy. I would like to hear others’ thoughts on the issue and I would like to discuss it further with my own thoughts or observations if there is any interest. God Bless, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Scotlyn, it’s a fine term, but how would you convert it into an adjective like “messianic”? “Antichristic,” maybe?
Eagle Fang, hmm! That strikes me as potentially a very worthwhile idea. Let us know how it works.
Marco Prof, I’m quite familiar with the FRC and know people involved in it. It seems to be expanding fairly quickly in the US, at least, and so — if you’re in this country — getting access to it may simply be a matter of waiting a few years. If you’re interested in mystical initiatory lodges, you might also consider looking into Martinism — there are quite a few Martinist orders active in the US and elsewhere, and mysticism is their core focus also. As for BOTA, it’s idiosyncratic but worthwhile.
Patricia M, well, at least you got something pleasant. I’ve been really depressed to watch Robinson descend into that kind of doctrinaire cant — he’s at least potentially a better writer than that.
Clay, no, I didn’t — fascinating. Not at all surprising, though — Russia has a very rich history of occultism. As for book translations, with the mutual sanctions in place, I don’t think that’s an option; still, we’ll see.
Jennifer, I’ve heard good things about both Waldorf and Montessori schools, and — if you’re not up to homeschooling, which seems to be better still — either one is a better option than the failed public school system. I’m not at all familiar with Charlotte Mason schools.
David R, in the next five centuries, sure.
Andy, thank you for this. I also admire Coulthart’s work, and also his fine essays, especially on things Lovecraftian, in his blog “Feuilleton”:
https://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/
Watchflinger, thanks for this! As it happens, I’ve written about the approaching population bust here and sketched out some of its consequences:
https://www.ecosophia.net/an-unfamiliar-world/
It’ll get more discussion here in the months and years ahead, as it’s one of the most important and least discussed forces shaping modern life.
Happy Boxing Day to my fellow Canucks and to anyone else who celebrates it, although Chris I guess that would have been yesterday for you.
There has been some discussion here about Trump. I gather that he’s somewhat popular with the Americans here, and since I’m not an American, I don’t have an opinion about his domestic policies, however, he has mentioned making Canada the 51st state. I hate to tell him this, but Canada is larger in area than the U.S. and since we have 10 provinces and 3 territories, they would have to be brought in as 13 separate entities (some people regard 13 as an unlucky number).
And then Trump would have to deal with our red Liberals, blue Conservatives, orange socialist NDP, green Greens, and bleu et blanc Bloc Quebecois*. No Donny, it’s not gender, it’s just politics. Dealing with this would drive Washington elites into full insanity.
As an elderly woman with glaucoma, I go to an eye specialist M.D. annually. I give the receptionist my OHIP card, see the doctor, book my next appointment and leave. Any payments are handled by the doctor’s office and OHIP. I have nothing to do with that (except pay taxes). Now I read about some guy in the U.S. who shot a CEO of a health insurance company and shake my head. I know little about how the health insurance system works in the U.S. except that it had to have been designed by a brainless barbarian. I want nothing to do with a system like that and everyone I know here agrees with me.
Here in Toronto it’s +1 and the snow is melting. My older daughter came over for Christmas dinner. I cooked a 1.7 Kg chicken–the perfect size for the two of us. Primer Doug Ford just raised the speed limit on the 400 highways to 110 k/hr. If the U.S. took us in, they would have to go metric. No way would we regress to the medieval measurements used there. The U.S. should go metric. I think all of the rest of the world is.
Bloc Quebecois*–ah yes. Canada is an officially bilingual country (one of several countries who have more than one official language). They will only speak French in Parliament, so accommodations would have to be made for that in Congress. Quebec would require that French signs be available throughout the country, so that would have to be done. And, if some guy from Trois-Rivieres goes to Phoenix and robs a bank, he can demand that he be tried in French, so that’s another consideration.
I could go on, but I have things to do and places to go.
I am not belittling Americans. I think you have a nice country and you are nice people, if a bit dense about things outside your borders.
And I am not saying Canada/Canadians are better or worse than America/Americans.
We are just—–Different.
JMG,
Thanks! Charlotte Mason is mostly a homeschool philosophy now, although in the 19th century there were schools. She has some very interesting ideas and methods, most of which I greatly admire (aside from the admittedly considerable influence of her devout Christianity on her educational framework). Notably, the children spend at least four hours each day outdoors, and she is extremely conscientious in assisting children in the right development of the will. Of her books, A Philosophy of Education would be the one to start with.
update from erika lopez:
for anyone following my eviction story, things had calmed down until the landlord came back for his annual “inspection” and he incited another tenant to start threatening me. this will be the third tenant and now the entire building is against me.
i have the garage and since we’d given our car away we didn’t need the spot and let people use it unless i needed it. when i went to visit family i needed it. but the kid downstairs let others use it and made it so my friend couldn’t park his truck in the driveway and he wouldn’t move and he threatened him.
so i said “no more parking.”
so the landlord shows and he asks about parking and landlord says she has no right to garage and you can park there anytime (i’ve had it 30 years) so now kid parked there and when i said no more he threatened me over and over and got in my face. they gave the new garage keys to everyone again and he threatened to go in and mess with all my stuff.
this was christmas eve eve so no one’s around.
the guy, sam, the kid, he said he was gonna get me once i was away from the building. he kept yelling you’re gonna be so sorry… you’re gonna be soooo sorry…
my friend who witnessed this was spooked when the guy came at HIM when i was gone, but then he suddenly said, “ah, he won’t do anything. make nice with him” and refused to write a statement.
this is what happens when you have regular normal people (yes, even weird artists) afraid of insane mad darkness. this is why i rarely ever told anyone things that happened to me: they don’t believe it and think it’s YOUR fault somehow.
you all alive during the covid madness know this, but extend it to OTHER things and it’s why people doing mean things no one believes, get away with things.
i was excited i finally had a witness on MY side. but no dice.
so i have to figure out how to fight this because i don’t know if my free lawyer gives a damn. i’m afraid for my life as i’ve already seen how they did James by sending me to jail for 5 days.
this isn’t cute.
so that’s what’s up.
i’m hoping that finally my landlord has gone too far because even “Kallianeira” here saw the pattern instantly. so i’ve gotta make my case simple and scrounge up whatever proof i can that my landlord and his management company have been harassing me.
so i’m afraid of being injured or killed right now and want this story out so people know this kind of thing DOES happen.
i’m surprisingly a little bit chill right now because i think i can scrounge up a lot of at least circumstantial evidence that should be hard to debunk. BUT it also may mean nothing because the legal system is made for certain types of people and how they think and act, and that’s not me.
i just don’t wanna go down quietly so i’m posting here.
san francisco…. yup.
erika
“I also expect the Iranians to go ahead sometime soon and test their first nuclear warhead. The example of North Korea’s got to be on the minds of the Iranian government these days: once you have a nuke, everyone backs off.”
There is a window of vulnerability between when one tests a warhead and when one has a deliverable weapon with a reliable delivery system. Iran is in a much rougher neighborhood than North Korea.
Your Welsh / related music of the day:
Tristwych y Fenywood:
https://night-school.bandcamp.com/album/tristwch-y-fenywod
Gothic rock sung in Welsh with zither, bass, drums and vocals being the instrumentation. Think of the zither as taking the place of the guitar.
Favorite tracks:
Blodyn Gwyrdd (Green Flower), Ferch Gyda’r Llygaid Du (Girl with the Black Eyes), Gelwain Gors (Bog Body), Awen.
The album is entirely in Welsh, but the lyrics are translated on the page for the curious. I haven’t read them yet. It doesn’t affect my enjoyment.
Welsh rapper and musician Ren:
Money Ties: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq3Z6D74dSA
Now digging up the root of evil, money tool like a blade
You can slice across a jugular or carve and create
But when the money ain’t the means, but the means is the money
You start to compromise ideals for dollars, morals get bloody
Now let me tell you a little story ’bout a boy named Ren
Born March 1990 in the Celtic Welsh ends
We didn’t have much, but mum and dad, they made enough
To put hot meals on the table, fill our bellies full of love
A little sister fell into the picture
Oh my God, we loved her, made our family richer
Then we both got older, world a little colder
Life, it had a way of chipping away at that shoulder
I held her and I told her, “Hierarchy, status exists
Sometimes the purity of youth gets snatched, leaving you stripped
You’ll learn that love is not enough, it’s not a world for kid
So toughen up and buckle up, because it’s bumpy as sh–
And there’ll be those who take advantage of the light in your soul
And there’ll be times you feel the cup you’re filling leaking with holes
And that dark can get much darker, we all must grow old
But listen up, my little sister, hold these worlds to you close
Keep that kind heart kind, humankind are in need
Never ever let this world make you bitter like me
Because this world needs love, and love it leaks from you, see?
Sis, this world needs light and you’re the brightest I see”
[Makes me think of this Hexagram 36, The Darkening of the Light: https://motheringchange.com/hexagrams/h36/ ]
Here is another one from Ren called Troubles, the lyrics might be enjoyed by people here: Troubles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt7Bpy27d1M
I don’t reach into the past very much
For these shards of shattered glass and harsh paper cuts
Leave me stuck when I reach in memories are seeped in hydrochloric acid
I go to war and get passive and freeze up
But music helped the ice to thaw
Put a chisel in the middle swing the hammer of Thor
Pull it out of the impossible, Excalibur sword
Etching note pads full of reasons why my feelings are sorе
The first day that I got sick ejectеd from cockpit of living
Nineteen, young teen, waking up bitten
Posters up, manhunt, Ren went missing
Hard to have faith when the gods don’t listen
The first year maybe was the hardest
Waking in a body that was buried like a carcass
Brain in the lion’s den, body in a shark pit
Waking up in pain again, aching, broken-hearted
—
Peace and keep on Barding in the Free World
@Chuaquin: You have a good explanation about the delay in the aid for the víctims of the Valentia’s floods, but this not explain that similar delays have happened in North Carolina and Germany. There is a youtuber nicknamed Michael Boor, Michael Voor or Miguel Cervera wich suggest that the spanish authorities have been threatened for a multinational power in the case that they’ll gave a Kick aid. But this idea seems to me absolutey unthinkable.
>I would like to hear others’ thoughts on the issue
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Qrg8t34yXRs
Jordan Peterson and Stephen Shaw did an interview where they talked about it. I don’t really have much to add to what they said other than childlessness is essentially people having lost faith in the future. Forget about “I need to focus on my career”, what they are really saying is “I have no faith tomorrow will be as good as today” or “All I know is I have the next 3 months sorted, so that’s what I’m planning for”. Reminds me of this meme:
https://9gag.com/gag/aZDKYm9
Well, ok, but…
(#57) “There doesn’t seem to be an antonym for “messianic”, in the sense that many of my family and friends expect (or hope for..) 47 to be the next mustache man.”
“…many of my family and friends expect (or hope for..) 47 to be the next [Anti-Christ]” also works. 🙂
Owen, agreed, as you say, “IMHO, if I was them, they should’ve quietly buried that news story, blacked it out, tightlipped reported it once and then made it go away.” However, it looked at first like the shooter had got clean away, and if he had had the sense to stay on that bus out of town he might have done so. A publicity circus was needed to smoke him out; it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that the shooter might be other than some mentally disturbed lowlife who could be quietly shunted off to an asylum somewhere out of sight.
I am observing the upcoming 250 year anniversary by attempting the 50 State quilt. That is quilt blocks which appeared in Home and Hearth magazine in the early 20thC, solicited from quilters all across the country and American territories, and printed one by one in the magazine, each design named after the state from which it had been submitted. The designs were gathered into a book by a couple of intrepid researchers in the 1970s, and I found the book a few years back 2nd hand. The editors chose good designs, no silly sentimentality, but these are not the famous designs associated with various states. No Ohio Star, New York Beauty or Road to California. Rather than do red, white and blue, I have chosen to select colors from each state flag for the dominant colors of each block.
Clip from a paywalled NY Times article
“Data center construction is driving an unprecedented influx of electricians to central Washington state, where abundant hydropower and tax incentives have attracted major tech companies building AI infrastructure, New York Times is reporting.
Microsoft alone projects needing 2,300 electricians in coming years for facilities across three counties along the Columbia River. Union electricians earning up to $2,800 weekly after taxes are transforming agricultural communities like Quincy, where data centers now account for 75% of local tax revenue.
While the construction boom has funded community improvements including a new high school, rising housing costs and limited long-term employment opportunities raise concerns about sustainable economic benefits for longtime residents.”
Bubble bubble toil and trouble seems appropriate here.
Hello JMG
You said around the time of the election that you’d had a dream that gives you hope for America’s future, and you were intending to post something on Dreamwidth about it. I’ve been looking out for that but haven’t seen it yet, have I somehow missed it?
SMJ
@Jennifer #85 I homeschooled our 5 children and I work at a homeschooling based charter school. I highly recommend the Oak Meadow curriculum with addition of the Dimensions Math home school curriculum.. Oak Meadow is based on Waldorf principles but generic enough so parents not into the Steiner’s thought are quite comfortable. Oak Meadow is a tool that can give a child a good home based education through high school if the parent is diligent and responsible. I have seen it done. An example I have – a family at our school is using Oak Meadow high school Chemistry they have a home lab kit, textbooks, teacher’s guide, student coursebook and they are happily learning chemistry together. The curriculum is reusable so what is used for an older child can be used for a younger. As they get older if children are close in age they can do the same history, science or literature/English together. I have seen the Saxon Math home curriculum succeed with high school students. You can also start them in that curriculum at younger ages.
All these curriculums can be easily found on the web by entering appropriate search terms.
My five children have the following vocations – running a university computer system, power lineman crew foreman, registered nurse, speech therapist, successful small business owner of several businesses vacation rentals, small taco restaurant, frozen yogurt shop, and are people you want as neighbors.
Family life and homeschooling works!
Annette2, I’m fairly sure the King in Orange is just engaged in his usual habit of stirring the pot. You’re right, of course, that people in the United States by and large know jack about what’s outside our borders, and also that Canada’s rather large — though of course its population is rather smaller than that of California, and only a little larger than that of Texas. Ours is the world’s third most populous country, you know.
Jennifer, interesting. Thanks for this.
Erika, good gods. Your choices are your own to make, of course, but in your place I’d leave the apartment, the city, and the state.
Jessica, but Iran already has robust missiles more than capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. Since fission warhead design is tolerably well understood these days, they can very easily make a dozen warheads, test one, and then calmly mention that the other eleven are already mounted on missiles and can pay a visit to anyone who wants to be stupid.
Flaneur, hmm! Glad to hear it.
Siliconguy, I wonder if the people in Seattle have any idea that their electricity bills are about to triple…
SMJ, I haven’t posted it yet; I haven’t felt as though the time was right.
BeardTree,
Thank you very much! I will look into it.
i agree, Papa, but i’ve not the money YET. the idea to do a print shop in the garage was about not relying on the dwindling spots here and starting a business to make some money to afford the crazy rents elsewhere. and where to go??? i just read Hickman’s Hinterlands’ post about looking for a place for him and his new wife to settle and he’s homesick, has him realizing there’s nowhere to go right now (it’s an honest piece):
https://shagbark.substack.com/p/last-of-a-dying-breed
i’m chill the more i bring this to light and things make more sense from the past. i’m loathe to go back into the details to legally defend myself but in the short term it’s what seems will be necessary.
i feel like the burning lady while everyone’s milling about. yes it’s long past time to leave but there’s a reason i’m here and it’s not to die because the lady that read my palm and/or cards when i was in the group home said a lot of truths that came to be and unfortunately she told me my death would be well into my 70s. it made me careless until i realized she didn’t specify what SHAPE i’d be in. so that’s why my long-time prayer i wrote on my books became: “may we all die with MOST of our limbs attached.”
and the more i’m open about it, the less i feel like i’m cowering in a dark alley, and running on top of mountains instead. that keeps me strong. and advices i always get seem to help.
so yes… like young Hickman, i too, don’t know just WHERE to go quite yet.
the optimist in me feels empowered to make paradise wherever i am, as it’s my loner myopic tendency to avoid people and now? whoa… i had no idea even my old pal was… soft. he said he’s sigma. some kids words are using to talk about men who don’t care. he thought it was a good thing now i see it leads to one’s self burning alive as a form of others’ entertainment.
scream more!
nope.
i’m feeling like whatever i learn now will help me get out of my own world as i try to recreate a bigger one wherever i go. gotta flip the story, you know?
but yes, Papa… it is INDEED time to get out. i’m trying to stay in touch with my pops and he’s up in amherst and i want him to keep his senses open about somewhere in new england as he knows people all over.
but i don’t see that for at least a couple of years yet, if at all.
thanks for responding. never hold back any thoughts.
oh! by the way, if you wouldn’t mind giving a link to some full frontal shot online somewhere (like i’d seen), the drawing i saw of you a few years back is coming back into my art to do pile, and your eye brows have a certain direction i like and can have fun inking, and i want to get your part correct in your hair. but i’ve decided you’ll be looking down because i don’t have time to commit to your EXPRESSION. it doesn’t matter as i really want to draw your long BEARD in pen and ink (that’s the giacometti frosting or essence of this idea for me. the rest of your features and face shape is unnecessary”filler.” but i need a ground so i want to get the most basic essences right).
i’ve decided to do it really long, first as book mark art you can add to books or use as you wish. i have to do the drawing like a held-back sneeze, but i’ve no USE for it so you could make posters, book plates, or whatever you want. it should be pretty cool.
i don’t need detailed photo. just your eyebrow angles and one that shows your part in your hair if not in one shot.
thank you, dear Papa. oh and i noticed someone else admitted they also wanna call you DAD!
told ya./ everyone else is just trying to stay cool. ha!
x
Quite some time ago, perhaps as much as a couple of years ago, someone posted here about a class of technical instruments, notably graphical instruments, that were standard in Victorian times. Among these was an instrument for drawing very large circles, free from the scale limitations imposed by the radius of a drafting compass. It had an odd steampunk-sounding name, difficult to remember, and I don’t.
It so happens that I am drawing images that are based on the same geometry as an astrolabe. This involves drawing circles at all scales, including some very large ones that are way beyond the practical bounds of a compass. I have searched online for its name without results to date. It would be really helpful to me if the original poster of that information happened to respond and repeat it, or anyone who happens to know of such a drafting instrument. Still better would be an image of the implement, or information about how to build one. Thanks!
Hi John Michael,
That’s my thinking as well on how the economic future may roll, but however the details work out, government will be smaller – the continuing debt escalation is a policy with an end point which we’re fast approaching.
Just chucking a crazy idea out there… I noticed a backflip on the stance in relation to crypto with the new folks. It occurred to me that possibly, some (or a lot) of the debt might get parked in that murky world, and disappeared. Stranger things have happened, and there is a wonderful sort of plausible deniability to it all. And in some ways that may firewall the problem to the murky financial world (obviously there will be real world consequences for everyone there, but I never personally expected a resource rich retirement if that even happens). Whatever the case may end up being, the debt will disappear somehow, and that digital loss might be less painful than hyperinflation at street level. Dunno, just a random thought. It might work though. What do you reckon about that possibility?
Cheers
Chris
Annett2, among Trump’s coalition is a group of monarchists who would like to be part of the British Commonwealth, which I suspect they see as a world spanning coalition of English speaking superior people. I rather think the Trump remarks were, in part, a dog whistle, is that the phrase, anyhoo were directed to the Anglophile monarchist faction, as well as intended to provoke liberal outrage. It is possible that he thinks a revived Commonwealth could stand against his bête noir, China. I think we should be seeking peaceful coexistence with Russia and China. But, then another part of the Republican coalition is those aggressive Christianists who believe that God has called them to spread their sectarianism worldwide. The Taliban managed to take over a whole country, so why cannot they do so also is how they see things.
I doubt any of Trump’s following have thought, (or even know) about the far northern territories, which are now, I hope I have this right, administered by indigenous peoples. That detail will not have escaped the attention of Trump’s corporate backers, oligarchs who think they should own everything.
Jessica and JMG, I have lost the link but Iran might have already tested a nuclear device. Just before the second Iranian attack on Israel there was an earthquake in southern Iran. This earthquake was in a very isolated desert region where I gather there are few if any fault lines. The seismographic signature looked just like a nuclear test and not like a normal earthquake at all. I think it was about a 3 on the richter scale if I remember correctly.
Hi JMG and commentators,
I was reading recently about how the US government is considering to sell off gold reserves in exchange for bitcoin. This of course would enrich the various silicon valley oligarchs who have large reserves of the bits and would be more than happy to receive gold for them. This felt almost like something out of a fairy tale and something in my mind clicked and a connection was made.
A couple of years ago I went down a rabbit hole of 1980’s cyberculture books and zines from the period when the modern silicon valley as we know it started taking off. One of the things I noticed and that genuinely surprised me was a heavy dose of let’s call it post hippie esotericism; Discordianism, the Church of Bob, the Illuminatus! books, various flavors of new age and human potential movement concepts, chaos magic(k?) and scraps of hippified eastern mysticism.
This stuff was all over the scene circa 1985 and given the vast powers the science fiction fans of the valley have managed to obtain in the intervening years, I was wondering if occult modes of operation are at play. Do they quietly keep thaumaturgists on staff to help convince people (particularly in the government and investor classes, who provide most of the money) that this or that nonsense technology is actually a brilliant investment?
These manias for various flavors of tech nonsense come like clockwork, as if someone or some groups are willing it to happen.
Has anyone heard about or met anyone who was involved in magical workings on behalf of tech conglomerates?
Cheers,
JZ
Trump has been saying a lot about the Panama Canal as well.
It makes me think if an Orange Caesar’s expansionist ambitions may actually result in this map becoming true centuries in the future:
https://www.deviantart.com/quantumbranching/art/A-future-Byzantium-208720439
@Erika #94: I second JMG’s recommendation. Elon Musk along with an increasing number of Silicon Valley types are bailing from California, for reasons similar to your own. That place seems well on its way to “failed state” status. Even people here Down Under are starting to notice:
Los Angeles described as over-rated hellhole by disappointed travellers
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/travel/los-angeles-described-as-over-rated-hellhole-by-disappointed-travellers/A7TSILRQBFC2FJKK4O33YNSZHM/
Anyone who is psychologically “normal” (in the sense of being “not Cluster-B Personality Disordered”) needs to get out of there ASAP if they possibly can. I understand that there are many parts of CONUS which are still clinically sane.
@JMG,
Thanks for posting the link to your earlier article about population decline. I think I read it, but just didn’t remember. A few things I have noticed regarding the discussion and I have a few mid range predictions about the demographic crisis.
I’ve watched many podcasts and lectures regarding the demographic crisis or baby bust. Generally, these involve an academic or economist who is making the usual case that an aging population will strain social security systems, pensions, healthcare, etc. And there is always a discussion about how this spells the end of “innovation” and we won’t have “growth” in the economy. It is interesting to read the comments under the videos, however. Usually it’s working class people who say something along the lines of “Good, this will bring housing prices down,” or something along the lines of “Great, the masters will have fewer slaves to exploit,” or “The leeches of society are worried that their labor source isn’t breeding enough.” I wonder if this is an instinct, or if the working class ever heard of the theory that the Black Death created the European middle class?
A few predictions that are possible:
1. When the population decline sets in, it will accelerate. As pensions become worth less, older people will become poorer and poverty generally correlates with shorter life span. The life span in the US is already declining, but that may be due more to unhealthy lifestyles and drug problems. Also, with fewer young people to staff health care positions, health care could be less accessible causing earlier deaths. Furthermore, with pensions being worth less, the elderly may decide to work longer, causing more deaths from industrial accidents for example or chronic stress related diseases.
2. There will be a famine or plague in the Middle East and Africa. Most of the Middle East is dependent on food shipments from the west just to feed their populations. You may remember near the beginning of the Ukraine war, there were worries about a famine in North Africa and the Middle East because Morocco, Libya, Syria, etc. get most of their grain and cooking oil from Russia and Ukraine. Turkey brokered a deal where the Russians and Ukrainians wouldn’t sink each others’ grain ships, probably because Turkey didn’t want to have a bunch of starving people that close to their borders. For Africa, many countries there are completely dependent on foreign food or aid just to keep their populations alive. Considering that the average farmer in America is 62, what is going to happen when not enough food is grown to ship to Africa because there aren’t any farmers to grow it? Western medicine also could dry up for the region. Would a European country decide to place export controls on its medicine in order to save it for their own populations?
3. The developed world in Europe and North America may not have any more people to import to prop up their economies. A funny graph I saw was of Columbia’s birth rate. Basically, it held steady for decades, then after Pablo Escobar was eliminated in 1992, the birth rate went through the floor and now Columbia has a birth rate of only 1.8. Guess a stable government and reasonable standard of living is the best birth control. Would the people-exporting countries try to hold onto their own populations and discourage emigration?
I look forward to further discussions on this issue.
Immense amounts of various metals are being sought to usher us into an electric battery, renewable energy run world. The deep ocean floor has a huge amount of “poly metallic nodules) which are being looked at as a source. But it was recently discovered these nodules produce oxygen. Article linked below. We really don’t know as much as we think on what’s sustains the thin layer of life that coats the earth and we meddle so blindly.
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/deep-sea-oxygen-raises-questions-about-extraterrestrial-life/
JMG, I realize that Trump was doing his usual “pot stirring” as you phrased it, but I decided to have some fun visualizing the fictional outcome of a merge of our two countries.
A commenter earlier referred to a column by Dave Collum. I skimmed some of it and saw this quote that made me think we have something in common:
“We have an enormous number of expensively schooled imbeciles who are badly educated at great expense.” George Will
Here is some more ‘classic’ peak oil stuff I came across. This time from some resource investors. A bit long and covers all the ground work of Peak Oil, Hubbard, rig count, ROI etc.
A quote from towards the end is a good summary.
“Between 1973 and 1985, the U.S. drilled more conventional well feet than during any other 13-year period. Yet production still declined. Today, we face a similar paradox: while undrilled locations remain and higher prices may render them economic, it is unlikely they will materially boost total U.S. production. In the end, the paradox remains—depletion is an unstoppable force, and it is becoming harder and harder to keep up.”
The Depletion Paradox – https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/the-depletion-paradox
I still remember about a decade back when news of things like 600 million barrel fields become seen as huge discoveries. 6 days of global supply is not really going to turn things around but the investors are happy.
I’m in the middle of a book by Mark Galeotti called Forged in War. It’s an account of how Russia took shape going back to its early days in the Dark Ages, so-called.
As the book’s title suggests it was a non-stop succession of wars as one gang after another spilled in, every one of them trying to carve out territory and vying for supremacy. Seems to me that the tribal chiefs, whether Turkic or Mongol or Viking or Slav, would get depressed if they weren’t planning a rub out. Nothing brightened their day like a good massacre and so for centuries they went at it hammer and tong. Right now I’m in the era of Peter the Great who was also no slouch in the mayhem department.
The reason I mention this book is because of present day goings on in that neck of the woods. It appears to me that the patch of land known as the Ukraine was kinda settled by Slavs and had sorta civilized places like Kiev while Moscow was still swampland which may explain Putin’s disquiet to the point of inflicting war over the issue of Ukraine’s status in the civilizational scheme of things. That and keeping American forces far from Russian borders.
If Putin’s problem is the centrality of the Ukraine in the Russian understanding of Russia given this history, the mirror of this problem may be in Ukrainian historical recollections of their own, many of them recent and possibly still within living memory, by which I mean the reign of Stalin and his depredations, in particular the Holodomor.
In my wasted youth I met a middle-aged Ukrainian woman at my summer job. Both this woman and her husband were sole family survivors of this calamity, that is, everybody else starved to death. And neither was a happy camper and both managed to get out during wartime. People say that history is bunk and maybe some is, but IMO not all of it or even most of it.
Of course the current Ukrainian kleptocratic elite may have more pressing issues like not being thrilled about paying tribute to Russian overlords. Because as sure as we sit here, there will be a reordering of who steals what if Ukraine falls. And this may also explain to some extent Ukrainian resistance, that is, the elite will fight to the death as long as it’s somebody else’s.
Well, as Smedley Butler so eloquently put it, war is a racket. War involves a lot of money and if you want to know the why of things, follow the money. So, the central question, cui bono?
Galleotti wrote another book, which I also read, The Vory, which is about Russian organized crime. It’s worth a look. I can’t remember who said it, Italian mafiosos play bocce, Russian mafiosos play chess.
@JMG & Neon “The hysteria is more interesting than the drones.”
I don’t know if I have been reading JMG’s stuff to long, but seeing all those head lines I just went “Hmmm… so this is what they want us to focus on this week.” And then went on with my day.
@JMG “I hope the station holds together long enough. Word is it’s got serious structural problems.”
It is of concern. The station is already 10 years pasts it original ‘Best before’ date and news of various new issues come up fairly regularly. When it finally comes down planned or otherwise, it can become another part of your epitaph to space. The western world would no longer has a space station at the same time SpaceX are still struggling to get their Starship into Orbit years past the original claimed dates. For all the hype we hear, the space situation is still a long way from where it was.
@ CLay “American Industrial and organizational power peaked about 1969 with the moon landing, American social and artistic culture peaked a bit earlier, with the “Charlie Brown Christmas Special””
Stephen Bruhner once made the observation that a plant peaks just as it is about to release its seed into the world. A Tomato plant is at its strongest just as the tomatoes ripen. Then the plant dies or declines into a much lower state. In the same way just as we peaked is when we sent all these probes into space via Voyager/Apollo, others.
You could argue the same for the arts. The seeds for the new big wave have been planted but it take decades before they show.
@ Chris “It’s hard not to notice that the bond yields to maturity, which I guess represent the underlying risk and cost of the borrowings, now exceed the coupon rates.” – “”It’s like the existing and previous policy makers have run out of new ideas.”
On paper everything should have shuddered to a halt decades ago but those in power learnt the same lesson as the Romans. It is easier to debase your currency/print money to get out of a problem on paper than it is to fix said problem. Having things like the share market digitised allowed this to happen much more easily. Thus you have stock markets hitting all time highs as homelessness also does the same. It can go on for decades but eventually the music stops.
In a similar vein, it has been fascinating watching the reaction to the whole United Health CEO thing. It has been a very long time since I have seen such a unified movement on both the left vs right. Many have started looking up vs down. Some of those in power have just enough self consciousness to realise that they are potential targets now, many will insulate themselves, the smart ones (if there are any) know it is time to start changing their ways.
Things like this start to happen when decades of neglect from those in power become unbearable.
@ Jennifer “Do you have any thoughts/opinions on the various alternative schooling methods floating around these days?”
Some of the smartest folks I have ever meet have generally come out of alternative education systems. You can get bright folks out of public education but not because of it. They see the system for what it is and then figure out their own path that is very much opposed to that structure. To learn from the failings of it. It wasn’t until I was free of the public schooling system each day and eventually life that I could finally get a decent education.
JMG and Neptune’s Dolphin,
Thanks for your comments. I’ll look for the Lecouteaux book and borrow some copies of Epoch Times to see if it looks worth reading. One reason we’d like to subscribe to something is that as our son grows up (he’s 8), we’d like for him to experience getting the news through a paper, not just online.
Jenniffer Kobernik re: homeschool. We tried using Oak Meadow with our son but it wasn’t the right fit for us. He wasn’t into it at all. Local Waldorf school is pricey and has become less Steiner oriented and more of just another private school option for the well-to-do. But give Oak Meadow a try. If my son had been into it, we may have stuck with it. As for Charlotte Mason, a commenter here awhile back recommended Ambleside Online.
We are struggling with our homeschool/independent learning now as he doesn’t want to learn and be at home with Mom for much of his week anymore. He is resisting doing any lessons/practice of 3R’s. He does go to programs with other kids and will be starting an academic homeschool day in January. Where we live there aren’t many options for learning: few charter schools, private schools out of reach, hardly any homeschoolers in our area (we drive a lot!). You’re in Texas, right? I hope you find more opportunities for your kids down there.
My fantasy school/program (for those of us who have kids who don’t want to be at home) would be a combo of Waldorf/Classical academics at your own pace plus working farm/primitive skills learning, 3-4 days a week.
Good Luck!
Ellen in ME
Erika, fair enough. As for images:
https://posthypnoticpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/john-michael-greer_author_400px.jpg
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/john-michael-greer-FGM.jpg
https://druidry.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/john-michael-greer1.jpg
Chris, it’s quite possible that cryptocurrencies could be used that way. Certainly, having a notional currency with no value other than people’s willingness to pay for it could be used to play any number of silly games.
Will, interesting. I could see it.
John Z, it’s by no means impossible that they do!
Watchflinger, it interests me that none of the discussions of population contraction mention, e.g., the fact that our entire banking system is propped up by overinflated real estate prices and will implode messily once contraction sets in…
BeardTree, good gods, are they really babbling about deep sea nodules again? Those were supposed to be the next big thing in the 1960s…
Annette2, by all means have fun.
Michael G, many thanks for this.
Smith, interesting. Thanks for this.
Kevin (#107),
Trammel or beam compass?
Hello, Archdruid
I am generally more fond of digital books than their paper cousins. I find them more convenient. I am glad to see that most of your non-fiction books are available on Google Play. I found both The King in Orange and The Twilight of Pluto on Play Books. Are you going to put The Astrology of Nations on Google Play as well?
RE: Iran and nuclear weapons
Almost having a nuke is actually good enough.
Iran has been a few weeks away from building a nuke for several years now:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/iran-has-been-two-years-away-from-a-nuclear-bomb-since-the-1980s/389333/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/us/politics/iran-nuclear-deal-uranium.html
“Before the nuclear deal, Iran had a “breakout time” of just weeks before it had the capability to build a nuclear weapon”
You can find a lot of other stories, like these, announcing just how close Iran is to a nuclear weapon, going back to at least 2010.
It looks like Iran’s strategy is to almost have a nuke. Which seems like a terrible strategy at first glance, but it is actually a very sound plan.
1) Most, but not all, of the relevant technology is dual use, so Iran can get almost everything that a bomb requires without crossing any lines.
2) Iran has the missiles to deploy a nuclear warhead on hand, in abundance.
3) Iran’s nuclear facilities are spread out and extremely hardened. Several of them are deep underground in remote, interior mountains. For all intents and purposes they are impervious to airstrikes or anything short of a ground invasion.
4) A ground invasion would take months of staging and build up, which would be obvious to Iran. Giving it enough time to build a dozen nuclear weapons.
This strategy gives Iran a nuclear deterrent but does not come with the sanctions from, and stigma of testing a nuke. And, Saudi Arabia won’t feel pressured to develope its own nuclea weapons until Iran tests a nuclear weapon.
They don’t need to test it either. The first tests were 80 years ago, they were almost certain it would work even though it was cutting edge physics at the time. The physics, machining, electronics, and computer simulations are much superior to the 1940s equivalents. A “nuclear test” these days is more a demonstration then a binary will it/won’t it test. The tests are useful for fine tuning the yields and other parameters, but they know in advance that it will work, which is part of the reason that Israel has never done any tests of its nuclear weapons.
For all intents and purposes, Iran has an Acme nuclear weapons kit, but it has decided not to open the package yet. And, all military and intelligence agencies worth their salt understand this and know that if they push Iran too hard or too far it will open that package and conduct a “test.”
@JMG #74
I’ve read a number of speculations by eminent scientists sounding off about this, that, and the other. Frankly, when they step outside their speciality they seem less informed than the educated layman. Case in point: Hoyle’s ideas about petroleum geology.
I put it down to the top guys being so intensely focused on their own work that they have no time to keep up with what’s going on in other fields. Massive intelligence cannot fully compensate for a lack of necessary data or ignorance of established concepts.
On the other hand, if you were not willing to stick your neck out and propose something new and different, would you be an eminent scientist in the first place? The plaudits go to the pioneers, not the followers.
Dear Mr. Greer, could you please enlighten me on an aspect of reincarnation that confuses me. When we die and go onto another life, does that mean we won’t be seeing our loved ones from our current life again? One reason I want to believe so much in an afterlife is that I am old and very very much miss so many people that have passed on, that I think about every day. Relatives, old friends, but especially relatives. I would appreciate any help you can give me about reincarnation. And please forgive me if this is a stupid question.
And a very Happy Christmas and Solstice and Hanukkah to here!! And Happy New Year!
First there was🥁General George Smith Patton III (1885-1945).
Then there was👐Donald Trump (1946-).
They look alike. I wonder if they are related.
Particularly around the mouth. Not Trump now, but over twenty years ago. Patton’s lineage includes Scotland. So does Trump’s.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🤔
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG #74:
Thank you for your answer about angels, I’ll keep in my mind. 🙂
Patricia Mathews:
I’ve read this year 2024 the same KS Robinson book, and I didn’t like it; I found it dull and very woke, too “geo-engineered” and improbable for the real future. For my luck, I didn’t purchased it in a book shop, I read it from my neighbourhood public library… 😉
Anselmo #97:
It’s true, I can’t answer correctly to explain the delay in aid to flooded areas in the U.S. and Germany because I’m not omniscient, I only can write about “friend-enemy dialectics” in Spain, where I usually live. The idea that is broadcasted on youtube by “Michael Boor” to explain the disaster after the disaster is to me unthinkable, too… 🙁
Smith,
Kiev was founded by (mostly Swedish) Vikings for trading in slav(e)s.
Both Ukraine and Russia are successor states of the eventually Slavified Kievan Rus.
The eastern half of Ukraine was an integral part of Tsarist Russia then of the Soviet Union from the 1600s. The westernmost part (Galicia and Volynia) was part of Poland from the 1600s until the partition of Poland in the late 1700s, then part of Habsburg Austria until 1917, then Poland again until WW2.
This westernmost part (around Lviv/Lvov/Lwow) is the source of much of the Ukrainian diaspora in the West and the core area for a strongly anti-Russian nationalism. The difference between these regions can be clearly on any map of the results of any of the elections before 2014.
That the 1991 borders would create problems was well understood even in 1991. It would have been much better for Ukraine, Russia, and all their peoples if there had been referenda in small-sized units so that people could decide which country to belong to. (Crimea tried to hold such a referendum but gave up under the threat of its water and energy supplies being cut off.)
Do you remember how often you hear about the issue of the border between Denmark and Germany or Austria and Slovenia or Austria and Hungary? No, because those borders have not been any kind of issue at all since 1918 or so. Because the borders were drawn by referenda.
Thank you so much! I can begin….
X
Hey JMG
Thought I would mention that I recently finished reading your latest book “Secrets of the five rites”, and enjoyed it quite a bit. It occurs to me that there could be a few ways to expand the exercise system you have described in this book by incorporating some more modern areas of knowledge into it. For example, I wonder if current endocrinology could point to ways you could improve how the exercises affect the endocrine system.
@JMG: are you familiar with the works of John Cowper Powys?
Mary Bennett, #100
I hope you will post pictures of this quilt project somewhere and link to it here, whenever there is something to see! It sounds like a wonderful project!
@David Ritz #112
For that map, I’d swap out the American Empire and put it where the Eastern Confederates are on it. In the place of the American Empire, I’d have some kind of Tex Mex / Southwestern desert country, because it’s a really different vibe there.
JMG,
Have you heard of Rudyard Lynch at all? I was listening to the podcast Impact Theory, who had Rudyard on a few months ago, and was utterly flabbergasted to hear this young guy (he’s only 23) spouting many of the same talking points as you. He is also a student of history and well read, and while I think he misses a few things, he’s talking about the impending demographic collapse, and the many parallels of other civilization’s declines in relation to the West. I would not at all be surprised to learn he is a reader of yours. If you haven’t heard of him, you should look him up.
My main question though is to ask if you could explain (again) how to tell what polarity your various etheric, astral, and mental sheath bodies are. I remember you mentioning it once a long time ago, but I am unable to find it (I really wish dreamwidth had a better search feature). Thanks as always for your wisdom.
-Trubrujah
Ellen in ME,
Thank you for the info! Yeah, we are in rural Texas. Only options locally are the public school (which was sub-mediocre even when I was attending it decades ago), and a small Catholic private school which is somewhat better academically but not really our cup of tea. There is also a Classical Conversations co-op which we might consider once our daughter is school age, although don’t totally jibe with them either. My mother-in-law homeschooled her four children and now her daughter is homeschooling her five kids, and they’re all doing great, but I worry that being out on the farm like we are isn’t giving our daughter enough chance to interact with others, especially other kids. We try to get to the library storytime and/or park once or twice a week, and take her on town errands with us, but the nature of farm life is that the more time you spend off-farm, the less successful you generally are. We are expecting our second child in a couple months, so at least they’ll be able to play together as they get older, but that’s not really the same.
I don’t know if any of you have been following the Great H1B Christmas War on Xitter, but it is getting rather spicy. This particular post made me laugh out loud and it takes a lot these days to get me to laugh.
https://xcancel.com/GreeneMan6/status/1872497244974498206#m
This 1989 comic is still topical.
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/12/20
If you were wondering what Calvin was going to do when he grew up.
Meanwhile, “In September, the Preservation Society of Newport County and Southeast Lighthouse Foundation filed a lawsuit against Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Revolution Wind, LLC, the owner of a wind project under construction 15 miles off the coast of Rhode Island. The project proposes 96 turbines nearly 900-feet tall. The project is part of a trio of offshore wind projects that will place over 200 turbines between Rhode Island and Martha’s Vineyard.
The lawsuit argued that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) failed to properly consider the project’s impact on National Historic Landmarks and other historic properties.”
But also, ““Nuclear energy is the only source that is sufficiently efficient, abundant and rapidly scalable to cope with the development of our civilization,” he added. The project will have the backing of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), with IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi joining Milei and his key advisor, Demian Reidel, during the plan’s official launch. Reidel stressed that the increasing demand for energy, particularly from AI advancements, makes nuclear power crucial to Argentina’s energy strategy, jpost.com reports. The first phase of the plan will focus on the construction of a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) at the Atucha Nuclear Power Plant.”
In my opinion, if Kamala Harris had been elected president last November, the USA would have its second figurehead as president, and it would have serious consequences. The Deep State would become even more solidly entrenched in power than it presently is, and the American public would eventually become accustomed to having a nonentity as president, a mouthpiece reading on a teleprompter speeches written by other people.
The USA would be ruled by bureaucrats, a caste rather similar to the eunuchs who were China’s high administrative class for centuries. Most of whom, I suppose, being capable men (and women, as to the USA) but bureaucrats to the core, instinctively hostile to free enterprise, innovation and risk-taking. Elon Musk would be subject to the same judicial hassles Trump was, and that would be, sooner or later, the end of his career.
Bureaucrats are good at managing things in good times, but not in times of turmoil. I don’t know what Donald Trump will do as president (I am a Frenchman living in France, not an American) but I am pretty sure that under president Harris the USA would have continued its long descent, similar to the long decay China experienced for centuries.
@Kevin #107,
You might be looking for what are called “trammel points”, or a “beam compass”. These can be used to scribe or draw a circle from one up to several feet in radius fairly conveniently.
For larger circles, up to an outdoor scale, just use string/rope/chain, a pole for the centre, and a sharp stick or chalk or can of spray paint, depending on the accuracy and durability of the circle desired.
— V.O.G
Another back in the 60’s item – fusion power! I remember them working on it back then, now at least 30-40 years behind predicted attainment, the endlessly receding future! Ray Bradbury in his science fiction had us settled on Mars by now in the original edition of his Martian Chronicles.
Planned to be operational by 2035, a 400 megawatt fusion plant in Virginia to power up AI and data centers all for a mere 2 billion at least as hoped for. AI is a hungry beast.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-the-worlds-first-nuclear-fusion-power-plant-be-built-in-virginia-heres/
@ WatchFlinger #114. You wrote: “I wonder if this is an instinct, or if the working class ever heard of the theory that the Black Death created the European middle class?”
I think it is an instinct. The working class understands that would is supposed to be good for the economy, the State, etc, isn’t always good for them. Basically, they have been deprived of a nation, and we all know that Homo sapiens is a territorial, tribal animal, who can’t live without a community.
The French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd (whose name was recently mentioned on this blog) wrote in his last book, “The Defeat of the West” (La Défaite de l’Occident) that in the British ruling class, hatred of white proles has replaced hatred of non-whites. I read the book in June of this year. In August, with Keir “two tier” Starmer in power, we all saw how correct Todd’s idea was. The white working class sees clearly that the ruling class hates them, even when they pretend to be left-wing like Sir Keir Starmer. The white boys won’t go blithely to war like they did in 1914 and 1940, because they know that they have no future in British society. According to Todd, 33% of young white Britons go to college, but 49% of young black Britons, and 72% of Britons of Chinese descent.
Imagine a young man being drafted and going to war for any of the European or North American countries. Suppose he’s lucky and comes back alive and with all his limbs, several years later. He would be likely to find that his civilian job has been taken by an immigrant, who, as a foreigner, can’t be drafted. Like many US veterans with PTSD, he would also be more likely than the average to end up homeless or afflicted with PTSD. Not good for someone who was originally among the 23% of young Americans who are fit to serve (I don’t know the stats for citizens of EU nations).
Similarly, during the last stages of the Roman Empire, Roman citizens were much less eager to join the Roman army than they had ever been. A Roman victory meant up to a million new slaves brought into the Empire, doing for free the jobs Romans did for wages, thereby ruining the small farmers who had been the backbone of the Roman army. In other words, the bravery and valor of the Roman soldiers eventually led to their financial ruin as small farmers.
@ WatchFlinger. You wrote: “Would a European country decide to place export controls on its medicine in order to save it for their own populations?”
It may decide so, but it would have zero effect. France (where I live) imports most of its medicine from China and India. I guess it’s more or less the same in the other European countries: it’s cheaper to produce medicine in China and India, therefore the big pharmaceutical companies found it profitable to offshore the factories to Asia. Here in France there are shortages concerning about 400 medicines (including vital ones) because their prices are capped, and therefore Big Pharma prefers to sell to other countries, according to my pharmacist.
The geniuses who rule France don’t seem to understand that medicine production is strategic. If China places export controls on its medicine, for any reason, Europeans (the French in particular) will be in a very difficult situation, and it would take years to build new pharmaceutical factories.
I have a friend who has an apartment near the Italian border, where he spends his holidays. He goes to Italy to buy medicines. They are much more expensive, but at least he can find them.
Mary Bennett,
Is this the book you’re using?
https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-united-states-patchwork-pattern-book-50-quilt-blocks-for-50-states-from-hearth-and-home-magazine-9780486232430?shipto=US&curcode=USD&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAvbm7BhC5ARIsAFjwNHuauEtYtW2XYBmtAyYCsEo2ZYUox-9_liKmhxCSX63nPQuo3TByY6EaAsziEALw_wcB
It occurs to me that it could be an interesting project for any ecosophians who enjoy sewing to do their own version of the quilt, or to do a block from their state for someone to assemble, or something like that, perhaps with prayers or blessings for the people in each state and the good of the country for those who are of that bent. If a communal quilt, it could even be given to someone on the Ecosophia prayer list who is having a hard time or donated to a patriotic organization or raffled and the money used for some worthy purpose or some such. I have recently gotten into quilting a bit myself and it’s just something that occurred to me as I read about your quilt project.
Rajarshi, the author of a book has nothing to say about that — the publisher makes those decisions. I don’t happen to know, but if you contact the publisher via their website, I’m sure they’ll be delighted to tell you.
Team10tim, maybe so, but the strategy hasn’t kept a lot of shenanigans from going down. That next step may be unavoidable for them soon.
Martin, scientists and physicians have that problem in common: the bad habit of thinking that expertise in one field gives them godlike omniscience more generally. I’ve read that con artists make a habit of targeting such people, because they’re so easy to fool in any field they don’t actually know well.
Heather, it’s not a stupid question at all. Remember that you don’t go straight into your next life after this one ends. That’s why near-death experiencers so reliably report having met their dead relatives and friends immediately after they leave their bodies: when somebody’s on their way out of incarnation, everyone who’s already there and hasn’t gone onto a new life yet joins a welcoming committee. (It’s very much as though they’d gone to a different country, and show up at the airport to greet the new arrival.) After that, we all have a lot of work to do between lives, but unless you’ve really screwed up and end up in the very lowest end of the astral (which is the origin of the legends of Hell), it’s not nonstop work, so you can hang out with the people you care about in the intervals.
It’s normal, too, for people with close karmic links to be reborn in situations where they’ll come back into relationship in their next lives, though the relationship may not be the same: your mother in this life may be your kid brother the next time around, or what have you. (It’s also not uncommon for people to be born into the same family; I know one family whose youngest daughter is almost certainly the husband’s grandmother in a new body.) Finally, remember that material incarnation is not a permanent condition, and once you finish your lives in material bodies and go on to more interesting things, you can and will meet everyone who’s already reached the same condition, and can expect to meet the others when they get there.
Northwind, good question. The resemblance has been noted!
Erika, you’re most welcome.
J.L.Mc12, thank you. I’d be delighted if somebody with the necessary scientific background could look into that!
Quos Ego, yes, I’m not a huge fan but his writings are very readable, and his portrayal of Merlin in Porius is to my mind the best in print.
Trubrujah, no, I haven’t heard of him. I’m glad to hear that other people are picking up such important and obvious points! As for polarity, I’ve written about it in two blog posts here —
https://www.ecosophia.net/on-the-metaphysics-of-sex/
https://www.ecosophia.net/on-magic-manhood-and-masculism/
— and also in my recent book The Philosophy and Practice of Polarity Magic. The short answer to your question, though, is simple. Your etheric body is the opposite polarity of your material body. Your astral body — well, how sensitive are you to other people’s emotional states? If you tend to pick up and share other people’s emotions, you probably have a female astral body; if you tend to project emotions rather than receiving them, you probably have a male astral body. Equally, if your creative life works best when it’s stimulated by other people’s work (as in fanfic), that’s another indication that you have a female astral body, while if you don’t benefit from that, it’s more likely male. The mental sheath is usually, though not always, the opposite gender from the astral body.
Other Owen, yeah, it was only a matter of time before Trump’s disparate coalition began to quarrel among themselves. It’ll be interesting to watch it work out.
Siliconguy, I watch this and chuckle. Offshore wind and fission power are both hopelessly uneconomic white elephants — I’d describe them as oversized fetish gear, in service of our culture’s sweaty, fevered craving for omnipotence — and watching their proponents denouncing each other is one of the entertainments of this phase of history.
Horzabky, my only disagreement here is the time scale. The US has been dominated by bureaucrats since the Second World War, and especially for the last quarter century. The issue now is that the US dollar is losing its status as reserve currency — gradually, but inevitably — and that means the US will no longer be able to borrow on international markets to fund its gargantuan bureaucracy. Thus the elite classes are turning against the bureaucratic state they created; it’s that or national bankruptcy.
BeardTree, between now and 2045 or so, when they finally have to admit that it won’t work, that “fusion plant” (aka makework project) ought to pay a lot of salaries and soak up a vast amount of subsidies — and that, of course, is its real purpose.
Dear Mr. Druid
Regarding Canada as the 51 state. In my opinion the Trump team is trolling Canada. Canada is currently run by a “Laurentian” elite, who consist of roughly 3 million people due to geography who can become effortlessly bilingual. The Laurentian elite is centered on Ottawa and has the personality of the Clinton-Obama wing of the Democratic Party – in particular absolutely no sense of humor. I can not think of a group of people less able to respond to being trolled, other than maybe Obama supporters. This group is 100% globalist and truly enjoys being a big fish in a small pond.
When Canadians talk about joining the US we assume we will join as equals. Best result for Canada – joining as states 51 to 63. Not going to happen. Worst for Canada is we become Puerto Rico and have an appointed administrator. This is best for USA.
Given the current changing borders, it would be more likely USA absorbs Canada, maybe 51 state if we are lucky. Now some people (See blogger Ian Welsh) have argued Canada would put up a resistance. Sorry, not going to happen as the rural Canadians who have the ability to be the resistance are generally happy to be rid of the Laurentian elite and would be supportive of joining the USA. And this includes Quebec IMHO. The 5 million south Asians would leave for warmer places and Canada would generally empty out, while there would be some Americans going the other way to live in less crowded places. There would be a whole lot of Latin American labour going north – Grande Prairie and Fort Mac would have the best street Tacos in Canada.
Health Care would become American, and Quebec would gradually become English speaking, particularly as Canada empties out and Quebeckers move south. Montreal becomes an open air museum for American Democrats. The vast crown lands would be auctioned of to large conglomerates. Canada’s monopoly corporations will get bought out and become part of corporate America monopoly corporations.
The big loser would be the Laurentian elites, and good riddance. As for the rest of us, life would carry on.
In other news, in a story few could have foreseen..;-)
Home insurance companies are raising their insurance premiums to account for the higher risks of natural disasters. Some insurers are choosing to completely exit states like Florida, California and Texas. Many homeowners are starting to find that their homes will soon be underwater, literally in some cases.
The stink is so high that it has reached lofty places like the WSJ and the NYT. Here is a sample.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/homeowners-insurance-rates-disasters-4f3e826d
The Piper is coming to collect and no one has cash.
It’s going to be so ugly.
Re Iran, etc.–I’ve thought for several years that the leaders of Iran and N. Korea would have to be insane _not_ to develop nuclear weapons. Bush declares Iran, Iraq and N. Korea an “axis of evil”. US claims Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and attacks. Iraq turns out not to have such weapons, is defeated, destroyed and its leader executed. If that isn’t a message to Iran and N. Korea that if you want to be safe from the US you dang well better have nukes, I don’t know what is. Which leads to the next thought–would the US have attacked Iraq if our military really had had evidence that Saddam had nukes?
re Waldorf schools–investigate the school carefully. Since there is no central control the individual schools and even the teachers within the schools develop their own culture and interpretations.
re drones–Walter Kirn who partners with Matt Taibbi on weekly broadcasts is saying that both the drone stories and the handling of the killing of the health insurance executive are intended to be unsettling distractions. He suggests that turning the discussion to the evils of the health insurance industry may be intended to distract the public from RFK’s targets–the food and drug industry. I won’t attempt to summarize his arguments; you can find them on RacketNews.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/what-would-happen-in-the-minutes-and-hours-after-the-us-invaded-canada/
Hi John,
From a military perspective seizing Canada and Greenland would be quite straightforward for the US.
And in one stroke it would become a huge geopolitical power with access to vast resources.
Why not?
@Horzabky,
Thank you for your comments and insights. One thing that will certainly exacerbate the issues of population decline will be a large majority of the population of wealthy countries losing faith in the institutions and leaders of those countries. You brought up the idea of a draft in American or Europe and the young soldier losing his position when he got home. In the US, if you are a reservist or National Guardsman (I won’t go into the Byzantine structure of the US military, but the esoteric aspects of the military might be an interesting topic of this blog, because if you haven’t been in the military, it does seem ridiculous and confusing…. sorry for the digression), legally your company has to hold your position open for a year if you are called into active service. That being said, I am a US veteran who luckily got out of the Army about 6 months before 9/11 happened. I had some friends that didn’t come back from Iraq and a friend who committed suicide after his 2 tours in Afghanistan. When guys from my era of the military came back home, we basically told our sons that “The military is not worth it,” or “Don’t fight for this country, it hates you.” And the family is the best recruiter for the military. I can trace my family’s military service back to the Revolutionary War, but if your dad tells you not to go, that’s definitely a blow to the current bad recruiting numbers.
The next issue regarding employment of young men. When I was growing up, it was very common for 17 to 25 year old young (native born) men to do jobs like construction of farm work, and, much like the military, was seen as an initiation into manhood. Now with a lot of young men sitting at home, getting fat and spending all their time on screens, they may have lost faith in the system and their ability to get ahead that they have just given up. The parallels to the Roman army are too perfect. In America, small town farm boys (usually of Scotch-Irish heritage) have always made our best soldiers, now they won’t join!
Anyway, lack of military preparedness is just another issue to add to those of the population bust.
As far as who is going to get the medicine, who knows, but our lives are probably going to get a whole lot simpler in the next 50 to 100 years. I just wish I could make a middle class living cutting firewood and growing turnips!
i loooove these photos!!!! they should be on your site. totally DIG the library one and the one of you in ceremonial garb!!!
you all have GOT To look.
i’ve got a big smile on my face. i was content to just do a scrawled smiley face with dots for the eyes just to get to the BEARD but man, these shots jacked my idea up and it’s sitting on blocks.
i love the full frontal wide-eyed one. but the LIBRARY??? wow. perfect photo. PERRRRECTO.
x
JMG wrote (#143):
“con artists make a habit of targeting such people, because they’re so easy to fool in any field they don’t actually know well.”
Absolutely right: Highly educated people are the easiest to con. They think they’re too smart to fall for any con. They hardly ever are. It’s the kid who grew up on the streets who becomes an adult you can’t hardly con.
My father’s step-father had worked as a carnival sharper and con-artist in his young adult years, before he found better work for a professional fence and crooked auctioneer. I learned a little about sharping from him, but even more from some of Houdini’s books, who also had begun his adult life as a carnival sharper. (See, for instance, Houdini’s The Right Way to Do Wrong (1906) and Miracle Mongers and their Methods. (1920), both long out of copyright and easily found online. They’re good reads.
“For that map, I’d swap out the American Empire and put it where the Eastern Confederates are on it. In the place of the American Empire, I’d have some kind of Tex Mex / Southwestern desert country, because it’s a really different vibe there.”
It is often the case that the “meta-ethnic frontier” (Peter Turchin’s term) of an old, falling empire forms the core of the successor empire as frontier people need to get along and be polite and friendly to each other to survive. In the old “core”, they can afford to be bitter, crotchety, complain all the time, etc. So when the old “core” falls to invaders, revolution, civil war, etc, a new polity often survives or develops near the frontier.
To give some examples:
(1) The Umayyad Caliphate held our in the furthest Western frontier of Iberia when the rest fell to the Abbasid Revolution.
(2) When the Frankish Carolingian Empire of Charlemagne distinegrated over the 9th and early 10th Century, the new Holy Roman Empire would be formed in the core of what is now Germany by the Saxons, which in Charlemagne’s time formed the frontier of conquest.
(3) Mainland China was overrun by the Communists in 1949 with a “People’s Republic” declared by Chairman Mao while the Kuomingtang survived in a holdout in Taiwan, which had only been settled by the Chinese over the previous three and a half centuries and had only recently been taken back from the Japanese
(4) When most of “British North America” became independent in the War for Independence, the Loyalists fled North to what would eventually become Canada, much of which had only recently been conquered from the French.
It seems that most people who crow on about vast new computing centers with imaginary power sources also forget that most of our current grid is powered by fairly temporary sources. The only old school nuclear power plants we have were all put on line in the 70’s or earlier and probably past their wise design lives. Most of the reduction in coal power was only made possible by the transition to making power with fracked natural gas, which also has a very limited sell-by-date.
As these things all wind down, grid power will become more and more scarce and expensive and the current mania to build data centers may come in conflict with peoples needs to have light and heat in their houses.
My wife had a meeting with the head of one of the Northwests biggest utilities for the purpose of hammering out price contracts for selling methane ( from sewage treatment plants) generated electricity back to the utility. The subject of all these new data centers came up with an interesting twist. Nearly all of them , including the ones mentioned by Silicon Guy in Eastern Washington, are in small towns with their own public utility districts or in other small publicly owned utility districts. This is not so much to be close to power ( though it helps) but because the Bonneville Power Administration ,which controls nearly all the Hydro Power on the Columbia, is prevented ,by current law, from limiting or cutting back power to these utilities. This is unlike the old Aluminum mills in the region which bought discount power direct from Bonneville in exchange for becoming swing customers.
So as long as the likes of Google or Apple can maintain a grip on the local politicians or PUC board members in places like Prineville OR, The Dalles OR or the PUC’s of Eastern Wa they can prevent the power they need to post cat videos and synthetic animation from being cut back so Granny and her cats won’t freeze in the dark.
Hey JMG
On the subject of nuclear energy, in Australia the LNP have been advocating for it rather loudly again, as they do periodically. In particular their federal opposition leader Peter Dutton has unveiled a plan to make nuclear account for 38% of electricity by 2050. The funny thing is that when the CSIRO once again crunched the numbers and demonstrated how uneconomic nuclear power would be in Australia, increasing power bills as much as 50%. Mr Dutton simply said the CSIRO was saying this because of influence from energy minister Chris Bowen, who advocates for the more “usual” renewables. While I of course trust the CSIRO, I wouldn’t be surprised if their report was motivated somewhat by the LNP’s defunding of quite a few of their programs and departments, especially ones concerning climate science.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/dec/11/peter-duttons-bid-to-politicise-top-science-agency-is-absurd-former-csiro-energy-director-says
Kevin @ #107,
I haven’t made it to the bottom of these comments, but in case nobody has replied to your query yet, here goes!
I believe what you’re looking for is called a Bar (or sometimes Beam) Compass. It has a center pin at one end, a long bar, then an adjustable lead holder that slides along the bar with a locking screw. You’ll probably be able to find one brand new at the Big River, or you may also find an antique one (though still functional) at Etsy. Best of luck finding one… I believe you will quite easily.
Pardon me. I was curious if anyone was aware of this 1981 book on “Nine Nations of North America”. Does anyone think it gives a good outline of what the post-industrial landscape may eventually look like:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Nations_of_North_America
>I don’t know what Donald Trump will do as president (I am a Frenchman living in France, not an American)
France’s gov’t is collapsing? So is Germany’s? The UK is wobbling too? Libya has already collapsed? I’m sensing a trend here. So let’s extrapolate to Murica? Or maybe not.
Thank you, Scotlyn. I am piecing by hand, something to do while listening to podcasts, so it will take a while. Alabama is finished, 49 to go.
JMG. I am curious your opinion of Vaclav Smil. I had understood he did his work carefully and was accurate a good engineer, and had solidly backed opinions on energy and peak oil that were fairly middle of the road. I have started reading “Numbers Don’t Lie,” which is 4 pages essays on various subjects. I am disappointed. He makes the absurd statement that COVID is 11 times deadlier than the flu. (The first wave in fact was 1.7 times deadlier than the flu. I carefully calculated it and wrote a book on it.) And he says Japan is a disaster because their population and GDP have not grown, ignoring that their per capita GDP and other measures of welfare are doing just fine. He generally seems to buy into the theory that the point in life is to grow your GDP as much as possible. (I am exaggerating a bit there.) I was expecting original thought and I am not seeing it.
A1, oh, doubtless Trump’s just having fun at your elite’s expense. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the US eventually ends up conquering and absorbing Canada, but my working guess is that we’re half a century from that unless the Canadian government decides to sell out to China too blatantly; if that happens, you can expect US divisions crossing the border in about fifteen minutes.
Anonymuz, I’ve been expecting that for a couple of decades. Since most banks won’t issue mortgages on uninsured real estate, this is part of the process by which a growing share of US housing drops out of the official real estate market and becomes available to the rural squatters whose grandchildren will be our deindustrial peasantry.
Rita, three good points.
Forecasting, it would cause serious problems in US foreign relations, since Britain and Australia are major forward operating bases for our military, and both can be expected to revoke treaty rights and terminate alliances if we seize Canada. It would also guarantee hostility with the EU, since Denmark claims some degree of ownership over Greenland. Thus I don’t expect it to happen for another fifty years or so.
Erika, delighted to hear it. The library one was shot in the Providence Athenaeum as part of a documentary on Pepe the Frog; the ceremonial-garb one is from something, I forget what, I did during my term as Grand Archdruid of AODA. I don’t put ’em on my blog for the same reason I don’t have a personal website — my ego is quite adequately inflated as it is. 😉
Robert M, I think you mentioned this to me once, but I’ve read the same thing elsewhere. In particular, investment fraudsters have an incredibly easy time going after university professors! I’ll check out the Houdini books.
Clay, the next few decades are going to be very, very colorful, and the AI fad will doubtless contribute mightily to that.
J.L.Mc12, it’s clear that we’re going to see another frantic and useless dumping of money down the nuclear rathole. Brace yourself for energy shortages, sky-high power rates, and large-scale utility bankruptcies!
David R., political history doesn’t suggest that future national boundaries will have much to do with cultural boundaries of this sort — and that doesn’t even factor in the likelihood of large-scale internal migration.
Hugh, expertise in one field does not equal competence in any other field. Engineers tend to be at the forefront of most fields of crackpot pseudoscience, partly because they mistake their expertise as omniscience, and partly because they make the mistake of thinking that numbers don’t lie. Au contraire, numbers can lie like rugs, and they can do it in hundreds of ways.
The Nine Nations of North America isn’t really a post industrial civilization book. It does, or at least at the time it did, describe the different value systems in place in the various regions of the continent.
I have the book, I should reread it to see what’s changed. I’ve lived in Breadbasket, Southern California, and Empty Quarter. The differences are real, the squabbling between Ectopia and Empty Quarter are very much in current events as Seattle succeeds by basis of sheer population at shoving its urban values on the East Side of Washington, and most of Eastern Oregon has already voted to join Idaho, but Portland seems to have no interest in respecting diversity and letting them go.
Horzabky@142
Chronic drug shortages have been in the US for a good while, and quite profitable for some.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/us-drug-shortages-reach-record-high-with-323-meds-now-in-short-supply/
With our oligopolies, we even have a countrywide shortage of SALT-WATER, yes saline…60% from Baxter plant.
https://www.baxter.com/sites/g/files/ebysai3896/files/2024-10/9-30_Medical Information Letter.pdf?utm_campaign=20241008_&utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery.
IMO – Alternative medicine is likely to become yet more popular, and some making real efforts at prevention.
Mary Bennet @109
The British Commonwealth and the French Commonwealth are both in palliative care. Most of the countries that belong to each of them are in Africa or the Caribbean and are starting to pull away since they realize that belonging to these organizations is not helping them develop. From what I’ve read (and I don’t read the MSM) some of the African countries are looking at the BRICS.
Nunavut is the territory you’re thinking of. It separated from the Northwest Territories in 1999 and is indigenous (Inuit) administered. It has 3 or 4 mines, gold and iron and some copper, but is not otherwise a plentiful source of minerals. Its population is around 40,000.
WatchFlinger @114
It’s not just the age of the farmers. I grew up on a farm and it’s hard work with little return–a late frost that kills your crop or an early frost that wipes everything out before it can be harvested. Or coyotes that get into the hen house and kill most of your flock. Neither I nor my brothers went into farming. But the big danger to American and Canadian farming (and maybe European, I don’t know) is industrial farming. All of that heavy equipment is compacting the soil and the chemical fertilizer and pesticides are killing the tiny organisms that live in the soil and nourish the plants. Once peak oil and peak natural gas and peak phosphate rock hit, which will be this century, we’ll be back to fertilizing with manure (including human) and bone meal. But it will take a long time–decades at least–to revive the soil.
Smith @118
Have you ever read Tolstoy’s War and Peace? I read it in high school, although it took 4 tries to get through it and then I read it again a few years ago. The book gives a pretty good description of the Battle of Borodino which I saw one reference to that called it the biggest one day battle in the history of the world. I take that with a grain of salt but it was Napoleon’s biggest battle. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was pretty traumatic for Russia and then about 129 years later they were invaded by Nazi Germany. Something like 27 million Russians died in World War II. That’s something you don’t forget.
Did you read Putin’s proposed treaty to NATO? He objected to NATO’s eastward expansion and said there was no security unless everyone was secure. NATO and the US laughed so Russia invaded 2 months later. The West talks about returning to the 1991 borders, but maybe they should go back to the 1922 borders before Lenin took what’s now eastern and southern Ukraine from Russian and gave it to Ukraine. It’s my understanding that the famine wasn’t only in Ukraine but in much of the Soviet Union. And Stalin wasn’t Russian, he was Georgian. And famines are more common than is realized. My ancestors came over here from Ireland during the potato famine.
But you and Smedley Butler are right–war is a racket and it’s also the cause of a lot of global warming which a lot of people don’t realize and no one addresses.
Hi John Michael,
Yes, I believe that will be the general way of things. Why else the sudden back-flip on crypto? – a chunk of financial chicanery I never really understood in the first place. As an amusing side note, to not understand that game, is perhaps a feature of it. 😉
Contraction of the notional value of transactions (i.e. the GDP measure) along with population decline is perhaps among our elites biggest fears. Like most fears, they’ll get to face both of those in due course. You’d have noticed that both variables are quietly going on in the background anyway, despite the vast (and ultimately futile) efforts to avoid them?
You know, down here on average we pay about 32% federal tax on income. Another 11.5% gets redirected into financial markets for the purposes of retirement savings. There are quarterly local council property taxes for those who own. Rents for those who don’t. Interest on debt. Subscriptions, licensing fees, insurances etc. Recently the whole deny, delay and outright confuse, has added on a new layer of crushing administrative burdens to the average person who has to deal with corporate and government entities. And I’m watching the sheer stupidity surrounding the capital under investment in the electricity grid. If this general outcome is the best that the managerial class can arrange, mate, it’s not good and I suspect that major failure, compounded by further failure to address the larger issues, has to be displayed before constructive change can take place.
I’ve long mentioned to you that there is a lack of vision from these folks. Given the way the many situations are heading towards a crisis, I do wonder if they see problems as narrowly focused administrative difficulties to be worked around? Dunno, easy to speculate, but always hard to know. One thing I’m aware of, when the poop hits the fan and the ugly details can’t be swept under the rug, failures will lead to sackings.
Cheers
Chris
Hey JMG
I dread that possibility, but I suspect that one of the few good thing that the LNP’s economic mismanagement will bequeath to the future will be that due to them, Australia will be unable to accomplish much nuclear power development even if it really wants to.
@Mr. O, JMG,
I continued to be flabbergasted by people who not only think that abiotic oil is possible, but who think its existence would be a good thing. It is as if they know nothing about planetary science – or even basic chemistry.
The upper layers of a planet (including atmosphere, if there is one) can be oxidizing or reducing… but not both. Earth has an oxidizing atmosphere with only very trace amounts of hydrocarbons like methane. The outer planets and Titan have reducing atmospheres with lots of hydrogen and methane but no free oxygen. And it’s got to be that way – otherwise a lightning strike would blow them to smithereens. So it’s oxidizing or reducing (pick one!) and chemicals of the opposite sort (i.e. hydrocarbons on Earth) are an anomaly that only show up as a result of the energy-concentrating powers of algae and other life forms.
Moreover, if Earth’s mantle did have near-endless seas of abiotic oil… then people would keep on pumping and burning it for the next thousand years or so, until they trigger a runaway greenhouse effect and make our planet uninhabitable like Venus. As much as I get that the deindustrial future that our host is predicting may seem unappealing to some people, I can hardly conceive how the Venereal future isn’t many times more terrifying!
So my advice to techno-optimists – drop the absurd abiotic oil fantasies and stick to plugging things like solar power, nuclear fission, and offshore wind…. They might not turn out to be economical enough to matter, but at least you can promote them without sounding like you know nothing about the laws of physics!
Hi Mc12,
If the folks at CSIRO had half a brain, they’d steer well clear of politics. Here the golden rule of ‘do unto others’ applies equally to them as it does the government. I’m not schilling for nuclear and believe it be a non starter. The problems need to be addressed soon, as in the next two to five years, and nuclear can’t meet that deadline. However, if for example CSIRO makes the observation that nuclear won’t make any money, why wouldn’t the government – who pays their wages – demand that they in turn make money? It’s a dangerous game they’re playing there.
The uni sector was heavily invested in the voice referendum. Did you notice that when it failed, international student numbers were immediately cut, AND, one of the most prestigious uni’s of them all, had to make amends to allegedly underpaid staff – a matter which had been going on for years and was quite financially significant.
Trust me, always unwise to bite the hand which feeds.
Cheers
Chris
Dear JMG,
Happy Christmas and Happy New Year.
I stumbled on this a week ago
https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/the-depletion-paradox
It seems that peak oil happened a year ago. This time it will not be delayed by dumping dollars on producers or dumping costs on some portion of society.
That’s it. Just to write it down on your block notes, because everything else about the implications have already been extensively covered.
Have a nice day
Pierluigi
@David Ritz (#156):
I think the map that Joel Garreau drew of the nine cultural “sub-nations” of North America is well worth deep consideration. IMHO, it reflects our cultural reality somewhat better than Colin Woodard’s later map of his supposed eleven sub-nations of the continent in his American Nations.
It is also revealing to compare and contrast each of these maps with the map of the various dialects of American English (William Labov, Sharon Ash & Charles Boberg, The Atlas of North American English, 1969.) and various military maps of “weather districts” (for example, the one compiled by H. H. C. Dunwoody for his Weather Proverbs, 1883, published by the US War Department as “Signal Service Notes,” no. IX).
That said, Garreau’s map of nine sub-nations glosses over the very real and potent differences between what one might call the various “sub-sub-nations” within each of his nine sub-nations. New England, for one example, is a single sub-nation for Garreau, but even within its US part, there are at least four historical “sub-sub-nations,” namely the “Northern Fringe” (roughly Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont), the “Puritan center’ (Massachusets north and west of the so-called Old Colony Line, plus most of Connecticut), the “South Shore” (Massachusetts south and east of the Old Colony Line), and the Narragansett Bay area (Rhode Island together with a small south-east corner of Connecticut). These four regions still manifest ancient cultural and religious (now secularized) differences between the various colonial settlements of the 1600s in New England. And Garreau also includes parts of parts of Canada in his “New England” sub-nation, about the history of which I know much less.
LIkewise, Garreau’s Ecotopia sub-nation, running along the Pacific Coast from central and northern California through Oregon and Washington up through Canada and into Alaska, contains at least six distinct “sub-sub-nations,” which locals are very keenly aware of.
JMG (#160) wrote: “investment fraudsters have an incredibly easy time going after university professors”!
I bet they do!!! And, yes, we have talked about this in the past.
@David R #156
I read Garreau’s book back when it was first published, and I have always found it quite convincing.
Now, of course, the future borders of the constituent North American republics will likely not coincide with current state lines! Nonetheless, if we do get a USSR-style implosion in CONUS, I think that the resulting polities will fall out roughly as Garreau describes.
Chris, it’s normally the case with bubble economics that not understanding what’s going on is a feature, not a bug. The same is usually true of government budgets…
J.L.Mc12, I hope you’re right. I’m sorry to say that we’re likely to get another wave of overpriced and underperforming nukes up here — but then I’ve been predicting that for years.
Sandwiches, granted. As I see it, though, the handwaving around abiotic oil isn’t expected to make sense. It’s purely a thoughtstopper meant to allow people to keep consuming oil like there’s no tomorrow and pretend that it won’t have consequences. Doubtless we’ll see even sillier claims down the road — it would not surprise me, for example, if fundamentalists started preaching that on October 23, 2044, Jesus will return and miraculously refill all the earth’s oilfields. Anything, absolutely anything, but coming to terms with the reality of planetary limits…
Pierluigi, well, we’ll see if they’re right this time. A glance at their past quarterly newsletters…
https://www.gorozen.com/commentaries
…shows that they’ve been predicting an imminent energy crisis for almost a decade now, and their previous predictions weren’t too accurate. That said, peak shale oil production will certainly happen at some point in the not too distant future — but the question is when.
@ David R.
I’m originally from the Southwest, and I can tell you that there are at least 3 subregions: Southern California, New Mexico, and Southern Texas. Southern Arizona might be it’s own region, and you might be able to further subdivide the first three into smaller subregions.
to MICHAEL MARTIN at #113:
i smile a tired sad smile because the silicon valley types are a massive REASON san francisco sux.
they came here and to paraphrase myself, they treated the city like a portapotty and made a mess.
the silicon valley types kill wherever they go and they cannot help it. i loved someone’s link to the OTHER OWN at #137:
https://xcancel.com/GreeneMan6/status/1872497244974498206#m
because the x post responding to vivek’s take down of American enjoyment of free time, fun, and having a personal life was brilliant. i had to read it like 5 times because it was so subtle as i’ve been in san francisco too long, where people going out is so …performative now. nothing feels real.
but the silicon valley types, we had people of the likes of mort zuckerberg sergey brin and jack dorsey remake society in their image. i can’t remember the entrepreneur who tore up some redwoods for his fairy wedding. their disrupt ethos urinated all over all our toilets without caring who’d come next.
so i say good riddance to the silicon valley types but in their vision of the world we’re left with, the most pathetic wimps of society have thrived on the passive aggressive social media world and crushed everything because they have no experience with humanity.
something like that.
(smile)
but i get your point.
x
p.s. is “CONUS” continental United States??? it sounded like someone trying to say COITUS with a stuffed up nost. conus. what an ugly sounding word. pray tell, what is it??? everything is distilled into an acronym now, eh?
HEATHER! thanks for asking Papa the question of reincarnation. i was too afraid to ask because i didn’t wanna risk being told i’d never run into James ever again. Life without him here is… well, he made everyday life beautiful and loving. and that it’d be over forever just like (*snap*) that? oh no… impossible…
thanks. that was hardly a stupid question. for me it is THE question because it also gives me a crack of sunshine regarding mordor and the psychopaths that populate one of the most beautiful cities making it hell.
erika
Annette2, Hi, of course you’re right about Stalin’s background. Sloppy thinking on my part maybe, but I think of the USSR as a Russian empire no matter who heads it up, I suppose similar to the Roman Empire having non-Latin or non-Italic emperors.
You’re right about the starvation also affecting other places in the USSR besides Ukraine. And here I guess it depends on the account that you read. According to my own reading the bigwigs in Moscow were making demands of the countryside for food for the cities which Soviet farmers couldn’t meet. The agricultural production was trucked away regardless and so the countryside starved. A man-made famine IOW.
So, did Ukrainians suffer disproportionately? Some say yes. Ukrainians suffered something like 5 million dead. Some say that they got especially bad treatment because Stalin had it in for them, especially Ukrainian kulaks, maybe because of their independent nature, or their nationalist sentiment or maybe because of their bad attitude towards communist agricultural reforms, or maybe because of their competence as farmers and relative wealth. Maybe they were seen as not good and not obedient communists. According to one account, the term Kulak is slang for ‘fist’ ie not a compliment.
Regardless, it was death on a massive scale, something unlikely to endear Ukrainians to Moscow-based shot callers as I myself could see from that Ukrainian lady I worked with.
As for War and Peace, I will get to it. I’ve been meaning to read it, oh, for about the last 50 years.
As for NATO expansion, I can remember guys like Kissinger, Mearsheimer, Kennan and Walt
saying don’t do it, especially leave Ukraine alone. And the Russians, or Soviets, whatever you want to call them, were promised in the early 1990s that there would be no eastward expansion. I also read that Ukraine was guaranteed its independence and security if it would give up the nukes on its soil. A lot of steps or mis-steps got things to where they’re at.
Jessica, Hi. I’d never heard of the border referenda you mention. I always had the simplistic notion that these things are normally decided by force of arms of course with the notable exception of the Czechs and Slovaks. You know, national honor and all that rot.
The idea of a referendum sounds commonsensical. Or you can run a flag up the pole and see how many people salute it, and repeat as necessary.
The problem of course is getting so-called elites to abide by the results. Like that of the Brexit vote. Getting a powerful official like the Brit PM to do something they don’t want to do usually means that they don’t actually do it. So, I wonder, was the result something like Brexit without an actual exit like some pundits said it would be?
Somebody said that Americans do the right thing once they’ve tried everything else and maybe that applies to people in general.
Watchflinger #90
> the aging population will be a drain on productive work
Yeah, says who? (maybe those elders who are unconscious, but there are plenty of those of ALL age groups.)
Here, I feel you are mindlessly regurgitating what you have seen in print. You are not being a bit original.
At least in my part of the world, and people I know, no elder is sitting around wanting to be served piña coladas while sunbathing on chaise lounges, or getting their arses wiped by home-health aides. Maybe that is the 30-year old set, but not the 70-year old set.
I, for one, will work until I drop. And I am not the only elder to say so.
Anyone who is in reasonably good health can ALWAYS help someone (if one has a mind to), and thus forge a small business. For one example, if one has a working car, gasoline, can read a how-to book, and has a mobile phone, one can be a personal assistant to a number of people, doing errands, making a sandwich, lightly mopping a floor, mailing a letter, packing a box, and charging for these things, giving the business-person food money.
We are ALL aging, and we can ALWAYS be a help.
So, no sweeping generalizations stereotyping elders, please. It depends on the person.
💨Northwind Grandma💨😎👙
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
70-something
Hey JMG
I was mulling ecotechnic civilisations again, and I wondered how public transport could be redeveloped in a way that is not the usual “horse-carriage and walking” that is the norm.
I recently came across a video about “chain boats”, which were a type of river-boat that propelled itself by pulling on a chain that lay along the riverbed. It occurred to me that a miniature version could be used with canals as a “aquatic tram”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_boat
erika lopez 94
My reaction: “Oh shite.”
JMG 104
> Erika, good gods. Your choices are your own to make, of course, but in your place I’d leave the apartment, the city, and the state.
Yeah, I agree with JMG. Leave if you can. I would go farther even, to east of the Mississippi River.
From 1990 to 2020, I lived in the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area, San Jose-ish. People in California have changed. It is all-out war between neighbors. No-one is civil. My husband and I sold our home in 2020, and moved to a nowhere-state, Wisconsin (where I finally feel safe). We left, in large part, because our next-door neighbor had declared war on us in 1997, and wouldn’t let up. They allowed their three kids harass us for 23 years, until we had had enough. It was bad. The other neighbors didn’t give a shite. If one doesn’t have a clan, one doesn’t have a chance. As a lone woman, you are sunk.
If someone says they will kill you, assume they will, and get the hell outta California before that. As JMG has written, people with money are leaving California, but I feel it imperative to get out of the entire West. Only poor people are left. Like us, the middle class is leaving. California is turning into the dregs.
Assume everyone west of the Mississippi River is stark raving mad, I mean seriously insane: whatever you have, they want and will take by force💥. Assume you are dealing with sub-humans. Move east of the Mississippi River. If you don’t mind cold, north. If you need (not ‘want’) heat, south. North is better, because hot-heads move south.
I pray for your well-being🙏. You have some deciding to do.
💨Northwind Grandma💨💥
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Happy Holidays to everyone here! I feel second rate to all the regular commenters, and make an effort to read as many comments as I can each week. I often feel too spacey at the computer to attempt to contribute, but I’ll report my Solstice misogi and the divination it brought me. Not exactly Solstice–Dec. 18–but as close as I was going to get. Nice and cold. Frequently enough when I’m chanting away under a waterfall, certain words of the prayers that I know like the back of my hand get snatched away. I meditate on those later. (It’s a long story how I arrived at this method–it was at the Dragon King’s shrine atop the mountain where Kompira Shrine is located in Shikoku.) The words this time, from the Ohharae (Great Words of Purification) were “Our great Mima-no-Mikoto [imperial ancestor god] declared with equanimity the bounteous reed plain [Japan] to be a Land of Peace, and made it sure doubly.” How I am interpreting this is in the context of all the instability arising in Western countries (which Japan feels itself to be among), Japan wll pull through, at least for the time being, with its Emperor system as a stabilizing, pacifying force.
So, we shall see.
I had yet another delightful experience there (near Mt. Fuji). A winter wren (Troglodytes troglodytes), nearly identical to the North American bird of the same name and a similar song, came singing its heart out very near me. They normally do not start singing until spring, but there is an explanation. As I prepared for my misogi, I was practicing away at overtone singing (for the same reason people sing in the shower–no one can hear how bad you are). Here is a lovely example of overtone singing from Anna-Maria Hefele https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9YRGBUQBKo (warning: music). I was performing Prokofiev’s Troika from the Lt. Kije suite, and there is a rapidly rising and falling violin sequence toward the end. The bird probably mistook me for a rival! (I am flattered.)
As far as I know Ian Welsh does not say that Canada will resist takeover by the US. He just says that it should. And that it needs to start preparing to do so now (well, years ago actually).
By the way, Canadian health care becoming like American health care is one of the things the most Canadians would most reject.
If the US wants Greenland, it should offer Denmark to give back the former Danish Virgin Islands in exchange. Any Danish government that turned down that offer would be out of office after the next election.
The era in which Roman soldiers knew that victory would mean a large surge of new slaves to the disadvantage of free labor was at the end of the Republic. The empire used paid mercenary armies. By the end of the empire centuries later, much of agriculture, at least in Italy, was slave plantations (latifundia). That is why life got better for ordinary Italians after much of the ruling elite in Italy died in Justinian’s Make Rome Great Again wars in the 530s and 540s. (The fall of the Empire by 476 was a nothing burger in Italy, for elites and ordinary folks both. In Britain on the other hand, for the Romanized part of the population, it was violent and devastating.)
I figure that non-experts develop skills at figuring out how to deal with fields they don’t know and especially folks who know more than them but can’t necessarily be trusted, but the experts don’t develop those skills. They develop their expertise.
When I was in Japan, I noticed that the folks who didn’t learn any Japanese had a set of skills for getting around that I hadn’t developed because I did start learning the language immediately.
There are reports on twitter of an open-source AI developed in China using a tiny fraction of the energy that Silicon Valley AI’s use. IF true, that could have an interesting impact on all the new power plants being built for AI. IT would also indicate that our capital allocation is highly dysfunctional.
CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere has risen to about 400 ppm. CO2 in Venus’s atmosphere is 965,000 ppm (96.5%).
The presidential inauguration was originally March 4th or 5th, to give the newly elected president time to ride a horse to the capital (originally New York City, then Philadelphia, then DC). This was changed by constitutional amendment after FDR’s first inauguration because the four-month delay that time coincided with a severe bank crisis and the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. Also, the lame duck president Herbert Hoover, despite having been massively rejected in the 1932 election, did his best to exercise his power right up to his last day.
By the way, FDR’s victory was a true landslide, by 17.8% in the popular vote and 472 to 59 in the electoral college. Trump’s recent victory was clear, unlike the 2000, 2016, or 2020 elections, but it was no landslide. Trump swept the swing states but carried none of the Democrat states. Something about it though felt decisive to both sides above and beyond the numbers and so far its impact has been greater than a 1% victory might suggest. Part of that is because Trump made inroads into core Democratic constituencies. Part is because even a narrow but clear victory represented a rejection of the Democratic Party narrative from 2016 onward that Trump is such a unique danger to the Republic that nothing else matters but defeating Adolf Vladimirovich Trump. The country rejected that by far more than 1% and the current Democrats have nothing else to sell.
For the historically minded, the only previous president to return to office after losing the presidency, Grover Cleveland, was completely rejected by his own party at the end of his second term (in those days, there was no legal limit on the number of terms a president could serve) and the party turned from his gold standard austerity (which had helped trigger yet another depression) to the original populists and William Jennings Bryan.
I wonder if the knowledgable people on this blog can weigh in on the claims about small modular nuclear reactors. Are they really that much better or promising than the tradional plants?
Just wondering if I’m missing something and they shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
@ Licensed Templar #155 –
Thanks, I appreciate your suggestion. However a beam compass is a compass just the same. You still have to anchor your center point on a flat stable drawing surface, and for drafting at the scale I have in mind that just isn’t practical.
I wonder would it work to mount a technical pencil or drafting lead on something that turns on the same principle as a bicycle? Do bicycles turn in a perfect circle, describing a fixed radius, or not? If so, what angular relationship between the two wheels would produce a circle of a given radius, and how may its course be plotted in advance according to a pre-planned design? Much fiddling and experimentation might be involved, which is why I was hoping to avoid having to reinvent such a device.
Greetings all,
Merry Christmas and my prayers for a happy new year!
I have a question: how do “demons” or otherwise malicious mystical entities fit into the Druidic conception of Annwn/Abred/Gwynfyd/Ceugant?
I ask because there is a lot of froth on Twitter about people taking ayahuasca, communing with some malicious entity, and then going off the deep end (example link: https://imgur.com/rSZjMII).
Is the behaviour described attributable to “demons”? If so, how is the existence of such entities consistent with a reincarnation model of souls gradually purging themselves of undesirable behaviour and then transending Abred and moving towards Gwynfyd and orbiting Ceugant? Or is this some sort of spiritual mis-development from lack of proper preparation?
Dear JMG,
I would like to ask you some questions about the Geometry Oracle.
When I’m shifting the cards I’m not sure how I should mix them properly so the upright and the reversed reading get mixed up properly too. Usually I’m turning them around an axis. Do you have any better idea?
The second is when I’m doing the daily casting, I found that to read the cards as a general teaching, sometimes in connection with my meditation, more helpful than take them as clues about my day. Since I’m home educating my two children, days are quite similar to each other:). Could that be a correct approach?
Thank you, and wish a cozy winter to everyone
“…oversized fetish gear, in service of our culture’s sweaty, fevered craving for omnipotence…”
Now, that phrasing is a keeper… that said, some visualisations it prompts are very hard to unsee… ugh! Lol!
Thank you!
Mary Bennet #158
Best wishes! I suppose you are proceeding in alphabetical order? In any case, Alabama is where my maternal grandfather came from, so I feel a certain connection there. 🙂
Watchflinger, if you are still reading: the answer to all of this is that the political and economic elites will keep importing people, regardless of what their populations think. In spite of predictions otherwise, including, if I may, our host’s, the average global fertility rate is still around 2.3 per woman, so well above replacement, and if you factor in the momentum as well (in other words how big the reproductive-age cohort is), global human population will likely keep growing for a long time still. Look at the fertility rates for Africa or some poorer Asian countries. That’s where the immigrants will come from, whether we like it or not.
I hope I’m wrong, but the data don’t lie.
Jessica, ” It would have been much better for Ukraine, Russia, and all their peoples if there had been referenda in small-sized units so that people could decide which country to belong to. ”
There was one such referendum, in 1991, and all of Ukraine voted overwhelmingly for independence. It was 80-90% in most places, but even where it was lowest, it was still over 50%. You can find the breakdown if you look it up online.
As late as 2008, Putin himself was saying there was no issue with Ukraine’s borders: https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-crimea-ukraine/26942862.html
Following the Great H1B Christmas War, El-on has decided to declare war on teh entire Internet. It doesn’t take much to knock someone off their hinges, especially if they spend all their time poasting. I’ve learned over the years that the internet will drain your sanity if you spend too much time on it. It looks like El-on has yet to learn that lesson. The more I learn about him, the less impressed I get.
And I’m toying with the idea of changing my internet handle to Elite Human Capital, based on the memeing that phrase has gotten. It makes me chuckle every time I read it.
@ Robert Mathiesen #151
Thank you so much for those titles Robert.
This looks like it is going to be delightful:
“There is an underworld – a world of cheat and crime – a world whose highest good is successful evasion of the laws of the land. You who live your life in placid respectability know but little of the real life of the denizens of this world.”
That last line could equally be applied to the occult…
If you ever write a ‘factional’ novel of the exploits of your family (e.g. the relative who left to live in the woods aged 10yrs) I would love to read it!
Maybe throw in a few tentacled ones (to be found in the Immanent Carnie Big Top) and there could be the makings of a tale for the ages. 🙂
Hi John,
Agree with your assessment. There is something of a 2070s/2080s warlord about Donald Trump. Who knows, maybe Barron’s grandchild, Donald Trump III will be elected president 50 years from now and take on his great-grandads tweets from the 2020s and successfully take the resource rich Greenland and Canada.
In regards to population contraction, do you still agree with LTG BAU model that we should peak globally around 2030? if so, that does suggest that the models which I track which all seem to align around a Greater Depression from around 2030 seem to be correct (a technical term for a globalised economic contraction).
I would be interested in your thoughts on this – https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-fall-of-europe/ – he is massively pessimistic about the future of Europe and his views on Poland are in similar to yours (although he does read your blog so maybe got the idea from you!).
Hi John,
Saw this article today and thought of you.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14230705/What-Kessler-Syndrome-Experts-warn-imminent-danger-space-collisions-knock-Wi-Fi-cellphones.html
Hello JMG,
Just to say that I’m about three quarters of the way through ‘The Shoggoth Concerto’ and am enjoying the story very much. ‘The Nyogtha Variations’ should be delivered in a few days. Brecken is a very likeable young woman who I’d like to meet in real life. If she was real, and I had the wherewithal, I’d want to take in her and Sho and look after them. One of things I enjoy in your novels is that you write women in such a way that leads to me thinking you truly like them, something that doesn’t come across with some writers.
You’ve mentioned elsewhere that you write novels as meditations and I’ve wondered about this with other authors. W. G. Sebald and Ursula Le Guin, in particular, both come to mind. Don’t know about Sebald but have read that Le Guin had many spiritual interests and that comes across strongly in some of her novels. Reading such authors puts my mind in a calm and comfortable place and I’ve long wondered how writers transfer mind states into words. It’s something I’ve played with myself, with a certain degree of success, and it’s fascinating how going to The Space in one’s mind can change one’s writing, but I don’t understand how the process works.
Lazy Gardner, yes, I know someone whose knee replacement is being delayed by three months because the hospital does not have saline solution. I was astonished. I could make it in my basement.
JMG and Neptune’s Dolphin,
Thanks for your comments. I’ll look for the Lecouteaux book and borrow some copies of Epoch Times to see if it looks worth reading. One reason we’d like to subscribe to something is that as our son grows up (he’s 8), we’d like for him to experience getting the news through a paper, not just online.
—
Me: If you are homeschooling, the Epoch Times is good for that. Most of their human-interest articles deal with families who live unregulated lives such as homeschooling on a ranch. The paper is divided into news, opinion (which is even-handed), health (focus on alternative medicine, clean living, etc), life (essays on how to live a moral life, a kid’s page with poems and activities), and home (garden, saving money, home improvement). It is like an old-fashioned Sunday edition. The Epoch Times comes weekly.
The other thing comes with a paper subscription is access to their website and Epoch TV.
I know I am late to the party.
I have read or heard of books coming out about the end of Christian civilization. It seems the general drift is to become Orthodox and mystical, etc, while hunkering down against the demons.
I get the end of Christian civilization, since it is obvious with the decline of Mainline Protestantism and membership in churches. But what is with the demons?
It seems that everyone (well not everyone) is preoccupied with demons. Neo-Pagans want to work with them, as friendly types. Christians want to banish them. Who are these demons? Are there certain demons who have invaded people’s brains?
I noticed that anti-Trump usual suspects are gearing up for more Magical Resistance stuff. (They actually read your book, “The King in Orange.” panned it, of course.) Are they playing with demons?
I ask this since I now have The Mothman (of West Va) on my altar. He appeared before the election, as a harbinger of change. I have read materials about what people think He is. But The Mothman doesn’t seem like a demon to me. Am I off base? Or is it a matter of interpretation.
Local public utility district goings on,
https://www.yoursourceone.com/columbia_basin/powering-up-grant-pud-plans-major-power-supply-expansions-amid-growing-demand-in-grant-county/article_226f24c4-8820-11ef-97c7-f338ad5e4b9f.html
The surplus power sales are those to outside the district customers, in other words the pool of reserve power that can supply Seattle or Spokane. The BPA itself often sells power to California.
@Annette2
#163 re: War and Peace. My great ×4 uncle was in the Grande Armee and crossed the Neiman twice in 1812.. I like to think of him like Pierre at Borodino, knowing things were happening, but with no idea who won or lost.
His descendant Dirk van Erp became a well known artist in the Bay Area at the end of the 19th century.
>so i say good riddance to the silicon valley types
They weren’t always evil. Or at least not as evil as they currently are. Maybe just merely naughty, back in the day. Speaking of which, this guy nails it in a detailed nuanced way, from the perspective of being in the trenches.
https://xcancel.com/treblewoe/status/1872633172636352958#m
My personal experience, I’d estimate 90% of the H1Bs didn’t need to be here and should not have been here. The other 10% were legitimately adding value. In any case, it’s modern day slavery. Don’t try to varnish that, it’s out and out slavery. At this point in my life, I’d be happy throwing the babies out with that bathwater and just ending H1B altogether. The world would be a better place. Wasn’t there something called Abolitionism back in the 19th?
—
>get the hell outta California
I’ve lived in various places, and here’s my advice on where to live, if you’re moving East. Which annoys you more – shoveling snow or spraying for bugs? If it’s shoveling snow, look at anything south of I-40. If it’s spraying for bugs, look at anything north of I-40. If you really really love shoveling snow, look for anything north of I-80. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to get out there and shovel in 3F mornings. That’s -13C or so for the rest of you.
A lot of Californians are fleeing to FL, TX and TN. But like your mom said, just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t make it right. Here’s more free advice – move to wherever your relatives are. If all your kin are in CA, I’d think about digging in and staying. If all your relatives live in Northern Canada, move there.
Expect crappier weather. October is the only really nice time to be outside, anywhen else it’ll either be too cold or too hot. But weather ain’t everything. Or what’s the point of good weather if you’re inside and stressed out all the time?
J.L.Mc12, that would certainly be one option. Another, less cumbersome in most settings, is electric streetcars. You don’t need vast amounts of electricity or a regional grid to run those, and they’re a proven technology that’s still in use in some areas.
Patricia O, thanks for this. For what it’s worth, I certainly don’t consider your contributions second-rate.
Jessica, thanks for this. I think swapping the formerly Danish Virgin Islands for Greenland is a fine idea!
Petula, every nuclear technology is clean, safe, and affordable until it goes online. Since nobody in power listens to fringe intellectuals like me, I’m quite sure we’ll see small modular fission reactors built, so on the very slim chance that they turn out to be viable, my comments won’t hurt anybody — but if they turn out to be yet another version of the same old nuclear scam, my readers will at least have some hope of not investing their life’s savings in them.
JH, from the Druid perspective — and more generally from within all the traditional belief systems that accept the reality of reincarnation — it’s important to keep in mind that souls like ours are not the only kinds of entities that exist. It’s a busy universe out there, and we’re only one class of entities in it. Some of the others are hostile or predatory towards us, and “demons” is a convenient label for those types of being. There are also entities from within our class who have gone off the rails in a big way and are out of incarnation for a very long time; the teaching has it that eventually they’ll find their way back to the course of evolution, but in the meantime they can also behave in hostile or predatory ways. That is to say, the universe is like any other large community — not everyone you meet is safe to hang out with.
YarrowMoon, first, what I do — it’s an automatic habit at this point — is cut the deck and then rotate the half in my left hand 180°, so that all the cards are reversed; I then shuffle the halves together. I do this three times before cutting once more and casting the reading. It seems to work. As for reading the cards as a general teaching, if that works for you, by all means.
Scotlyn, you’re welcome. That turn of phrase may find its way into a post one of these days. 😉
Other Owen, it’s going to be fun to watch. I note that Trump and Vance are staying entirely out of it — smart of them.
Forecasting, so far the BAU forecast is still on track; we’ll see, but unless something happens to disrupt it, I’m going to keep treating it as the most likely case. As for Ian Welsh’s predictions, yes, they seem entirely sensible to me. He does a good job of tracing out the walls that are closing in on Europe. I’m glad to see more attention being paid to the risk of a Kessler chain reaction!
Bacon, thank you for this! Yes, I do in fact like women a great deal — I remain baffled by the fact that some straight men apparently don’t. I think you’ll be happy with how Brecken and Sho end up. With regard to the meditative dimensions of writing, I’m not really sure how it works either; I naturally think in words, so it’s very easy for meditative states to crystallize into verbal forms in my mind, but what mechanism drives the process is a mystery to me.
Neptunesdolphins, people generally pay attention to demons in periods of civilizational decline; I can speculate as to why that is, but it’s pretty reliable as a marker — and yes, there are always those who cower in terror of them and those who try to cut deals with them. (Both are bad ideas.) I’m glad to hear that people in the Magic Heat Sink (that being what resistance requires, in electrical terms) are reading The King in Orange — they’re perfectly welcome to pan it, but I can at least hope that some of them will learn from it and begin to notice the fact that they’ve been shilling for a corporate-bureaucratic establishment that despises them and everything they believe in. As for Mothman, no, he’s not a demon. The universe has plenty of different classes of being in it, and I’ve never heard any evidence that Mothman was actively malevolent; he just signals the coming of crisis and convulsive change.
Siliconguy, hmm! Thanks for this.
As regards peak oil and peak natural gas – there is every impetus and motivation to keep production up and maintain the current unsustainable in the long run technological and economic systems we live in. As Adam Smith said, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation” and another saying whose source I don’t know “Rome didn’t fall in a day” Frankly I hope they can keep things going as is longer than seems possible, pushing off serious painful decline. I have a simple but comfortable American life.
In the remnants of the “angry atheist” movement I was a part of, The Satanic Temple used demonic imagery
to get media attention & mock religious believers rake in donation moneyfight for social justice. Their progressive supporters seem to believe that they can somehow get the Dobbs ruling leaving abortion policy up to the states overturned, or mass indoctrinate children in After School Satan Clubs that don’t exist past the initial meeting.Are actual demons involved in generating publicity for the organization, or whatever ceremonies the more dedicated Satanists perform (even if the participants regard the rituals as make-believe)?
@Patricia O: Anna-Maria Hefele is really good. If you can do that at all, even badly, then I’m impressed.
@JMG: Does the ability to create overtones like that have any similarity to the ability to “vibrate” a sacred name? I seem quite unable to do either.
Kevin (#184):
Just how big of a circle do you need? And how accurate does it need to be? When the circle gets big enough, you can just calculate points along the arc and connect them with straight lines. How many points you need will depend on how accurate the approximation needs to be. Another approach would be to create a partial-circle template, perhaps using a trammel compass just once, then draw as many arcs (between calculated points) as you need with the template.
Before the development of computer-aided drawing, technical drawing often used plastic templates of useful shapes, and among these were arcs of various radii. I see one offered for sale on eBay, with radii of 15 to 1000 mm.
@Patricia #181: Much respect for practicing misogi in its original form in its native land. (Kind of odd how all kinds of self-challenge activities are being called misogi in some circles; seems disrespectful.) And a bit of old-fashioned sinful envy that you have the opportunity. (I make do here; the land is flat so there are no waterfalls, but no shortage of cold water flowing in with every tide.)
I really hope the near-miracle you’ve divined comes to pass.
And no, you’re not second rate to anyone here!
Kevin – PS: Your description of a “bicycle” for drawing arcs didn’t make sense to me right away, until I realized that what you want is a pair of wheels, of different diameters, connected rigidly to an axle: essentially, two slices of a cone. A cone would roll around in a circle, so any two slices of it would as well, drawing two concentric circles if ink were put on their rims. For any two wheels, the center of the circles would be the point of convergence if the entire cone were present, so the radius of the arc being drawn would be adjustable by setting the distance between the wheels. However, any slippage of either wheel would create cumulative error in the curve. On the other hand, if there were a pencil holder between the wheels, an erasable line could be drawn.
How this is in any way relevant even to an Open Post week, I don’t know, but maybe it’s consistent with a post-digital technology world and individual creativity.
Hi JMG,
I’m fairly late to the party but I am finally reading the books of/about the work of Viktor Schauberger (Callum coates translations). I’m only part way through The Water Wizard but do you have any thoughts or opinions on his work particularly from an appropriate technology standpoint.
Mr Kemble
RE: Drone panic — It doesn’t take much to accidentally cause panic
The drone scare reminds me of something that happened when I used to live in a suburb near a Washington DC airport: My son was in the Boy Scouts at the time. They would regularly hold a “Court of Honor” meeting and the Scouts who stayed after to help clean up were allowed to take home a handful of the Mylar helium balloons that were used as place settings on the tables.
Meanwhile at home, I had been showing Honored Son how to make a simple flashlight by taping a red LED light bulb to a button battery. The red LEDs were the brightest ones, so we mostly used those.
Riding home in the car, Honored Son asked me, “Dad–Do you think one of these balloons could lift a red light into the air?”
“Let’s try it and find out,” I foolishly replied.
When we got home, and without consulting Sensible Mom/Wife, we located a red LED lite-and-battery, taped it onto the ribbon attached to a mylar balloon, and let go of it in the November darkness.
It was only after the balloon and light rose above treetop level that I realized:
A) There was a slight breeze, blowing the balloon/light towards the Airport, 10 miles away;
B) The bright, red light was swinging back and forth, making it look like it was blinking;
C) Being Mylar, the balloon would be detectable on Radar, and
D) It was thus an airborne object, heading towards a major airport, without a transponder.
What do you get with A, B, C, and D above? Yep, it’s a UFO (or UAP).
As Honored Son and I were gazing at the departing, blinking red light, we heard the characteristic “Thrubba-Dubba-Dubba” of a couple of helicopters that zoomed over our heads at treetop level, ALSO heading towards the airport. We think that’s what they were, because they were mostly dark with some barely glimpsed red lights as they zoomed over.
“Oh well,” I said to Honored Son, “Time to go inside now!”
“I wonder what’s going on outside?” wondered Sensible Mom/Wife, as the helicopters made several more passes over the house.
Honored Son was about to reply, but I quickly said, “No idea…”
It doesn’t take much to accidentally scramble the Air Force, so my take is that the Drones are likewise mostly hobbyists that are getting noticed more because its a Meme. Some of them could be spy drones, I suppose, but probably none of this is new.
If you are bothered by drones in your neighborhood, I suggest taking up the old fashioned hobby of Night-Flying Kites. For about $40, you could get 10 cheap kites and loft them on a drone night. Any drone flying near risks getting its props tangled in kite string. Put an LED light on them, if you want to see the Air Force…
To The Other Owen, Mr. Greer, all .. regarding the smarmy princes of Dog(e)y – Oh man! I’m soooo glad that I invested in PopCorn futures, having recently ordered beaucoup seed for the next several seasons. This dust-up of hubris-n-mouth disease will be one of many, no doubt. It appears, by all accounts, that baseMaga ain’t having none of it. I can only hope that they/we can hold the line. These rich PUNK$ • Couldn’t • Even • Wait • a few more weeks .. before spouting half-truths and insults (back-handed or no..) to the plebs!
Grrrrr!
As an aside, I watched Jimmy Dore, on his site, rip the two, pissing, little/rich dogies some big orifices. Jimmy tends to fight the good fight. Thank the Gods for phools and jesters.. eh?
Other Owen–on moving from California. My daughter has some friends who have moved to places like Texas and observes that they get there and start looking for the things they liked in Calif. Where are the bike paths?where is the company paid child care? etc. Of course, some of them are moving for jobs, not disgust w. Calif. So, they are mostly ending up in the bluer parts of the other states and will probably succeed in making those areas more blue, at least for a while.
As for the H1B visas–I have always seen them as a revival of a sort of indentured servitude–come to American, but only to work for a particular employer. And we are supposed to believe that the employer has looker really hard for an American who can do the job. Of course, so much job recruitment is farce these days. Daughter works for a community college and knows of many jobs that are formally advertised but everyone knows in advance that an existing candidate is going to be hired. But to stay on the radar you have to go through with making applications, interviews, etc. She currently has a new boss who has no previous experience in the area of administration she is in.
I like Elite Human Capital–ever since personnel departments became Human Resources I have felt like a lump of coal waiting to be turned to diamond. Is there a term that better conveys that the elite think of us as, and treat us as, barely distinguishable lumps of raw material rather than as humans with our own needs and interests.
How long do you think the internet will remain accessible to the general population? It seems to require a great deal of cooperation among people that are rapidly losing interest in cooperating. Maybe we will see countries try to make a separate “intra-net” for their own citizens so they can more directly deal with the upkeep. Unless physically infeasible, I would suspect governments have a strong vested interest in maintaining internet infrastructure to exercise social control.
All – Re: The Epoch Times. We got a sample copy a few weeks ago, and it looked pretty good. (However, we still subscribe to the Washington Post to keep track of what Our Betters are up to.) The news-aggregator “ZeroHedge.com” often includes Epoch Times stories, and they seem to be among the best found there (which may say more about the unreliability of the rest, but just read everything with a critical eye). (By the way, viewing ZeroHedge with Firefox “private mode” goes a long way toward suppressing annoying ads.)
Hi Mr. JMG & Commentariat,
I am finally getting around to the open post. I have been very busy with the holiday recently!
Mr. JMG, I have been reading and researching Robinson Jeffers based on a comment where you name-dropped his work as a good example of the American cultural spirit. I am halfway through Roan Stallion, Tamar and other poems. I find that Jeffers’s best work is when he can describe the moments when Humanity slips into concordance with nature and the divine. Specifically, “Roan Stallion” is a great example of this concordance. What elements of Jeffers’s poetry excited you?
Mr. Trubrujah & Mr. JMG, I am very interested in this conversation about polarities. I am a young man, and the whole business of sex and dating is quite challenging these days. I did not know about polarities and how they relate to human material sexual expression. I am very interested in what I can learn here. I have been trying to clean my own etheric body over the past couple months (I have not had the language to describe this specific phenomena until today). I am still working my way through the first blog post on your response, Mr. JMG, but I would love to learn more about how to clean up my etheric self.
Finally, commentariat, I am interested in your opinions on therapists. I feel like modern therapists hold good intentions with their work. Personally, I have found their ways of explaining the world to be unhelpful, mainly because I find them unhelpful in dealing with problems that are better dealt with on the spiritual or etheric plane. Does anyone else have similar experiences, or more insight to the shortcomings of therapists? We do live in an era where they are celebrated and held in high esteem.
Best,
MRDobner
I usually don’t speak about Trump, but I will say that he has a real talent to drag conversations where he wants them to go. My wife has been upset for weeks because of his “51st state” comments.
Nobody has any doubts that the USA could take over Canada militarily if they wanted, but why would they? They can already get any resources from Canada that they please, it is at most a question of customs rates. And I am sure all this theatre about the 51st state and “Governor” Trudeau serves simply to confuse and weaken Canadian negotiators and thereby eke out a few more percentage points.
@A1: You put it as if the only two possibilities were subservience to a “Laurentian elite” or annexation by the USA. We have only been living in Quebec for eight years. Still, I feel rather sure that any rapprochement between USA and Canada leading to more US-like income distribution or health care would see the support for an independent Quebec skyrocketing. It has dropped to about a third of voters only because, all in all, Canada has been very accommodating. Any encroachment on the French language would IMHO ensure a majority for independence.
@Gaia Baracetti #190: The 1991 referendum, AFAIK, was about independence from the Soviet Union. It was not about a choice between adhering to a non-Soviet Ukraine vs. a non-Soviet Russia.
Thinking of San Francisco and class issues….
Where I live in the outskirts of the greater SF bay area, I see and interact with low income people, as I am one, surrounded by clueless upper middle class/monied ( they think of themselves as struggling middle class). But, a few days ago I experienced the part of San Francisco that is realy where these clueless, monied, living n their own bubble people reside. hang out. What a trip. I was in a part of the city with no homeless on the streets. The parks were clean, the bathroom at the park was clean, I used one, at a small park with a childrens play area not taken over by drug users. Lots of dogs. The larger park at the top of the hill had so many large off leash dogs at sunset running around while their humans chatted. We walked back thru that park later during dark/dark, didnt see anyone, felt very safe, some of those strange driverless cars tooling about. Ate dinner at some trendy, expensive resteraunt. Kind of an interesting glimpse into how the other half live I guess. I think they have no idea that they are in the top 1%or whatever it is of US income. I think they think that is all normal and is due to their hard work and diligence, that anyone could be like this. The rest of us are invisible. My eldest offspring and spouse comment to me after, they see it as I do, that that is not normal. They live in a low income county in Oregon, and as I did they see where we were and what we experienced as too out of touch and decadent – we see the amount of money that was spent on that meal as obscene waste. This is what we feel in reflection, at the time, we just ate and drank what was brought out and had a nice time of course with the kind of extended family person. My offspring says that the monied people in their county of Oregon would never be that separate in how they live–you know they have money because, yeah the nice truck and that they own whatever ranch or business and they can donate. They dont have these basically separate enclaves where they dont have to see the poor — We talked on the phone, where I reminded, yeah, real wages and standard of living has dropped, you can see the charts on the wealth redistribution that has happened. They dont see it. Even a younger family member, a young PMC, who was at that dinner, in previous conversations has said to me that the economy is doing well and wont believe me that it is not doing well for most people. In that convesation I tried to make the point that stock prices are not a direct marker of how the economy is doing. But, I am not very eloquent or good at making my points, I see it, but cant describe it to them.
Thank you all here for being a place of sanity so I dont think Im the crazy one for seeing the Emperor has no clothes
BeardTree, granted. The question is purely how long they can keep going before hard physical limits come into play. What’s happened so far is that increasingly energy-poor grades of liquid fuels have been brought into the mix, so that notional production stays high but the net energy (energy yield minus energy cost of production) drops steadily. As long as they can keep playing that game, we can expect slow erosion of lifestyles rather than sudden discontinuities (from that cause, at least).
Phutatorius, I don’t happen to know. Anyone else?
Mr K, it’s intriguing stuff. I’ve read that some aspects of Schauberger’s work have turned out to function quite well in water treatment plants and the like, so it certainly deserves attention and experimentation.
Polecat, you’ll have ample use for your whole popcorn harvest. This is just the first round; other conflicts will break out into the open as we move further into the Trumpian era.
Trustycanteen, it’s hard to say. My guess is that the first signs of the decay of the internet will be rising prices for online access, plus more fees for what’s now free content — the internet has to pay for itself eventually, and as energy and resource costs increase, that’s going to become difficult. Rationing by price will be the order of the day. Loss of access in rural and impoverished areas will be the next sign — and yes, fracturing the net along national borders is likely as we proceed.
MRDobner, I find some of Jeffers’ shorter poems profoundly moving: “The Purse-Seiners,” “Shine, Perishing Republic,” and “Carmel Point” perhaps most of all. His philosophy of “inhumanism,” of stepping outside the human standpoint and offering a wry commentary on our self-important fantasies, is always a breath of fresh air to me. As for polarities, my recent book The Philosophy and Practice of Polarity Magic covers this in some detail. As for cleansing your etheric body, sunlight, fresh air, cool or cold water, and a diet high in natural foods are all good places to start.
Aldarion, Trump loves to get people into a swivet. I think he feeds on the energy.
Debra, thanks for this report from behind enemy lines! The airtight bubbles in which the privileged live will turn out to be their worst enemy — it guarantees they’ll have no warning of the changes that will end their way of life.
Dear Mr. Druid
You have made comments about the need for the ruling class to keep the overseer class happy and on side Do you think this should also be extended to the fighting class? It seems throughout the Collective West we are having trouble getting people to join the army, and Ukraine has shown manpower is still important. It seems the robot army of Silicone Valley is not quit ready for prime time.
Also, some polling in Europe has shown the young people who vote for the globalist parties are not interested in fighting for their countries. This appears consistent with globalist thought, everything is fungible and mercenaries just cost money. When the Ukrainians are bled out, do you think American troops will fight as hard for every millimeter of the Donbas as the peoples of the Donbas have been fighting? Do you think the USA will openly declare war and man up?
Jennifer Kobernik @ 143. Yes, that is it. I hope many quilters will give it a go this next year.
@JMG,
Re abiotic oil, “thoughtstopper” sounds like the right word to me. And another thing I just don’t get (since I know more than one fwct about chemistry) is the nutty people who get all passionate about how we need to hurry up and colonize outer space before we run out of fossil fuels and lose the ability to do so forever….
I’m like: “Guys, you know you couldn’t burn fossil fuels on any other planet but Earth, even if they exist there which they probably don’t. So if it’s possible to colonize space (a big if!) then it’s also possible to just end our dependence on fossil fuels here on Earth… and we should focus on doing that first!”
Also, some links that the commentariat here might enjoy:
The blog “Contemplations on the Tree of Woe” has published a semi-comical takedown of JMG’s philosophy re resource limits and civilizational decline. Since there seems to be a lot of crossover audience between JMG and Tree of Woe (i.e. they’ve both been interviewed on Ahnaf & Kenaz’s East meets West podcast) I figured that some of you might want to go to the comments there and defend our host.
https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/aenean-age-or-american-eschaton
Second, the Twilight Patriot substack has an interesting article about the recent coup in Romania (which just canceled its presidential election with the apparent support of the Biden Administration) and how the global left is trying to introduce “Iran-style government” to as many countries as possible by making elected officials into ceremonial figureheads who pose no threat to the real or “permanent” government.
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/romania-and-the-iranization-of-the
Mr K and JMG, Here is a link to place where Schauberger’s concepts are being put in to practice at full scale in a municipal waste water treatment process. It does a good job of outlining current mechanical treatment process’s and the natural treatment that follows it in this example.
https://fernhillnts.org/design
JMG,
Oh, I agree. With the west becoming increasingly belligerent and irrational, Iran might need an irrefutable demonstration sometime soon. But, dialing the demonstration to eleven isn’t likely to change the west’s behavior. It will likely change the headlines and the rhetoric coming from politicians, but testing Iran’s redlines is going to continue same as before, see Russia for an example.
The west has been pretty aggressive in recklessly poking the bear despite the bear having the world’s largest collection of nuclear weapons and an effective triad to deliver them (ICBMs, long range bombers, and nuclear subs) and the only missile defense system in the world that has a realistic chance of reliably intercepting incoming ICBMs (the S-500 cannot cover all of Russia, but it can cover the population centers in western Russia.
At least on paper, real world conditions haven’t yet been tested.).
But, Iran’s current nuclear deterrence has prevented the west from launching a war against it* with western troops, same as it has for Russia. Lots of sanctions and proxies, but no US military. I’m guessing, based on their previous behavior, that Iran will hold out on building a nuke for much longer than anyone in the west expects them to.
*If the “seven countries in five years” report from the Pentagon is to be believed, then Iran has gotten off easy compared to the others on the list.
https://genius.com/General-wesley-clark-seven-countries-in-five-years-annotated
JMG at comment # 144:
My astral body is definitely female; fanfic inspires me. Speaking of which, I found it! I’ve mentioned it before — thought it had dropped off the internet — here is one of the best (IMHO) short (10,000 words) Harry Potter fanfics:
Glass Half-Full
No spoiler that it’s about Golden Trio mid-life crises. It starts with Ronald Bilius Weasley, age 39, in his first AA meeting.
Where I read it before, there was a complaint about a lack of Brit-picking. That is, the author failed to make it sound British. I couldn’t tell. Kind of like Dick Van Dyke’s “Cockney” in Mary Poppins. As a kid, all I understood was that I couldn’t understand him. (To this day, Mr. Van D gets razzed about that inauthentic accent. He says Bert’s parent were immigrants from Iowa.)
Hi John Michael,
That’s funny, and true! I doubt that many people on the inside of that world knows the detailed truth of the matter either. There’s little incentive for them to be onto that detail, and every reason not too – they’re enjoying the largess of other peoples wealth.
But of course, there’s always that pervasive blindness to realities. After all the currency crashed directly after the big spenders announced they’d been doing just that and shot past their previous estimates by a considerable margin, the media mostly collectively blamed US interest rate policies. Yeah, if you say that was the cause dudes… 🙂 Sure… (he says sarcastically)
I’m observing that in this rural area there is a bit of property being offered for sale now. It’s an odd predicament because the land is crying out for younger people to move in and make some use of it, or at the very least, maintain the plant and animal communities. It’s productive country. The older folks selling up are asking too high a price for the land, and they’re probably selling up because the work is getting too much for them, so property is really slow to sell. Meanwhile the houses and infrastructure continue to degrade, as they all do. And the productive capacity of the land goes to waste.
The weird thing about high property prices is that in a rural area that story makes little to no sense. If you’ve got land, but have two full time adults working in the monetary economy (plus kids), unless they have super human levels of energy, and also unless the domestic arrangements are radically altered (i.e. with extended family), there’s no way that land can be used to produce. Unless they inherit oodles of cash, I don’t quite understand how a young family could pay for a small farm, run it, have kids and work full time jobs.
It’s like a crazy circular problem don’t you reckon? Do you believe that small family run diverse farms will make a come back? I kind of think that it will be a viable future arrangement.
You may have noticed that we work like dogs to try and make this property easier to live with and more productive? Better to do the work now when we’ve got the energy to do so, than sit on the couch dreaming of some future plans.
Cheers
Chris
Hey JMG
That is good to hear, public transport technology is underrated in terms of how it improves quality of life.
Another thing I have mulled over is wind-powered trains. I am not confident about how good an idea they would be since the sail or wind-turbine needed to power them could cause the train to topple over if the wind suddenly got too strong, and they would need a secondary power source anyway for quiet days. However, some people have looked into it before apparently…
https://www.notechmagazine.com/2009/07/guido-vigevanos-wind-car-1335.html
@Patricia A. Ormsby (#181):
You are not “second rate” among the commenters here. Not in any way! I am always delighted to find comments by you, and I learn from them. You routinely see beneath the surface of things more clearly than many can or ever will.
(For whatever it may be worth, remember that it’s always very hard to come to a true understanding of one’s own worth to others in a community.)
To all who commented on or are interested in the topic of the demographic crisis, I would suggest this movie to you.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19719904/
It’s a Japanese movie titled “Plan 75.” The basic plot is that the Japanese government starts a program that pays elderly people to be euthanized. It brings up many of the issues you have brought up such as the elderly continuing to work until their late 70s and immigrant labor. It’s interesting that this movie came from Japan, which has been loosing about 400 to 500K people a year for the last decade.
@earthworm (#192):
Thank you for your appreciation!
I’m no good at writing fiction, but I have already written up all the stories I have about the lives of my ancestors in North America, in some lines as far back as 13 generations before me; one of my sons wanted me to put them all down on paper for him, since he always had trouble keeping all the details straight. It made a book of 124 (8.5″x11″) pages. I’m happy to share it with you (or with anyone here who is interested). In an hour or two I’ll be putting it up on archive.org, where you should be able to download it. Its title is one on my mother’s sayings that I heard a lot growing up, “Mathiesens are Different.” I’d be glad to hear what you make of them.
Those ancestral stories are my greatest treasure. They went a very long way toward teaching me how to shape myself into a human as I grew up. (Being human was a thing that did not come easily to me as a child or a ‘teen, but took a lot of hard work. I never could understand how it seemed to happen naturally and effortlessly to other people. )
Peter Kahn of the Potlucks.
Lucky you to have a distinguished ancestor. I’m afraid to find out about mine. They were probably horse thieves. Nor have I ever encountered anyone famous. Well, except I once saw Stompin Tom Conners live. (You really have to be a Canuck to know that one).
Emmanuel Goldstein
Ha. Funny. When I heard about the drones flying around the East Coast my first thought was that it was just a bunch of boys having fun.
Jennifer K.
I hope you’re getting lots of books for your daughter. I grew up on a farm and every Christmas I got a book. My earliest book was about fairy tales (pre-Disney). It was read to me until I started school and learned to read and I must have read it hundreds of times. I still fondly remember that book. Reading was something I did almost every night since I never saw a TV until I was a teenager. TVs first started coming out as I entered my teens. I’m the same age as Biden, but with a functioning brain.
Ericka
I second your thanks to Heather for asking about reincarnation. I’m hoping to see my husband again and the ArchDruid’s reply gives me hope that I will.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will fire most of the “expensive” American government workers and replace them with H1-B immigrants from India who will work for a quarter of the pay.
Oh I’ve seen enough of El-on to know he’s not to be trusted. Elon is only concerned about Elon and nobody else. Which is fine if your interests align, I guess. And kind of entertaining if they do not. I didn’t think he was capable of sperging out like some 10th rate internet famous TikTok personality, that has been the amusing and surprising part of all this.
—
Yeah, they always dangled the hope of that ever-so-precious Green Card in front of all those H1B slaves, as I recall. Work hard for 3 cents a day, put up with all the corporate nonsense and you might just get one. But it’s a scam, I think I only saw one of them out of hundreds I ran across actually get that longed-for Green Card. That scam worked so well, I think the EU tried copying it, calling theirs a Blue Card?
Hello JMG and forumistas.
I have some questions regarding old courses and resources online.
1) Now that I really need it I can’t find the Red Cross Nursing Handbook c1940, though I was certain of having saved it. Does anyone have a link to this handy? Information on practical home wound dressings and the cleaning thereof without bleach or contemporary commercial products would also be appreciated. @Lathechuck, I still remember and want that book on survival medicine you have recommended but it was so very expensive I passed.
2) I definitely did save (twice), and have been going through, the Pelmanism 12-lesson course discussed on dreamwidth in June. This is I think a US version of the original English course. The OCR is not good and the mental interpolation required does make me wonder whether I am comprehending the fine points.
On Internet Archive there are some scans of booklets from the English course but there are at least 15 lessons in that one; the one labelled XV still seems to be a version of only the introduction; and not all of them seem to be there. Did anyone happen to find a better scan of either version?
Many thanks and best wishes to all
kallianeira
When one starts asking questions like: Will compact nukes save civilization, or will fusion power keep the Industrial system going?, or will wind and solar keep the fry huts and Disney World ( hat tip to JHK) going? one has to first answer a technical/philosophical chicken and egg question.
Did Technology progress and evolve based on the innovation and creativity of humans and various power sources along the way were harnessed to power it?
Or was technology stopped out at a Middle Ages level until humans discovered and developed how to use fossil fuels? In other words did the cheap abundant energy come first and the technology after?
If you believe the first thing then perhaps there is another power source just waiting in the wings to juice up the EV’s and power the internet as the technology was the key thing.
If you believe the second, that humans stumbled on a one time trove of cheap plentiful energy that was the product of millions of years of sunlight stored beneath the surface of the earth ,then the end of this one time energy gift is the end of most technology beyond wagons, rudimentary firearms and printing.
@Lathechuck #206 –
Hi Lathechuck. I need a circle of any desired radius, easily up to 20 feet or even more, determined by geometry on the spur of the moment. I need it to pass through predetermined reference points. In a word, I need a device that has the flexibility of a compass, but with much greater capacity. 1000 mm radius is small potatoes for what I have in mind.
Yes, I could build big circles in straight line segments; the math I have for doing this is trig. It’s very tedious. Something rapid, swiftly & accurately adjustable and with great radius capacity is what I need. And I prefer it to be a mechanical device, the simpler the better, not based on software. I’m betting it can be done, and very likely *has* been done.
@MRDobner #216 re: Therapists
I’ve been seeing a therapist for around five years ago, originally due to trouble dealing with the grief over my mother dying, and working on various stuff since then. That time period also has covered much of my transition from full-on atheist to “the Gods are just subconscious archetypes, but archetypes are powerful and valuable” to a believing polytheist and practicing occultist. I have found it valuable enough to keep going, but there are indeed some challenges and things to keep in mind. A few of those that come to mind:
1) It’s helpful to find a therapist who is at least roughly as smart/insightful as you are. Obviously, getting this right requires some self-knowledge and an ability to evaluate the therapist, but a very rough rule of thumb that might help is to look for a therapist with a degree level at least equivalent to what you have. This is especially fraught these days with the state of academia, but generally someone with a PhD isn’t going to be a dummy. The downsides here are that a. you generally pay more for therapists with higher level degrees, and b. therapists with higher degrees are far less likely to be familiar with/interested in/capable with alternative approaches to psychology or therapy. If you want an Esoteric Jungian Shamanic Druid Therapist, you’re likely to have a lot fewer to select from and if you find one, he might be a crank or he might be amazing. Someone with a PsyD is likely to be very mainstream PMC in outlook and beliefs, but more likely to be baseline competent at some standard model of therapy like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Oh, and also, higher quality therapists are less likely to take much/any insurance, and so are pricey.
2) As for finding a therapist, getting recommendations from friends is very helpful, as this is definitely a field where it’s hard to tell whether someone is going to be helpful for you purely on credentials or experience. In my case, a friend recommended her therapist, who didn’t have any availability, and referred me, and I lucked out in that she has seemed to work out well.
3) Related to worldview/beliefs, I have opted to be careful with sharing too much of my occult way of seeing the world and try to opt for more figurative or allusive ways of conveying things. I worry that if I start talking about the effects my thoughts and feelings might be having on others at a distance, I might get an unwanted stay of indefinite duration somewhere unpleasant! Instead, I focus on the symbolic aspects and frame things as “my intuition” or “I got to this by meditating/praying about it.” I might have lucked out a bit, as my therapist was raised Hindu, so the idea of believing in and praying to multiple Gods is normal and fine for her, but talking about magic might be going a bit far. Trying to thread this needle makes the therapy less useful, since a lot of what is most important to me about working on in my inner life is very wrapped up in spiritual things, so sometimes I have to talk around the edges of it or phrase things as analogies (for example, I’ve been trying to better balance the four elemental energies in myself, so I have to translate these into more mundane psychological terms).
4) I don’t know how you feel about psychiatric medication, but know that if you choose to go to a psychiatrist, he or she will almost certainly see medication as a first or second resort. If you purely want to stick with talk therapy, you’re likely better off with someone who can’t even try to prescribe you medication.
5) What I have likely found most helpful about going to a therapist is having a regular opportunity to talk very frankly about what’s on my mind/what I’m feeling with someone with whom there aren’t any personal stakes about the topic of conversation. For example, it’s a lot harder to talk to a friend about how you feel like your friends make too many demands on your time than it is to a third party. The downside, of course, is that your therapist may or may not be able to give you much insight into the other party/parties’ point of view.
6) Even if you find a therapist you like and find helpful, remember that he or she is just a guy or a gal, however smart, however well he or she knows you, or whatever fancy training or degrees he or she might have. He (sticking with this for brevity from here) might get to know you very well and might have the best intentions, but his advice won’t be infallible, and sometimes his insights might be off. Therapy isn’t a cure-all. Self-directed self-work like journaling, meditation, and regular reflection are still necessary as a supplement.
Anyhow, I hope this helps, and whatever you end up deciding to do, good luck!
Jeff
@SDI #13 re: Plotinus
My apologies for missing this until now! Thanks very much for the recommendation! Much as I want to check out the root of this line of thinking (at least in the West), I also want to check out where it’s gone!
Cheers,
Jeff
@Dean Smith #31 re: “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”
My skimming skills for replies are weak this month, I just saw this! Hah! Great film, and I’m sure if you squinted hard enough, you could find a Platonic reading, but one doesn’t come to mind off the top of my mind.
Cheers,
Jeff
Kevin, perhaps a pantograph? They can be used for more than circles, though may not allow for the scale you hope for. I touch on them briefly here: https://www.mimeographrevival.com/blog/
@Jill C. #17 re: Riffing on “The Good, the Beautiful, and the True”
Once again, sorry to have missed this! Thank you for the riffing, and I’m glad it spurred some thoughts!
Cheers,
Jeff
@clay Dennis #224
Thanks muchly for the link, looks very interesting. I will have a closer look when time permits.
Mr Kemble
JMG in your comment to Debra, you said “The airtight bubbles in which the privileged live will turn out to be their worst enemy — it guarantees they’ll have no warning of the changes that will end their way of life” which completely explains Kim Stanley Robinson. He lives in Davis, CA (a blue bubble of established older “In this home” homeowners and a university town with all its associated CA wokeness) in a sweet little permaculture-inspired enclave built in the late 70s, bearing street names out of Tolkien’s trilogy (to wit, there’s an 890 sf house for sale there now, on Bombadil Lane, for $550K). He’s incapable of imagining outside of his bubble, it seems.
ERIKA LOPEZ, you are most welcome! And our Archdruid gave a very good answer that I found most comforting.
As to your other questions, I just wanted to tell you what I am going to do. I live in Albuquerque NM right now because I’ve been living with my oldest daughter ever since her husband passed away (suicide) when her son was in kindergarten. So I moved in and started taking care of James. He graduates from high school this May and I plan to move to the Pittsburgh PA area. I lived there for 2 1/2 years back in 2010-2012 and LOVE the area! I t reminds me of the Western WA area I was born in, and is now all but unlivable. I know that because I visit my cousins that still live there every once in awhile. Anyway, I have another daughter and a son and three grandchildren in Pittsburgh and they all want me to go join them. My little grandson, Julian, I swear is a little druid! He hugs trees and talks to them and listens when they speak to him.
Anyway, I have two sisters, one of whom was just widowed and another one that will be widowed soon who want to come live with me in the Western PA area. We figure we can pool our social security, etc. and take care of each other and be around two of my kids and 3 grandkids. My daughter in NM and her new partner are thinking of moving east and my grandson, James, wants to go to college in the east. So lots of the family will be close, which I think is smart, considering what appears to be coming down the pike. I have another sister in CA, but her lifestyle is very different from ours. She always had way more money. I have another daughter and two more grandkids who are grown and in college that I wish would move to PA by us. We will see.
I’m not trying to tell you what to do at all, but at least for me, moving east is a good idea, I think. I have kind of had it with the western US.
Good luck, Erika, would it be ok with you if I prayed for you? I find prayer to be so helpful and comforting.
Kevin, my apologies – direct link here: https://www.mimeographrevival.com/posts/the-pre-hectographs-part-1-the-state-of-copying-up-to-the-early-industrial-revolution/
Annette2, re:books
Oh, yes! I am a bookworm myself, so my trouble is more in resisting the temptation to acquire too many books for her than the reverse. We read a lot of old books together; I like John Senior’s 1000 Good Books list, although again, my problem is more in keeping the list short enough to finish before she reaches adulthood! I must say that most new books coming out are much worse than I anticipated, and our library’s children’s collection barely contains anything worth reading. It’s very sad.
A1, I doubt it has ever entered the darkest dreams of the elite classes that the masses won’t fight for them when ordered to do so. That said, no, the US isn’t going to send troops into Ukraine — well, not beyond the “military advisers” we have there now. Our military technology has taken a world-class drubbing over the last couple of years, and the last thing our leaders are willing to risk is the kind of solid military defeat the Russians are ready to deal out to us.
Sandwiches, oh, there are plenty of hydrocarbons on other planets — the shortage, as you realize and most other people don’t, is oxygen to make them flammable. As for the “Jayemgeus” business on Tree of Woe, thank you. That’s seriously funny, not least because in point of fact, the eastern Mediterranean societies dimly remembered in Homer’s account of Troy were doomed — not because of a tin shortage, but because their agricultural practices had wasted most of the fertility of the shallow local soils, and their brittle political and economic systems were frightfully vulnerable to sudden shocks, of the sort that their own interactions with neighboring peoples had made inevitable. That said, I don’t recommend that my readers go there and make pests of themselves. They have just as much right to promote their viewpoint as I have to promote mine.
Clay, excellent! Thank you for this.
Team10tim, fair enough.
Nemo, ha! Glad to hear it.
Chris, my guess is that the land won’t be worked to any significant degree until current land ownership arrangements collapse, and squatters move in to abandoned properties and start subsistence farming there.
J.L.Mc12, those have the same problems as all wind-powered systems, which is intermittency; that’s less of a problem for sailing ships, but there are other ways to travel on land that are more reliable.
Anonymous, keep in mind that DOGE doesn’t actually have legislative or administrative power. Trump’s being clever as usual — Musk et al. can be kept on as long as they’re useful, and then discarded at will.
Kallianera, it’s not a 1940 edition, but the 1951 edition can be found here —
https://archive.org/details/ARCHomeNursingTextbook1951
Here’s a 1908 British textbook along the same lines:
https://archive.org/details/b28063363
And here’s Charlotte Aikens’ classic 1917 text The Home Nurse’s Handbook of Practical Nursing:
https://archive.org/details/TheHomeNursesHandbook
I haven’t found another source of Pelmanism material, alas. Anyone else?
Clay, oh, we can go further than wagons, firearms, and printing. Long distance sailing vessels, canal transport, urban sanitation, and decent plumbing are all pre-fossil fuel technologies; a case can also be made that slide rules, radio communication, local hydroelectric power, and ultralight aircraft will be viable even after the twilight of the fossil fuel age. But your broader point is of course correct.
Temporary, that’s really sad. It also summarizes what’s wrong with science fiction these days — it used to be a gritty pulp phenomenon of urban newsstands, and in those days it was still innovative and original. One of the reasons I make a point of living in a working class urban town with plenty of immigrants is precisely that it keeps me from falling into that sort of vacuous trance of privilege.
Aldarion and Baracetti,
A referendum on autonomy was held in the Crimean Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR on January 20, 1991. Voters were asked whether they wanted to re-establish the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The proposal was approved by 94% of voters. (If the voter-approved new union treaty had been carried out, Crimea would have been a constituent member of the new USSR, not a part of either Ukraine or Russia.)
A referendum on the future of the Soviet Union was held on March 17, 1991 across the Soviet Union. A Yes vote was for a reformed Soviet Union to continue under a new union treaty. It passed in the Ukraine SSR 71.48% Yes vs. 28.52% No. (I would be curious to see a breakdown of the Ukraine SSR vote by oblast.)
A referendum on the Act of Declaration of Independence was held in Ukraine on 1 December 1991. 92% of voters approved the declaration of independence made on 24 August 24, 1991.
The attempted coup against Gorbachev {or was it?} in August 1991 both blocked the implementation of the new union treaty and triggered the Ukraine SSR’s declaration of independence.
Regarding farm ownership with high land prices, what has been happening in New Zealand is that older farmers have generally done one of the following things when the children aren’t interested in continuing the farm:
1) put the farm in trust for their descendants (usually the case if they do not have a mortgage anymore) and have it run by a farm manager (ie a salaried employee); or
2) put the farm in trust for their descendants and run it in an equity partnership with a farmer (i.e. they provide the land and/or stock and the farmer provides stock and/or sweat equity and they split the proceeds. There is a long (over 100 years) history of this in the dairy industry here with 50/50 revenue splits and it has its own special legislation); or
3) sell the farm (usually to corporates or wealthy people) who then run it in one of the above ways; or
4) where it is more marginal land (usually sheep & beef hill country) it has often been sold for forestry.
The trusts and equity partnerships are essentially holding the assets in the expectation that they will continue to rise in value, and are reliant on low debt (the rise in interest rates over the past few years has been the biggest hit for young people trying to get in to farming who don’t have land in the family already). Often where previous generations inherited their farm, and so have little debt, they are either selling out or using the existing farm as collateral and buying up neighbouring farms to create mega-farms.
Given that New Zealand exports about 95% of the food it produces (and mostly to Asia and Europe), it will be interesting to see what happens when shipping no longer has access to affordable diesel (fertiliser isn’t as big an issue as historically farming used to be far less fertiliser intensive here and will be able to revert with a drop in production – especially of dairy) – especially what happens to the exchange rate and whether pricing shifts from US$ to Chinese currency.
Aldarion, yes, but it still shows extreme support for Ukraine, because it was Ukraine that was separating. By your logic, Ukraine could also have invaded Russia because Russia didn’t have a referendum on NOT being part of Ukraine (some border lands were historically “Ukrainian” before Ukrainian culture was erased from Russia. Most countries have messy histories like that).
Most countries never have a referendum on borders, let alone one every so many years. And many referendums that did happen in the past were not free or universal and wouldn’t be recognised today. Those that do happen successfully today only do so after a long political process that is recognised by both sides (e.g. Brexit, Scottish independence). Otherwise you just get mayhem, which was Russia’s intention in Ukraine.
@Nemo #226
What a well written story! I get the impression that there’s some very real life experience behind it.
I think I have more sympathy for Elon and Vivek than most posters here, but they have gone too far and burnt a lot of the goodwill the average populist had for them. At this point, DOGE might be dead on arrival before Trump’s inauguration.
Their responses so far are just cringe.
Someone more politically astute with their position, namely, that highly skilled, top 0.1% talent from around the world should be allowed to migrate to the US, would acknowledge the problems with H-1B and come up with a plan of reform. Instead, IIRC, Sriram posted (now deleted) about lifting country-level caps on H-1B, which can only be read as opening the floodgates to Indian outsourcing firms.
Elon is on the Asperger’s spectrum, while Vivek has a case of “chad envy”; Elon is an immigrant himself while Vivek’s parents are immigrants so they have a clear personal connection, but there is no reason why they shouldn’t decry the abuse in the system, unless they are going to continue exploiting it; i.e., the H-1Bs are not for the top 0.1% talent but just to get cheaper tech workers.
___
Anyway, separate topic.
JMG, you mentioned before that you believe barrows and mound burials for rich individuals are a debasement of a tradition originally based on individuals sacrificing themselves for the tribe and being buried alive in a mound to protect the tribe. The rise of cremation was a subsequent reaction against the debased tradition, which essentially created revenants, or barrow wights.
Do you have any sources to read regarding this?
I have been exploring the spread of Proto-Indo-European cultures from Yamnaya, as well as the spread of the chariot to non-Indo-Europeans like Shang China and Egypt.
I find it interesting that it seems the Chinese only started building mound-shaped tombs after the Shang. Before that, they used pits. Mound burials continued for the emperors down to the Qing, even the Sun Yat-sen memorial is mound-like, though not an actual mound. The average person’s grave is a tumulus, also a kind of mound, although cremation has also been practised since the introduction of Buddhism.
Another way of using a wheeled device to scribe a large circle: imagine a bicycle with the front wheel fixed at a slight angle. Assuming no slippage, it will be forced to travel in a circle.
If my maths is correct, the needed angle in radians = wheelbase of bike / desired radius of circle.
TemporaryReality,
ZOMG, Kim Stanley Robinson lives in that cute Tolkien enclave in Davis? Wow.
I have driven through Davis a number of times driving to/from California and I always stop, get out my rollerblades for a 30-minute skate to refresh, and make it back to my car 3 hours or so later. (Often tired enough that I wind up spending the night there.)
The first time, I just happened to wander into that enclave and noticed the street names, so I always skate around there. As you know, Davis prides itself on being bike-friendly and really is. Which makes it a fascinating town to skate around too.
I know there are all manner of class issues in actually-existing Davis and the Tolkien enclave (including that the university made its new housing more car friendly, I am guessing for the sake of the many Chinese students, who seem to want nothing to do with bicycles, which makes sense given that for them, bicycles are how your impoverished Mao era parents or grandparents got around), but there is much about the city and the enclave that is appealing in a good way. The enclave is laid out in a way that makes it easy and enjoyable to walk or bike around and there are extensive community gardens including fruit trees.
Given its location in the state of California close to the Bay Area and much closer to Sacramento and its dependence on the university, I don’t except the age of decline to be kind to Davis, but a girl can hold an image in her mind as a clue to what a saner future might look like.
BTW, I liked Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy immensely. Yes, nothing like that is going to happen but he tackled that notion in great and fascinating detail. Did drive me nuts with all the temperatures given in Kelvin. The follow-up book set on Mercury a little bit later was also fascinating. I love sci-fi that creates amazing fascinating worlds even if nothing like them will ever come to pass. KSR’s more recent works, Aurora and Ministry for the Future, seemed a bit forced, as though he twisted what the muse was offering to fit an agenda.
Mr Dobner #216
You ask about “therapists” – and this is a broad term, covering many different approaches to healing… sort of like asking about forests when you really are interested in ferns, or oak trees, or squirrels…
However, I will say that I am a trained and licenced acupuncturist. What I provide in my clinic certainly qualifies as “therapy”. It is my opinion that any “style” of medicine, therapy, or care is able to provide “maps” to the “terrain” which is the individual person sitting in front of you in any consultation. Each map is selective, and prioritises a certain way of looking, and no map can cover everything. However, some maps are more useful than others, and some are more useful in different situations and with different people.
My own mapping system deals primarily with moving, and regulating “qi”, which is a Chinese word broadly referring to the energetic flows of the etheric body. Nevertheless, as I work with people’s qi, using the tools with which I am familiar, people sometimes find restorative healing taking place in different levels of their being, from the spiritual to the emotional to the energetic to the physical. Each person comes to a therapist looking for something, and hopefully, open to receiving it, but much of the work of knitting their own selves together into one harmonious whole will take place within themselves, and with their own internal native powers.
We (and I broadly mean “we, therapists” here) can only help a person untangle some of the knots they’ve got themselves into, perhaps add some necessary nourishment where they have become deficient, perhaps help clear away toxic waste that they have accummulated, at which point, their own systems recover their normal capacity for self-healing, self-repair, and self-balancing.
It is my considered opinion that therapists treat, but patients heal.
As to yourself, if you will have them, may I offer blessings for all of the journey and discovery that lies ahead?
Hi John Michael,
Fortunately some folks will get a head start, but from what I’m seeing, productive small farms are a dying breed. So yeah, when the land is free, it’ll get worked.
And yet another fault. I never liked plane travel anyway. The jet set can have the perquisite for all I care. Far out!
Cheers
Chris
Re MRDobner (#216) concerning therapy:
I second the advice given by Jeff Russell (#238), but let me add a little remark. You wrote that you found therapists’ ‘way of explaining the world unhelpful’, and that is for me the crux of the matter. A therapist is not there to explain the world to you. He or she is there to help you with a specific problem. A good therapist will recognize whether your problem falls into his or her area of expertise, and if it does not, suggest a different course of action. My three rather short encounters with psychotherapists all went that latter way.
It is true that therapists are highly regarded in the modern West (especially in the PMC), and many people seem to view their therapist as confessor, wise elder, fountain of truth, and arbiter of the meaning of life all rolled into one, which is not a healthy approach – you can see it from the fact that they go to same therapist for years, always repeat the same tinned phrases on how helpful their therapy is, yet never seem to move out of the rut they are in. But that doesn’t mean therapy cannot give you some real benefits. So, in my opinion, when you are unsure about whether you should go to therapy, first try to get as clear as possible about the nature of your problem.
Robert Mathiesen #231
Got it Robert – Thank you!
The introduction [Telling Family Stories] is already useful and the quote at the beginning by Shaw is great:
“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”
“Being human was a thing that did not come easily to me as a child or a ‘teen, but took a lot of hard work. I never could understand how it seemed to happen naturally and effortlessly to other people.”
I’ve long thought that being human is not a default state we arrive with, but is something we may or may not achieve in our time here… funny thing is, the longer I’m here, the weirder it gets.
Your idea that we each have multiple personas – sleepers is intriguing and I’ve never seen it put like that before.
“The very oldest of your Sleepers are poorly formed and hardly human. In your infancy even your Waking Self was inchoate, monstrous, and just beginning to be human. As your Body’s life unfolded year by year, the new Sleeping Selves that it created became less and less monstrous, more and more well formed and human.”
For me, ‘self’ changes over time, as different paths are taken and some aspects sink into the background and are there ‘in potential’, whilst other choices bring different patterns out.
For example, 30 yrs of martial practice has developed a sleeper that can be awakened, but that sleeper developed over time and has never been separate per se, just that other facets of human existence / personality have taken their turn at the helm and can be switched out as needed.
Considering: “It is not possible — even logically — to integrate all of your Sleeping Selves with your Waking Self.”
In all my practices if I dig into the depths, the foundation and aim[s] are about a process of cleansing, brightening and integrating selected disparate parts to create something that is more than the sum of the parts.
Trying to create an ‘integrated human’ if you will; but that seems different to what you are suggesting.
If the waking self is generally the ‘personality/ego’, does using the metaphor of sleepers complicate the quietening of ego to access intuition?
Will need to go away and think about this some more!
As the Sufis say; ‘there are as many ways as there are hearts of men’
The closest I have come to something similar to your metaphor is my partner doing inner child work – the meditative practice that uses the current self to work with a past self. My partner has described situations where more than one of these inner children can manifest in mind simultaneously.
When that happened, she used to refer to them as ‘the kindergarten’.
Many thanks for putting your family history online!
Computer question: I am currently running Windows 10 and am happy with how my computer functions. Microsoft has been fussing at me for not upgrading to Windows 11 and says they are going to quit supporting Windows 10 in 2025. My current computer cannot upgrade to Windows 11 and I’m not interested in swapping out bits of hardware so it can. Is there something relatively simple (purchasing an anti-virus program? a firewall?) that would keep an old Windows 10 computer relatively ‘safe’? Thanks very much for any suggestions.
Ah, I hope it’s not too late in the week to ask my question (I was struck down with migraine for three days, and then needed another day to recover from the resulting brain fog…)! I’m trying to make sense of the Jupiter/Saturn synodic cycle, but I’m having a hard time finding any information about it, apart from a ‘oh yeah, they were called the Great Chronocrators in ye olden times, and their conjunction heralded the new king taking the throne from the old king’-nod, before they move on to more interesting things. But to me, this cycle seems to be fundamental for understanding all the other synodic cycles of the outer planets, not least because Jupiter and Saturn were the only outer planets known to us for the longest time.
So, I do know the basics — the conjunctions every ~20 years, moving through the elements, the change of element every 200 years, and so on. What I want to know is what areas they signify changes in, and how that follows from the planets’ meanings. For example, I looked up the last conjunction before my birth, which was the 1961 conjunction in Capricorn, and then used Wikipedia (yes, I know…) to see what stuff of some importance happened that year. For America, it was the Space Race (with Yuri Gagarin in the lead), the beginning of the Vietnam War, and the stirrings of the Civil Rights movement (the Freedom Riders taking the bus down South).
However. In Cosmos and Psyche, Richard Tarnas points to the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1961 for the Space Race, and to the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in 1965 for the civil rights movement. And I guess you could say that the Vietnam war was a development that started in the post-war conjunction of Saturn and Pluto in 1947 that heralded the beginning of the Cold War. So, where’s the Jupiter/Saturn conjunction in that?
Georgia Stathis in Pushing Through Time connects this cycle to economic ups and downs, but she’s a business astrologer, so maybe that’s her bias?
And that’s all I have so far. I haven’t found any books about that particular area of interest on the Big River shop, either. Not only do I wonder what exactly those conjunctions signify, I’d also love to know how a conjunction in Capricorn differed from a conjunction in Taurus in terms of manifestations down here. I’d be grateful for any insight from you or other commenters.
Kevin – (with apologies to JMG for going on about this) –
Now I’m really seeing a gap in your requirements (speaking as the engineer that I am). If you need to draw a circle with a 20′ radius, you’ll need to explain what sort of surface you’re planning to draw it ON! A basketball court? A football field? If you’re marking out a circular foundation for a water tank, there are ways to do that. If you want to draw a circular arc with a 20′ radius on an 8-1/2 x 11″ sheet of paper, that’s entirely different (and probably indistinguishable from a straight line, but it depends on the precision that you need. I can imagine some sort of scientific instrument might need that, with accuracy better than 0.001″). But then, you wouldn’t be drawing that on paper; you’d be scribing it on a polished metal surface.
The strength of a compass-style approach is that each point on the arc is independently measured from the center. So, regardless of the roughness of the surface that you’re writing on, errors in one location don’t result in errors elsewhere. No path produced by integration of motion from one point on the circumference would have that useful property (whether inspired by a bicycle with non-parallel axles or a chariot with unequal wheels).
Stepping out to another level of abstraction, I note that often the hardest part of a project is figuring out exactly what the project is required to do. We can’t get what we want until we know what we want, and we can’t get help until we know how to ask for it.
“Do you believe that small family run diverse farms will make a come back?”
I grew up on such a farm that proved uneconomic. Too much work for too little return, and that was in the 1960s.
The machinery needed to make farming non-destructive to the body is expensive and requires a big farm to make it cost effective. (A combine sits idle all but two weeks of the year. In most industries that much capital investment would be allowed to sit idle for only the vital of emergency equipment like a backup generator.) High production dairy cows need to be milked three times a day and that leaves no time for field work, so you end up with a grain farm and a dairy feedlot. There isn’t time to run the cows out to the pasture and back either.
Politically governments want cheap food, so again economies of scale favor big farms. One way out of this is to hide the cost with subsidies to the farmers to cover part of the cost of production but those aren’t popular either.
I don’t see small farms being viable again until well into economic collapse, the more so since diesel engines can burn vegetable oil with minor modifications.
“Electricity prices in Norway recently surged to $1.18 per kilowatt-hour, marking the highest level in 15 years and an increase of 20 times compared to the previous week. Historically, Norway has enjoyed relatively low electricity prices, thanks to its extensive hydroelectric power generation, which accounts for nearly 90% of the country’s energy supply. However, this sharp rise in prices is largely due to a shortfall in wind energy from Germany and the North Sea. In response, Norway’s government covers 90% of the additional costs above a certain threshold, in line with agreements made with neighboring European nations. As a result, the government plans to cut its electricity interconnection with Denmark when the current agreement expires in 2026 and suspend exports to Germany and the UK. Critics argue that Norway should prioritize domestic affordability by ensuring lower prices for its citizens before exporting electricity, as was the practice for decades.”
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/regulation/power-prices-spike-in-norway/
And Germany needs 30 times more renewables to keep the lights on. Actually it would be worse since the best sites are already taken.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21244/europe-germany-renewable-energy
Alvin, my starting point was RJ Stewart’s essay “The Tomb of a King,” probably most easily accessed as an appendix to his book The UnderWorld Initiation. From there I did a deep dive into archeology and myth from much of the world; some of the results are summarized in a couple of chapters in my recent book The Ceremony of the Grail. As for China, are you aware that ancient Chinese has some important Indo-European loanwords? Tao, “way,” is one of them; in archaic Chinese it was pronounced something like *drogh, and is cognate to the English word “track.”
Chris, I’m glad that I prefer to travel by train…
Athaia, we don’t know. Keep in mind that classic mundane astrology was mostly a specialty of Persian and Muslim astrologers, and not that much has been translated on the subject into any Western language. I’ve been doing experimental charts for Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions, using standard mundane technique, but I haven’t yet had time to do a deep dive into history in search of repeating patterns linked to the conjunctions of the chronocrators. That’s what it’s going to take — that, and more translations from classic Persian sources!
Siliconguy, oof! Energy nationalism rears its head. As that spreads, the economic impact will be severe.
JMG, that’s mindboggling! From the way these conjunctions were treated on the websites I searched out (mentioned in passing, as if it was some basic stuff that the author naturally assumed the reader already knows), I had assumed that… well… that it WAS some basic stuff I had somehow overlooked.
If someone in the commentariat has any sources, on archive.org or otherwise, I’d be grateful. I don’t feel fit to do that kind of research myself – I’m just an amateur!
But fwiw, my own thoughts are along the lines of – Jupiter (as ruler of Sagittarius and Pisces) has the vision, the philosophy (or ideology) for how to run society, while Saturn (as ruler of Capricorn and Aquarius) provides the material structures, the bureaucracy and technology (and the economical decisions) to make that vision come true. Jupiter also has the legislature to create a legal framework for that new impulse. When they’re in conjunction, they both approach this ‘new directive for the nation’ from the same angle (no pun intended), and agree on the terms and conditions for it. I can also see the Jupiterian side of that conjunction pop up in the universities first, fuelling new social movements, while the Saturnian side lines up the banks and corporations to finance and/or profit from the new movements.
That’s the theory, but I do wonder how the 1961 Capricorn conjunction fits with the spirit of the Sixties, or how the 1981 conjunction bore out as Reagonomics (I don’t see Libra as especially capitalist…?)
RandomActsOfKarma (#260) –
My Dell Latitude E6500 is running Windows 7, successfully, and apparently safely. It still gets security patches, and seems to do everything I want it to do. I can read/write email, watch YouTube videos, and join Zoom sessions as a watcher (though it has no internal camera and I’m not sure about a microphone). It looks like the oldest directories date back to 2014. Don’t let Microsoft scare you into accepting the upgrades THEY want you to have!
SiliconGuy (#264) – A grain harvester (combine) need not sit idle all but two weeks of the year, because a man with a combine can follow the ripening crops north and south to perform harvesting service for farmers without the equipment. I just did a quick Internet search for “grain harvesting services”, and found a couple even in my thickly settled area of the mid-Atlantic. Some will plant a crop for you, too. So, I guess what’s left for the farmer is to buy or lease the land, select the crops, review bids for sowing/harvesting, assess the amount of fertilizer that will be needed (and apply it, between crop cycles), buy the seeds and fertilizer, and pray for good weather.
In Arizona they are having a big battle over the political make-up of the Utility Board that regulates the rates Arizona utilities can charge. As you would expect with inflation and fuel price increase over the last decade electricity rates in Arizona are going up drastically. These consumers think that air-conditioning their homes is a necessity and a right, but it of course consumes many times the electricity that a non air-conditioned home does.
But rather than facing up to the reality of the future of living in a place like Arizona they blame everything on the utility commission. If only they lowered rates for the little guy, spent less on lobbying, offered lower returns to bond holders or mandated more renewables, then rates could be lowered back to what they were in the good old days.
It is certainly possible that the utility commission is mis-managed but the reality is that the current rates at most utilities are not coming close to paying for the repairs, upgrades and maintenance needed to keep the grid running in to the future.
There is no new cheap power sources coming online, magic robots will not cut the cost of maintaining the grid, renewables powering the grid will not save you money ( but they might be a great idea for heating your own water in Arizona) .
Probably the only solution is a slow-then fast exodus from Arizona, but that will be painful as such a situation means most residential real estate will have to be abandoned on the way out leaving the refugees broke.
Correction: If drawing a circle with a bicycle, the angle to fix the front wheel left or right is
Angle = Wheelbase / 2 x Radius (radians) or sin^-1 (Wheelbase / 2 x Radius) (degrees)
A kiddie’s tricycle would be better than a bicycle since it won’t fall over, or maybe a skateboard modified so the front wheels can be turned a fixed amount.
JMG –
In the TSW department, I woke up around 2 AM this morning, and as I returned from the bathroom to my bed, I was aware of a thumping musical beat intruding into my house. It probably wasn’t enough to wake me, but it was irritating. I thought about calling the local government’s noise-control number, but didn’t know enough about the source to file a complaint. So, I turned to prayer: “May the person making that music feel happy and satisfied with what they’ve heard up to this point, and choose to play no more.” The music immediately stopped.
I wish I could say that I dropped right back into sleep at that point, but in fact I lay awake for a long time, contemplating what. just. happened!
>Is there something relatively simple (purchasing an anti-virus program? a firewall?) that would keep an old Windows 10 computer relatively ‘safe’?
Make sure it’s never plugged into any network. Hope that helps. You do know that W10+ is essentially spyware, right? That Microsoft does not respect you as a customer? That they view you as the product, even though you pay for the OS when you buy a new computer?
Peter the Khan etc. The story of Stompin Tom fits in with a lot of the issues discussed on this site and on the ADR, so here goes.
Tom Conners was born out-of-wedlock in 1936 in St. John, New Brunswick. His mother did odd jobs to support them and they were often evicted for not paying the rent. She sometimes stole food so they could eat, which may be the reason she ended up in prison. Tom was put up for adoption and a couple in Prince Edward Island took him in.
He ran away when he was 13 and was on his own from then on. He eventually went to Tillsonburg, Ontario and picked tobacco leaves for a living for awhile, but he kept on moving on. He got his first guitar when he was 14 and taught himself to play.
He eventually ended up in Timmins, a mining town in Northern Ontario. He went into a hotel bar (bars in Northern Ontario are in the hotels–handy for the hookers, I guess) and ordered a beer. When he found out the beer was 35c and he only had 30c, the bartender offered him a free beer if he would sing a few songs. That was the beginning of his career. He stayed at the hotel in Timmins for over a year and then moved on. He would stomp his foot as he played which earned him the name Stompin Tom.
He wrote his own songs, mostly about actual events in Canada but also about the common working class: the farm hands, miners, loggers, fishermen. He wrote about us and we loved him for it. If you wanted to hear him live, you didn’t fork out big bucks for a concert ticket–you went to a smoky bar in a gritty Northern Ontario mining or logging town and ordered a beer or two. That’s where I heard him.
And, JMG, he said people shouldn’t die happy so they have an excuse for coming around again. When he died in 2013, my husband and I shed a few tears and brought out our Stompin Tom CDs and talked about the old times while we listened to him. I think of him now, wandering around the other planes with his guitar and entertaining all of the entities there. And when he comes back, we should be well on our way to a deindustrial future and he will probably again be a young boy with a guitar on his own and wandering around the work camps or whatever playing songs about the people he encounters.
For all you writers out there who write about the future we’re going to get, a character based on Stompin Tom would be extremely interesting.
>At this point, DOGE might be dead on arrival before Trump’s inauguration
DOGE was DOA before they started flogging it to us. At this point (this is something nobody seems to want to look at) the gubmint IS the economy. Or, the main thing keeping the illusion of an economy going, is all that massive amounts of gubmint money spewed out. And even that is beginning not to be enough to get people to believe in the illusion of a functioning economy. Also see: Soviet Union 1991.
So, you tell me what’s going to happen when you start dialing back all that gubmint spending? That is, if that’s actually possible.
Graham-Rudman-Hollings once thought as they do. They don’t know the power of the Dark Side. They’re going to find out though. I can’t tell you how many conservative types I’ve heard over years talk about this sort of thing and it always ends up the same way. These days, I optimize to the inevitable outcome and tell them to go away and shut up.
What would I do if I were given access to the levers of power? I don’t want them! There’s no good choices to be made anymore! Whatever you do at this point will be wrong. The last chance to have done something about any of this was 15 years ago, I estimate.
>The machinery needed to make farming non-destructive to the body is expensive and requires a big farm to make it cost effective.
Even so, I was paying attention to how winded Jeremy Clarkson got climbing up and down his tractor when he first started out. That’s a line of work that’s very physical and requires a minimum level of physical fitness. I can only imagine how disastrous it would have gone if all he had were mules instead.
I don’t think the primary driver of people going back to derive food from first principles will be economic or that will be a secondary priority but will be primarily because nobody trusts corporations anymore not to sell poisoned food. It’ll be a security issue, not an economic one.
Athaia, astrology is still recovering from the immense loss of knowledge that happened at the end of the Renaissance, when it (along with all the occult sciences) was tossed into the dumpster by the goon squads of the triumphant new ideologies of scientific materialism and post-Reformation Christianity. A vast amount was lost then and most of it hasn’t yet been recovered. One thing that I’m quite sure of at this point is that you can only draw very, very limited conclusions from the placement of a great conjunction in this or that sign — that’s equivalent to the sun sign of a natal chart. Much more has to be learnt from the placement of the other planets at the moment of conjunction, and especially the aspects formed by the conjunction to other planets.
Clay, I expect to see such battles play out with increasing levels of passion all over the industrial world. Only by facing up to the reality of decline can that be avoided — and next to nobody is willing to do that.
Lathechuck, excellent. In my experience that kind of telepathic suggestion is especially powerful when the person you want to influence is drunk, stoned, or sleepy — and phrasing things in a wholly positive way, as you did, is also important.
Annette, thank you for this! What a fine story — and yes, one that’s likely to be repeated many a time in the deindustrial future.
I ran across something interesting last night that I thought I’d pop in and share: Newtonian mechanics theoretically allows a ball balanced precisely on top of a dome to spontaneously roll off in a random direction at a random time without any force causing it to do so, without violating Newton’s first law of motion.
The simplest way I can explain it is that you can model a ball sitting perfectly balanced on top of a dome (with the usual hypothetical physical assumptions: no friction, no air, nothing to shake the dome, etc.) — and then suddenly it isn’t perfectly on top of the dome, and gravity pulls it down the side.
On the surface of it, this is a violation of Newton’s first law of motion, but when you try to pin down when the violation took place, you can’t find it. At at given instant of time, Newton’s laws are fully being followed.
This isn’t actually a problem for physics since Newtonian mechanics is only an approximation of what’s actually going on, but it has apparently caused quite a stir among physicists.
Here’s the video I ran across for those interested in watching a more detailed explanation, including the original mathematical version of the problem involving differential equations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjZB81jCGj4
JMG, you wrote that your first book about mundane astrology comes out in January 2025. Does that mean there will be further books about mundane astrology?
@JMG
So I’ve been following several channels that focus on current China events. One of those channels is Lei’s Real Talk.
She had several videos not too long ago discussing the demographics of China. She and some fellow youtubers used ChatGPT to ask about publicly published, official CCP stats available both outside and inside China to see what purchasing data and maintenance costs say about how large China’s population is.
As an example she says one thing they followed – going back to 1990 (mind you, this is official publicly available CCP data) – the amount of injections, eye drops, etc every hospital must have on hand to give to newborns. This data is published twice a year going back to 1990. She also used official CCP data for newborn refills of diapers, infant formula, etc. Basically everything needed to meet CCP requirements – immunizations, feeding, etc. Also data for anything needed for mothers.
The data going back to 1990 tell a very different story than the official demographic number. The best she and other researchers came up with – and this is being very generous with the official stats – is that China has, at very best, only 800 million people. I also seem to recall her saying some official data in many provinces show for every 1 new birth another 6 people die.
Also, official CCP data show for China’s Tier 1 cities births have dropped below that of South Korea and there is worry that pattern of ultra-low TFR is spreading outward to tier 2 and 3 cities.
Finally she mentioned she and her group discovered that in 2018 Russia Social Media was in uproar over Chinese demographics info that went viral. It appears some Russian Intel researchers had a paper presented to Putin’s inner circle and the conclusion was that China only has 500 million people at best right now. The Russian researchers came up with that number by looking at the amount of international food purchases and food exports the Chinese have been doing for many decades.
She herself said she and her researchers came up with a lower bound number of 695 million based on all the official CCP data ChatGPT drew upon to crosscheck with.
Interestingly, she and her group used the exact same methods with ChatGPT pulling publicly available data for India as the control. Turns out all those disparate but publicly available numbers crosscheck. India, it seems, actually does have 1.4 billion people to (being generous) China’s 800 million. She honestly thinks the 695 million is much more likely and said there’s even good reason to think the Russian Intel paper may be the closest to the true demographics of China.
Someone pointed out to me if the Russian numbers are the closest estimate to China’s true numbers that means China’s total population about equals the combined populations of the U.S. and Mexico.
She then explained how official data going nearly back to the years after the Great Famine shows China’s TFR would have had to match African TFR rates with much lower death rates for many decades in order for China to catch up with India’s current demographics. When you factor in China’s One Child Policy from 1980 – 2015 she said there is no way mathematically they could catch up and that is why she believes China has less than 800 million.
Combined with the fact that local governments and officials’ city budgets rise and fall based on the numbers of people reported for each town gives a strong incentive to inflate the number of births. She also said crosschecking official numbers show officials are likely under-reporting the death rates in their towns. Again, likely due to wanting to avoid budget cuts and salary cuts. Maybe Chinese official’s salaries are also tied to the number of people registered in their district?
Of course now TFR has fallen so drastically for so long officials can’t cover up the fact of dying towns and school closures and one of the examples she gave – hospitals refilling their supplies for newborns once a year or less instead of every 3 months or so.
So I wonder what does history say a leadership will do if they see their dreams of geopolitical dominance will only go downhill from here on out due to their people refusing to have babies? Does that make them more likely to say…go to war over Taiwan, finally challenge India over the line of control (BRICs be d*mned if they got mad enough – they could simply threaten to cut off a huge chunk of India’s fresh water supply and what could India realistically do back? Not much I’m guessing other than maybe slap high tariffs on Chinese products?), etc.
Will this make the CCP more prone to war or less so as the decades roll on?
One of several videos on investigating China’s true demographics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR5F_8dSjOw
The Other Owen,
Considering that Trump’s main goal during the COVID 19 pandemic is to keep businesses open so that the economy could stay afloat and the stock market can continue to increase, I highly doubt that Trump would want to get rid of anything that might cause the economy to collapse. And if cutting government will cause the economy to collapse, then Trump won’t do it, so DOGE is either dead on arrival (seems very likely at the moment) or will be yet another wasteful bureaucracy that taxpayers have to pay for if actually implemented since it won’t do what its supposed to do (cut government down to size).
So many people, including JMG, who were putting all their hopes on Trump and Elon and Vivek and DOGE cutting government down to size in the comments of this blog a month ago are going to be sorely disappointed when the government stays just as large as it was back when Biden was president. As we’re seeing what’s happening on Twitter right now, same goes for the anti-immigrant activists who put all their hopes on Trump for cutting immigration of every kind whether legal or illegal, only for Trump to come out and support Elon and Vivek in bringing in more H-1B immigrants into our country.
Chris at Fernglade,
it’s good to see the land rewild spontaneously every once in a while. We are not meant to farm everything all the time forever. The world is to be shared with other species. And I say this as someone who farms.
Oops. I think I sent the wrong link although the one I sent gives a good idea of how freaked out the CCP must be over dropping TFR.
The one I meant to include is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftcLM3502_8
How I used AI to calculate China’s real population
and also Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3zhCCCYVeA
The Proof of China’s Population Dropping Below 800 Million
#210 drone ufo. Back in ancient times small town Canadian prairie we took black plastic garbage bags, rigged a X out of straws, taped birthday candles to the cross arms. After dark fired up a couple of the hot air balloons (winter cold works best) and they wandered across the night sky. Made the news in Edmonton as mysterious ufos that faded and disappeared ( bag caught on fire) .
Tried gold panning this summer up coast in a inlet. Darn hard work sod all to show for it. Prefer to curl up in the cockpit practicing violin and guitar with nary a soul in range to complain. Justin Johnson southern swampy blues if you want outstanding guitar. Did some decent oil seascapes on the sailing trip. The trolls bought me some watercolor kit for Christmas which I’ve never worked with before. Lovely media
Clay Dennis @ 269, maybe you, or someone else who understands economics can explain something to me. One of the reasons I quite driving was because I got fed up with paying into an insurance pool when in 40 years of driving, I had two fender benders and two tickets. Some folks say things like, if the poor had to pay their own way, they would work harder. Well, maybe if Dad had to pay the full cost of irresponsible offspring’s auto crash, he might decide a healthy teen can walk or bike.
So with regard to utility prices, why do frugal people, who make minimal use of the service, have to pay the same or even higher rates than the extravagant folks? Why not a baseline rate, with the amount you use over a certain amount being charged at the higher rate? They way things are, it sems to me like a frugal person not only is paying into the maintenance of 5 or more layers of office fauna but also helping subsidize the McMansion family whose dream palace includes two heated swimming pools and an acre of picture windows.
I am able to take advantage of a program which evens out energy expense throughout the year. I pay extra in summer and less than I use in winter. That makes the winter heat bills affordable, and I have no need for and do not apply for HEAP. But that can only work for someone living alone or possibly with a roommate or partner who has the same frugal instincts.
Late commenting, due to Christmas.
As far as Christmas presents received, I mostly just get presents from my 3 adult children and 5yograndaughter, and they were raised with me trying to keep the corporate greed filled nonsense down. So, I received a good quality, Japanese made Hori Hori garden knife, a pho-sized local handmade pottery bowl, a potted houseplant separated out from the givers houseplant in a ceramic pot, and some various and sundry handmade things bar of home made soap, canned salsa and jam, and my grandchild decorated a beeswax candle with colored wax, painted the edges of a small pine cone, and painted a wooden tree ornament. While they were here, I sent the adults off and set up everything so my grandchild could make all by themselves dipped beeswax candles, which being so hot and all was very exciting. 4 were made and some thrifted Christmas cards I had bought were also signed by the child for all recipients. Both parents and I training for being simple and thoughtful.
In regards to local conditions in a changing world. The news hypes up everything ( and hypes down, Ca in general may get small tornadoes, but only in certain areas) but the reality is that we do not normally ever, ever get tornadoes in this area of California, but we did a week before Christmas. I live in the mountains, but had just been in Scotts Valley at businesses there about 15 minutes before it hit, the hail on the car on the way up the mountain was the edge of that system. This was unprecedented, and in this case I would say, yes, a climate change weird weather event. I believe 7 cars were toppled, traffic lights ripped off, some building damage. No-one killed. A week later, a few days before Christmas, we had bad coastal storm surges (Santa Cruz Ca). The “real” damage, as far as affecting the area and people was to the harbor moorings and docks and boats there. This is harder to say in regard to climate change, as these things happen. My take as a local would be that this is indeed happening more frequently or the amount of events may be the same but the surge levels are higher than historically would be expected, and this is getting worse due to sea levels or whatever changes cause worse surges. My visiting offspring, who was down there as candle dipping was happening at my house, said the waves hitting the bottom of the municipal warf was pretty amazing. It was getting slammed for sure. But, the main issue with the Warf is the other problem facing our society, and that is aging infrastructure. It is 100 years old. So, while climate changes are starting to change things, we have aging infrastructure and also dont have money and also have bloated and inefficient governments and large construction firms. That warf was damaged and partially roped off from the public 2 years ago. So, rust never sleeps, and I am left wondering what value the warf has and what the city will decide. Maybe this time they do fix it. But if they do, it is a close thing as far as finances and priorities, as I am sure I am not the only low income local wondering what value it gives vs the costs it will entail.
I see. Well, I just ordered Manilius’ Astronomica, seems the chronocrators are at least mentioned there… and I wanted to brush up on my Latin, anyway 😬(I did order the bilingual edition, though, in case I’m too rusty LOL).
Slithy, I like that. It’s rather reminiscent of the “swerve” in Lucretius that sets the universe in motion.
Booklover, yes, I hope to do a book on outer planet conjunctions in a couple of years, and quite possibly other mundane projects as well.
Panda, fascinating. I’m not at all surprised, all things considered, but it has me wondering about the standard models of the collapse of Rome. The population of the Roman Empire dropped like a rock over the last three centuries or so before Rome fell; to what extent were the barbarian migrations less a matter of pressure, so to speak, than of suction exerted by empty lands?
Atmospheric, thank you for the data points. Your presents sound very nice indeed.
Athaia, that’s a good place to start. I’ve got some translations of Arabic astrological works for study along the same lines.
Yes, the Federal deficit is 7% of the economy.To me that indicates a suddenly balanced budget would definitely cause a recession and unemployment, politically unpalatable. So DOGE making a real difference in government spending looks like road kill. Perhaps the best we can hope for is diminishing the Deep State and regulatory interference. What is really going on in Black Budget land? When you add in consumer borrowing, credit card, mortgages, car loans, business borrowing the economy needs accumulating debt to be paid back somehow in the future.
Tariffs while a start aren’t a quick fix either , rebuilding American manufacturing is a years long even decade long or more process. The skilled workers, plants, equipment, internal supply lines are gone and have to be rebuilt. There will be pain before the real gains manifest down the road. Long term thinking and cooperation on a difficult goal is not part of our every two year political process
Trump percentage wise barely flipped the country. Voters disgruntled by the pain before the gain could reverse the flip.
Electricity and Food
Here in California we pay .42/kWh, which is very high ( if you look it up, you will see something like .32 as the average, which shows how many people are getting low income subsidies as the rate is .42). So I was amazed to see upthread of Norway paying over 1/kWh for some time frames ! Looks like their government subsidized that surge pricing so the consumers did not pay that much, but that is not sustainable. Then the whole computer server farm usages in the USA. If these other usages increase, that is going to make our bills higher, and regular people cant afford it as is. The subsidies to lower usage all benefit the upper middle class and up. Beyond the nonsense California does, which is paid for from our high electric rates, look at the Federal subsidies. It is quite possible to make subsidies that are available to anyone. Rebates, for example. Or, since they feel like the IRS should be in charge of all this, refundable tax credits even. But, the current subsidies only benefit high wage earners. A working family with a few children, who doesnt earn enough to have a tax bill ( due to child tax credits, low income, etc…) do not get the help that high wage earners who need the help less get ! What I am referring to is money the federal government pays if you buy a double pane window or insulated exterior door or insulate or put in a solar hot water heater or just buy a more efficient furnace or hot water heater or buy an efficient wood stove. And for solar electric. The upper income households are all given 30% back for what they spend. The low income households get zero. And, I can tell you that low income households need to replace doors and hot water heaters and could use the help more. They could also realy use that wood stove that burns less wood and emits less pollutants.
I guess when you are so stressed out just trying to get groceries and make ends meet that people may not be up on all this — but, that cant continue. At some point I would imagine that people are going to notice that what gets voted in are even more freebies to the upper classes and that non essential electric usages are keeping them from keeping their kids warm or from having electricity at all.
When I mention this to upper middle class, they claim it is fine as they are realy paying for that 30% as it was from their taxes, thus they are deserving — metaphorically just have their fingers in their ears humming quietly ” I cant hear You” while I say the government not having the 30% is the same, it is gone from their budget, the government is spending it just for you who need it less. I dont get out much, so I make little difference in enlightenment on any issue of course. But I certainly notice it. I dont know when the masses are going to.
Food. I was a bit shocked, as I roamed thru a standard grocery store looking for molasses, I think canned corn was $2.50 for a can of conventional(non-organic) and other shocking prices. I realy dont get out much. But, wether we can or should start “farming” aside, we all should be trying to grow some fruit and veggies, and learn to make do with local, seasonal. I just finished drying persimmons, and in my area that is free for the picking all over, and a tree most anyone could grow in their yard. I have dried apple slices. I have canned fillings. We are entering citrus season in the USA, even if your state is too cold, that is the season, ship it in from CA or Florida and forgo international off season. It is time for kale — not imported green beans. If you can grow some kale under an old window. Dry parsley in the summer and use in winter. It is time. We dont need to grow all our calories, just the high vitamin stuff.
Hey JMG
A thing I have been meaning to ask you, is the significance of some countries getting harsher on youth crime. In Queensland the state has recently enacted a law that ensures that children as young as ten get treated as an adult if they commit certain crimes such as murder. Here is an excerpt from an article about it.
“The laws apply to children as young as 10. They designate 13 offences as “adult crimes”, including serious assaults, breaking and entering and dangerous operation of a vehicle. Children convicted of them are subject to the same length of sentence as adults. If convicted of murder they must be given a life sentence with a 20-year minimum non-parole period.”
The odd thing about the whole situation is that according to official crime statistics youth crime has been very low for years, and our prison system is already overwhelmed as it is. But there have also been a few heavily reported incidents of children committing armed robberies, and victims of youth crime complaining about not being dealt fair in court. I don’t know exactly what to think about the reality of the situation, but I think most would agree that trying a 10 yr old as an adult is a odd thing to do.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/dec/12/queensland-children-as-young-as-10-face-life-sentences-for-as-tough-new-laws-pass-parliament
@JMG
I know you don’t do video so I’ll just mention it here. Though it was a mistake I’m glad I posted that first link because it shows a “Menstruation Police” Officer screaming (not kidding about that) at a young man to get married to the woman the Officer had in tow. The Officer told the young man per the latest CCP Policy Initiative handed down last month (November 2024) every young man must get married and have 5 kids minimum. Each young man has a 5 kids quota now as of last month. The young man scoffed and asked if the government was going to paying for all 5 kids. “No! You are!” shouted the Officer. Every young man is now required by the CCP to pay for all 5 kids from birth to college graduation according to that fire-breathing Officer. He did state it was an official quota for young men (and obviously young women too).
The Officer threatened the young man that if he ignored the new Policy “men in camouflage” were going to show up and tear down the man’s house and likewise send his social credit score into the pits of hell if he didn’t get married in one week’s time. The young man had a one week grace period to fulfill the new policy or the officer promised to make good on his threats. This was video captured from a CCTV camera and was uploaded to Chinese social media that went viral before Censors took it down.
Lei’s group of researchers provided the english translation of the exchange.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or just stare in awe at how utterly flipped out and brazen the Officer was or what. He was a firebrand promising to rain destruction down on the young man’s house if he didn’t comply with the new CCP quotas. I’m guessing the “each man must have 5 kids quota” is because for every one baby born 5 people die.
All I can say is if the CCP are starting to get that in-your-face to their youth population they must be very scared at the latest birth stats they’re seeing.
Erata:
I meant to say CCP must be seeing data that for every baby born 6 people die.
@Mary Bennet,
I am not really an expert on the internal workings of an electric utility but here is my guess.
First of all I agree with you that the best thing would be to have utility bills without a fixed base rate. That way people could reduce their electric bill as much as they are able through conservation and frugality. As energy becomes more expensive and less available such a zero baseline plan would lead to more conservation and fewer people just dropping off due to the inability to meet the minimum.
But the reason they don’t do it this way is probably for reasons related to norms and traditions ( that might no longer make sense) but also because of the economic concept that as long as you are connected to the grid ( or water system etc.) you owe a certain share of its upkeep and capital cost which is represented by the minimum charge.
The idea that they charge more for the first quantity of power, and less for higher volumes of power after that seems counter productive to me, and is more about maximizing the utilities income than optimizing the use of electricity.
As to the unaffordable insurance rates for a low accident driver. This one is a little more straightforward. In Insurance only a portion of the actuarial risk you present to the insurance company is predicted by you past driving behavior. A person can be a perfect driver for 30 years and still end up in a massive accident due to bad luck or circumstances. Even though your losses to the company remain low, the overall loss rate of the entire pool can increase due to high repair and medical costs which will be added to your costs though you have done nothing personal to deserve.
That said I personally think that insurance is a racket that was mandated in most cases ( auto, mortgage, etc.) to benefit banks and financial institutions not to help people. As the empire winds down it will become one of the main Jenga blocks that causes the tower to fall down earlier than it might have needed too.
@Jessica 255: KSR’s Aurora and Ministry for the Future are quite different. I read Aurora twice and thought it was very clever. The opening, sailing downwind to a leeward dock, really worked for me since I have sailing experience, quite a bit of it in fact. (If I’d been the author, I’d have had that bit end with the little sailing dingy capsized and its mast stuck in the bottom/mud beside the dock!) That opening mirrored the events near the end where “the ship” is trying to slow down enough to be captured by the sun’s gravity. Clever, I thought. But Ministry for the Future…. not so good – after a compelling opening chapter it became half Chataqua, and half novel, and pretty implausible novel at that. The single chapter on slavery at sea was interesting. BTW I liked the Three Californias trilogy a lot. And I have refused to read the Mars trilogy for perverse reasons all my own.
@earthworm (#259):
You’re very welcome. I hope it meets your expectations as you read it.
As for multiple selves (waking, sleeping, child pattern, etc.) versus a single self that changes over time and with changing circumstances, with back-grounding and fore-grounding of various parts or aspects: it may be just a difference between our terminologies. For me, the totality of all these selves (waking, sleeping, even the monstrous sleeping selves that one locks up in a sort of internal dungeon) is closer to what you call the “personality/ego.”
That said, for me the primary reason for positing multiple selves is perhaps more philosophical than empirical. The ideas of personhood and personal identity strike me as far too straight-forwand and simplistic, more as a convenient fiction useful for establishing social norms and law codes, than as a reflection of how things really are in the realm of their full existence, which lies beyond all time and space, energy and matter, even beyond the misleading dichotomy of things that are and things that are not.
The Ancient philosopher Iamblichus in the early part of his De mysteriis seems to say that the Gods Themselves lie wholly beyond the realm of human conceptions, where the human claims that “The Gods are Good and/or “The Gods are not Good” are not respectively true and false, but have measning only within our highly limited understanding of how the Gods Themselves live. That fits well with my own very imperfect understanding.
For me the quieting of ego is not the most important thing. Sure, ego can get in the way of grasping truth; but that’s not the main barrier you need to get past, IMHO. The more important barriers to wisdom lie in what are called in Greek aisthesis and noesis. Aisthesis is sense-perception, noesis is mental activity (thought and statement). Slow down or stop both of these processes, and wisdom awaits in the quietness of their ceasing to be active. This approach to grasping reality is called apophatic; our modern scientific approach using words, logic and nowadays mathematice is called kataphatic. There is also both kataphatic and apophatic magic. The former uses such things as rituals, talismans, effective verbalizations of one’s will, and so forth, whereas the latter ignores all such things tin order o silently administer a gentle tug to the web of “living fire” (to use an inadequate label for what is beyond all words and thoughts) in which all things live, move and have their being. (Eastern Orthodox readers of this blog may like to look at the treatise “Three Methods of Prayer,” falsely attributed in Symeon the New Theologian. You can find it in volume 4 of the Philokalia, which was finally translated into English a few decades ago.)
>DOGE is either dead on arrival (seems very likely at the moment) or will be yet another wasteful bureaucracy
Oh, I didn’t think of that. That would be deliciously ironic.
>only for Trump to come out and support Elon and Vivek in bringing in more H-1B immigrants into our country
So basically, get ready for a deluge of money printing and another deluge of H1B slaves. Whatever decision they make will be wrong, remember that. Apres moi, le deluge…
Also, looks like we’re getting our promised “hate revolution” that was discussed on this blog a few weeks ago. Just look at all the hatred on Twitter on both sides of the H-1B debate, descending down into ethnic hatred between Americans and Indians.
If you don’t want to “upgrade” to Windows 11 then your best bet is to install Ubuntu. The learning curve will be modest. But the reward is that you will finally actually own your computer, rather than renting it (in exchange for surveillance by Billy Bluescreen). The change is a bit of a PITA, which is why I’ve put it off – I am on Windows 10 at home still, but unless you want to pay for a new computer, then let Microsoft’s AI monitor everything you use it for, them’s the brakes.
@Alvin, Other Owen re:DOGE
Naked Capitalism cross-posted an intersting article on the “Trump Coalition” Here:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12/trump-and-political-realignment-twirling-toward-freedom.html
The author proposes a series of measurable benchmarks, to test whether Trump is serious about the reforms he promised, or if his administration will be more oligarchical “kayfabe.”
“[M]y test hypothesis is that Trump and Vance might make relatively rational decisions on a multi-year time frame with the goal of delivering real benefits to working people. The bar for achieving this is set very low—if the Trump-Vance administration does a barely competent job of delivering material benefits for the working class, that would be better than what the two factions of the legacy uniparty have done for the past 30 years, including what Trump did during his first term. …
“For purposes of this post it is important to distinguish material benefits (which the oligarchs want working people to have very little of) from culture war conflict and entertaining stunts that give supporters a dopamine rush (which we get plenty of precisely because the oligarchs do not care about these issues). …
“The null hypothesis I’m testing against is that Trump and Vance will continue the legacy uniparty scam in which both factions have basically the same macro-policies cloaked in divisive culture-war language, psyops, and stunts.”
Another interesting post from Naked Capitalism:
How MAGA Can Stuff DOGE Back in Its Box and Win the Day on H1B
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12/how-maga-can-stuff-doge-back-in-his-box-and-win-the-day-on-h1b.html
“Here is a strategy for MAGA to win on H1B. Congress is so closely divided that even a few members hold veto power over the House’s choice of a Speaker. Take these steps: This week, form a MAGA caucus (minimum size: four. See below). Then, when Congress reconvenes at noon ET on January 3, the MAGA caucus should deny their votes to any Speaker nominee. No speaker can be elected. Without a Speaker, the House cannot function, let alone count and certify the results of the Electoral College so that Trump can take the oath of office on January 20. The only way out: The Republican Party agrees to the MAGA caucus demands on H1B policy. The MAGA caucus then allows the vote for a speaker to proceed to a conclusion.”
Has anyone in Congress got the “stones” enough to do this? It would be mighty exciting if they did!
Papa, i have a question i never thought to even ask:
i am using the new year and James’ death as a time to re-consider who/what i’m going to be next. ideally, i’d like to choose a proper next level instead of wasting time on ego weaknesses of my own. i’m pretty broken down right now so i’ve only got scrapings of swagger, but it’s still there and maybe that’s why i’m suddenly really into making sourdough: because just a touch of mature yeast can generate. yeah… like the liver.
(that skeleton tarot card really is my own card)
so riffing off what i wrote here about the tech people crapping all over the world’s toilet seat and leaving for mars, i ended up reading this long form article definitely worth reading:
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/
and it horrified me how, as with the covid debacle, things are farther along than we’d thought. i mean, this article is absurd. hollywood was already dead and we were already being fed soylent green. movies that don’t matter…streaming…
it’s what it does to one.
the reason i’m having a helluva time in san francisco and even new jersey seeing my family, is that everyone’s MISERABLE. and while i thought i identified with the liberals, i AM a liberal in that i (like James) think, “it doesn’t have to be this bad.”
when you read that article about what of the movie industry, you realize the H1B conversation is existential in: how do you want to live? what constitutes a good life?
so this seems to be a great time for massive existential change (as the Christian return shows). i just KNOW that we’re bound to just swing to another extreme because no matter who wins, or seems to win, am i trapped are WE all trapped in a belief in progress…
i’m speechless because i’m still a relative normie compared to where the collective story has to go in order that we don’t make life worse and worse. i feel a sense of urgency because once Gen X dies out, the ones left behind are toast, and finding their way back to themselves will be remedial, take too much time, and humanity will lose precious ground.
James used to say i was nature’s way of reasserting itself.
that…or HE popped that back into my mind as i was thinking about what you Scotlyn and others have said “ruuuun!”
but where TO? and WHY???
i’ve no children, am re-estranged from my family… if i can learn something to hand to the ones left behind, then i’m properly mulch and not just a waste of resources.
back to life’s purpose and existential questions….
so i ask:
is it absurd to ever expect that we as a species tweak our balance away from this love of technocratic death? even the bible said something about God wishing we wouldn’t need kings. THAT’S EVERYTHING RIGHT THERE.
is that too much to hope that we’d get there a little more in regards to BALANCE?
because that article shows how allll… everything is Nothing… so that’s why i get vertigo. it’s amazing how …BORING … it is out there. what i’m going through… is it training???
but even you say “RUUUN!” but i’m broke and cancelled and clueless. i’m an artist. Quakerism wasn’t a social club as it was apparently for my family.
all this because of JAMES. i never knew. he was my 40 years in the desert and cleansed me of their … ouch. they hurt the way they love.
so the movie business. …. took over our STORIES… it is because we are whores. we’re forced to be.
so am i trapped in liberal “one day perfect world” optimistic crap???
or can we at least hope to nudge humanity back to loving itself and being human a little more???
otherwise i fear leaving all these oldies are already irrelevant like records sent through space for distant aliens.
because i don’t wanna waste my time on what time i have left here, by making up my own stories based upon wrong assumptions.
but i listen and see all the beautiful defiant writers and all these guys come alive with words and the power shifts us away from devouring mother death… for a time…
but am i naive to think …we can fight back by merely asserting our own humanity? “nature’s way of asserting OURSELVES”? you’ve said it yourself… just turn away.
because if so, this H1B visa discussion is that EXISTENTIAL question. what is is to be American and are we willing to turn away with our nausea and recreate something that doesn’t make us finally become machines?
the men’s voices out there now, yours included, are to me the best of men’s fatherly fighting LOVE for being alive and protecting family.
the story feels epic… and yet yeah… tech remakes us all into algorythms… and it’s not enough to be in person, we have to…well… crash now and avoid the rush, right?
i only said that to have you bypass a pat answer. i know theoretically what would be cool. how do we dial back at least to the 90s in terms of being human so that we may find our way back? because this now is all post modern white walls of vertigo.
as in people really are hungry little ghost monsters out there. i didn’t feel a soul in my sister. i’m sure it’s there. but ….she felt EMPTY and that kinda freaked me out at the dinner table. it was like stepford wife hell. weird because she used to be INTERESTING.
but so many…
so is it even POSSIBLE? because according to all this history, we’re toast. but as you’ve ALSO pointed out, some of the people on the low did great while everything sucked for those above.
i suppose i’m also vaguely asking you about STORY. if the netflix subscriber over auteur/art model has prevailed and they’re making shows based on one’s abiilty to do the laundry and still follow along, the dumbing down is …WOW.
because that’s what i’ve noticed. people have these magic phones and no attention span for EACH OTHER. so it’s catered and solidified in our “entertainment.”
wow.
so when real estate is locked up…how do we find each other in real life to do art as even in the old days there was live theatre for theatre. we can’t meme our way out of this… or can we???
i’m asking for advice on artistic DIRECTION. maybe you’d call it a working, casting an idea, yeah… as an artist who tests this stuff out in real life, i don’t trust my take. James is gone … my GROUND is gone. my knee is wobbly and i’m using one hand to fend off the jackals who want my blood.
if it is a lost cause and it’s about me only, i STILL don’t know what The Collective Story is. what i’m advocating because it seems presumptuous of me to try and pitch anything other than what THEY themselves apparently want…so…. who am i to pitch “this enjoying life and love thing is amazing try it!”
i love the H1B argument and love that people seem hip to avoiding the racist entrapments. it’s existential.
what is success? what is the good life?
but i fear that people still envy the ending to “body heat” with kathleen turner on the beach drinking mai tais with a stranger after blowing up her nice house and family. for THAT??? ew.
stories.
does technology and the entanglement of everything make it worse than history… right?
i’m asking you for a way out because at this point, “a way out” seems like progressive FALDERAL. i love that word, too.
you’re gonna swat this all down to one line and i’ll feel like a childish food asking Papa to tell me there are no boogeymen in my room so i can sleep.
i don’t know what i’m fighting FOR. but i’m willing to serve if it advances our understanding of how to undermine the death machine’s gears by sparlkining and reminding of humanity like Elvis’s hips on television.
i’ve realized the power of just standing still and paying attention. they snap.
they wanna KILL you.
so it’s a power worth learning how to not get crushed. it’s the only way i see to the third way: simply trying to be in each other’s footsteps a little more.
Scotlyn was saying connection is one-on-one. that is my art. i was telling Valentine i realized the power of instant WOW connection just by stopping in an aisle of walgreen’s card section, listening to a young Jesus man talk in scripture. he was speaking his PERSONAL loneliness and pain via scripture. when i listened and gave him attention even he stopped, got woozy from the eye contact, and had to break it and go. but it was GOOD.
i don’t want to just be one of those axxhole artist who uses people without being vulnerable and using what i learn for good. good in this meaning is connecting ONE AT A TIME. most of us aren’t dxcks. and most dxcks are that way because they are afraid of people and want money and power to have control and not feel “i neeeeed you!”
how did netflix and a cabal of sociopaths take over our stories??? how did WE let it happen???
yes. that guy Jeff i think on Magic Monday he said you’ve gotta practice being the one ready to put the fire out on the lady when everyone’s watching, by grabbing little moments through out the day as practice.
i said it before as: “say what you don’t want to say…and with kindness.” it starts amazing adventures. not so good here in San Francisco. but it’s how i find My PEOPLE.
when i asked why write, Valentine said, “to find your people.”
later i thought, “oh yeah.”
question is: is it being trapped in liberal progressive ideas to think humanity can stop making everything so crappy on the way down? can we divert the rivulets of our own blood away from the white carpet at least?
because i’m kinda lost at what my goals are as artist. as multi leo i’m fine being me me me. but after James there is no Me me me. it’s we we we. even alone i had “story.”
to further distill my question:
is it even POSSIBLE that we can ever hope to divert culture from wild mood swings at the whims of evil landlords with nothing else to do???
i’m failing here in mordor. whether i stay or not also depends on such answers. it’s not up to me to change others, but could i change the magnetic charge by finding MINE???
because if i could do that others could and …???
is it possible that people ever turn away from power without getting another Napoleon? and is it possible, as artists thinkers etc, to nudge things this way as even a possibility? or is the human…
i’m lost. whatever you’ve got i’ll take.
thanks, Papa.
Happy New Year to you and anyone who made it this far.
x
erika
Greetings Gaia Baracetti!
Thanks for your insights. What is true in one country, is perhaps different in another. I’ve never been to Europe, and my senses would probably be over stimulated by your built up environment, and perhaps find it disconcerting.
As I type this, I can look out the window and see forest and some clearings, way off to the far horizon. A possum could travel from here to there with only the occasional dangerous road and rail crossing. You may experience this environment as being far too quiet and devoid of people. Dunno, it’s hard to say. But there’s plenty of wild areas out there.
One of the difficulties here is that for upwards of sixty millennia (and maybe longer), humans have altered the continent to suit their needs – every single square metre of it – and the soils, plant and animal communities have adapted to this form of management. To take away that human interaction actually creates a lot of chaos.
Without people, things would of course would eventually settle into a new equilibrium. But I tell you a funny observation, the forests down here provides plenty of housing for birds and critters, but very little in the way of food. They all come here for a feed. Most earlier settler accounts suggest that yes, there were some stands of thick forest, but by and large, the majority of the continent where trees survived (> 500mm annual rainfall) tall open forests dominated for a very good reason – they were super productive environments.
Just a different perspective. The term ‘wild’ as used in these sorts of discussions is a very abstract concept, with little basis in ecology. I hold doubts that there are many areas of Europe which were not impacted by ice sheets, or people.
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
Yes, trains are a very civilised way to travel.
Your former President Carter lived a long life. A fine achievement, and a great orator too. Those days were a pivotal moment where the future could have gone in a more sustainable direction. Alas, little point crying over spilt milk, as the old timers used to say. I find it to be rather odd, how reviled the bloke was/is in some circles.
Cheers
Chris
Hi JMG,
I was born into a family of media magnates, predominantly of the print variety, but also radio, with one significant example from television. My family has been influential in the area where I was born, which I currently live far away from, but I’m not really sure of the extent and kind of exploitation that doubtlessly also occurred to get us where we are. They have people that don’t like them, but I’m not aware of many, or any recent examples. I’ve tried to explain catabolic collapse to some and have finally gotten my parents to understand that quality of life is going to decline by some measures over my lifetime. I’m not involved in any of their businesses, and the second and third generations of the family have mostly done unrelated things. None of my friends are part of the same social class. My big interest is ceremonial magic, and I’m trying to use my considerable time and freedom to focus my life on that right now. Most recently, under normal circumstances, I get in about two hours a day between basic ritual, divination, meditation, record keeping, making offerings to deities, and practice of more complex (though still, at this point, simple) rituals, and I’m trying to work my way up to four hours a day. Other time goes to language study, chores, volunteering, relationships, and, to be fair, I still waste too much of it.
I’m gay and I’m not sure whether I’ll end up adopting, and surrogacy seems like a waste on many levels. But I want to protect my family’s legacy, or at least my aging family members, who don’t seem capable of facing even intellectually the chaos that’s coming, and somehow stabilize the wealth and try to be a positive influence on the coming world. At this point I don’t have enough money to buy land, know where to do it, or have much knowledge of agriculture, nor am I sure who I would be passing whatever influence I create to. Do you have any words of advice for me to at least disentangle myself from the unethical aspects of my station in society and avoid problems, and at most to be a force for order in the coming world?
“So with regard to utility prices, why do frugal people, who make minimal use of the service, have to pay the same or even higher rates than the extravagant folks?”
Because the actual energy cost is not the only cost. You administration and maintenance on the distribution system, power lines, trimming the trees away from the power lines, replacing power poles, and so on and so forth.
If you use little energy then those fixed costs have to be spread over fewer kw-hr. Where I live they use a different system. I pay 59 cents per day as a basic charge which is the cost to maintain the system to deliver the power. Then I pay the rate for however many kw-hr I actually use which was 1972 kw-hr last month. (All electric house in the dead of winter.)
If I had three phase commercial power the basic charge is $1.12 a day.
Hi JMG,
I’m curious if you have ever looked into the Beast of Gevaudan, which terrorized the French countryside in 1764. It’s not clear what exactly the beast was, and a case can be made for a wolf, werewolf, lion, hyena, or even a presumed extinct creature such as a dire wolf or amphicyon bear-dog. I personally would vote for the latter, not because of any particular documentary evidence, but because I think it makes the story better.
I’ve read Kim Stanley Robinson’s original climate change trilogy; 40 Signs of Rain, 50 Degrees Below, 60 Days and Counting, as well as Ministry for the Future.
The climate change trilogy has overblown sudden catastrophes almost as bad as The Day after Tomorrow, and a deus ex machina that saves the world in the final book by making trees grow faster to draw down CO2. One odd thing is I noticed that one of the main characters, a Californian, is around in Washington DC as it gets trashed by a series of disasters, and seems to be enjoying it too much.
The more recent Ministry for the Future is better, but still has what seems like a not very credible ‘saving the world’ aspect.
I enjoyed the Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy more, along with the sort of fourth part 2312 which seems to be set in the same universe but not necessarily following continuity. You have to suspend disbelief with the terraforming etc. but it is an interesting tale, and it hasn’t been too badly affected by planetary scientists learning more about Mars in the about 30 years since its publication.
BeardTree, ah, but it’s not quite that simple. If, for example, all that bureaucracy is a dead weight dragging down economic activity, the increase in the velocity of money (that’s what economists call the frequency with which a dollar changes hands) could more than make up for the decrease in notional GDP. Furthermore, by cutting the federal deficit, more credit becomes available for other uses, potentially driving up GDP. And of course there’s the far from minor fact that those budget deficits are only viable because the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and is losing that status…
Atmospheric, thanks for the data points.
J.L.Mc12, that’s bizarre. I’m not at all sure what to make of it. How about they start by enforcing the laws against political corruption instead?
Panda, doesn’t surprise me at all. That’s a very Chinese thing to do!
Anonymous, being hated is a normal part of the immigrant experience in America; I can’t think of an immigrant ethnicity that didn’t get that. I’ll want to see more signs of hate becoming fashionable, especially among those who were denouncing it most stridently, before I agree.
Erika, human individuals, communities and societies move in and out of balance. There are times when people, as individuals or groups, get their act together and accomplish amazing things, and then there are times when even people who had their act together trip over their own feet (or whatever) and mess things up again. Right now we’re in a very messed-up situation; very few people are even making an effort to try to fix themselves — and of course work is what it takes, along with courage and sheer dumb luck. Thus I don’t have a pat answer or a one-line response. I’m trying in my own way to kindle a spark of possibility, hoping that others will pick up on what I’m doing and make something vital out of it — and that may fail; it’s failed before. But it’s what I can do, and what I feel I have to do. I think it’s possible that we’re near bottom and things can start to improve from here, in human terms; I’m willing to gamble on that. But it’s a gamble, of course.
Chris, trains also have a lot less distance to fall if something happens to the engine. As for Carter, he did the unthinkable — he admitted that the US was in deep trouble, and that we couldn’t expect onward-and-upward forever. The mass media and the corporate system crucified him for that, and a lot of people are still parroting the hate that was flung at him.
Eli, that’s an immensely complex question depending on a galaxy of mostly personal variables. “Find your true will and follow it” is about the only meaningful advice I can offer you.
Samurai_47, now there’s a blast from the past! Yes, I read about that many decades ago, when I was up to my eyeballs in werewolf trivia — I was around 12 at the time. I have no idea what it was, but yeah, some kind of prehistoric horror makes a great story.
“The Officer told the young man per the latest CCP Policy Initiative handed down last month (November 2024) every young man must get married and have 5 kids minimum.”
That won’t work. The one child policy gave China a huge surplus of men. I’ve been wondering if the CCP would get desperate enough to start force inseminating women. Or to dive into that old science fiction staple, the uterine replicator. That sort of R&D will never be allowed in the West, but CCP ethics are quite different.
I do remember the announcement that India had passed up China in population was supposed to occur in 2026, but it already happened. Did the baby supply cut off that quick, or did they lose vastly more than they admitted to the virus that cannot be named?
As to the end of Windows 10, Linux Mint Cinnamon edition looks a lot like Windows 7 and works quite well. LibreOffice works quite well to replace MS Office, although the graphing is not as good. Linux does require a 64 bit system, but that is nearly everything that still works.
@ Martin Back –
Thanks, I think you’re on the right track. But what does “wheelbase” mean? Does it refer to the distance between wheels relative to their respective diameters, or to something else altogether? (I assume their diameters are equal, unless otherwise stated.)
Also, I understand much better when a proposition is stated in terms of geometry rather than as a mathematical formula. For example, a sine wave described by an algebraic formula conveys nothing to me; but when it’s expressed as a diagram in descriptive geometry, such as a cutting plane intersecting a right circular cylinder at a given angle, then I can readily draw it with accuracy. So if there’s a way to state the relationship you’re describing in those sorts of terms I have a better chance of properly grasping the concept.
Many have already heard but former president Jimmy Carter has passed at the age of 100. One of the few to actually talk to the people like adults. To openly admit to the predicament of our times in terms of resource limits, something he was still talking about even a few years back.
He had been described as ‘the accidental president’ somebody who should have never made it to that position. While not perfect in the role, a few more like him in power could have set parts of the world on a different path one that was a but more genuinely sustainable.
#291 It could be this wasn’t actually a real interaction with an overzealous police officer, but some kind of satire staged and filmed by dissidents. Either way, I can see why the Chinese authorities aren’t too keen on its distribution.
#302 For those of you who watch Youtube, I can recommend the channel of Gwillerm Kaldisti who did a PhD in paleoclimatology, for example his video of The Last Ice Age climate in Europe where the author shows the output of temperature and rainfall simulations of the last 120,000 years, using the predicted temperature and rainfall to assign a climate classification to it. He also does videos for specific locations, showing the current climate location that the climate in a certain place at a different time would be. For example: Climate History of Brest (Brittany), which 17,000 years ago had a climate like that of West Greenland in 1961-90.
Andy at comment # 252:
Glad you could get to it. Here’s another link (for some reason the fancy-pants HTML doesn’t work from my end):
https://archiveofourown.org/works/192815
Author “pir8fancier” has a family history of alcoholism. So, yeah, they know their subject. It’s a beautiful, brutal, funny story. Crams a lot into 10K words. It explained something I’d wondered about: why getting sober often ends a marriage. You’d think that sobriety would make things all better. Nope. Sobriety changes everything, including relationships.
JMG, I will assume you are aware of the 80/20 rule. That 20% of the work yields 80% of the work. Mostly an observation that refinement is the largest part of a project.
I am wondering if you see this as applying to your larger published works. Do the 1st drafts come quick but then most of the time is spent on edits and revisions? Similar idea to Hemingway with “Write drunk. Edit sober”. Let it flow quickly but spend more time refining the details.
Hey JMG
Funnily enough, the current government is doing a fair bit to ensure multinational companies, who are notorious for paying little or no tax in Australia, actually pay more taxes than usual.
But apart from this, I do wonder what the significance of the “adult crime, adult time” laws are. It may be a way to attract boomer voters who watch too much news, but I also wonder if it is a way to make it easier to dominate certain groups, such as aborigines, who have a notoriously difficult relationship with the law. I wonder also if it has something to do with stamping down on protesters which is another worrying thing that has been happening lately.
thank you, Papa. that was exactly what i needed from you. thank you so much.
xxxxxxxx
@JMG, yes! I read the classic paper “Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese” sometime back and actually recently was searching for the latest in the field in the last 30+ years of research. This paper is speculative but sums up some of the research: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10432883/
As I understand it, Bjorn’s hypothesis is that an Indo-European language, spoken by the Afanasievo culture, who are likely the ancestors of the Tocharians, gave loanwords to Proto-Uralic, Pre-Proto-Turkic (not proto-Mongolic though), and Old Chinese. This spread was likely associated with the Seima-Turbino “phenomenon” which he thinks is a trade and cultural exchange involving multiple language groups.
Afanasievo didn’t have spoked-wheel chariots and were later overrun by Indo-Iranians from Andronovo and Sintashta, from whom the Chinese word for “horse” came, according to Bjorn. The Tocharians splintered off from the core of Afanasievo and so managed to survive as an isolate in the Tarim Basin.
I also looked a bit at the spread of steppe cultures to northwest Europe (i.e., what might have been the ancestors of proto-Italo-Celtic and Germanic). It seems, from what I could find, that there was fairly limited influx from the steppe after the initial Corded Ware incursion. The Bell Beakers and later phenomenon emerged within Europe itself, the chariot-riding Andronovo didn’t directly transmit the chariot to Europe; the Corded Ware had wagons and carts, but fast-moving war-chariots came quite a while later. The British Celts apparently only got them around 500 BCE.
There’s a fair amount of Canada talk on the timeline this week, and I don’t have time to go into it, much as I might enjoy to, except to say three things:
1) If you’re a Canadian reactionary and not following Fortissax, you’re missing out. He has a great Substack entry here:
https://fortissax.substack.com/p/canadians-vs-americans
2) A pox on both the Canadian and American healthcare models. Both Americans and Canadians far too frequently point at each other’s systems as horror stories, apparently unable to grasp that most of the world operates with something in between.
3) @Robert #169
“Garreau also includes parts of parts of Canada in his “New England” sub-nation, about the history of which I know much less”
This is correct; I’ve often joked that I live in New England North. It’s time to share two of my favourite pieces:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-nova-scotia-almost-joined-american-revolution-180963564/
And then there’s a historical novel worth reading:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fort_(novel)
^ Few people know the story of how Maine was “in play” during the Revolutionary War – Britain wanted to call it “New Ireland” (to pair nicely with the existing New Scotland). I personally had an ancestor on the British side of this battle who was granted land in what is now Canada for his efforts.
@JMG
I just rewatched that 2nd video. Things are more dire for China than I remembered. China recorded 9 million births for 2023, the latest year for which birth stats are available. That’s the lowest number of births since the take-over of China by the CCP. That’s even lower than the 16+ million births recorded at the height of the Great Famine in 1961 when China had less than 600 million people.
Also a slight amendment. The One Child Policy started in 1978, not 1980 like I thought.
Lei mentioned she thinks China may have hit a high of 1.1 billion people back in 1990 but has been in decline every year since then and latest stats show TFR has fallen off a cliff – below that of South Korea in China’s most expensive cities – and deaths are accelerating as the overall population ages.
I’ve often thought Peter Zeihan was over-catastrophizing that China’s economic model will collapse in the next 10-15 years because of their demographic contraction but now I’m thinking he might actually be right at least about that one thing.
Hi again,
A lot of people are talking about Trump’s flip flop on the H1B visa program. The deeper thing that next to nobody (aside from some right wingers on 4chan) seem to notice is that if Trump goes through with these proposals to adopt a more Trudeau-esq immigration system the the upper middle class in America will begin to be fed into the wealth pump, as the wage classes and lower middle classes were before them.
This is a very dangerous thing to do at this stage in the game because that class, the orbiters around the affluent are the ones that are essentially the lynchpin of any system of power. If you lose or otherwise push them to the wall they will quickly make common cause with the lower classes and quite often move to revolutionary violence.
That the democrats are continuing to double down and in effect quietly support Musk and company’s proposals because until very recently mass migration was officially a plank of the Democrats alone (though the GOP tacitly supported it to drive down wages) despite the unpopularity of mass migration with the electorate.
Now the GOP is heading that way as well, and the biggest advocates for mass migration on the GOP side are resorting to the usual bigoted cliches about “Americans are lazy, foreigners work harder for less, you’re racist if you oppose this” and so on. This telegraphs to the public (and in particular to that upper middle class segment that desperately needs to be loyal for any system to function) that electoral politics of any kind offers no possibility of change. It says that regardless of party affiliation the ruling class is a cartel that cannot be voted away or otherwise have its interests curtailed.
I hope, sincerely that violence does not break out in the United States, but it seems the possibility is much higher than at any point since the 1860’s. I am very interested to see if and how the political and economic elite respond or if they will blindly charge ahead like the Ancien Regime. Is this just pessimism or are things as sensitive as they seem?
JZ
Siliconguy, not quite. The laptop on which I’m writing this, a nice elderly Toshiba that runs Windows 7, is a 32-bit machine, and so are my two backup laptops. There may be more 32-bit hardware out there than you realize.
Michael, thanks for this. As for the 80/20 rule, no, that’s not my experience. I spend about equal amounts of time on first draft and revision — I’ve learned to get the revision process to flow, too.
J.L.Mc12, quite possibly, but it does seem very strange.
Erika, you’re most welcome and glad to hear it.
Alvin, thank you for this! I originally learned about the IE loanwords via the appendix of a somewhat offbeat translation of the Tao Te Ching, and thought it was fascinating stuff — though completely plausible, since the invention and spread of chariot technology would inevitably have been accompanied by loanwords.
Bofur, thanks for this.
Panda, I find all this very heartening. There are too many human beings on this planet, and if population declines due to demographic shifts that’s a lot more humane than, say, war, plague, or any of the other alternatives.
John Z, it’s early days yet. In an elite replacement cycle, the incoming elite (in this case, the entrepreneurial elite) will have to make a lot of adjustments as it solidifies its power and buys off influential power centers and pressure groups, while supplanting as much as possible of the outgoing elite (in this case, the bureaucratic elite) and cutting deals with the remainder. The vast amount of noise being raised over H1B visas is a classic squabble among the victors over who gets what share of the pie; behind all the shouting, I expect to see some sort of compromise to be struck.
“The population of the Roman Empire dropped like a rock over the last three centuries or so before Rome fell;”
Do you have a source for that? I would love to read it.
Papa, this is so important it needs to be duplicated because it’s anti-suicide chat written down:
You’d said:
“Erika, human individuals, communities and societies move in and out of balance. There are times when people, as individuals or groups, get their act together and accomplish amazing things, and then there are times when even people who had their act together trip over their own feet (or whatever) and mess things up again. Right now we’re in a very messed-up situation; very few people are even making an effort to try to fix themselves — and of course work is what it takes, along with courage and sheer dumb luck. Thus I don’t have a pat answer or a one-line response. I’m trying in my own way to kindle a spark of possibility, hoping that others will pick up on what I’m doing and make something vital out of it — and that may fail; it’s failed before. But it’s what I can do, and what I feel I have to do. I think it’s possible that we’re near bottom and things can start to improve from here, in human terms; I’m willing to gamble on that. But it’s a gamble, of course.”
like Scotlyn saying connection is one-on-one, that’s been my art. protecting my moment with someone. and it’s a fight. it’s also how i got if you were really gonna be a skilled player, you wouldn’t flaunt, you’d make who you’re with so sated and special and fulfilled that every return moment would be like bon bons in bed. never mundane.
pitching humanity back to itself.
because James healed me i know it’s possible. it took and takes awhile to see differently. you can see the pinched faces of people everywhere when you let go. and i know that a single moment can be an After-Life Experience. Scotlyn reminded me that everyone feels like the outsider. but they ARE outsiders, even to themselves. that’s why they cling to the hive. it’s a short cut. but it’s breaking. in real time.
the inner work is the hard sell. i don’t see them ever wanting to work on themselves. what i hope for is getting the balance back a little bit so they’re in their places and not running things into the ground. make being human in style again. everything is fashion with people. this is where we’re up and pitching the better story.
we’re having a collective existential crisis and that i feel optimistic… i read that article about the absolute nothing meaningless of the streaming “entertainment” world that no one cares about… we’re being trained into jello molds and had to check in with you and see if i was just about to be babbling in a corner. i can’t tell what’s real anymore because i can’t believe people are the way they are. it’s so boring un fun doesn’t feel good.
and then why do anything??? if you can’t get the proverbial girl have a home… why? what?
so this is a beautiful hero story already and i don’t wanna get decapitated by misplaced optimism just yet. i’m glad everyone else is burning out on evil, too. it’s all gentrified.
go figure! being decent might be back in style simply because we’ve run out of even scarier evil. it makes you ill. nauseous.
thanks for reminding me of your optimism because i see your effectiveness and it makes me smile like “did you see that?”
cool.
if this is bottom, i think we can win this. if it goes on another 20 years, nothing will be left. they are blood thirsty cannibals.
so then that means i have to stay here for now and focus on learning what i can to be successful enough to get out of here with as little drama as possible. i trust a place will call me as i get my work back out there. i’m counting on it. finding my people!
and yes, Heather, i’ll talk all forms of love. thank you.
x
@320 John Zybourne
“I hope, sincerely that violence does not break out in the United States, but it seems the possibility is much higher than at any point since the 1860’s”
Months ago, I watched a YouTube video arguing that the reason why large scale violent revolts fail to happen in America and Western Europe is that violent revolutions come largely from movements of angry men below the age of 30, and in our agring societies, the proportion of young men in countries’ population pyramids has dropped to unprecedented lows.
Women aren’t anywhere near as violent as men. Men over 30 are past their physical prime, and generally have more to lose from participating in a futile riot, or from disruptions to the status quo. The YouTuber* thinks the greater proportion of middle aged people in our societies compared to even a couple generations ago is affecting mass culture in general.
*Possibly Whatisalthist
Jessica – yep that’s the place. We lived in Davis when our kids were young, lucking out to get a small apartment in the grad-student/family housing the university used to have – best place to raise kids in the 2000s because it was like being in the 1950s-70s with kids running loose in the neighborhood, parents watching out from the kitchen window and lots of unstructured play and diverse ages all together, pre-cell-phones. So much outdoor time, some of it spent on bikes and heading over to that enclave to pick mulberries and cherries and jujubes and apricots from trees overhanging the public walks.
There’s much to love about its infrastructure, but there’s a kind of brittle attitude of complacent comfort in its residents that I can’t help but notice now that I’ve lived elsewhere (even just 10 miles away part of the time) the last 15 years. Boy are they The Good People.
@Peter Khan @JMG re: Anti-Messiah Naming Contest
This is an intriguing idea, coming up with a concept for the Anti-Messiah!
My first idea for a name was spelling ‘Messiah’ backwards. ‘Haissem’ is actually pronounceable, but won’t mean much to most people.
On reflection, I think a better fit might be the Hindu Goddess Kali–
Here’s one link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali
If I’m reading this right, Kali is (among other things) a Goddess of Recycling–
She is a Goddess of destruction that precedes creation, the making of all things new, a Goddess of motherly furious defense of the innocent. She is portrayed as wearing a necklace of (men’s) heads. Perhaps this is a metaphor for taking down the powers-that-be. Kali gives us what we need, not what we want, and is a Goddess of darkness, time, and nature. Reading about her, I am not convinced that she is evil, or has evil intentions– She just does what needs to be done.
A Messiah is someone who makes things right by fixing them or restoring them to what they should be. Kali, by contrast, destroys the moustache men and sets the stage for rebirth. She has a lot in common with Aphrodite. Kek too–but not as much fun as Kek…
That’s my entry for Anti-Messiah–Anyone else?
@JMG: “The vast amount of noise being raised over H1B visas is a classic squabble among the victors over who gets what share of the pie; behind all the shouting, I expect to see some sort of compromise to be struck.”
I sure hope so. It would be a wonderful thing to have rational actors in charge of things again. We haven’t had rational, adult leaders in the U. S. since Bush, Sr. lost in 1992.
Michael Gray @ 311 What I chiefly remember from Carter’s presidency is the interview in which Egyptian President Anwar Sadat said, “I will go to Jerusalem”, an unheard of thing at that time. And then he said, “The Americans will help us.” The peace treaty between Egypt and Israel still stands to this day. For that reason, I consider Carter the greatest president of my lifetime.
I feel really bad for the victims of Helene. There is going to be a polar vortex between January 9 through 11 bringing arctic temperatures (-40F) down throughout the eastern continental US, and many of the victims of Helene are still sleeping in tents waiting for help to arrive. Some of them are going to freeze to death over those three days.
@JMG and writing 80/20 rule. Thank you for the feed back, that is great to hear. I suspect that part of it also comes from having loads of experience.
@Silconguy & JMG – RE : “The laptop on which I’m writing this, a nice elderly Toshiba that runs Windows 7, is a 32-bit machine, and so are my two backup laptops.”
Seeing as you are running Window 7, there is a good chance your machine is probably 64bit capable. AMD switched in 2003 and Intel in 2005(?). That said, I am not advocating upgrading any time soon. Some of the most security conscious folks I know are still running Windows 7 as it seems to be the last version of it that hasn’t been completely ruined by middle management. Stick with it as long as possible I say.
I advocate for things like GNU/Linux not because of the tech,a ltough it is great at keeping decade old machines alive, but because of the specific license that it is bundled with. The GPL is a wonderful piece of legal work that is designed to keep the power of these things in the hands of the community rather than corporations. Richard Stallman who initiated it was one of those special folks that could see where things were heading decades in advance and tried his best to try and head it off before it became to late. Did paid work 6 weeks a year so that he could spend the rest of his time building the system for others to use for free as they wish. Apart from the technology angle, he lives closer to Diogenes than most folks… also equally disagreeable to talk to.
He was partially successful as it has become the back bone of the internet but that wasn’t exactly what he was after. It was about computers you control rather than computers that control you. Alas, Bill Gates ended up with billions of dollars and unelected soft power over huge parts of the world pushing out software that restricts people, Stallman ended up couch surfing around the world trying to encourage others to do what is right for others, that sharing software is good, rather than amass huge amounts of money.
@ Happy Panda,
Thanks for that info about China’s apparent population bust. I consider it to be excellent news. I didn’t relish the prospect of a world dominated by the CCP, and this makes that seem much less likely. Maybe the Russians can keep Lake Baikal, and the Willamette River Valley can remain American.
Fifty years ago Paul Erlich and like-minded people had us in a swivet about the Population Bomb. Now pundits on YouTube and (no doubt) elsewhere want us to fret about population decline, which they call a “crisis.” I’m not going to worry about it for one instant.
@Silicon Guy (#309) said:
I’ve been wondering if the CCP would get desperate enough to start force inseminating women. Or to dive into that old science fiction staple, the uterine replicator.
and
Did the baby supply cut off that quick, or did they lose vastly more than they admitted to the virus that cannot be named?
Lei says China’s Birth Offices (the ones that used to force abortions on unwilling women but have since been converted to “fertility-friendly” offices) now call every woman in their district to give them the date of their last menstrual period. All birth offices now track women’s cycles. Hence the moniker Menstruation Police which Lei says was first given in Romania.
There are reports all across Chinese social media that men and women – especially those newly married – receive weekly calls to report to the local government their attempts at conceiving.
These officers are officially called Female Follow-Up Officers to make sure each man and woman does their duty to have 5 kids for the CCP. One idea for the over supply of men is for these men to find foreign brides in surrounding, poorer countries like Vietnam or Thailand and bring them back to China. I don’t know how successful that attempt will be.
China also passed a recent policy saying that the maximum amount for a bride price from the groom’s family to the wife’s family is limited to 3x the average income for the district the groom’s family is in. Because so many men are refusing marriage due to insanely high bride prices demanded by the women’s family it has contributed to the falling marriage rate and TFR falling off a cliff. In a Tier 1 city the current bride price is so high it can take 10 years for a young man to come up with that amount and that’s before any of the other prerequisites the bride’s family has are met.
I remember watching China Observer or one of the other china channels and they said the requirements for a young man to pay the bride price to the wife’s parents are typically the following:
He must first have ‘good conditions’. That is – he must make at least $85,000 a year minimum (when converted to U.S. dollars). He must also own his own house in full, own his own car in full, be able to support his wife and kids and his own parents and often his wife’s parents too on his salary alone and the job ideally should be some kind of government job because those are more secure than working for a company. Oh…and now the CCP has decided he must pay for 5 kids minimum from birth to college graduation to boot.
According to China Observer this would place such a man in the top 5% of all income earners in the whole country. So…in short the average Chinese woman’s family wants their daughter to marry a top-tier CCP official. The bride’s family (rural families that is – the one child policy was relaxed earlier for rural residents than for urban ones) then will use the bride price money received to help their SON pay the bride price to his fiance’s family. So it’s basically an ever-expanding racket of over-indebted men desperately taking out loans from local chinese banks and passing debt money to each other in order to get married. And all of this is required before even one baby is born, let alone five.
Naturally Chinese men – especially young Chinese men – have decided they have better things to do these days than get married and drown in debt for the glory of the CCP. China is a conservative society so out-of-wedlock births are in the single digits. It brings great shame still to a Chinese family if their daughter has an out-of-wedlock baby. Therefore, no marriage = no births. Hence that Officer in the video link I listed earlier shouting at that young man that he was, “an eternal sinner” for refusing his duty to marry and pay for five babies.
Since very few men of any age have all the prerequisites required for the going bride price rates in the country China now has a surplus of Left-Over Women (seriously, that’s what they’re called on Chinese social media) to go with the surplus of Excess Men.
Lei says there’s something off about China’s death stats too and other industry stats made her and her research group believe China had far higher deaths from the 2019 virus than the CCP is willing to admit to. Also the cross checks led her research group to think the death rates in China from other causes are higher than the CCP is willing to admit to.
I guess it’s possible Jinping’s inner circle might actually think China has over a billion people since there’s strong incentives for local officials to lie about births and deaths since at least 1990. Anyone reporting the true rates is punished with budget cuts and salary cuts. No wonder China’s inner circle of elites can’t figure out why no one wants to buy all these ghost towers of half-built apartment buildings. They’re probably wondering what the heck happened. Why did 50% of the population refuse to buy Evergrand housing? (Lei says: maybe because birth rates have been consistently overstated by 37 – 50% since 1990?)
The Russian paper presented to Putin’s cabinet said the Chinese are very aware at how useful threatening surrounding countries with their 1.4 billion number brings compliance from their neighbors in various geopolitical disputes. Especially since they have to ‘keep up with the Jones’ (ie…India).
So maybe Zeihan is more right about China’s dismal long descent economic future than I’d first figured.
I’ve discovered today a German writer, Kristina Hazler (hat tip to Egon Fischer), whose website has some interesting material from a spiritual/magical perspective which the commentariat may appreciate, and much of it has English translations – her matrix series is quite fascinating – see for instance https://kristinahazler.com/en/matrix-and-the-missing-link/
While you should leave the details to your Patreon/subscribestar. Do you agree with many astrologers that 2025/2026 is looking like a period of big changes with a lot of the outer planets changing signs?
Many feel the change could be dramatic and not for the better at least initially.
It is almost tedious to report another two Dunkelflautes this month in the UK. This time each lasted about 48 hours rather than the monster one of almost 10 days last month. Each time wind power supply fell to less than 10% of demand and solar gave less than 5% and just for a few hours. It is good to see realisation of this issue spreading into much of the MSM over the last couple of months and it may be contributing to a general perception that many of the policies of our Labour government are dissociated from reality. Some interesting opinion polls have come out in the last couple of weeks, showing Labour, Tories and ReformUK each favoured by virtually the same proportion of the electorate. In fact at the moment there seems to be an almost equal split between left-of-centre and right-of-centre in the UK, somewhat similar to the US. Here, Tories, Reform plus a couple of micro parties add up to just under 50% in terms of stated voting intention, as do Labour plus Liberal, Green and nationalist parties. We seem to have a government which is already highly unpopular and politically dead in the water after just 6 months, with no way of getting rid of it for about 4 years and only dark economic clouds ahead with the incipient defeat in Ukraine likely meaning a further energy squeeze on Europe. I fear very difficult times coming quite soon!
Hi John,
Since this is an open post, I have a question regarding consciousness and the planes. Who is it that operates on these planes? Does the “I” belong to a plane, is it a thought, something behind the planes, etc? Who or what is the observer?
Also, Trump seems to be with the Musk camp regarding H1Bs.
Thanks,
Kevin.
Chris,
agreed. I assumed you were talking about modern(ish) agriculture, and not older/indigenous types of land management.
You are right that, to a European, the open spaces of other continents, as awe-inspiring as they are, can also feel empty. I lived in Canada and I found it extremely beautiful, but I also missed the history and variety I grew up with in Europe. Europe is not only extremely crowded (unfortunately) but also visibly diverse both in terms of humanity, and of nature. From where I live, you can literally walk to, and through, different countries, language areas, and ecosystems. Still, I do wish us humans hadn’t taken over everything. Not so long ago we still had majestic forests, and birds would nest on our beaches. We lost a lot in a short time, like many others did.
All this being said, I of course don’t object to human action on nature; I’m just saying we need to remember that this world has many inhabitants, that the past, future and present are not the same and don’t need to be, and that humans withdrawing a little can be a good thing, too.
Re: Siliconguy: “Linux does require a 64 bit system, but that is nearly everything that still works”
Where did you get the idea that Linux doesn’t run on 32 bit systems?
Maybe Ubuntu and Mint don’t release 32 bit verions anymore (I haven’t checked), but they’re hardly the only distributions available 🙂
bk.
@Kevin #310
I hope this sketch will illustrate what I mean. Done with MS Paint so rather crude.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O1_alufbThNj29VRHknTFFTzCTtxC3oy/view?usp=sharing
Hi John Michael,
There is that aspect to trains, and your point also illustrates that all forms of transport are problematic to some degree. I find the trains to be quite relaxing, and usually have troubles not drifting off to sleep. The country trains here are pretty nice. Being suspended 10,000m / 33,000ft above the sea level does not fill me with comfort. 🙂
Hey, did you see this bit of ocean weirdness: Two dead, nearly all ports closed as 13ft-high waves batter Ecuador and Peru. Apparently the local reports say it’s a new phenomenon which they can’t recall.
There’s a lot of energy in the atmosphere, and the last couple of very hot days down here, have also been cloudy (which is a relief). The cloud blocks some of the suns energy on those hot days.
Cheers
Chris
Robert Mathiesen #295
“…where the human claims that “The Gods are Good and/or “The Gods are not Good” are not respectively true and false, but have meaning only within our highly limited understanding of how the Gods Themselves live. That fits well with my own very imperfect understanding.”
I’ve been looking at different metaphors from different traditions because of that line of thinking; searching for patterns. My working conclusion at the moment is that we have even less idea of what is actually going on than might be imagined; that human capacity to comprehend is indeed very limited and that the nature of the metaphor is not the important factor but rather how it is used.
That said, the limitation and lack of understanding is not a show-stopper, just that at certain stages of ‘realisation’ one metaphor may be allowed to fade as another is used for some purpose.
An aside to that – I can appreciate JMG’s admonition to pursue training and suck the marrow out of a system before moving on – since metaphors are limited by our ability to express them, the words in your family history ring loud: “These stories reflect only my perceptions of our history, and mine alone.”
And that a metaphor is a construct that works as training wheels for a bicycle. The interesting questions (for me) begin when one has danced with a metaphor long enough that it becomes a personal story rather than a story being passed down.
“For me the quieting of ego is not the most important thing. Sure, ego can get in the way of grasping truth; but that’s not the main barrier you need to get past, IMHO. The more important barriers to wisdom lie in what are called in Greek aisthesis and noesis. Aisthesis is sense-perception, noesis is mental activity (thought and statement). Slow down or stop both of these processes, and wisdom awaits in the quietness of their ceasing to be active.”
Perhaps we are approaching the same thing from different perspectives. Currently I am looking at sense perception and mental activity as actually being ‘tools’ that Consciousness uses to experience and that the ego/personality is merely wrapped in those sensations and feelings. Quieting the ego for me is, as you say, an action to: “Slow down or stop both of these processes, and wisdom awaits in the quietness of their ceasing to be active.”
In the Taoist system I originally studied there was an exercise called sealing the five senses; it is only relatively recently that I’ve considered that in relation to Dion Fortune and JM Greer’s metaphors alongwith the work of Hazrat Inayat Khan and Paul Brunton.
‘Sealing the Senses’ might more usefully be thought of as changing the focus of the senses.
My working position at the moment is that of taking the metaphor of the consciousness using the gross physical ‘body’ (sensation), the etheric ‘body’ that is the thing holding stuff together and powering our existence materially, whilst the emotions and imagination are a further ‘body’ that give what passes as some basic mental activity.
Essentially, that we operate on multiple levels and it is only our limited perception that hides that fact. Taking that further, the levels are only apparent facts rather than actual Truth.
From JMG’s Occult Philosophy Workbook he elucidates on the development of a mental sheath and mental body; Inayat Khan on the other hand talks about the importance of an ‘ideal’ and that a man with no ideal is in a worse position than a rogue with a misguided ideal.
I’ll need to look into apophatic and kataphatic – those terms are new to me, but at first glance my path appears to tend toward apophatic – not out of religious sensibility but more a case of self preservation – I long ago concluded that my own foolishness might be better served by keeping focus on a goal rather than trappings to accumulate on the way… which is funny to write when I consider the lengths I’ve gone to gathering emergency material resources for ‘just in case’ scenarios!
“I hope it meets your expectations as you read it.”
Thank you and yes, I enjoyed the anecdotes a great deal – I did not focus so much on dates and names, more ‘something else’ that I’d be hard pressed to put into words… the story of a family metaphor over time perhaps.
My cousin spent a great deal of time and effort tracing our family tree, but without stories it is an empty framework.
As you say: “That is why I have put our family’s stories down on paper now. They are meant not for entertainment, but for inspiration, as we practice our odd art of self-creation.”
Stories add flesh to the bones of that dancing skeleton – I know only a few of my family stories, and, reading yours adds fuel to the idea that as much as we are all different, still the same/similar patterns play out.
That it is useful to have one’s own stories alongside appreciation of others’ stories – Somehow it feels that someone else’s stories makes it easier to feel ‘sympathy’; as Inayat Khan puts it:
“Sympathy is the main quality to be cultivated in order to develop the spiritual faculty; but if one would ask me what I mean by sympathy, it is something I cannot explain. All such words are different names, different aspects of one and the same thing. What is called sympathy, kindness, mercy, goodness, pity, compassion, gentleness, humility, appreciation, gratefulness, service, is in reality love. And what is love? Love is God.”
And of course, the question that follows on from that is boggling!
As you said: “…each one of us has also been an ongoing work of art, never finished, never perfect, but always under creation.”
Thank you for sharing your stories!
Depopulation may be accelerating. For those who do podcasts, Jeremy Grantham and Hagan have an informative interview that looks at falling fertility, with special attention to toxins and pollution.. Mention of forbidding emigration (like Ukraine) and promoting immigration (soft US policy) is made, as well as discussion about how Japan is dealing with their population loss. https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/155-jeremy-grantham.
US numbers have been falling for some time, with immigration making a notable overall difference.
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/how-american-households-have-changed-over-last-65-years. 49% (1960) to 25% (2023) with kids, HH in US, from USAfacts
>Linux does require a 64 bit system, but that is nearly everything that still works.
Debian still supports 32bit x86 targets, last I checked. Your choices if you wish to stay 32bit are getting fewer these days though. I suppose if push comes to shove, there’s always Linux From Scratch. Something something real men something something.
The scary thing these days is that there are some software packages you literally cannot build unless you have a 64bit system with adequate amounts of real memory. It’s usually the linking phase that fails. I suppose if you were to look under the hood of the linker, there’s probably some way to get it to work again with memory constrained 32bit systems but nobody wants to bother. Although these days, I wonder if it isn’t because nobody can. Get a real computer, sonny.
>The Officer threatened the young man that if he ignored the new Policy “men in camouflage” were going to show up and tear down the man’s house and likewise send his social credit score into the pits of hell if he didn’t get married in one week’s time.
The beatings will continue until morale improves? Guess they’re going to have to beat a lot of people.
I’m not asking for medical advice.
JMG (or others of the commentariat),
Have you ever researched and come to conclusions about the effects of mercury fillings on health? I have many mercury fillings and have done some research, but am not sure what to think after reading so many different theories about it. I have come to mistrust the medical establishment and do not consider them saying it’s fine to necessarily mean it is fine, but also know that just believing something because the medical establishment doesn’t isn’t necessarily the route to truth either.
Thanks, Edward
I stand corrected that you can’t just install Ubuntu on an old machine – although those people out there on 32 bit Windows 7 installations probably aren’t going to be bothered too much to install Windows 11. However there are Linux options for 32 bit machines, I just don’t have as much experience with them as with Ubuntu.
Another problem with installing Linux on old machines is that there may not adequate support for the power saving features of old computers. I had a Toshiba laptop of about the same vintage as JMG’s, and although installing Ubuntu on it was trivial, it was miserable to use because the CPU couldn’t properly idle, so it got hot, the fans whirred and the battery life was cut to a third.
@Justin, @Lathechuck, and @The Other Owen,
Thanks very much for your advice!
I just did a quick few minutes of research in to the H1B visa program and discovered the following. If you type in which companies sponsor the most H1B visa’s you get two different answers depending on which country the website holding the information is aimed at. If it is a website for mostly US based eyes then the list is something like: google, Intel, Cisco, Apple etc.
But if you end up on an English site aimed at consumption in India you get a different looking list with something like: Delotte, Tata Consultancy, Walmart, Amazon, etc.
So it appears that this program has gone further off the rails than I had assumed. Where I live most of my neighbors are from India, who now have permanent residency visas, but first came here with H1b visas to work at Intel. Most of them have Masters or PHD’s in engineering, physics or material science. One could argue that such workers may be necessary to keep the US in the important and competitive world semiconductor game.
But if we are giving out H1B visas for immigrants to work at Walmart or Amazon then the program has been captured for nefarious purposes. I would imagine some of the listed companies like Tata consultancies are some kind of pass-thru employment agencies suppling workers to smaller companies but who knows.
What do you think about the BS generators? (ironic mode)
https://www.bullshitgenerator.com
😉
JMG, glad to hear it, on all three points!
I finished ‘The Shoggoth Concerto’ this morning, having portioned out the story so there would be exactly the right amount left to read in bed with a mug of tea, and it does look like Brecken and Sho have found a good place. I’m glad about that and look forward to their next adventure. As an aside, you’ve said your characters write themselves, but I kind of want to say to Brecken, ‘Eat your greens!’.
With the question about meditative dimensions of writing, I’m relieved you just said you don’t know and not ‘That’s a fine theme for a meditation’. This aspect of writing is something that has puzzled me for many years and I’ve never really settled on any answer. Sometimes when there’s a writer whose style I like, I can usually channel the style and write in it myself but how that works I can’t really say. Then you get the thing where you’re writing on a subject you feel strongly about and the emotions come through in the words, even though they might be short ones and you don’t use many of them. I’ve found Joe Haldeman to write this way, with brevity but the emotion comes through strongly. Orson Scott Card is similar. I find myself trying to be immersed in a story but also wondering ‘How do they do that?. I’m not expecting The Answer, just wanted to put it out there.
You have a laptop from before 2007 that still works? I’m impressed. Desktops hold up quite well unless the capacitors or clock batteries leak, but laptops generally don’t.
There were a lot of 32 bit windows installations on hardware that could run 64 bit software, but I believe you. There are 32 bit Linux versions around, but they are not the easy to install distributions.
@kevin #237
Circles 20 feet of more? I was musing on this and although I’ve not tried anything other than the thought experiment I did come up with a scheme (h/t Barnes Wallis) that is certainly cheap and might be practical as well. You would need a section of white circular drainpipe that could be stood upright at your circle’s center. Mounted on a plank if necessary. Also a straight two by four around 2 yards long (the longer the better). You would also need a T Square, a protractor and two cheap laser pointers. Ideally different colors. Both green and red are available. They cost just a few dollars these days, apparently they are popular with cats and their humans.
Using some 2 part epoxy mount one later pointer at the right end of the 2×4 using the T Square to ensure it is a 90 degrees. You’ll want to do this so that you can still access the switches and batteries. You might want to mark a vertical line on the wood at that end so that you have a consistent point of contact with the surface.
At the other end of the wood at a known distance (e.g. 6 feet) you mount the other laser pointer at an angle, using some poster putty or something similar (Blue Tack in the UK). You can work out the angle with some simple trig but if you want to avoid math altogether and you can place the right hand side of the wood at the right distance (the radius of your ultimate circle) the angle of the second laser pointer is simply that angle so that the two laser pointers converge on the drain pipe.
What you have constructed is a very big right angled triangle where the wood represents one of the lines connected to the right angle and the right angled laser pointer the other. The angled laser pointer is the hypotenuse.
To mark out your circle, mark the first point on the surface where your marker line meets the ground. Shift the wood left a few inches and tweak the setup until the two laser points converge on the surface of the drainpipe again. Mark the point.
You simply repeat the process until you have enough points on your surface to define the circle you are after. Laser pointers can have a range of several hundred feet so you can get quite a large right angled triangle out of this if you want although you’d probably need someone standing at the center watching to see if the dots had converged. You can work out how to move the wood depending on whether the color of the pointer at the right hand side of the wood is on the right hand side of the two points in which case you are too close. If the right hand dot is to the left of the left hand’s laser dot you are too far away.
Variations such as having both pointers at the same angle and the contact point halfway between them are also possible. You probably need to change a few details to get this to work under your circumstances but I’m fairly certain that an optical solution could be made to be quite accurate.
Happy nearly new year! I know you’re a proponent (and user) of rail travel. Say what you will about Biden, he and his administration were very good to Amtrak and passenger rail in general. Trump’s nominee for transportation secretary, on the other hand, has voted against every rail-related piece of legislation he’s encountered, even when Republican leadership asked him to vote for it. Do you think loss of or at least a tremendous curtailment of passenger rail is worth the gains elsewhere?
@JMG
It just occurred to me one reason the Russian Intel Agency did this report in 2018 is possibly because China threatened Russia by mentioning its 1.4 billion people to draw upon for a draft. I know Russia and China are still disputing certain borders as well as some river islands.
There’s also the alternate possibility Russia was curious to see how many men China could draft should they be able to convince it to enter the Ukraine war on Russia’s side since Jinping knows China is next if Russia loses.
Re: Siliconguy: “There are 32 bit Linux versions around, but they are not the easy to install distributions”
When is the last time that you installed Debian? The joke that Ubuntu is linux for people who can’t install Debian is almost 20 years old, you know.
bk.
Anonymous: #329
I just read about the incoming polar vortex, and noted some confusion regarding the temperatures. One map was labeled “effective temperature”, which I take to mean “wind chill”, but a comment next to the map (on X) said that it was “departure from mean temperature on that date”. No doubt, “-40F” is going to be cold! But if the typical temp for that part of the country is, say, 25F, it’s “merely” -15F. And, taking wind into account, it might be a balmy 0F actual temperature. Technical debate aside, though, it’s going to be dangerously cold for both people and infrastructure. (I should probably bring in the rest of my Brussels sprouts, which might have tolerated a normal cold snap.)
TemporaryReality: There’s much to love about its infrastructure, but there’s a kind of brittle attitude of complacent comfort in its residents that I can’t help but notice now that I’ve lived elsewhere (even just 10 miles away part of the time) the last 15 years. Boy are they The Good People.
I never interacted with folks there much. Just observed. Except one time, being a gardener then living in Colorado, but envying a gardener with big tomato plants in March, I asked her:
“When was your last frost?”
After some thought, “umm 5-6 years ago.”
I can believe you about the brittle complacency. If one attempts to be an enclave of the better in a time of cultural decay, that is an easy pit to fall into. Same if one is spiritually a bit more awake than the surroundings.
Bofur: ^ Few people know the story of how Maine was “in play” during the Revolutionary War – Britain wanted to call it “New Ireland” (to pair nicely with the existing New Scotland). I personally had an ancestor on the British side of this battle who was granted land in what is now Canada for his efforts.
Many of those involved in the famous Salem Witch Trials were refugees from the Maine section of Massachusetts (as it was then), where a war with the Indians went poorly at first for the settlers.
In his memory, here is a link to the famous “Crisis of Confidence” Speech which Jimmy Carter gave in 1979…
Where he speaks of human value no longer accruing what one does as to what one owns… and the emptiness of “stuff”. Where he speaks of the pessimism of people fearing for the first time that their children may be worse off than themselves, to the widening gap between expectation and experience.
https://www.613tube.com/watch?v=wy5U68FgZcQ
TemporaryReality, that was the other thing that appealed about Davis. Folks there told me their kids went everywhere they needed to go on their bikes. I was living in Boulder, Colorado, which was rated one of the best cities in the US for cycling, but no one who loved their children would have sent them farther than a block or two on their bikes.
I’ve visited Copenhagen many times over the years and love the bike culture there. Everybody goes everywhere that way. Even folks in business suits on their way to/from work.
I have sources on my Twitter feed who have quite varied takes on China. I make sure to include sources such as Gordon Chang, who are ideologically predisposed to see only the bad in the PRC. But I have heard nothing of the Menstruation Police and it seems contrary to the style of governance that I believe dominates there. Maybe in Mao’s day.
My best guess as to why China has so many empty apartment blocks is because they built far too many. After the 2008 global financial crisis, China could no longer export enough to keep up with the every-increasing production. China has for decades used the same economic model as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan: suppress consumption, feed the resulting funds into investment, then export the production what comes online because it can’t all be sold domestically (because of that suppressed consumption).
In the Japanese case, the US forced Japan to nearly double the value of the yen in 1985 and that cut off Japan’s export machine, so the powers that be started a real estate construction boom as a substitute. That bubble popped (Bubburu Hokai) and Japan has never fully recovered.
China has more tools in its economic tool chest, the example of Japan to learn from, and is able to makes decisions for the sake of China (as it defines that) rather than be forced to make decisions for the benefit of the US (as Japan does), so they stretched the real estate boom out far longer than economists thought possible. But that strategy is clearly past its best-by date. The new strategy is to resume exports by moving up-market into products China was not capable of producing 15 years ago. No one thinks that will work for long. (Another case of needing infinite growth in a finite world.) Even some of the Chinese government’s own folks are skeptical. But politically, the government has been unable so far to switch to a consumption-driven economy. None of the east Asian nations using this model have really been able to. (That is one of the background factors in the current political situation in South Korea and makes Taiwanese politics less flexible, less adaptable than it might otherwise be.)
The word for popcorn in Chinese is 爆米花. Literally, Exploding Rice {Grain?} Flower
By the way, and this is pure speculation on my own part, but I have to wonder if when the PRC leadership contemplates a consumption-driven economy, they look at the Western paragons and shudder.
I had the theory 40 years ago that the global economy is like an old-fashioned light house. The light moves around in a circle and lights up one section. The country being lit up looks very bright and everyone runs to imitate them (Japan in the 1980s, the US after, China now). But the lit-up country is not really brighter. It just happens to be where the light house is shining at the moment. And the light house keeps on turning….
Jessica, it’s been years since I last looked into that so I don’t have the references handy. My understanding is that serious depopulation is widely accepted to have been a serious issue in late Roman times.
Erika, “being decent might be back in style simply because we’ve run out of even scarier evil” may just be my new motto. You’re right, though: one of the things that a lot of people don’t get is that nastiness really is self-defeating. May all go well with you!
Emmanuel, okay, but what’s the adjective? We have “messianic” — would it be “Kali-anic,” or what?
Michael M, what I’m seeing is that the compromise has already been negotiated — the H1B program will continue but with tighter limits, minimum wage levels, and fees for businesses that use it. There are no rational actors, in the strict sense, in any context that includes human beings, but there are people who can pursue their goals and settle for the best they can get.
Michael G, all I know is that that’s not what the “system properties” doodad says! Like a lot of people who use computers, I’m not a tech geek. This is also why I haven’t gone to Linux; the people I know who are into Linux are all tech geeks, and have a level of knowledge about computers that I simply don’t have. I just want something that will run the very small number of programs I want to use, and require no fiddling or fussing.
KAN, thanks for this.
Michael G, I have yet to see good reason to think that the current fixation on outer planet ingresses is justified. I’m not saying it’s necessarily an invalid technique, but I simply haven’t seen justifications for it — and it’s far too reminiscent of sun-sign astrology for me to be comfortable with it. Most of these people don’t even cast a chart for the moment of ingress and relate it to houses cast from some terrestrial location! That’s why I rely on the older standby techniques of solar ingresses, eclipses, comets, and outer planet conjunctions to make my predictions.
Robert M, ouch. Yeah, it’s a mess.
Kevin, that’s a difficult question to answer, not because the answer’s intricate or obscure — it’s not — but because it’s so easily misunderstood. The observer itself, in the purest sense, is the synteresis or divine spark at the center of the being. Most of us, though, have a heck of a time differentiating that divine spark from its embodiments. The personality, for example, is just a set of habits of thought and feeling — an embodiment on what occultists call the astral plane. The “higher self” is another embodiment on a higher plane. We have a long, long way to do before we can experience ourselves as what we actually are — a divine spark clothed in embodiments or vestures on each of the planes of manifestation.
Chris, we had a remarkable wave hit Santa Cruz, CA and demolish a pier; I wonder if it was related. If those keep up, it may get interesting. Who knows, maybe drowned R’lyeh is surfacing, and sending waves out in all directions! 😉
Gardener, yep. If our global civilization follows the usual curve, we’ll bottom out at something below 500 million people worldwide in a few centuries. Just think of it — right now, there are more human beings alive than have ever been alive at one time before, and almost certainly more than will ever be alive at the same time again. This is the zenith of our species’ population curve, and you’re here to see it.
Edward, no, I’ve never looked into it. Anyone else?
Chuaquin, I think they’ve been in common use in our society since I was born. Most of them, however, are housed in human brains.
Bacon, like many people who’ve been raised in poverty, Brecken’s cooking style focuses on foods that are cheap, easy to store, and provide ample fuel for long workdays. Greens unfortunately don’t count. As for writing, I frankly try to avoid thinking too much about the process — I don’t want to foul things up!
Siliconguy, I bought this round of laptops at a computer repair store in a small city in the Appalachians, where older technology is standard because nobody can afford the new stuff. I doubt I’ll get anything so retro here in East Providence!
Roldy, in theory, Biden’s people were pro-rail. In practice, the service on the Amtrak routes I use has continued to degrade straight through the last four years. I’m not going to be happy if rail suffers further, but other issues ranked considerably higher on my list.
Panda, interesting. That’s quite plausible.
Scotlyn, thanks for this.
I went down the mercury fillings and other dental work rabbit hole. Yes, the entire time you have those fillings they will be releasing mercury. This will not cause health problems for everyone, some people may clear the poison out of their system, or in other ways have robust enough health to overcome it. Some people will be very effected by it. If you get plastic fillings, composite, you will have some microplastics in your system from it, maybe that will affect you. Pure ceramic onlays dont release problem particles. Pure ceramic crowns ( not ceramic over a crown base of base metal) are good, gold crowns with the gold made with noble metals is realy good and lasts longer than ceramic.
Messing with your teeth has consequences, you want the least intervention possible so these things are less of an issue. For example, last year I had a 25year old pure ceramic onlay crack. No dental work lasts forever. The mainstream dentist wanted to grind my tooth down alot to cover it with a full crown. I went back to my dentist I used years ago for a second opinion and had him do the work, as he just reconstructed onto what I had with some type of new less bothersome composite material. He does great reconstruction work, least intervention possible. So you do have choices, but you may need to seek them out. The less intervention dentist is not part of a plan, does not take insurance, a one dentist independent that does give discounts for cash. I had a pure ceramic crown pop off a rear molar 2 weeks ago, eating something sticky, it was 25 years old. He cleaned everything and reglued it on as I had it and I went right in.
I had all the mercury taken out of my mouth 25 years ago, with proper, careful technique to not poison me or the dentist. I would recommend not getting mercury fillings, I would recommend composite over the mercury fillings. When I removed my mercury fillings, I was suffering alot of health problems, I was allergic to alot of things, most metals, chemicals, scents, I obviously was not clearing out toxins or handling toxins as well as the average person. I also had high lead levels and did real western med chelation, so it was a part of a larger picture. It is a big intervention in itself to remove them, if you are considering that, but it can get another toxin you need to get out of your environment to heal, this you have to figure out. At least when they fail on their own, and they all fail eventually, do not replace with more mercury. And yes, having a more toxin free environment was helpful for me, and over time I became less sensitive to many things and better brain function and other healing. Still cant wear normal pierced earrings ( nickel, etc… and not the cheap surgical steel either), which is too bad, they sure are cute
If the Trump admin wants to pressure Canada to come up with something better than what we are presenting to the world now, that’s fine. Lets see what kind of response this trolling elicits…so far not much. Yes Canadian/British troops burned the White House down in 1814 and that was a long time ago. Perhaps foundational values will be rediscovered and we can restore a kind of national identity here. Otherwise, the cultural deconstruction initiated by the globalists is near complete. I guess the better option than becoming an EU reaource base is that is we get conquered, or more traditionally – saved from the evils of British rule. We have (almost willingly?) fallen under the spell of preference falsification. I appreciate American attention to this matter.
(Apologies for posting twice. I wanted correct preference ‘fabrication’ for ‘falsification’)
@ JMG “This is also why I haven’t gone to Linux; the people I know who are into Linux are all tech geeks”
*raises hand nerdily*
Linux is great and easy to use until it suddenly isn’t. When everything is running smoothly it is great but a single break can destroy both machine and sanity.
And thank you for the brief overview of the outer planet situation. Possibly much ado about nothing.
Hi John Michael,
Perhaps Cthulu is stirring in those green slimy vaults? 🙂 There was a suggestion that off shore winds along the entire coastline was driving the waves. It’s a long coastline.
Forgot to mention too, that ex President Carter may have suggested that ‘the party’s over’ when in fact the revellers didn’t wish to put an end to the festivities. The old timers used to say that a person has to take the good with the bad, and I believe that suggested balance sounds about right. To take a much biggerer good, means that the inevitable badderer will be horrid. (Thanks for that last word, Mr Longfellow!)
Did you know that deliberate wage theft down here has now become a criminal act for directors? Australian bosses on notice as ‘deliberate’ wage theft becomes a crime. Some of the wealthiest people in the country may have to pay more attention to their payroll systems. Hmm. You know, it’d never occur to me to pay someone correctly, and then ask for them to return some of that in the form of cash. My mind simply doesn’t work that way. There have been some awful examples of this practice going on. Brings to mind the profound question you raised years ago: If you had enough, how would you know?
These things are inevitably hard and expensive to prosecute, but I’m thinking that sooner or later a high profile example will be made, and that will probably be enough to bring the rest into line.
Cheers
Chris
Michael Martin #299
The article you linked to contains this line:
“The obvious way to reduce the number of undocumented non-citizens working in the U.S. is from the employer side, through administrative measures such as requiring employers to use E-Verify for real and cracking down on duplicate use of social security numbers. Trump actually did this for a little while late in his first term.”
I, too, have often wondered about this “obvious way”, which involves directly confronting the American employers benefitting from illegal immigration… I’m actually somewhat reassured to here that Trump has done some work at this end of the issue, hopefully this will not be forgotten. Otherwise, the dangers of being deported can actually act to reinforce the downward pressures on wages, as there is no disincentive to the employer to continue IMPORTING undocumented workers as needed, while each undocumented worker continues to be easily subject to intimidation, and strongly disincentivised to stand against the worsening of wages and conditions…
If you really want to safeguard wages and not just keep foreigners out for the sake of ethnical purity (say), the potential benefits to employers will have to be the main point of attack.
@JMG: “There are no rational actors, in the strict sense, in any context that includes human beings …”
Yes, I know! The concept of a “rational actor” is a construct of Game Theory, which assumes “rational decision making.” Those assumptions, in turn, assume we are dealing with “actors” in Westernized, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Some anthropologists have done studies in non-Western societies which show that Game Theory assumptions are not universally applicable.
I am also aware of Herbert Simon’s concept of “bounded rationality” where you have to make decisions based upon incomplete information.
I use the term “rational actor” to denote people who perform goal-seeking behavior based upon an effort to actually understand reality (as best they can), as opposed to assuming that it is somehow the responsibility of “reality” to fit their fantasies, ideologies and desires.
The last time I installed Debian was last year when I put Debian 10, the last 32 bit version, on a 2006 Mac Mini. That was a war requiring rEFIt and burning a DVD as the EFI implementation on the first generation of Intel Macs is broken. It does work, but the main reason to use Linux there was for the web browser, and that was stuck at Firefox 78.whatever.
Then I found a PaleMoon fork that does work on 10.6.8 and with that browser working there was no point of continuing further. It should be noted that the stock 64 bit Linux Mint installs from USB without issue on 2009 and newer Intel Mac minis.
@ Roldy & JMG regarding Amtrak.
A few years back I saw an article about “How they turned Amtrak around!”. It was written by and for economists so you can already tell what angle it took.
Essentially, they just favor the most popular routes and then let all the others rot. Yes, the MBA’s got in and they can make the line go up on a spreadsheet but destroy the actual physical asset at the same time. So while they may have a lot of government support, one wonders what over sight there is on the allocation within Amtrak.
@Siliconguy & JMG RE : Older laptops.
You probably can get those older laptops in Provenance but you will be dumpster diving for them or going to the local pawn shop and buying them for a few dollars. One of the best computers I ever had I found in an alley way. The most I have EVER spent on a computer is $134 (AUD) from a pawn shop, they saw it as rubbish, I saw it as a neat thing. It is still going almost 10 years later.
The issue coming up is that because gains in performance via shrinking the transistors started to really slow down about 15 years back, memory shrinking stopped entirely about a decade ago, most big companies are now trying to tie their new operating systems to newer hardware in the name of “security”. If they can no longer convince you of getting the newest thing through performance, they will try to force you to buy the new one by simply locking you out. Planned obsolescence in action, now powered by software in the name of innovation.
The other day I was talking to someone who bought a G4 Mac from 2004, they were shocked at how everything ran faster than what we have today. It was because the systems weren’t (as) bloated at that point. There has been the argument that apart from video playback and games, there is nothing those system should not be able to do for the average person. That is if those making the software actually took so care in it. Back in the 90’s early 2000’s when I used to do programming in lower level systems you get an appreciation for just how much work even chips of that era could do. There is a lot of potential in computer hardware that is not being used/burned away on stupid decisions. When you have coded on 10Mhz machines, 1Ghz machines feel like an infinite amount of compute and we are way beyond that point now. So far it has been squandered.
I have mentioned them before the Permacomputing folks that are looking to make computers that can last decades, even by just figuring out how to keep those older machines going. So long as the power supply, capacitors and storage are looked after, there is little reason why many of these things cannot go a lot further than they typically do. This will not apply to machine for the last decade as they have shrinked them to the point that they will wear out with use much quicker. They used to offer a 100,000 hour usage rating on chips (11.4 years), they don’t do that any more.
Regarding Musk, Ramaswamy, Theil et al .. e.i. The GOD$ of SillyCon Val ..
I liken them to the KRELL, those a i-like manifesations which eventually destroyed the former inhabitants of a certain forbidden planet..
just sayin
A thought just occurred to me – What if Professor Morphius was actually a terran H1b galactic visa holder, who.. not quite so shmart as he makes out to be, flips the wrong switches .. and twists the wrong dials ?? Humm..
@ Martin Back #339 –
Yes, that helps quite a bit. It’s along the right lines for my purposes. It would be even better to see the orientations of the front and back wheels relative to each other, and also relative to the wheelbase.
The “skate board” model might work best for stability, and for mounting a graphite lead or other drawing element. But for all I know the four-wheels configuration might complicate the process of determining the turning radius. Other things being equal, simpler is better.
A local bummer;
“MOSES LAKE — In a significant operational shift, REC Silicon ASA has announced the discontinuation of polysilicon production at its Moses Lake facility, while maintaining its silicon gas production equipment in a state ready for quick restarts. This move aligns with the company’s strategic focus on silicon gases, where it sees greater market strength and product differentiation.
The closure of the Moses Lake plant follows the earlier shutdown of its Butte, Montana facility in February 2024, marking a complete halt in the company’s polysilicon production. Challenges at the Moses Lake plant, including issues with impurity levels in production, have led to unsuccessful attempts to meet quality standards, resulting in an unsuccessful qualification test on December 17, 2024.”
https://www.yoursourceone.com/columbia_basin/breaking-moses-lake-rec-silicon-plant-to-cease-production/article_01bb0c8e-c70e-11ef-bc25-ebcdcad118ac.html
The interesting thing is that when I retired from there in 2018 they had no trouble meeting quality standards. Standards have obviously tightened up and the fluid bed reactors can’t meet it. The 2 mm beads have too much surface area for a given mass of silicon. When you are dealing with parts per billion contamination levels any contact with anything other than equally pure silicon results with contamination.
Part of the Butte plant is still running making silane gas for the semiconductor industry. The polysilicon part of the plant is what shutdown last February. Power costs are too high in Montana to use the old Siemens process which is notable for the merry way it makes the MW-Hr meter spin.
JMG and commentariat,
I’ve been observing international events closely and it really feels like the months of November and December have been particularly nasty for any and all political figures in power, not to mention the numerous incidents and catastrophes that have assailed the world (there have been no less than 4 major plane accidents this last week, for starters…). As far as politics go, let’s see: the failed attempt at martial law and subsequent impeachment of not only the (now former) president of South Korea, but also the incumbent president. Japan also had Fumio Kishida’s resignation and the rise of more populist figures in the parliamentary elections. The French and German governments have effectively collapsed. The attempt of a color revolution in Georgia, one that seemed suspiciously similar to the Maidan in Ukrained, failed spectacularly. In Romania, the government effectively canceled the elections due to dodgy claims of “Russian interference”, only it turned out that it was the government itself that had interfered with election campaigns. in Syria, we saw the fall of Assad in what was possibly the most unexpected turn of events this whole year. In Brazil, Lula almost died from a brain hemorrhage and the country is currently being the target of massive financial speculation efforts to try and drain the government of any legitimacy (did you know the Central Bank of Brazil has suffocated the country with interest rates so much that the federal government spent over BRL 900 billion in interest in the last 12 months?). To say nothing of Trump’s landslide victory and subsequent betrayal of his voter base over the H-1B visa issue.
I guess the point has been made. It’s like the universe is conspiring to try and shove a battering ram into the world in order to force some kind of change. It’s just bizarre to see so many malefic events happening in such a short span of time. It reminds me of what Lenin said about “a decade happening in a week” (paraphrasing). It’s hard not to feel like something is aligning to make all of this happen, and I am reminded of what JMG wrote before about the last eclipse… If it’s true that it’ll last until September 2030, then I suppose the 2020s will be a very “exciting” decade, but not necessarily in a “fun” way. 😜
I have two pretty random geology question. First off, you have many times talked about how over the next several centuries you expect the land mass from the Rocky Mountains to western Nebraska to become as dry as the Sahara. That got me wondering about places like the Bighorn National Forest. Its a section of mountains in eastern Wyoming that is east of the Rocky Mountains. It has some very tall peaks that are always covered in snow and feed rivers that create a lush forest in the middle of the rolling grasslands. What do you think will happen if those grasslands turn to desert? Will we get an 80 plus mile oasis in the middle of a massive desert? If so, that area is almost guaranteed to become a major kingdom. I could even see it become the centerpiece of trade in-between the Mississippi and the Rockies. Second off, what do you think will happen to the Mississippi? Will it dry up entirely, shrink considerably, or just hold the line with runoff from the great lakes? As you of course know, a lot of the future of North America depends on what our water does.
Hi all,
One last question.
I was wondering if anyone knows any good weird fiction or alternative science fiction publications. I have a satirical story I wrote that I want to try to submit somewhere, but I don’t think it would be a good fit at any of the big Sf&F publications.
The story isn’t really straight deindustrial science fiction. More a grotesque parody of the optimism of science fiction pseudo-dystopias of the sort found in cyberpunk so I’m not sure it would fit at New Maps either and I have a different story I’m working on that I want to submit there.
Thank you and cheers,
JZ
@ Chris “The country trains here are pretty nice. Being suspended 10,000m / 33,000ft above the sea level does not fill me with comfort. ”
I have forever hated flying, I have only done it because others essentially forced me to do it. All the news of Boeing’s issues doesn’t help either. “‘I’m Boeing to die” either via the planes or as a whistleblower. 😉
Also following on the Jimmy Carter saying the unspeakable, Bill Clinton once said that you don’t win an election on saying what you cannot do.It lost him an election.
Panda
I haven’t read the linked articles yet, but I am sceptible that the population could have dropped that much without being more widely noticed world wide. With all the modern methods of surveillance and spying as well as observations by travellers and trade figures, it would seem to have been more obvious to all and sundry. I can believe 800 million, but 5 or 6 would be pretty hard to conceal. It would seem that the population decline would be more like Japan’s or S. Korea’s. This is the first I have heard of it, which surprises me considering some of the sites I look at. Maybe western intelligence has concealed this information in order to justify the enormous defense budgets.
As to the draconian attempts to force people to marry and reproduce, I can believe it, though it seems a bit heavy handed; but then again, much that China does seems that way to me. Your observation about the bride price is interesting.
Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention: fascinating world we live in.
Stephen
JMG re: Kevin’s question about consciousness
I had to look up “synteresis” — I always enjoy when I’m introduced to an old term I don’t know, so thanks for that!
I’m wondering if you have any insight into the so-called “problem of other minds” — really the problem of other syntereses. Like everyone else, I’m confident that there are other people and things that are conscious. But every time I try to pin down why I believe that, let alone so confidently, I run into problems.
Certainly I don’t observe other consciousness — in a sense it’s the one thing I never can observe, even in principle. (This is why it’s not really the problem of other minds — I could in principle observe someone else’s thought, their perceptions, etc. through for example some form of telepathy. But I can’t observe their consciously witnessing it.)
Perhaps I inferred it inductively — other things behave as if conscious, so they are — but how do I know what conscious things behave like? I’m only working with a sample size of one here!
Abductive reasoning feels like a better match to what’s really going on in my head — it would be surprising if I were the only conscious entity, but less surprising for me to be one conscious entity among many. But is it really so surprising? From my viewpoint, my consciousness is actually guaranteed by a variant of the anthropic principle: if I were not conscious, I wouldn’t be asking myself these questions. So I don’t actually need other people to be conscious to explain my own consciousness — I don’t need an explanation of that at all.
Finally there’s the pragmatic argument: the belief that others are conscious is a better guide to action than the belief that they are not. I have no real argument against this, but like most raw appeals to pragmatism it’s not really a terribly satisfying answer.
Re opposite of messiah.
Etymologically, messiah derives from the Hebrew word mashiach meaning anointed. (google)
So how do you un-anoint someone? You use paint stripper.
The Hebrew word for strip is pashat (To strip off, to invade, to spread out).(biblehub.com)
Therefore, etymologically an anti-messiah would be a pashattah.
But the usual meaning of messiah is “a leader regarded as the saviour of a particular country, group, or cause.” (google)
The opposite would be a leader who leads a country, group, or cause to its doom.
There’s Hitler, but he also led Germany out of the doldrums which muddies his badness.
I can think of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Jim Jones of toxic Kool-Aid fame.
A piedpipah? A jimjonesah? Don’t like ’em.
I prefer ‘doomiah’ as the opposite of messiah, because the meaning is fairly obvious.
(None of the above is to be taken too seriously.)
@JMG re: Antonyms for Messianic:
Kalianic– Not bad! In a sentence: “Under the Kalianic leadership of Pol Pot, many were needlessly killed.”
Or in Yiddish IIRC, a _Schlemiel_ is a fool who accidentally causes trouble, (while a Schlimazel is someone to whom bad things always happen).
‘Schlemiel’ could be your word.– And it may be good to explore uses of ‘Anti-Schlemiel.’
as in, “Some say Trump is the Schlemiel that will bring down the USA–But he may really be The Anti-Schlemiel! Either way, we’re all Schlimazels now…”
Also ‘Destructor,’ from the Ghost Busters original movie.
Gozer the Gozerian: “Choose the form of the _Destructor_.”
In the movie, it was a colossal-sized Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man.
I’ll also add a coined word: “Mess-titanic.”
“Under the messtitianic leadership of Bush the 2nd, the US plunged into decades of war.”
Dangers of Mercury Fillings–
The general principle with absorbing metals: You need to link them to another molecule to make them available for absorption.
For example, Iron; If we could absorb Iron directly, you would only need to suck on a nail in case of iron anemia. Nail-sucking won’t work though. You have to link it to another molecule for the body to make use of it. So iron supplements in the store tell you they contain “Ferrous Sulfate” or “Ferrous Gluconate”, etc. The type of link and the other molecule make a difference too. “Ferrous Oxide” (2+ energy state) is the blackening you see in a seasoned frying pan, and you can absorb some of that when you cook in such a pan. “Ferric Oxide” (3+ energy state) is pretty useless as a dietary supplement.
The same applies to Mercury and many other toxic metals.
Mercury is fortunately very inert, to the point that the bright orange (and toxic) Mercuric Oxide that they used to put on backs of panes of glass to make mirrors will lose its oxygen over time, and become a heavy vapor.
Any mercury liquid will slowly vaporize in this manner. It can damage lungs brain and liver if the concentration is high enough, ie., if you work in a lab or a factory with large amounts of it.
The Dilemma of Mercury Amalgams
Dentists used to mix powdered silver and/or gold with liquid Mercury to make a pasty substance known as an Amalgam. It is an alloy of Mercury and silver (or gold) that can be made at room temperature, and is rather stable. Over time, your Amalgam fillings will slowly lose some of their Mercury. What’s left in the tooth has more and more silver content, over time. Chances are, about half of the vapor leaves you when you breathe out, particularly if you breathe out through your mouth. Some could be carried through the digestive tract if it is carried into you with food. If you breathe in through your mouth, particularly just after getting an Amalgam filling, some could go into the lungs.
Mercury is a little like Asbestos in an old house–
If it is stable, not disturbed, one option is to leave it alone. If you decide to have all of your Amalgam teeth drilled out and refilled with an epoxy, you will stir up the Mercury and may experience a spike in your mercury levels, depending on how many fillings we are talking about.
Do you have symptoms of heavy metal poisoning?
If you have pins and needles feelings that include numbness and pain in the extremities, all the time, it may be worth getting a heavy metal tox screen. People also get these effects from some hip replacement joints that release metal particles as they wear out.
Hope that’s helpful!
Hey JMG and commentariat
I thought that you would be interested in two links I have found which may be of value or interest.
First one is a French website that has digitised the famous photographic archive of Albert Kahn, who photographed people all over the world during the 1930’s.
https://collections.albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.fr/
Also, Lost art press now has their book about the use and construction of low workbenches, “Ingenious mechanics”, available as a free download.
https://blog.lostartpress.com/2024/12/27/download-ingenious-mechanicks-for-free-today-and-always/
That’s interesting what you say about cheap food and what Brecken cooks. It shows the differences between where I am and where Brecken is. As a student in the UK I was as poor as a church mouse and in those days the go-to foods would have been more along the lines of potatoes, cabbage and other seasonal vegetables, which would have been bought fresh rather than stored. Vast amount of lentil and carrot stew were eaten. Anything with cheese in it was generally too expensive.
‘Eat your greens’ is a running joke in the UK, used by frustrated mothers for decades. I’m not good at making jokes.
Anyway, I appreciate now why Brecken eats mac and cheese 🙂
OK, John, I agree about BS generators…
I hope you and the kommentariat have a Happy New Year!
Hi JMG, if I read the Capricorn Ingress chart correctly, it has the possibility of a seismic event near the beginning of its duration. With that in mind, a Sun Tzu quote has been at the forefront of my mind.
An evil enemy will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.
Obviously it’s in relation to the outgoing party in the White House and the very dark forces behind it. My question is, are they stupid enough to destroy the nation to keep at the reins of power, or maybe even closer to the truth, are they so enfeebled by their loss in November that they’re too incompetent to stop the broader changes set in motion? Or maybe, some combination of both?
Adjectives for the opposite olif Messianic–
We’re looking for adjectives to describe The Changer of the Pacific Northwest Myth;
Why not combine ‘Schlamiel’ with ‘Chameleonic’ to form the adjective
‘Schlameileonic?’
Some say Trump brings a National Tonic,
While the Left says, ‘No no– He’s more Chthonic.’
Schlimozel? Schlamiel?
I don’t know how you feel
But to me, Trump is Schlamieleonic…
Speaking of China threatening it’s neighbors here’s a headline from Zerohedge today (Dec 31) about what satellite imagery is showing about China’s border dispute with India. This is why I wondered earlier if history shows this is a typical response by a hegemonic power when it only sees decline staring it in the face because its people refuse to have babies.
I’ve read Jinping’s faction in the CCP is the Chinese equivalent to the Bush-Cheney Neocon warmongers. The Jinping faction is very pro-in-your-in-face with military threats and use compared to all the other CCP factions from what I’ve read.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/satellite-images-show-rapid-chinese-build-disputed-border-area
“Second off, what do you think will happen to the Mississippi?”
The Great Lakes do not drain to the Mississippi. They drain over Niagara Falls.
Most of the Mississippi’s water comes from East of the river. The Missouri River which does come from the west could easily dry up, at least seasonally.
You could look at the Humboldt River in Nevada for an example of what could happen. That river starts in the Ruby Mountains near Elko, goes west past Winnemucca, then south past Lovelock and eventually ends at the Humboldt Sink. And by end I mean end, it sinks into the sand and gravel.
Also in the area, the Stillwater river comes out of the Sierra Nevada, runs into a marsh and vanishes. The Walker River comes out of the Sierra Nevada runs into the Walker Lake , and evaporates. None of those get to the ocean.
To All,
Happy ‘Catch-up with the Sun’ day!
‘;]
ReL Siliconguy #369
Installing Linux on Apple hardware is almost always a mess. Been there, done that..
But whre does it say Debian 10 was the last 32 bit version? Debian’s download page for version 12 (current stable) has downloads for 32 bit machines.
bk.
Ian, I hope that Canada can squeak through the current mess without being wholly devoured by Europe. Any nation that can produce Gordon Lightfoot deserves a better fate.
Michael, exactly. If somebody can come up with a Linux release for non-nerds — simple, stable, and easy to recover from when it bluescreens — I’ll be first in line.
Chris, Cthulhu rising from the deeps and flooding the world with eldritch madness would be a decided improvement on the current situation, so here’s hoping. As for wage theft, good to hear. It’s theoretically a crime here in the US, but under our two-tier justice system that law is rarely enforced, and never against the big corporations and privileged people who do most of it.
Michael M, duly noted. I tend to bristle at the phrase, because so many people think, or at least talk, as though such mythical beasts as rational actors actually existed.
Siliconguy, at what point do the demands of the technology exceed our capacity to meet them?
Thomas, I’ve been watching all this with a raised eyebrow as well. It’s been a wild ride!
Stephen, (1) it depends on whether those mountains still remain snowcapped. If the climate changes as I expect, they won’t, and they’ll become something like the Ahaggar and Tibesti mountain ranges in the Sahara:
(2) Judging from prehistory, the Mississippi will come to resemble the Missouri or the Platte — as the old saying goes, “too thin to plow, too thick to drink” — while the Ohio basin will be the furthest west basin that has really good prospects for agriculture.
John Z, I wish I did. I have stories I’d like to place with a magazine but I don’t know of one that’s open to anything as far from the dogmatic SF mainstream as I like to go.
Slithy, as Gödel showed us, there are many true statements that cannot be proven by any form of logic. The existence of other minds is one of these. Schopenhauer went further than that in On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and argued that consciousness as such is not subject to the principle of sufficient reason and thus cannot be proved or disproved by any logical means. In trying to be conscious of consciousness we are up against the hard limits of human cognition, and all we have are raw intuitions.
Martin, hmm! I like peshattah — not least because the opposite of messianism would be peshattism, which sounds seriously nasty.
J.L.Mc12, thanks for both of these.
Bacon, interesting. We’ve got the advantage here in the US of vast amounts of cattle country, and so much dairy production that the government has price supports. Cheese is cheap here. (Much of it’s of vile quality, but it’s cheap.) Corn is also crazy abundant, and so corn products such as grits and polenta are very cheap. So Brecken can keep Sho well supplied with cheese polenta on a very modest budget!
Jeff, it’s entertaining, in a bleak sort of way, to watch the last days of the Biden regime. Jill Biden, who is clearly the acting president, is just as clearly livid with rage that Joe was shoved aside the way he was, and will do whatever she can to extend a middle finger at the Obama-Pelosi faction while still shoveling as much money as possible into the Ukraine money-laundering machine. The Obama-Pelosi faction is trying to undercut the incoming administration but has few levers left. Trump has sidestepped most of the pitfalls by paying for the transition himself and treating the federal bureaucracy as a national security risk, and he’s also got a lot of the rank and file of law enforcement on his side — the number of sheriffs who’ve already told their notional bosses to get stuffed and announced that they will cooperate with Trump’s deportation program is just one measure of this. So my guess is we’ll see flailing, floundering, and then quite possibly a significant number of leading Democrats fleeing the country just before Trump takes power.
Panda, yes, I saw that. I hope the Chinese don’t do anything really stupid.
Zero Hedge has published a list of the MAGA agenda. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/maga-wishlist
I agree with #s 3, 5 and 20. About 20, I agree that Mr. Soros, along with others of his social class, is a malign influence on our polity.
About #19, the problem with an automatic Death Penalty is that the temptation to manipulate a system to take out one’s enemies is simply too great. We already have seen far too many persons released from Death Row following discovery of evidence proving their innocence. Furthermore, I don’t like my government being used for someone else’s private revenge.
I also emphatically do not agree that right to filibuster belongs in the Constitution.
Oh, and the no questions asked support for Israel, more than one item, tells us all we need to know about who is financing this faction, or at least the public face of it. So much for no more overseas wars.
What I find most interesting about this list is what it doesn’t address. Nary a word about farm policy, environment–at least they are not calling for selling off national parks–or winding down the over seas bases. No mention of a peace policy.
I insist it is not “leftist”, much less “communist” not to want to live in a toxic chemical stew. I think public policy should be crafted for the benefit of all, not to feed to hatreds and obsessions of a particular faction and I already know that the “Left” is guilty of this as well.
@Slithy Toves (#378) and JMG(#388) in reply:
Alternatively, one can experience (universal) consciousness by what might be called “direct perception,” that is, perception of reality that lies outside one’s own body which is not mediated by any of one’s bodily senses or by any activity of one’s mind.
“Direct perception” seems to me to be a real thing, for I experienced it myself for several hours on two separate occasions not quite 70 years ago; and my hours of direct perception back then included (but was not limited to) direct perception of universal consciousness. It was perceived as wholly independent of any limitations of time and space, of matter and energy. So it matters not, at least to me, whether one can prove the existence of universal consciousness by any indirect means such as logic or sense-perception. Somewhat like Gödel, I think it is one of those things than can never be proven to exist, but only experienced as real and true.
Alas! I know of no way to deliberately and reliably induce direct perception by any means whatever. However, it can come to a person out of nowhere as a sort of free gift.
As an Archdruid, I was curious if you were aware of Julian Jaynes theory of the “bicameral mind” and how it broke down around the time of the Late Bronze Age Collapse:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/
>as Gödel showed us, there are many true statements that cannot be proven by any form of logic
I wouldn’t say many. He pointed to a specific example of one in particular. There are others out there but we don’t know where they are. If there were many of them, math would be abandoned for something else. Godel showed us hard limits to what math can and can’t do.
I think Feynman said something about the basis of reality being ultimately non-mathematical. I tend to agree with that instinct.
Here is a narrative that I came up with after contemplating many of the issues I see address here recently:
As we approach a time of resource depletion and societal transformation, we are witnessing a shift in the dynamics of power and control, epitomized by the age-old metaphor of the wolf, sheep, and shepherd. Historically, societies have relied on hierarchical structures, with the shepherds—those in power—managing the flock of sheep, who represent the passive masses. The sheep are kept docile through belief systems like Christianity, a religion well-suited for the Age of Pisces. Christianity’s emphasis on faith, sacrifice, and submission reinforced the shepherd’s authority, providing a comforting narrative that kept the flock obedient and focused on an afterlife rather than immediate survival.
However, as resources dwindle and the systems built to sustain this hierarchical structure falter, we are transitioning from an age of bureaucrats—those who manage the flow of resources through centralized control—to an age of entrepreneurs and individuals who build and create. This shift reflects a move from abstract power to active power, as those who can produce and innovate will become the true sources of influence in a resource-constrained world.
In this new age, the dynamics of the wolf, sheep, and shepherd may evolve. The wolves—those individuals and groups who are independent, innovative, and resourceful—will thrive, as they are better equipped to adapt and survive. The sheep, on the other hand, will struggle to cope with the loss of the shepherd’s support. The shepherds, or bureaucrats, once the gatekeepers of resources, may find their authority weakening as the wolves—empowered by entrepreneurial activity and individual autonomy—assert their control over what remains of the world’s resources.
The age of Aquarius, with its emphasis on innovation, individuality, and collective consciousness, further complicates this dynamic. The Aquarian spirit seeks to decentralize power, rejecting traditional hierarchies and authoritarian structures. In the coming era, spirituality and religion may evolve away from the institutionalized structures of the past, as individuals seek more personal, decentralized paths to understanding and survival. The focus will shift from submitting to an external authority (the shepherd) to empowering oneself and the collective (the wolves) to navigate a world of diminishing resources.
In the face of resource depletion, the wolves who can innovate, adapt, and build new systems of survival will lead the way, while the sheep—who have relied on external systems of control—will face an increasingly uncertain future. This marks the end of the shepherd’s reign and the rise of a new era, where power is decentralized, and survival depends on the strength of the individual and the ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world.
———————————-
Let me know what you think.
>Linux is great and easy to use until it suddenly isn’t.
They’ve made it less and less likely you’ll need to drop down to the shell like it’s 1979 but you will inevitably at some point have to put on the bell bottoms, play the disco and /bin/sh to get it solved or fixed. At least the terminal has colors now, instead of being green on black. Progress, I tell you, progress.
My guess is by mid-century, there will be a linux where you won’t need to touch the command line for anything, it will self-heal using AI or something. Or maybe it’ll be designed right in the first place? We may never know. Linux is sort of like the tides, it comes in slow but the advances stick around.
JMG said: “If somebody can come up with a Linux release for non-nerds — simple, stable, and easy to recover from when it bluescreens — I’ll be first in line”
These have been available for many years now: many Linux users are non-nerds, it’s just that the really vocal ones are of the nerdy variety 🙂
bk.
I’m late to the party but if anyone is still here I think The Marker Ticker’s Karl Denninger’s latest entry on Jimmy Carter, the man and the president, is a worthwhile read:
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=4194326
He’s the first president I remember, being a young British child of the 70s and he seemed like an ok guy to my young eyes. As we go into the next little while in 2025 this reflection on the past certainly adds extra contrast.
Happy New Year to all here.
Jay Pine
“Ian, I hope that Canada can squeak through the current mess without being wholly devoured by Europe. Any
nation that can produce Gordon Lightfoot deserves a better fate.”
alanis morrissette, conor mcdavid, annik foreman*
(*not famous, just cool)
Panda et al
An interesting bit of trivia about the Cocescus that Xi Jinping might want to bear in mind: at the end of the revolution in the 1990s they were both sentenced to death. An army battalion (500 men) was asked to provide two volunteers to shoot them. The entire battalion raised their hands. After the execution the death penalty was then banned in Romania
Stephen
As far as I know, China has not attacked any other country militarily since its war with Vietnam around 1980. Here are some countries that have bombed or invaded other countries in recent years: Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, Russia, Ukraine (arguably US and NATO too), Yemen, France, the UK, Turkey, Pakistan, India (and India isn’t listed for Kashmir for purely technical reasons), Georgia (attack on a de facto separate country that is de jure part of Georgia), Armenia, Azerbaijan., Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea.
China and India have had border skirmishes in which some folks have died. Who attacked whom or if that is even an intelligent way to frame the matter, I can not determine. I don’t trust either side’s version. By all accounts, all of these affairs combined don’t equal a good gang war in a major US city.
China has been the subject of a propaganda campaign in the West that seems designed to make the general population amenable to hostility with China and possibly outright war. Even a trade war will create suffering in the West that rulers will want the population hating China enough to accept. If one takes that propaganda as true, then one is brought into support for exactly the folks that most everyone here, right or left, agrees are no friends of us or of humanity.
This doesn’t make China an angel, but it does mean that a serious supply of salt is required.
Xi Jinping is nowhere near as aggressive in attitude or speech as US presidents, What is different since he took power is that he has dropped the previous super-humble stance of “we’re just a poor 3rd world country” and adopted an attitude more in keeping with the reality of China’s rise in the world. I myself think that he made that shift a few years earlier than would have been optimum, but once Hilary and Obama decided to “pivot to Asia”, the die was cast in any case. Of course, when XI made that shift, he didn’t have me in mind but most likely the domestic audience.
Moving elsewhere, North Korea did not really need nukes. Seoul is so close to the border that North Korea could wipe out half of South Korea’s economy in a few hours using artillery and now drones. And the North Korean troops have had 70 years to dig in. Though the nukes are useful to keeping anyone farther away at bay.
By the way, the second official impeached in South Korea just now was the Prime Minister and acting president. He was impeached for impeding the process of impeaching the president himself. Under South Korea’s constitution (US-written, one would guess), the South Korean supreme court has to confirm the president’s impeachment and there are currently empty seats on the court making that difficult.
I just finished The King in Orange.
First off, nice work. I was quite pleased with it. And, despite seeing most of it here before, I was still surprised by a few things. I especially liked the notes at the end. Thank you.
I’m curious, since it was written before the 2024 election, if Trump still looks like the changer to you. On the one hand, losing in 2020, two impeachment attempts, two (or more) assassination attempts, a bunch of lawfare, and being literally Hitler didn’t seem to pose any obstacle to this round. But, on the other hand, there didn’t seem to be any ‘gets,’ magic frogs, or strange synchronicities. Though, he did magically dodge hail of bullets and his opposition did seem to be hampered or restrained to an unusual degree. Again, just curious.
On a more secular and accessible note, the H1B visa debate that just transpired. Do you read that as a confirmation that the magical state has lost its power? The Overton Window has shifted from the values of of illegal immigration to the interest of legal immigration and the debate took place in a public forum (X/Twitter) rather than a scripted narrative handed down through the MSM. I would say that such a debate would have been strictly verboten a year ago.
As to Debian and 32 bit Macs,
https://wiki.debian.org/MacMiniIntel
The special Mac only boot disk listed in the Macmini 1,1 section only existed is 103 when I was looking. So that is what I used.
The 2012 and 2014 minis booted up from USB Linux installers very well and installed without issue. A 2010 Mac Pro put up a bit of a fight due to the old Nvidia card, but I did fine the magical incantation to coerce that into compliance as well. (DRM mode =1, where DRM is not digital rights management.)
Mary, yeah, this shopping list comes out of one of the dozen or so factions that’s trying to spin Trump’s victory to its own benefit.
Robert M, thanks for this. Interestingly, Schopenhauer’s philosophy leaves ample room for that sort of direct perception — but it also points out that however convincing it may be for the person who experiences it, it’s not a source of logical proof. (The perennial problem of the validity of gnosis rears its head here once again.)
David R, I read it when it first came out in the 1970s. Like most theories of the evolution of consciousness, it goes out of its way not to notice (or deal with) the evidence that the changes it chronicles went the other way at various points in history — for example, during the transition from the late Roman world to early medieval Europe.
Other Owen, as I recall, Gödel proved that there was an infinite number of such statements in relation to any logical system. No, that doesn’t require the abandonment of math, because math is a self-contained system of abstractions; any logical system can be complete in itself, even though there are many true statements outside its reach.
Clark, it’s a plausible theory. The one potential weakness is that the wolves of one era very often turn into the shepherds of the next; it remains to be seen whether or not this will happen to the current crop of wolves.
BK, nobody yet has recommended one to me. It’s always the sort of thing I’ve heard here — yeah, Linux is great, but sooner or later you have to get under the hood and start monkeying with it.
Jay, thanks for this.
Jessica, I simply noted the one I like. As for China, er, I think you’re forgetting the repeated hostilities on the China-India border, in which China has been as often the aggressor as not.
Team10tim, the 2024 election didn’t have anything like the level of high strangeness we saw in 2016, but it had its weirdnesses. Trump’s capacity to dodge bullets was one of those, but far more interesting to me was the way the Democrats repeatedly shot themselves through all four cheeks at once. It wasn’t just that they were hampered or restrained, it’s that everything they did turned against them. It looked to me as though they were under a curse — possibly blowback from all that evil magic done on their behalf, possibly something stranger. “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make stupid…” You’re right that the Overton Window has gone skidding out of elite control over the immigration issue and many others. It’s going to be interesting to watch.
Other Owen 396: ” Godel showed us hard limits to what math can and can’t do.”
As I recall, Godel’s Theorem applied specifically to formal systems of mathematical logic, proving that they could not be both consistent and complete. It was either one or the other. But trying to understand the proof was above my paygrade. It involved self-referential strings of logic looping back on themselves, I seem to recall. However, I, like you, question JMG’s generalization.
@team10tim For the little that it is probably worth here’s my IMO take on your “Again, just curious” query in comment #404. I think we just experienced a shift in the “powers, principalities, dominions” realm. Ephesians 6:12 in the New Testament is a reference to this aspect of reality. Or to put it another way the Archangel Michael did some behind the scenes take down work on some bad guys. Anyway that is how I understand the recent shift from the perspective of my own spiritual system and practices
And I think it was a response to an ocean of prayer and invocation of angelic help. We will see how it goes and I am hoping for somewhat of a reprieve and revitalization, but not anticipating the gates to an earthly utopia to open.
CLARK re #397:
As we approach a time of resource depletion and societal transformation, we are witnessing a shift in the dynamics of power and control, epitomized by the age-old metaphor of the wolf, sheep, and shepherd. Historically, societies have relied on hierarchical structures, with the shepherds—those in power—managing the flock of sheep, who represent the passive masses. The sheep are kept docile through belief systems like Christianity, a religion well-suited for the Age of Pisces. Christianity’s emphasis on faith, sacrifice, and submission reinforced the shepherd’s authority, providing a comforting narrative that kept the flock obedient and focused on an afterlife rather than immediate survival.
“as resources dwindle and the systems built to sustain this hierarchical structure falter, we are transitioning from an age of bureaucrats…to an age of entrepreneurs and individuals who build and create. This shift reflects a move from abstract power to active power, as those who can produce and innovate will become the true sources of influence in a resource-constrained world….
“In the face of resource depletion, the wolves who can innovate, adapt, and build new systems of survival will lead the way, while the sheep—who have relied on external systems of control—will face an increasingly uncertain future. This marks the end of the shepherd’s reign and the rise of a new era, where power is decentralized, and survival depends on the strength of the individual and the ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world.
“Let me know what you think.”
——-
i was about to come back to write an update on my ideas as i search for a creative way to craft a CREATIVE living as a weirdo artist. If Papa could do it, it can be figured out in other areas of life with enough creativity. i think.
the reason i’m kinda fine staying here is because i’ve already been through horrors and in hindsight i learned lessons others don’t even know exist. so how do i use seeing from the low to my advantage without exploiting others’ weaknesses? I have to get my God straight or it’s all raspberry jam from here on out.
i’ve done that and unwittingly fed this woke stuff just by my presence and the college tours i was on was a preview of what eventually vomited forth across the west. i hadn’t seen where it was going as i was too busy being their step n’ fetchit token, in order to make my cheap rent.
i see my sister and mother appear to have financially won but as Scotlyn pointed out, they have no love, they got nada. that’s why i put “Everything” in capital letters. i would’ve added the trademark symbol if i’d known how.
so reading that article on netflex and tech world’s remaking of the individual star into mash, slurry as the author, Will Tavlin [FASCINATING horrifying but most important article, by the way]–
by the way, there’s a lot of new hucksters popping up now that Naomi Wolf has made it acceptable to have seen ghosts. they read like AI culling material from here… a little something each person has said to hook you into “i’m not alone!” but then you’ve gotta subscribe to read more.
if you were really woo woo, you’d do whatever you could to find your people you wouldn’t charge at “hello.”
—
but we’ve gotta make livings right?
i’ve decided that if in the arts– meaning fine arts to commercial arts like Adbusters— those of us who study the Art of the Pitch a la Edward Bernays…
we can flip it.
and that’s what i’m trying to do. my question:
how do you truly get beyond the most superficial of mass fandom? if tech has taken hollywood’s star system and bypassed the casting couch to make even the audience meat, then who’s laughing now or anywhere?
ew.
this is the inherent weakness of the tech business destruction model: you kill all your hookers and you’re left with leaky blow up dolls.
the last evil one laughing in a wasteland world isn’t to be honored envied emulated or rewarded and yet that’s what’s a great ending.
this is a long way around of saying that i think you’re right because even though i’ve royally had my behind handed to me by this Devouring Mother play book of rules and reasons, it cannot last because they are psychopathic and brittle. weak. because they can destroy things but they can not create and if you truly try a new way, they jam up and don’t know what to do.
i’ve seen that in a couple of instances where i haven’t done what’s expected. it throws them off.
and yes, when people are human again and blood courses through their veins and they’ve suffered, they SEE me. we find EACH OTHER.
so it doesn’t pay to “behave” to blend in because then i won’t find my PEOPLE.
i think that even though my sister seems to have inherited all the stuff, she is empty and cannot function on her own and deal with her own failings so there is no …endeavoring… just accumulating. and it’s forever empty and bitter.
so they will continue to bleed people and/or the system but they’re like dying ticks. their emotions will crush them as i see it.
so if i can learn the art of JUJITSU in dealing with these types, then maybe i have a new tool or “weapon” i can share with the world to better neutralize the very ones who’ve made air the color we think it is.
learning a new way of seeing involves time to acclimate to the levels so you don’t get the bends and back off. there hasn’t been SUPPORT for such change on a huge scale until now, YES because of the internet.
but what happens in the real you can seep into the internet as has happened here on this very site. I’ve watched it. i recognized it when James first told me to read something from The Archdruid long ago.
it’s hard to shift. it’s all an adventure now. anything solid takes thinking much thought and most do not think but FOLLOW. i underestimated how much the human being is ruled by momentary passing FASHION. those purple mollusks know, baby seals say hell yeah, and those stuffed birds on hats and lampshades made of human skin.
yeah, Papa. i wish we’d get the screaming and horror over already about our own inner dark sides, then we could stop being Such Good People and making every one and every thing’s life absolute HELL.
so i’m going to use Scotlyn’s reminder that connection is one on one, and since the internet is generalized subscription models, i’m going to start doing some sort of illustrated xeroxed zines that i send via the u.s. postal mail all over the world.
just to remind you of the miracle of personal MAIL.
i’ll make you crave corded landlines with stretched out spirals even more than you already do NOW!
so yes. some author already said liberalism’s success was all this whining and complaining.
erika
Under computer related oopsies,
Intel, the 56-year-old chipmaker co-founded by industry pioneers Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce and legendary investor Arthur Rock, had its worst year since going public in 1971, losing 61% of its value.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/31/silicon-valley-turn-of-fortune-intel-worst-year-broadcom-record-gain.html
The fine article blames lack of AI hardware and neglects to mention the self-immolating top of the line CPUs Intel built in the quest for absolute supremacy in the benchmark race.