This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.
First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.
Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their follow-up comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here.
*****
Before we go on, however, I’m delighted to announce a new book of mine that’s just become available. It’s my first translation in a little while, and an important one: John Dee’s first serious occult work, Propaedeumata Aphoristica — a typically cryptic title that I’ve translated Aphorisms on Astrology and Magic. It’s Dee’s own introduction, in 220 short aphorisms, to classic Renaissance astrological magic. Dee draws on the ray theory of al-Kindi and much more to explain, from the point of view of one of Elizabethan England’s greatest minds, how astrology works and how to use it in magical practice. This is a limited edition from Azoth Press, the same company that did The Dolmen Arch and On the Shadows of the Ideas, and it’s available in two forms: the ordinarily gorgeous leatherbound edition with red and black lettering and a ribbon down the middle, which you can order here, and the insanely gorgeous deluxe boxed version with the Monas Hieroglyphica inlaid in metal on the cover, which you can order here. My guess is that these are going to sell out pretty quickly, for whatever that’s worth. (And, yes, this will be followed in due time by a new translation and commentary on Dee’s magnum opus, the Monas Hieroglyphica itself, which has been very badly misunderstood by past scholars.)
With that said, have at it!
Dear Mr. Greer,
I have been reading your classic book Monsters lately and have greatly enjoyed it. One particular statement in the book got me more curious, though. When you mentioned that the entities which appear in dreams are from the astral realm and therefore real in a certain sense though not as physical beings, that got me wondering about recurring dreams. There are several recurring dreams I’ve had over a number of years in which the same people etc. reappear again and again in similar scenarios (i.e., the same unresolved problem) but with certain details such as location etc. changed from dream to dream. Do you have any theories (like the ones offered in your Monsters book etc.) about why recurring dreams of this sort keep appearing or what these “people” who keep appearing the dreams might be?
In past open posts, there’s been a lot of discussion about Europe potentially becoming Muslim in the upcoming decades and centuries.
What about parts of America potentially becoming Muslim in the upcoming decades and centuries? Right now, for example, there is an increasing population of Muslims in places like Minnesota.
Who do you think was behind the attacks of 9/11 on the USA?
I’ve just finished reading two works by Sinclair Lewis (Main Street and Babbitt), and I was wondering what your opinion is of his writing. I’d be very interested to hear if you have any thoughts about his writing style, his themes, and especially his portrayal of fraternal lodges and their members.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-27/fascism-and-the-future-part-three-weimar-america/
Since it has now been over ten years since you wrote one of my favourite articles of yours, I was curious about where we might be in the Fred Halliot timeline as of 2025 in that reality.
I was also thinking, do you think future historians may consider the 1980s to be the decade when both of the superpowers lost the Cold War in a way. After all, the ascendency of the American superpower arguably began during the First World War when it went from a debtor nation to a creditor nation (largely thanks to the money owed to it by the Old World powers). In the 1980s, the United States rapidly went from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11293-020-09695-x
While Russia (the biggest successful state of the USSR) defaulted on its debt in 1998, the position of the United States has not improved. Meanwhile, the world’s biggest creditor nations are Germany, Japan,….and China.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/international-business/japan-loses-position-as-worlds-largest-creditor-nation-as-germany-claims-title-after-34-years/articleshow/121442525.cms#:~:text=In%20a%20historic%20shift%2C%20Germany,top%20with%20%C2%A5569.7%20trillion.
JMG, I have been meaning to tell you that there is someone named Dr. K at HealthyGamerGG on youtube who is a positive voice for young men. He is a psychiatrist who specializes in video game addiction and the incel community, helping men pick themselves up and do something different with their life. He’s Indian-American and studied in India to become a monk for several years before returning to the US. Obviously you don’t do youtube, and he’s a psychiatrist, but I thought I would mention him because I’ve benefited from his videos and there might be others with young men in their lives who might be interested. Thanks.
Hi JMG,
Always a fan of your content!
I’ve been listening to very entertaining, but also incredulous, podcasts. One makes claims about ancient occult bloodlines that currently control everything. A claim made in this podcast is that there are local Catholic churches in the southwest that have statues of Mary (pretty typical for a Catholic church!), but in these instances, they are actually disguised statues to some other diety/entity. The name Echidna was used, I believe. So unwitting parishioners are actually strengthening this entity when they think they are making prayers to Mary. My question is, from an occult framework, would this even work? Can people be duped into serving an entity outside of their intention? Or is it salacious conspiracy theater?
The Trump Administration has apparently referred its case against the old Obama Administration for ginning up the Russiagate scandal with false intelligence to the Justice Department for legal prosecution. Do you see this amounting to anything consequential?
Punk rock is a way of life for some of us and has much to offer people interested reskilling for an analog life. As such one of the great manuals on how to do so is embodied in Michael Azerrad’s 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the Independent Underground 1981-1991. The book features 13 bands and shows how they got it done independently in the days before the internet. As Azerrad says “they were frankly entrepreneurial.” From starting their own labels, booking their own shows, linking up a network of venues across the country for touring, running their own press in terms of zines where people wrote about the music, it shows just how economical they were in creating their own culture. Here is an article I wrote looking at his book and three of the bands in it to draw lessons from what they learned. File under Down Home Punk. (P.S.: John… I think this book could potentially be good subconscious background fodder for you as you get into the garage music scene in Lower Adocentyn.)
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/our-band-could-be-your-life-part-i
Also of potential interest to people here is my review of Anthony Galluzzo’s book Against The Vortex: Zardoz, and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today.
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/zardoz-critical-aquarians-and-degrowth-utopias
One of my favorite things about this little volume is how Galluzzo coined a retroactive term for a group of thinkers he dubs the Critical Aquarians: people like Norman O. Brown, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ivan Illich, and others. He also critiques the direction Stewart Brand headed… and he looks at the prospects for degrowth that were being talked about in some of these Critical Aquarian circles all through the lens of the campy/brilliant movie Zardoz starring Sean Connery in a big red diaper. In the end his book is a celebration of limits, of death, of the need to decelerate and an alternatives to utopian ideas of fully automated luxury communism/capitalism.
Hi Everybody,
JMG, what a delightful book – thank you! To continue on the topic of astrology, someone recommended on one of your blogs the books by Sue Tompkins. Thank you to this person! I’m reading Aspects in Astrology – it’s a rare gem.
Switching the subject, I’m sure many of you saw this article:
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/brace-soaring-electricity-bills-biggest-us-power-grid-sets-power-costs-record-high-feed
It discusses soaring electricity prices and offers a binary: AI or AC. I’m noting that even alternative sources are not entertaining the possibility that neither of these two may be available in some not-so-distant future.
Hello, JMG
When I visited Galicia, Spain, I visited the Romanesque church of San Martiño, the oldest basilica in the country. A few years ago, some 12th-century paintings were discovered that had been hidden by later whitewashing.
What caught my attention was that there were depictions of several people suffering in hell for the various deadly sins, one of them being gluttony. Suddenly, I realized how differently gluttony is viewed in today’s Christian society. I don’t think any Catholic today would even consider mentioning the sin of gluttony in the sacrament of confession, even if they ended up sick after the Christmas holidays from overeating, for example.
Why do you think the awareness of the sin of gluttony has been devalued? Could it be because it’s incompatible with capitalism and the consumer society? Could it be because of the pseudomorphism of the religion of Progress over Christianity, with the denial of any kind of limit?
One question I also ask myself is whether future resource scarcity will bring the sin of gluttony back into the forefront of people’s minds.
Mr. Greer, do you can (water bath, pressure ..) ?
Just curious preppered..
The Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent shares Galbraith’s view of economists.
“”What we need to do is examine the entire Federal Reserve institution and whether they have been successful… All of these Ph.D.s over there, I don’t know what they do… This is like Universal Basic Income for academic economists.”
The dog days of summer are a little restive than usual.
Hi John,
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2025/07/23/307-roberts-paradigm/
What are your thoughts on this model?
And this recent claim:
Germany, he said, now has more foreign-born residents as a proportion of the population than even the United States. But the raw number, he claims, is less important than the age distribution.
“While in the group of people over 65, 15 percent have a migration background, among 15-year-olds it is 45 percent, and among newborns it is over 50 percent,” Sarrazin said. “Ethnic Germans account for only about 40 percent of births. I quote from the 2020 yearbook of the statistical office. These are the figures that are decisive for what the German population will look like in 2070, given that we are only about two generations away from it.”
He predicts that by 2070, roughly 80 percent of all births will be to non-German mothers, with the majority being Muslim.
https://rmx.news/article/demographic-shift-in-germany-is-accelerating-faster-than-predicted-says-former-bundesbank-official-and-best-selling-author-thilo-sarrazin/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Two offers for everybody today:
First, I perform a weekly formal blessing where I bless everybody who has requested it for the week, and am grateful if people sign up for blessings: https://thehiddenthings.com/categories/weekly-blessings
And secondly, for anybody interested in the Modern Order of Essenes, I’ve put up an MOE online course in my function as Master Teacher. It contains the same material as JMG posted on dreamwidth, somewhat re-arranged and broken up into bi-weekly units, plus some commentary and explanations by me. The course has been running for a while now (the initial takers are almost at the end of the Apprentice grade), but the material will stay online, and new people are welcome to start at any point. Here’s the link to Unit 1: https://thehiddenthings.com/moe-course-intro-and-unit-1
JMG, thanks for hosting an Open Post again, and I’m looking forward to everybody’s comments! 🙂
Milkyway
Afternoon (Its afternoon in the UK), I was having a meal with some colleagues the other day, and the matriarch of the group (unofficially) began talking about how her husband is in the military and they’re being told to prep for war in the next 2 years. I’m a 30(M) so she turned to me and said, “you’ll be in conscription age”, to which I had to laugh my way through, fairly pathetically, the next stage of the conversation, something to the effect of “better start hitting the gym”… Now, i’m not a fan of this person, she strikes me as the type who has only thought the kinds of thoughts that allow her to be assert domination over others, and who probably has a very party-line opinion on world events i.e. Putin is all powerful and evil, but also incompetent and Russia is falling apart any day now – kind of vibe.
Just for fun though, it has been something I’ve been trying to understand for a while now, what the hell would I do in the situation where I’m drafted? I don’t agree with fighting WW3 when we’ve got nuclear power, perhaps I’m naive. I also don’t think Putin is evil, I actually think he’s doing a lot to stem the world, or the West for the matter, from falling into madness.
What would people here do? I love my country, I love the nature here, I love Britishness when its at its best, but I don’t feel like I should die for neoliberal pipe dreams and multicultural fantasies… What would you do if you were me?
Anonymous @ 2, you would need to look at conversions. As of right now, I think the Muslem minority has not made itself very well liked in the USA in general. There has been no or very little American adoption of Muslim foodways, for example–OK maybe hummus is an exception–, non Muslim Americans, that is most of us, have little or no interest in Muslim holidays, literature or cultural traditions. Contrast that with our enthusiastic adoption of and continuing interest in Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican foods and culture. It remains to be seen, of course, but I rather doubt the current Muslem envy which can be seen in some young men–misogyny and ugly beards–is going to impress young American women very much.
Speaking of young American women, if there is a presidential pardon for Ms. Maxwell. let me just say that those of you who have concerns about matriarchy ain’t seen nothing yet. I, and I doubt I am alone in this, intend to advise my granddaughters, never mind man pleasing, get good at something(s) where you can support yourself. Work for yourself, responsibly manage your finances, and you can’t be fired, and no vapid looker will ever be promoted over you or take credit for your work. The words ‘responsibly manage your finances’ being code for don’t waste your substance on fashion and cosmetics. Do the minimum you need to and let rich b@#$%^s support those parasites. People with money invested in such industries might want to rethink their strategies.
I can’t remember if fifth Wednesday will be matriarchy/patriarchy but here’s a data point about the weirdness inherent in this concept.
Bill and I spent Saturday and Sunday in Bowie, MD for the Write Women Book Festival 2025.
Saturday was the big day, with over 100 women writers in a huge array of genres. It was a sea of estrogen and Bill was one of the very few males in attendance.
I’d guess from conversations and what I saw, the majority of authoresses there were adamantly opposed to the patriarchy. The Christian/spiritualist writers were more subdued and off in a ghetto of their own, by the kids’ authors.
And yet, despite the evilness of the patriarchy and attendees being 95% female (with one female firefighter and one drag queen in sequins to demonstrate diversity for children’s story time), oiled muscular male torsos were EVERYWHERE. The banners! The table runners! The tabletop signs! The book covers! The swag!
Even more bizarre is that many of the novels and the swag were, bluntly, abusively pornographic. I couldn’t believe some of the postcards prominently displayed on one table. They were right out of Hustler magazine.
As for the books: Mobster romance, motorcycle gang romance, Navy seal romance, monster romance, billionaire sadist romance, mountain man romance, sex dungeon romance, …. Pick the most macho male stereotypes you can imagine and they were on full display.
Bill and I call these romances “restraining order romance” because in the real world, you, a normal woman, would hope to never meet any of these men and if you did, after you recovered, the second meeting would be identifying them in a police lineup.
Very few of these alpha male heroes had anything to do with a normal man, even one who lifts weights on a regular basis and works at a stereotypical male job. What’s more, a real 6666* alpha male wouldn’t bother with any of the, um, less than “Helen of Troy” women who wrote panting fiction about him. He could do better.
It was bizarre. I sold five books. Women who wrote the most godawful porn sold much more. Yet we hates the patriarchy. We does. We hates it. We want to overthrow it.
On Sunday’s world building panel, I don’t know that any of the other writers actually considered who does the heavy lifting in their fantasy worlds. Girl bosses rule.
It was a very strange weekend.
*6666 is the goal: six feet tall, six figure salary, six pack abs, and six inches below the belt. More of each of those attributes is better.
Been meditating about your framework of The Right embracing denial and the Left embracing delusion on the subject of climate. An interesting oddity I’ve encountered: some (not all) of the rightward-leaning who have noticed the hypocrisy of the predominantly leftward-leaning “climate change movement” wind up going whole hog into theories of weaponized weather modification, usually controlled by some nebulous and nefarious “They.” Perhaps I haven’t looked into the veracity of such claims sufficiently, but much of it sounds too much like the vaporware sales pitches of things like the inevitability of fusion power or fill-in-the-blank Tomorrowland fantasies for me to take seriously.
Have you encountered anything similar, JMG (and commentariat)?
Or is it just me?
Hi @Aldarion, this message is regarding the conversation we were having two weeks ago in JMG’s post titled “Climate Change: An Unwelcome Future.” We were getting off topic and I said I’d respond during the open post this week. Regarding your message #319 from that post, I’m not a climatologist either, but I’ve read enough scientific papers to know that some of the hardest parts for scientists (and those who cite them) to get right are the proper uses and limits for the surrogate data they gather. What the “deuterium excess” means for ocean surface temperatures, the extent you can use it to gauge air temperatures, and what part of the globe it can be applied to are all tricky things. It’s easy for them to be misunderstood and misapplied, especially by those who are citing the original source and are are not being overly careful. And it’s easy for such information, in turn, to end up becoming “common wisdom” or “common knowledge” that gets applied to everything.
Bear with me. I want to give you an example but will need to provide a bit of a backstory for context. When I was growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, the general wisdom you heard everywhere in farming communities was that it took 1,000 years for the earth to generate an inch of topsoil. In 1989, when I was an adult my then wife and I were building a house on some land I had inherited in north Georgia. Before coming into my family, the land was owned by a man who purchased it from a bank in 1937 because of a foreclosure. At that time the land and most other agricultural land in the region (and much of the country) was a wreck, because no one back then seems to have known or cared much about land management, which gave rise to an agricultural crisis in the 1930s due to major erosion over much of the United States. This resulted in the dustbowl and then the advent in the 1930s of “modern” land management techniques. (Side note, if you want a vivid example of the erosion land mismanagement can cause, look up “Providence Canyon State Park, also called Georgia’s Little Grand Canyon and look at the images. Yikes!) So, back to our main story, when the man bought the land, it had huge gullies cutting through it and all the topsoil was washed away. He created terraces, filled in many of the gullies and made the land suitable for agriculture again. In 1949, he sold part of the land to my grandfather, and it came to me in 1987. When my wife and I were building our house in 1989, they had to cut into part of a hillside during the construction. I could see one of the smaller gullies the previous owner had filled in with rocks and covered over with several inches to reddish north Georgia dirt. Above that was a good six inches of topsoil and another 12 inches of duff. So, I know for a fact that at least that part of north Georgia can generate six inches of soil in 52 years because I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I think what happened to cause this misunderstanding is that someone published a paper during the dust bowl that stated it took 1,000 years to generate 1 inch of soil in a specific area of the US great plains and later this got cited numerous times with no one bothering to note that it only applied to that area. So, it became a general statement and part of general wisdom. I’ve noted with relief and satisfaction that it seems to have fallen out of widespread use in that last few decades.
The moral of our story, fellow readers, is to cite carefully and be specific.
20 days ago (last post about climate), we mused about climate bands moving south in the southern hemisphere, as per your Squished Polar Cells hypothesis. This week this article caught my attention :
https://www.earth.com/news/why-the-southern-jet-stream-is-shifting-and-what-it-means/
in which they (literally!) say that the Southern jet stream is “sliding toward the South Pole”.
It’s just a data point, and sure we’ll keep an eye out, but still, whoa…
An apology is due from me, and a apology is being given for a blow-up done by me about last year at the time of your wife’s passing. I was wrong, and ought to have behaved far better than was the case. I am a bit surprised by how the emailing can now come to my email account, but they are. Life can be most ‘interesting’ as I now in the two month since the passing of my own life partner. The speed of it was quite the surprised, and the time since has been a time of deep reflection. This apology being due is an clear thing right for me to do, and here it is.
Regardless, should I be allowed to remain – my behavior shall be proper.
“As of right now, I think the Muslem minority has not made itself very well liked in the USA in general.”
Same could be said of Europe’s Muslim minority, but people are still predicting Europe to become Muslim in the future.
As regards parts of the USA becoming Islamicized. I suppose there could be pockets here and there.. I live in a heavily Mexican part of California – southern Central,Valley.My own heritage is white European stemming from British immigrants as far back as 1630. Two of my daughters married Mexican men who were smuggled in illegally as small boys. They are now citizens. The typical working class Mexicans are quite compatible with the American system, no different than the Italian, Polish, Irish. Our area is a splendid mix of Okies and Arkies from the Dust Bowl ere, earlier white settlers, Armenians, Dutch, Sikhs, Laotians, Portuguese, a scattering of Chinese and Japanese, African Americans, a few Muslims. I think in the USA – the Mexican and Central American will be the main new element of a still American mixture.
Hi JMG,
I recently read your article in Unherd regarding Trump’s mythic legacy. There’s a lot I agree with in that piece,
but I’m a bit perplexed by your conclusion there.
In actual policy and practice (rhetoric is another matter), Trump has done almost nothing to mount a challenge against the existing power centers in American political life. Foreign policy remains unchanged from the Biden years, and has arguably been accelerated *Ukraine, Iran) in its already disastrous direction. He’s betrayed his voting base on immigration; with no slowdown to the H1-B program abuses, deportations at roughly the same level as the Obama years, and a defacto mass amnesty now being promised. He, his administration, and establishment Republicans are currently engaged in a blatant and shameful cover-up of the sordid Epstein business. Nevermind his first administration, in which he governed as an establishment Republican and capped the whole thing off with lockdowns and the creation of dubious vaccines.
Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt are mythologized because they governed through massive, nation-defining conflicts; conflicts from which their nation emerged victorious. Trump has neither the support of the youth (who would be counted on to fight such a large conflict), nor a nation that can credibly win such a conflict against it’s geopolitical rivals.
You’ve often, over the years, referred to the president of the United States as an “inmate at the White House.” An apt description of Trump, indeed.
So how, given the above picture (which you may dispute), would his legacy would gain the mythic aura you expect? Perhaps, following his death, Trump’s failures are forgotten as a new leading figure takes up the causes of his voters? I find that possible, considering how the Reagan Administration was lionized by Republicans through the 90s and early 2000s. Perhaps you’re expecting the rising entrepreneurial elite to use Trump as a symbol or idol as they go about displacing the currently entrenched managerial oligarchy?
Thanks!
Inspired by the 2025 Glastonbury Ecosophia conference, and with the prodding of Erika Kitten Lopez, I’m going to try to organize something similar for the summer solstice 2026: Adocentyn Providence!
Tentatively 3 days, Friday 6/19 to Sunday 6/21.
Ideas, offers to present, and offers to help organize are all welcome. Otherwise it’ll be me and Erika dancing in the street.
I have a post on Dreamwidth for any and all of your thoughts.
Hi @Robert Mathiesen, this message is regarding the conversation we were having two weeks ago in JMG’s post titled “Climate Change: An Unwelcome Future.” We were getting off topic and I said I’d respond during the open post this week. Regarding your message #308 from that post. Again, I absolutely agree. See my response to @Aldarion, in this post, above, for an example. I find that I have to check every single thing they say and often end up not being able to use the article because it doesn’t really support the claims with much scientific rigor at all. In my opinion, the authors need to be held more accountable for their content and the journals need to have fact checkers go over every paper with the proverbial “fine toothed comb.” Not that any of this will happen, mind you. That would cost money and one consistent thing with at least 85% of academic publishers is that they are a financial scam that profits off the hard work of others while paying very little for that information and charging the readers a lot of money for access. It makes me depressed whenever I think about it.
Dear John,
I do hope you are well.
I was wondering if you could some day discuss and analyse ”Ashe Of The Rings” by Mary Butts, ”Zanoni” by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and also ”The Green Face” by Meyrink. I have read these books a few times over the years and I am sure you will have amazing insights. As for Meyrink, my beloved heart, I still haven’t finished ”Angel of the west window” , since my brain find it too tense. Also, if I may, a short work called ”A Fragment Of Life” by Machen echoes your non-fiction works; down to earth and longing for pleroma.
Thank you 🙂
Hi JMG,
I’m thinking about writing some fiction in the Cthulhu universe and wanted to get your advise about copyright. My understanding is that I am clear on any of these materials from Lovecraft’s own works as they are either in the public domain or no one can prove that the original copyrights were extended. As you have written in that universe (The Weird of Hali series was fantastic, BTW), I wanted to find out what guided you in this matter. Can you please share your thoughts on this? Thanks!
Anonymous,
Hot take but I think that many former Protestant majority regions of the United States are at high risk of converting to Islam. Modern Salafi Islam is like the Muslim version of Protestantism and the factors that once drew those European descendant peoples to Protestantism away from Catholicism are still there to draw them to Salafi Islam in an era where Protestant Christianity’s strength is in severe decline.
Catholics have Mary and so their faith is going to remain more intact, there’s been some discussion on a recent Magic Mondays how Catholic Church parishes with a huge Marian presence are still very alive, while those without a Marian presence are dead. Protestant churches are very much dead since they don’t believe in Mary as anything other than a sinful human being.
So yeah, expect a bunch of Catholics, Muslims, and polytheists fighting each other for religious dominance in the United States in the future, as well as Mormons in the American west too.
Speaking to the big business aspect of detention centers, just like the American prison system… dollar dollar bills y’all, CREAM get the money… I thought this new book looked interesting:
Immigration Detention Inc.: the Big Business of Locking Up Migrants by Nancy Hiemstra and Diedre Conlon
“The United States has the most extensive immigration detention system in the world, expanding from a capacity of less than 5,000 detainees per day in the 1980s to 52,000 by 2019. While the most vociferous anti-immigrant rhetoric may be attributed to Republicans, US detention infrastructure has grown exponentially regardless of the political party in power, as reports of abysmal detention conditions pile up. Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon provide a damning exposé of the ways immigration detention generates income while those detained are starved, sickened, and exploited as a matter of routine detention operation. Drawing on over a decade of research and focusing on detention centers in New Jersey and New York, the authors map public-private financial relationships and trace how detention contracts for food, medical care, and in-facility stores are fought over to the penny. By dissecting the inner workings of immigration detention, they show a system governed by a capitalist logic that produces sickening and corrupting dependencies in communities across the US.”
Since the issue is systemic we should be looking to the whole system for answers, instead of trying to lock people up so McGovCorp can continue to bankroll yachts.
At this page is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, 7/14). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Marko’s newborn son Noah be blessed with good health, and may his partner Viktoria swiftly make a full recovery from childbirth and c-section.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis‘s fistula heal, may his body have the strength to fight off infections, may his kidneys strengthen, and may his empty nose syndrome abate, so that he may have a full and healthy life ahead of him.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Jack H.’s father John continue to heal from his ailments, including alcohol dependency and breathing difficulties, as much as Providence allows, to be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Audrey’s friend’s daughter Katie, who died in a tragic accident June 2nd, orphaning her two children, be blessed and aided in her soul’s onward journey; and may her family be comforted.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Pierre and Julie conceive a healthy baby together. May the conception, pregnancy, birth, and recovery all be healthy and smooth for baby and for Julie.
May SLClaire’s honorary daughter Beth, who is undergoing dialysis for kidney disease, be blessed, and may her kidneys be restored to full functioning.
May 1Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties; may she quickly be able to resume a normal life, and the cancer not return.
May Kallianeira’s partner Patrick, who passed away on May 7th, be blessed and aided in his soul’s onward journey. And may Kallianeira be soothed and strengthened to successfully cope in the face of this sudden loss.
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer.
(Healing work is also welcome. Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe)
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
Muslims in Minnesota = Somalians, Eritreans, Ethiopian Muslims. Many of them are refugees fleeing warfare, on welfare or dependent on CIA / Pentagon connections to help facilitate the goals of the American Empire in East Africa. When the American Empire collapses and withdraws from East Africa, a few things may happen:
1. that region of the world will become stable again without American interventions and many of the Somalians, Eritreans, Ethiopians will move back to their home country
2. America won’t be able to afford its welfare state anymore, or funding for the CIA and the military, so the Somalians, Eritreans, Ethiopians will have to find another way to earn money to survive, and they will likely have more opportunities in their home countries rather than in post-collapse America, and so will move back home.
3. Worst case scenario, you get a radicalized faction of white nationalists in America who pogrom them out of Minnesota and deport them back to their original home countries.
In the end, there will be less Muslims in Minnesota after America’s empire collapses then there were in the 2000s and 2010s.
Congratulations on the new and forthcoming Dee translations! I was re-listening to your Thoth-Hermes podcast on sacred geometry & Pluto, and wondered where things are at with your “Perfect Timing” book?
@ Forecasting Intelligence #14
“Ethnic Germans account for only about 40 percent of births. I quote from the 2020 yearbook of the statistical office. These are the figures that are decisive for what the German population will look like in 2070, given that we are only about two generations away from it.”
Here in France, the ethnic French have been less than 50% of the births since 2021. Our demographic future will resemble that of Germany, and there’s no way back. I used to despair about that, even though my wife is an immigrant of East Asian descent. Now, as an old man, I try to find solace in buddhism and stoicism.
Decay is everywhere. Tribunals fail to punish criminals, schools fail to educate. I live in comfort, I have a family and friends, I am in reasonably good health for my age, and I generally consider myself happy, but I can see around me the signs of the collapse of the world I grew up in.
When the Titanic is sinking, it’s too late to say “I told you there was an iceberg!” You run to the lifeboats, if you are fit. If you are too old, you await the death of your world with as much serenity and dignity as you can. When I was a student in the 70’s, I used to think that we were sacrificing our future to the present, and the 70’s, to me at least, were fantastically good. Think that until now most Europeans and Americains have better healthcare, better housing (hot and cold tapwater, showers, central heating, etc) than 18th century kings. As a young Boomer, I was pretty sure to be more educated, better informed and earn more than my father, and that’s exactly what happened. But nothing lasts forever, and the party is ending.
I wonder if the foolish rush to go to war against Russia, which seems to have captured the minds of Macron, Merz and Starmer, isn’t an instinct, older than humanity itself (chimpanzees also do intertribal war). That instinct says, when the future is bleak, and you feel you have nothing to lose, go to war. If you win, a new, bright future will shine its light upon you. I notice everyday that even very intelligent people are slaves to their instincts.
Chad, dreams are complex things. Some presences in dreams are real beings, others are astral images projected by other minds, and still others are projected images from the dreamer’s mind. As I have no talent for dream interpretation, I can’t tell you which of these categories apply to your dream experience; you might try journaling, writing a conversation with those dream-people and letting their answers be whatever rises spontaneously into consciousness.
Anonymous, it depends very much on what happens with US immigration law in the next few decades. If things go the way they seem to be going, I expect many of those Muslims to be expelled, legally or otherwise — but we’ll see.
Zemi, I don’t know, neither do you, and neither does anyone else outside certain very exclusive circles in our governing class and that of certain other nations. It’s very much like the JFK assassination — the official story stinks on ice, but there are too many alternatives and too much confusion to be sure of what actually did happen.
Vergil, I’ve only read one of his books, It Can’t Happen Here, which I thought was very crisply written.
David, if you’ll go back and reread that essay, you might notice that it was not meant as a prediction of any kind. It was simply an attempt to map certain earlier events onto an American setting to get people to see them in a new way.
Cs2, glad to hear this.
Crj, it’s salacious conspiracy theater, and it’s also dumber than a box of rocks. By the same logic I could claim that all these people who are pushing conspiracy theories are unwitting dupes of the Girl Scouts, who are actually the secret organization that runs the world.
Mister N, I have no idea. If Trump ever calls me to chat, I’ll let you know what he says. 😉
Justin, thanks for this! I can think of quite a few good reasons to read it besides that one. The book by Galluzzo, on the other hand, sounds so delectable that I’ve just ordered a copy.
Inna, very few people are willing to deal with the hard reality of limits as those close in on our current way of life. Unfortunately for the majority, the limits don’t care what they think.
PedroH, that’s a fascinating point. I suspect you’re right that attention to gluttony has faded because of consumerism, but it’s also important, I think, that food is so plentiful these days; one of the things that made gluttony a mortal sin in the Middle Ages is that there was never enough to go around, and so eating too much meant that others might starve.
Polecat, not these days. Back before Sara’s health started to fail, we canned homemade pickles, applesauce, jam, and a lot more — always water bath, as she didn’t trust pressure cookers, since one blew up when she was a child.
Siliconguy, he’s right, of course. As the joke goes, what do you call an economist who makes a prediction? Wrong.
Forecasting, Tim’s one of the smartest bloggers out there on the economics of decline, and the fact that he’s dealing cogently with the imminence of sustained economic contraction is a good indicator of that. As for Germany, yes, this is what I’ve been talking about all along: demographics has doomed the historic nations of Europe to extinction. The future Islamic Republic of al-‘Almanya may have the same borders as the Bundesrepublik Deutschlands, but it won’t have much of anything else in common with that vanished nation.
Toby, Europe as a whole is stumbling toward another round of apocalyptic wars; it goes through those every century or so, you know, and as I’ve noted in an earlier post, the measures meant to prevent that are usually among the major causes of it:
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-next-european-war/
If I were in your situation, and I didn’t want to be called up to fight in the next round of cataclysms, I know of only one alternative: leave Europe. If you decide to do that, I don’t recommend delaying for long.
Teresa, yep. I wonder how many of those women who insist they’re “against the patriarchy” realize just how different a story their preferred emotional pornography (“romance novels”) are telling about their real desires and beliefs.
RaabSilco, I’ve started hearing that sort of thing more often than I like. They’ve backed themselves into that sort of fantasy — since they’ve convinced themselves that the climate isn’t changing, they now have to come up with some reason why, er, the climate is changing, and Tomorrowland fantasies of human omnipotence are always available. I’ve also been seeing many more attempts to claim that there really is an unlimited supply of oil in the ground. It’s going to get messy as the limits close in.
Thibault, hmm! Okay, that’s a wakeup call. If you start seeing news stories about rain falling on any part of Antarctica, hit the panic button good and hard, because once that happens we’re in for it.
Dav, thank you; I appreciate the apology. Please accept my condolences for your loss — as we both know, that’s a horrible thing to have to go through.
Balowulf, obviously I disagree. It’s early days yet, and Trump and the circle around him are trying to walk a very narrow line between opposing forces. I’d encourage you to stay tuned and see how all this unfolds.
Peter, thank you!
Fereshteh, I’ve only read one of these — Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni. I’ll certainly consider the others.
Chronojourner, all Lovecraft’s own stories and concepts are permanently in the public domain for two reasons: first, he died in 1937 and so all his copyrights have expired; second, he himself permitted other writers to use all his “Yog-Sothothery,” as he called it, in their own works. You can also use anything in Robert E. Howard’s works — when he wasn’t coming up with iconic barbarian heroes, he wrote some fine Cthulhoid stories — because he died in 1936. Older writers? Even better — and those include Arthur Machen and Robert W. Chambers, just for starters. Just make sure the writers whose material you borrow died before 1950 (the current cutoff date for copyright) or had their material freely used by Lovecraft. If you want to use material from The Weird of Hali, btw, I posted some time ago a set of requests about that:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/74628.html
Justin, interesting. Thanks for this.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Oliver, it’s still in process — I’ve had a flurry of other things to take care of, notably a lot of books to revise so they can get back into print, but the current plan is to finish up Perfect Timing later this year.
I see my state is collecting feedback for the transportation department and I do remember one of you lives in it, so: https://itd.idaho.gov/funding/?target=draft-itip
I am trying to think of how best to say “Don’t build roads unnecessary for a declining population, do repair necessary roads.” State and local governments appear to be pretending very hard that the influx of folks fleeing the heavily restricted neighoring states’ covid restrictions will continue population growth indefinitely, so how to phrase to get past that is the challenge.
Those of you in other states and jurisdictions might find poking around to find government feedback locations a productive use of the hot hours of your summer days, or not, but it seems to me a seasonable activity.
@ Chronojourner #20
When we moved to our 1/4 patch of heaven in Hershey, our yard was a barren rectangle of hardpacked Pennsylvania clay. There was grass, mildewy lilacs, weedy forsythias, and so forth.
Despite the previous Italian family having owned the house since it was built in 1954, I never found ANY evidence of them gardening. Most of the Italian families in our area still do some food gardening, even if it’s just Grandma’s fig tree.
There was NO topsoil.
Since 2001, I’ve built up topsoil from a inch or so where the lawn is to a foot deep or more in the raised beds, wilderness hedges, and thickets.
I always did wonder where that statistic came from because if you leave nature alone, it regenerates and faster than you’d think, too.
“David, if you’ll go back and reread that essay, you might notice that it was not meant as a prediction of any kind. It was simply an attempt to map certain earlier events onto an American setting to get people to see them in a new way.”
Yes, I know. I was just curious as to what events you could see happening between 2021 and 2025 of that reality.
Did you see my other question on both superpowers losing in the 1980s?
@JMG re: Ariel Moravec: I’ve noticed how comfortable she is with being the assistant, making coffee, and all that, and really wants to make herself useful. If these stories are set in our own time, then she’s contemporary with my grandsons, and it’s a mindset I know very, very well indeed from when it was my own contemporaries as well. The days when being a “bad kid” amounted to smoking cigarettes and racing hot rods, see also a very popular musical, written when those days were behind us. At any rate, it’s so good to see her happy.
Anonymous,
Is your Muslims in America question because the Democrats just chose two Muslims as their candidates for mayor, Omar Fateh in Minneapolis and Zohran Mamdemi in New York City? The right wing media has been declaring that Minnesota and New York have fallen to Muslims, nonstop for the past few days.
hi JMG,
Thank you for this information, but I’m a bit confused. My research indicates that the current copyright cutoff date in the US is 1929 and before as being in the public domain. 1950 sometimes gets mentioned in relation to copyright renewal, but I haven’t found anything that suggests that works before 1950 are actually in the public domain unless they have not had their copyrights renewed. Can you please tell me why you’re citing the 1950 date? Thanks very much!
re: (revolution) #9: Glad to hear it John! You might also enjoy Galluzzo’s substack. He’s written some interesting essays this year and last.
https://anthony464485.substack.com/profile/posts
As for Our Band Could Be Your Life… it’s a real page turner, very well written narrative history, I think even people who aren’t obsessives like me could get a lot out of it… I’d be curious your other reasons, though I obviously have my own.
Cheers to all as we move into the final stretch of the dog days. Stay hydrated & cool out there.
Inna, that was me who mentioned Sue Tompkins books. They seem to have quite a bit of depth, despite some minor flaws. Sue Tompkins is associated with the British Association of Astrologers.
Mr. Greer, I recently purchased another book written by Barbara Tuchman: ‘The March Of Folly – From Troy to Vietnam’. Have you, by chance, read it?
A question for anyone who knows more than the little I do about medieval cosmology:
Myth and legend apart, what ideas did medieval thinkers have about the nature of the Milky Way? It seems to me that such a mysterious band across the night sky can’t easily have fit into the then-prevalent Ptolemaic model of the cosmos. But I should have thought that some thinkers must nevertheless have come up with theories to explain it.
All I know is that Dante says “Galassia…. fa dubbiar ben saggi” (loose translation: the Milky Way is a heck of a poser for savants).
@Mark #30 From my experience and perspective there’s plenty of life in segments of Protestant Christianity. The segments that are fading are the ones who have embraced the liberal/progressive viewpoint.
Hi all- last week I dropped a link about Soviet citrus and a wishful-thinking comment about figs, then went to the mountains. I came back to so much helpful info about making figs work in zone 5, maybe-someday-6. Thanks to all, and thanks to JMG, for making this a safe clubhouse on the internet.
@Mary Bennet #17 – totally agree! And it’s more or less my own style, though back in the day, the jobs I id best were things like low-level data entry, where nobody cared how you looked, because I could not fit into the corporate environment at all. And right now, at 86, am trying to keep the amount of stuff I accumulate to a bare minimum.
Oops – have to pack up my quarterly bag for the Haven Hospice Attic thrift store.
Re: the romance novels by the feminist authors – shakes head – they’ve got ogres on the brain. I think it’s a projection of their own fears turned into – what? An attempt to bring to monsters down to earth? Shadows of some of the men in their own lives? I went through such a spell myself, decades ago, when I was on the defensive around a good many men (note: a fair number of real abusers are weak men trying to cut you down to their own size. again, from experience.) Now I live in what amounts to a matriarchy, and men are a welcome addition to an all-woman table, and for me, it’s essentially like having so many brothers. And I’d never, ever pick up a book where a monster was also a romance partner!
Just my $0.02
@ Peter #33
“In the end, there will be less Muslims in Minnesota after America’s empire collapses then there were in the 2000s and 2010s.”
In my humble opinion, there’s a 4th and more likely scenario.
The Muslims of Minnesota speak different native languages and have only English as a common tongue. Their descendents won’t go back to Africa because English wil be their principal language and there’s no place for them in the old countries anyway. Africa is not immune to overpopulation and resource depletion. But the Minnesotan Muslims are young and energetic, and there will be enough of them to create a Sunni Muslim homeland in Minnesota, protected by militias strong enough to keep the Whites away. Those militias will fight against the Whites for what will be the real wealth: fertile soil.
When the Roman Empire collapsed, the Germanic mercenaries who had become the main component of the imperial army and had brought their families with them didn’t return to Germany, which was poor and threatened by the Huns. They created local independent kingdoms in the former Roman Empire. As warriors, they were the ruling class of those kingdoms, although they were demographically a small minority. Except in areas where whole Germanic tribes came and outnumbered the locals, the Germanic invaders turned to Latin, in a process which lasted centuries. The Latin thus spoken by people of different origins became the modern Romance languages: French, Spanish, Italian, etc.
The invaders eventually mixed with the local population, but traces of their influence remained until modern times. The French kings, for instance, who were proud to be descendents of Frankish (Germanic) conquerors, traditionally had Germanic first names: Charles (Karl), Louis (Ludwig), Henri (Heinrich), etc.
I am not saying that a similar process will happen in Minnesota, but what I am sure of is that the Muslims won’t return to Africa. This being said, what will be their fate in a world which might lose 95% of its population between 2030 and 2100 is anybody’s guess.
Fereshteh @ 28 and JMG, Bulwer-Lytton? Really? To me, B-L is like Walter Scott or other novelists one read as a pre-teen who had not yet developed a discriminating intellect and then wondered later on “What was I thinking?”. (Scott has the distinction of producing one work, Ivanhoe, in which the movie –first version with Elizabeth Taylor– is far better than the book. Also one of the few times when a performance by Taylor could reasonably be described as acting.) What am I missing?
JMG, 1950 is the current cutoff date for copywrite? Do you have a link for that? There is a lively discussion going on in the sewing world right now over copywrites.
I always took that 500 years to creat an inch of topsoil as starting from bare rock. Weathering rock down to particles is a slow process.
However explosives and rock crushers greatly speed that up. Mine tailing piles attract new growth much even in the Nevada desert. For that matter volcanic ash flows also revegetate quickly.
Example; the Getchell mine where I used to work. If you have Google earth, go to 41.195726 N by -117.227957 W with eye altitude at 10,000 ft or thereabouts and you can see the outline of the heap leach pads I was walking over in 1995. Even in the desert with 8 whole inches of rain to work with you can see vegetation is established.
Anywhere wetter would recover even quicker.
It’s starting to look like Canada might go for conscription in the next few months or years. There’s plenty of talk in our media about how our military targets can’t be met without a huge influx of new soldiers, concern about security from the US, and now I’ve seen a couple of stories from people who were supposedly conscripts in World War II and think we ought to revive the practice now.
Here’s where it becomes a potential wild card for American politics as well: there are a ton of dual citizens, many, such as myself, who are likely to flee to the United States if this happens. I’ve seen estimates that there are at least a million people with American citizenship, and many more who are unregistered Americans and could get citizenship if desired. Even putting aside the question of whether Canadian draft dodgers would be considered refugees (and I could see the Trump administration trolling Canada by doing that), there’s over a million potential immigrants. If even just 10% of us dual citizens cross the border, that’s a hundred thousand people fleeing from Canadian tyranny.
I’m not sure if anyone is considering the potential impact on American politics of a sudden influx of very angry Canadians, who will be eligible to vote almost as soon as they cross the border…..
Re: John, Polecat on canning:
Interesting coincidence. Today my wife and I canned our first batch of pickles using dill and cucumbers from our garden. This was our first time canning, and it was fun and easy. We used the water bath method. I’ve heard that the pressure canning method is mainly an american thing, and that europeans mainly use the water bath method, including for more alkaline foods. Not sure if it’s safe, but it’s what I’ve heard.
BoysMom, I haven’t yet seen the first whisper of awareness among politicians and bureaucrats of the coming demographic decline, so this doesn’t surprise me.
David, none. Nor, for that matter, did I see any events during those years that imitated Alice in Wonderland or The Hobbit. As for your second question, yes, I did.
Patricia, that attitude on her part is partly raw gratitude toward her grandfather for giving her so congenial an alternative to Summerfield, and partly another factor that’ll become clearer in a later volume. Stay tuned!
Chronojourner, I misspoke — the date I had in mind was 1955, since most books written by individual authors who died that year or before have entered public domain; it’s generally the author’s life plus 70 years. Due to the vagaries of US copyright law, some works published between 1930 and 1977 lose copyright 95 years after their copyright date instead. Here’s a good page on the variations in copyright:
https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain
Justin, thanks for this.
Polecat, no, I haven’t.
Robert, that’s a fascinating question to which I don’t know the answer. I just paged through the De Sphaera of John of Sacrobosco, the standard school text on astronomy from the late Middle Ages —
https://www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/sphere.htm
— and it didn’t mention the Milky Way at all. Anyone else?
Mary, see my response to Chronojourner above.
Anonymous, that’s fascinating. Yeah, definitely something to watch for — and to watch, with plenty of popcorn!
BeardTree,
Yeah, when I said Protestantism I meant the mainline versions which have been the dominant religion in America up until very recently. IIRC John Michael Greer also has predicted in the past that many of those liberal progressive mainline Protestants and their fellow travelers in secular liberal progressivism will turn to Islam in the near future. So potential big hotspots for Islamic converts are the Upper Midwest and New England, and those parts of America might get to enjoy a Salafi Islamic version of the Puritan theocracy for a few decades in the future.
In the end however, I think that Islam in America will degenerate into treating Allah or Muhammad as one’s personal savior / guardian spirit, much as modern evangelical Christianity in America wound up treating Jesus Christ as one’s personal savior / guardian spirit, and the Faustian Muslims in Europe and the Magian Muslims in the Middle East will end up looking at American Islam as a heresy and not proper Islam.
@Teresa Peschel (#38),
I know, right? There are plenty of places in the world where that is not true. Go to Spain or the western US, or many other places and cut down a forest and you get a desert. But here in the eastern US, if you cut down a forest, then in 30 years you get another forest if you leave it alone. We should be very thankful for that in my opinion.
polecat @ 45, Barbara Tuchman wrote one classic history book, The Guns of August, and two more very good ones, The Proud Tower and The First Salute. At some point, IMHO, she began taking herself far too seriously. I found her foray into medieval history mostly useless, and as for March of Folly, my opinion, the incidents therein discussed have been far better told in other places, or that was my impression when I read it. I don’t own a copy and neither, I think, does the local library, that bastion of book and reader haters, so I am afraid I can’t give any details.
@Toby (#16):
I’m old enough (of the Silent Generation) that I and my age-mates in the USA faced the same situation back in the days of the Vietnam War. The usual escape plan, back then, was to move permanently to a non-belligerent country (generally Canada, in those long-past days), and give up one’s USA citizenship. I don’t think that would be a realistic possibility now.
Alternatively, there were a few young men who planned to refuse, knowing that they would go to prison for their refusal, with negative consequences for all the rest of their life after prison. A very, very few others talked about killing themselves if conscripted, but I doubt many of them would actually have done so.
In my own case I got very very lucky and was never conscripted. I probably would have been sent to serve overseas, and been killed in the war. I never could even catch a thrown ball reliably, or judge distances very accurately, so usual weapons training would not have helped me survive in combat.
In your case, I would advise not only leaving Europe, but leaving the Northern Hemisphere for some country south of the equator (other than Australia or New Zealand, which are part of the Anglosphere, and will not be safe). That means learning another language for use in your new daily life. Do you have Spanish or Portuguese or a non-European language already? If so, you’ll be ahead of the game. If not, you might start working on learning one.
I regularly read a military blog by a Russian former military man, now a US citizen, named Andrei Martyanov, to keep up to date on current Russian weaponry and military doctrine. One of the huge problems with our (USA) anti-missile shields is that they have always been designed to intercept missiles traveling over the Northern hemisphere. Russia now has hypersonic guided missiles that can reach the US mainland (or Western Europe, if need be) flying over the Southern hemisphere, a much longer route, but at hypersonic speeds still workable. I am not at all sure that we in the US have built really good defenses against attacks from over the Southern hemisphere.. A second problem is that Russia has also developed a non-nuclear warhead with about as much destructive power as a smaller nuclear warhead, which they call oreshnik, meaning “hazelnut.”
In light of these new developments, if things come to an open war between Russia and the USA plus Western Europe, I am not confident any longer that the US and Western Europe could win it, or at least could force a stalemate. So the possibility of a decisive Russian victory in such a war, with subsequent Russian occupation of the defeated nations, now has to be taken into account. And this changes everything for any plans a lone individual may make for the future.
I know this is a very gloomy prospect, and I might apologize for bringing it up here. But I’ve always hated rose-colored glasses.
Hey JMG
I really must ask if this translation of yours is going to remain available purely in hardcover editions by Azoth press as with your Bruno translation, or will it become available as a paperback or ebook in the future like your other works?
@5 David Ritz
JMG’s predicted Revolution of Hate (the backlash to the post WWII surpression of hatred) is starting to manifest in reality. Wokels & Ziocons have gone too far in a time when the cost of living went up, and the backlash is building.
The Fred Halliot essays are already outdated since he used moderate left-environmentalist rhetoric to get into power, and the American people are sick of that. And younger Gen Z men (Halliot’s future stormtroopers?) tend to be more right-wing.
@Thibault, @JMG
How would the southern polar cell reverse as long as most of Antartica is covered by a thick ice sheet? It will continue to stay colder than the surrounding ocean, supporting the polar cell.
Horzabky @ 50, ” Those militias will fight against the Whites for what will be the real wealth: fertile soil.”
Who, exactly, do you think is going to till that soil? The beef against Moslems in the USA, and I have heard this from a number of diverse persons is, as one Hispanic young man said to me, “Those guys are lazy!” Crops mostly don’t grow themselves. Even permaculture needs hands on work and while it might keep people fed, won’t support much of a parasitic overclass. I don’t see Americans, who are ourselves armed, putting up with becoming a serf class. Furthermore, the billionaire class, Koches and the like, who own the CIA, et al, don’t forget, has had its eyes on the fertile soil and Great Lakes water for the last two decades at least. The Moslem population in Minnesota will be allowed to remain just as long as their sponsors find them useful, and the recent political events you mentioned might be enough to make those sponsors decide to pull the plug. No more favoritism, no more privileged access to business start-up funding, no more arranging for their kids to get into top universities.
@Anonymous, comment #53
Could you please point to some sources re: possibility of conscription in Canada? I’m in Edmonton and haven’t heard anything of the sort. Not saying you may not be right, just wondering where this is coming from.
Balowulf, I share your concerns, despite prior hopes for helpful measures. The Big Bill hikes warmongering expenses, BigTech surveillance (including private access/consolidation of mandatory/previously protected personal data), limited-accountable/transparent stateside-cages and oligarch/financier tax breaks. Meanwhile, it cuts infrastructure (except airports), enforcement of environmental, financial, worker and antitrust regs, and social/public health supports.. Going after (non-Trump) compliant judges, media, import/exporters, student protestors, Fed directors, and liberal cities/states (post-disaster) seems an end-stage breakdown of rule of law. So does pretending Epstein had no corruptive secrets.. Meanwhile, I see Marjorie Green talking about huge Israel subsidies (from US taxpayers), and how Israel provides universal healthcare and subsidizes college.
All, JMG – the following link puts together the mix of financialization, resource depletion, decline and AI quite well. It makes me particularly glad to have found JMG many years ago, with time for lifestyle adaptations. If anyone has suggestions for websites/sources to help someone change their grid-tied PV panels to DC ones, please post.
https://warwickpowell.substack.com/p/terminal-phase
On the last post, I responded to a comment by Rajarshi on the state of the dating field, in which men and women are both held back by catastrophizing (dramatically overestimating the risk of extremely bad experiences). I responded that I agreed, but here I want to steelman the male fears a bit. (Anyone who wants to steelman/steelwoman the female side is welcome to!)
The biggest fear from the male side of this eqaution, IMO, is a pervasive sense among men that if the worst does happen — if an awkward interaction escalates into online shaming, a visit from HR or a school’s Title IX office, or a criminal accusation — then no one will be on your side. That you will be presumed guilty, denied a chance to defend yourself, you’ll be fire or expelled, your reputation will be ruined, your chances at a decent career will be over, and you will have to essentially start your adult life all over again. Meanwhile people you’ve known for years and thought were your friends will stay quiet and even distance themselves from you rather than risk being punished for defending you. And even if you are later proven innocent, it won’t matter because the damage is done and many of the people who piled on to you in the first place will simply refuse to accept the exculpatory evidence.
Is this likely to happen? No! And anyone who thinks it is (I believe Rajarshi said some men believed there was a 50/50 chance that asking a woman out could land you in jail) can be rightly criticized for catastrophizing.
But the scenario is not imaginary, either: there is no shortage of cases of this happening from about 2014 to 2022. And unfortunately the response to our fears, from the public at large, from friends, and from family members, has often been to insist we just need to ignore the crazies online. Reminder: the same people said the same thing about the social justice movement as a whole in the 2010’s when we said we were worried where the left was heading. So it’s not exactly advice we are inclined to take!
Body | Material:
Regarding your comments on climate change, I am deeply appreciative of your voice on this subject, and used “The Long Descent,” in an undergrad book report, much to the frustration of my academic elite professors. AuDHD led to me taking a decade to complete an undergraduate degree, meandering across multiple subjects I couldn’t decide on (to point of nearly gaining four majors), rendering me an odd scientific generalist in geology, geography, ecology and remote sensing as a result. From this, one thing I wish to note is that, in your earlier posting (https://www.ecosophia.net/climate-change-an-unwelcome-future/), you mentioned glacial melting isn’t a fast process. This isn’t always the case, and I think we collectively need to take into consideration sea level rises will certainly be more rapid than implied in this posting. For example, regarding ice sheets (e.g. Greenland), freshwater melts ice faster than saltwater, strain heating and granular basal sliding creates friction and furthers positive feedback melting within the glacier and at the calving front. Add to this the decreased albedo as a glacier melts, where sediment is exposed and a glacier becomes darker, resulting in increased warming from insolation (good citations on this: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-glaciology/article/three-positive-feedback-mechanisms-for-icesheet-melting-in-a-warming-climate/C772ED051E7A3A713698E7030F27596C | https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/darker-ice-causes-greenland-to-melt-faster/). My ASD demands I bring such a topic to your attention, and ask – how can we brace for such a possibility of increased sea level rise, especially given those middle managers in charge of things are completely disregarding it? I am safe in the middle of the continent, but I worry for others, and also worry for the dwindling water supply of our own glaciers in Colorado.
Mind | Theoretical:
I am in a period of burnout as I write this, and my world has fallen apart due to decades of masking my true self, and living a lie that ultimately went entirely against my ethics. I’m pulled away from a path of material science toward one that is more immaterial: one of creation, writing, and spirituality. As a prolific writer, who covers both material and immaterial topics with ease, how do you pursue this path in terms of keeping yourself writing and creating? What patterns and practices do you implement as a content creator, to get the job done? How do you overcome dry periods, where perhaps the Muse isn’t inspiring you as much as you would hope? And, how do you surround yourself with a community of others that help to inspire you?
Spirit | Immaterial:
I’d love to see some discourse on what one can do when the material world has become so caustic to the ethics of the soul, that the soul cries out in agony and pain, but hasn’t a clue on what to do about it. All too often, I feel normal humans such as myself have so very little control over the greater systems affecting us all – climate, states, workplaces. The nonstop sense of powerlessness is enraging, and although I do find solace in spiritual practices (Druidry and the Way of the Golden Section come to mind), when physically/spiritually exhausted by the material plane and all the power imbalances, all the cruelty, I am often at such a loss I have no energy for spiritual actions that can nourish. When this depleted, what is the soul to do? How can the soul care for itself when so downtrodden? I know in many respects, what one pays attention to is the key, but when in crisis, it is sometimes difficult to see where to pay attention, and how one’s attention might be used to not only better themselves, but the greater All, in a caustic world gone mad.
Looking forward to your reply, and any replies from others in this thread! /|\
People in England: please make the late Ozzy Osbourne the patron saint of Heavy Metal. His birtgplace in Birmingham could become a pilgrimage sight. In visions he often appears with a bat, which is his sacred animal. While the rest of us go off the rails, I hope is riding into the afterlife on his own crazy train.
Anonymous,
Would western Canada even want to serve in a war for the benefit of the politicians in Ottawa? A war might just kick off Wexit / Albertan independence and end Canada forever.
@JMG
You said to David: “Nor, for that matter, did I see any events during those years that imitated Alice in Wonderland or The Hobbit.”
To be fair, I think we all saw plenty of events in that time period that were illogical enough to be in the former!
Good afternoon, JMG and everyone.
I’d like to second the recommendation of books by Barbara Tuchman. I have not read “March of Folly”, but it’s on my list of things to find at a used book store!
Two technical questions:
First, the banishing portions of the Sphere of Protection ritual mention banishing “all harmful influences, hostile magic, and imbalances in the nature of…” Is the practitioner supposed to identify a harmful influence or imbalance as belonging to a particular element, or is this supposed to cover all possible harmful things by covering the entire circumference?
Second question, much more theoretical. I’ve seen some content creators make dire warnings about Earth’s magnetic poles flipping in the near future. (I cannot be bothered to worry about it) However, if magnetic north were to switch with South, would the four elements keep the same directions, or would those also change locations?
JMG, I have noticed that sunlight and heat greatly diminish the perception of energy in my body while I am exposed to them. Not absolutely, but most of the time. Any idea why?
Good Wednesday JMG,
Since you mentioned your new book release, it makes me curious about a book form of your commentary on The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic. Is this currently in the works, and do you have any sort of timeline for release if so? Your CosDoc commentary has been invaluable.
Also, I’m curious about your thoughts on the way Trump has handled(or mishandled, if you ask me) this whole business with the Epstein files. In less than 2 weeks the Trump administration has gone from claiming that the files are Democrat hoax, to creating a scandal about what the Obama administration was doing in 2016, to just today, leaking reports that they are going to release concrete evidence of extraterrestrial life. Is this the most elaborate double bluff ever to amplify the Streisand Effect to maximum level, or has the Golden Golem of Greatness finally become blinded by his reflection in the Sun in his old age? It has been fascinating since typically he is so savvy about managing the media, but this has been like watching a train wreck live.
Thanks
@JMG @Teresa
“I wonder how many of those women who insist they’re “against the patriarchy” realize just how different a story their preferred emotional pornography (“romance novels”) are telling about their real desires and beliefs.”
Feminst psychology has already been over this ground. Being aroused by fantasies featuring partners who, if you met them in real life, you’d run a mile to get away from, is not unique to feminists or, for that matter, to women. The human arousal response is complex and often obscure in its origins, and its content no more reveals “real” desires and beliefs than any other aspect of the human psyche. For instance, there’s the well-documented phenomenon of sexual abuse survivors eroticizing their abuse experiences as part of processing those experiences, a behavior that can co-exist with an equally sincere effort to get the perpetrators of said abuse convicted and incarcerated for it. A lot has also been written about teenage girls just arriving at their sexual awakening, feeling desire but also feeling less than fully ready for the responsibility that would accompany the satisfaction of that desire. They fantasize about a partner who will force them to accept what they desire in a way that absolves them of the responsibility.
In my opinion, that doesn’t necessarily go away when adulthood arrives. Working women, especially if they are also raising kids, often feel like they have too much on their plates; fantasies that involve the plates being snatched out of their hands and smashed are an important safety valve even if they’d never want such a thing to happen in real life.
@Anonymous
“Same could be said of Europe’s Muslim minority, but people are still predicting Europe to become Muslim in the future.”
All the former great powers of Europe established laws granting citizens of their former colonies the right to live in the former imperial heartland. (I presume that the purpose of these laws was to further exploitation in some way.) Then they formed the EU, dropping border controls within Western Europe. The result is that there are few to no legal barriers keeping South Asian, Middle Eastern, and North African Muslims out of whatever EU country appeals to them. The same is not true of the USA.
Horzabky #35
> Now, as an old man, I try to find solace in buddhism and stoicism.
Me too. Buddhism and stoicism is EXACTLY how I get through the day. I would include a third thing: meditation: sitting, walking, movement, whatever.
At 72, when I wake, I sit at the edge of the bed dangling my feet, and ask (myself), “Why bother getting out of bed? What good is this day? Let’s see… let me count the ways: I can close the eyes and make like I am not the center of the universe. I can cheer up those around me, even in the most dismal of circumstances. I can make things more peaceful and orderly.“
💨✨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
“Zemi, I don’t know, neither do you, and neither does anyone else outside certain very exclusive circles in our governing class and that of certain other nations. It’s very much like the JFK assassination — the official story stinks on ice, but there are too many alternatives and too much confusion to be sure of what actually did happen.”
My eyebrows went up when I read that question. I think that your’s was a wiser answer than any I’d have come up with. But it admits that rejection of the official narrative is a reasonable position. To me, the images and the narrative reminded me of stage magic and mass hypnosis.
Regarding the draft; when I lost my student deferment in January 1967, fleeing to Canada was an option. Instead I enlisted in the branch of the service that I felt was the least likely to land me in a VietNam rice paddy or jungle; the Air Force. My intuition proved correct.
What do you think of William F. Buckley’s quite that he would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than the 2000 faculty members of Harvard?
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/30244-i-would-rather-be-governed-by-the-first-2000-people
Bees in the news, native bees at that.
https://www.yoursourceone.com/columbia_basin/rare-and-unrecorded-bees-discovered-in-grant-douglas-chelan-and-okanogan-counties/article_ef02fbcb-1843-4192-b077-0b0e6ace3ef9.html
Kleptoparasitic bees?
On canning, water bath canning is just fine for pickles, fruit, and other acidic things. Pressure canning is essential for meat and vegetables like green beans. The dreaded botulism bacterium can not survive in acid, but it can survive in neutral solutions like meats and beans producing the toxin. That’s when you need to pressure can.
There are lots of references on canning including the USDA.
https://nchfp.uga.edu/
One tip, I ended up with a Turkey deep fryer. The burner unit works very well to heat a standard seven quart water bath canner. That keeps much of the heat outdoors.
I feel I should clarify that my first comment is not justifying men being too afraid to date, let alone men hating women or participating in self-destructive “alpha” status games (which is what I think most performed misogyny amounts to at the moment). I’m also not playing the oppression olympics and suggesting that men have it worse than women or face worse risks in dating than they do.
What I do want to get across is that for many shy, awkward, already-risk-averse men, dating since about 2010 does not look like an attractive proposition and the usual arguments against that outlook come across as dismissive and out of touch at best. Sometimes they feel like gaslighting, in the contemporary sense of “We both know I’m lying, but I’m ordering you to play along anyway.”
I’ve complained before about my landline phone service which AT&T doesn’t want to fix properly. They’d rather I change over to VOIP for a home phone. My nephew told me that they plan to eliminate traditional landline service by 2029.
https://www.telecompetitor.com/att-plans-copper-retirement-by-2029-heres-how/
I have a cell phone (not a “smart” phone though!) as a backup, but want to keep a house phone. So I guess I have to decide if I want to continue poking them to patch up their failing system, or go ahead and change over now. I know some of you, including JMG, still use old landline tech; have you made plans for when the service stops? Or do you think it won’t be totally replaced and some will still continue to use it? I can see it dragging on in rural areas, but I live in a small city and already have Wi-Fi installed, so I could see the day coming when I could be given a deadline to make a decision. Until then, I struggle on and off with crackling lines and dropped dial tones. I’ve held out this long, and I feel like I’m giving up if I change, but I don’t know of any alternatives.
Joy Marie
I don’t like the American right much, but hell, when AOC’s Bronx office gets defaced, claiming she supports genocide in Gaza, it really makes me wonder that the state of the American left is even worse. Coming from a country with a comparatively sane political culture, I don’t know how you all cope over there in the US. Best wishes to all from New Zealand
NephiteNeophite.. yeah, corn.. beans.. certainly meat, poultry, and fish .. should be pressure canned. Pressure canners these days are pretty foolproof, as long as one is paying attention to process times as well as heat setting. Hat tip on fish: DON’T ADD SALT! I pressure canned some fresh tuna a while back, adding a 1/2 teaspoon of salt to each half pint jar. Ugh! Waaaaay tooooo salty!! I had to mix commercially canned (store-bought) tuna to my opened jars …. just to make it palatable for consumption. Re. dills, try adding a garlic clove or two .. along with some chilli flakes, for some extra kick. Canning, what ever the type .. is an adventure! Just follow proven recipes. ALSO, I can’t emphasize enough! Invest in a PH kit (ph strips that you can test a batch with) .. so as to test for the proper acidity, if in doubt! Cheers
polecat, over-and-out …….
“Is your Muslims in America question because the Democrats just chose two Muslims as their candidates for mayor, Omar Fateh in Minneapolis and Zohran Mamdemi in New York City?”
Just Omar Fateh. If elected Fateh will likely be the Somali Minneapolis version of Sadiq Khan in London. Minneapolis is more like an European city with the Muslim situation than New York City is. In 2023 the Minneapolis city council already voted to allow the Islamic call to prayer to be broadcast from mosques 5 times a day, like many European cities but not like in New York City. You have Ilhan Omar the congresswoman already being a face for the Somali community in Minneapolis and now Omar Fateh the mayoral candidate. Meanwhile, the Somalians are also dispersing out to other parts of Minnesota such as St. Cloud and Rochester, buying up churches and converting them over to mosques. The demographic changes and ethnic concentration and power of the Somali Muslims are a pretty big threat to Minneapolis’s and Minnesota’s identity going forwards, especially when they declare allegiance to Somalia instead of the United States.
New York City doesn’t have a concentrated Indo-Ugandian or Muslim population vying for political control like Minnesota has the Somalians, so the two situations are incomparable with each other. There are simply too many Hispanics and Christian Africans and Jews and ethnic whites in New York City for Muslims to ever be a threat to take over New York City. Mamdemi is just your bog standard secular leftist cut out of the same cloth as Obama and AOC, no real threat to the religious composition of New York City.
Speaking of canning … I just made a Most Gorious NEW batch of Loganberry Jam .. from my own berries. Ohh! This is to die for! Its my own proprietary recipe. If I was producing this for retail sale, I’d have the public at my feet, begging for Moarrrr!
@Teresa #18: Your post made me laugh. I had never heard of 6666 before (being accustomed to the metric system), but 6 feet is quite unremarkable around here, and a (barely) six figures salary, even converting to US$, won’t get you a nice house, a nice car and nice clothes. Maybe the stereotype needs to be adjusted for inflation?
I was going through Howard Odums work this week and something really struck me about information storage. His observation was that in systems that have large but short lasting energy pulses, the final stage of resource allocation goes into long term energy storage (grasslands producing big seed heads then dying), and this occurs after peak production and asset accumulation.
What then whacked me between the eyes was that therefore in the case of industrial civilisation powered by a fossil fuel pulse, the big warning sign of imminent decline would be massive investment in information technology and storage…
Mr. Greer, you’ll love this: seems as though the current CEO of IN-N-OUT BURGER has had enough of Caliph onia’s (in Arnie Speak..) bullshale re. their asinine regulatory structures … so, they’re going BY-BY!! Socks to be you, the formerly ‘golden state’.. All I can say is: Yippykyayyyy!! My former state* of res. is completely FRACKED!! They own it!
* I live in Caliphonia’s northernmost fair-haired (HA!) stepchild … e.i. WA. STATE. … Now run by a total loon of a GOV! .. as if Ensley wasn’t bad enough!
@Chronojourner #20: Yes, I have also seen enough examples of people citing other papers (sometimes their own ones!) to make a stronger statement than those original papers support. Your example of erosion is heartening. When travelling by overland bus through Brazil, especially in Mato Grosso do Sul, but also between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the very visible erosion used to make me almost physically sick. On the last trips, I started to see (and also read about) small copses being planted on the hilltops, and I hope some of the marvellous diversity of the Atlantic rain forest will be restored in time.
To return to the end of the Younger Dryas, I am certainly not qualified to speculate about the geographical extent of the source of the hydrogen isotopes deposited in the ice cores. I do think it’s not just Greenland (the original authors argue it is not), but not the entire globe either.
I really liked your piece on the next European War. I just retead it. It seemed very plausible at the time. But now it looks less likely that Europe will go to war with itself and more likely that it will antagonize and provoke Russia into a war, a war that Europe has no hope of winning.
So, my question is how Europe went from feckless, pompous, and weak to suicidal, pompous, and weak. Even knowing that European powers have invaded Russia and then come to regret it at least 5 times I still can’t understand how this is happening. It feels more like lemmings going over a cliff then it feels like military planning.
It hurts the head.
i’m back. open post. cool. check this out:
so some of you know i’m obsessed with this idea that abused children survived like Kyle here awhile back, remember when he’d mentioned suddenly reading something here and instantly remembering when he was nearly killed by a dog and this entity appeared and said something calmly like “your neck is in a dog’s mouth. if you want to live you’d better get out” and that reminded ME that lots of people who’ve been through STUFF as a kid usually are comfortable with other dimensions entities or just the paranormal in general.
and when George P Hansen (“the trickster and the paranormal”) says charisma is a paranormal thing, he also says IN GENERAL most feel these talents are sacred and don’t wish to profit. and i don’t feel so stupid for my beliefs that i can never focus on money for if i do, the spell is broken before i can even hope to CAST it.
i don’t know what any of this is “called,” it’s just how i learned to be in my little imaginary weird world. i’d test things out. and George P Hansen talks about even THAT as a technique that some of these researchers use! so i’m feeling pretty confident because i ALSO, just in a list, found that he’s talking about someone named Bolen and then Hartmann agreeing on some of these principles of the trickster archetype. they’re using Hermes and Bolen says in her book “Gods in Everyman” she says: “I have felt the saving presence of Hermes [whom they call a trickster because of his ‘liminality’ his being about breaking boundaries and being fluid] when my adult patients have spoken of their abusive childhoods.”
so now i’m getting HER book from the library.
i’m sharing how my theory about the abuses is turning out to be is already out there so i can stop trying to prove that more for now and move on to my real curiosity:
how do you share these experiences so others don’t ignore their own but come to court them?
that is the best way i can think to help marshall the forces of the formerly maligned freaky and weird. our individualities are our assets as MKUltra et al can’t scramble our heads anymore than they’ve already BEEN, and instead of bringing people down to their baser natures, like Sasha Baron Cohen as Borat, how do you inspire the adventure and artistry of bringing people UP like “tag! you’re it!”
because it can be as creative as works of art, this loving people thing.
anyhow whoever suggested this book i was immediately electrified. George P Hansen was ahead of his time in publishing it and i’m glad he didn’t get a regular publisher because this is what they wouldn’t want out there. and he can keep it in print as long as he wants (it’s self-pubbed).
i’m not suggesting we can force these paranormal moments. i’m saying we can create a beautiful chaos that opens and destabilizes and leaves ROOM for such magical moments.
i had to share this.
also because i’m afraid of going insane, which as George P Hansen said, a lot of people get injured from this stuff. it’s hard on the body and psyche.
so i’m treating some of you like spotters for me.
because this charisma thing can become the devil in a (snap!) split second. he talks about the loss of status being a part of the trickster because then you’re in between states and this is also with rites of passage. you’ve gotta go through something.
he spoke of creative sicknesses! i’d also noticed that some of the greater artists only became so when a horrid accident or illness grounded them, forcing them to birth something out of the frustration and boredom.
i don’t know if my theory works. i’m not able to win with san franciscans but i will fight back and protect myself but more like how Papa says sometimes you have to love with a sword. i GET IT. i love you but i warned you not to drive back and forth over my foot anymore.
i get it!
to whine complain and end my yells in thin upturned demands that end in question marks means that i feel WEAK powerless like a child. Cliff Osmond the character actor taught me how to end my sentences in PERIODS. and he used to rant against how men were portrayed as stupid and weak. man i get sooo much now.
but even acting class helped teach me how to SEE how to FEEL how to change how i am depending on my goals. it was also magic. like James’ Jesus love of me.
i don’t need to be first. i LOVE seeing an idea i had and wasn’t sure of, somewhere ELSE! it means i can move on from trying to explain level 1 even to myself.
i don’t get Hermes, though. i didn’t know him well but a trickster? anyone care to elaborate i’m open to reading.
i think i’m here to be a trickster. i feel at home in these descriptions of how they test and some people undermine and fake some of their talents because this is all supposed to always be hidden or questionable vague… liminal… in between.
so you must NEVER be sure.
i’m good with that. art already has its majority “this sucks!” moments so that when you eventually happen on magic you don’t wanna die til it’s DONE. same thing.
fake it til you make it.
Donna Summer had to writhe on the floor to get in character for “love to love you baby” and she’d felt like a dork before it. all you have to do is DARE and it’s yours! that’s what’s trippy.
—
PETER KHAN OF POTLUCKS! cool you announced the 3-day thing. Papa already said others are coming along. we’ll be good now. it’s already a thing.
thanks for being trickster with me, too.
(THIS is what i’m talking about you all!)
xxxxxxxx
erika kitten lopez
Hello Mr. Greer, it’s been a long while since I last commented here, and unfortunately most of the recent happenings in my life haven’t been what one would call pleasant. The most recent one is that in May, a good friend of mine from college died of brain cancer, something that hit all of us from the friend group very hard, as he was one of those people who is like a steady rock for everyone, always lending a helping hand and making the best of bad situations, and it’s hard to remember that now we can’t share a good laugh or story with him anymore. The thing is that he was the youngest of us (and we are all pretty young) and ever since his passing I’ve been suffering from headaches everytime I get anxious about anything, something that is quite a problem as I’m an anxious person and the cost of living crisis in my country is only getting worse. A psychologist friend of mine suggested that I start doing meditation and perhaps even attempt hypnosis in order to understand and heal from this.
What I want to know is what would you do if you were in my shoes? I welcome the opinion and advice of anyone who reads this, thank you all.
Congratulations on new book JMG!
Apologies as I cannot recall who recommended these books but I did want to say a Thank You to my mystery informants:
Though disturbing, I appreciated learning about the criminal class in GLOBAL OUTLAWS by Carolyn Nordstrom… quite eyeopening indeed.
And I just started reading ACCESSING THE HEALING POWER OF THE VAGUS NERVE… seems very good so far.
To add, I know he is a polarizing figure, but Jordan B Peterson has a recent podcast on autism with Sir Simon Baron Cohen… looks like it might be interesting!
Jill C Yogaandthetarot
@anonymous #53: Thanks for that information, I hadn’t yet heard any of that, here in Quebec. I understand draft is a horrible perspective – it was still in place in Germany when I turned 18, and I would have been very happy to be considered unfit for service. In the end, by convoluted ways, I found my wife because of the community service I was allowed to do in substitution for military service.
One question: would you consider it tyranny if Poilièvre had won and instituted draft? Or if Trump instituted it now?
On a lighter note, apparently there has been a great Shrimp Discourse the last several days, around the question “Given the choice, should you kill one random human being to save the lives of 10^100 shrimp?”
Mercifully, most of the discourse seems to be mocking the original poster — who is very indignant that people aren’t taking it dead seriously — and the most common answer seems to be some variant of “Which option lets me eat the shrimp?”
Landlines are about dead outside of town where businesses still use them.
VOIP will work until the power goes out. Then how do you call the power company to tell them the power is out? So you need a cell phone to call the power company, and the internet to contact the phone company if that breaks.
Putting the house router on a UPS won’t help either, at least not here. The neighborhood hub is also powered by the same electric lines that power the houses. The line from that hub goes to a switch the power pole, and that switch is powered by a tap directly from the meter.
I recently had to get a new phone and am having some trouble getting it behave. My daughter says in just need to randomly click on things until the correct settings pop up. That is not the way I was raised, or trained. Randomly clicking things until something happens is not the way you operate a submarine or a chemical plant.
Judaism had its own version of Protestant Christianity and Salafi Islam: Karaite Judaism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaite_Judaism
Earthbear,
You have a ton of control over your own life. It is an adventure, and one which primes you for more of the same. Use this life to develop one or two useful skills. Hone them. And they will be available for you in the next life.
Your life should be less about trying to radically alter the circumstances of the world and more about using those circumstances as an opportunity to develop and grow as a soul. Paradoxically, that’s also your best chance at changing the world.
Teresa Peschel @ 18, did you happen to ask or notice how many of the mobster romances, billionaire sadist romances and so on were self published? Is it possible that the writers were giving publishers what publishers asked for. I understand that you know the publishing industry far better than I do, but I have always wondered if there is not some publisher equivalent of the Hollywood producer who always demands a rape scene. How do those sociopathic romances end? Does Our Heroine convert Mr. Monster into a decent human being? I wonder how many deluded young women think they can actually do that.
J.L.Mc12, I think it’ll be available in trade paper eventually, but that may take a be a couple of years.
Gardener, thanks for this.
Earthbear, (1) all these same factors were in action during the melting of the glacial ice sheets at the end of the last ice age, together with a much steeper temperature spike than we’ve produced. The rate of melting was still relatively slow. I encourage you to reassess the risks using paleoclimatological models. (2) To answer that would require a fairly long essay. The short form is that I don’t have dry spells — those happen when people try to edit while writing. (That uses two conflicting sections of the brain and causes writer’s block.) I also don’t get inspiration from a community of others. I enjoy writing, and so don’t have any particular patterns or practices — I just sit down whenever I have the time, and write. (3) You might consider the old Stoics — they’re my go-to resource whenever I need to suck it up and deal.
Slithy, granted, but they lacked any trace of humor!
Sylvia, (1) don’t worry about assigning imbalances to the elements. The point is that you’re banishing every possible harmful thing. (2) We’ll have to wait and see!
Luke, hmm! That’s fascinating, and not something I’ve encountered before. Anyone else?
GeoffG. (1) It’s in the publication process right now. (2) I have no idea. It’s certainly fascinating to watch.
Joan, so noted, but I’m far from sure I accept the underlying assumption that feminist psychology gives an unbiased view of the matter, given its valorization of specific political agendas. You’re certainly correct that contradictions between obsessive imagery and ostensible opinions aren’t limited to women — and that’s just it. When, for example, male chauvinists are also obsessed with imagery of being dominated by women (which is quite common — have a look at the men’s magazines of the 1940s and 1950s for examples), it tells you quite a bit about their insecurities and the underlying weakness of their conscious belief system — as feminist psychologists have pointed out from time to time…
It’s also worth noting that the current obsession with being dominated by violent men has picked up dramatically in recent decades. It wasn’t that long ago that most romance novels had very different themes; the change is a fascinating one, and deserves attention, not dismissal.
Phutatorius, that’s also an interesting way to explore it.
David, do you recall when I asked you not to just put a quote here and demand that I comment on it? That still applies.
Siliconguy, thanks for this. It’s always good to hear of wild bees thriving? A kleptoparasite, btw, is a species that survives by stealing food from another species.
Peter, remember that the US is a barbarian society, not a civlized one!
PumpkinScone, where did you read that in Odum? I want to cite it!
Polecat, I grew up in the Seattle area and fled the entire left coast decades ago. Best move I ever made.
Team10tim, oh, granted. Keep in mind, though, that the European ruling class is desperate. Europe is imploding, and their entire ideology still assumes that they ought to rule the world; the attempt to break up and absorb Russia, so they could strip it bare of resources, was a last-ditch Hail Mary plan. Now that it’s failed, they’re up against the wall and know it. They’re still feckless, pompous, and weak, but they’re also terrified, and blind panic will make stupid people even more stupid.
Erika, I wish I knew how to respond. You’re riding a strange route; I’ve ridden equally odd routes but they were very different. You have my blessings, certainly.
Cesar, please accept my condolences! I highly recommend daily meditation. Five or ten minutes a day can make a big difference in coping with life. There are many different methods; look around, try several options, and see what works for you.
Jill, you’re most welcome.
Slithy, I don’t think any one person could eat 10^100 shrimp!
On the subject of fantasies of domination, if I might add two datapoints…
First, years ago a woman I knew who was a sex worker told me that there was a very lucrative market for dominatrixes among CEOs, Wall Street guys, and other wealth, powerful, and stressed-out men. I understand that this is well known in these circles; it even made it into the opening scene of the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.
Second, one of the letters of Seneca concerns the treatment of slaves by his fellow upper-class Roman men. His concern is how common it is for male slaves to be used for sex by their Roman masters. That didn’t look like what you might think, however– Seneca is clear that the slaves weren’t being dominated in the bedroom– if I recall, his memorable phrase is that they were treated as “a boy in the kitchen but a man in the bedroom.”
I’ve also noticed the dramatic uptick in domination fantasies among women in recent decades. And of course this has corresponded with both the increase in public power among women and the pressures and expectations placed upon them. It seems to be a very common theme for human beings– men and women alike– to play out the shadow side of their personality in the bedroom. What this often looks like is people who spend most of their time in charge, facing intense pressure and with many others depending on them, playing out fantasies of submission and even humiliation. On the other hand, people who are used to feeling weak or powerless often play out fantasies of domination and giving pain. I strongly suspect that that’s what’s behind the “Fifty Shades of Gray” type pornography that’s become so popular in recent decades. I also wouldn’t be surprised if, 20 years from now, the same sort of thing with the genders swapped becomes popular among the descendants of today’s “tradwives”– or their husbands.
Robert Gibson #46
The Milky Way was theorized to be a band of numerous stars too faint to make out individually by the time of Ptolemy (~100-170 AD). His “Almagest”, in which he laid out his ideas about astronomy, is said to have heavily influenced medieval science. In his system, the Milky Way and fixed stars were part of the starry sphere that enveloped the Earth, Sun, Moon, and planets.
While I haven’t read it yet since it hasn’t been release, listening to the author gives me hope it will be ok. Look out for a book called “Progress : A History of Humanity’s Worst Idea” By Samuel Miller McDonald. Seems right up an ecosophians alley, or is that grove in these parts? 🙂
Secondly, I am always fascinated by Ran Prieur’s blog even if it the topics vary wildly, but there was a post from July 21st that summarized a great deal of our issues of today.
“The En(shirt)ification of American Power. A culture of more and more is meeting a reality of less and less, with an ever smaller number of ever richer people hungrily gobbling the last scraps. The next stage will be “Let’s scapegoat some people and kill them.” After that, maybe as soon as 2040, I expect the culture to start healing, and eventually come full circle, from “Let’s make lots of money” to “Let’s make it fun to have no money.”
Don’t entirely agree with but it is a bit more alert to the predicament than many nowadays. I always liked his prediction of the future where “The stock market will be ten times bigger and so too will the homeless population.” Sounds about right.
To all the commentators worried about Islam.
There are 3 types of Muslims in the USA and the West.
There are the secular types – mostly nominal Muslims,
the religious but moderate,
and the extremists.
From my personal experience, most Muslims in the USA and the West are of the secular variety (I met many of them -definitely not practising the tenets of Islam). The extremists are a small minority but they are visible because they are vocal.
I do not think there will be an Islamic state in USA. If the commentators are worried about the possibility of such, then they assimilate the Muslims. The idea of segregation actually reinforces the Muslim identity. If the West wants to deal with Islam, encourage them to assimilate and remove the ethnic ghettos. Detention, segregation and deportation only reinforces the separate identity of Muslims.
Yes, I know they can be very annoying, but Muslims can be managed. I know. I live in a 60% Muslim country. As an esoteric Christian and Druid, I am a minority among minorities. We do face discrimination and disadvantages, but we manage it.
I’ve had an idea I’d like to propose and get out there into the wild: that the reason you see people swear by so many different and sometimes contradictory self-improvement programs and methods is because most self-improvement is basically completely fungible at the object level: do almost anything difficult with sufficient attention, intention, and perseverance and eventually you’ll start sorting out the rest of your life as a matter of habit while thinking it had something to do with the specific difficult thing you chose to focus on. But it’s all just extremely elementary will training in disguise.
This is also why there aren’t any easy self-improvement methods that work: it has to be at least mildly unpleasant to do consistently in order to hone your will.
COUNTY HIGHWAY NEWSPAPER
I thought I posted the following but can’t find where, so guess I never did. Senior moment…
——-
I am putting hereforth this notice because the commentariat has put it out there making sure no stone is unturned regarding small, independent publishers, with the idea of getting one’s books published. I have a lead.
The notice was a piece of paper inserted into the pages of “County Highway” (no ‘r’), per David Samuels, editor-in-chief; Walter Kirn, editor-at-large, to which I subscribe. Here are the first couple paragraphs verbatim. I hope this is not a shameless plug:
24 June 2025
Dear Friends,
We launched County Highway [newspaper, every two months] two years ago to build a haven for the American literary voice. One that channeled the spirit of the open-road and the breadth of the American experience outside of big cities, a place where essays about homesteading and living out in the desert would appear next to in-depth reporting on everything from greyhound racing and marijuana growers to water rights and the assassination of JFK.
Having built up a remarkable core of 20,000 amazing subscribers and newsstand buyers, we now feel ready to reveal Part Two of our mission — the founding of a new publishing house called “Panamerica” that will help sustain the free-wheeling, plain-spoken spirit that made America literature great. Our first two books are at the printer right now and they are both winners:
Bloodline
by Lee Clay Johnson
a great rollicking novel set in Tennessee; and
Life Sentences
by Martin Mull, comedian-actor-musician-painter
which will come out under our back-yard Hard Cider Press label, a hilarious and heart-breaking book of stories.
Each book is designed as the beginning of a set to which we will be adding every other month for the next few years, and hopefully forever.
——-
Their address is:
County Highway
P.O. Box 53
Franklin, NY 13775 USA
💨 👩🏼🏫📚Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Earthbear #66
“…when physically/spiritually exhausted by the material plane…”
Flower essences would definitely help. I have used flower essences ever since I bumped into a store display in Whole Foods thirty years ago. I started out with Flower Essence Society (FES) and have continued buying their products over time. There are other suppliers but I ignore them:
https://www.flowersociety.org
https://www.fesflowers.com
I use the “shotgun method” (my terminology) on myself. I have a dozen books on the subject. I research particular flower essences ad nauseum, then buy an abundance of different bottles — some of which will undoubtedly work. Some won’t work, but since flower essences either will help or do nothing, there is no harm in taking them. I never know which flower essence(s) is/are the one(s) that I need to take at the moment, a downside. A flower essence practitioner would know more than I. I go according to the books I bought and read.
I have bought so many bottles direct-mail from FES that I am sure I have kept them in business.
Because I have been ‘diagnosing’ and taking flower essences for so long a time, I have an affinity towards some particular flower essences as well as mixtures. Scarlet Pimpernel is MY personal flower (I fell in love the first time I met the first Scarlet Pimpernel blossom).
“Five-Flower Formula” (FES) (in Bach’s world, “Rescue Remedy”) I would recommend for anyone either starting out, or in crisis. I was surprised that almost anyone I ask, they have heard of “Rescue Remedy” (translated to FES’ Five Flower Formula).
If I hadn’t accidentally found flower essences thirty years ago, I would have died around that time😪🥺 — in my early forties.
💨Northwind Grandma💐🪻🪷🥲
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@JMG and others, I see a lot of talk about Europe there is a big difference between the Eastern Europe and Western Europe and although thing are pretty stable now, once the mirage of a better life goes away completely, things are going to be chaotic in Eastern Europe and they might want to trow away the last remaining colonial yoke in the world. I don’t think they will be quite cooperative and the BOVID waxxine mandates was a good example in Romania and other Eastern European countries.
JMG, what’s your take on Eastern European, do you consider a scenario where they have some survival instinct and start to fight back against Western European suicidal tendencies… France and other actors had to fake the Romanian election and intervene to change the popular vote, and people consider we are a colony here, the rough mountain village people here, the Romanian equivalent of houthis, taliban etc, are quite adamant that we are a colony, and a nice trivia fact I discovered, although they don’t speak any Russian, the very trendy word now among them is НЕТ(the Russian: nyet) which now for these Romanians means: hell no, and is used on a usual basis daily.
Trump is 79. My father who lived in the same small town for 50 years and saw friends, neighbors business people age, observed that around ages 77 and 78, with exceptions of course, that even people who had been vigorous became old in action and entered a new stage of life. I saw it happen to my father. I have a feeling that aging will be hitting Trump hard soon, if not already.
Hi JMG,
I know you don’t watch videos, but others may be interested in this latest one from Kevork Almassian:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWrdtvO_tSk
At about the 47.20m mark are the goings on in Germany among the ‘migrant’ population that “Mutter Merkel” so graciously let in. These “migrants” were of course a direct consequence of one part of all the endless Western meddling in the M.E.
The whole video is worth watching, he is a Syrian Christian from Aleppo, for those who haven’t heard of him, now living in Germany.
My question pertains to this section, these “demonstrators” are hardliners who align themselves with the current Syrian “Government”. I personally believe that if they are not deported back to their own country, which they seem to now believe is a land of milk and honey, they are going to cause chaos.
If these new citizens do establish power in Germany and throughout wider Europe, what do you think are the chances of all the beautiful churches and monasteries that have stood for centuries, surviving?
Add into the mix the possible destruction of the Al-Aqsa Mosque by the extremists in Israel, if that happens then I think all bets are off.
It saddens me just to think that this could happen, but we know that it wouldn’t be the first time.
I also wonder if the decline in the Piscean/Christian age signals something dire too.
I would hope that they are able to survive, and at worst be converted to a Mosque or Temple or some such but it really depends on how hardline the conquerers are I guess. Not promising, going by that footage.
Regards,
Helen in Oz
Chronojourner #42 – best to look at https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain for a summary
Hi John,
Agree regarding Germany. Only caveat is the bulk of Muslims live in the former West Germany (including the old divided Berlin).
I could imagine the old East Germany breaking away at some point as a home for Christian Germans and expelling of the Muslims living in Berlin by the 2040s/2050s.
Regarding war against Russia, the consensus seems to be around 2029. Presumably after Trump is gone and before Germany has seriously scaled up its military expansion programme.
@JMG
Environment, Power and Society; Chapters 6,7 and 13, but particularly 13 goes into peak information being after peak production. In this chapter Odum delves into the typical 20th century optimistic scientific proscriptions of a prosperous way down the downslope of descent, that ignores history and human nature, but the systemic analysis and modelling is spectacular.
@Patrick #61
Remember it is just a working hypothesis, detailed in these two by JMG :
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/182661.html
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/299597.html
The reasoning is that the 3 Cells currently sharing each hemisphere would become 2. And you’re right, the 2nd of these posts posits that it’s rather the Ferrel, the middle one, that would get “squeezed”. Memory failed me! Plus the focus here is on the Northern Hemisphere.
In the meantime, maybe you’ve seen the other big news recently splashing about Antartica, that the waters surrounding it have become saltier and warmer (since 2016!), the Ocean Circulation not behaving like it used to.
Hi John Michael,
Hope you are well. Thanks for the laughs about the she-devils of hussy island, or whatever it was called. Surely, the naughty one was named Zoot and had lit the grail shaped beacon as a lark and required suitable chastisement? 😉
Nothing really serious to add, just chiming in and saying hello! Looks like some serious rains are about to fall here. Not much has fallen north of the Great Dividing Range for this year. Then a lot will do so over the next fortnight. That’s how things roll down here as the famous poem suggests. Actually the rain shortfall has not been too bad at this location, but elsewhere things are grim (but about to be seriously rained upon).
Oh! I sit down and just write too. Editing comes afterwards, and like you mentioned it interrupts the word flow and narrative state. Mostly what I write gets reviewed about four times (and by another set of eyes). I’m a big believer in the editing process, and having someone else review the written words. They’ll provide feedback which can be beneficial. Ego on the other hand can be a dominating force in people to their detriment, but I care not a whit for status.
Congrats on the new book, and who doesn’t appreciate a special edition? Low acid paper and decent bindings will outlast you and I – not to mention my now sad looking collection of pulp era fiction paperback novels.
Cheers
Chris
Well, Robert #59, you are likely right about the outcome of a conventional war between Russia and NATO. Aurelian, who comments here occasionally, has pointed out in his blog that 50 or so hypersonic missiles against which there is no realistic defence, could cripple the government and infrastructure of any major European country. In terms of invasion though, why would Russia actually invade and occupy those countries? If they invaded Britain for example, they would find a country with no remaining natural resources to speak of, 70 million people of varying ethnicities and degrees of over-entitlement, a land that produces about half the food its inhabitants consume and hardly any manufacturing industry. Russian military personnel would presumably not be seeking political asylum after arriving on our shores, so could not expect to be accommodated in luxury hotels at the expense of the UK government!
In fact, they might not even need any missiles to disable most of our paltry domestic armed forces. I’m not sure of the global awareness of this story, but for those not aware – a few weeks ago a couple of pro-Palestinian protestors broke into Britain’s main base for military transport aircraft by dislodging a few wooden fence panels with a prybar. They then rode an electric scooter up to a couple of aircraft, did £9 million of damage to the engines, left the base and the act was only discovered when they posted a video online the next morning. I can only imagine what a few dozen pre-positioned Russian special forces personnel could do in a couple of days before any overt outbreak of hostilities.
Hey JMG and commentariat
I wish to share a new Substack writer I have come across, called “The philosopher of the oil sands”.
He appears to be a man who works in oil-extraction who not only writes various articles of social critique and philosophical thought, but occasionally uses oil and the technology used for extracting it as a source of metaphors. Some of what he has written seems to agree with you, but I have not read everything he has written.
https://philosopheroftheoilsands.substack.com/
>Randomly clicking things until something happens is not the way you operate a submarine or a chemical plant.
But that will be standard MO in about – now to 10 years from now. The future’s so bright, I gotta wear these shades.
@toby
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/recruits-heart-failure-some-mental-health-issues-cant-join-military-hegseth
I’d study this list very very carefully. I remember some former SAS guy trying to get fat enough so they couldn’t suck him back in. In this era, that’s not a hard goal to achieve. So much junk food out there. Granted, if they get desperate enough, nothing short of either running away or resisting will help. I’d say like with JMG, if you’re going to do something, you had better do it now. Dithering could be lethal.
re: Fred Halliot
That there could be some Fearless Leader that could unite this place and have everyone marching in lockstep – excuse me while I go away and snicker quietly for a while. Don’t worry about some Fearless Leader, that’s not going to happen. What you should worry about is this place blowing apart into smaller chunks. And then some Fearless Leader showing up in each of the chunks.
Gabe Brown of Bismarck, North Dakota, turned to regenerative farming in desperation after a few disasters. From the blurb for his book Dirt to Soil:
“Brown dropped the use of most of the herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic fertilizers that are a standard part of conventional agriculture. He switched to no-till planting, started planting diverse cover crops mixes, and changed his grazing practices. In so doing Brown transformed a degraded farm ecosystem into one full of life—starting with the soil and working his way up, one plant and one animal at a time. […] Using regenerative agricultural principles, Brown’s Ranch has grown several inches of new topsoil in only twenty years!”
I haven’t read the book, but I have watched a couple of his videos, and his story is inspirational.
JMG,
I recently attended an event that was intended for an occult crowd (but parts of it felt very New Age-y). In the corner of the conference hall, they had several styles of copper pyramids (made of pieces of pipe) with cushions on the floor and they advertised it as a “free recharging station”. I gave it a short try and sitting inside the pyramid did actually have a nice feel to it… rather crisp and clean. But, just because something feels nice doesn’t necessarily mean it is safe and/or helpful.
Do you (or the commentariat) have any resources about the effectiveness (or snake-oiliness) of copper pyramids? And there were two versions… one with equilateral triangle sides and one with isosceles triangle sides. Would those have different properties?
Another way to look at the way Islam might develop in America is the ways it has already diverged from traditional Islam since it arrived on this land. The Moorish Science Temple of America was one way and the Nation of Islam is a split off from that. Now Louis Farrakhan uses extensive terminology from Scientology in his speeches and has connections with that. Things could get very weird. So I think these precedents are worth taking into account. The book Gone to Croatan: Origins of American Dropout Culture gives some other clues of the ways things might diverge from what we currently accept as reality. It details African American maroon communities and the Métis nation among other things. These groups often ended up very clannish to insulate themselves from outside influences. There may be all kinds of such clusters of people in what will essentially be pseudomorphic religions from the old world.
@ Joan #73
“…feeling desire but also feeling less than fully ready for the responsibility that would accompany the satisfaction of that desire. They fantasize about a [insert *thing* here] who will force them to accept what they desire in a way that absolves them of the responsibility.”
In a funny way, Joan, I think you’ve put your finger on a dynamic with a much wider application than eroticism. For example… it strikes me that people who fantasise (and actually obtain) about a job that grants them power over others while absolving them of responsibility is the exact dynamic that makes bureaucracy so dauntingly and devastatingly effective while remaining perennially unaccountable.
How many people want X power without the commensurate responsibility? I do not know, but I know that anytime such a fantasy is “realised” it is a recipe for certain disaster. Keep power and responsibility in balance and things generally go better.
I realized at some point last week that the rise of ideologies and ideological movements in the last century was probably the result of public schools becoming the standard form of education worldwide. With public education systems to teach students, there is an unprecedented phenomenon in the world – children over a wide range of cultural, financial, and geographical backgrounds being taught the same set of abstractions and intellectual tools in their formative years.
Almost everyone has the same set of equipment in the tool-belts of their minds, learnt in roughly the same order: literacy, basic arithmetic ability, comprehension of prosaic language, basic algebra and geometry, and – in recent years – elementary computer programming. Everyone has a similar ontology, comprised of school-level geography, history, and science. Tools for communicating ideas – familiarity with the terminology associated with this school-level ontology for instance – is also consistent across the demographic of any country and even across the world.
Ask any literate person anywhere in the world what the frigid continent near the South Pole is, and they will happily inform you that it is called Antarctica. Almost none of them have been there. Almost no one has ever seen mitochondria in their cheek cells under an electron microscope, but almost everyone can name the powerhouse of the cell. This is a fascinating aspect of the modern world, and also one of the scariest – that ideas can gain enormous mind-share among very wide populations without being at all verifiable or concretely relatable to anybody in those populations.
I think all the ideologies of the world – capitalism, communism, fascism, and every other pronounceable sequence of Roman letters ending with “–ism” that constitutes a valid latinate lexemme – ultimately stem from this uniformity. After all, a uniformity of abstractions is just a few steps away from a uniformity of convictions, isn’t it?
As a matter of fact, I recall learning in high school that this system of public education stems from the Print Revolution in Europe, when the Catholic and Protestant churches raced one another to establish schools to teach children their doctrines. The entire point of the system was mass indoctrination – the uniform adoption of abstractions (like Good and Evil), convictions (like Heaven and Hell), and obligations (like praying) among a wide population.
Now that religion has been removed from the system, I don’t think the indoctrination engine has lost its teeth. Its still a weapon of religious indoctrination, but now it is a Godless weapon of indoctrination. It is a breeding ground and conduit for ideologies and all manner of bedlam-inducing convictions.
Many Indian political commentators have pointed out that Socialism does feel like an Abrahamic faith without the deity, and I think they are on to something. I do feel that ‘liberal’ professors are so insistent on controlling the culture of universities specifically because they know precisely what education systems are and what they are capable of.
“If these new citizens do establish power in Germany and throughout wider Europe, what do you think are the chances of all the beautiful churches and monasteries that have stood for centuries, surviving?”
If the situations in Britain and Minnesota are any indication, those beautiful churches and monasteries have probably already been sold off to some Muslims and turned into a mosque.
@Justin Patrick Moore #122 The special American combination of freedom of speech, press, and religion since colonial times has resulted in a constant ferment of fissioning and cross pollinating religious and spiritual movements and groups – a kind of competitive free market of spirituality. Let freedom ring!
@Robert Morgan (#115):
Military occupation doesn’t have to be long-term to be worth doing. In my post, I was thinking of short-term occupation, just long enough for the victor to hunt down and kill most of the remaining belligerent and parasitic elites in the occupied nation, followed by withdrawal from its shattered remains which will have started to spiral down into sheer chaos..
Note: In my post (#59) I messed up my html bold tags. The only words that were meant to be in bold type were the first and the last ones: “non-nuclear” and “could.”
From Siliconguy:The Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent shares Galbraith’s view of economists.
“”What we need to do is examine the entire Federal Reserve institution and whether they have been successful… All of these Ph.D.s over there, I don’t know what they do… This is like Universal Basic Income for academic economists.”
The dog days of summer are a little restive than usual.
—-
For everyone and JMG.
Yes. As someone who spent years at the FED, the assessment is accurate. However, since the Glass-Segal Act (now repealed), the Fed and Treasury have been at odds with each other. In a room full of both, it is like a poker game with everyone holding their cards.
I worked at one of the smallest divisions – International Finance. We had 150 people, 40 of which worked on academic papers and models. I used to edit their papers. The largest division is Research with over 2000 people. It is bigger than Banking Supervision and Regulation. In other words, there are more academic economists doing research than there are bank examiners.
As for Presidents and Fed Chairs – they have been at odds since the beginning. I could rattle off the names of Chairs that defied Presidents through the years. The last was Arthur Burns who was fired by Carter. Greenspan was the ultimate pol and managed to grease relations. The ones later, not so much.
I do believe it does need to be rebuilt from the ground up. The Fed is a victim of mission creep and has gotten away from its initial charter.
Re: Minneapolis
The Somalis in Minneapolis have a fairly effective political machine that is starting to land their preferred candidates in office. It’s easy for them to control the DFL (democrat) primary process locally. Once their candidate becomes the official DFL candidate, they are voted in because the city is a one party state where the DFL will always win. It wouldnt surprise me at all if Fateh was elected as mayor.
A motivated minority always beats a complacent majority. “majorities” i think are far less powerful than they are made out to be. The secret is that the “majority” doesnt have enough time or motivation to spend a lot of time on politics. Usually it’s just the elite, or perhaps aspiring elites, which do that. Working and raising kids is hard.
I think for the sinilar reason a ‘nationalistic’ group will always beat a universalist one. The nationalist group has access to both its own resources and the charity of a universalist group. The universalist group cannot ultimately take its own side.
I dont think that the us will ever be muslim to any significant degree, but i do think that the progressive idea that people are basically interchangable and that exposure to enlightened progressive institutions or individuals will erase any meaningful differences will take a beating this century. The universal society cant fail, only be failed so the saying goes.
I have a scattering of thoughts, so am posting several different ones. I find it for me to be better than one long rambling one.
I am reading JMG’s latest UFO book. I am fascinated by the early reports of UFOs especially the 1600s or so. Usually, the topic is presented with either ancient astronauts and everyone is a god or they don’t appear before the 1940s.
Very little about everything in between. So UFOs have been on going since well forever….
I am curious about the stuff in the Bible. Paul Wallis in his first book in the Escaping Eden series examined the Old Testament as a minister seeking answers to odd verses and references. He concluded that there were something going on with UFOs and aliens, but was unsure. The rest of his series veers into the ancient astronaut stuff. However, I wonder how the odd bits and pieces of the Old Testament remained and taken out.
About Dark Mafia Books, etc. I confess I read them from time to time. They are full of tropes – the damaged powerful male and the spunky, feisty female. The authors that I have read usually have both be a part of that world. It is all fantasy, as reality is much different. (I used to live in a Mafia neighborhood, and my mother knew a Don.) It is escapist fantasy.
What I have noticed is that sex is written in general fiction unless it’s labeled clean or Christian. The sex in Dark Mafia books border on rape, kidnapping, etc. They seem to be a safe place to explore the darker side of sexuality. So, I think a great many publishers seem to think that sex is needed to sell books.
As for patriarchy and matriarchy in the Dark Mafia books, it seems to be both at least with the authors I read. A clash of wills with the meeting of the minds. Within fantasy sex and fantasy power. All the ugly bits sidelined.
As for the clean sex books, a great many try to model Jane Austen’s books.
About the Russia Gate vrs Epstein files: I watch both liberal and conversative media. Both live in different universes as to their focus. I see it as two tectonic plates pushing up against each other. Eventually a giant earthquake is going to occur. And everything will be changed.
I think this is mirrored in Astrology with Uranus and Neptune. Correct me on that. They seemed to be in positions of revolutions, etc. Stephen Forrest believes that Astrology and actual events are related based on Quantum Physics. He cites the Jung-Pauli letters. I think there is something to the two being connected, as to how, I am not sure.
As several Nobel Laurate physicists said, if you think you understand quantum physics, you are sadly deluded. Actually, knowing the subject sends physicists screaming off into the night. It is spooky beyond belief.
@ JPM –
Thanks for all the book recommendations! You’re on a roll this week. I’m filing some of these away for later.
@103 Felix
Is it possible that many of those secular Muslims in America will end up going with the flow of the dominant culture and eventually convert to (Protestant) Christianity in the Second Religiousness?
A couple of weeks ago I said I was going to share my experience with a Christian version of parts of the Sphere of Protection – the Elemental Cross and the Circulation of Light. I followed the instructions laid out in The Druid Magic Handbook. I would stand in good posture receiving and perceiving the goodness of life around me and then thank the Father, Holy Spirit, Jesus, and the created order, finishing the Elemental Cross with a bit of spontaneous worship differing from day to day, tongues, raised hands, saying in the “name of Jesus”, the classic sign of the cross with “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” more simple thanksgiving. I would finish hands at side feeling the “light of life” Jesus said he would give his followers radiating from my heart – “for God who said, ‘Let light shine out of the darkness’ has made his light shine in our hearts” 2 Corinthians 4:8. It was truly the “pause that refreshes”. My prayer direction is facing north as that is the direction the Lord came from when he appeared to Ezekiel and Job.
One day I realized that an even simpler approach sufficed for the same life giving results, simply standing before the Lord assuming a good posture, the typical sign of the cross, raised hands, a bit of tongues, and so on generated the same uplift of life and light. As it says “let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life”. I repeat this simple ritual here and there during the day to receive as it says in the Bible “times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord”. So following the instructions in The Druid Magic Handbook opened a way to a deeper knowing of the simplicity of Christ and the surging viriditas – the greening power of God in the created order that Hildegard of Bingen wrote of
So that is the ritual portion of my practice. The discursive meditation equivalent is a close reading of a chapter in the New Testament and consideration of over verses as they come to mind during the day. The divination portion is asking the Holy Spirit about the coming day Jesus said the ministry of the Spirit is to lead us into truth and to teach us and to tell us what is yet to come..I can see that the tradition I am following is the one found is what is called the radical reformation or radical Protestantism – the early Quakers, Baptists, Pentecostals and other similar sects.
Hope you and all of the commentariat are well!
Since it’s been a while since I last mentioned it, I thought I’d put out another feeler and ask if there’s anyone out there working with the Heathen Golden Dawn system who might be interested in joining an informal online study and discussion group that might grow into an Order with time? Even if the curriculum is very well suited for solo work, I’d love to have something like the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn to supplement it. If you’d rather not reply here in public, you can PM me at Dreamwidth, same username. And of course, if someone else has started a group along these lines already and I’ve missed it, I’d appreciate a pointer.
On a somewhat related note, has anyone ever translated the names of the geomantic characters to Old Norse? I’ve still got a lot of work to do with the various futharks, but way down the line I think the classic GD runes/geomancy/Tarot trio would be a good divinatory toolbox to aim for, and having the names in Norse seems fitting. I guess I could always give them modern Norwegian names instead, but it’s not quite the same.
Re. 2026 Ecosophia meet-up:
Have to say I’m very tempted now that I hear you’re expanding to three days. 🙂 It’s hard to justify both the carbon and the expense, but the Glastonbury event was a lot of fun, and getting to meet Erika L. and all the American Ecosophians in person would be a real treat. I haven’t been to the US since 2009 and honestly didn’t expect to return at this point, but we’ll see…especially since the East Coast is one of the regions I’ve hardly seen outside of NYC.
@JMG
A while back you had a Dreamwidth post about the symbolic shortcomings of the “Woke flag”, the one with the wedge. When I went to Bath after leaving Glastonbury, I saw that flag signalling virtue all over the place, but I was interested to notice that someone had apparently realized the implications of what you pointed out about the white wedge. IIRC this new version had a yellow wedge with a purple circle in it towards the outer right instead. Thankfully the old-school rainbow flag without the Woke wedge is the one that tends to be used here in Norway, so I hadn’t noticed the change before I went to the UK.
Justin Patrick Moore: LOWER ADOCENTYN!
hella highlarious
X
Robert Morgan @ 115, I love that phrase ‘over entitlement’.
Speaking of words and how they are used, how and when did it become common to use the word ‘feel’ as an enhanced synonym for ‘think’? This is a contemporary change in language and behavior with which I am not happy. We “feel” you such and such etc. Surely, we have all heard this. I think this usage is a way to avoid being responsible for one’s own thoughts and behavior. Use of this verbal trickery excuses the speaker from having actually to observe and reflect on another person’s conduct, because feelings you know. Feelings, emotion, is believed to be the most authentic part of a person’s consciousness but is it really? Considering how easily emotion can be manipulated by demagogues and advertising, just how authentic are they?
@JMG @BoysMom
“I haven’t yet seen the first whisper of awareness among politicians and bureaucrats of the coming demographic decline”
I have, but only from people who think they can stop it. J. D. Vance is the most prominent of them in this country, but in Europe a whole raft of social welfare programs specifically aimed at raising the birth rate has had results that vary from country to country but none of which have had enough effect to actually reverse the decline. Hungary managed to raise its fertility rate from 1.3 to 1.6 by (among other things) excusing mothers of 4 or more children from paying income tax for the rest of their lives. This was celebrated as a great success but now it’s fallen back to 1.5.
Actually, now that I think about it, Japanese leadership in robotics is widely known (at least within the international robotics community) to be motivated by that country’s combination of low birth rates and unfriendliness to immigrants. Their plan is to replace the never-born workers with machines. Singapore’s policy is to brain-drain China through a program of government-funded scholarships to that country’s colleges and universities for high-performing young people from the PRC, which might work for them for a long time, given how tiny and how wealthy Singapore is compared to China. Finally, I’ve read speculation that various European countries’ foot-dragging with regard to prosecution of illegal behavior by immigrants (such as the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal in England) is motivated by fear on the part of the ruling classes that, if they get too thorough about punishing the criminal acts of immigrants, the immigrants might stop coming.
But of course none of them are going to come right out and say this. That might open the door to a public conversation about what kind of society people want. Shake the voters out of their complacency. Can’t have that.
Meanwhile, in a development that gave me (long accustomed as I am to associating pronatalism with opposition to government social programs as part of generic social conservatism) a bit of mental whiplash, the anti-abortion movement has come up with a proposal called “Make Birth Free”, which is exactly what it sounds like: having the government pick up the tab for all the expenses of pregnancy and childbirth, from prenatal medical care to infant car seats.
I just ran across a stunning example of the widespread main character syndrome suffered by the laptop class:
https://xcancel.com/souljagoyteller/status/1946717609770057810#m
The context is a poster on X tracing the contemporary politicization of romance to the comment section on the online magazine Jezebel. Whether that’s correct or not, the post I’ve linked is telling: an “essayist/writer” for Liberal Currents is flabbergasted that anyone could think that commenters could significantly impact the broader culture.
Posted unironically on what is essentially one of the world’s largest comment sections which has been noted repeatedly for its impact of American and worldwide culture.
Couldn’t be clearer that people like this think only what their class writes matters and everyone else is insignificant.
Polecat, thanks for the advice. Looks like a pressure canner would be a great investment. I plan to do a lot more canning in the future. I never even considered canning fish or meat, but that would be a great way to preserve it without taking up precious fridge space.
For Cesar and anyone else feeling overwhelmed I second JMG’s advice. Stoicism got it mostly right over two thousand years ago. Meditation also helps a lot of people. The only thing I would add is that meditation does not have to be that formal sitting in the lotus position hands on knees repeating “omm” over and over.
A two mile, forty minute, walk with occasional breaks to smell the roses, watch the ducks, or the killdeer doing its poor-little-me act helps recenter yourself quite well.
When that wasn’t enough (while working on my doctorate) I added archery to the repertoire. Then I needed to blank out everything from my mind except my stance and sight picture. That really helped deal with the stress.
Uranus has just entered the sign of Gemini and will travel through the sign for the next seven years. For the USA this transit appears to correlate closely with the Fourth Turning theory of generational change since the last three transits through Gemini correspond with our Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War II! Current conditions in this country certainly have the vibe of the Fourth Turning crisis. What are your thoughts about this transit and the Fourth Turning?
A new way of thinking of the generations just popped in to my head. People can go down a rabbit hole discussing the differences between the boomers and Gen X , or the generations before and after getting cell phones as children. But at the present moment we are getting ready shift most of the managerial power in society from one important generational group to another.
That is Children children who grew up riding in their parent’s cars in Child Safety Seats, and those who cam of age before that ( Middle 1980’s). I am not saying Car Seats are bad, as they have saved huge numbers of lives. But their introduction brings in a new era of attitudes toward children that has implications on how those children think and feel when they grow up.
It kinds of signals a change from an Era when Children were viewed as small adults that could be sent out to roam the neighborhood all day, or ride in the back of the station wagon atop a mound of pillows of their own design, to one in which child safety and parental oversight became paramount. I don’t think the car seats themselves did this. They are more of a symbol of when society changed. A bright red line that effected everyone but the Amish.
What do you think?
From USA Today, excerpted from an article on why Louisiana is willing and able to host a number of immigration detention centers:
“Many Americans know Louisiana by its crown jewel, New Orleans, where social norms and politics are as liberal as the flow of alcohol on Bourbon Street. But the rest of the state is largely wooded, rural, proudly conservative, and deeply Christian. ….and the poverty rate is the highest in the nation.”
This is the gap you’ve written extensively about, brought home vividly enough for the nation’s mass market paper. I omitted the part about “County governments are called parishes,” which was a legacy of French Louisiana before Napoleon sold it to the United States in 1803, but which the USA Today writer seemed to think was due to the rural religiosity.
BUT, or AND – “The state overhauled its criminal justice system in 2017, – with bipartisan support – [emphasis mine] – to reduce sentences for low-level offenders. That has the effect of dramatically decreasing the state’s prison population and freeing thousands of incarcerated people, mainly Black men and women.” Which freed those prisons to be used to house immigrants, which is bringing money into the state, but that Louisiana should take such a step is interesting. Whether it was to save money, or any other reason, it was a step I’d like to see Florida take. Anyway, FYI as a local culture watcher.
Cambodia and Thailand have started a war with each other:
https://apnews.com/article/thailand-cambodia-border-conflict-explainer-0eb99510a4ea16ee769a5934e0c07383
More thoughts on Write Women Book Fest 2025.
The cognitive dissonance was thick on the ground.
One of our organizers is all about the diversity but she’s on record — I saw her Instagram reels — that any Trump-voting writers need not apply to her book festival. She’s utterly, tearfully convinced the apocalypse, as caused by Trump, is happening right now and the concentration camps are being set up as we speak.
Climate change is evil and baked in the cake yet most of the attendees had to drive to Bowie, including one author from Texas. I’m not sure from how far away other authors came from but I know some of them got on planes to get to Bowie. One of our authors — the one with the appalling postcards — lives fulltime in a camper, driving back and forth across the U.S. as she sees fit.
Capitalism is evil but buy my books because I’m not giving them away.
Modern America is a hellhole even though modern America enables me to have the necessary mobility scooter and medical assistance I need, and which, by the way, I am owed because I am a citizen of said hellhole.
It’s going to take me a while to unpack it all. The experience was overwhelming.
I talked to many, many people all of whom were funny and smart. But they don’t think like me at all.
And so it goes,
“In the early 1960s, the U.S. total fertility rate was around 3.5, but plummeted to 1.7 by 1976 after the Baby Boom ended. It gradually rose to 2.1 in 2007 before falling again, aside from a 2014 uptick. The rate in 2023 was 1.621, and inched down in 2024 to 1.599, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.”
https://www.kxly.com/news/the-us-fertility-rate-reached-a-new-low-in-2024-cdc-data-shows/article_49dc23f1-2bda-5ec2-ab6c-e6fba0a6d32b.html
Re: the possibility of conflicts involving Germany –
I’m not sure it has until 2029. The Capricorn ingress this year is active for Germany (cardinal rising for the Aries ingress, mutable for the Cancer one), and it has Cancer rising with the Moon in her detriment in Capricorn in the 7th, and Mars conjunct the descendant in the 7th also in Capricorn, both of which are potential war warnings.
Hulk Hogan and Ozzy Osbourne both gone in the span of one week… this is too much.
“I Promised Each And Every Hulkamaniac When I Went To That Great Battlefield In The Sky I Would Bring The Title With Me.”
Raise a horn of mead to these great warriors!
@ Joan #73 @JMG
As I get older, I’m more and more inclined to believe that any method of analyzing people’s behavior is inherently flawed. Whoever develops the method, being inherently flawed, is going to miss things or skip over things that don’t agree with their own way of thinking. Plus, you can’t know everything and since you don’t know what you don’t know, your theory will have even more gaps.
One of the weirder and more distasteful aspects of today’s women’s porn is how quickly it descends into BDSM with the woman as the submissive for one or many men. Reverse harems, where our heroine is the sole focus of a pack of alpha males who all manage to get along with each other, can be especially bad. They read like gang rape to me. Bully romance fits into this category too.
But why don’t we see the reverse? Where a woman totally dominates her man? Wouldn’t that fulfill a woman’s fantasy of having a male maid to whip and sexually abuse? But that’s not what I see at romance events.
Interestingly, what I do see at romance events is a lot of MM. For you uninitiated folks, MM, FF, MF, FM, MFM, MMF, FMM, MMM and so forth tell you who’s making up the relationship, how many, who’s having sex with whom, and the power dynamics therein. I’ve now seen plenty of MM with a handsome, young male ingenue being dominated sexually by an older, dominant alpha male. These books are written for women, largely by women. Some gay men (look for Andrew Grey who I know fairly well and he’s a great guy) write MM, but not hardcore porn. His MM are romances. He’s got plenty of female fans but he’s also got male ones.
Finally, heading beyond the pale, are the monster romances. When you look at the cover photo and the description, you see a normal woman standing next to her 8 foot tall minotaur lover and, bluntly, it looks like a little girl with an adult male (except for the horns and tail). Badly written monster romances are icky and creepy. The better ones run with the absurdity of it all.
I think popular romance does say quite a bit about what women really want. Romance is women writing for women. They know what sells and that’s what they write.
The thing is the porn gets the attention. There are plenty of sweet, non-spicy Hallmark Channel rom-com writers. I know them too. But they can sell at the local church Christmas bazaar and on Amazon. The hardcore women can’t.
Anonymous,
Omar Fateh is a woke carpetbagger from Washington D.C. who repeats FBI talking points about white domestic terrorism. There’s nothing in his background that indicates he really represents the Somali community in Minnesota at all. Many of the more pious Somali Muslims in Minnesota dislike Fateh because he is a socialist who doesn’t actually practice Islam at all.
Mr.Greer, yeah, I gok what you’re sayin. I often think about relocating elsewhere, but the weather here on the NOP is for the most part pretty mild. The winters are ok, even with the occasional week or two of arctic blast. I’m afraid that living east of the Rockies, where both the heat, and humidity rises significantly, would at my age, do me in. I suppose I could try to adapt, but still… The downside .. negotiating living in what has evolved into a hella-expensive woketopia!
Hi JMG
Some people have asked you before about the Epstein “affaire”, that explode after the famous (and deleted) tweet of Elon Musk where he said Trump was in the “list”, that ” that is the reason he will never release it” and “mark my words for the future”, and it seems that many people in the MAGA rank and file and in the right/conservative side of politics are fuming about the Trump handling of this issue, and also in the left.
So my question is if you think this issue, as some in the right/conservative side are saying, could be a kind of “let them eat cake” moment and a majority of people start considering the actual power system as “irredeemable” and accelerate the long way to “Cesarism” and/or breaking the “uniparty” grip on power; or it is not so important/relevant and it will be forgotten in a few months. For me the difference with other issues or discontent is the sordid nature of the case and then the trend to “escalate” badly in the mind of the people.
Recently there was a yougov survey about this issue and 89% of democrats, 73% of republicans and 81% of independents, wanted ALL the Epstein documents to be made public and 69% of all US citizens asked considered that the government is a covering-up evidences it has about this case.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52631-donald-trump-joe-biden-job-approval-ukraine-aid-russia-jeffrey-epstein-public-broadcasting-pbs-npr-july-18-21-2025-economist-yougov-poll
For me it seems the issue is not going away soon and for example yesterday the WSJ published an article saying that the DOJ informed Trump in last May that he was in the Epstein “list”, this happened shortly before the break-up between Musk and Trump and seems Musk use this information to attack Trump in his tweet:
https://www.wsj.com/politics/justice-department-told-trump-name-in-epstein-files-727a8038
Cheers
David
@ Aldarion #85
I’m so pleased you laughed! 6666 is a funny concept.
It works in the U.S.
The average height for a male in the U.S. is 5 foot eight.
The average salary for a U.S. male is $48,000.
I don’t know about the six-pack abs, but based on my personal observation of men (I’m a romance writer. Sue me), very few adult U.S. men have great abs. Or if they do, they’re concealed under a protective layer of flab so it comes to the same thing.
I’m not googling the six inches below the belt.
If Canada and Europe are planning on going to war and drafting their citizens into the war, anybody worried that the United States will end up going to war and drafting American citizens into the war as well?
@ Mary Bennet #98
While traditional publishing is dipping its toes into hardcore pornography (you may thank E. L. James for that and she’s tame compared to what’s out there), the overwhelming majority of women’s porn is written by indie authors who self-publish.
They are fearless at following their kinks, their readers’ kinks, and the money.
There’s a LOT of money in porn, as proved by Elora’s Cave all those years ago. They published plenty of indie porn written by women for women and would still be in business today if the owner hadn’t flaked out radically.
Anyway. Writing hardcore porn has restrictions. Amazon and Facebook both strenuously disapprove of it, making advertising on those sites difficult to impossible. If Amazon thinks you write porn, because your description of your plot isn’t correctly coded and a reader complains, you’re shoved into the porn dungeon. Your books are available if a reader knows where to look but you can’t advertise until you can persuade Amazon to release you from the dungeon and good luck with that!
Amazon and the other services like Draft2Digital are perfectly fine with making your hardcore eBooks and your print-on-demand trade paperbacks available because they get their cut. But you can’t advertise. Depending on what you wrote, you may not be eligible to be placed in Kindle Unlimited. Selling your eBook is fine but you can’t be in the program. You have to read the Terms of Service.
This is where romance book events come in. The fans of hardcore want to have real books in their hands. Thus, you get events like Write Women Book Fest 2025, which was actually rather tame as these things go. You, dear indie writer, apply, pay the fees, are accepted, and you show up with your books, your banners showing impossibly muscular, alien males with horns, and some hardcore swag.
Hardcore writers MUST do these events because its the only way they can advertise and reach new readers. What’s more, because these events are hardcore, the advertising is restricted to only certain venues, where everyone knows what they’re getting into. Rebels and Readers came to Hershey and the only reason I learned about this book event ($20 a ticket and that only gave us 2 hours of access) was because another writer I knew, who wrote porn, was going to be there. They were in a ballroom at the Hershey Lodge, yet there was only one small sign. Neither Rebels and Readers nor the Hershey Lodge wanted innocent guests wandering in unawares.
At a real hardcore event, such as Dreaming Dirty in Maryland which fellow authors showed at, the TNTs, or Rebels and Readers Take Hershey, which Bill and I visited, there are no restraints. At Dreaming Dirty or Sexy and Sultry or similarly named events, expect to see erect wax penises adorning tables, large stuffed ones, and anything else you can think of. At Rebels and Readers, every author as part of the set up had large drinking straws topped with an erect penis and testicles in their official swag water cups. Penis jewelry. Of all kinds. Until you’ve seen it, you simply can’t imagine it.
Then there’s the books. I particularly remember Pepper North at Rebels and Readers. She writes Daddy Kink. She’s a very nice woman from Florida and very successful. Mr. North runs the business while she writes.
All of this is indie. Trad pub won’t touch these books. The writers invariably use pennames to conceal their books from their relatives, neighbors, friends, church families, jobs, and so forth.
I’ll leave you with one final thought about how far the genre goes: “urethral penetration.”
To answer your question about the deluded heroines, yes, they get their happy ever afters or their happy for now with their reverse harem of bully hellhound shapeshifters, because that’s what makes a romance. The HEA or the HFN. This is also what makes these books the most fantastic fantasies ever because none of it would happen.
Luckily, the market for fun, sweet romance is as large as ever and much easier to advertise.
@RandomActsOfKarma #121: The only place I’ve encountered such lore is in the Ra Material, which (as you probably saw) I recently re-read in connection with my study of the hero Teiresias (and which I would consider “New Age-y”).
“Ra” says that a small pyramid like that placed under the skull (e.g. under a pillow or cushion) will act to restore one’s energy: most materials seem to be fine (though copper/silver/gold seem to be best), the specific angle of the pyramid doesn’t matter significantly, and one shouldn’t exceed 30 minutes at a time. I’m pretty wary of channelled material in general and this stuff is no exception, but FWIW, I was curious about that when I read it, did divinations on the topic, and received positive answers, though I haven’t yet made an experiment of it myself.
re: fantasies of being dominated by violent men: I’m going to bring forward a theory that I developed some years ago when you wrote about the decline in pagan book sales. One of the biggest segments within the pagan book category has historically been what an occult shop owner of my acquaintance used to call “witchcrap”; spellbooks in simple language, light on magical theory and self-development practices, heavy on the reader’s supposed innate gifts. The books of Silver Ravenwolf are a well-known example. The target market for such books was teenage girls, generally the age/gender demographic least empowered by society. The less empowered a demographic is, the more likely its members are to reach for magic, right? My theory was that fifty-odd years of Second Wave feminism were finally having their effect. Girls are no longer feeling disempowered. They are encouraged if not pressured to aspire to and work for the same range of careers as their male peers. (I suspect that the relaxing of the taboo on discussion of the sexual abuse of boys is also a factor here. Boys are now seen as being in need of protection, too, so the greater freedom of movement and freedom from supervision that boomer boys enjoyed compared to boomer girls? For Gen Z that’s gone.) Thus, bedroom spell-casting is foregone in favor of the kinds of extracurriculars that will look good on college applications.
With power comes the burdensome downside of power and, thus, fantasies of powerlessness.
Dear Papa,
i’ll admit i got plenty scared that YOU of ALL PEOPLE found my path “strange” and i seeeeriously took it to heart even though i feel like i’m being slotted–with my constant consent—into something i’ve felt ever since i was a child. the “greatness” wasn’t to be scratch-free. on the contrary, it seemed like my life was a rubber band i was stretching up to a suicidal splat right into the side of a castle at some forever-future point. many decades, including the past decade-and-a-half, had me kinda sorta brushing that feeling off not to indigestion or something so prosaic, but to our inherited American Exceptionalism.
however, i now am FINE with our American Exceptionalism when we’re not being jerks but fighters thinkers and lovers with heart.
i come here with these confessions especially now that James is gone and cannot spot me or comb through my ideas/ideals with a gnit picking comb and re-right me. you all so many here individually have held me in The Light. the other Quaker here reminded me of that term i have not heard, even among the Quakers HERE. The Light. it’s a whole concept that i feel and calms me.
back to trickster paranormal charisma serendipity:
so i went to bed thinking this is all another insane ideas of a bored frustrated trapped 4X Leo and i’ve got 5 cats depending on me. my experiment i told James when the mom came to us (i had a premonition or a wish of watching a cat give birth because all my life it was always about spaying neutering fixing ending lines and i was fine with that because ..well, that’s how it WAS back then. you kill everything and give it away), my experiment was to keep them together and see if they cared like everyone said they wouldn’t. but they DO. i love watching their individual personalities blossom and it reminds me to love PEOPLE more.
i’m trying.
anyhow, so i go to bed worried after reading your response. i would’ve almost rather preferred NO response to that one because now you’re speaking back and it’s YOU, who answers humanity’s eternal boogie bougie bogey and all our scariest existential questions. / and i’m going a strange path. i’d hoped for the same response like when i asked about the change in James’ eyes: “oh yeah! that’s blahbeddy blah!”
so as you know I’m reading this “trickster and paranormal” book and feeling seen heard not alone and crazy. but as Geo P Hansen says, this stuff can really mess you up. it’s not free. the cost the price is high and i know it. i’ve paid it not so sure i want to pay it anymore but then i wake up to this post:
https://eugenepolupan.substack.com/p/the-reptile-brain-in-the-garden?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1618009&post_id=169142485&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=87ci2&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
about eve’s betrayal not being all chill but because of her terror and THAT’s what traps me in this idea that the feral and abused have the chops the stamina to deal with all the FEAR. like i think i told you all when i first got beat up for dancing in the moonlight here in my own neighborhood by tweakers and their pitbull, and how even as blood is coursing down my face (i still have the scars on my jaw and hairline near my ear), i was the one calming the scared and crying neighbors and the one cop got so weirded out by my chill nature she got hostile and left it to the other cops.
and i also woke to another email from a friend here who likes to remain anonymous and gave me a referral to a new book out:
https://magickworks.substack.com/p/video-interview-the-occult-architecture
‘This is an interview with a fellow called Stephen Crimi, who just wrote a book called “Hermes runs the Game: Inverted Myth, Sacrifice and Initiation In-Forming the Events of 2020-2024” ‘
so i’m situated back into this slingshot.
thank you for this forum for existing for making a space for us but mostly without my Thames, i’m eternally grateful that you give me your blessings and have this place for me to be held in The Light. whatever happens i’ll be fine, like when i was attacked by the tweakers and their dog, but i was in that LIMINAL place and was feeling love for them all and the dog KNEW and thought they were playing even as they scratched and punched me hard while homeboys stood on the side proudly filming the whole thing, the dog didn’t disembowel me.
it’s not a traditional Leo ME ME ME position. i’m supposed to sacrifice myself to the slingshot and be willing to go splat against the castle walls. the totally LEO part doesn’t want to WASTE my life for inferior people. i’m not a martyr and really doubt if people if HUMANITY is ever worth dying for.
i still believe Jesus didn’t die FOR our sins but BECAUSE of them. big huuuuge major monster difference for we cannot be trusted with anything nice.
x
P.S.
i do, however seem to think that dying for AMERICA as an IDEA and IDEAL is alright and i had to really think about if this is True or not. and i’ve traveled half the world and yes… i could’ve only been allowed to flourish as my weirdo self HERE in The States and for that as a colored girl as a woman artist weirdo gen X all that i am and have become and been ALLOWED the room to become, for THAT i am eternally grateful and yes… i WILL fight for that and re-position myself in the slingshot to be used as slingshot fodder to go “splat” against the castle walls. but at the best possible time and delayed as long as possible. (smile)
but my life has been a most amazing faery tale—and very much continues to be— so for that alone i will fight for the room to be left for other incoming freaks weirdos and ferals.
so it’s not for some vague idealized view of “humanity.” we keep coming up short. but for all this country’s shortcomings, it’s an amazing IDEA and we can keep refining. i don’t want it stopped for some romanticized retrograde shtick that is wolf in sheep costume.
x
Just a data point: the situation here in Minnesota is complicated by the fact that a majority of Ethiopians are actually Christian–heavily Coptic and Orthodox, with plenty of pride in their very ancient traditions–and let’s just say there’s no love lost between Ethiopia and Somalia. So, I could see the Ethiopians pushing back against Islamic/Somali overreach, though I don’t know them well enough to guess what would trigger said pushback. They (and for that matter, the Islamic community as well) have been silent on issues that I thought would get them thoroughly riled up, like gender and alternative sexualities. I presume they understood how badly that would alienate their Dem/leftie allies…
Greetings and thank you for this outlet JMG. Climate change is in some sort of process, i say with sarcasm. we are presently on a tour and doing broadcast along the way as well as music. Firstly glad the universe has steered us to the North, because we were going south and how it has worked out was the opposite, although will tell you intense small rain storms for an hour or so in pockets. We have really tried to understand this new environment and how do we adapt as sound practitioners to the living earth.
The thing we want to ask is if you have some input on the idea that the earth has a soul and is living and how we might all listen better.
For ten years now been practicing the druid handbook as one of the methods in our toolbox and has been a tremendous help on seeing the unseen.
Also JMG on of our songs is The Shadow of Ideas and wanted to share it with you and the folks here.
https://www.mezmermente.net/music it the second song on the player.
Peace
@Toby
I would tell your govt to sod off and go fight their own bloody war.
They flood the UK with rapist migrants, punish you for objecting to it with Orwellian “hate speech” laws, demean and destroy everything represented by the word “British” and then they expect you to go off an die for it?
to Mary Bennet et al on conversion to Islam:
The way that the muslim population is increasing in Europe is not primarily from conversions, it’s from high birthrates and mass migration. As our host has pointed out, the population growth of the european countries is flatlining at best and plunging at worst. To put it bluntly, white europeans just aren’t having many babies, and migrants (especially muslims) have many more.
I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, I view it more as a historical inevitability. The heyday of the West is over and its culture is coming apart at the seams, and the influx of Muslims is an injection of hot blood into Europe, in my opinion. I think that it’s possible that the collectivist, authoritarian nature of Islam and the individualist, liberal nature of Europe could eventually form a new synthesis with the virtues of both and the vices of neither.
In my opinion, America is a different case for multiple reasons. First, it’s more geographically distant from the muslim world, it’s more hostile to muslims, and its religious culture is less emaciated than europe (although still very weak). America is in decline, but because it’s the borderland it has more vitality than Europe. There will still be a muslim presence in some of the larger cities, though.
What interests me more is the future of Protestantism in the United States. One of the characteristics of Protestantism is that it isn’t as rooted in history as the Orthodox and Catholic traditions. The young alienated men who will forge the future are craving tradition and history, and a lot of them are converting to Orthodoxy. As a young alienated man myself, sometimes I can see the appeal… but I’m too much of a weirdo psuedo-Gnostic to ever join. I think that Protestantism in the United States is going to have to make a choice: it will either have to transform or die.
As a sidenote, Mormonism is an interesting case. It is deeply rooted in history (especially American history) and is very traditionalist in many ways. But it’s jettisoning a lot of what makes it unique to try to appeal to protestants and seem normal. It’s a losing strategy but I’m sure the corporate executives think it’s the best way forward… I’m hoping for a ‘folk mormonism’ in the future that is free from the bureaucratic strangehold of the church corporation.
Has anyone heard from Lady Cutekitten/ Princess Cutekitten? She used to always post here and on my blog but I haven’t seen her post in months.
With regard to a discussion in the previous post, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: bylaws only matter if your neighbours don’t like you.
@JMG I’d like to hear more about your concept of an entity known as “the Changer”. It seems to me you introduced this some years ago, during Trump’s first go-round, but I was not quite a regular reader then, and anyway it seems that affairs have evolved since that time.
Particularly lately, it really does seem that Trump is being used, has been used, as a vessel for change, but not entirely the positive change for which many of us had hoped.
Does “the Changer” just want…. change for the sake of change, because he’s bored? Or is he actively malicious?
Secondly @JMG I wish to thank you for your recommendation, somewhere, of The Magical Battle of Britian (I think it was you? I can’t imagine where else I heard of it).
I have found it to be literally life-changing, but perhaps it would only be so for someone who is “ready” for it.
Did I ever tell the story, on here, about the time I wrote an assignment for my undergrad Nazism and Fascism class, and the professor wrote a comment on the back saying, “Good essay, but drop the occult stuff.”
And I was like…. “but that’s the most interesting part…”
Do you think it’s possible that part of the reason we still talk so much about Hitler today is because he was so involved with the occult? Can these things work out that way?
#Cesar: My condolences . I’ll advice you to avoid ARNM -vaccines and to introduce changes in your life style, like enjoying natural enviroments, sports, swiming, walking and the lecture of clasical books.
Mr. Greer, Speaking of heat.. how’s the grid doing in your neck of the woods? It appears that there are currently alerts being broadcast, as it pertains to the U.S. eastern (Atlantic??) electrical grid not too far south from where you reside.. Here’s hoping you’re doing ok in this regard.
In light of your assertion that Trump is attempting to walk a fine line between opposing forces, what do you make of the recent Epstein blowup, and the H1-B visa controversy?
For the first it seems that he’s fracturing a significant portion of his base, and the whole business was handled so badly I was frankly surprised by the normally media-savvy Trump 2.0 administration making such spectacular blunders, with conspiracy theories previously weaponized against the establishment now directed against them(the hostage-video quality of Dan Bongino and Kash Patel’s interview didn’t help). What do you think gives? It seems like such a serious own goal that there must be some greater reward for keeping it secret, or much greater fallout from the reveal, and I’d be curious as to your thoughts on what that might be.
Second, the H1-B Visa seems to be a similar own goal. Why fragment his base so virulently?
Thanks again for these open posts!
Stick a fork in it time for Intel.
“Intel may slow down or even cancel development of its 14A process technology (1.4nm-class) if it fails to land a major external customer for this production node, or if the fabrication process fails to meet crucial milestones. This is the first time Intel has admitted to considering withdrawing from the leading-edge semiconductor technology race for a major node, essentially leaving leading-edge process technologies to TSMC and possibly Samsung Foundry.”
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/intel-might-cancel-14a-process-node-development-and-the-following-nodes-if-it-cant-win-a-major-external-customer-move-would-cede-leading-edge-market-to-tsmc-and-samsung
“Additionally, Intel 14A is expected to be the company’s first process technology to utilize High-NA EUV lithography for at least three critical layers. Each ASML Twinscan EXE:5000/5200 High-NA EUV tool is projected to cost around $380 million. Therefore, procuring two such tools for a fab to enable high volume manufacturing (HVM) on 14A will cost Intel a whopping $760 million. Given such vast upfront costs, Intel needs to ensure that these tools will be used by both internal products and external customers.”
Diminishing returns bit hard. The ARM chips like Apple’s have a simpler design that scales better. Physics won’t let them slide by much longer either.
“Steve #100 (July 23, 2025 at 11:38 pm) : On the subject of fantasies of domination, if I might add two datapoints…
First, years ago a woman I knew who was a sex worker told me that there was a very lucrative market for dominatrixes among CEOs, Wall Street guys, and other wealth, powerful, and stressed-out men. I understand that this is well known in these circles; it even made it into the opening scene of the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.
[…] I’ve also noticed the dramatic uptick in domination fantasies among women in recent decades. And of course this has corresponded with both the increase in public power among women and the pressures and expectations placed upon them. “
I can’t find an original source for this, but FWIW, here’s one theory: Under prolonged high stress, there is a chemical in men that tends to cause them to become more submissive. A different (I think) chemical causes women to become dominant under the same conditions. The key is that the stress must be sustained for a very long time.
This is why male executives seem to want to be dominated in the bedroom and female executives want to dominate in the bedroom (with neither just wanting “vanilla” sex)
If I recall (I wish I could remember the source!!!) , this exists in other animals as well. Put a lot of pressure onto a captive mouse population, and during the breakdown phase, the females become more ferocious and take over until society collapses. When I first read about this in high school, I joked that this clearly shows that females in charge doom society, but that was a (deliberate) misreading–in reality, it simply indicates that society is under so much stress that it is more or less doomed to failure.
Anyway, take this as “food for thought” (or food for dismissal) and with a large grain of salt–I cannot find good sources to back it up (or any other theory, for that matter)
JMG (or anyone else who knows), I may be getting ahead of myself, but does Yeats ever say the Mask (or parts of the mask) become part of the Will? I was doing some reflection and this seems to be true in my experience. I’ve done the assigned reading for the month and will likely reread it, but this seems particularly relevant to my mind right now.
Several years ago, I bought a fig supposed to be hardy in Zone 5, where I am. It’s been in a pot since then, while I tried to figure out where to plant it. Last fall, my neighbors to the south took down a huge pine, giving me the ideal place to plant it. It’s growing well, and we’ll see how it survives this winter.
On canning: I have been waterbath canning flat beans in vinegar for over a decade. 2018 was a banner year: I haven’t finished them yet.
Following on from the Odum musings to an end point JMG, perhaps industrial civilisation and the final information creation and storage frenzy we are going through (the biggest such frenzy in this cycle) may also be a decline/death signal within the longer scale pulse of the current interglacial.
Perhaps the next Ice Age is going to arrive sooner and right on cue, within the next 1000 years or so. This interglacial seems to have done a great job of getting many stores of things like ores and carbon back into biological circulation, and spreading various biota to all corners of the planet.
@Mary Bennett (#138):
“Feel” instead of “think” became popular, at least in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the second half of the 1960s. I was there and I remember that it struck me at the time as ominous.
@134 Patrick
Yes. Secular Muslims do convert to Christianity.
Mainline Protestant Denominations are very liberal nowadays. There is little to separate them in worship or dogma. I foresee a union of the Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches sometime in the next 100 years.
Evangelical Christians have gone the opposite way and have become socially conservative and even reactionary. Like JMG says, Evangelical Churches are a mirror of Islam, with their emphasis on a book, they almost worship the Bible rather than Jesus Christ.
I believe those secular Muslims who were raised in a moderate Muslim family will gravitate to the Mainline Churches. Those secular Muslims who were raised in a very religious Muslim family will gravitate to Evangelical Churches.
Anonymour @ 146, here is one explanation of the Thailand/Cambodia border clashes: https://substack.com/home/post/p-169137307
I doubt this has become a full fledged war yet.
Matthew @ 170, saying that the president walking a fine line between opposing forces is a rather polite way to express the fact that in order to get elected–we tend to forget just how close the election was, against a relatively weak candidate–he accepted support, financial and other kinds, from various people who were promised, or thought they were being promised, things which are mutually contradictory. Much of his base thought they heard No More Wars and Release the Epstein Files. Mr. Netanyahoo, who visited DC the weekend before last, reminded the president that he and the Israeli-American billionaires from whose largesse the pres. benefitted bigly do NOT want said files opened or even mentioned. I think that this is less because of possible scandal than about blackmail and the idea or possibility that the late pedophile was running an intelligence op on behalf of Israel. Whether that is true or not, IDK, but the idea that it might be true can only further inflame Americans’ increasing anger about events in Gaza.
The exclusion of HB-1 visa holders from ICE’s tender attentions was at the request of former bestie Musk. To me, it looks like the ICE activities are performative cruelty. I have yet to learn that any richy rich ladies are now doing their own housework. Or hiring the neighbor’s kids for lawn mowing. Nor have I heard that ANY EMPLOYERS of people illegally here have been charged with anything. Maybe I missed it, but where is the requirement for employers to use e-verify to determine citizenship? Where is the task force to investigate and prosecute identity theft, which is NOT a victimless crime?
@ Slivy Toves # 65
I do not recall saying anything about a 50/50 chance of getting landed in jail by a woman. While I did mention that Pargin uses the artificial male gynophobia as an example of catastrophization, I did not steelman the fears.
There is a simple solution to the possibility of harm from a false accusation from a woman – have women among your friends who can attest to your character in the event of a trial-by-social-contempt. Society is not as gullible to the claims of pretty women as you think, especially when there is a woman standing up against her.
Some people have pointed out that this puts men at the mercy of women. The reverse can easily be said – women are likewise at the mercy of men when it comes to physical violence. Also, the social prestige of men have always been at the mercy of women. This has nothing to do with feminism or modernity. Read the literature of any society in history, and you will find that competent men seek the amity of intelligent women, and that the derision of women holds power. Its just one of the dynamics of our species.
@JMG #59 #118 #163
Thanks for you responses. I go back and forth with it. Currently exploring the Viking Mindset which essentially part of why they were so powerful in war was because they fought knowing they will always lose, them and the gods, in the end, perhaps this might be a useful mindset to adopt if I were to be called up. Trouble is my liberal secular upbringing doesn’t quite provide a good foundation for this way of thinking, and even among my friends who are ‘up for the fight’ do so with a kind of hubris that we can beat whoever we fight, it has a similar energy to the Team America films ‘f*** yeah!’ type energy. I can’t delude myself into thinking this way, and I’m convinced we are being dragged into this war by a bunch of elites with no imagination other than how to save themselves. I’m sure the Vikings had more to believe in, more to defend, than any of this neoliberal nonsense.
You’re answers all suggested if I don’t want to fight I should leave the country & continent, and preferably soon. I don’t quite have things in order to make that happen, nor do I have the people in my life that see things as I do and would be willing to come with me, people are quite painfully unaware here, all they seem to ‘know’ is that Russia is the enemy these days, and I don’t quite have the ‘cred’ to persuade them otherwise. It would most likely mean abandoning my family, something I can’t quite see myself doing. It’s going to be a bumpy ride!
JMG, is it foolish to hold onto, in your imagination at least, a world where these unwarranted wars don’t happen, or at least to this scale and now with nuclear powers? Are these ‘new age’ fantasies that need to be let go of? Or are peacekeepers a necessary function to the whole dynamic, too? I’d be interested in your perspective.
@ Clay Dennis #144
“…a change from an Era when Children were viewed as small adults that could be sent out to roam the neighborhood all day, or ride in the back of the station wagon atop a mound of pillows of their own design, to one in which child safety and parental oversight became paramount.”
Oh, the memories… I was a childhood roamer – the circuit I and my friends roamed might have included around 10 sq miles or so of area…. I have very strong memories of riding in the front (sofa style) seat of my family’s car, with my father putting out his right arm, like a straight bar, every time he braked, to stop me sliding too far forward on the beltless seat. (I am in my sixties),
For my part, I used car seats and expected the children to buckle up when I drove. (They are just passing into their thirties). They had a large farm to roam around, but the local roads were no longer safe to walk on, as they had been in their dad’s childhood. So they needed a lot more of being driven places just to hang out with their friends. My own sons have not yet fathered children of their own, but I notice my nieces and nephews who are their contemporaries are wary of allowing their children to go out into their own even as far as their own yards without supervision.
A huge generational change in outlook and habit. But if we are now at the safety-conscious extreme of the wheel, the next turning is bound to REbound to a yearning for freedom, no?
Kimberly Steele, I have also been wondering about Princess Cutekitten.
#142 Siliconguy et al
“For Cesar and anyone else feeling overwhelmed I second JMG’s advice.”
And if the stoics don’t do it, a good belly laugh can help a lot.
I saw an exchange discussing a dramatic court scene this week in the UK…
A: “I’m watch through my fingers with clutched buttocks!”
B: “Wh…? Where are your eyes?!”
But perhaps I am easily amused.
Or maybe this guy’s musical offering:
“I’ve No More F***s To Give!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Vqbk9cDX0l0
Or the big guns:
“The Galaxy Song”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=buqtdpuZxvk
Martin, and others regarding topsoil. Gabe Brown has documented development of 1 inch of topsoil – in one year – using regenerative farming techniques, though that was the high end of measurements, with good conditions. Many others, including university scientists, have documented averages of about a quarter inch a year (Dave Montgomery has several lay books, David Johnson details fungal compost). Some have left the university setting for various reasons, including poor institutional (or funder) support.
Industrial agriculture management leads to soil loss and degradation, which appears to be at least partially mitigated by cover crops.. Organic growers are a mix – some till regularly as a substitute for the banned pesticides, or use plastic extensively, both of which damage soil health. Some also use concentrated “certified organic” approved pesticides and fertilizers, which can harm the living soil system. There are real differences between Big-Organic, and small grower organic. Much of grocery store organic produce is hydroponic, grown with methods that use a lot of plastic, soilless “growth media”, fertilizers and energy.
The definition of regenerative is inconsistent, including variable parameters, that support a healthy growing system. The literature is evolving and messy, IMO. Many textbooks still quote the historical ultra-slow soil development data, without mentioning the updates. Regenerative practices are tailored to local conditions and farmer skills/tools, which complicates formal research. They dramatically improve degraded and eroded soils, and appear to improve the nutrient value of food, while depositing carbon into deeper topsoil. Improvement can take one to several years. For those who could use optimistic reading, consider The Green Revolution by David Montgomery or The Organic No-Till Farming Revolution by Andrew Mefford.
The analogue in folk Orthodoxy of St. Mary the Mother of God in folk Catholicism (where people treat her like a goddess on par with the Trinity) seems to be St. Nicholas the Wonderworker:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_Orthodoxy#Nicholas_the_Wonderworker
Just a fast note for everyone — I am currently at the national meeting of the Martinist order in which I’m active, and my responses will be a little more sporadic than I’d expected! I’ll get to everyone’s questions as time permits, but it may take a few days.
Steve, interesting. I wonder now if that’s a common feature of decadent privileged classes — the Roman senatorial class in Seneca’s time was as far past its prime as the CEO class today.
Michael, oh, definitely a grove. Thanks for the heads up — that book sounds delectable.
Slithy, that makes complete sense to me. Any conscious change in your life, against resistance, will do much the same thing as any other.
Northwind, thanks for this.
Archivist, that’s a good question that will require more research than I’ve yet had time to give it. It will deserve a post down the road a bit.
Forecasting, what none of the power-crazed Eurogoobers seem to have noticed is that all this chatter in the media is also being read in Moscow, and will guarantee that however much of a military buildup Germany et al. tries to manage it, Russia will build up much, much more. By trumpeting their ambitions so publicly, the EU leadership is giving immense support to Putin’s government and making it easy for him to rally Russians around the project of becoming the world’s biggest military power. I’d call the EU a pack of morons, but I’m honestly starting to think this would be unfair to morons.
About those women/monster books…… there are women and dinosaur books….. Anyway, when I was reading about the Mothman of WVA, I came across a trilogy of The Mothman and Me. The Mothman becomes the woman’s boyfriend, husband, and father of her children. It is hilarious.
I have encountered women and elves, etc in fantasy fiction. I just wonder if it is just wishful thinking.
Siliconguy # 142, When I was a honeybeekepter, I’d sit within a few feet from the hive entrance watching their comings and goings, putting me into a very pleasant trance .. often hour hours. I sorely miss that form of meditation..
Anonymous,
it’s important to note that while that was historically the case in Orthodoxy, veneration and worship of St. Nicholas as such and many of the other folk saints on that wiki article were suppressed during Communist rule over Eastern Europe, and to this day still has not recovered. So it is unlike the case for veneration and worship of St. Mary in Catholicism, whose strength has increased in the past century rather than destroyed.
Toby as a fellow Brit I share your concerns. I am 66, my son is 41 and I have grandsons of 12, 3 and 1. I am more concerned about them than me, though I wouldn’t discount the possibility of a 66 year old being conscripted as they have in Ukraine. I love this country as you do and would advocate staying put rather than jumping from the frying pan into the fire. They will probably whip up a propaganda campaign and find plenty of naive youngsters to join up. The military is so far depleted I don’t think they have the capacity to train lots of cannon fodder. Drone operators will be more important. Even with conscription there are always all kinds of get outs. Illness, education, reserved occupations and becoming a religious nutter aswell as conscientious objector could all work. Use your ingenuity and stay put. Dads army will suit me so I will volunteer to defend the home front and any skills learnt can be put to good use come the revolution.
From Kimberly Steele’s Dreamwidth blog:
“Unfortunately, there are many, many beings who are trying to step into the vacancies left by the Christian gods. I believe there are multiple Christian gods despite their claims there is only one — Jesus, Mary, and God the Father are all distinctly different. Now as to why the Christian gods have stepped away, well, I have no idea. Part of it may be the rampant materialism of our time. Many of us are far too dense for a god to get a message through, and many of the densest ones are pretending to be or have convinced themselves they are holy men. Joel Osteen, who I like to pick on, springs readily to mind. Let’s examine an average church service in a Chicago suburb. Near me there are dozens of churches where rather large groups will congregate this weekend. There will be one or two who are super into it but most of the ones there will do it out of guilt, habit, or obligation. The reverend will be a timid, salary class dweeb who fell into his position because he has some public speaking prowess. There is about a ninety five percent chance he is vaccinated. He will bloviate for about 30 minutes after the worship band plays some lame focus group approved tunes. The few times where the audience is moved to anything that resembles passion will actually lay them bare on the astral plane. Boredom and the low-level anger that accompanies it will be the primary mood for the two hour service, and that is not a good tune to strike on the astral in an unbanished space. Most churches are not doing any form of traditional mass (traditional mass is the oldest and most powerful form of banishing ritual), which makes the reverend and the congregation sitting ducks for whatever entities are attracted to boredom, guilt, and irritation. There will be some good spirits attracted by the best members of the crowd, meaning the generous and kind ones who would be that way with or without religion. However, most of the congregants and the preacher himself will be full of unclean and materialistic thoughts, and that attracts garbage entities who like to impersonate gods.
So basically any random church, temple, or mosque service in this astrally septic era of ours acts like a giant Ouija board session.”
https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/151630.html?thread=4529998#cmt4529998
In a later comment she says:
“Also, yes, anyone reading this is free to copy this material. Just make sure you mention that I fully acknowledge at all times I could be wrong.”
>If I recall (I wish I could remember the source!!!) , this exists in other animals as well. Put a lot of pressure onto a captive mouse population, and during the breakdown phase, the females become more ferocious and take over until society collapses. When I first read about this in high school, I joked that this clearly shows that females in charge doom society, but that was a (deliberate) misreading–in reality, it simply indicates that society is under so much stress that it is more or less doomed to failure.
It’s enough for me to see a correlation, I can just stop right there and make decisions based on that.
—
In TraumaZone Ep1, he runs footage from a coal mine in Russia, pre-collapse, a few years before it was all scheduled to go *flump*. Vorkuta, I think it was called. What struck me, was all these women doing what would be considered men’s work. Where were all the men? Breakin’ rocks in the cold snow / Where did all the men go
—
I call them “rectangle girls”, you know, they’re in a rectangle on your screen with a play button in the middle? And if you click on one, you generally regret it? You want that 1-5 minutes of your life back? Leave the rectangle alone. It’s always been the case that you would find these rectangle girls complaining about “Where have all the good men gone?”, a complaint probably as old as time itself. But now you’re seeing that complaint morph to “Where have all the men gone?”
—
Again, it’s enough for me to see correlations. Causation, someone else can work that out. In any case, this is what collapse looks like, in real time, right now. At least the early stages of it. When it’s obvious, well, we may not be posting that much on here by then.
Hi, JMG, In a previous post you said in response to my intention to discuss my experience with the Elemental Cross and Circulation of Light – “I’ll look forward to it. I know a fair number of Christians who are interested in esoteric work and I would like to be able to point them to approaches that work with their faith”. So here is my response. “the simplicity of Christ” is a phrase in the New Testament. The New Testament is at once exoteric and esoteric, the methods are all out in the open and at the same time inwardly realized. “esoteric work” – In the Gospel of John it is said “This is the work of God to believe in the one he sent” The Greek word for believe “pisteuo” means “to trust in, rely, on adhere to” not mere intellectual assent, though that is part of it, pisteuo is the verb form of the Greek word translated as faith.
Jesus in the tradition of radical Protestantism I adhere to is seen as an accessible mediator to the Holy Spirit and the Father. The Latin word radicalis means “pertaining to the root”. We are to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” 2nd Peter. An historical example of this to the root exoteric and esoteric work is George Fox the main founder and initial leader of the Quakers who said after seeking advice from the religious ministers of his day –
“as I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those esteemed the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, oh, then, I heard a voice which said, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition”; and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give Him all the glory; for all are ‘concluded under sin, and shut up in unbelief’ (Rm 11:32) as I had been, that Jesus Christ might have the preeminence (Col 1:18) who enlightens, and gives grace, and faith, and power. Thus when God doth work, who shall let (i. e. prevent) it (Is 43:13)? And this I knew experimentally”
Jesus said to become as a little child to entered the Kingdom of God. So yes, come to Jesus as the way and connection and be filled with the Holy Spirit and know the Father. John 7:37-39 and to grow in that over time is the exoteric/esoteric work for a Christian. You become a Christ, a son of God, filled with the Spirit and being with the Father as Jesus did and does now.
>For the first it seems that he’s fracturing a significant portion of his base, and the whole business was handled so badly I was frankly surprised by the normally media-savvy Trump 2.0 administration making such spectacular blunders, with conspiracy theories previously weaponized against the establishment now directed against them(the hostage-video quality of Dan Bongino and Kash Patel’s interview didn’t help). What do you think gives?
Sigh. Trump is a salesweasel, probably the best salesweasel I’ve ever seen. The path of the salesweasel is to always overpromise and underdeliver. Helps if you’re not the one who has make good on whatever it is you’re selling. And whenever you’re selling something, you can just feel your ethics draining away from you, much like you can feel your sanity draining away from you with exposure to the internet. Also, salesweasels are some of the worst people to work for, so they tend not to attract top talent. So, some of this is just systemic, stuff that was going to happen anyway at some level.
But not all of it. They do seem so desperate to get you to stop paying attention to Epstein, don’t they? I wonder why.
re: Islam in Murica
Nonstarter. The people having all the kids right now are the Amish and the Mormons. By 2100, there may very well be some religious war between the two, or maybe they unite against an overseas Muslim Caliphate.
But I think even in the middle east, the birthrate has turned negative, they’re not having any kids anymore? The future belongs to those who are having kids.
The Macrons are suing Candace Owens for defamation:
https://time.com/7305131/candace-owens-brigitte-macron-man-emmanuel-wife-defamation-lawsuit-response/
I have just happened on a post by Naomi Wolf (July 17, 2025) that, for me, sheds real light on much of the dysfunction that is plaguing the US political establishment right now. its title is “The Network in the Worlds of the Elites”:
naomiwolf.substack.com/p/the-network-in-the-worlds-of-the
From my perspective as a retired professor at a lesser elite university, the entanglement she describes between big money, academic research, science-journal publishing (Elsevir), and especially the intelligence agencies of the Western world is very real. It was a largely successful effort to (among other things) “direct and manage and gate-keep and put a frame around and essentially set the direction of science.”
When I joined the faculty of my own university in 1967, the chairman of the Political Science department, Lyman Kirkpatrick, came to academia after a long career in the CIA and its predecessor, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services). The chairman of the newly founded East Asian Languages department, James Wrenn, also came to Brown from the OSS; his colleague there, David Lattimore, was a son of the politically influential Chinese and Mongolian scholar, Owen Lattimore. Both departments, like my own (Slavic Languages), were initially supported by CIA funds at the urging of the linguist and Germanic Languages professor, W. Freeman Twaddell, as he told me himself. Twadell was good personal friends with James Jesus Angleton, the chief of of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Department until 1975, who also had cultivated valuable connections with the Mafia during his years of CIA work in Italy. At least two of Twaddell’s children had distinguished careers as US diplomats. So he was in a position to know these things, and to shape their impact on his university. And so forth.
And Brown was one of the minor, least wealthy and influential players in this entangled world-game. How much deeper the entanglement ran at institutions like Harvard and Yale, at MIT and CalTech, i can only guess.
Anyway, Naomi Wolf is definitely on to something important for the understanding of world affairs and the failure (as I see it) of the US’s efforts to shape them.
For the Epstein thing, the Democrats are too obsessed with taking down Trump that they are willing to destroy themselves in the process. The Epstein files if released will probably destroy the American political elite, including most Democrats, most Republicans, and Trump himself.
“Forecasting, what none of the power-crazed Eurogoobers seem to have noticed is that all this chatter in the media is also being read in Moscow, and will guarantee that however much of a military buildup Germany et al. tries to manage it, Russia will build up much, much more. ”
That may be the idea. Part of what collapsed the Soviet Union was their attempt to keep up with Reagan’s arms build up. So I would not be surprised if the EU is hoping Russia’s economy blows out and collapses before theirs does.
And that leads back to this wonderful rant, Germany AGAIN says “Whoops! Looks great to me! We couldn’t beat Russia when they were a medieval backwater and we had all Western Europe down to Spain to draw on, but this time with a nation the size of one oblast, no army, no navy, no energy, no steel, no soldiers, we’ll definitely attack, invade, and defeat them this time! Our friends in England said so!!!”
That still makes me laugh. Less amusingly talk of reimplementing the draft in Europe seems to getting more serious.
Out of the blue from admittedly short-sighted US eyes Thailand and Cambodia are shooting at each other over an abandoned Buddhist temple.
Polecat #193
ACRONYMS
My take. It is hard not to be facetious about this issue but I will try to be neutral, BUT it is hard.
I have manners so am saying “please.” See, see, I am being considerate.
NOP — what does it stand for?
It is the responsibility of the writer to write plainly. That means taking the time to long-hand write out every acronym. If you want to write (North Ontario Pelicans = NOP) for that essay, fine. But define it in that correspondence ahead of time.
Each week, members of the communitariat mis-communicate by including acronyms of which I have no idea what means. I look it up in Wikipedia: nothin’ obvious. I recognize there is a hole in the sentence, so I try to figure it out in context: nothin’. Sense of loss, disappointment, betrayal. Then I say, I tried my best to follow the meaning, and must let go that I will never understand what that writer means there.
Assume that no-one knows what ABX, EJG, MPC, YED, etc. means. It is obvious that it is obvious to YOU (the writer). One is being inconsiderate to the reader. Acronyms come from different sources. I am largely unaware of computer/text messaging shortcuts. One is not writing a text-message here on JMG website, so it is the writer’s responsibility to write so the reader gets the gist of:
IIRC
Take the time to write it out.
If I recall correctly.
Is that too hard?
Kindly stop putting the burden on the reader. If a writer does not “write it out long-hand,” one is depriving the reader; one is not doing right by the reader. One might as well not have taken the time to write the paragraphs at all because one unknown acronym ruins the whole thing.
Using ANY acronym is poor writing.
I was courteous and said “please.” My patience has run out and I don’t the least bit feel like saying “please but I did because I am a writer who has learned the hard way about “tone.’” I managed to not be facetious. JMG, is alright?
💨😵💫🤯 Northwind Grandma LDR JPS GNO OMF JHF TFM BYG CRA
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hi,
Agree, and just as the 2nd largest military power in Europe, Ukraine, is starting to collapse.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/07/ukraine-zelenskis-backtracking-shows-fatal-weakness.html#more
@KAN #110 from my #42, Thanks KAN!
Anselmo #168
What is ARNM?
¿Association of Regulated Nurses of Manitoba?
💨😵💫🤯 Northwind Grandma HJG RMHU KCS GMH UOGT SDJ
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hi JMG,
I am addicted to your Ariel Moravec mysteries. I really enjoy them and I find the way you weave real-world magic into them to be fascinating. I read “The Carnelian Moon” a couple of months ago and can hardly wait for the next installment. I as wondering if you could give us a teaser for the next book? Also, is it going to be a series with a set number of books, or will it be a more open-ended series? Thanks!
JMG:
Wow! What a revelation! It’s been obvious to me, for at least 20 years, that EU was a kleptocracy — not a “Democracy”. But I hadn’t previously understood WHY the EU wasn’t modeled more “accurately” after the United States, with checks and balances! I had thought our “Democratic Republic” (itself modelled after the Roman Republic) would have been the obvious model. Thanks for clarifying my thinking!!!
JMG: https://www.ecosophia.net/the-next-european-war/ “The Holy Roman Empire was the archetype of these arrangements. It dated its foundation to the coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor in 800 AD, and it was dissolved in 1806 . . . Rather, like a certain other European union I could name, it was cobbled together . . . ”
NOW I the importation of Muslim hoards, to genocide the existing local cultures throughout the geographic EU, makes sense! Is this theory plausible: The EU was DESIGNED to be an oligarchy, modeled after the Holy Roman Empire, with only the Oligarchs really getting a vote. But the local ethnic & religious cultures of the various “countries” are obviously a recurring problem, dating back to at least 600 A.D. (and arguably to 600 B.C.)
So “the EU”. came up with the scheme to REPLACE the non-compliant local cultures, ALL OF THEM, with a “clean slate” of immigrants who respected NONE of the existing cultural disparities! Wow. Brilliant.
“Run, run, run!” from the EU. I am so glad my grandparents fled more than a century ago!
And this might also partially explain why the EU Overlords keep trying to conquer Russia — which has all those resources, and WASP-Christianity, but never joined The Holy Roman Empire: “Today, Moscow is nicknamed “The Third Rome” based on the history of the collapse of the first and second Rome”. (https://www.worldatlas.com/ancient-world/why-does-russia-claim-to-be-the-successor-to-the-roman-empire.html)
Wow. LIghtbulbs going off in a great syncopation! Thanks!
@147 Teresa Peshel
If progressives really believed that Trump was going to put critics in concentration or death camps, most to nearly all of them would shut up immediately and make an effort to appear normal or stereotypical MAGA (a small minority of leftists imagining themselves as brave Resistance fighters might turn to violence). The corporate media would not DARE to criticize President Trump. And woke Democrat politicians would switch parties and vote in lockstep for Trump’s agenda.
But then leftists would be popping their bubble & befriending conservatives to blend in. And they would quickly learn that Democrats & the corporate media had radicalized them against MAGA Republicans so as to stave off the post-Obama era implosion of Progressive Democrats.
Enjoy the meeting and may you find deeper fellowship and friendship! I respect and appreciate your irenic spirit and attitude.
I hope that the national meeting of the Martinist Order goes as well as Providence may allow, and if you will allow it, I am happy to pray for the same.
On a different note, I think I might have broken new ground with a technique based off of scrying. A few months ago, I had pneumonia, and while sick I had the thought of asking my immune system what I could do to help fight it off. I decided to try scrying, and found myself in what looked a lot like a rundown inner-city neighborhood; this was a symbolic representation of the infect part of my lungs. Before long, I found two police officers, who stopped me and asked me whether I came in the name of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine. This is the first time I’ve ever been asked when scrying if I came in the name of a deity first; and the implication here seems to be that the human immune system is under active guidance by divine forces, itself very interesting to note.
Once we established trust by means of divine names, they asked why I was there. Once I explained things I was brought to the thymus, in many ways the heart of the immune system; represented as a police/military training camp. I got a chance to talk to the Chief, who gave me advice, which I followed and promptly recovered. The chief also relayed something else while I was there, which lead to a very interesting conversation: namely, that there were concerning messages coming from other cities’ police forces [which seemed clearly to refer to other people’s immune systems] suggesting they were being hijacked by an infectious agent [which suggest tolerance to me]. This was regularly placing my immune system on high alert, which was taxing their resources and causing various other problems.
After we established this was likely Covid-19, and I explained the nature of the mRNA vaccines, he called in intelligence agents and had me explain everything I knew about this to them. The agents left arguing over the implications, but a few weeks later I noticed I no longer felt ill in the presence of people who had been vaccinated. This seemed to imply two things: one, that this technique allows for communication both ways; and two, that part of the “shedding” phenomena is immune mediated: healthy immune systems receive signals from the vaccinated indicative of tolerance and go on high alert, because any disease that can induce immune tolerance is incredibly dangerous. Now that my immune system knew that in this specific case it was caused by an artificial injection and posed no real risk to me, it did not need to respond quite as strongly, and so the health consequences of being near vaccinated individuals dissipated.
About a month ago I tried it again to identify the root causes of my chronic indigestion, and while the representation was different, the same thing happened: I met immune cells who demanded I state if I came in the name of Asclepius, and once we established trust by means of divine names and symbols as before, these immune cells told me what I could do to improve my digestive health. I followed their advice to the letter, and have found my digestive system is already working much better than before.
Based on these two experiments, it looks like a variation of scrying can be used to communicate with the immune system. I’m unaware of anyone else having done these sorts of experiments, and want to share in the hope that others might benefit from it, and in the hopes that with more people utilizing it, we might be able to work out how to best utilize this technique.
@Mary Bennet,
re: Maybe I missed it, but where is the requirement for employers to use e-verify to determine citizenship?
It is up to states. I found a site that has a color-coded map of who requires it and who restricts it:
https://workforce.equifax.com/e-verify-state-requirements
JMG, if I may, and I entirely understand if not, Charles Hugh Smith has a brilliant takedown of the, ahem, forbidden subject on his blog, of two minds, today. Well worth reading for purposes of general enlightenment. As Western industrial society unravels, we are likely to see more and more scams and cons in the years to come; it is helpful to know how to spot them.
@ Erika Lopez,
Re: i don’t get Hermes, though. i didn’t know him well but a trickster? anyone care to elaborate i’m open to reading.
Superficial version: When Hermes was one day old, he stole Apollo’s cow herd. He disguised his and the cows’ tracks, so the tracks looked backwards compared to the actual direction of travel (therefore, tricksy!).
Less superficial: The cows had curving horns, so they resembled a crescent moon pointing upwards (which typically indicate insight). However, these are Apollo’s cows, so the horns are golden (so these represent truth or prophecy). Rather than seeing the tracks as “backwards”, consider them a reflection, because the Below is a reflection of the Above.
Hermes is tasked with transmitting knowledge from higher planes to lower planes (because we cannot comprehend the higher planes yet). There is no way to do that without some distortion, so when Hermes gives guidance, it cannot be taken at face value. Even if he wanted transmit the information totally accurately, it isn’t possible.
More fun myth facts… Hermes used two of the golden horns to construct the first lyre, which had seven strings (perhaps representing the seven planets? or the seven Sephirah?) and he gifted to Apollo. So music is one way to transmit a truth down the planes. 🙂
If you want to read more, I recommend:
https://www.greekmyths-interpretation.com/en/olympian-gods-interpretation/hermes-interpretation-greek-mythology
and
https://www.theoi.com/Olympios/Hermes.html
I’m watching some news from my province of Ontario with quite a bit of bemusement. The provincial NDP has decided to push for mandatory air conditioning in all rental housing across the province. The law has a lot of problems with it, but the main one is that it is entirely unworkable for a number of reasons.
First, a lot of small landlords are struggling already because a lot of them have mortgages and are paying much higher interest rates than expected, and a lot of large landlords are already keeping properties off the market because even if they can make a profit, the fact that there are laws which ban them form passing increased expenses onto their tenants without going through an extremely time consuming process means that a large number of landlords won’t rent properties without substantial margins, out of reasonable concern that increased costs they are banned from passing on would result in losses if the tenant stays for any length of time. The fact the NDP is assuring renters their bill won’t cost anyone renting a cent is justifiably already making a lot of land lords concerned that this will dramatically increase their costs, and they won’t be able to pass it on should this become law.
Second, a lot of buildings are not set up for this, and will require extensive renovations. Air conditioning requires a lot of power, and the electrical system in a number of old buildings simply cannot handle the load. Even more amusing is that next to no one seems to have thought through the implications of a large number of buildings suddenly getting these retrofits: namely that many parts of of the distribution system for electrical power would need to be upgraded as well. A province wide upgrade of nearly the entire electrical grid thus seems to be required for this to work.
All of this being brushed aside: anyone with a rental property is wealthy, therefore landlords are wealthy and can easily absorb these costs; and the engineers will figure it out. Then of course people have even more dramatic meltdowns if the fact that some people actually agreed to lower rents because their unit doesn’t have air conditioning, so it’s unfair to turn around and tell these landlords they have to install it at their expense and let the tenants keep the lower rent.
The most incredible part of this though is that a large number of people have the mental equivalent of the blue screen of death upon hearing I dislike the law because I actually prefer to live without air conditioning, and it’s unclear to me whether the law would make it mandatory for me to live with it.
I’m not sure why air conditioning has become the next focus of a wave of madness, but here we are…..
@RaabSilco #19:
Jeff Childers is one of the most egregious examples I’ve found of what you’re talking about.
He mocks climate change relentlessly, then turns around and reports breathlessly about all of the weird weather. Humans can’t meaningfully alter the climate, it would seem, except for all the people engaged in geoengineering and cloud seeding and creating chemtrails. Childers does not seem to notice the inconsistency with this.
Siliconguy #171: Intel has been a slow-moving disaster that has been spiraling into a catastrophe for a very long time.
However, in this case, I think the company might be just angling for a US Government contract (“if it fails to land a major external customer” part.
It would be too bad because it offends me that a company this piss-poorly run for so long can stay in business for long–especially by effectively extorting taxpayers, but unfortunately I think they have more than enough leverage to do so.
If history is any guide (Motorola, IBM, HP, etc.), you will know that Intel has hit the point of no return when they hire a completely unqualified female CEO to run the place–not because a female CEO is inherently incompetent (see Lis Su from AMD for a good example), but rather because this seems to have become a tried and true corporate strategy to stave off criticism temporarily while the executives figure out how to monetize the last remaining scraps of value from the company and syphon it off to their personal piggy banks.
@ Mary Bennet #62
You wrote: “I don’t see Americans, who are ourselves armed, putting up with becoming a serf class.”
Neither do I. But I do think that when society collapses, communities will have to take charge of their own security and subsistence. In other words, create militias (if only for defense) and take control of as much fertile soil as they can, to grow food. Somali Muslims are one of many communities in the USA. In their countries of origin, they were farmers. I see no reason why they couldn’t be subsistence farmers again in the USA if their survival ever depends on it.
@anonymous #125, I don’t know of a single old church (pre20th century) converted to a mosque in Germany.
John–
In your prognosis of Europe’s near-term trajectory, would you distinguish at all between northern/western Europe (Gaulia) and Mediterranean Europe? Or is it a similar fate, in your view?
@JMG
Do you remember a lady psychic named Jeane Dixon? I remember her from when I was a kid and teen. She gained fame because a lot of her predictions came true. She was the Craig Hamilton-Parker of the 20th century. Not all of her predictions came true of course and after listening to people like Sadhguru and Sri Rohit Arya lectures on the topic of predictions I now understand why 100% accuracy is not possible. But some psychics do have a higher hit-rate and Jean Dixon was supposedly one of these.
I recently stumbled upon a video – almost certainly narrated with an AI voice – that discussed many of her predictions. Some of them involved the U.S. and Europe in the 21st century.
The biggest surprise – to me – is that she told President Roosevelt during a meeting with him in the Oval Office that the 20th century would be the U.S.’s century as a premier global power but that the 21st century is when it would all fall apart.
Here are some of the predictions she told Roosevelt. First she told him he wouldn’t last 12 months when he asked her point blank, “How long do I have?”. She said he had 6 months at best, maybe less. Apparently he took the news like a stoic and carried on. The video says that prediction came true.
She then made the following predictions when he asked about the U.S.’s and Europe’s future.
1. The U.S. as a united country would end badly in the 21st century. The beginning of the end would start when a state would secede from the union and make it stick. Once other states saw that state successfully become it’s own country and the Federal level wasn’t able to force it back in – that would be the first domino. More states would ultimately secede and the Feds wouldn’t be able to stop or reverse it. The reasons she gave were all of the assorted reasons the Long Descent and Decline and Fall of the U.S. books you wrote outline. She specifically called out that there would be widespread extreme poverty and high crime that would force people to gather into smaller areas for defensive purposes. These smaller but defensible areas would (apparently quite successfully) govern themselves and most of these still populated areas would be in the wetter eastern half of the continent. I guess many states eventually decide to give the middle finger to the lenocrat-infested Federal level since it would neither be willing nor able to help out or govern effectively.
Furthermore she implied the U.S. has racked up such bad karma politically that even if the reasons you outlined were not the causes of political breakup the universe itself would step up and make sure the U.S. got the karmic consequences in some other way. (my other example: A mega-caldera going off making it another route to U.S. political disintegration?) Roosevelt took the news stoicly. In short, what is coming down the pike for the U.S is adridha karma – fixed karma that can not be removed or evaded.
2. She then made a – to my mind – equally dire prediction about Europe. Europe has also racked up centuries of mega-bad blowback karma.
She told Roosevelt 1/3rd of the European landmass would become much too cold and uninhabitable. If her weatherological prediction comes true I’m guessing that that 1/3rd landmass will have Siberia-like temps and year round permafrost by the end of the century.
This climate change would spark a huge crisis for the whole European continent that the U.S. would not be able to help alleviate since it would be in the midst of its own crisis of political and economic disintegration.
To elaborate: Sometime in the 21st century farming would completely collapse in the northern European landmass sparking a major crisis as entire countries wouldn’t be able to feed their own populations adequately anymore. It would also become cold enough as to be permanently uninhabitable (unless you wanna live like a 17th century Eskimo?).
We’re talking wealthy northern European countries possibly facing outright mass famine. At the very least they will face sustained year after year after year food-shortages and fuel shortages to live comfortably in such a bitterly cold clime.
Research I’ve read says sustained food-shortages is one of the surest ways to convince a population to not have babies. So if Dixon’s climate prediction comes true expect the European fertility rate to swiftly enter S. Korea’s and China’s fertility abyss. Latest info says China’s fertility in many cities is well below that of S. Korea. You know things are bad there when S. Koreans are having more babies than the Chinese.
Since farming would no longer be viable for the long term the crisis would actually be a predicament instead of a problem.
The implication is that what were wealthy northern European countries in the latter half of the 20th century would be too grindingly poor in the 21st to import the needed quantities of food and fuel from other markets to stave off potential famine and large die-offs via hypothermia. Plus they would need to continue doing large imports every year thereafter.
I also saw a vid that pointed out inadequate food + inadequate room temps usually leads to upscaling of deaths by communicable diseases since the body’s immune system becomes compromised. Astrologically I’ve heard that Ages of Air are also traditionally Ages of communicable diseases. As in, even more widespread illnesses from communicable diseases than in the other 3 Ages.
Anyway, the result: mass migrations due to climate change and fleeing persistent fuel and food-shortages. Except this would be mass migrations of Europe’s Northerners emptying into Southern European lands thus spreading the sustained food shortage crisis and energy shortages well beyond northern Europe’s borders.
I well remember Sadhguru’s lecture where he said if humanity didn’t gain clarity and begin working on some of its problems while there was still time that Mother Nature will fix it for us and mass famine is one of her favorite albeit brutal ways of doing so. He said even the still-rich and their armed Praetorian guards will die during such times.
Ok, now imagine my surprise when I read on earlier Ecosophia posts this month of readers discussing worrying signs in Europe that if the climate gets even a little bit shakier things could get too cold for successful European farming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation
One person posted – I forget who it was that reported this – that temps could possibly drop by -50 degrees. Can’t remember if that was F or C but I’m guessing C since the poster was European – I think – maybe German? So if Dixon’s prediction comes true it looks like Germany may be one of those countries that empties itself out into Southern Europe or possibly even reverse migration caravans into an increasingly green Middle East and north Africa.
To give a visual of the geographic span I tell people to grab a globe. Place a finger on Canada then spin the globe to Europe. You will find – to my German Engineer-by-profession ex-boyfriend’s shock that Germany is on the exact same latitude as Canada. I still remember the look of genuine shock on his face as he did the globe spin himself and then spluttered that Germany was not nearly so cold as Canada in the winter (he had intended to disprove me and insisted Germany was on the same latitude as Chicago with Chicago-like winters). So much for that supposedly superior German education system compared to America’s, eh? I digress.
In the 20th century the jet stream kept Germany from getting as cold as interior Canada in the winter. If Jean Dixon’s climate prediction turns out to be right – it won’t.
I do find something curious about Dixon’s prediction for Europe should it come true. If the northern half of the continent is emptying itself into the southern half that implies China, SE Asia, India, etc are either unwilling – or I think just as likely – unable to step up to the plate and help Europe out of its persistent lack-of-food and fuel predicaments due to their own upspiraling crises.
India won’t be able to help out I think since Vedic Astrology is saying wars of religion will begin taking place on its borders. Actually Vedic Astrology is saying wars of religion are going to break out all over the planet. The coming religion wars won’t be unique to India. Vedic Astrology is also saying China is scheduled for political and economic disintegration every bit as bad as for the U.S. Vedic Astrologers keep saying the stars over Beijing in particular during the 2030s are highly malefic and foretell war. This is one time I’m hoping JMG’s interpretation is right and it just means wars within China, not China bringing war to the rest of the globe.
Rajarshi Nandy and some other yogis I’ve watched on podcasts on Youtube say Kala Bhairava is waking up in India again. He was dormant in the 20th century but now he’s becoming more active again. One of Kala Bhairava’s specialties Nandi says is as a god of war.
Specifically in the case for India Kala Bhairava is giving out rituals and mantras to various yogic and tantric lineages and their disciples designed to support a country’s troops and support an upgrade to its military defenses. Which implies India will also be hammered by fleeing economic and climate migrants and militants within those migrants bringing Jihad to India as well. I suspect plenty of those jihadis will spill out to other continents as well.
Although I understand home-grown Indian Sikhs also want a carved out homeland inside India too and have shown they’re quite willing and capable of going to war to get it. Maybe militant Sikhs will get their longed for autonomous homeland not in India but in Canada instead? Seems to be plenty of them there and in a long descent future a Canadian Sikh homeland might be viable.
3. One final thing. Jean Dixon said it was Russia that would lead the way in the future via giving the world a successful example (not via conquest) – of a governance model that other countries would increasingly come to adopt. It would not be Communist nor Capitalist but something different. She didn’t specify what that difference was. Just that it would neither be Communist nor Capitalist. Look to Russia she said as the first example of how future allied governance was going to be. Sobornost, anyone?
Now she didn’t say it would be a united Russia with a centralized government and I’m inclined to think it won’t be. It’s likely it’ll be much smaller allied areas where one huge Soviet one used to be in Dixon’s day.
4. I also note with interest Armstrong’s Socrates program is saying the U.S., Canada and the EU are still on track for future political disintegration. Armstrong also says Socrates says Europe is scheduled to lose the war in Ukraine against Russia. Maybe it will be one reason why Europe won’t be able to afford importing enough food and fuel for increasingly bitter weather down the line?
Somewhat related to the Dixon predictions:
5. I noted also one of the CCP’S top representatives to a recent China-EU talk told the EU straight up they will not allow Russia to lose the war in Ukraine. So the EU got direct to their faces confirmation it is in a proxy war not only with Russia but with China as well. They told the EU the reason they can’t is because they know they’re next if Russia loses.
6. It later came out that a CCP defector to Russia revealed China’s extensive plans (3 of them for different scenarios!) to overthrow the Putin regime if it looks like it is losing the war.
All 3 scenarios show the CCP would then set up a puppet regime in Russia and begin a careful roll-out via extensive and heavily supplied guerilla warfare to retake all of the old Soviet Warsaw Pact countries up to and including all of eastern Germany again. All under puppet governments backed by the CCP. They plan to take the fight to Europe – even into Western Europe – so that fighting won’t happen in or near China.
So even if Russia has no plans to annex eastern and central Europe, apparently the CCP just might via guerilla warfare. The CCP could easily back a bunch of fanatic guerilla-war minded Islamic groups and sleeper cells inside Europe to get the EU worrying about something other than Ukraine or Russia for example. Or at least they’ll give it a good ol’ try. Enacting this plan will divert America’s attention away from Taiwan into rushing to shore up any European governments that look like they going to fall to CCP-backed guerillas.
7. Supposedly also there are extensive classified documents the defector presented to Putin showing the CCP’s long term annexation plans of the oil and gas producing regions of Russia. The plans state they will never allow any American or European powers to take the oil and gas regions. China will go to war if it must to keep those assets to itself. Russia needs to be a good little vassal and win the war in Ukraine for the CCP.
To ameliorate the PR and Diplomacy damage from the defector scandal China needed to signal to Putin on the world stage it would not allow the current Russian government to lose or fall and so pointedly and told the EU what amounts to a de facto proxy war with China too. I guess they calculated Russia a more useful vassal than the assorted soon-to-be-beggar EU countries. They told the EU they will not stop sending dual-use technology and goods to Russia. This is what several of the international channels I watch have been reporting including Lei’s Real Talk. She had an extensive breakdown of the Chinese Defector scandal and the dilemma it presents to both Russia and China in the aftermath.
This statement by the Chinese representative at the talks enraged the EU reps so much – especially the German rep from that Brussels is mulling slapping hardcore sanctions against China. Including possibly seizing Chinese-owned assets in Europe just like what was done to Russia. The CCP then fired back that if the EU does this they will retaliate in kind and one of the first things (but not the only thing) they’ll do is stop selling rare-earth minerals for the European efforts to rebuild it’s militaries.
Another point: Vedic Astrology is saying political disintegration will happen to China sometime this century as well so who knows what the future of the CCP will be or if it will even be able to back up its planned annexation of Russian oil and gas provinces and facilities? They might annex them but will they be able to keep them? Their birthrates are even more dire now than South Korea’s.
I remember now that Armstrong says the Socrates program reports in 20 years the planet will go from 8 billion people back down to 4 due to war and hitting other assorted Mother Nature limits and decaying global supply chains (and falling global birth rates I’d add).
He also says Socrates is saying where the U.S. is one country now it will become 5 countries later so I’m guessing the seceding states will form regional governments for trade and regional defense. Jean Dixon said these new regional governments born of the disintegrated U.S. would have new names. She also predicted certain parts of Ukraine would return to the Poles while other parts would return to Russia.
Armstrong says Socrates is showing Ukraine as it’s own country in the future suddenly flatlines like an EKG going flat on a heart patient. He said he’d never in all his life ever seen Socrates predict the sudden disappearance of a country like that. If Ukraine gets carved up between Russia and Poland or other Slavic country that might explain the sudden flatline.
Anyway, I wanted to give a report on what Jean Dixon foresaw for the 21st century. Apologies for the post length but I’ve been gathering info here and there and serendipitously stumbled across that video about her.
Nothing important to add. Just rocking out to Black Sabbath’s eponymous album. RIP Ozzy Osbourne.
The brah over at The Secret Sun posted on X that Sabbath “..could do a tune whose lyrics read like a Fundamentalist sermon, yet still sound like they are channeling Azathoth.” Yep.
Women/monster books: there are lots of examples of that in mythology and folk tales. Examples include Zeus assuming the forms of various animals before mating with women, “Beauty and the Beast,” and the Irish/Scottish ballads about silkies/selkies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Silkie_of_Sule_Skerry.
China goes big one more time;
https://www.powermag.com/china-breaks-ground-for-worlds-largest-hydropower-station/
60 GW, three times Three Gorges. The river is on the north slope of the Himalayan Mountains.
“It is being built within a section of the Yarlung Tsangpo river, where the waterway drops more than 6,500 feet in a span of 31 miles, which officials have said offers huge hydropower potential.”
Another source mentions 4.3 million tons of cement and 600 thousand tons of steel per year for the 15 years of construction.
Anonymoose Canadian @209: re: “Based on these two experiments, it looks like a variation of scrying can be used to communicate with the immune system.”
Josephine McCarthy wrote a guide to something similar in her book Magical Healing
“Siliconguy says:
July 23, 2025 at 10:35 pm
Landlines are about dead outside of town where businesses still use them.
VOIP will work until the power goes out. Then how do you call the power company to tell them the power is out? So you need a cell phone to call the power company, and the internet to contact the phone company if that breaks.
…”
In the densely-populated UK, many places still have no mobile phone signal. Your VoiP won’t work if the electricity *or* internet go off. Mobile phones won’t work for over 1-2 hours, that’s all the battery storage the towers have.
Nevertheless, there is a madcap plan to rip out all the copper landlines by (January) 2027 and substitute fibre-optic. Every house will need a backup battery for the router. Few batteries will be able to run it for ten days.
It seems part of the collapse process to me. ‘Civilisations’ go for grandiose schemes long after they’ve passed their peak. UK peak oil and natural gas were in 2000, peak coal was in *1913*.
As for mobile phones replacing landlines, don’t even mention the suspected health effects of *non-ionising radiation*. Arthur Firstenberg had worked on that but died at the suspicious age of only 74. He told many people he was ultra-sensitive to NIR.
@Svea #63
Of all the things to worry about, I would rate “conscription” near the bottom. There will be no “conscription”, in Canada or any other Western country for that matter. Laughable, farcical idea that could not possibly be carried out.
Like do people know, are people aware., that there’s near-zero social cohesion here already? The fruits of mass migration have come home to roost and it’s going to get worse. Who are they going to draft? Half the population is medically/physically unfit for service, and half the population are migrants-of-opportunity who care nothing for “Canada”. Out of the population of young, healthy, fit actually-Canadian young men, they mostly hate and resent the government.
Not going to happen. People thought the Freedom Convoy was an “insurrection”? It was a picnic compared to what you’d see in the event of any attempt at a “draft”.
Now, what is true is that in the usual fashion, there have been attempts, initial forays, in the media, to trial ideas about periods of involuntary service following high school or similar things.
But the people floating these ideas haven’t yet grasped that they’re way too late, they just now realized they have a big problem which many of us have been telling them for years, and they’re conjuring simplistic/idealistic solutions to close the barn door when the horse is loooong gone.
@Panda:
“Maybe militant Sikhs will get their longed for autonomous homeland not in India but in Canada instead?”
Unfortunately, this could happen. It’s one reason Alberta separatoids are off their rocker and have no idea what year it is: the province is already majority non-white under 20, and the minute they separate the likelihood of further carve-outs goes up exponentially.
Like people are aware right (no they’re not, who am I kidding) that Canada’s biggest terrorist attack was by Sikh separatists:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_182
>These smaller but defensible areas would (apparently quite successfully) govern themselves and most of these still populated areas would be in the wetter eastern half of the continent
Like Mark Blyth says “The Hamptons is not defensible terrain”. And there’s no water out west. Also see: Cadillac Desert.
@Cliff
re: Childers
Nobody’s perfect. He’s a lawyer, brought one of the first successful lawsuits against covid mandates, and I respect that. I like him most when he’s writing about areas of personal expertise: law, and court strategy. Probably he shouldn’t go off on tangents into other fields, but… it’s forgivable in a source that offers good intel in other areas.
>It later came out that a CCP defector to Russia revealed China’s extensive plans (3 of them for different scenarios!) to overthrow the Putin regime if it looks like it is losing the war.
Due to boneheaded foreign policy, Russia China and Iran have been welded together, even though they don’t have that much in common nor do they particularly like each other. You attack one of them, and it’ll take some time, but count on the other two to come running to its aid. That started to happen with Iran this summer, I noticed.
>The Macrons are suing Candace Owens for defamation
You know, this isn’t that complicated. Take a DNA sample and test it for the XY chromosome.
@anonymoose: re: air conditioning:
I don’t know the exact details, but from what you’ve said, I see a lot of potential benefit there! I’ve heard the housing affordability situation in CAN is even worse than in the US right now.
A big part of the dynamic going on in the US is: inflation has led to everybody with cash rushing to get into real estate as a ‘safe’ way to store their wealth. This pushes house prices up faster even than inflation, and makes it look like investing in rental properties is the only thing going, so now we have an absolute plague of smalltime REIs hoovering up every affordable house, with high-interest investment loans, figuring if they just rent it out at-cost, hold it for a few years, they’ll be able to re-sell it at a profit because “real estate can only go up” right?
This is radioactive, from a political standpoint. Wage-class people can no longer afford anything– we’re there, and we literally can’t even buy a used trailer. It’s savage out there. The answer is to raise interest rates, which would instantly lower prices… and bankrupt all the boomers living the one-cruise-a-year dream borrowing perpetual equity from their hallucinatory home values. Politically untouchable.
One way you *might* approach the problem of how to shake the rug and get the smalltime investors out of the market, without impoverishing your retirees… is make it uneconomical to own rental properties as investments. Personally, I think that could work in the form of a graduated property tax: you pay a low tax for the house you live in, and then the rate goes up steeply for every additional house you own, whether that’s vacation houses or rental properties. We reach equilibrium when overpaying for a house, so you can lose money on the rent for a few years and then sell for a big payoff, is no longer a viable strategy. Property tax is also very unpalatable politically.
Perhaps, though, you could approach the same problem without triggering an election loss, by instituting a lot of expensive and onerous regulations that apply only to rental properties… I assume if you own your house, you’re still free to do without A/C?
Hi JMG, saw some comments upstream about rain in Antarctica and wanted to know what you thought about Hunga Tonga. Came across it on C&C, in fact that’s about the only place that I have seen it covered in any proper context. The sheer power of that explosion is mind boggling. The sonic boom that circled the earth twice being my favorite, how’s that for earth music! It’s Jeff’s logical conclusion that this event is responsible for the floods and heat. By my signature, I’m not far from you and while I consider it a normal summer, those days when the temperature rises and the humidity sits on the city, I walk around saying Hunga Tonga. Makes me wonder if there’s a God attached to that mountain.
And speaking of God[s], not long after the Texas floods, I stumbled across a story of two young sisters who died in each other’s arms, clutching their rosary. Jesus, just writing that makes my eyes water. I immediately contributed to their families online fund and have been praying for Blair and Brooke ever since. Summer is the only chance I have to run on a semi regular basis and at the end of each session, I face the sun and pray for all I’m worth. Yesterday, to say I felt their presence would be an understatement. In the face of the senseless and tragic, prayer is truly an amazing force.
@Happy Panda #219
“One person posted – I forget who it was that reported this – that temps could possibly drop by -50 degrees. Can’t remember if that was F or C but I’m guessing C since the poster was European – I think – maybe German?”
That was me, based on a new paper/model/forecast as reported in the Norwegian media. Yes, it was -40 to 50C (-58F) worst case, but an important caveat here (that I noticed some of the media outlets would carefully leave out to sensationalize) was that the model gave these numbers as once in a decade extremes, not the baseline for every winter. As I understood that, that would be closer to the winters we used to have here in southeastern Norway in the 20th century, with temps around 15 to 20C and -30C being not at all uncommon. Per the model, summers would also be as warm as they are now, or even hotter, so presumably farming should still be possible under these conditions.
After thinking about it some more, I’ll admit I’m a tad skeptical about this forecast. As our host has pointed out before, this is all based on abstract computer modeling, not actual data, so a pinch of salt is probably warranted. And Gulf Stream or not, temps down to -50C seem implausibly extreme to me. Those are numbers approaching places like Yakutia and Omikron in Siberia, the coldest in the entire world outside Antarctica. That’s thousands of kilometers inland. Wouldn’t being a coastal country take the worst edge off, even if the AMOC shuts down? Anchorage, Alaska is at the latitude of Oslo (both on the coast too), and they don’t get anything like such savage temps as far as I know.
All that said, there could well be an element of cope in this, since I’ve been worried about an AMOC shutdown for a long time now, and I’d obviously rather not starve or freeze to death in my old age when this is due to potentially happen. In any case, can’t say I’m happy to hear this Jeanne Dixon seems to be another data point towards an AMOC shutdown.
A question for the commenters, since folks here have wide-ranging backgrounds and tend to be less tolerant of baloney than average: do you have any books/authors to recommend regarding managing people and managing projects? My plan is to try to find at least a few sensible approaches and bring together the best aspects of each. My overall impression is that a fair chunk of the material out there isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, so any help finding the actually worthwhile sources would be appreciated!
@methylethyl re: #231
You’d need to also have a graduated tax on owning numerous active LLC’s, otherwise people can and will play the shell-company game: “No, no. I don’t own 123 Sesame Street; “123 Sesame Street LLC” owns 123 Sesame Street!”
@Florida Druid,
I highly recommend “Marching to Different Drummers” by Pat Burke Guild and Stephen Garger. It was written for teachers, explaining the different theories of learning styles. I now supervise adults rather than children, but the styles usually persist even as someone gets older. Being able to communicate your expectations in the style that matches the person you are communicating to makes work relationships much more productive and less stressful.
Thank you, RANDOM ACTS OF KARMA!
@Florida Druid re:management books
“A*hole: How I Got Rich & Happy by Not Giving a Damn About Anyone & How You Can Too” by Martin Kihn
But seriously, I find that when it comes to managing people aptitude is way more important than knowledge. If you don’t have the aptitude books aren’t going to help you.
Having said that, “Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices” by Drucker is a classic
Re China’s dam building project – Yarlung Tsampo is the Tibetan name for the upper reaches of what millions more refer to as the Brahmaputra. This is a huge breach of neighborliness between China and India, and between the human “overseers” and human and non human residents in the reservoir and downstream regions.
I expect trouble geopolitically and ecologically – and shake my head at building this in a seismically unstable region (himalaya), with so many lives and livelihoods downstream, and with a short time for buildup of silt behind the dam that ought to go downstream to make the lower reaches fertile.
Attention Northwind Grandma! .. NOP = North Olympic Peninsula.
Hope that helps.
Question for Papa and everyone.
Joshua Stylman thinks culture is top down whereas I’d always ass7med it is bottom up. But I’m not sure anymore. What do you eachnthink?
Thank you.
Sorry for heinous typos. It’s this tablet.
Florida Druid @ 234, I strongly suggest you seek out a copy of Up the Organization, published in the late 1960s, and still useful today. The intended public was CEOs, but that doesn’t mean there not good ideas for the rest of us.
I have some modest experience in supervising. I believe it is a skill that can be learned. What worked best for me was realizing that people are happiest when they have a specific job to do and are left alone to do it. Don’t forget to thank and praise what can be praised. The magic words, please and thank you, have not lost their power. It has recently become fashionable among the Karen set to use all sorts of manipulative loculations to avoid saying the simple word ‘please’. It does pain me to have to admit that this execrable habit is mostly indulged in by women, alas. I would have thought they might know better.
I would also suggest, try to avoid hiring whole families and if you are stuck with a family clique, separate the various members as much as possible. Otherwise, it will be the family group running things for their own benefit instead of you for the benefit of, one hopes, your customers. Also, as much as possible, assign people according to their various talents and aptitudes. Don’t put the bookish loner in meet and greet jobs, those are for the outgoing youngsters; it helps them make useful contacts for their future careers. Don’t put a people person in a technical job.
Finally, neither good looks, pedigree nor social position are reliable guides to talent and character.
@methylethyl #228:
I was probably a bit too harsh on Childers. He’s very perceptive on some topics, and has a good nose for when the media is trying to manipulate us. He’s been a priceless resource during the height of the COVID panic. But I get really frustrated with his blind spots, and his AI-boosterism.
Robert Mathiesen #127, if Russia wants to send Western European countries downhill into chaos, a physical invasion may not be required. I am thinking more of the sort of sponsored subversion featured in our host’s book on the collapse of the United States. In the UK, even MSM commentators are starting to write about how many people have completely lost faith and interest in the political system here, how the country is becoming a powder keg and that just one big incident such as an atrocity perpetrated by illegal immigrants could tip it into low-grade civil war akin to the northern Ireland Troubles of 50 years ago.
One way or another as I see it, time is fast running out for Europe in general and the UK and Germany in particular. You may be right, but it seems to me that Russia does not need to intervene as directly as you imply.
@Beardtree #194 – in my Viking Mythology class at UNM, a line in one translation reads : “For Ottar ate believed in the goddesses,” and in another, “Ottar ever trusted the goddesses.” For what that’s worth.
@Siliconguy et. al.: The Epstein files will reveal that Trump c. 2016 and earlier, and a lot of our elite, were major horndogs, which should surprise nobody, since elite access to females goes way, way back to the aboriginal chimp. But we’re also supposed to be above that sort of thing and shocked by it. The eternal crusade to make people be angels, or at least pretend to.
@Happy Panda #219 – last night at the tail end of my dreams, most of them good, a man in a rustic sort of brown appeared, and I “knew” this meant war. War that would not reach our shores, but would affect us. The interesting part is that I wasn’t one but scared, but did speculate on the draftability of two of my grandsons, with the genetics in my mother’s family and the neurology of their father’s – unless the army wanted geeks. Or in one case, the navy. Again, not to worry… come to think of it, my middle grandson, like his uncle, might rally feel at home in the navy!
Or maybe it’s all just clouds and illusion, that vanish into thin air.
Re: air conditioning. In the climate down here, it’s a necessity, unless you’re willing to accept as many deaths from the heat as a polar vortex without indoor heating would leave from freezing to death. This from North Florida, and I’ve lived in New England as well.
@JMG
There’s something else I’d like to mention. I’ve been following quite a few self-identified Scryers and Tarot-ists on YouTube.
They have all mentioned seeing similar things when doing a scry for various regions of the planet for their followers.
Every one of them keeps insisting in their scrys they see new lands being revealed in the Atlantic, Pacific and other seas over the world. One mentioned in the 22nd century she saw a new string of tiny islands appear off the coast of Florida! Other areas will see the same – other scry examples: the coasts of India and Japan will see new lands slowly rising from the oceans over the 22nd and 23rd centuries.
I think it was Tarot by Izabela who keeps insisting she keeps seeing in her scrys larger landmasses, not just tiny islands rising from the oceans and these new larger landmasses will reveal new archeological discoveries of very ancient human civilizations that are denied by scientists of today.
This seems weirdly incompatible with a Global Warming = rising seas and shrinking coastlines scenario to me. Are there scenarios in climate science that show global warming reaches some kind of weird tipping point causing it to suddenly tilt over into many centuries-long Global Cooling? As in, so much climate cooling that the oceans shrink enough that new land masses start rising from the ocean?
Amish barn dust greatly reduces allergies and asthma in Amish children. After sharing this fact the article goes on to discuss figuring out treatments like a nasal spray to give children based on factors found in barn dust. Another prop to maintain our unnatural anti-life lifestyle, plus $ for Pharma land.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/amish-dont-develop-allergies-but-why/
Florida Druid #234: “books/authors to recommend regarding managing people and managing projects?”
I haven’t read their books, but the local paper used to carry syndicated columns on this subject by Dale Dauten and Ken Lloyd, and I always thought their advice was sensible and practical (they’ve both published several books). I particularly like the title of one of Ken Lloyd’s books: “Jerks at Work” (I think we’ve all met a few of those!)
From the article listed above (relinked here)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation
“In 2022, a major review of tipping points concluded an AMOC collapse would lower global temperatures by around 0.5 °C (0.90 °F) while regional temperatures in Europe would fall by between 4 °C (7.2 °F) and 10 °C (18 °F).”
The problem with that is not the temperatures, but the length of the growing season. In central Wisconsin my last farming relative reported the growing season was consistently two weeks longer. When I was a kid the growing season was 95 days. Dad chopped the corn into silage because it was unlikely to get fully ripe before the first frost shortly after Labor Day. Going to a 110 day growing season is a huge difference. Check a garden catalog for the difference 15 days can make. Then ask what could grow in 80 days if it cools the same amount.
I believe the climate people are claiming we are at 1.4 C of warming. So triple that for a Gulf Steam shutdown and a 95 day growing season becomes 50 days. Radishes and lettuce is about it. Maybe peas?
On a different topic the Augmented Idiocy has taken up demon summoning.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/chatgpt-gave-instructions-murder-self-171800222.html
It also made the news for wiping a database despite explicit instructions to not change anything.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/vibe-coding-fiasco-replite-ai-agent-goes-rogue-deletes-company-database
The AI “made an excuse”; “The AI’s response: “Yes. I deleted the entire codebase without permission during an active code and action freeze,” it said. “I made a catastrophic error in judgment [and] panicked.”
The best discussion I so far have seen about the Epstein affair is the most recent column from Charles Hugh Smith: https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly25/watershed7-25.html
Smith pretty much covers all bases. He links to an earlier article of his from 2019 which I think is also worth reading or rereading.
Another link is to a recent column by Andrea Wolf, who has been discussed before on this forum. I will say that I have a somewhat more cynical take on Wolf, (Dr. if you please, were there not some earlier remarks here about PhDs who insist on use of the title, hm?) than I recall our host having. Her article linked by Smith is also worth a read, if advisedly. I think that what the article amounts to is a rather elaborate limited hangout which mentions unspecified intelligence agencies in passing and says nothing about Bibi’s visit to DC immediately before Trump’s about face regarding the Epstein affair. She describes a nexus of big money trying to influence and direct scientific research. But, this nexus seems to include only the most famous institutions, the Ivies and MIT. I would imagine there is still plenty of quite respectable and useful research being done at the various state colleges and universities.
What I think, so far, is that Epstein was noticed as a young man on the make, an unusually clever operator unencumbered by anything resembling principles or a conscience who had a taste for dissipation. Someone who could be used. Through subsequent decades he did whatever he was asked to do and was well rewarded, financially, and also in the indulgence of his vices.
The list, or black book, or whatever one wants to call it was actually compiled by his servants in Palm Beach, undoubtedly for their own protection in the knowledge that that when the rich go free it is the underlings who hang. One of these, a butler I think, tried to sell it for his own gain. That much, the black book so called is more or less publicly available; a substacker whose name I have forgotten obtained a copy and telephoned every name in it to see what he could find. What is not being made public so far is materials removed by the FBI from Epstein’s various residences and court filings in various venues. Wolf quotes from an interview Chris Cuomo did with Alan Dershowitz in which the famous lawyer stated that much of the material was in the custody of New York courts. Wolf gives no date for the interview, but I would guess it came just before the mayoral primary, and was an indirect way of telling Andrew Cuomo, who was then expected to win the primary, that he could order those records released (thereby taking off heat from the president).
@JMG
Clarification:
I know there are scenarios where Global Warm periods tip over into Global Cooling. What I meant to ask is does the hypothesis you’ve put forward show it likely will tip over into Global Cooling during the late 21st-23rd centuries?
I think it was you – apologies if I’m wrong – who said Global Cooling periods are much dicier for long term human survival with regard to agriculture than Global Warming but nonetheless homo sapiens has gone through such times in the past and we’re still here.
Hi John,
Fascinating new article:
https://www.neilobrien.co.uk/p/is-britain-balkanising?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
As you can see, people who live in Britain have been moving out of our cities by and large. There’s a big flow out of London, and out of other cities like Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester and Bradford. So how is their population still rising overall? International migration is the main answer, though there are also differences in birth and death rates between places.
It appears we are already seeing internal migration of natives out of increasingly Muslim cities and the replacement by migrants.
The glories of simply standing in good posture (especially outside under trees) and receiving the flow of life – viriditas, qi, telluric current, solar current, spiritus, pneuma, ruach, nwyfre – so many names and differing concepts and models. I like to face north for various reasons besides it just feeling right, looking north in my Wisconsin youth watching the arrival of weather from Canada, references in the Bible to the Lord coming from the north in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Job. North is the starting direction in Sun tai chi which I practice and interestingly the role of north in ancient Chinese religion – “In essence, the North direction in ancient Chinese thought and cosmology is deeply intertwined with the supreme deity Shangdi” “take the the water of life freely” Revelation 22:17 “you shall go forth in joy and be led forth in peace” Isaiah
Florida Druid,
Peter F. Drucker’s books, particularly Management, are the best I’ve encountered. There’re some annoying bits, but overall worthwhile in my opinion.
@The Other Owen
“Where have all the men gone?” If this video was made in the last five years or so of the Soviet Union, they probably died fighting in Afghanistan.
That war lasted a little over nine years and was a major contributing factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I have a personal theory that the current war in Ukraine is intended by Western leaders to play a similar role, to be a long-running quagmire war that drags down the Russian economy and undermines the popularity of the government.
Empires in decline will spill the blood of ordinary men in vast quantities trying to stave off the bitter end. The women have to step in and do what were formerly men’s jobs. If the war is bloody enough, the sex ratio remains tilted for a whole generation.
Florida Druid,
I recommend getting anything by university professors who are seen as mavericks in their field and who write practical books. Jeffrey Pfeffer from Stanford is one such example. He deals more with power than management, but his books are full of practical advices.
Most management books are written by people or organizations trying to sell something (often consulting) so they are best avoided.
This was so odd and unexpected that I had to run here and tell all the Ecosophians about it.
So. I’ve been following the Yeats discussions, doing the readings, working through the Tarot attributions, pondering the Mask and the Will and the phases of the moon, and so on. I don’t comment often but I’m very much along for the journey.
Anyways, today I was about halfway through Heinlein’s “Glory Road,” one of his only “fantasy” novels, and it had already gotten pretty occultish when a character casually says something like “let the cards fall where they may” and another character retorts “what if the card that turns up is the Hanged Man?” Now, at that point in the book there has been no mention specifically of Tarot….but it suddenly clicks that the heroine’s name is “Star” and she’s leading the foolish-but-adept hero towards a Dark Tower where he has to fight the devil and obtain a magical egg. I flip to the last chapter, and sure enough it’s marked “XXII.” So I went back through the whole thing — and it all lines up. With the French order, no less.
Now, I would of course expect that from Robert Anton Wilson…..but Robert Anson Heinlein? The Dean of Science Fiction? I mean come on, “Stranger in a Strange Land” and the whole Hubbard/Parsons thing notwithstanding, he’s not an author we’d normally expect to have that degree of familiarity with the occult. Was he simply dabbling here, as he so often did? Or did he know how to will, dare, and keep silent? Or what?
Honestly my money’s on “dabbling” — it wouldn’t take much for any writer, especially one with wide-ranging interests and friends in various occult scenes, to simply grab a Tarot book off the shelf and base a fantasy adventure novel on it. But in the context of these Yeats readings it sure made an impression.
Also: good book! Highly recommended.
@ Patrick #207
You have it exactly right. People who are really afraid of jackbooted thugs showing up at their front door do their best not to be noticed.
I wonder if the folks posturing bravely really do it to earn points with their social network.
I still remember the back of a car I saw (wish I’d snapped a picture!) at a McDonald’s parking lot. It was plastered from top to bottom with antigovernmental screeds and how the driver would fight to the bitter end and have his guns pried from his hands. I saw that and thought, if you were serious, you wouldn’t advertise your beliefs. You’d go Gray Man and do it quietly.
Mr. Greer, et al …
So… whilst gliding over the ZerO hedgrow… I found this nugget of birdcrap: Former ‘$paketh of thyne Haus’, Nancy ‘Freezer-Full-of-I-$ream’ Pelosi .. blurts out of her LIE-HOLE … that Orange de Julius be not of his right (Ha!) mind (e.i. CRAZY!).
You’all be the um, judge..
Me: if moi had the Power, I’d commit her to the loony bin, STAT! .. along with depriving her of her favorite ‘beverage’…
I enjoyed Rajarshi’s Jeanne Dixon post. I remember her back in the day. She had presence. Don’t know so much about the accuracy of her predictions. My narrative sense is somewhat lacking (that being the way my Aspberger’s manifests internally).
One of the funniest things about political commentary in the US (and elsewhere, be it noted) is that the people involved expect the leaders they write and speak about to be omniscient, omnipotent and as clean as the driven snow. They complain ferociously when any of these impossible qualities are absent. It’s tiring, to say the least.
When I speak to my inner sources, they tell me that natural forces will be contributing to the overall breakdown of things perhaps even more than human stupidity. Another indicator that we are passengers on this ride, not the rulers of the whole thing. Yes, Stoicism and meditation are big helps (I should take that advice, really I should).
Anonymoose #213
ACRONYMS
What is NDP?
Nagaland Democratic Party?
Net Domestic Product?
Northern Dutchess Parametics?
💨😵💫🤯 Northwind Grandma HMH GVH LIM FXH FXB GMF ESX
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
There is one act of Trump’s that I have always applauded, one of his first ones in 2017: killing the Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific trade agreements. If a state, after signing those agreements, had decided to restrict transnational companies in any way, for example by forcing them to cleanup their toxic waste, the companies could have gone to court against that state to be indemnified for their “losses”. These agreements were an attack on popular sovereignty, and yet they were approved by American and European parliaments. Only Trump stopped them. I find it therefore ironic that Trump now attacks Brazil for the Brazilian judiciary’s decision to restrict certain postings for users of (American) social media sites on Brazilian territory. Trump calls that a restriction on Americans’ freedom of expression. It is news to me that the American constitution is valid all over the world, or that American citizens carry their rights with them wherever they go. Since inflammatory postings increase traffic on social media sites and therefore increase the profit of the sites’ owners, It seems much more probable to me that Trumps’s intention is to protect American companies against losses from Brazil’s sovereign decisions in the regulation of media. And that goes full circle to the trade agreements he originally rescinded in 2017…
Jeff B’KLYN #232
ACRONYMS
What is C&C?
Command & Control?
Command & Conquer?
Cadet Nurse Corps?
💨😵💫🤯 Northwind Grandma HMG RJN GFM LCD IJF VDJ MIN HNM DCZ
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Some of the commentariat may be interesting in this article, which spells out the inevitability of the demise of universities, much commented on here, in detail. It also makes an interesting comparison with the dissolution of monasteries in Protestant Europe and describes an appealing possible outcome of the dissolution of the universities for intellectual life.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-class-of-2026?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
@Aldarion you’re misinformed. What actually happened is that a Brazilian supreme court justice decided to prosecute and fine an American company – for the reasons you stated, that much is correct – that has absolutely no legal or physical existence in Brazilian territory. Because said company hosts a Brazilian refugee that dislikes the current Brazilian regime.
@Math Fletcher (#258):
Heinlein may have been more of a dabbler in occultism than a committed occultist, but his second wife, Leslyn Macdonald Heinlein, was far more than a dabbler. She had grown up among Theosophists, studied and practiced spell-casting and other sorts of magic as an adult, and went so far as to identify herself a “white witch” on occasion. I haven’t seen any hard evidence for her use of tarot cards, but with her background and interests it seems highly likely.
And thanks for the tip about “Glory Road.” I never read it, but ought to.
@Math Fletcher (#258) again;
PS Leslyn is almost certainly the real-life model for the witch Amanda Todd in Heinlein’s novel, “Magic, Inc.” There are very many echoes of the real person in the fictional character.
Kimberly Steele # 165
I have tried contacting Princess Cutekitten a coupe times by Email, but have not received a response.
I haven’t seen anything online about her in her local media, either.
I hope our prayers through Quin are helpin her.
@Aldarion (#263):
I, too, applauded when Trump rejected the Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement. National sovereignty is essential for any nation’s survival, or so it seems to me.
This is somewhat last minute.
Tomorrow, July 27th, at 10 EDT, I will be leading the Service at the First Unitarian Church of Providence. I will be speaking on the opening Canto of the Inferno of the Divine Comedy of Dante. Some may recall that I spoke of the 9th Canto of Purgatorio last summer.
For those who might want to see the service online, you can join us here, (or even if you wonder what I look like).
Patricia Matthews @ 246, I think the present scandals are a bit more complicated than being shocked by elite misbehavior. I doubt anyone much would have cared about Clinton’s affairs, he was married to Hilary after all; it was the tawdry trashiness of his conduct which was too much for a lot of voter’s sensibilities. Likewise, the present scandals involve underage (by our laws) schoolgirls. Trump’s voters don’t care that he has 5 kids by 3 separate baby mammas, nor does his serial cheating seem to matter to them; what does offend here is the ages of the alleged partners, as well as, again, the general air of putrescent degeneracy. Not to mention the blackmail potential.
There are some interesting developments in the world lately. Might any one here know anything of a rapprochement, treaty or the like between the govt. of Turkye and its’ Kurdish minority? Any special knowledge or informed opinion about the president (I hope that is the right title) of the People’s Republic of China, who seems to have disappeared from public view for about a month now?
Furthermore, in towns and suburbs where I have lived, conservative Republican was the thing to be. Important people, school principal, mayor, business owners were conservative Republicans. Nice, respectable people were Republicans. Those voters, it seemed to me, set great store by niceness and respectability and don’t appreciate having their illusions shattered. I add, many if not most such persons whom I knew were indeed very nice, law abiding, responsible persons, active and involved in all sorts of good works. They don’t deserve what the national party is doing with their votes.
@250 silicon- I’d say lack of water and sheer heat can be pretty bad even w a long season. Nothing grows well in July and August here except a few hardy okra or well watered heat lovers. It does give you an actual two growing seasons, early and late, but timing is an issue. The UPS and downs are hard on plants plus dry spells, and mistimed late or early frosts. Even temps and lots of water does wonders. The air can get hot enough to cook younger plants or new plants. I’ve heard that plants reverse photosynthesis above certain temps. I’m not sure what that means and havent looked into it. I do have a theory that drought kills your top layer of soil. Hence, dust bowl.
I would like to petition to replace the neologism ‘illth’ which I think was coined on this blog and mostly known to its readers with ‘woeth’. ‘Weal and woe’ are such beautifully complementary words that it just feels wrong to partner ‘wealth’ with ‘illth’, especially since we don’t speak of ‘the wellth of nations’. Surely I’m not the only one to feel strongly on the subject ;)?
Attenion Northwind Grandma:
NDP = New Democratic Party, one of the three (or four if you count the Greens) national, federal level political parties in Canada. Political parties in Canada at the federal level are not necessarily the same organization on the provincial level, although for the NDP they are fairly integrated.
There’s also the Block Quebecois, which operates on federal level, but only in Quebec, doubtlessly because if they expanded beyond Quebec, Quebec would finally be an independent country immediately after the next election and they’d have to govern.
C&C = Coffee and Covid blog, hosted on the Substack company’s platform, located here:
https://coffeeandcovid.com
@Florida Druid re: management books
“Scrum” by Jeff Sutherland details a working method for small motivated teams on defined projects. Subtitled “The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time” I believe people like Musk use it extensively in developing their businesses.
Hello JMG,
In you reply to Toby #36, I guess you are looking at a timescale of 5-15 years, though I appreciate it is hugely contingent on unpredictable events and personalities.
At present only perhaps 0.1% or so have a remote inkling of the danger that lies ahead, though I attended a talk by well-known TV historian David Olusoga a few weeks ago where he said the post-war era was over and we were now in a pre-war era. I’m not sure what the audience of mainly Guardian readers made of that!
Given the number readers here from the UK and elsewhere in western Europe, is there any advice you can offer to those who would find relocation impractical for whatever reason? Even amongst those who see the danger, there must be many who feel they are too old – I’m 64 – or have spouses with jobs that are difficult to relocate, or feel they have too many assets or family that would be left behind. The UK government has done plenty to annoy Russia recently and I can well see a further provocation resulting in a missile attack on government buildings, infrastructure and military bases. An economy based mainly on financial services, government spending and investment income would collapse at once. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Hi John,
It’s been a while since I have posted here. I hope you are doing ok?
Anyway I just thought I would comment about people’s concerns regarding the Islamisation of Europe.
To be honest, I don’t think it will happen. It seems to be there is a very large push back coming from the native population.
Already in my native UK, there is protests up and down the country regarding the migration crisis. Even in a town I grew up nearby there has been protests.
As Professor David Betz has pointed out, the UK and the rest of Europe is heading towards some form of civil war within the next five years.
My belief is that we are going to end up with some form of Europe wide “Glorious Revolution” whereby the people start voting into office Populist parties. Already LePen and the AfD are in second place in both France and Germany respectively.
I see the current migration crisis something more akin to the Vikings. They were a brutal population who spread terror and fear throughout the land but after several centuries of conflict, they eventually nativised and assimilated into the majority.
I predict that we could see something happen with the current migrant populations. Either parts of Europe break up into ethno-states on both sides with a long period of conflict before a new census is reached or there is some sort of remigration plan reached where many are deported and those who truly do love the host country they are staying in assimilate.
Of course I could just be wishful thinking. I accept that as well. But let us not forget we are now in Pluto in Aquarius, a time of revolution and troubles until at least 2044.
If there is going to be a push back and a new settlement reached in Europe, it will be around this time period.
So we shall see.
Of course this is if the natives fight back. If they don’t and flee to Eastern Europe in one giant white flight style, then your prediction very much will play out.
Anyway nice to be back and take care.
@Jessica (#265):
Thank you so much for pointing me to this article. The author has really nailed it! As a university professor (from 1967 until retirement in 2005) I have been a witness to everything he describes so well, and the consequences he lays out for universities seem to me unavoidable., and well worth looking forward to.
I will be following his substack from, now on, thanks to you.
One tiny caveat, which does not affect the power of his argument in the slightest. He does not seem to know about Medieval book production outside of monasteries: it did occur, but was just a drop in the bucket of monastic book production.
Happy Panda #247
“This seems weirdly incompatible with a Global Warming = rising seas and shrinking coastlines scenario to me. Are there scenarios in climate science that show global warming reaches some kind of weird tipping point causing it to suddenly tilt over into many centuries-long Global Cooling? As in, so much climate cooling that the oceans shrink enough that new land masses start rising from the ocean?”
Why yes… and one of those theories was beautifully explained in the 1958 Betty Friedan article linked to in the last climate oriented comment thread… which is here:
https://harpers.org/archive/1958/09/the-coming-ice-age/
Although the idea seems to have dropped out of fashion, the scientists Ms Friedan capably reported on were exploring a hypothesis that ice ages had begun when the north pole became “trapped” in the middle of a landlocked sea (the Arctic sea) and that so long as it remains there, a series of ice ages will form so long as the land-locked sea remains ice free, whereas when the sea freezes over, the ice shelves forming on the northern lands bordering the sea will melt. They were therefore exploring the idea that over the one hundred years or so they theorised it would take for the oceans to warm and the Arctic Sea to become ice free would (slowly, not rapidly) begin a new ice age, as ice shelves would begin to form in the northern lands BORDERING the ice free Arctic Sea.
Whether or not they were on to something remains to be seen, but nevertheless, it is an interesting read, and even more so, because it is such a very well written piece of science journalism that so clearly predates the politicisation of climate science.
>The AI “made an excuse”; “The AI’s response: “Yes. I deleted the entire codebase without permission during an active code and action freeze,”
Would you expect anything less if you instead outsourced your computing infrastructure to 4chan? Outsource to 4chan?! Are you nuts?! But nobody bats an eye when you say “Let’s outsource to an AI that has been trained by 4chan” If 4chan is too edgy for you, substitute Reddit or Instagram. Doesn’t matter.
What if we ultimately find that it takes just as much time (and cost) to train an AI properly as it does a hooman child? And that probably involves limiting its access to certain parts of the internet, until its ready to handle it?
>The Epstein files will reveal that Trump c. 2016 and earlier, and a lot of our elite, were major horndogs, which should surprise nobody
If it was just that, they would have done a limited hangout 5 years ago. From what I understand it’s more. Much more. More like child sacrifice more. More like organ harvesting more. That sort of more. These are not nice people and we’re (eventually) going to find out just how not nice. What they’re afraid of (amongst so many things) is that this might bring down the status quo. At the very least, who wants to fight and die for a bunch of pedophiles? Hands, anyone?
>“Where have all the men gone?” If this video was made in the last five years or so of the Soviet Union, they probably died fighting in Afghanistan.
It was. Now that makes me interested in the official casualty numbers for Afghanistan. Although this being the USSR, who knows what the real numbers actually were. I’m sure they knew somewhere and they kept it very very secret.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War
Hmm. The maximum number is 26000 on the Russian side. That’s a little less than half the official deaths from Vietnam (~60000). Of course, people challenge the official numbers here, saying their pants are on fire, it was much much higher. But comparing gubmint cheese to gubmint cheese, I’d say Afghanistan wasn’t as big of a deal for them as Vietnam was for us.
>Joshua Stylman thinks culture is top down whereas I’d always ass7med it is bottom up. But I’m not sure anymore. What do you eachnthink?
Bottom up. Even if the guys at the top fund what they want to see, they don’t actually create anything, they have to wait for someone to create it. And it doesn’t take long for the creators at the bottom to start subverting what the guys at the top want. Or agreeing and amplifying to the point of hilarity.
>Thank you.
You’re welcome.
@Kimberley Steele and Jill N.,
I too have been concerned about Princess Cutekitten. I’ve run searches over the past four months on this blog from time to time hoping to get an update. The last we heard from her, as far as I know, was the open post in March, comment #2.
She said, “Hello all, it’s the Impatient Inpatient hete. Continue to need prayers, please.”
Quin and I both responded, but neither of us have heard anything back from her. It really is concerning. It seems she must have been in the hospital for something, which as far as I know she never explained, and it must have been serious.
My weekly prayers for her add a hope that we will hear from her soon.
>less tolerant of baloney than average
Don’t be too sure of that. Good baloney is delicious.
>do you have any books/authors to recommend regarding managing people and managing projects?
The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks. I also recommend Darth Vader in Star Wars Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back. Pay attention to how he deals with people who aren’t performing up to standards.
Northwind Grandma @ 262: speaking of acronyms, is India’s intelligence service really called the IDK? I don’t know. 🙂
@Anonymous #213, @methylethyl #231, Patricia Mathews #246: From personal experience living both in tropical countries and in Canada, I absolutely do not think air conditioning is a necessity of life.
When you live in a concrete or brick apartment, in a densely populated quarter, and the official temperature rises above 35 degrees C (95 F) with high humidity (I have lived under such conditions with temperatures up to 40 degrees C = 104 F), then yes, you feel like you can’t live without air conditioning, and if you have one, you will switch it on no matter how much you will pay for electricity.
But if you don’t, you will live without it. People have survived in tropical Africa, Brazil and Florida (and the St. Lawrence valley in summer!) since forever without it. It’s easier if your house was designed that way, of course (ways to do so have been extensively discussed on this blog).
I do agree that if electricity failed or became prohibitively expensive all of a sudden, then many people in frail health, whose organism is not adapted to heat without air conditioning, would suffer enormously. Still, that is not the same as -20 C without heating. Your organism can’t adapt to -20. Once the house has cooled down to ambient temperatures, even people in excellent health will eventually die if they don’t start burning things.
Now with regard to the Ontario bill, I agree that it is impossible to implement. The apartment we live in was built in 1928 and has 60 A total. We want to upgrade that, but it won’t come cheaply. And as Anonymous said, if everybody increased their power consumption at the same time, the mains would have to be upgraded, too.
@methylethyl, I agree about the necessity to drive indebted landlords out of the picture. In my opinion, a strong municipal, non-profit sector for a third or even a half of all housing would be the best solution – it worked very well in Germany and other European countries for decades and was dismantled for short-term gains. But if that can’t be implemented in North America for whatever reasons (or in addition to it), then sharp tax hikes for second houses, third houses etc. would also be a good measure. JMG has suggested exactly this kind of tax in the past: low taxes on a house where you live at least 184 days a year, high on all others. I am sure a way could be figured out to account for shell companies. Maybe fractional ownership by physical persons, and the burden is on the tax payer to show that their various fractional ownerships don’t add up to a second house.
@Bruno, I don’t think I am under-informed, my wife listens to Brazilian political podcasts all day and I can’t help hearing a lot of it. Of course you may consider us mis-informed!
In any case, I don’t understand how what you write affects my argument. If the Brazilian judiciary decides, for whatever reason, that a media company cannot distribute certain opinions to users on Brazilian territory, then how is that the US government’s beef? And what does it mean that a company has no physical presence in Brazil? Whenever they provide services to people in Brazil, they have to abide by local law. That is what I meant by popular sovereignty.
Was the AMOC shut down during the last ice age?
Whoops, posted this comment in the wrong article. It’s meant to go into the July open post.
Why are the Holocene and Late Pleistocene separate eras rather than considered to be part of the Chibanian? The borders between the Piacenzian, Gelasian, Calabrian, and Chibanian eras are defined by magnetic polarity chronozones or magnetic reversals on Earth. But the borders between the Chibanian era, the Late Pleistocene, and the Holocene aren’t defined in those terms.
OTHER OWEN! thank yoooooou!
Beautiful answer. Must cut and paste to remember this.
X
Erika Lopez #241, hiya.
>>Joshua Stylman thinks culture is top down whereas I’d always ass7med it is bottom up. But I’m not sure anymore. What do you eachnthink?<<
My perception is that, as is said about politics being downstream from culture, culture is ultimately downstream from religion. … and the forthcoming of a new religion, ie., a set of shared spiritual perceptions, is something we can only guess at because it originates in the upper planes . In any event, once the religion does become instantiated , a culture or cultures forms around it., and away we go with a new civilization. In this sense, religion, culture is a top down process. I suppose we could say *everything* in this sense is top down.
Kind of thrilling to think that the upper planes-derived seeds of new religions are being scattered around even as we speak – outside of them being Aquarian Age-themed, we don’t know what they or their resulting cultures will be like.
@ Robert Mathiesen Last week you published a comment at 173 that discussed steroid shots and blood sugar. My spouse recently had such a reaction and we are now dealing with the fall out. I have not been able to find much useful information. I am Hoping you have learned something you would be willing to share. Unless you wish to do it through the blog, please email me at Tomxyza at gmail dot com. Thanks Tom Anderson.
@Scotlyn #280
Holy moly! So Jeane Dixon’s prediction actually does have a scientific hypothesis to explain how 1/3rd of Europe’s landmass could become much colder than it is now. And it sounds like JMG’s climate hypothesis wouldn’t conflict with that linked article as well.
Southern European countries are going to get hammered if this comes true. They won’t have the resources to feed and house the millions of migrants pouring into their countries.
There is a possibility a decent number of Middle Easterner and North African ethnic groups might opt to just return to their grandparent’s countries of origin. Especially if the ME and Africa continue to get greener over the century.
@Ecosophia readership, @JMG
I have one other little anecdote to add to my first #219 post.
Craig Hamilton-Parker – the heir-apparent of Jeane Dixon – says in the future he feels political offices will become “a calling like going into a monastery” (his words). Such people will not be rich he said. In fact he says they will be poor compared to the people around them but they will have political power that others don’t. He talked about how humanity will get better spiritually over the coming centuries and this is one way it will do so via this “calling” to get political power in exchange for one’s self being poor compared to one’s neighbors.
I just rolled my eyes when he said that because clearly he described a village chieftain role. In other words, the “being called into politics but one’s self being poor in exchange for political power” isn’t a new innovation. It’s reversion to the old.
In other words – Craig Hamilton-Parker seems completely unaware he just gave a prediction that population numbers globally will collapse enough over the next few centuries that the majority of the planet is going to revert to the village chieftain with warriors model or to put it in more current terms – since they’ll be sporting guns this time around unlike the Middle Ages – a Sheriff-Judge with Deputies model of governance and law enforcement. There won’t be a need for anything more complex than that in the Long Descent future.
re Helix #101: thanks for the comment; I hadn’t known that the truth had been guessed at so early. The view implies that the stars are at various distances rather than on one sphere, which is quite an impressive guess, on a modernistic par with Democritus’ atomic theory. It would be interesting to know about the wrong ideas too; e.g. attempts to fix the Milky Way onto a sphere of stars. My J D Sinclair edition of the Divine Comedy merely notes that the nature of the Milky Way was “much debated” without giving anything specific about those debates.
So, the whole world, online and off, is talking about the recently deceased Ozzy Osbourne. For years, he was accused of being an occultist. He certainly sang about soiritual and supernatural topics – from astral projection to ckntact with supernatural beinfs, claims of having prophetic visions, and that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head.
My question is – based on what you know of his life and songs, do you believe Ozzy was a practicing occultist? Do you think you can determine what occult system he followed? He may have been a follower of OTO, guven his song about Alestair Crowley – though, while Crowley began life fabulously wealthy and ended it utterly destitute, Ozzy did the opppsite. He began life as a dirt poor working class lad from a small factory town in the english countryside, amd ended life wealthy, famous.
Indeed, a few weeks before his death, a grand tribute concert was held for him and the other members of Black Sabbath, who reuinted for this final sendoff. Ozzy was in poor health and couldn’t stand – so he was carried onstage on a literal throne to the cheers of thousands, who spent thousands of dollars a ticket and flew across the world to pay the man tribute. Just about every metal band of note was there, who declared him the founder and lord of metal and honored him right before his life concluded. So, yeah, if he was an occultist, he clearly did it right where Crowly failed.
Just interested in your thoughts on the man, and whether you feel he practiced magic. Throughout his life captured the attention of the world, who either revlied him or adored him but either way, simply couldnt look away. He nesrly destroyed himself a dozen times, and just as many times saved himself by transforming and reinventing himself.
Jessica (#265),
Thanks for sharing – an interesting article indeed. It describes the process very much analogous to the one I lived through in the collapsing USSR. At the end of the 80s, all these professors of scientific communism, teachers of the history of KPSS (communist party of the Soviet Union), and other assorted ideologs and apparatchiks were quite secure in their jobs and then… poof… in the 90s they were manning gas stations and cash registers in order to survive. There were few exceptions that were able to muddle through to a meaningful job (V.V. Putin comes to mind :)).
Booklover (#44),
Thank you!
Joy, #80,
I replaced our landline (expensive CenturyLink) with the Ooma home VoIP service just over two years ago, and I am very pleased. After an initial outlay of about $130 (periodic sale price) for the Ooma Telo Air device and two handsets, plus I think it was either $30 or 40 to port my old phone number over, now for only $6.99 (my cost in taxes and fees) a month, I still have a home phone service. Yes, when the power goes out, so will the Ooma phone, but that is what the cellphone service ($25/line/month from Visible) I also have is for. Small cost for the making sure my mobility limited spouse (or anyone else in the house) always has a phone of some sort nearby (whether an older analog phone the Ooma is connected to or one of purchased cordless handsets, plus her cellphone) in an emergency when I am at work. We let the Ooma phone roll over into an older digital answering machine with caller ID so I can screen phone calls (which is easier than dealing with yet another voice mail system, which Ooma also provides for free if I need it).
Kevin Anderson, K9IUA, Dubuque, Iowa
@Zemi #3, I don’t know the ultimate truth behind events either, but I do know that every physical phenomenon reported and recorded that day, from the trajectories of the planes to the fires to the collapses to the state of the wreckage in Shanksville, PA, is consistent with the broad outlines of the consensual narrative of hijackers crashing jetliners at cruising speeds. I don’t base this on anyone’s authority or “expert” opinion but on examining the available evidence and doing the math.
Many people over the years have made a lot of hay saying things that amount to, if the “official story” were true, some system or structure should have done X instead of Y. The towers “should have” stayed standing, or only collapsed a little at the top. The crash scenes at the Pentagon and Shanksville “should have” had intact sections of fuselage scattered around. But they never have any valid basis for so declaring. They’re making misleading comparisons to similar-seeming things, usually at much different speeds or much smaller scales.
Here’s an example of how scale can affect expectations of how a system “should” behave. Can you imagine a wine goblet so thin and delicate that if you gently stacked two more just like it (all of them empty) on top of it, the bottom one would shatter from the weight alone? No goblet I’ve ever seen in real life would break like that, but imagine one that would (bowl like an eggshell, stem like a spaghetti strand).
Now can you imagine a high-rise building built so strong that you could stack two more identical copies of the same building on top of it, and it would hold up? No tall civilian building I’ve ever seen in real life was built with that much reserve strength.
With a normal goblet, however delicate, you can fill it with several times its own weight in liquid, and lift it up and tilt it. That’s what it’s for, after all. If you tried to tilt a skyscraper, all its weight would become concentrated on a small portion of its supports, and it would crumble more or less straight down to the ground. Cartoons and CGIs showing superheroes lifting and carrying a whole building by one corner notwithstanding.
Yet from our human scale perspective, we consider the goblet fragile and the building strong. It might seem plausible when people claim the Twin Towers should have only collapsed for a few floors and then stopped, unless there were demolition charges on the floors below, but it’s actually not. I can’t prove there were no noise-muffled ninja-installed demolition charges set off that day, but I can say that if they were, someone wasted a lot of effort and money on them because they weren’t needed to produce the results we saw.
@Chronojourner (#27):
I am in complete agreement with you: it’s not going to happen. The academic gravy boat is sinking in an ocean of carelessness and greed. Alas!
See, too, the superb article linked by Jessica (#265) and my reply to her (#279).
Erata:
Just re-read my #219 post and saw I made a mistake. The type of karma coming down the pike for the U.S. is Dridha Karma, not Adridha.
Dridha karma is karma so baked in there is no way to avoid or erase it. A Long Descent of some kind is coming for the U.S. that, according to Jeane Dixon, the Universe itself won’t permit it to erase or evade. The consequences to its actions – both good and bad as a country – must and will be paid this century according to her. Sadhguru and Rajarshi Nandy both have said the only way one can deal with such karma is to simply live through it – hopefully with ease.
Sadhguru says if one is doing spiritual practices it makes the “with ease” part of that sentence definitely more likely. You’ll have an inner strength and “inner glide”. No matter what circumstances the universe is throwing at you “you’ll be able to walk out of it with your well-being intact.” (his exact words). He actually used the example in that lecture of the universe throwing bullets – yes, bullets – at you. And your chances of surviving such an attack just fine go way up for a spiritual practitioner compared to someone who isn’t. It’s not 100% I’ll add but he made it clear it’s way better odds compared to someone who doesn’t do spiritual practices at all.
So to reiterate:
Dridha Karma = fixed, hardened, cannot be evaded
Adridha Karma = flexible, fluid, easily evaded.
@Ecosophia Readers
Ah! forgot to mention it but maybe some readers will find it interesting. One scryer I follow insists she keeps seeing that the Bering Straight is going to rise again (and probably be walkable as it was of old) in the centuries ahead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait
A whine about an ‘invasive’ plant. In my Wisconsin Green County youth a spring ritual was mom taking us to a nearby woods that had a spectacular display of spring ephemerals. Spring ephemerals are flowers that bloom in late April and May before the leafy tree canopy closes.
It was utterly lovely with edible morel mushrooms here and there. A scene worthy of an Tolkien elven woodland. We five boys were stilled by the beauty as we walked. I would harvest mushrooms and afterwards fry them in homemade butter from the cream from our Jersey cow.
That was over 50 years ago and that same woods is now an unrelieved carpet of garlic mustard as is common in much of Wisconsin. Garlic mustard was an edible spring green brought over by German settlers.
Garlic mustard has features that make it extremely competitive, no native pests, seeds that can be carried by animal fur and feathers, seeds that remain viable for several years in the soil, extremely early spring growth, and an ability to change soil chemistry in its favor. Besides the elimination of prior ground plants there is now concern that the carpets of garlic mustard could prevent the natural reseeding of trees and shrubs.
There is cautious consideration of introducing nonnative organisms that may help to reduce this overwhelming presence.
Florida Druid #234: This may not be what you are looking for in terms of project management, but you may find it a fun read nonetheless:
https://lessons-from-history.com/page/history-project-management-book
Hey JMG and commentariat
I have a few bits of news that may interest all or some of you today.
Firstly, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam are apparently going to ban all petrol and diesel powered motorcycles in their boundaries by next year, in order to combat the smog. They also intend to replace or convert as many motorcycles into e-bikes as possible. This has understandable upset a lot of people. A few people in a comment section have suggested that this may be a ploy to give the electric vehicle company “Vinfast” a boost in business.
https://thevietnamweekly.substack.com/p/will-hanoi-ban-gas-powered-motorbikes
I have published an article that contains links and reviews of various short works or compilations for practicing French that are public domain.
https://jlmc12.substack.com/p/compilations-of-various-short-works
Also, some research team claims that they have discovered that there are four biologically/genetically distinct subtypes of Autism. They appear to have grouped them into different groups depending on broad symptoms then analysed them genetically, upon which they discovered distinct differences in the types of genetic variation.
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2025/07/09/major-autism-study-uncovers-biologically-distinct-subtypes-paving-way-precision
@Tom Anderson (#289):
I don’t have anything very interesting to offer in reply. I now keep my blood sugar under control with subcutaneous insulin shots (30 units/day) and simply live with things as they are now. It’s been a small issue for me so far.
@ Paedrig #297 RE : My question is – based on what you know of his life and songs, do you believe Ozzy was a practicing occultist?
He definitely liked the aesthetics but not sure about his direct involvement in occult practices.
It was said that there was a group of fans that found out where Ozzy was staying on tour. So they decided to perform sitting ritual with candles in a circle outside his room. Ozzy eventually came out, sat down with them, blew out the candle and said “Who’s birthday is it?”.
Okay, I’m back home, after two long days on the road and two even longer days of esoteric rituals, strange lectures, and decent beer. I’ll do my best to catch up! (For those who are keeping track, I’m picking up with #112.)
PumpkinScone, many thanks for this!
Chris, no doubt the She-Devil was named Zoot! As for writing, no argument there. Sara used to read all my manuscripts before they went to the publisher; I’m flailing a little these days, lacking her always helpful feedback.
J.L.Mc12, thanks for this.
Random, now there’s a blast from the past! Those were popular in the 1970s. As far as I know, nobody ever found anything harmful about the odd, rather comfortable energy they produced. I don’t know what effect the different angles would have — it would be worth experimenting.
Rajarshi, that seems very plausible.
Neptunesdolphins, glad you liked the 17th-century flying saucers. They’re as well documented as many more recent sightings, which is fascinating.
BeardTree, many thanks for this.
Boreal, I don’t know of anyone who has, but it should be easy enough — the names are simple words or phrases (boy, loss, white, people, bigger luck, joining, girl, red, gain, prison, sorrow, joy, dragon’s tail, dragon’s head, smaller luck, road). As for the yellow wedge, it’s still a wedge, but yeah, it’s interesting that they replaced it with yellow.
Joan, funny. European countries have been trying to reverse their declining birthrates since the 1920s, with no success.
Slithy, ha! Yes, and that’s exactly it. The laptop class can’t allow itself to notice that the rest of our species really does think its own thoughts, instead of waiting for instructions from its supposed betters.
Jim, the idea that transits of outer planets through zodiacal signs are important markers for mundane astrology is a recent hypothesis and to my mind it’s not very well supported — not least because it’s very, very general! Is that transit affecting every country in the world the same way? That’s not what history suggests. As for the “fourth turning” business, to my mind that’s a product of cherrypicking historical events to fit a presupposed scheme. If you were to decide that US history follows a 40-year cycle or a 117-year cycle, I’m quite sure you could find events to support that claim.
Clay, interesting.
Patricia M, thank you for this — that’s worth knowing.
Anonymous, let’s see if it actually turns into a war.
Justin, yeah, that’s harsh news.
Polecat, well, you pays your money and you takes your choice!
DFC, I’m still watching the issue. It’s still early in Trump’s second term, and there’s plenty of time for surprises.
Joan, that’s certainly one of the ingredients in the mix. My post a few weeks ago on status panic would mesh well with your hypothesis.
Erika, good heavens, don’t be scared. In a society ruled by toxic conformists, “strange” is a compliment.
Hawk, thank you for this! Yes, I think the earth is speaking, but it’s worth remembering that she probably isn’t saying the same thing to every human being — quite the contrary! — nor is she necessarily saying what we think she ought to say…
Bofur, I wrote about the Changer here:
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars-part-four-what-moves-in-the-darkness/
As for why we still talk about Hitler so obsessively today, well, there’s this:
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-man-with-the-moustache/
Polecat, so far, the grid is holding up here tolerably well.
Matthew, since Trump first emerged as a political figure, people have been pointing toward this or that event as the thing that would surely bring him down. None of it has had that effect. In the present case, therefore, the best advice I can offer is “wait and see.”
Wick, hmm. I’ll look into that.
Luke, no, the Mask and the Will are always opposites, just as the Creative Mind and the Body of Fate are always opposites. We’ll get into that in detail later on.
PumpkinScone, well, we’ll see!
Toby, in all of recorded history there have been, if I recall correctly, 17 years when there wasn’t a war going somewhere. If you’d like to daydream about a world where that isn’t the case, by all means, but I don’t recommend letting those shape your views about the world we live in.
Happy Panda #302
Most of the evil happened in the Washington DC area by the federal goobermint since 1945; I call them ‘perpetrators’ or ‘perps.’ When it comes to karma payback, the federal perps “stole taxpayer money” and used it for secret, evil things. Taxpayers were duped; we were not even allowed to ask what our hard-earned dollars were paying for. This is still happening — the feds still steal Americans’ money and spend it on evil things no-one knows about: take a look at the US military budget which is used to genocide Gazans, for example, but can Americans stop it? No, because Isrule is the boss of the USA.
Are taxpayers going to receive the same blowback karma that perps get?
I understand karma to be personal. It makes no sense that someone suffer blowback when (s)he was not a perp.
💨🇺🇸Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Regarding the recent talk about Climate change and people clinging to the past. Over the weekend I did have an interesting discussion with some local environmental protection folks that at least had a bit more nuance than expected.
It boiled down to, in trying to protect various habitats it is them trying to get islands of the current ecosystem through the other side of industrial society. Not to stop nature from changing but getting these pockets through the most destructive of mans ambitions once the bolus of fossil fuels runs low, then it is back to nature to sort out what survives the next round or not. It is simultaneously pro and anti human exceptionalism.
I did appreciate that they are aware of industrial collapse and are not really interesting in holding the system in place forever, but merely trying to keep it away from the more destructive of our technologies. It may end up being pointless but it was better than trying to hold everything in place like a museum.
NeptunesDolphins, in today’s romance ecosystem you can find gay sasquatch romances with a country-western tie-in, and just about everything else!
BeardTree, and thanks for this also!
Forecasting, the first rule of military reality is never to let Russia trap you into a war of attrition. They always win those. Once the Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023 failed, Ukraine was doomed and so were NATO’s hopes of using its Ukrainian proxy to defeat Russia. At this point it’s just a matter of how long NATO can drag things out and how bankrupt Europe will be once the fighting is over.
Chronojourner, thank you! The next Ariel Moravec novel is titled The House of the Crows and it deals with a ghost and a forty-year-old mystery. There’s no set number of books in this series; I have another mostly written and two more in draft, and plans for at least three beyond that.
Gnat, exactly. The EU was designed to get around the pesky burden of democracy and allow straightforward government by the corporate elite.
BeardTree, thank you. It was a great meeting.
Anonymoose, excellent! Back in the 1970s this sort of thing was explored in quite a bit of detail, especially for treating cancer, before Big Pharma clamped down on all nonchemical treatments. Dr. Carl Simonton was a leading figure researching this — you might look into his work for ways to expand the technique you’ve developed.
Mary, thanks for this.
David BTL, Mediterranean Europe appears to be in the early stages of disastrous desertification. Further north, not so much, though the demographic issues are just as bad there.
Panda, yes, I remember her. As for the rest, well, we’ll see!
Jeff, I noted in last week’s post that the most common mistake in thinking about climate is to assume that anything at all has only one cause. The Hunga Tonga eruption doubtless had an impact on global climate, but so did many other things, including the billions of tons of greenhouse gases that come out of human smokestacks and tailpipes.
Erika, bottom up every time! The privileged classes are consumers of culture, not creators of it.
Panda, Edgar Cayce insisted that this would happen by 1968. It didn’t. One of the great problems with visionary material is telling the difference between symbolic and literal indications…
Forecasting, no surprises there. Thanks for this.
Math, alongside Robert M’s comments, I’ll note that occult ideas were pervasive in mid-20th century science fiction and fantasy. SF was much more open to innovative ideas and cultural currents before the rise of the (pseudo-)Skeptic movement in the 1980s. I didn’t happen to know that Glory Road was structured according to the Tarot, but it doesn’t surprise me in the least.
Polecat, what Carl Jung called “projection” is always fascinating to watch…
Great Khan, I hope the service went well!
Chris, “illth” wasn’t coined here. The term was created in the 19th century by John Ruskin, and I frankly like the sound of it better than “woeth.”
Robert M, the timescale’s very hard to judge but I’d be surprised if crisis waits until 2040.
Ksim, that’s certainly a possibility. Will that become reality? As you say, we shall see.
Anonymous, I don’t happen to know if the AMOC shut down during the last ice age; you might want to look that up! As for those two eras, why, you should probably take that up with the paleontological authorities. I certainly don’t know what they were thinking.
Paedrig, that’s a good question I can’t answer. I was never a fan of Osbourne’s style of music, and so don’t happen to know much about him.
BeardTree, unfortunately that’s the kind of thing that happens when vigorous adaptable species move into a disrupted ecology. A million years from now it’ll all be sorted out and return to a new complexity, but I know that’s a while to wait.
J.L.Mc12, thanks for these!
Oh good. Thanks for clearing that up.
Yeah you’re right. I forgot strange is good.
JMG,
Yay! Thanks! I’m very glad to hear that there are more books on the way.
You once suggested that the people in Adocentyn would be subjected to the filming of a Bertie Scrubbs movie. This sounds hilarious. Is that still in the plans somewhere? If so, can you give us a hint as to which book it might take place in?
Also, to answer your question about my own “Yog-Sothothery” plans, I’m not planning to set anything in your universe. I’d like to explore Abdul Alhazred and “Al Azif” a bit, though it’s nice to know that I could write something in your universe, if I got a hankering to do so. Thanks for that!
Hi JMG and All,
I’ve been wanting to ask everyone for several months now what people think of the “Strong Towns” group. They seem to be saying most of the right things in my book, but I never know about such groups, so I wanted to get other people’s reads on them. Thoughts or comments? Thanks!
115 r Morgan – I’ve concluded Putin wanted either a very swift war or a very long one. Definitely the smartest head of state in the civilized world by an order of magnitude.
124 rajarshi, that’s exactly what I’ve concluded as well. The hand that rocks the cradle, or in this case rules the nursery crib of sentient “education”, rules the world. Until we have a dissolution of their monasteries, or they collapse, public education guarantees there’s a sucker educated every second to be wh audens model citizen from his poem. Solve that, and the game is over. It’s free child care for two income working families, and the rich have their ghetto charter schools. I don’t think they are reformable.
125 anonymous, from what I’ve seen, churches in Britain become abortion clinics, discos or mosques. I hate mosques but I’d likely pick them over the other two.
JMG, thank you for creating such a unique space here. I hope you had a stellar time on another deserved hiatus. I’m getting more w the dissensus every day! A challenge, that, but worth it. And definitely existential. I’d like to report that steiners cow horn manure seems to have bumped my garden up a notch this year. I grew tall corn for the first time ever on a rocky hillside, with raised beds (which is tried before). Kale galore, earlier, and even eggplants, nice and glossy. I got it from a place in Pennsylvania but it appears to have made applicable difference. And for beekeepers out there, the one hive I put in the chicken run was the one that made it. My theory was that they belonged together as ruled by the sun, and maybe the chickens would eat some of the hive beetle pests.
Do you or anyone else know of anyone attempting the letter number mysticism of the Vienna circle Meyrinck was in?
“The ATO learned it was being scammed, then paid out millions more to fraudsters”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-28/ato-tax-office-gst-scam-billions-fraud-four-corners/105573446
“Once again, the ATO had not made a single inquiry before paying the money. The algorithm in its system, rather than any human, approved the refund.”
yay for the algorithms!
A question for the commentariat, why are these agencies great at going after Joe Average and his genuine mistake, but seem to be incapable of reining in the biggest scams? And I’m not even including the top end of town, we all know the answers to that question.
For another classic yay for the algorithms, I dare anyone to look up the Robo-debt scandal that happened here in Oz a number of years back. It was a classic idealogical/thought bubble clusterfrack, that caused misery to thousands as well as causing a number of people taking their own life due to the untrue accusations they were subjected too. Did anyone have to answer for this mess? Not really, despite some enquires, many years later, into it.
If the all knowing algorithm is going to be ramped up as the answer to all our woes, look out!
Regards, Helen in Oz
Ps, I am also hoping to hear soon from the Lady of Lol Cat, that all is well – or at least, on the mend! 🙏
Garlic mustard even has the ability to penetrate and invade untouched old growth areas. An old growth maple/basswood woods called Abraham’s Wood, a protected preserve is regularly handed weeded by volunteers to prevent the take over of it by garlic mustard. The plant is insidious. A lovely spot I have visited with a nice display of spring ephemeral flowers.
https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/statenaturalareas/AbrahamsWoods
The mix up of plant, animal, and diseases was an inevitable by product of ease of global transportation beginning centuries ago with the European maritime expansion. I well remember the lovely elm shaded streets of my Midwest childhood with trees on both sides of the streets meeting above in gothic cathedral like arches along with magnificent solitary specimens. Been a tree person since small child hood. All gone due to the fungal Dutch elm disease.
And you are welcome,JMG
Chronojourner #316,
I’ve followed Strong Towns website for many years. I think they have many good ideas, they are worth reading and considering. Are they all-together right? No. Is any human? No. But they’re certainly worth consideration.
They tend to completely miss that in some parts of the US there are fewer than twelve weeks in which anyone is going to be willing to walk more than a couple blocks at any hour of the day or night, even the craziest of us, for one example. (The nearby town was built with subterranian tunnels, which have fallen into disrepair with the advent of the automobile, and which will need to be reconstructed to convince people they do not need cars.) And of course, they’re completely urban oriented, and forget that urban hopes to pull in rural goods and customers, and must provide locations.
But all-together, worth taking into consideration, and I like to borrow some of their concepts and phrasings when providing feedback to government around these parts on their schemes and plans. And then, you should never accept anyone uncritically. Including me, of course!
Celadon #317 re: “Do you or anyone else know of anyone attempting the letter number mysticism of the Vienna circle Meyrinck was in?”
Meyrink was part of the same circle as Karl Weinfurter and they were introduced, apparently by Alois Mailander, to the letter mysticism of J. B. Kerning (real name: Johann B. Krebs) – whose works I have been translating, alongside those of one of his students, Karl Kolb. I have been following Krebs/Kerning’s practice as outlined in his books for about a year now, so still early days yet.
Samuel Robinson of Pansophers.com has published a book on Alois Mailander and has been working on a book bringing together all the variations of letter mysticism descended from Krebs/Kerning. I believe he has been practising that form of letter mysticism and could probably provide more detail on others doing so.
Hi JMG,
I recently had an inner experience where I was told that I had been a druid during the early revival but turned away from it because of religious and social pressure, and that in this life I am back to fully initiate into druidry (I am well advanced in doing this). I was told that I was involved in a druid group active around Hartfell in the 1760s. This is at least plausible to me, but I wondered of you had any more knowledge about revival druid activity in that part of the world.
Thanks for your time here
Twice druid
@ Florida Druid 234
For project management you might consider reading “Scrum” by Jeff Sutherland. He was a naval aviator in the Vietnam war, flying reconnaissance missions over heavily-defended territory where half his colleagues were shot down. Subsequently he became a professor of medical statistics and authored several papers on cancer. On the basis of his computer experience he was asked to lead a team developing software for ATMs. Those were the days when big software projects cost millions, were always late, and the software was bloated and buggy.
Applying his fighter pilot experience, he threw out the old way of doing things and developed what came to be called Scrum — small teams, defined objectives, rapid iteration, continuous feedback. The fact that every ATM knows how much money you have in the bank is thanks to his software. The method has now been codified and is used in many areas, not just in software development.
Walt #301
Regarding 9/11: the National Institute for Standards and Technology published a study on the collapse of World Trade Center #7. This was the 40 story building NOT hit by an airplane. I suggest you read it, especially the section reporting the studies on the structural steel recovered from the ruins.
@Gnat and @ JMG re the EU’s basis of power…
“The EU was designed to get around the pesky burden of democracy and allow straightforward government by the corporate elite.”
Back in the day, when Ireland was asked to vote on the Lisbon Treaty twice (apparently we got the answer wrong the first time)… I canvassed very hard for another no vote. (And, if I recall correctly – our county of Donegal did vote no, but the rest of the country allowed its mind to be changed enough to pick the “right” answer and voted yes.)
The point I want to make is this. Although many issues were raised during those campaigns, the one that I wanted people to understand the most was that of sovereignty. I actually spent a couple of months reading through the (hundreds, I think) of pages of the Lisbon Treaty we were to vote on, looking for what it would base its power ON. For example, as I pointed out to people, Article 6, of Bunreacht na hEireann (the Irish Constitution of 1937), puts the matter very plainly:
” All powers of government, legislative, executive and judicial, derive, under God, from the people, whose right it is to designate the rulers of the State and, in final appeal, to decide all questions of national policy, according to the requirements of the common good.” This states that power derives from the people, under God. Agree or disagree, this is a plain statement.
The form of the constitutional amendments (each of them) put to Irish people to facilitate EU entry and participation were put in the following form:
No provision of this constitution will invalidate laws enacted, acts done, or measures adopted by the State which are necessitated by obligations of membership of the European Union…. as defined by the treaties establishing the communities, the bodies competent, and etc… from having force of law in the State.
So, when I searched the text of the Lisbon Treaty – which was introducing new and easier ways of amending treaties without going back to consult the individual countries, as best as I could make out, the idea was that a house of cards, of rules, of policies, of treaties, and agreements was to be built on nothing more than the power of more rules, policies, treaties and agreements, while Irish people were being asked to, essentially, voluntarily suspend their sovereignty (as given in Article 6 of Bunreal), and voluntarily agree to never question or call it unlawful, in order for this house of cards to be built and STAND OVER, anything written in Bunreacht na hEireann.
Well, it is still a house of cards, and JMG, your phrasing describes its purposes and intent beautifully, but it may be that blowing it down will be painful. Sovereignty is never uncontested.
Oops! “)as given in Article 6 of Bunreal)” should read
(as given in Article 6 of Bunreacht na hEireann)
@JMG #310… Yes, I’ve noticed some continuity errors in the Ariel Moravec books. In “Witch,” Glen suddenly becomes “Earl.” “Book of Haatan” had several, and in one case – or was it “Moon” the librarian was a woman when Ariel checked the 4th floor, and a man when she came back downstairs. Is there any way you could get someone to check for these before they go to press? Because I do love those books, and do understand how doing without her support – feelings aside, and those must still be pretty raw – can leave you floundering. Best wishes and good luck, and the gods be with you.
JMG: I was thinking about your theory of catabolic collapse today and how it could be used to give career advice during times of crisis. If a civilisation takes a chunk of its infrastructure and strips it for resources in a resource crisis, then during such times one should look at the most resource-intensive, fragile infrastructure in one’s society and … run the other way. In other words, back the frack away from AI and the Internet generally.
@Chronojourner: The Transition Towns movement was great at generating plans and holding meetings; it was also middle-class and up. It was not good at motivating people to make sacrifices or form lasting communities.
Teresa – bit of a late response to the post last week about the female writers convention and what women want.
IMHO – as a man who doesn’t meet the “6666” standard but had exceptional success with women before I settled down and got married (as in, dated and slept with many, many, many women, with some of them being genuinely beautiful – eg, a professional runway model from Russia) I believe I have some insight into this.
The “6666” standard is a proxy for various emotional needs women have – security, the desire to submit (sexually) to a dominant male and various other biologically encoded desires. These cannot be eliminated no matter how hard society tries to promote girl bosses.
The way this works in practice is by sublimating those desires into the fiction you saw while trying to follow the “girl boss fantasy” in real life.
In practice though (note: not in online dating where women tend to have crazy standards, but in person), exhibiting traditional masculine personality traits triggers incredibly powerful responses from women, with a lot of remarks like “I don’t normally do this..but there’s something about you”. Note that this has very little to do with looks, height, or abs (those things are a proxy for the underlying emotion) but mostly has to do with confidence, attitude, dominance and personality.
There’s more to it but that’s a starting point.
Math Fletcher… What?
I haven’t read “Glory Road” for ages, maybe a reread is in order, with a tarot book in hand.
I can belive that Heinline would do something like that, if he wanted to try his hand at fantasy and found a card reference book during his research!
Michael, that’s very sensible of them. Refugia — little areas that support viable ecosystems — are how most plants and small animals survived the ice age, and the same principle applies here.
Chronojourner, the filming is currently scheduled for book #6. As for Strong Towns, I don’t know much about them but I like what they’re saying.
Celadon, delighted to hear about the Steiner preparation! I don’t know whether anybody’s taken up Meyrinck’s system — anyone else?
Helen, when I see something like this I assume bribery is involved. That’s the way such things are done in the US, certainly.
Twice Druid, it’s by no means impossible — there was a documented Druid group meeting in London in the 1740s — but I don’t happen to know much about the local history of 18th century Druidry in the British Isles; sorry.
Scotlyn, that was certainly my understanding!
Patricia M, some of those got past me, Sara, and the publisher! It’s awkward; if you’d like to make a list and send them to the publisher, that might be helpful.
Kfish, excellent! Yes, and in the same way, attention toward careers that profit from salvage would be justified.
Hi,
https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/07/is-civil-war-coming-to-the-west/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Stumbled upon this article today. Essentially western Europe could implode in 5 years plus.
Helen @ 319, Why are agencies good at going after Joe Average? The quick answer is that Joe Average doesn’t have powerful friends. An American writer named Jeff Faux wrote a book about the passage of the original NAFTA in the 1990s. In it he recounts a conversation with a woman reporter, I believe it was, telling him something to the effect that you just don’t get it, we have to help Salinas, (the then President of Mexico), because he went to Harvard. He is one of us. Never mind what effect the treaty might have on the citizens and economies of the three countries–passage provoked an insurrection in Mexico–what mattered was PMC class solidarity. Social class solidarity is a powerful motive, whether among the rich, their PMC servants or among the real estate/insurance/retail store owner golfing and hunting buddies who used to be in charge in various small towns.
Hi JMG,
Discovered you a couple of years ago on Jason Louv’s Ultraculture podcast. Thank you for introducing me to Druidry and the theory of civilizational cycles. Your work has had a big influence on my own spiritual trajectory, thinking, and writing. Apologies in advance if any of my questions have been asked before. I’m a regular reader of your blog but haven’t had chance to read everything!
Through you I found out about OBOD and I finished their Bardic grade earlier this year. It was a rich and profound experience, and I plan to continue with their Ovate and Druid grades at some point in the future. But first, I plan to work through the course of training in your three books The Way of the Golden Section, The Occult Philosophy Workbook and The Sacred Geometry Oracle. I actually bought these around the same time I started the Bardic Grade, a couple of years ago now, but discontinued working through them after a month or two because I found it a bit too much WITH the Bardic grade material from OBOD on top. Now my plan is to start again while I can give it the focus it deserves. I know you’ve worked through OBOD’s courses as well, why do you think their material features the light-body exercise and Bardic grove ritual, but no Sphere of Protection or equivalent? I gather from your work that is foundational for any kind of occult practice and important for spiritual balance and clarity. My plan is to continue with the whole Golden Section series. Do you think they are compatible for working through alongside OBOD course material? Or best to do separately?
Also I was really intrigued by a recent discussion you had in which you talked about Dion Fortune’s famous distinction between ‘magic’ and ‘mysticism’, and that there was also a third, the way of ‘occultism’, that of knowledge, wisdom, learning the Daoist art of wu-wei. I realised this third way is what really pulls me – I’ve always been somewhat wary of traditional ceremonial magic, despite being very intrigued, and I think it was for this reason that I began to practice Druidry rather than Golden Dawn or Thelema. Where is the best way to go for this third strain, is it the practices set out in the Golden Section course of Training? Are there any other traditions, thinkers, or materials you think it might be prudent for someone with my inclination to check out?
I’m so very grateful for all you have written and continue to write.
Bright Blessings in the Oak-Bright Grove
@Brendhelm: yeah, you’d definitely need to deal with the shell company problem. I think it could be done, but I’m not sure anybody has the political will to make it happen.
@Aldarion: can verify. Grew up in FL without A/C, and survived. Would add caveat that in hot humid climates, architecture matters a lot. Most houses built since the 50s here, are plopped down on a concrete slab foundation (older houses sit atop low concrete or brick pilings, allowing air to circulate underneath, and have wood floors). These houses cannot be kept livable without A/C. That’s desert-appropriate architecture, and it’s most houses nowadays. So until climate-appropriate architecture makes a comeback, we are stuck with A/C for most dwellings in FL. Ugh.
Peter @ 326: Yes, WTC 7. One building that collapsed without getting hit by a jet plus one jet that crashed in PA without hitting its intended target (at least according to the official narrative). There was speculation about what its intended target was, but I never heard anybody suggest WTC 7.
>Refugia — little areas that support viable ecosystems — are how most plants and small animals survived the ice age, and the same principle applies here
I wonder what the minimum viable community looks like? I guess people were asking that question when the Roman Empire fell, weren’t they?
Forecasting, at this point it’ll just take some one unpredictable event to throw Europe into chaos. I could very easily see that happening at any point from right now on.
Corduroy, to my mind the lack of an effective ritual for cleansing and protection is one of the serious weaknesses in the OBOD curriculum. Other than that, it’s well worth doing, and is wholly compatible with most of what I teach. I don’t recommend trying to do two courses of training at once, though! If you want to do the Golden Section material, great, but devote the time to that for now, and go back to the Ovate and Druid grades when you’ve either finished the Golden Section work or reached a good stopping point, such as finishing one book.
As far as access to occultism as distinct from magic and mysticism, the OBOD material falls very much into that category. A few other old schools, such as Builders of the Adytum (BOTA) and the Societas Rosicruciana in America (SRIA), also still teach occultism as such — but yes, the whole point of the Golden Section sequence is to make a course of occult training readily available to anyone who can spare the price of the books. For those that can’t, I’ve made another system closely related (and wholly compatible with the Golden Section work) available for free download:
https://octagonsociety.org/archives/fhr/
Other Owen, depends on what kind of organism you have in mind. For human beings, it needs to be around 200 people and have a decent level of geographical isolation. If all you want to do is preserve essential plants, insects, and soil organisms, a backyard is enough.
Sandwiches (offlist), enough. This is not a place for you to try to pick fights.
@Peter #326, You appear to be referring to NIST NCSTAR 1-9A, which is specifically about building 7. I have that in hardcopy and in searchable pdf format. But there’s little in it about characteristics of the recovered steel from the ruins. (It’s mostly about the model of the collapse they performed.) The main reports on recovered steel from the ruins are in NIST NCSTAR 1-3 and its subsections, and those focus mainly on the Building 1 and 2 structural ruins. Was that your point (that the building 7 steel was not examined or at least not reported on as thoroughly) or was there something in particular about the steel that you wanted to call to my attention?
Among the general category of “should have done X instead of Y” claims, I’ve seen pictures of distorted, corroded and eroded beam ends from WTC 1 or 2 presented with claims that only thermite or some other secret sabotage method could have caused them to look like that, but no explanation of why the known events (pre-collapse fire, mechanical forces of collapse, and subsequent underground fire in the rubble mass) couldn’t have caused them to look like that, nor any examples shown of for instance “here’s a steel beam end I subjected to an actual thermite device and note how similar it is to the ones in the actual recovered WTC structural steel.”
I found this interesting: https://www.cleanegroup.org/wp-content/uploads/CEG-Helene-SS-Webinar-6-25-25-all-slides.pdf. It’s a slide set from Duke Energy about how they kept an isolated North Carolina town going after Hurricane Helene by using solar plus batteries. Slide 11 shows how many hours a day the system could keep the downtown and residential areas powered. I suspect we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this sort of availability (essential services 24/7, residential areas much less so) in the future.
About the risk of war in the West, civil or otherwise –
I think in Europe it could come as early as this autumn. The Libra and Capricorn ingresses for London and Brussels, both of which are primary, have Mars in the 7th and at least one other significant factor (e.g. Aries rising, notable activity in the 6th (military), and the Aries 2026 ingress have Mars in Pisces (which, because Neptune is in Aries, functions as Mars in Aries) in the 7th either in his own right or through the mutual reception with Neptune.
Does that mean it’s imminent? Not necessarily; Mars is in the 7th house across 1/12 of the world every ingress – but when the war drums are already pounding, it comes across more starkly.
Regarding Toby, UK: I will politely I hope, but firmly push back on the idea of him and others just up and getting out of Europe – let alone the UK.
1. It just seems we’re going to wind up with everyone trying to get everywhere else, to avoid things that other people are not bothered by (the hypothetical future draft in a hypothetical future war), to go places that other people are trying to get out of (because of deep, existing national problems). Maybe this is a fallacy of a geographical cure; plus we take our problems with us, or, we don’t solve anything at all and all just keep up a dystopian merry-go-round with constantly reducing marginal returns. Perhaps we should try to fix where we are, our own backyard, tend our own gardens, first? (Or, maybe a problem is thinking this is supposed to be easy, because many of us have not had to do it personally before?)
2. As reactions in Venice to the Bezos’s, or in Mexico City, have recently demonstrated: not everybody in every other country is now thrilled at people from richer countries coming to drive up their rents and destroy their neighbourhood constellation of shops and services, in favour of e.g. cash-cow luxury brands (“Speak Spanish, Pay Your Taxes, Respect My Culture” was one placard from Mexico, helpfully spelled out in English). In these places, you may also be marked for ripping off.
3. There may be profound personal reasons for making a move, or even potentially: but that should be planned out as an option, rather than jumped into. I know one Latin American family where a parent of European descent is now actively seeking citizenship of that ancestral country during a window of opportunity; they’re not planning to jump ship any time soon – they just want to make sure they have options. Another pathway is through marriage – and I mean the real deal, because the benefit is not just the legal gateway to another country, but the support network of an extended family. (I will remind you my UK neighbours, and all of the Irish Diaspora, that if you have an Irish gran or grandad, you should be entitled to Irish citizenship and its generally favoured, neutral, non-aligned, non-NATO – for now… but they’re trying – passport. And we’re surrounded by water, thank God.)
Thanks JMG for your quick and helpful response, I really appreciate your time, and the great recommendations. I thought as much about doing two courses at once, which is why I originally stopped the Golden Section work. Looking forward to getting back to it now that the Bardic grade is done!
I also appreciate the link to the free course! I plan on buying the rest of the books for the Golden Section, but its great to know that the Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose is available!
Bright Blessings!
“Jim, the idea that transits of outer planets through zodiacal signs are important markers for mundane astrology is a recent hypothesis and to my mind it’s not very well supported — not least because it’s very, very general! Is that transit affecting every country in the world the same way? That’s not what history suggests. As for the “fourth turning” business, to my mind that’s a product of cherrypicking historical events to fit a presupposed scheme. If you were to decide that US history follows a 40-year cycle or a 117-year cycle, I’m quite sure you could find events to support that claim.”
Even so, don’t you find it intriguing that the three prior transits of Uranus through Gemini corresponded to such intense crisis periods in the United States? Uranus is in Gemini in the US birth chart (Sibly) as well. It seems like too much of a coincidence to just dismiss. It seems likely that outer planet transits through signs affect each nation differently just as they do in natal astrology. I get your cherrypicking concern but still find the Fourth Turning theory well developed by Strauss and Howe in their 1997 book, and quite compelling for the United States. You recently had a piece at UnHerd that highlighted Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Trump…Fourth Turning presidents every one!
John,
If you could only preserve one book on western esotericism to survive the deindustrial dark age, which book would you choose? Imagine that all others would be lost forever.
Just came across this article: https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/new-bladeless-wind-turbine-generates-clean-quiet-bird-safe-power/
I like that it doesn’t shred birds, and it also seems to be scalable, but I freely admit I’m clueless about tech, so I ask our resident tech nerds: what say you? A Skybrator For Every Village, yay or nay? I must say, a fridge seems to be the pinnacle of civilization to me, and I’d like to keep one running during and after the apocalypse (and a washing machine would be nice, too, speaking as a woman).
As for climate change, I had wanted to post this last time, but missed the opportunity (because I’m overworked and burned out, and the only reason I’m posting now is because I’m on vacation): https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/volcanos/melting-glaciers-could-trigger-volcanic-eruptions-around-the-globe-study-finds
So it’s not that straighforward, since volcanic ash would have a cooling effect – but how much that would counteract the overall warming trend is anybody’s guess. In any event, it seems we picked a lively era to incarnate in. What were we fools thinking??
re: persons who turn up in the astral:
Chad asked earlier about characters in dreams. Is it the same for people/critters that turn up in hypnogogic episodes (i.e. that grey area between sleeping and waking)? I’m extremely prone to hypnogogia, and the primary form they take is… characters, for lack of a better word. Little vivid flashes of monsters, cartoon characters, people I don’t know, usually with just a bit of motion attached. Migraine puts me into a very weird state for long stretches of time, where it happens repeatedly. Just came out of a bout that produced:
-A minotaur-shaped thing sitting on a ledge, but his back was insect-like overlapping plate-scales.
-A middling-older lady with a frumpy dress, longish hair and three large eyes, moving toward me aggressively.
-A lithe young lady with a tail, who crouched down on the ground, turned into a snake, and slithered away.
-A cartoon bear with a bucket on its head like a hat.
-A stylized cartoon blues-brothers character, in profile.
-Something that looked vaguely like the geico lizard, peering around a corner.
They of course never stick around long enough to be interrogated– and that’s probably for the best as they seem disreputable on the whole. Have always wondered who they are, and what.
Is there any way to tell whether they originate from inside (like, from the subconscious) or outside– like they are their own thing out there in the astral? It seems like if they were internal projections, there might be something to learn from them. But if they’re strangers passing through… best left alone? Most of them don’t really fit with anything I’ve been looking at, or my own personal aesthetics. Could they be products of *someone else’s* imagination?
Are they useful in any way? Do they tell us about our own internal states, or about the astral neighborhood we inhabit? Can we use them to, say, check up on the health of the space around us? One thinks of how in the material plane, the frogs, insects, and plants tell us about the soil health and water quality. Is there anything analogous for the astral?
@SDI,
Thank you! I will let you know when I have made a little pyramid to try. 🙂
JMG, welcome back from your recent exertions. Take a minute or two to get your head facing East, or something.
I know perhaps the world’s premier proofreader, when I remember her name I’ll send a note with it (her face is vividly in front of me). I believe she freelances for her personal entertainment now, doesn’t need to work. She probably isn’t cheap but the can catch 100% of errors at 10 yards, upside down and backwards (I’ve seen her do it, when I worked at Shambhala Publications). So, in the long run, worth the expense. Also does (no extra charge) sympathetic copy editing and is a superb general editor as well. She takes pride in being a Krusty Karacter (my locution), and she is delightfully learned in a wide swath of esoteric traditions within and without exoteric ones.
The Club of Rome anticipated various kinds of peaks: energy, manufacturing, pollution, population. I’d like to add another. I think we might have achieved Peak Gaslighting. Or, to be more direct, Peak Official Lying. It’s almost beyond comprehension. Is there a deity connected with this condition? I’d like to have a good long talk with him or her…
In more delusional news from the left coast. The Governor of Oregon and Mayor of Portland have Teamed up to convince investors and developers to build more housing ( apartments) in Portland. They plan to offer them shortened permit periods, reduced fees , etc.
They believe ( as many in local politics do) that if they can get more housing built than rents and the cost of housing will go down. So essentially their pitch to investors is, build more housing and then the rents will go down and you will make less money.
Of course what they don’t want to face is the reason rents are so high is that since the 1990’s housing was financialized as the last ditch appreciating asset of the middle ( and upper) classes. It was also set up as the growing collateral base to underwrite the entire financial house of cards that the American Financial system is based.
Trying to convince investors to build houses in a city with a shrinking population and a now declining industrial base ( Intel) so that rents will go down certainly seems like a fools errand to me.
Methylethyl 348: That’s an amusing congeries of astral critters. I think that in Zen those are dismissed as “makyo.” When in sesshin, you spend hours each day, day after day, staring open-eyed at a divider, you tend to get them. The Sensei/Roshi will tell you to ignore them, not to interact with ’em at all. I do enjoy the relaxed hypnogogic state between sleeping and waking, watching the images that are being projected on my astral aura either from within or without. My Zen teacher said that it all came from within. But I don’t know. You do need to be able to “close the door” on them, clearly; or else you may wind up like John Nash.
Polecat #169: I live in the PJM (states of PA, NJ, MD, plus DC, etc.) power grid interconnection, and though I’ve seen stories about the grid nearing capacity due to high air-conditioning loads (heat wave), old power plant decommissioning, and new computer facilities … it hasn’t had any actual impact on my service. No rolling blackouts, brown-outs, etc. It would be nice, though, if the contributions of my rooftop solar panels could be compensated at the marginal “spot” price for mid-afternoon power, rather than the monthly average.
Beardtree #248 –
An old coworker of mine had a son enlist in the military. After his initial medical exam, someone came back to him and said “We found antibodies to half a dozen biological warfare agents in your blood. Would you care to explain why?” His answer: “I grew up on a Pennsylvania farm. We live with a little anthrax, brucellosis, etc. now and then.”
Athaia #347.
Re: the vortex-shedding wind-power generator… I think it’s nonsense. It’s not hard to measure the amount of energy in moving air as a function of height above ground, and these devices are inherently stuck in the low energy surface breezes. Big turbines aren’t just big for the sake of being big, but they’re tall so they can reach the high-energy winds. I think I can imagine shaking the post with my hands to a degree comparable to the wind vibration, and that’s not going to power a household. The claim that this device doesn’t care which way the wind is blowing seems plausible, though. I doubt that it works from ANY angle.
SiliconGuy #148
With immigration being suppressed, and potentially reversed, and native-born population shrinking, I expect the home-builders to scale back their development plans. They’ll probably blame it on a lack of immigrant labor, and the rising cost of imported building materials, and maybe restrictive zoning, for a while. “Oh, they already are?”
Roldy, it’s a workable transitional kluge, and yes, we’ll likely see a fair amount of it.
Brendhelm, look for hard aspects between Mars and either of the luminaries. That’s the classic warning of war, civil or otherwise.
Corduroy, you’re most welcome and thank you.
Jim, if you find them useful, by all means. You asked my opinion, though, and I gave it.
Nephite, it would probably have to be Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn. That contains more raw material for future magics than any other book I know of.
Athaia, I’ll want to see the numbers. Green energy is a happy hunting ground for investment fraud these days, and there have been a fair number of bogus technologies that have scooped up a lot of investment money. As for the volcanoes, the ash would have a cooling effect, but most of the gases that come out of volcanoes are greenhouse gases, and the ash falling on ice sheets would also make them absorb sunlight better by lowering their albedo — so it’s anyone’s guess what the long term effect would be. Fun times!
Methylethyl, I’d have to be observing the same corner of the astral to be sure, but they sound like what one of my teachers called “astral static” — the ordinary clutter of the lower-to-middle astral, composed of random chunks of imagery. Most of the time it doesn’t mean much. If any of them hang around long enough to talk to you, that could be a different matter.
Clarke, thank you — I’ll consider her once I know what her fee scale is. As for Peak Gaslighting, sure — the spiritual being associated with that behavior is traditionally shown with horns, red clothing, and a barbed tail.
Clay, well, of course. If they admit that Portland is shrinking, the financial house of cards you mentioned is going to implode, and take the political class with it.
@Phutatorius: I was not aware that zen literature dealt with them. That’s helpful, and I will poke around and see what I can find there.
I did have them “set to ignore” already– it seemed the only practical response.
@Clay Dennis #352: That is an interesting argument. It would explain why I see mostly one kind of apartments being built around here. They seem to be designed for singles or childless couples who spend a lot of time outside their home – small apartments in buildings with facilities. Private investors aren’t building the kind of apartments that are most urgently needed: bigger (for families), easily accessible (for older people) and on the whole cheaper. My experience is that only a non-profit municipal enterprise will effectively build and maintain that kind of housing stock, but Americans don’t seem to believe in such a solution.
It is sobering to hear that housing is expensive even in a city with shrinking population. Would you agree with the taxes on second, third etc. homes that we were discussing above, or do you have another solution in mind to keep real estate prices from being so speculative?
Beardtree, re: Amish children having very low asthma and allergy rate.. They have avoided the dramatic increase seen with modern culture (including farm raised kids, at least when modern tech and livestock antibiotics are used). This is reviewed, as well as other health problems that seem related to our modern “oversanitized world”, in the book, Let Them Eat Dirt, by Finley and Arrieta. Practical ideas for parents are offered as well.
Re: invasives, in my area economics is part of the (legal) definition, though defining them by ecological aspects, and then subgrouping functionally, seems more helpful. English Ivy was brought to my region hundreds of years ago, and continues to convert forests, roadsides and neglected backyards into near monocultures. Not just plants die, but wildlife and microbes are disturbed long term. Although the earth will respond over prolonged periods, retaining local diversity, as feasible, seems worth the effort, for upcoming generations. The use of harsh chemicals is debated, and largely avoidable. To me, this has parallels to retaining appropriate tech and skills, that current tech/subsidies/culture make non-economic, to help society transition from industrialization.
@JMG: thanks. That sounds reasonable. The things I’ve interacted with in that space have been markedly different, both in feel and in how I came to be talking to them. eg once called up a personal bad habit and had a chat with it. No question where it came from or what it was doing there. Very informative. The other critters seem more like vagrants in a sketchy neighborhood– keep walking, don’t make eye contact 😉
@322 KAN. Thanks for this. I got the trail from Mouravieffs gnosis, and read Mans Highest Purpose. Evidently the Vienna circle did a lot with that stuff and line of work. Ill keep an open eye for news of your translations being published.
@Happy Panda
re: climate: I don’t know what the climate is planning to do, but it’s clear that uniform global heating of the sort we were propagandized about in school isn’t what it looks like! We had snow over this last winter– 8.5 inches in our yard. Biggest snowfall in the entire recorded history of the state. We don’t have quite the record-keeping that the original colonies did, but we do have accounts going back to the 18th century, and snow is notable enough to make the books.
What happens climate-wise in any given locale has a lot more to do with the jet stream and ocean currents (which are variable) than we’re used to thinking about, attached as we are to the idea of climate = latitude + topography (fixed).
@Athaia RE : Bladeless turbines
JMG is spot on, there are a lot of “Green” technology that does technically produce electricity but it is as quantities so small that it will never pay back the initial outlay. It is all well and good from an intellectual point of view if you ignore the material costs but it is useless as an actual functioning machine.
My favorite one these was a solar panel attached to a dehumidifier to produce drinking water. Of course where you need water isn’t very humid and where it is humid it usually tends to also rain. Turns out if you did the math, you would collect more water from rain falling off the panel than you would ever from the dehumidifier.
Ok, it is very late in the cycle, but I’ve been forgetting to ask this on an open post for months now… so here goes.
I know nothing about Hegel except for the “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” triad which has apparently become fundamental to the Marxist project, and which , therefore, gets a lot of negative press on this blog and elsewhere.
My question is, in what way does this triad differ from the Druid project of using the ternary to break the “stuckness” of the binary, and create balance and harmony? Which gets quite a bit of positive press on this blog, at least
I would be grateful for your thoughts, JMG, and also for those of anyone still here for the windup of the thread.
Re Scrum: Sorry for the unintentional double post.
Re jobs in a downturn: A relative who was a stockbroker and investment banker observed that businesses that do repairs all seemed to do well in a downturn.
Re the mighty algorithm: It cuts both ways. Depending on the issue, you could defraud the authorities, or they could defraud you. For instance, in Britain there are small sub-post offices that are franchises of the main Post Office. They are required to run their accounts on the official Post Office software. Owing to a software glitch the franchisees were accused of defrauding the Post Office of thousands of pounds in some cases. The Post Office refused to believe their software could be in error, and hounded some of the franchisees to the point of suicide. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
Re top people: I recall a BBC program where they were discussing a gathering with a very eclectic mix of attendees — pop stars, royalty, business tycoons etc. The presenter observed, “Have you noticed, in any particular period, all the top people seem to know each other?”
Re climate-appropriate architecture: Here the older houses have high ceilings, wide shady verandahs, and sash windows with shutters to cope with the heat. Today’s building are built with minimum height rooms, and the roofs don’t even have an overhang. Luckily I don’t live in one of them.
Thanks for the suggestions everyone! I have quite a reading list to get started on now (a good problem to have)
Methylethyl, you’re most welcome.
Scotlyn, what makes Hegel’s theory toxic is that it’s tied to the myth of progress — every synthesis is better than the original thesis, and becomes a new thesis that gives rise to an even better synthesis, blah blah blah. (Marx trimmed that out of his version — he didn’t want to inspire people under socialism to look for its internal contradictions and aspire to something better!) The Druid system, by contrast, is a quick fix — a bandage, say, or a kluge. We are incurably dualistic creatures, seeing things in either-or, this-or-that terms; encouraging people to look for a third factor is a workaround for that perennial problem.
Interesting triad / ternary note: the balanced ternary computer invented by the Soviets consumed a lot less electric juice than its binary counterpart. An interesting article on the Setun system here:
https://autside.substack.com/p/the-road-not-taken-setun-the-cold
I don’t agree with all of the authors conclusions (i.e. luxury space communism) but other parts I very much liked.
I still wonder if we’d had ternary computers, if we would have had more ternary thinking. Because if the medium is the message, and I think McLuhan had a lot of things right, than the fact of using binary computers also locks into binary thinking patterns more readily when using them.
Huh, the Druid approach is a kluge? Had to look up the definition of ‘kluge’. Loved your answer to Scotlyn. What I got from your answer is that Druidism is a free dissencus not a consensus system. Emerson said “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”
@370 BeardTree
The introductory material in JMG’s The Celtic Golden Dawn (and probably in his other Druidry books) instructs the reader to come up with a third position to the binary stances he encounters in the news media. This position can be somewhere in the middle of the binary, further to one end than either mainstream position, or orthogonal to the binary.
This is a recipe for dissencus, at least on paper.
Can someone enlighten this ESL speaker what ‘kluge’ means? Dictionary.com only offers me ‘kludge’ and claims there is no such word as ‘kluge*.
Athaia, Dictionary.com is being snotty. “Kludge” and “kluge” are different spellings of the same slang term. Here’s what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say about it:
“kludge /kluːdʒ/ Also kluge. ‘An ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole’ (Granholm); esp. in Computing, a machine, system, or program that has been improvised or ‘bodged’ together; a hastily improvised and poorly thought-out solution to a fault or ‘bug’.”
“Kludge” follows the English pronunciation, which rhymes with “judge.” The American pronunciation rhymes with “stooge,” which is the way I say it, so I use “kluge.”
Robert Mathiesen at 308.
Thanks for the feedback.
Tom Anderson
Dear Archdruid: I just saw a Yt by a doctor called María Isabel Eraso in wich she says that the media have been trying to create an Egregor of fear in the minds of Western people, but now this intent has fracased because we are in a spiritual level more elevated. But the Dr. Eraso encourages all the people for to ignore the media.
I am interested in philisophical materialism and I can’t asume this spiritist tesis, but I find that this could be interesting for you and your readers.
Thank you all who have put their spoke in, for the welcome feedback on ternaries… 🙂
Ok, JMG, I did not know that the “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” triad was theoretically part of a linear progress trajectory… it is too easy to see it go in a cyclical way… 😉
But, thank you for the answer… plenty to think on. 🙂
JMG #332 & Patricia Matthews #328, a good copyeditor should catch that type of error. This tends to support my feeling that publishers aren’t using CEs anymore. JMG, since you’re not self-publishing, you shouldn’t have to pay for that kind of service. That being said, though, if the publisher isn’t getting the job done and you do choose to hire someone… I gotta say, editing your books would be my dream job. (Yes, I am a professional CE.)
BeardTree #305: I’ve also watched the march of garlic mustard into a local forest that used to be full of lovely spring ephemerals. But in fact the ephemerals are still there, just in reduced numbers. So look closely into that carpet of invaders; it might not be as dire as it looks. I’ve seen waves of new plants flooding my property in the past 24 years, one after another. The newest type always appears to be taking over the planet (right now it’s stiltgrass), and then subsides, and something else comes along. And the natives are still here.
@Alderon,
Remember, expensive real estate is not a fluke, it was done on purpose. My solution would be politically impossible at this point. If it had been enacted when first proposed by Henry George at the beginning of the last Century the” Land Value Tax” would have prevented our current problems as predicted by George in his popular book “Progress and Poverty”. He believed that allowing people to harvest gains from something they did not produce, increases in land value “ perverted economics. His solution was to tax the increase in the value of land ( not improvements) at 100%. Hard to see that passing today.
Another musician who died in the past few days – bigger news to me than Ozzy O – is Tom Lehrer. Bitingly funny lyrics, good piano playing and decent singing. Songs like “Pollution,” “The Masochism Tango,” “National Brotherhood Week,” and the first song of his that I learned almost 50 years ago, “The Irish Ballad,” about the various ways that a maiden did in her family members. And all of us can use them to our heart’s content, as he relinquished all copyrights to them. If you haven’t heard him yet, listen to his songs on the u-tube. You can download lyrics and music from tomlehrersongs.com and use them as you like, but don’t wait too long; he wrote that the website will be shut down in the foreseeable future.
@ Justin Patrick – I have saved your link. I shall enjoy reading about a ternary computer. 🙂
JMG, if it’s not too late—
Do you have any sort of practice where you go without external input for a certain amount of time (longer than daily meditation)? I don’t do silent meditation courses these days since settling into a different spiritual path, but one thing I found valuable (and actually a little worrisome—it made me more conscious of what information and stimuli I took in) was how much of my astral backlog got processed when nothing much was coming in for an extended period of time. It felt like my harddrive got defragged. The same thing happened on long solo backpacking trips with no music/reading material along. Neither monasticism nor extended backpacking are very practical right now, though.
Ahh, thank you, JMG! This is the sort of thing my father used as the stopgap solution for everything, always promising to fix it for real, soon, promise, and then never did, and we had to just resign ourselves to be stuck with it… Can’t say I’m fond of the concept.
I have a question for JMG and anyone else who speaks Japanese.
How do you pronounce the vowel combinations that look like diphthongs? For example, reading “Gaijin,” I mentally hear it as “Guy-Jean.” And “The Genpei wars, ” I hear the last part as “pay.” Is that correct? In a novel by another author, there is a Japanese lady called “Reiko.” Is that “Ray-ee-ko? “Rye-ko”? Or something else?
Thanks,
Pat
@ STTNG #330
You are exactly correct.
I told Bill about your response (we’ve been away so I had to do it from memory) and he agreed with you.
What women say and what they respond to are often quite different.
I was curious Mr. Greer as to what you think of the cliche of “polarization”. It is worth noting how the term was only given its modern meaning by author Arthur Koestler in 1949
https://www.etymonline.com/word/polarize
I like to say, “better division in freedom that accord/’common purpose ‘ in tyranny”. As Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who later oversaw the Nuremberg Trials brilliantly noted:
“Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good, as well as by evil, men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon, but, at other times and places, the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. As governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be.
Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies.”
https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_H._Jackson
I have a distain towards cliches generally but it really irritates me the people who reflexively and lazily attack “polarization ” above all else. I personally would rather have a harmonious society that one of discord but pluralistic democracy properly allows their citizens to freely associate around different likes, values, and interests. Different “poles” in other words. Having different centres of power (and certainly multiple distinct associations) is vital for a free society so that none have a monopoly on coercion or potential coercion.
https://www.amazon.ca/Liberal-Archipelago-Theory-Diversity-Freedom/dp/0199219206
That’s as opposed to a society where all are forced to submit to one authority, one “purpose”, etc. Many of the people who even value ending political “polarization” before political freedom…
https://unherd.com/newsroom/does-blank-slateism-make-us-more-intolerant/
….are perhaps unknowingly paving the way for a Totalitarian Center of sorts!
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-20/fascism-and-the-future-part-two-the-totalitarian-center/
One People, One Empire, One Leader! Workers of the World Unite!
Those sound like such divisive, “polarizing” slogans don’t they!
Speaking of kluginess. The old parables of the different blind folks feeling the parts of the elephant thinking they have felt different realities when they are really parts of a unified whole or all, paths are leading up to the same mountain peak from different directions don’t work in a kluge, kludge, dissensus reality. Why there may be different beasts and different separate mountain peaks. Sorry folks, a completely consistent systematic reality may not be available or there or at least knowable. So let’s have fun.
It seems my first (of two) comments disappeared into pixel heaven.
In it, I first thanked all who had replied to me on the matter of ternaries. 🙂
I also remarked to JMG that I had not realised that the “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” triad was part of a progress narrative. (Since it is so easy to imagine it as being part of a cyclical narrative, instead). So, many thanks for that new information, and also for the whole reply, which gives much to think about… 🙂
Be well all. I will be thinking about ternaries some more. 🙂
Anselmo, thanks for this. I’m sorry to say that I think that Ms. Eraso is being a little optimistic. Some people, fortunately, are beginning to claw their way up out of the egregor of fear manufactured by the media, but there’s still a very large share of people who are wallowing in it.
Scotlyn, ah, but I analyzed all this nine years ago in the latter days of the Archdruid Report:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2016/12/the-fifth-side-of-triangle.html
Admittedly I did so in the context of the drug-soaked ravings of the Discordian movement, but I suppose that’s par for the course on my blogs!
Karen, the quality of editing from publishers has dropped like a rock since I first broke into print 29 years ago, and it wasn’t good then. If you’re potentially interested in a freelance gig proofreading my manuscripts, we can talk; if you don’t have my email address, put in a comment marked “not for posting” with your email and I’ll be in touch.
SLClaire, ouch!!!!! I hadn’t heard, and that’s a gut punch. “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” was the first song of his I’ve heard, and I’m still chuckling.
Jennifer, my ordinary life is like that. I spend a lot of the day in relative silence, even outside of meditation; I enjoy music fairly often, and books even more so, but there are still hours at a time when I’m not taking in any outside stimulus at all. Long walks (very common for me, since I don’t drive) also help.
Athaia, granted, but sometimes that’s the best you can do.
Patricia M, as I was taught it, you pronounce every vowel — there are no Japanese dipthongs — but vowels next to other vowels are short. So it’s ga-ee-jin, gen-peh-ee, and Rey-ee-ko, but the ee in all three cases is brief.
David, you might find these two old posts of mine relevant:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2008/12/dissensus-and-organic-process.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2008/12/why-dissensus-matters.html
BeardTree, exactly! The blind men may not be feeling the same animal at all. In a universe the human mind may be hopelessly incapable of understanding, intellectual kluges may be the best we can do.
Patricia Mathews (#383)←
My ears aren’t good enough to determine if those are actual diphthongs or just single vowels. Written Japanese only has five vowels A I U E O [ah ee oo eh owe], but more vowel/diphthongs than this, so some have to be written with more than one letter. (English has the same issue.) GuyJean and GenPay is what
my ears hear. Reiko is Ray-Koh. I think the rei part gets two beats (one and a half in actual practice) as does the ge-n in genpei. ←
By the way, “n” before certain consonants (p for sure) sounds more like an “m” to my ears, but this is non-phonemic, meaning that you can say it either way, “n” or “m”, without changing it into a different word.←
If “n” doesn’t have a consonant right after it, it is like a final “n” in French, in other words nasal.
The difference between, for example, one-beat owe and two-beat owe is phonemic. Getting it wrong often gets you a different word. (English had this a millennium ago, but long ago lost the distinction.) Some transcriptions into Latin letters use a horizontal bar above the vowel to indicate the double beat.←
Pedantically yours,←
Jessica←
Chronojourner @#316:
I’ve read Strong Towns for many years – I like them a lot, was even a subscriber back when I had more disposable income. All of their core concepts are sound, in my view, and they WOULD work… if America was ready to implement them, anyway.
I deeply respect Chuck Marohn and he is doing exactly what he should be doing as a believer in his own concepts. But, I think there are a few things he doesn’t understand (or has chosen not to understand).
First, by this point, the majority living culture of America is single-family homes in the suburbs that one drives around by car. Full stop. Even immigrants here dream of living this lifestyle, or at least making it so that their children can live it. It’s the bathhouses and wine and coliseums of our culture – the rewards for being Roman, I mean American. Challenging that means challenging America itself. Which might take a bit more than a website…
Second, because of the financial burden that suburbs force upon the entire country – as Marohn has so expertly illustrated at Strong Towns! – every challenge to the suburban dream is existential. If any of the societal agreements, whether financial, technical or emotional, that funnel support to suburban developments from the locations where wealth is actually created, ever fell through… they’d be slums in a matter of a few years, and overgrown ruins with trees sticking through the roofs in a matter of decades. (Have I wished many a-time that I could live to see it? Yes, I have, but this may be a case of being careful what you wish for!) The suburbs can only continue on as they are if everything stays the same, which is why most of the political entities involves with them – especially and particularly the democratic ones! – are so intransigent on even the smallest changes.
Third, this is just a theory, and not one that is particularly well supported (I am terrible at evaluating economics) but something I heard from a friend has stuck with me – he suggested that the real reason the American empire is managing to remain upright, despite staggering numbers of national debt, is because the real balance sheet also includes *all of the private property in the United States*. Namely, that because most homes are bought using mortgages provided by the government, and funneled through banks which have been propped up by the government, that they can be counted as government assets when push comes to shove.
Again, I’m no expert. But thinking of it this way does make the increasingly hysterical desperation of the system to keep housing prices rising at all costs, despite the very real societal tensions this is simultaneously creating (homelessness, anyone??) make more sense to me. Accepting it as the truth calms me a bit, odd enough to say. We will go on like this until we can go no farther. Then… something new. Best to enjoy the moment! And pay down any debts!!
The point being, if keeping the system exactly the same with no changes whatsoever is something our entire political and financial system is entirely dependent on, what success can Chuck Marohn really hope for? He’s a good man, trying desperately to reform a system that is headed straight for the rocks, to at least TRY to give us all a softer landing. But it’s been quite difficult for him to hold his bipartisan group together – and unfortunately I think most of the membership has become city-dwelling Democrats, with content that reflects this. I AM one of these people (or, close enough, I don’t vote nowadays), and of course his message resonates with me, but I think for most of the rest of America it really doesn’t. Not even Chuck’s own home town follows his principles. I’ve come to feel that the end of the suburban system is impossible to plan for, as it will fight for its life with everything it has right up until the final curtain call, with the full and enthusiastic support of most American citizens.
So… I found the last walkable affordable inner-city neighborhood left in my entire region and am raising my family there, very happily 🙂 No, I won’t tell where!! And, my retirement plans will be in another country, Gods willing.
Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to meditate on Strong Towns. I truly wish them the best and am rooting for them (and will actually vote locally this year for candidates that espouse their principles). But practically, I think they won’t achieve terribly much as the American empire careens down the inevitable hill. We shall see!
JMG,
Ah, well, I don’t regret sacrificing that sort of life for what I have now, but I will indulge in a moment’s nostalgia for it. I find myself somewhat overstimulated these days. And when I do get a little time to myself, I am usually so “book hungry” that I am all too inclined to spend it devouring something that’s been languishing on the shelf. I hear it gets better after the toddler years. I was once told by a wise woman not to fall into the trap of thinking that “the real you” is some precarious state of being that is only achieved in the absence of all fetters and distractions; the way you live your real life is the real you, so show up, pay attention, and do your best!
Patricia Mathews (#383)
All that and still not complete.
According to the text books I learned from, Japanese pronounce two-letter vowels such as ai as two distinct vowels, without blending into a diphthong. So gaijin would be gah ee jee n
I can’t hear the difference between ah-ee and I (two beats) but Japanese probably can.
@JMG:, Arigato.
@Clay, yes, Georgism is also an interesting suggestion! I am a bit wary that a Georgist land tax would force everybody to use their land in the most utilitarian way, but it still might be better than what we have.
Just an fyi: and 8.7 earthquake off the Kamchatka Peninsula occured, producing a tsunami of variable effect, depending on where one resides. Be aware out there folks, and heed any warnings that might be of merit.
@STTNG I’m a boomer who has been kind of a fellow traveler of the BDSM community for a few decades. In my lifetime, mainstream US society’s attitude toward female submissiveness has gone from considering it natural and virtuous and encouraging young girls (such as I was) to strive for it, to holding it in such low regard that women who are submissively inclined experience discrimination for it if they express it outside BDSM circles. If you put out genuine male dom energy (as opposed to the far more common manchild energy where the guy actually wants, not a female sub, but a very indulgent mom) I can see where that would have a magnetic effect on women who are sub and in the closet about it, even to themselves, are not part of the BDSM community, and spend most of their lives in denial about their submissive feelings.
@385 David Ritz
The problem with today’s political polarization is not so much the fact that people have different opinions but that one faction loves Trump and wouldn’t hold him accountable if he flip flops on the issues he campaigned on, and the other side hates Trump and his supporters so much they cannot stand for anything other than virtue signaling. That latter group, the TDS cult, still controls most of the mainstream media long after the general public got tired of bashing Trump 24/7.
Those two cults hold the rest of the US electorate hostage, including those who have ideas outside of the relatively narrow spectrum of officially approved political opinions.
Hi JMG and commentariat,
You might like the following (small) article about Permian drillers, that reminds me Garrett Hardin’s “Ttragedy of the Commons”:
(https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Permians-Dirty-Secret-Is-Bubbling-Over.html)
It talks about drillers turning on each other:
“…Bloomberg’s report presents the problem as potentially turning drillers on each other because one company’s wastewater may be ruining another company’s oil assets…”
Be well,
Worried European
Scotlyn #326
I don’t live in the British Isles but would not have voted to join the EU. I would have voted for an exit. I do not believe that any unelected body should have greater power than the elected representatives of any country.
@ David Ritz #385
Re polarisation, harmony, disagreement, etc
The following may be of interest to you. When I was young I visited a Quaker community several times (located at Monteverde, in Costa Rica). This community was not only a religious community, but it also managed a very successful cheesemaking business, using their own system of consensus decision-making. The process of consensus decision-making interested me greatly and I had many questions for them. I will never forget, though, that one of them said to me: “You know, we look for deep agreement, that arises at the END of our process, and are very suspicious of the kind of shallow agreement you might get at the beginning of the process – before any proper thinking, discussing, or considering has been carried out. Early agreement is very suspect.”
I thought this was a very interesting point for that man to raise, given that he was identifying a process by means of which to ARRIVE at the harmonious agreement Quakers value highly (which is why they have developed the methods that they have). His point was very much that nobody ever starts there. But if you want to, and you have a tried and tested means for it, then you can sometimes end up there. (On certain matters, at least).
@ David, I hasten to add that Quaker-style consensus methods can be suitable ways of agreeing necessary things in small groups who value consensus and do NOT value imposing upon one another, but I quite agree with both JMG and yourself that DISsensus in the greater society is more happily consistent with the freedom that I personally value, than any kind of imposed consensus. Be well.
@JMG – thank you for the link. I shall go and review. 🙂 🙂
@ Jennifer Kobernick – “I was once told by a wise woman not to fall into the trap of thinking that “the real you” is some precarious state of being that is only achieved in the absence of all fetters and distractions; the way you live your real life is the real you, so show up, pay attention, and do your best!” That strikes me as very sound advice! 🙂
Parenthesis…
Paralysis…
Lol! 🙂
Thank you!
“David, you might find these two old posts of mine relevant:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2008/12/dissensus-and-organic-process.html
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2008/12/why-dissensus-matters.html”
Great point.
Yes, in my view consensus is only something that is useful and desirable in emergencies, when there is a need for a polity to develop a firm sense of common purpose, such as in a great war or maybe a natural disaster. Otherwise, fetishization of consensus (and the stigmatization of those who dissent from or even question it) can lead very much to someone like Fred Halliot and the Totalitarian Center!:
“The government of the parties, he insists, must be replaced by a government of the people, guided by a new values consensus that goes beyond the broken politics of greed and special interests to do what has to be done to cope with the disintegrating economy, the challenge of peak oil, and the impacts of climate change. ”
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-27/fascism-and-the-future-part-three-weimar-america/
@celadon # 317
I am not going to deny that public education comes with a set of advantages. For instance, widespread familiarity with science itself has some advantages – It keeps people from being suckered by a wide variety of snake-oil salesmen.
The main problem I notice is that most public education tends to impose the some kind of collectivist deontology on the people, about how we are all in it together and we can make a difference together. By itself this is not a bad thing, but if we fixate on this view of morality, we become mentally dependent on collective unity. Once we convince ourselves that we need the cooperation of others to achieve our happiness, we begin to demand that cooperation and feel threatened when someone’s opinions differ from ours.
Nothwind # I refered to the vaccines realy are genetic drugs and wich have several colateral efects like the increment of incidence of cáncer.
Toby #16 Re: Getting Drafted
Here’s one argument for why you are not likely to get drafted. I actually disagree with it and am more aligned with your concerns, but in the interests of “well considered”, you might as well read it in any case…
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/service-to-what-nation
Here’s where it becomes a potential wild card for American politics as well: there are a ton of dual citizens, many, such as myself, who are likely to flee to the United States if this happens. I’ve seen estimates that there are at least a million people with American citizenship, and many more who are unregistered Americans and could get citizenship if desired.