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.
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.