Things are piling up very quickly for me and so I’ve decided to go on hiatus here and on my blog for the rest of January. I expect to be posting again by February 1. I’ll log on semiregularly to put through comments, so the conversation can continue as before. Have a good month, and I’ll be back in due time!
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JMG, wishing you a good January. Please keep doing what you do, some of us genuinely rely on your writing to help keep our sanity. 😊
A hiatus? Now?!? But the President just decided to reenact the plot of Twilight’s Last Gleaming in Venezuela today!
Well, I wish you good fortune with whatever piles come your way. Although I must say the timing of this hiatus is curious enough to make me wonder if something came up in your crystal ball…
Anyway, see you next month!
Hi JMG,
Yeah, disengage. Do an about face. Take a ferry. One meets the most interesting people on ferries of New England.
In 1965, my mother and older brother and I did lighthouse-hopping, visit lighthouses as we came to them. The lighthouses and ferries of New England are magic. Ya never know what conversations are started while leaning at the rail of a ship, hopefully, not up-chucking. Take a dramamine, if necessary.
Visit someplace fire.
Visit someplace water.
Visit someplace earth.
Visit someplace air.
Visit an island. Visit a marsh. Granny says so. Have a good one.
Have a great “month off.”
💨🏚️⛴️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Best wishes for a happy and productive January JMG.
Dear John Michael,
Before warning others of the impending changes to the winds, recall to look after thyself. If the Titanic sunk, what good would you be in the -2’C water wearing less than seven (the lucky number) pairs of long johns? Think of the baker who survived. He was on the money that day.
Cheers
Chris
Hello JMG and commentariat:
Oops! This “hiatus” has caught me by surprise! Well, John, I’ll have patience to wait your next post (like the rest of commentariat, I hope it). Have a good January! Now, with JMG permission, let’s comment some things.
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I’ve read last John comment about Dali greatness, and I agree. He looked himself as the last great figurative painter, and indeed he was right about it. Although his big egocentrism and bizarre personality led him to perform a personal Spectacle in which he pretended to be mad, me think. However, geniuses can be excused for his excentricities when they do real art.
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I think too there could be a secret deal between Trump and Putin to give up Venezuela failed state in exchange for Ukraine regime (which it’s not a failed state yet, but without USA huge help it won’t last much time). If this theory is right, I’m afraid EU is going to be in a ridiculous and pitiful situation, by evident reasons. Today EU governments can be cheering the Maduro regime fall, but tomorrow…We’ll see in near future.
If John and other online proffessional and “dilettante” analysts have said about the Venezuela raid (it could be and affordable loss to Russia because in exchange the USA give Putin the Kiev regime head)and they’re right, the EU attitude seems to me not wise. Spanish language has an expression which unluckily can’t be translated into English easily:””Aplaudir con las orejas”. Well, can you make applause with your own ears? I bet you can’t. I don’t know if you haven’t understood this expression irony. Well, I think Brussels and their national governments could regret his today happiness, if this US/Russia exchange theory is confirmed soon. Let’s wait…
A last comment about Salvador Dalí. I think his biggest life tragedy (and his biggest wry irony) was he was pretending to be crazy, since his younger age; but when his loved wife and muse, Gala, died, and he realized he was become an old man, he gave up painting and he really got depressed. Depression isn’t properly to become nuts, but indeed is a mental disorder, so I think in a wide sense, Dali pretended crazyness became real. I was a child when Dali started his last and sad life stage, so I remember only a very old man in a wheelchair who said one of his last famous phrases: “Geniuses mustn’t die”. Of course, Dali finally died like everybody does, in spite of being a genius, but nowadays we can admire his beautiful and disturbing (alike) art works.
I wonder if you’ve understood well the metaphore implicit in the vernacular spanish expression which I could translate roughly like “clapping with your ears”. When you clap with your own ears (which it’s really impossible in the real world), you do it because you can’t clap your hands; so you’re not in a very good situation, but you don’t recognize it and pretend everything is OK. I think EU nowadays would be in a similar situation if the Russian/American influence zones exchange is confirmed. If Zelenski falls, Brussels situation could be worse than bad. Translating roughly another spanish expression, Trump could leave European leaders “with their pants down”. I think you may understand its meaning. In a less rude mode, I can remember the biblical quote “Those who laugh today, tomorrow will cry”. However, let’s wait if future events confirm John and other online people hypothesis…
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This morning (local time), during my coffee time, I’ve read in my favorite bar the local newspaper Sunday magazine. Its main article title was: “Comparing Trump and Hitler brains”. Here we go with the “Reductio ad Hitlerum” phallacy. I think this article was perpetrated…cough…written days before the Venezuela mess, but of course after “Nuremberg” movie was released in theaters here. So it’s very opportunistic, me think. Technically, Hitler wasn’t crazy until maybe his last war time (the bunker time), and the journalist indeed can’t show hard evidences of Trump brain/mind damages, only circunstancial cherry picked stories about his “strange” behavior. I think it’s a dishonest tactic against Trump, a politician who I don’t like very much, but he deserves a basic respect, at least to criticise him.
The same magazine had has a couple of years ago another article asking rhetorically wether Putin was crazy or not. So its propaganda disguised of fake psychological science doesn’t surprise me.
May your January be restorative and productive. Looking forward to your return in February.
Chuaquin,
I’m answering your comments on the previous post.
I’ve had some trouble keeping up with the comments lately, so I didn’t read your assessment of Vox. Yes, it pretty much sums up my own views. It’s nice to find someone who doesn’t fall for the addiction to hatred within our country’s politics for once.
Yes, I had Pedro Baños in mind. I’m fine with approaching our former territories but, given our alleged betters’ recent record, I distrust their real intentions when pushing these ideas. I tend to think they see Hispanic America merely as a mass of slightly less problematic immigrants that will drive salaries down and their profits up by sheer demand. But I could be wrong, of course.
“Traduttore traitore”: Indeed. I’d rather believe our translator just had a bad day while working on the part I happened to read. But I can’t help thinking any of us would do better.
Best wishes for continued health and sanity.
Have a restful hiatus.
Wishing you a well deserved rest and catch up.
Drew
Mr. Greer, I hope things are piling up in a positive way .. at least mostly. Enjoy the respite from the ‘daily blogger’s grind’. ‘;]
Take care and stay safe, JMG. All the best.
Wishing you a good and refreshing month, wherever you go, whatever you do.
Stephen
Have a good hiatus. Your schedule must be exhausting with having to run and moderate your blog, especially on Monday-Wednesday.
I look forward to the book club post next month!
Hope the time off goes well for you, and you get done the things you need and want to do.
It has been a long time since you took a break. Not counting your working week in Great Britain.
Have a nice blogging respite.
Best regards,
V
Wer here
Well it isn’t over yet there in Venezuela. The vice president and the chavez people are arming themselfs looks like it’s gonna be a partisan warfare soon. If Trump decides that sending boots on the ground will necessary he will have a second Iraq/Vietnam over there. I don’t think that the deal between Trump and Putin is correct.
The Us tries to put boots on the ground it will be a mess espacially since people in Venezuelan goverment are procvaming they will not give up it reminds me of Iran when the war started and there were assasinations and everything but then they started an response to the attack. The EU is turning into a Third World during Christmas many Germans came to Poland to visit Christmas Markets in our country why? Because many german towns had banned them because of not hurting others fellings etc. Muslims are already an majority in Brussels and soon in other nations. EU ranting about failed states should be soon looking at themselfs…
I wish you success on the hiatus, and hope it is productive for you. I don’t know how you keep up with things as it is. Will you suspend the Dreamwidth postings as well?
We will be waiting on your return.
Miguel # 11:
I’m glad we mainly agree. I only would like to write in addition to your comment about this party, I think Vox leaders seem to be avoiding very carefully an open fall outside the democratic consensus; which of course would lead them into the legal and constitutional radar. If themselves aren’t so smart, they indeed have good paid lawyers to their service. It seems the last thing they would dream is reaching the power bluntly and ruling the country according a one party regime (like classical Fascists did and like neofascists usually imagine it). That reality contradicts the weared, rehashed and spectacular usual denounciations against Vox as fascists by the woke left (usual brainless propaganda me think).
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Mr. Baños can say what he says because he’s allowed to say it by the economical elites and his former fellows in the intel services, so you’re quite right about him. I think he’s pointing ideas towards spanish Overton Window, which only a few years ago were unthinkable in public debate (limited only within fringe online and personal arguments). I think this is good and bad alike. Of course we don’t have access to hidden agendas in high spheres…
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About the translación topic: I agree too. When you start reading a foreign book translated to your language, you trust the translator has been a proffessional and has done well his/her job. A bad translation “hurts” that trust.
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I may understand John decision to make an hiatus now, though actual news can push us to pay more attention to internet now. However, it’s also paradoxically true John and more people need some rest and to go away from a heavy over-charge and over-stimulation. Maybe I didn’t understand well Mr. Greer motives to leave for a while his blog, maybe I’m wrong. In every case, I wish John enjoys these “hiatus” days peacefully.
Wer # 21:
I’m glad to see you again in JMG blog, though I can’t always agree with your views. I think Venezuela thing is a turning point in every trends which are evolving in nowadays world (wether there’s a tacit USA/Russia deal to exchange countries or not). I also think it’s too early to reach a full view over the whole situation, because propaganda from several ideological fronts doesn’t let us to see what’s happening under competing Spectacles. Are the most fanatic Chavists preparing a guerrilla style insurgence? It’s possible. But we don’t know how many Maduro supporters are really eager to kill and die for his hijacked leader. So we can’t guess wether there would be only terrorism, a located guerrilla or a full civil war in spite of the American “help” to the possible puppet government. We also don’t know what’s the real power of self proclamed “majoritarian” anti-Chavist opposition, and its effective influence on Venezuela Army. By the way, I din’t think Trump isn’t fool enough to send ground troops to secure that oil rich country, unless he would be compelled by a full scale civil war (which although it isn’t impossible, I think it’s not very probable because Maduro economical policies have been a disaster, so he’s been lost partly some former Chavist supporters, me think). I tell you: let’s wait and watch the future events carefully…
Here the Left has mourned the Trumpist raid, and Right has cheered Maduro arrest. Nothing new under the sun. What worries me is the possibility of political unstability in an after Maduro Venezuela, which could provoke an even bigger migration towards Spain.
If you’ve witnessed personally or you have reliable sources to trust, I can only confirm EU is headed towards the failed status level (well, I should write maybe: failed super-status).
You deserve your hiatus. Enjoy it and catch up.
See you in February!
Anyone giving odds that JMG is activating a contingency plan and will be resuming blogging in February from Lower Slobbovia?
You are the last person I would have to say this too, but enjoy the time off and don’t forget to touch the grass. 😉
Slithy #26:
I think that “Operational Security” applies here as in:
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/490449-stfu
“How About A Nice Cup of Shut The [bleep] Up?”
Slithy Toves # 26:
A good question, I understand you’ve asked it half kidding, half seriously. I’ve thought about it and I think it’s possible John would be planning something important for the future: maybe a contingency plan or something else. Who knows? Of course, until John himself tells us his motives for this hiatus, we only can guess about this topic. Let’s wait for a while…
John, you spoke about about episodes of depression in your life lately. If you could use some prayers sent in your direction, let us know…
We love you, John!
In honor to the truth, Venezuela has reached the failed state condition, not only thanks to its Chavist government economical incompetence (and inner corruption), but by the American (and its EU serfs) economic sanctions against the country, too. Let’s see the whole picture beyond the Spectacles…
Another evident hard fact, which you all probably will know (so I’m going to remind you briefly) is the huge oil reserves stored under Venezuela soils. Of course, it’s not a mere coincidence USA foreign politics are usually so eager to harass “towards democracy” different countries regimes which only share their oil rich reserves (cough cough). By the way, next US sponsorized government in Venezuela will go on extracting its oil…oh wait! A heck of oil reserves there are super heavy and thick oil (which is difficult to be refined). Good luck with it!
Since this is more or less Son of Open Post, I thought I’d share this
https://xcancel.com/Knesix/status/2007960824783003721
It’s about Venezuela, from a Venezuelan. Basically, there are no heroes in this story, nobody is up to any good and the people who think they’re the heroes are actually some of the bigger villains.
Oat milk, lol.
Wendlinger # 30:
If John needs prayers to help him in his actual supposedly depressive days, I also could help…However, JMG should write openly he wants to be helped by we the commentariat.
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The Other Owen # 32:
Of course, there aren’t any real heroes and villains within the Venezuela Narrative, but…I think I must write something trying to have my mind “cold”, after having seen your link.
What I’ve read (thanks to your link) is an opinion fully biased by the anti-Chavist emotional Spectacle, which I can see it’s mostly an emotional basic reaction driven by rough propaganda, I’m sorry: I don’t see much smart thinking in that blunt speech. I can empathyze with that poor devil (Venezuela exiled people haven’t had an easy life in Spain and other countries, I’ve met some of that people personally), but not everything in the current and past failed state can be blamed to Chavists villains (Do you have noticed Venezuela economy suffered heavy sanctions by the western countries? Cough cough). Of course, Chavist regime has its hands full of blood, but “democratic” opposition is not angelical, neither, so I’m afraid when it reaches to power there (if and when Trump allows it to nominally rule the country), there could be a bloody purge as revenge. I hope not, but…
There’s a part of reason in pointing the American (and European) left/liberal wing is weeping with hypocrital “crocodile tears” for “poor” Maduro “abduction”, to obviously erode Trump positions, but it’s so naïve to trust in Trump interest in implementing democracy in Venezuela…Venezuelan exiled shouldn’t be careful before celebrating and cheering so much Trump now. Things may be worse in the future, thanks to the Orange Guy.
By the way, Maduro supporters are equally and simetrically emotionally hijacked by their own hate propaganda, but I’ll have the good taste of not to link with their Spectacle (anger and rettalliation wishes). Indeed it’s a mirrors game.
Wer here Chaquin
I’ve met an army of German Catholics in my local are recently, why you ask?
Because Christians in Germany are treated now like leapers either is the newcomers who are openly hostile or an goverment that treats them like some dangerous pseudoinsurgents.
I swear to God Allmightly there were Polish Churches full of Germans who were praying there because “they are afraid to express their faith in their own country” that either they will be backlisted by some lunatic, or some “diverse man from Syria” (which they say are not returning to their country at all) will run them over with a truck during a Christmas market or something. It is bizzare as ….. The dumbest moment is when the german goverment proclaims their hatred towards Russia while boat migrants are already invading their country.
I’veread studies that proclaim now that majority of Western Europe will be muslim dominant before 2041 are the right I don’t know but after seeing thousands of Germans Christians praying in Polish Churches afraid of their own country I am starting to belive them.
Re Slithy #26:
JMG has been warning us all for years. And here we are, with the nasty brown stuff hitting the fan, everywhere I look. Can you say: Saturn-Neptune Conjunction? Maybe the time for personal action has come, for those of us not already busy implementing long-made plans. Or maybe we are not yet entertained enough? Lol!
Hi JMG,
I remember the old days when you took the month of January off. I hope this January will give you rest and space to do whatever task is demanding your attention. Have a great month!
@ Slithy #26, there is a nonzero chance that in Februari a significant part of the commentariat will resume posting from Lower Slobbovia….
@chaquin
That’s why I said there are no heroes in this story, everyone is up to no good. Maduro, is a villain. So, are we. And so are the screaming bluehairs whining about it all. At least Trump is being honest about why they’re doing it this time, instead of invoking some silly WMD story. Nah, we want the oil, that’s it. Personally, I don’t want anything to do with it. If there’s no hero in the story, it’s perfectly fine not to pick a side, IMHO. My concern is if they plan on sitting in Venezuela with troops (and I don’t see how they get around not doing that), this could turn into another Vietnam quagmire. But this time with drones. Those southern mountains look particularly dangerous to me. Maybe I’m just seeing things though.
Otherwise, if all they do is declare victory and leave (like China did with Vietnam), there will be squawking and preening and posturing and then it will all blow over and go away.
Wer # 34:
I’m sorry, but you must know that online manipulated news (or worse, directly fake news) by the several competing propagandas has made me more paranoid than I usually am (and well, my basic level of paranoia is a little higher than the average people).
If you met a lot of German people in Poland churches, there’s a real problem in Germany. I knew by online news that German government was very anti-Russian, but it seems I had underrated its hatred against its own Christian population, while it takes so much care of massively arrived new migrants with (cough cough) such as different customs. It’s one more between the several inner contradictions of disastrous German rulers nowadays.
Remember that in a comment (#261) to last week’s post JMG himself said, “I’ll be relocating soon,” that is, moving so some other location soon. (And in earlier posts he has explained why he needs to do that: for personal reasons,. not geopolitical ones.) Presumably his plans for relocating — always a huge job under the best of circumstances! — have suddenly picked up speed.
The January sabattical was a great tradition; good to see you taking time when you need it. We’ll miss your insight since this is shaping up to be the month that finally proves Chudda and his “nothing ever happens” mantra wrong, but, hey! You also want to encourage us to think for ourselves and not wait for the Great Guru Greer to make up our minds for us, so this is perhaps the _perfect_ time for a sabbatical.
My bet for the timing: Trump got a briefing (similar to the one Jameson Weed got in Twilight’s Last Gleaming) about the US oil supply and decided to do something drastic to kick the can a little further down the road. Fracked wells deplete quickly, remember, and this year (or at least this term) is, IIRC, when that depletion was expected to make production drop off a cliff. As Weed said: “We need that oil.”
So far it looks like it’s going to go a lot better than it did in the book, but time will tell.
Charguin
Well I never said the the Venezuelans will come at the top but if we consider recent US attempts at colonialism (Iraq and Afganistan ) the most realistic scenario is that Venezuela will become a looted failed state as opposed to an failed state, insurgency, civil war etc. It’s not like living as an US colony (until Chavez) was great for the Venezuelans.
But some years later the US under another president will withdraw leaving a shell of an nation just like Iraq (which depopulated rapidly and is constant state of chaos, religious war and different group fighting for power)
Just the US will find trying to control Venezuela and it’s restless population and impossible task let alone trying to fix anything (which they will not). The EU is a … I don’t think I have worlds for it right now….
I f trump demands for Denmark to hand over Greenland then things will get insane in the EU states….
I am cautiously optimistic about the Venezuelan situation because (assuming the new regime is effectively a US puppet government), sanctions and socialist economic policies will be lifted, which should benefit many Venezuelans regardless of if the new regime is tyrannical. The bar is set low.
The primary concerns of the Trump admin are, of course, subjugating a state hostile to US interests and allied with Russia and China, and getting access to Venezuela’s oil. Regardless of whether America cut a secret deal with Russia, this operation is probably a PR move to not make America look totally incompetent when Russia wins in Ukraine. These are rational motives which, as an American citizen, I support.
>shaping up to be the month that finally proves Chudda and his “nothing ever happens” mantra wrong
Maybe nothing was happening back in 2013 but I think that was probably the last year you could say that. Things have been happening ever since. And this year seems to be an acceleration on 2025.
I find it interesting, the more hate directed at that symbol (the Chud), the stronger it seems to grow…
For my part, I have no sympathy for Maduro or the “Free Maduro” sentiment currently fashionable among Trump’s enemies. I’m also quite happy for the many Venezuelans who’ve been celebrating Maduro’s capture and who are hopeful for a better future for their country.
But overall the whole situation is deeply discomfiting for me. I want us to roll back our empire, not expand it. I want us out of the regime change business. And I’ve seen a disturbing embrace of imperialism and even outright war for “securing resources” on the right.
Sigh. I suppose by historical standard, though, this is a reversion to the mean. Nassim Taleb certainly called it when he said the long dearth of wars in the 20th century was a statistical artifact and not a new world era of peace. And JMG said much the same thing.
I just hope Trump’s bluster about Greenland etc. remains that. But I’m not so sure. It almost feels like, having been snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize, he’s decided he might as well be the force of chaos they think he is.
The Other Owen # 37:
I understand your view, but last weekend the slogans which exiled Venezuelans and their native “friends” shouted in my town “spontaneous” demonstration were something like “thanks Mr. Trump for giving us the democracy” mantra (variations over the same topic). I don’t have hard data about possible hypocresy of those demonstrators, I assume their shouting as honest…So I think this is the antiChavist Spectacle, at least in my country. The Good People (TM) vs the Bad People. Now, let’s see who’s the brave man who says Trump only wants what he wants to the naïve “democratic oppositors”.
I share partly your concern about an hypothetic US troops massive arrival in near future, but I think Trump isn’t a fool: he will prefer a native straw man (or woman) in Caracas government before to risk facing a possible insurgence filling coffins with US soldiers. My today doubt is what would do the Chavist masses (maybe near half of population?) after the initial shock. How many will be frozen by fear to rettalliation, and how many will change their fear into open violence? I don’t know…
Well, Venezuela has some mountains (and jungle) in its far South; in addition to this fact, there are the Andes in its West: if a located guerrilla manages to find some cannon fodder and a minimal supply chain, it could be a problem in near future for a puppet government. I can also point Venezuela has been “de facto” in a low intensity civil war since Chávez arrived to Presidency. Of course, until a few days ago, Chavist machine had its relative advantage controlling Police and Military forces; although we can’t forget the opposition had the western (American and EU) backup, maybe financiation too. There’s been open violence from the two sides alike, so I’m afraid the violence cycle doesn’t end with Maduro arrest.
It’s a wry irony the two sides in Venezuela shares the same belief: the country was under a Socialist/Commie government. This idea isn’t really true. According an Anarchist Venezuelan author in his book:”Venezuela, la revolución como espectáculo”(translated as: “Venezuela, the Revolution as Spectacle”), reality is more complex than this commonplace. Indeed, in that essay Chavism is criticised from a far left point of view. I don’t share everything in that book, but I think it’s a good idea to look at another alternative views different of usual binary propagandas.
A last interesting lesson IMHO about this mess. I knew my country (far) right populist party was the most antiRussian biased of EU right wing parties. I’ve checked (hearing this last days Vox speeches) its leaders deep serfdom to the foreign US politics, correlative to their screaming Russophobia. Let’s compare spanish populist right with the Hungarian one: of course, the lesser antiRussian is its speech, the lesser US cheering we can see.
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Robert M. # 39:
It could be a heavy reason to explain John current hiatus, but until JMG writes why has made it, we can only guess his real reasons.
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Tyler A.#40:
You maybe are right in Trumpian plans. I’d like to write in addition to your comment that American (and its vassal countries) sanctions against Chavist regime damaged badly oil facilities too. Chinese helped partly the disaster wasn’t complete, but indeed crude extraction has been going down during last years. I think western technology could make oil extraction would rise again in theory. However, remember a great part of Venezuela oil reserves is thick extraheavy oil, whose economic and energetic benefit is low (compared with another oils like Saudis). Oh, and let’s pray any Chavist hypothetic insurgents don’t get upset to watch oilfields with bad eyes…
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Wer # 41:
OK, I’ve understood your point of view. The scenario you’ve depicted for the future Venezuela is grim and possible, but now there are some other futures opened as work hypothesis. I only can guess now it’s probably Trump doesn’t want to be trapped in a Vietnam or Iraq direct war against an insurgency. Maybe he limits to give aerial support for native antiChavist future government as cannon fodder. I don’t know how many Chavist zealots are eager to kill or die soon, but I imagine some of them won’t wait at home the “democratic opposition” probable revenge against them.
The Denmark/Greenland/EU future with Trump Damocles sword over them: No argument here, Wer.
By the way, Putin real attitude and future plans are an enigma. Is he preparing an action against Zelenski government in exchange to an hypothetical deal with Trump? Or (if that deal doesn’t exist) Is Putin waiting again because he hopes to go on weakening the EU with the current Ukrainian war? I’ve seen some online opinions and I feel they’re maybe 50/50. But online opinions doesn’t resolve Putin enigma. We’ll see…
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Patrick # 42:
I disagree. I’d like to be optimistic too, but you assume too soon IMHO that not only antiChavist people, but Chavist supporters (I remember it again, more or less half of full population) are going to surrender peacefully and sing together the “kumbaya” with their former enemies, too. There’s been too much violence between the two sides so I don’t expect a quiet transition into a calmed US protectorate. Former opposition maybe will want revenge, and if only a few thousand of Chavist nutties steal a gun and hide themselves in some mountain area, we won’t have a happy scenario, me think.
I think recent events play into JMG’s last post: I suspect this is going to amplify the demand for someone to appeal to the abandoned center. It won’t necessarily be anyone new, either: I suspect one of the most powerful spells a political figure could cast right now is to say, with even a smidgen of earnestness, “I was wrong and I will do everything in my power to make up for it.”
I’ll play; I throw in my bet that John has again been mailed some stack of occult material and in digging trough it he found something that has sent him on a trip to R’lyeh. He’ll be back in February with preparations for the 20th. 😀
>I think Trump isn’t a fool: he will prefer a native straw man (or woman) in Caracas government before to risk facing a possible insurgence filling coffins with US soldiers
Originally South Vietnam started with a puppet government, which needed advisors, more advisors. Ok, soldiers. More soldiers. More. Now it’s 1965 and Fort Benning has 500,000 men in training at any given time. I think 1/3 volunteered and the other 2/3 were conscripted.
If they’re not going to declare victory and stay out, it’s possible we could go down that path again, this time with the loony lefties happily volunteering all the men they hate into military service and the right wingers being less than enthusiastic about it all. All those hated, so, so hated – straight white males.
Maybe they can get the oil companies to hire mercenaries instead? Mercenaries aren’t drafted and are paid well. I’m sure if I’ve thought of it, they have too. Echoes of the East India Company. Or maybe Air America in Laos.
In any case, if they don’t handle this well, it could blow up not only in their faces but for ordinary citizens too. And I suspect some of those guerillas in Venezuela have been fighting for decades now. On their home turf. Jungle and mountains you say? Vietnam had both.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/mamdanis-nyt-tenant-czar-called-seize-private-property-calls-home-ownership-white
It fills my heart with song and I just want to sing, sing, SING
Soyuz nerushimy rezpublik svobodnikh /
Splatilo naveki velikaya Rus’
(I’d leave NewYorkifornia ASAP. Sooner is better than later)
Miquel #11
Is it true that Pedro Baños is really Peter Toilet? One would think it advantageous to change one’s name to something more propitious.
💨🚽👝🚰Northwind Grandma💨
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Just a few brief comments:
Wendlinger, thank you, but I’m actually feeling better now than I have for a while. Action is always, at least for me, a cure for sour moods.
Robert, I see you’ve been hitting up the crystal ball again. 😉
Vitranc, oddly enough, I did just score a huge trove of occult documents — more than sixty original publications by Harry Gardener, the Los Angeles-area Rosicrucian occult teacher whose odd but useful work has inspired some of my recent writings and practice. (Cost me a pretty penny, too.) So far I haven’t found any references to R’lyeh in the material, but I haven’t gotten very far — and right now I’m in a hotel in Brooklyn, getting ready for a meeting of one of the Gnostic churches in which I’m involved, or entangled, or something like that. No, it’s not going to be meeting in Red Hook, more’s the pity; if shoggoths, Deep Ones, or tentacled cuties in muumuus show up anyway, I’ll be sure to let you know. 😉
“Anyone giving odds that JMG is activating a contingency plan and will be resuming blogging in February from Lower Slobbovia?”
Slithy, no one in their right mind would move to Lower Slobbovia. Everyone knows that Upper Slobbovia is far nicer.
For those who may be interested, Antonio Turiel, a very reputed scientist in Spain, (working in a public institute) who is a specialist about natural resources, was a major voice in the peak oil scene and introduced JMG work into Spain more than 14 years ago, has written a short essay about Venezuela’s oil extraction prospects. In short, He believes that the extra-heavy oil from Venezuela will serve to balance the logistic problems that the oil from fracking causes.
https://crashoil.blogspot.com/2026/01/venezuela-y-la-crisis-del-modelo.html?m=1
JMG,
Please say its not so. You are not really in Brooklyn to sign a lease on a hip loft in a renovated ice cream factory in Williamsburg? Just the dwelling needed to pursue your new place among the literary glitterati.
( the above is an attempt at humor)
My oldest son did spend a few years living in an overpriced apartment in an renovated ice cream factory in Williamsburg because it was walking distance to his Video Editing Job. I visited a few times and I am sure you would find the denizens of that Hipper-than-thou burg intolerable.
Clay, permit me to reassure you. No, I have zero interest in hipper-than-thou communities and I dislike lofts. I’m in a little hotel on Atlantic Avenue right now, having just gotten back from a lovely dinner in the West Village with an old friend, and the people I mingled with on the subway and the streets were about as far from the pampered-hipster class as you can imagine. Tomorrow I shall don the finery of a Gnostic bishop, receive incardination into a Gnostic church (the third in which I’ve qualified to carry out a bishop’s functions), and go out to dinner with as fine a gaggle of Gnostic eccentrics as one could ever hope to meet; Wednesday it’s back to Rhode Island for a few days — and then things really get busy. More soon!
Slithy Toves # 44:
I don’t have much pity for Maduro, neither. And I share your concerns about Trump as a possible “power drunk”. I can guess the Orange Guy, under his rough and blunt pose, is smarter than the leftists like to depict him, but less wise than their supporters like to imagine him…(I think it happens the same underestimation and overestimation with Putin critics and supporters, though he’s a different kind of politician).
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The Other Owen # 48:
I didn’t think in mercenary soldiers as ground troops to reinforce local cannon fodder. It’s a possibility.
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Morthwind Grandma # 50:
Oops! Ha ha, oh no…Pedro Baños can be Peter Baths more properly, me think!
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JMG # 51:
I’m glad you’re better now. Thank you for writing again to us!
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Guillem # 53:
I think Turiel analysis about Venezuela “special” heavy oil to balance the fracking decline is maybe right. He usually has access to some interesting information. You’re also right with Turiel prestige here in Spain as peak oil expert and a very smart scientist. However, I also think everybody has a dark side, and Turiel isn’t an exception. I think he’s too commited into the leftist ecologism activism, so sometimes he looses the supposed science objectivity and he falls into biased views. When he doesn’t write about his science matters, I think his opinions have the same value as the average citizen opinions. Thinking the opposite thing would be to believe in Plato “king philosopher”…Oops!
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JMG # 55:
I hope you spend a good day with your Gnostic friends! I’ve got some eccentric friends too, but I’ve never met the Gnostic variety of them. And well, I’ll wait for news from you soon…
I’m afraid I could be a bit boring, but I keep looking at the current Putin enigma. What he will do after the Trumpian raid over Venezuela?(If he does something about it).
Of course, I can’t read Putin thoughts: it’s impossible to know what’s thinking another person (at least me, who I don’t have the telepathy power). However, I can guess how he could think, having knowledge of his past actions.
Western rude propaganda loves to depict Putin like a allmighty tyrant, with a narrative copied from obviously Hitler. Reality is very different. Putin attitude seems to me very cautious. He likes to think very well what’s he’s going to do before deciding something. Like a chess player, he thinks a lot of possibilities before acting (sometimes too much, IMHO).
In the other hand, Putin really isn’t an omnipotent dictator. He relies on his advicers and the oligarchs, who aren’t an unified block in Russia. Well, from my European view, it’s difficult to guess how Russian politics work really: not only for the opaque tendence there, but also for the shameful UE censorship and propaganda against Russia. However, I think I can grasp some useful information from several alternative online sites, and the gaps between censorship/propaganda. I think in Russia there are two main groups who influence Putin decisions: “Atlantists”(who would like peace and trade with the West) and “Asians”(who prefer the Chinese alliance, so confrontation against the West too). It’s evident for me the first are in minority (or at least they’re less popular) than the second one, because Putin started years ago the war against Ukraine. So it’s a fact Asians view is backed by Putin. However, I think the Asian faction may be splitted between partisans for a “quiet” war against the West, and people in favor of a fast escalation towards definitive Kiev regime (western puppet government) defeat. I don’t know who will win Putin mind. If Trump and Putin have a real deal to exchange countries between their influence zones, I’d say hard line Asians (and until some extent Atlantists) will win: Zelenski days may be numbered. However, if there isn’t any deal with US, soft line Asians will win, so Putin is going to keep on the Ukraine front slowly, accepting “de facto” the loss of his South American geopolitical piece.
Putin usually takes his time to decide, so I think we’ll have a Putin enigma for a while.
“The calm before the shock ” the youtube astrologer “Enmanuel von Zehnstern” proclaimed on Jan the 2., talking about the incipient events triggered by the full moon on Jan the 3. at 11am.
It was Venezuela and also, the terror attack on the electric grid in Berlin. I am not sure how much international attention this gets;
approx. 90000 people without electricity, more than two percent of the cities’ residents.
Three days later, the problem has not been resolved. The emergency generators and equipment have been sent to Ukraine, while Berlin’s mayor (if I read correctly) refused emergency order and military help.
Berlin is experiencing an unusual cold weather for these years, with up to minus ten degrees celsius.
Apparently, water pipes in apartments already burst, potentially, making it unlivable for an undefined time.
Enormous economic damage, and still no recovery.
Potentially the situation will last for longer now.
The government has called people prepping for outtages right extremists.
There were three heists in banks in Germany – the German secret service calling people who buy gold right extremists last year publicly. Gold vaults have been raided by professionals, and if the gold wasn’t registered – the owners cannot get compensated.
There is a clear collusion of interest in these incidents.
As I sat with my step father, who served the pharmaceutical industry, mainly US corporate, for decades as a mathematician.
“weren’t there damages to those taking the vaccines?” “Of course – heart muscle inflammations and all, all published in the studies.”
He explained to me, because of high costs in designing medication and low margins of return, the industry wanted to make RNA vaccines happen – a great opportunity to sell new products, where the human body would function as the factory for the proteins itself!
“They also have DNA vaccines – but they did not dare to make use of those, too risky”
“That would mean, the cells produce the desired protein – permanently…?”
“Yes, permanently”
“Isn’t it weird the whole affair lifted off in 2020 when since at least 2017 a wider economic crisis was predicted, based on raw fuel and mineral resource data…?”
“That, indeed, would be a strange thing to coincide…”
I had heard a great deal about vaccine damages. In my case, up to now, nothing, a certain exhaustion I often have is the same as before 2020 – a troubled mind, unrestive spirit, trying to do too much in too little time with no rest, my weak nerves under constant attack of an unpredictable social environment, if still in the safer part of our world when it concerns physical violence.
My christmas holidays have served me well and I am in good health again, even relaxed from time to time. Amazing. I have had to give up on harder muscle training these past months in favor of hiking and bike riding.
Recently, bike riding – to be out a lot in the Winter is a protection of one’s immune system against respiratory disease, as I have once again found out.
I am looking for answers. My friend, who did pcr tests in the laboratory and identified many anti-covid-vaccine claims as fraud over the years- maybe he still missed a lot of the bigger picture?
What about these claims of sudden spikes in cancer all around? Are there reliable sources…??
My interest in this story has been rekindled….
I’ve written before about how could be a possible Chavist backed insurgency in the “democratic” Venezuela. I repeat: there’s a wide panoplia of scenaries, from a near peaceful country (except a few terrorist attacks or sabotages) to a full high intensity civil war, going through a located guerrilla war or widespread guerrillas across the country. We don’t know really every hard fact to solve the violence equation, this explains the open panoplia about the near future.
What I think I can guess is a hard fact: Chavist regime has ruled Venezuela for a long time, first with its founder and then with his ideological heir. So Chavism has had time enough theirically to brainwash a full young generation, not only with the evident official propaganda, but with material advantages. In spite of the regime corruption, we can’t deny Chavism had a good public relations management: social subsidies and new houses were for its “thankful stomachs” who in exchange renewed their regime support voting fir it and filling the streets. Of course, during Maduro last times on the power, things worsened to his regime: inner corruption and outer sanctions made more and more people left their support to the “socialist” regime and go towards the opposition “troops”. We can’t identify real system support with official votes, because it’s suspected elections were manipulated, but seeing nowadays polarization in the country, I could guess near half of population has been Chavist until today. A part of them who we don’t know are real zealots. Indeed, I think nowadays there’s a hard line Chavist zealots group who cannot be despised by American triumphalism. How many? I don’y know: it’s another enigma. If the regime indoctrinated well its minions, and Maduro had a plan B, there could be soon an insurgence, from a low level to a high one. It would depend of the citizens support. It could be possible too, that Maduro (like another dictators) would have fool enough to not have planned his plan B. That’s possible too, if Chavists high spheres felt invulnerable (that reckless attitude isn’t strange when you look at other historical cases). Time will say which one of the possibilities I’m wondering becomes real.
@Other Owen, regarding Venezuela (and basically all of South America), you have no idea how incompetent most of this subcontinent militaries are. I can’t think of more than three armed forces in the region that could withstand a direct American assault for more than three or four weeks. And Venezuela is not amongst them.
>I suspect one of the most powerful spells a political figure could cast right now is to say, with even a smidgen of earnestness, “I was wrong and I will do everything in my power to make up for it.”
Yeltsin resigned from the Communist Party two years before it all collapsed. That was courage and instincts. Anybody see that level of courage and instinct out of any Murican polly? Let me know.
OMG, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine this! :-O
After all the speculation! This is some sort of MacGregor mating migration! 😀
Well my friend my all your endeavors be fortunate and may a geekess Bee cross your path.
V
https://xcancel.com/AgrisAcademy/status/2008280244105380254
A corporate guy summarizing what he saw inside Venezuela over the years. Not a fan of Maduro. He was corrupt and incompetent.
If you live in NewYorkifornia, I’d pay extra special attention to this particular part:
>The government opened grocery stores and sold staples below the cost we sold them to the government. In theory they used petro oil money to lower grocery prices. Our regular grocery outlets were forced out of business. When the government demanded we sell them products below cost we simply had to shut down. The populous became ever more dependent on the government handouts. (PS this is the mayor of New York City’s proposal.)
Northwind Grandma,
Well, you’re not wrong, but to me it sounds different. Yes, baño (pl. baños) can be translated as latrine, toilet. But where I’m from that sounds like someone wants to avoid saying the name of the bowl-shaped fixture out of prudishness and uses the noun for the room that contains it instead. So, it’s rather an affected synonym.
To me, the most usual meanings of baño are ‘bath’, as in the action of taking a bath (not the fixture where you do it, that’s a bañera) or simply ‘bathroom’ (although I tend to say cuarto de baño, literally “room of bath”). So, Peter Baths or Peter Bathrooms doesn’t necessarily sound that bad after all, but I suppose it could be different elsewhere.
Curt # 58:
A terrorist attack which generates such a big blackout is indeed a very important thing. It’s also a wry irony Berlin people find they lack enough generators thanks to the hatred their rulers have against Russia (EU countries leaders “love” Ukrainian cannon fodder only for their correlative anti-Russian hate). OK, dear Germans, enjoy what you voted…I wouldn’t trust anymore in German government if I were a German, I wouldn’t pay much attention with warnings about possible right terrorist attacks (although of course terrorism exists); they seem IMHO a scapegoat for German reckless attitude these last years. In addition to this, real useful idiots within far right maybe often infiltrated by intel services (bogey men are very needed from
every times).
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Bruno # 61:
Of course, Venezuela army wasn’t very strong, so he could be defeated shamefully by the evident US aerial supremacy (stealth planes included, me thinks) and a relatively “clean” commandos operation. Defeated but not destroyed, because only ground troops can finish the job. US has shown its military power in which is powerful yet, and ironically its weakness. I bet Trump knows he can’t and he doesn’t want to send ground troops massively towards Venezuela (US Army is overextended across the world and Trump doesn’t want to see black bags returning home, neither). Opportunely, Trump has chosen a relatively near home victim, within his evident influence area. Oh surprise.
By the way the new American protectorate government must purge soon its now nominally not Chavist army of its probable most Chavist troops and officers (Good luck with it), and prevent the Chavist civilian zealots get weapons to start an insurgency (good luck with this too).
I guess next Caracas puppet government will show with the western MSM help, the “democratic transition” Spectacle. Maybe it works if there’s a low level insurgence, but we’ll see if an higher level of political violence is generated in the future.
Finally, today crime rates in that failed state are very high, so the protectorate will have to fix this problem, or at least making it less contradictory with its happy and democratic Spectacle (good luck in this thing, too).
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The Other Owen # 64:
These selling strategies are named “political prices”. Bread and circus for the low class people. It’s as old as the Roman Empire whose expression I’ve (not cassually) used. I’m not surprised by these Chavist bribes. It’s not cassually it’s indeed the same proposal which said NY major. More populist bread and circus…
It’s also interesting how the regime managed to infiltrate trade unions and social activism there. A Chavist guy told me some years ago, with proud, that while in Europe countercultural alternative people was prosecuted and fined, in Venezuela its government financiated them. WTF? You can bet this “help” in exchange was becoming them into captive voters and eventually stormtroopers against the opposition.
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Miguel # 65:
Ha ha…well, I agree. It’s the same word, but not the same word between native spanish language speakers. General meaning is “bath” but in a certain
context is the “toilet”/“restroom”.
Well, my fallow commentors .. I shouldn’t have to state this, but Lower Slobovia HAS the bestest bagels of any of the antipodian regions of the mind… just seance-in.’;]
oops! I meant to type-in ‘fellow’ .. but perhaps fallow is appropriate, being that it IS Winter after all …. at least in Upper Slobovia.
About the utility of Venezuelan oils to the US
I have read both that:
The US Gulf Coast has a number of refineries designed for heavy oil such as Venezuela’s
and
Those refineries all closed years ago because of the reduced flow from Venezuela, so it would take years and billions to start using much oil from Venezuela.
Don’t know which is true. Even more than usual fog of war on this whole thing,
@Chuaquin, I don’t have an opinion about Turiel political positions, nor i think they have any relevance regarding his blogging activity. I’ve been reading his blog since 2013, and i can say that he mostly talks about resource depletion, energy sources, EROEI, etc.
It’s not only that he have acces to information, by the way. It’s that he understands this kind of matters very well, and can draw his own conclusions about what is happening. The analysis in the link is his own view about what can be interesting about Venezuelan heavy oil for the US, and does not enter into partisan politics.
>you have no idea how incompetent most of this subcontinent militaries are
Does that extend to the irregular guerilla forces? Then in that case, the oil companies hire a bunch of merc-, I mean, defense contractors to do private security and they all stay away from the jungles. And everyone lives happily ever after.
>I had heard a great deal about vaccine damages
In other news, Scott Adams is barely clinging to life, struggling with something that looks like turbocancer.
(He took the shot, one of those “science” trusters)
>Berlin is experiencing an unusual cold weather for these years, with up to minus ten degrees celsius.
That’s 14F in Murican. Another day Up North, here, people start complaining and buying bread and milk. Nothing like walking out to the car in your shorts and t-shirt when it’s that cold.
Jessica # 69:
I hadn’t heard of those special refineries. Heavy oil can be refined by proper technologies; economically is less efficient than light oils refining; and in terms of energetic efficiency is even less efficient. However, peak oil never sleeps, so it’s time to extract and use the worse quality oils…Second half of Hubbert curve is opening slowly (or not so slowly) in front of us.
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An interesting story about how worked oil industry during the “old good times” of Chavism. It’s well known Chinese oil industry was welcome then to Venezuela, but indeed (in spite of the proud title “Socialism of the XXIst Century”), the regime allowed, according its own laws, foreign private corporations “help”, to its official public oil company, PDVSA. In theory, this corporation under the state property had the oil extraction and crude selling monopoly, but there were some legal holes (big holes) where foreign inversions could go through them. One of these private corporations eager to work in Chavist Venezuela has been the spanish Repsol. When it started contacts with the regime to cooperate with the national company, Repsol bosses found a “little” problem: they had to ask permission
to the US government before working in
Venezuela. Well, the permission was allowed finally. This story’s a hard lesson to learn not only for the believers in the Spectacle of Bolivarian Revolution (what a strange socialism who needs the help of transnational capitalist corporations, cough cough), but also for spanish nationalist fantasies about being a sovereign country and more, a (secundary) geopolitical power which can influence economically and politically over the Hispanic America (cough).
>real useful idiots within far right maybe often infiltrated by intel services (bogey men are very needed from
every times).
All too true. However, what we saw from the theatrics lately, the glowies seem obsessed with trannies and furries. Who knows why, I guess you can say it’s – national security. That’s my suggestion for today, anytime anyone in gubmint uses that phrase, think about trannies, furries and Epstein.
(It’s all national security)
Best wishes for your break from this blog, whatever you have planned for this time.
I know our host doesn’t do online video, I actually am taking a break from watching Youtube this January. I’m starting to find a bit more time to tidy up a bit and hopefully will slepp a bit better and have a bit more energy inthe mornings. I’m going to try and cut out mobile browsing as well, although I have slipped up on that a bit I haven’t watched Youtube on mobile for a while.
I wonder if Trump has attacked Venezuela just to deliberately alienate European leaders who maybe haven’t really taken the bait so now he’s threatening to invade Greenland.
I’ll admit that, as a Canadian, seeing the US kidnap a sitting head of state and claiming monroe doctrine doesn’t fill me with joy or confidence in the US. I’m no fan of Maduro or his ilk, but I’m even less a fan of the US’ tendency to meddle in the internal affairs of other nations. It often doesn’t end well for the USA, but even more so, too many of the countries meddled in end up in ruins.
@Curt, if you go over onto JMG’s dreamwidth blog, you’ll find an enormous series of open post-style threads about covid. If you ask your question there, you’ll probably get deluged with information of assorted degrees of reliability.
JMG, I begin to wonder of perhaps congratulations are in order. Be that as it may, please accept my very best wishes for happiness and prosperity in your future life.
Good luck with your venture, ventures, or adventures,— whichever fits.
💨🎒🧳Northwind Grandma💨
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Guillem # 70:
I don’t despise Turiel wise writings about scientific and technical stuff, but I don’t have to share his opinions about geopolitics, history and national politics (in which he’s not evidently an expert). In his books, he usually points his opinions about those topics, more bluntly than in his blog. And like everybody in this world, he’s got his own biased views.
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The Other Owen # 75:
Thanks for your comments. I’ll take into consideration…
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Spanish right wing block is desperate to replace actual woke “socialist” government, so the polarization and the political tension is in full mode. Until some time ago, they limited themselves to their friendly MSM propaganda (correlative of government MSM opposite propaganda), but since a time ago, the opposition has started a real lawfare against the government. Some government members and some of their nearer “friends” have been accused of several charges of corruption. Sometimes there are evidences, too. Well, this opposition strategy seems opportunist to me, but it shows a true fact: nowadays, people who usually approach to professional politics here, has a very low human quality. Maybe they become politicians to become rich, it doesn’t matter how (for example, proffiting the COVID pandemics to get richer with masks business, cough cough…). Of course, I won’t be naïve to think this corruption problem only affects to the woke government and it isn’t a general political problem…
>I wonder if Trump has attacked Venezuela just to deliberately alienate European leaders
Nah, I think I’ll take him at his word when he said he wanted the oil. I do appreciate that New York bluntness. Other things that might have fed into this. Venezuela was making threatening noises against a neighboring country (Guyana, I think) a few months ago, wanting to take their oil (the universe has a sense of humor here). I think there was some warning shots fired against Venezuelan military assets harassing Guyana oil rigs or something like that. F-16s were involved. I think that was what got the deep state thinking “Well, while we’re down here, we might as well…”. Maduro, is a retard, IMHO.
The big unanswered question I have is how effective are Venezuelan guerillas at fighting? Whether or not this turns into another Vietnam will hinge on that. The deep state misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t make me very confident this will end well either. What’s the word some dissidents keep using? Competency crisis? Maduro is a retard, but then again, so are we. All of this fills me with the urge to stay out of it.
Chinese government reaction, after Trump has hijacked…sorry, arrested Maduro, looks like overacted, me think. Chinese diplomatic tantrum seems to me part of their Spectacle of pretending they’re angrier than they really are. I think the loss of the dwindling Venezuela light oil, and its huge (but problematic) heavy oil reserves doesn’t deserve such supposed rage. Indeed, China has free access to the Russian oil (with some discount thanks to its alliance with Russia) and has deals with the Saudis to buy their light and sweet oil. Maybe Chinese would be more upset with the geopolitical effect of US raid against Venezuela: the loss of a former Chinese piece in South America. China leaders can’t be happy with this today situation, but indeed they can comfortate themselves checking they have geopolitical and economic influence yet, beyond their Asian influence zone (for example in Africa). A battle has been lost, but the war for geopolitical hegemony isn’t over.
So, what real reasons would have the Chinese state to pretend being more outraged than usually? I think they are acting for their inner audience. Chinese people maybe want to see their diplomacy being rough against the Orange Monster, and they get what they maybe want.
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Western countries leftism doesn’t understand (and it doesn’t want to understand) the “mysterious” and repeated Trump success thanks to a majority of American voters. Oh, I also include Antonio Turiel in this lack of understanding, in spite of his scientific competence (which I don’t doubt). A heck of stereotypes have been thrown against the Orange Monster, of course ending with the rehashed accusation of Fascism (“reductio ad Hitlerum” fallacy). So according this thougstopper so loved by leftists, Trump voters are Fascists too…
I think to understand something or someone doesn’t mean to justify, but in near every liberal mind the taboo is strong (except a few scattered cases).
There’s an easy to find reason (between other several factors) which can explain Trumpian success in USA (and maybe the right wing success in other western countries today and in near future), but the left cannot see it by its biased own views. The elephant in the room’s the Democrat party hasn’t done it very well until today. In addition to its Russophobia in its Ukrainian crussade, I think its engagement in woke cultural wars has made a lot of Americans to be fed up of wokester b***t. Trump has been smart enough to get profit of this “woke hangover” for his own agenda. It’s said less than 10% of Americans support woke ideology today, so let’s do the math… However, western leftism has commited such a deep engagement in the woke doctrine, that its supporters and leaders are incapable to do the necessary and painful self criticism, before giving up that unpopular and outdated near religious dogma.
It’s interesting to see how the woke madness has been replicated by local left parties, at least here. Which has been correlative with the fast growing of (far) left supporters (and voters), equivalent to Trump with a local color. It’s interesting, too, that in last times, our “socialist” government has softened a lot its woke rethoric, but I think it’s too late to fix its previsible next electoral disaster…
@Chuaquin I can’t remember asking you or anybody else to agree with Antonio Turiel; The Venezuelan “event” has everything to do with oil, as Trump himself has stated. Turiel is a scientist that writes about natural resources, and sprcially about fossil fuels.Thus, I thought his opinion about this matter may have some relevance and so i shared it here.
If you are not interested, that’s your choice. But i’m also not forced to agree with you if you find him ,too leftist, biased, or having a dark side, because to me that is unrelevant when considering someone opinions. I can put it in Spanish: Si funcionan es lo que importa, y no si son galgos o podencos. Each of us is biased in some way.
I’m no oilman, but my understanding is that in terms of weight, the heavy crude coming out of Venezuela isn’t any worse to work with than the goop from Canadian Tar Sands. Indeed, like Canada– which has some conventional production– the majority of Venezuelan reserves are tar sands. Unlike Canada the Venezuelans aren’t currently exploiting them, I’m pretty sure.
re: oil
A bigger problem for US refineries is rather than the “heaviness” of the oil, which can be compensated for relatively easily, its “sourness”– like bitumen from the Canadian Tar Sands, this stuff is heavy in sulfur. That’s not a problem for the refinery per-se, except that if you don’t get the sulfur out you can’t sell the refined product in North America. (Ever notice it’s always “low-sulfur diesel”? The stuff that isn’t low-sulfur was banned decades ago.) Taking the sulfur out DOES require extra work and tooling at the refinery. I don’t know what the production quotas are like these days, but my understanding is that most refineries in the USA that can handle heavy sour oil are getting their fill of Canadian syncrude out of the tar sands.
On the other hand, it’s still a win for the USA to get more heavy, sour oil to the gulf coast refineries. Canada has virtually no infrastructure to export elsewhere, so US refineries can already buy from the tar sands at a discount vs the world market. Having another source of heavy sour crude (especially if it has no choice but sell to the US) is going to glut that market and drive prices down all the way to the cost of production. That’s not good for Canada or Venezuela, but it’s sure going to look good to Americans if they can pay less at the pump.
FWIW, I suspect that the court-mandated chapter 11 buyout of Citgo by vulture capitalist Paul Singer, and the fact that those Citgo shares were previously pledged as collateral for a rather large loan from Rosneft, has a lot to do with the sudden and bizarre kabuki-theatre extraction of Maduro.
Citgo, a US petroleum refining and distribution company, is majority-owned by PVDSA, aka Petroleum of Venezuela.
I think this wasn’t even technically about the oil, or even politics, so much as the oil money; probably some weird contractual legalese that if Maduro, who signed for the loan, is indicted by a U.S. court then the Rosneft loan gets discounted, or something.
(Amusingly, one of the charges in Maduro’s indictment is possession of illegal machine guns in violation of the National Firearms Act. The online gun-meme community is gonna have fun with that one.)
tldr: American military personnel were deployed into harm’s way so that a hedge fund vulture can get the deal he wants.
Something I thought last night: for years now people have been trying to warn the US political class, and especially the Democrats, that if they didn’t stop their shenanigans and shape up they were going to unleash forces they can’t control. Well, time’s up.
While I still don’t think Trump is Hitler 2.0 — nor is Mamdani going to be Stalin 2.0 — what the events of the past week have made clear to me is the safeties are now off and anything goes. The old rules are no longer in force and the new rules haven’t been agreed on yet, and won’t be for some time. Now is the time of warlords, whether their fiefdom is a city or a hemisphere.
As JMG said last week, this flight to the fringes and chaos will create its own backlash and flight back to the center and order, but as he’s also repeatedly emphasized, this comes with its own dangers, arguably worse than the ones we’re currently facing.
May cooler heads prevail and may the gods take pity on us.
Random thought: I’m not sure how common this feeling is among other autistic people, but I don’t like the term “on the spectrum” at all. It reeks of yet another attempt by normies to sell their deep discomfort with our existence as virtue, and it’s perversely exactly the sort of euphemistic talking-around-the-point word game (which spectrum, again?) that autists like me find so frustrating in other contexts.
That said, if you insist on calling me “on the spectrum,” I’d like to put in a bid for the 710–716 MHz range, as this has nostalgic value for me. Thank you.
I’m sitting in New York City’s Penn Station, killing a little time while waiting for the boarding call for my train back to Rhode Island. A couple of brief comments:
Vitranc, I’m sorry to say that tentacled cuties were in short supply at the Gnostic meeting yesterday. So, for that matter, were shoggoths and Deep Ones, though I have my suspicions about some of the people I passed walking through Brooklyn on the way there.
Pygmycory, it’s not supposed to fill anyone outside our borders with joy or confidence. It’s a reminder that heads of state who don’t toe the US line may face personal consequences. I’m not saying that that’s a good thing, just that it’s the reality. As Thucydides wrote, “the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.”
Mary, alas, not yet — but I have hopes.
Slithy, ha! I’ll take something up in the gamma ray wavelengths.
>American military personnel were deployed into harm’s way so that a hedge fund vulture can get the deal he wants.
Be, all that you can be.
Slither Toves # 88..
Well, I personally wear my psuedo-quasi spectrum badge with pride .. on the physiology, of where I sit! Not um, bummed, whatsoever!
And to Mr. Greer in your reply to S. Toves above .. so, does that make you the 50 Foot Druid? And, if so .. just how do you go about tucking yo-self into that train car – or do you plan on hanging on to roof, giant tentacled fingers curled through window openings for purchase? Cue tacky SiFi Horror celluloid production. ‘;]
The Venezuela thing came out of nowhere, but now that I’ve learned they have the largest oil reserves in the world, it makes more sense. It reminds me very much of the fracking boom a few years back, which also seemed to come out of nowhere. It appears Trump may have papered over the effects of peak oil once again, and kicked the can down the road possibly another decade or so.
John – Sincere best wishes to you as we get ready to begin the Year of the Horse –
freedom, movement, adventure, new beginnings – and as we wrap up shedding the old in the waning Year of the Snake.
I’d like to pose a question to the entire gathered commentariat and hopefully illicit some thoughtful comments, opinions and sources of information that
are found in few forums outside of this one: Could the Trump administration’s Venezuelan operation be a shrewd land developer’s feint to move attention in the opposite direction of the real prize – Greenland and other points north in the Arctic that could prove to be far more lucrative for resource extraction in the long run, and offer less in the way of longstanding human claims, problems and posturing by many interested and powerful people, groups, nations or alliances? As in the “Venezuela is the new Vietnam” theory being discussed, or in thinking about the quagmires of Iraq or Afghanistan…
Greenland and the Arctic are basically uninhabited, and claims on the region that are largely spurious have not had to be defended – yet – except as a matter of somewhat polite international debate of a mostly theoretical nature. But as the search for resources, particularly hydrocarbons, becomes more intensely desperate, seemingly impossible stratagems become more plausible, at least in the boardrooms and war rooms of powerful nations that have capital to invest and armies to keep occupied and occupying. Hence, “Seward’s Folly” may well morph into “Trump’s Folly”. Whether it can be successful remains to be seen.
Obviously the climate and technical challenges could prove to be insuperable. Still, the research done in Greenland over the past several years can’t only be in relation to climate change, can it?
Will Trump call on Musk to prove the plausibility of his wet dream to colonize Mars with a project a little closer to home, to potentially solve a problem of much more immediate concern?
When nations of the northern hemisphere look into their Arctic back yards, they must be tantalized by the possibilities of a true conquest of that region. Who will get there first? Who will even be mad enough to try? Who will be able to defend the gains they make, if any are even achieved? Will nature, as always, simply have the last laugh? I hope the learned members of the Ecosophia blog commentariat will consider and comment on the truly seductive possibilities of a new “Donroe Doctrine” – North to the pole! – annexing Greenland AND Canada on the way. Is this likely? Far more likely in my opinion than Denmark and/or the EU achieving or even attempting a plan to develop the Arctic. But I do believe that China and Russia are making plans in this direction. Desperate times call for… thoughts?
@ Guillem #53
Thank you for the Turiel article…. and in particular the map he has posted in that article, which says a whole bunch.
Partly what it says is that future quality of life for anyone on earth probably hangs on not living next or near any source of fossil fuel or desirable minerals, because the scavengers will visit and pluck you, your land, and your people clean before they leave for the next find.
If your land is entirely lacking in mineral resources, be thankful!
In honour of the map, and what it depicts, an old Enya song… 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-ofM8aGpxU
May you, Guillem, and also all the lovely Ecosophia commenters and readers, all be well and stay free in 2026…,and may unlooked for blessings come your way!
Oops! In my comment # 83 when I was writing about equivalent of Trump here in my country, I was thinking in far right guys, not far left like I’ve written by mistake. I’m sorry!
@Jeff (#94):
Russia successfully moved to take over the Eurasian section of the Arctic region from the 1580s onward through the 1600s, and it had fully incorporated these territories into its empire by the end of the 1700s. Thus about 180 degrees of land within the Arctic Circle, out of 360 degrees in all, have been Russian territory for as long as the USA has existed. And these Russia-Arctic lands have significant long-term populations, both indigenous and Russian. Also, Russia has for centuries used the Arctic Ocean, during the months when when it is not iced over, as its maritime back yard; and with 20th-century developments in icebreakers and submarines it has extended that use to include the iced-over months.
The remaining half of the lands within the Arctic Circle are mostly Canadian territory, with small parts of them (Alaska) belonging variously to the USA and and (chiefly, but not exclusively, Greenland) to the Scandinavian countries.
Trump and his advisors probably know little or nothing of this Russian history in the Arctic, and mistakenly suppose that the Arctic regions are no-man’s lands, free for anyone to take over as they may be able. (For them, also, annexing Greenland may well be just their opening move, to be followed by the eventual annexation of Canada.) Such an attempt will inevitably lead to all-out war between the USA and Russia over control of the Arctic, with Russia likely to pull out all the stops in defending its ancient claims to about half of the Arctic lands.
Additionally, the US military establishment — sclerotic as it seems to be — probably still thinks of any Russian missile attack on the USA as having to pass over the Arctic region, which indeed is the shortest great-circle route between the two countries. And we have long-standing defenses against such an attack. But Russian developments in navigable hypersonic missiles over the last few years has made a similar attack over Antarctica equally feasible, and — so far as is publicly known — we have done little or nothing to defend our territory against hypersonic missile attacks coming up from Russia over our southern border.
Worrysome times indeed!
I was too late to the previous open thread to ask this: are there still plans afoot for a multi-day Ecosophia gathering in Providence this summer?
The Other Owen # 82:
OK, democracy and human rights mask has fallen from the Uncle Sam face (thanks Trump-and I say this without cynism). However, acts have effects, not always controlled nor known by its active agents. Germany started its two finally disastrous world wars apparently winning (oops, I hope not being accused for “reductio ad Hitlerum”) and many other empires too, but hegemony is hard to keep alive in the long term. I didn’t know the dirty fact of Maduro harassing Guyana with his toy army…(facepalm here). About possible guerrilla warfare in Venezuela, it’s an enigma because we don’t have enough hard data about real situation there.
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Guillem # 84:
Of course, the Venezuela business is about oil, but also about geopolitics and maybe hidden factors we don’t know today. I don’t despise Turiel apportation to the debate nor your link for him, but it seems I’ve disturbed you when I’ve pointed the biased leftist tendence of your hero (I’m sorry, I won’t go insisting in that way).
However, if you have read another comments of mine, you could see I don’t have leftist authors as my personal black beasts. For example, I’ve written about Col. Pedro Baños, who’s clearly in the Right wing (flirting too
much with far right, me think), and I’ve pointed critically his bias and possible agenda too, without throwing every of his opinions to the garbage. I only ask you be careful with everything you read and hear.
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Slithy T.#87:
Trump isn’t Hitler, but he’s got an agenda which maybe we don’t want to know better. Oh, and the opposite to woke cultural wars is the right wing correlative cultural wars, so good for a rational debate about the really important things…(I’ve written it with sarcasm here).
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JMG # 89:
Well, I don’t have much pity for Maduro and I see he’s been playing with fire too much time without understanding how hard are geopolitics; but I hope he has a fair trial (if he arrives alive to it).
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Jeff # 94:
I don’t know wether Trump’s thinking to annexionate Greenland for the USA or not. What I can only say is that in the case he’s been planning that idea and he would order it in a near future, it would be ironic the global warming he denies in public would benefit his economical interests in it.
@Curt and whoever cares:
German authorities claim the terrorist attac was committed by the far LEFT, not right.
Makes more sense as well…, maybe…
Chaquin, China might be a bit grumpy about Venezuela because of the additional 22billion usd they just loaned them… on top of however much that totals out to over the last 10+ years.
JMG,
Enjoy some well-earned time away from your two websites.
@Chuaquin, it seems to me that your way of talking is rather provocative, and somehow unpolite. here. Yet, this is your fault and not mine, so i will not take offense. My answer to your comment is, once again and for the third time, that i don’t care about Turiel political positions, and much, much less about your own, or who you criticize or not… Can you possibly understand that? What is so challenging about it for you?
@Scotlyn
Glad that you found it interesting. I also didn’t knew that there were so many resources on the Orinoco basin.
Some years ago, I also didn’t imagine that Trump way of making America great again would involve such maneuvers. But of course in an age of scarcity, we can expect a merciless fight over the last good mineral deposits.
May you and your loved ones also be blessed, y recuerdos a tu marido. 😉
Guillem.
@Chuaquin
I would rather my country America be honestly selfish rather than use human rights as a smokescreen to pursue selfish actions.
“we have done little or nothing to defend our territory against hypersonic missile attacks coming up from Russia over our southern border.”
There’s a novel thought considering that Venezuela is to our south. A missile detection system there like the old DEW line but aimed south?
As for Greenland, as I’ve pointed out before you need a polar projection or an old fashioned globe to see what is going on up there. Regular maps just don’t cut it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Sea_Route#/media/File:Map_of_the_Arctic_region_showing_the_Northeast_Passage,_the_Northern_Sea_Route_and_Northwest_Passage,_and_bathymetry.png
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/mamdanis-rich-kid-commie-tenant-advocate-starts-crying-when-asked-about-millionaire
Oh my. Wealthy parents with private property. I wonder how she’d feel if that were seized first.
As a distraction from the world’s worries and some personal drama, let me present to you one of the most stubbornly frustrating and perplexing mathematical facts: we have no idea what probability is.
What’s frustrating is that the problem isn’t that we don’t yet know how to work with probability mathematically. Probability has been axiomatized in multiple equivalent ways and there is rarely any problem about measuring, estimating, or applying it either in practice or in theory. On an operational level, probability is a solved problem*.
But when you ask “OK, but what is the thing you’re measuring?” honest statisticians and probability theorists have to throw up their hands. Every attempt to answer that simple question has failed. I don’t have time to look at them all, but the two definitions/interpretations most commonly trotted out as the One True Definition of probability are frequentist probability and subjective probability.
The former defines the probability of an event E as its long-run relative frequency: if an event E (ex: a single fair die rolls a 1) has a probability Pr(E) = 1/6 on a given repeatable trial, then given enough trials the proportion of trials in which E occurs will converge to exactly 1/6. The main problems with this definition is that it treats a theorem of probability theory (the Law of Large Numbers) as the definition of probability, and that it covers only a very category of things; in particular, it can’t make sense of the probability of nonrepeatable events (ex: which team will win a particular upcoming game) or events whose outcome is already physically decided but not yet known (ex: whether an already-flipped coin landed heads).
Subjective probability remedies these problems by moving probability into the mind: a probability is a “degree of belief” or measure of an agent’s uncertainty about the outcome of an event, past or present. Essentially, a probability is an educated guess. This has the advantage of being able to apply to literally anything and so allows decision theory to be applied to literally anything. Big win for the practice of statistics.
Its drawbacks are that (a) insisting that probability is all in our heads and not at all in the world stretches credulity, and (b) it’s not clear that degrees of belief actually exist in any meaningful sense. In fact, it’s not even clear what degrees of belief are supposed to be; several operational definitions have been proposed, but essentially all are based on how a rational agent would bet on a given event occurring, and so fall victim to some variation of the Puritan objection: an otherwise rational agent might refuse to gamble on purely-moral grounds.
But there’s a bigger, more subtle problem with all the definitions: not one of them can provide a plausible account of what exactly rational agents are actually doing when they calculate their subjective probabilities. Let’s say I think the chance of Bob McRoberston winning the upcoming school board election is 65%. Therefore I must rationally believe the probability of his opponent, Robert McBobson is less than 35%. (Less than to account for the nonzero chance that neither win because, for example, a large meteor kills both them during a debate.) But where the heck did I get 65% from? And again, 65% of what?
There’s a third One True Definition, which is the propensity theory of probability, but no one can say what a propensity is supposed to actually be in a non-vacuous way.
So anyway, yeah, probability is weird.
* Well, actually… but that’s a very subtle story for another time, perhaps.
@Chuaquin the problem Trump faces is political and not military in nature. The US could easily steamroll Venezuela if it wanted to. However, there would inevitably be casualties, and the more of those, the more politically costly the war becomes, up to the point of becoming a liability.
@Other Owen, yes, it does. Irregulars are as incompetent as most militaries in the region – it’s telling that when the two face each other, the militaries, incompetent as they may be, usually prevail. Mercs would do the job quite well and I think you have a fine point there. That’s what’s probably going to happen.
@Robert #97
Thank you for some truly enlightening history of Russian involvement in the Arctic! I wonder if Putin and Trump
(or their eventual successors) might “divvy up” territory in the Arctic region, much like Hitler and Stalin initially attempted in Eastern Europe prior to their eventual hostilities? I doubt that it would work out any better this time around, and an all out war could be the result as you suggested.
@Chuaquin #99
Irony can be pretty ironic, can’t it? Or was it just clever subterfuge? 🤔
Best wishes, Mr Greer
Hello JMG (and commentariat), what’s your opinion on Tom Murphy? His views were aligned with yours a while ago, but it seems he’s diverged after reading Ishmael, and has gone “off the sustainability deep end”, calling for a return to hunter-gathering in his usual witty way. He’s also been calling agriculture of any kind unsustainable recently, and I thought I’d ask your opinion of it!
Sub-question: What are your thoughts on the book “The Dawn of Everything”?
Robert M. # 97:
Artic geopolitics may be heating soon in historical terms, due to global warming. When the Artic Ocean will be ice free more and more time during the year cycle, it will be more suitable to ship trade and military Navies.
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Pamouna # 100:
If the attack was really commited by far left nutties, that supposed fact doesn’t invalidate my hypothesis about intel services possible infiltration. Far left guys are equally vulnerable to the “agents provocateurs” as their hated far right enemies!
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Anonymous # 101:
I didn’t know that fact, money is money. However, taking into account Chinese whole economics power, such a big economical loss is painful in the short term, but less in the long term…Maybe I’m too stubborn, but I smell some overacting yet.
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Guillem # 103:
I’m sorry if you find my writing style too offensive to you. Maybe I went too far in my criticism, but I think I’m far to be a hater/troll here.
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Patrick # 105:
Human rights and democracy have been a commonplace to justify imperialist USA foreign politics until yesterday, so at first sight, when Trump has given up this rehashed subterfuge, it’s a relief for everybody. However, the “fig leaf” fall is exposing roughly the US shameful true face, so we can say farewell to the soft power influence across a world who is seeing perfectly the US ugly face.
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The Other Owen # 107:
Interesting link. About Mamdani himself, I think he’s no doubt IMHO a populist politician, which doesn’t play his game in the right wing like Trump, but in the liberal side. He’s not a real commie (Spectacle), but he disguises very well his populist speech (which means demagogy) in a fake Marxist slang. Let’s wait to see what this rich family guy does in the future. Some people see him as Trump nemesis, but I’ve got my doubts.
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Bruno BL # 109:
Every problem (economical, military, social…), until some extent, is finally a political problem. Trump probable fear to send massive troops into Venezuela ground is a political fear, like you’ve written. It seems the after Vietnam syndrome is strong yet in American minds, so let’s go on
fighting “easy” wars and wait the USA (and we the NATO vassals) doesn’t be engaged into a big real war directly (can you guess how a not prepared army could fight against a true strong enemy?).
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Jeff # 110:
Well, what I wanted to say is it could be an “historical irony”, but I’m afraid I’ve written what I’ve written in # 99 too fast, me think…Indeed, I’m not very proud of that expression.
Last fiscal year the US Treasury paid out $1.22 trillion in interest on the national debt. That works out to $3.34 billion per day. So if the US seizes or is gifted $2 billion of Venezuelan oil they could hold off paying interest for all of 14 hours.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/interest-expense-avg-interest-rates/
That’s assuming they don’t have to pay for the oil. Venezuelan oil is similar to Canadian bitumen sands. It needs to be melted with steam and dissolved in solvent for transport. This is expensive. Cost per barrel varies depending on how much oil each well produces to amortize the cost. I’ve seen a number of $42-56 per barrel. Selling price is well below WTI or Brent because the refining demands are greater. Maybe $20 per barrel less. These numbers are hard to find.
https://incorrys.com/energy/oil-supply/international-oil-supply/full-cycle-cost-of-venezuelan-oil/
What it boils down to is Venezuelan oil is not madly profitable and I can’t see that annexing the Venezuelan oil fields is going to make a significant dent in the US debt burden. Which implies that more resource grabs by the US must be expected.
@ Guillem #104
¡Igualmente! y ¡bendiciones a todos tus queridos, también! 🙂
With your permission, I’d like to tell you about a topic which isn’t directly related with this hiatus post nearly monothematic thing. Last week, I had to go with one of my friends to the hospital, because she felt sick. We went into the ER hospital section, because she had big pains. Luckily, we hadn’t to wait too much time for the doctor. While we were waiting for him/her, I had enough time to look around and see how much crappy and weared looked like those public hospital facilities. I won’t bore you with a full description of that hospital rooms, I’m only will say chairs were old and maybe dirty, for example. State funded health services in Spain are held by “autonomic”(regional) governments, not by central Madrid govt( so its problems can’t be blamed to the “Perro Sanchez” crew, our wokeized national leader, like he’s called here within the right parties tension strategy). I want to say, regional govt in my region and another country zones is controlled by the right and far right alliance, so…I think they’re cutting money for public health services, at will, not casually. Last years, some private health corporations clinics and hospitals new buildings have been started, with our regional and local govts blessing and possibly money subsidies. This situation can easily lead to people to use more private hospitals than (defunded) public ones. A similar “modus operandi” can be found in local and regional right leaders in the education thing (also under regional/local financiation): the more they subsidize private schools (usually Catholics), the more defunded are state schools. What a surprise…
I didn’t comment nothing of my thoughts to my friend, because in spite of being mildly poor, she’s right winged in politics and she can be very stubborn at arguing.
In addition to this, I’m afraid the last in the welfare state coffin could be the endless EU fondness in throwing money into the weapons (and corruption) black hole named Ukraine. It seems the perfect subterfuge to dismantle state funded facilities.
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In terms of (geo) political Machiavellism, the Venezuela Trumpian strike has been apotheosical. However, this tryumphalism shouldn’t hide a dirty truth, IMHO. I’m going to point the fly on the soup and remember the raw power can be implemented roughly, because it evidently works, but in ethical terms: how do you can arrest and blame a foreign tyrant for his evident and less evident crimes (by the way, some of them bizarre to believe them), and at the same time, be excused by your own dirty things?
Of course, a dictator isn’t the same as a democratic elected head of state, but I can remember Trump historial isn’t very clean. For example, he overheated so much his true believers not very time ago, until they ended rampaging the Capitol. Trump was clever enough to not being too explicit with his utter wish (so he couldn’t be blamed for it easily by Democrats), but I think his angry supporters understood him well. The Capitol incident looks like to me too similar to an attempted coup d’état.
Of course, Trump doesn’t mind this ethical contradiction (he’s reckless about it like in another things), but moral flaws are part of prestige, and this term influences in soft power persuasion, which in the short term doesn’t mind in front of raw power, but in the long term it’s worth to be thought with more interest.
Wer here
Well about the situation in Venezuela so far the goverment there did not collapsed and I don’t know what are the possibilities of blitzkrieg in the age of drones and other nasty things.
Chuaquin
I’ve once read a book written by a polish corespondent who was in Iraq for years after the invasion took place and who observed the happenings there and he wrote “The same people who were celebrating the fall of the (fat Sunni- Shia term for Saddam Hussein) were ironically the same people who several years later were constructing bombs in their basements and shouting “death to America”” basically that any form of colonial rule by the US ends up with the country destroyed and it’s population migrating en mase etc. It is not Saddam loyalists who were fighting the Us forces in Iraq during the civil war but the ordinary people angered enough they ended up joining ISIS etc.
The same happened in Afganistan and every other place the US ended up….
Venezuela’s oil is mostly tar sands and extracting those is very different from just drillong an oil well as I assume anybody who is reading this blog is aware. The Eroei is very low just like fracking and If you factor in things like insurgence attacks and piss poor infrastructure in Venezuela itself you get a grim picture.
And Trump joked apparently about capturing Kadyrow somewhere does anybody belive in any idiotic deal between Trump and Putin
JMG belives the trump is a genius or something in my opinion he is someone crazy enough that will demand for Russia to hand over Siberia on the internet type. He just probably started another Vietnam or Iraq here
I’ll disagree with the commentariat and say: there will be no Vietnan in Venezuela unless the gringos botch it really, really, REALLY bad, like mass rapes, firebombing cities and mass starvation.
It also seems to be that’s too early to call the end of the American Empire as it seems to be passing thru a phase change and not a desintegration. That phase change will be a mix of Hadrian and Pompeii: Abandon what can’t be kept (Hadrian in Dacia) and convert junior partners into occupied territories with governors and diminished local rulers(Pompeii in Syria and Judaea). The americans seem to be getting ready to abandon the ME and Europe while tightening control in the Americas and some presence in the Pacific.
Also by controlling half of the oil reserves in the world directly or indirectly Festung America can get rid of the iranians either by finally go all in or by disengaging the ME and tell both the jews and persians to pund sand since shutting down Hormuz, the only card the iranians have in their hand, will no longer affect America, Hormuz will be a chinese/indian/euro/japanese problem.
Finally, Iran: It seems we are getting our first victim of the global warming. Iranian cities ran out of water, looming farming collapse due to lack of water is one of the main drivers of the hyperinflation they are having there. The rioters, this time, are not westernized students and paid mossad agitators but merchants that are being wiped by the inflation and state violence is not stoping the protests. There’s a non-zero chance that this time the Islamic Republic will fall,finishing, with decades of delay, the New American Century plan for the Middle East.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/blackstone-craters-after-trump-teases-institutional-ban-single-family-homes
Not often I’m surprised but you can call me surprised at this. This is up there with Jamie Dimon coming to Jesus a few months ago. Perhaps they actually do want to fix the housing problem in this country after all. I guess late is better than never. I guess.
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>Mercs would do the job quite well and I think you have a fine point there. That’s what’s probably going to happen.
My best guess for how this turns out – more like Afghanistan with the Soviets and less like Vietnam. They’ll be able to control the cities (and what really matters, the oil rigs) but the countryside and especially the jungles and mountains become no-mans-land. Probably to some extent they already are but that will go into overdrive. However, it’s Soviet Afghanistan with mercenaries, I mean, private security contractors. Provided it all pays its own way, this could be sustainable. Then again, wasn’t Iraq supposed to pay its own way and it turned into a litterbox of cat candy? I’m not confident in their abilities to make anything happen.
Hello JMG,
I was rereading some old posts and found this:
Owen, history says you’re wrong. The social and political chaos that follows the collapse of a civilization doesn’t settle down that quickly; sure, you have brief attempts at stabilization — the Lombard kingdom of Italy and Charlemagne’s empire are examples — and then down they go. Since we don’t have the kind of highly stable subsistence economy that enabled Chinese dynasties to recover after 2-3 centuries of chaos — quite the contrary — the full 500-year dark age cycle is our most likely future.
This might be the case for most countries, but not all. Here in SE asia, for example, we have people practising agriculture very reminiscent of the old styles like in Indonesia, Laos and Vietnam. I could see those holding steady amidst the declines, and blooming into sultanates and a cornucopia of new empires. Thoughts?
Another query: you mentioned in another post “Wesley, one of the great flaws of contemporary climate modeling is that it tends to assume that every part of the world will have the same temperature increase. Not so; paleoclimatic models suggest that temperatures will rise only modestly in tropical areas, but will soar around the poles. In the long run — as in, after the ice caps melt — I expect the shores of the Arctic Ocean to be a major center of culture and civilization; I figured Tony was asking about the short to middle term, and in that frame, I expect east and south Asia to do very well.”
What are these short to middle terms in numbers? Because from the reading I’ve done, we’d need an 8-12 celsius (ballpark) temperature increase which would literally end civilisation in the rest of the world. I just am curious as to your thoughts on this; thanks for the quality information over the decade!
It’s been 10 years since i looked at your blog the first time (at the ripe old age of 13) so cheers!
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/trump-admin-declares-war-added-sugar-embraces-real-foods-massive-maha-reset
My prediction a year or two ago was they would start outlawing fast food and junk food. This is probably the first step in this. I don’t think it’s a bad thing but they were warned about this 10+ year ago and did nothing. If you own a fast food franchise or a junk food plant, now would be the time to sell out and do something else.
>Owen, history says you’re wrong.
It would be less confusing to know what I was wrong about. 500 years out, I have no idea what things will look like, good or bad. I stop at 100 years or so. I think the world of 2100 will have a lot less people, look very Amish in character and the major conflicts will all be religious based. But who knows?
Chauquin @ 113 et. al., about the newly elected mayor of NYC., newest darling of the more naive part of our left wingers: The Moslem diaspora is possibly the least well liked of our immigrant communities, for any number of reasons. I, myself, along with many others, have learned from painful personal experience, that I do not want to do business with these folks, I don’t care what country they nominally and allegedly come from. You want to call that bias, go ahead.
This particular group did not build our railroads, does not pick out crops, and when was the last time anyone ever saw a member of the umma wielding a shovel, or broom.? Their poster child member of congress, Rep. Omar, is roundly disliked; not even fellow leftists seem to want to have much to do with her. This in stark contrast to the home grown followers of the late Elijah Muhammad, who have in the decades since the FBI assassinated one or their charismatic leaders, earned a certain acceptance. I think the present day Moslem faction was looking around for someone, preferably not from the Middle East, to improve their image and fixed on the charming and ambitious young man then serving a term in the NY legislature.
Look at what is nowhere to be seen in his policy proposals. One would think NYC, with crumbling infrastructure, would be a great place to have a public works program. Put New Yorkers to work doing useful and necessary stuff, and infuriate the MAGA faction while doing so, Cash stipends to the desperately poor, bypassing the social PMC bureaucracy, have been shown to be both effective and cheaper than than maintaining small armies of social welfare functionaries. And then there is Wall Street, through which a Niagara of cash flows every day, courtesy of infrastructure built and maintained by New Yorkers. So, why not impose what is I believe called a Tobin tax? People who trade in the billions can afford to pay NYC a tenth of a tenth or thereabouts of their gains. No that need not affect the guy or gal who owns a minute amount of stock which he or she might want to sell someday to finance a house purchase or a kid’s education. These are easy, off the top of my head notions that anyone could come up with; the point is that I doubt Mondami is a serious person. He knows he can’t be president and will very likely never be governor. Any number of accomlished black and hispanic persons of significant achievement, just to mention two important constituencies, are standing in his way. Mondami’s assignment is to make Muslim governance look benign,while steering city contracts to his ethnic compradores.
There are a couple of factors about the Venezuela attack/ Maduro abduction that I have thought about. I am not claiming to have the whole story. It seems there are some refineries on the US Gulf Coast that are set up to handle the Orinoco heavy oil, and probably the regular Maracaibo oil as well. They were set up and owned by PDVSA/CITGO,a Venezuelan company. I guess they can handle the Canadian tar sands, but the chemical makeup of the Orinoco works better for them. CITGO was also bought by a vulture capitalist, Paul Singer, who is a major Trump donor ,at a greatly reduced price.
I know the Maracaibo field is in terminal decline and the Orinoco expensive , hard to access and low EROI. I wonder though if Trump &co, in addition to the money he has received from Singer, might reckon that this will postpone or at least confuse the arrival of peak oil until after the Nov 26 elections, and hopefully for them the Nov 28 as well, in addition to keeping his jingoistic MAGA base enthused.
Putting oneself in their position, it makes a twisted kind of sense.
Stephen
,
Curt#59
Cáncer increasing by COVID “vaccines”
Fuente: Fundación Cáncer Vida https://share.google/TwuvcSbDKGP8QmRp4
See Page 42
JMG, all the best for your (supposed 😉 ) upcoming relocation (after arousing so much speculation, if the target location should be anything mundane, obvious, and boring, there will be a lot of disappointment among your readers… 😛 )
I’d like to point out three offers for everybody – given the current times, I hope they might be welcome and useful for some of your readers:
1. I perform a formal blessing each Wednesday for which everybody can sign up:
https://thehiddenthings.com/categories/weekly-blessings
This is a standing offer – just go to my site whenever you’d like to be blessed the next Wednesday, and add your request as a comment to the very latest Blessing post. I’m collecting signups all week for the upcoming Wednesday, i.e. you’re not obliged to sign up on a certain day.
2. If you’re feel something more hands-on (or rather: hands-up) might be in order, a little while ago I published a short series on “Blessing: How to Get Started in 9 Simple Steps”:
https://thehiddenthings.com/blessing-how-to-get-started-1
3. And finally, for anybody who feels called to spiritual healing, or who feels they might profit from it, I’m republishing the Modern Order of Essenes material as an online course, laid out in bite-sized chunks:
https://thehiddenthings.com/topics/moe-course
We’re currently about the enter the Master grade, but this, too, is a standing offer – you can start with the very first unit whenever it suits you, and the comment sections of the units will stay open for questions etc.
Of course, these three things aren’t mutually exclusive… 😉
I hope you have all had wonderful and relaxing holidays, and I wish everybody a happy, healthy and prosperous new year 2026!
Milkyway
@ luciano geronimo #118
” Iranian cities ran out of water, looming farming collapse due to lack of water is one of the main drivers of the hyperinflation they are having there. The rioters, this time, are not westernized students and paid mossad agitators but merchants that are being wiped by the inflation and state violence is not stoping the protests.”
Could it be that Operation Popeye, or its descendants, are at work here?
Considering what the news is all about, I’ve decided to go on a news fast for a while. Things will either happen, or they won’t, or some mixture of the above. Meanwhile, it came to me last night that various cries from certain corners of “Trump=Hitler” are way off base. What I’m reminded of right now is a certain Corsican corporal with big ideas, and “Long Live the Emperor!” Theme music, well, not Waterloo. Maybe Tchaikovsky’s best -known Overture, formerly the climax of every 4th of July concert, complete with a cannon and fireworks. Except that this time, our home-grown Napoleon and Russia are on the same side!
And it this time it won’t be exile to Elba that ends it, but (I recognize the symptoms, as I pull on my support stockings and take another water pill and open another 4-pack of certain paper rolls) but the One who Comes For US All in the end, after which we see ourselves and what we’ve done with perfect clarity, and for a lifelong showman……
“History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Marx said that.”
“Groucho?” I think so.
Anyway, back to what’s real…. wake me up when something happens that we truly need to know.
Hello JMG.
I had been fond (as others here do from time to time) of calling you the Archdruid, but now I read you have been ordained(?) as a bishop in a Gnostic church, so how shall we address you properly? Father? Congratulations!
And time off seems like a great idea, especially since learning recently that you are creeping up the economic ladder. Congratulations on that as well! Well done and you deserve it. Maybe some time off spending your hard earned dollars, or maybe not. Either way your choice and yours to enjoy. Do Enjoy!
And last, for now, some time ago I thought to comment on your offer several weeks ago, seems like last year, to write about three topics instead of one for the 5th Wed. of that month. Wow, what a splendid idea, more is always better when it comes to your sharing of your thoughts with us here. Your generosity is appreciated.
Long Life Peace many many thank yous
Jeffrey # 112:
I didn’t know nothing about Tom Murphy until you’ve written about him. The short depiction you’ve done about his “attractive” thoughts makes me very lazy to know better him, if you’ve understood well his ideology (I think you’ve done it well, by my fast online “research”). OK, it’s anarchoprimitivism in its splendorous way me think: So, the usual hunters-gatherers life idealization, primitive communism shamefully borrowed from Marx and Engels, agriculture as original sin, and so on. By the way, we really don’t know much about Prehistory, so everybody can make up whatever ideology he/she wants to project his/her favorite unicorns into the far past.
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Martin B. 114:
Heavy oil refining process is technically possible but economically less efficient. I agree. However, I’m afraid there will be serious attempts to refine it massively, because better quality and cheaper oils aren’t available like in the past; in spite of heavy oils low rentability and lower energetic efficiency. Social and ecological effects could be a disaster, but in the Trumpian mind, who cares about them?
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Wer # 117:
I agree. Venezuela government didn’t collapsed. New “protectorate” leaders should start a “de-Chavistization” of their bureaucracies as soon as possible, especially the nominally today anti-Chavist (?) army. Something like the 1945 German De-Nazification. Good luck in that task!
Well, it’s interesting to remember how much people feelings can change in not very much time, so I think this tendence can be applied to everybody, with the evident local “color”. However, I keep thinking Trump (who isn’t a genius but he’s quite smart) won’t fall in the colonial trap, and he is going to let the dirty job to the former Venezuela opposition leaders, unless insurgency grows too much (good luck with this job). If Maduro and his minions weren’t stupid, they should have had a plan B for an insurgence in case of defeat, but maybe their arrogant bias could made Chavists blind themselves to this possibility. Who knows?
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Luciano g. # 118:
Well, Venezuela isn’t Vietnam. In this point, I agree. However, it’s also a real historical tendence that in every imperial US adventure against the usual Third World countries, an insurgence has been born soon or later. Each case is slightly different, depending on how is the native culture and other factors, so it’s never Vietnam, but it rhymes to some extent. I think Trump will try to rule Venezuela with a puppet anti-Chavist local govt, but if this protectorate would fail, I wouldn’t discard a direct occupation by the US. It’s one of the possible futures, not very probable but not impossible.
I’d like to tell you analogy is good to guess historical tendences which can repeat in different cycles, but be careful, because you may have chosen a not very accurate analogy. Even professionals of History can be wrong comparing past and present. Well, we’ll see in near future…
Most Iranian people can be fed up to live under their theocratic regime, but if they are a little smart, they also know which are really the “advantages” for being driven into the US submission. So…we’ll see.
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The Other Owen # 119:
The future isn’t clear yet, me thinks. We’ll see what happens soon or later.
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Jeffrey # 120:
My idea about long term future is a long decline, like John thinks; but I also think the pace if that decline wouldn’t be the same depending of the local elites wisedom/idiocy, the cultural and economical substrate and another possible causes I can’t even grasp now from my “dilettantist” view. So I can imagine easily some areas under the raw power of war lords, and other areas where new states and societies could modestly thrive, but in a context of less technology and social complexity than nowadays.
I hope JMG (with his “catabolic collapse” idea) and another commentarists can answer better than me your question.
Mary B. # 123:
I’ve understood, according your description of Mr. Mamdani origins and attitude, that this guy is a political fiasco, so he’s not the Trumpian (and post-Trumpian) Nemesis which our European very biased MSM usually show. I’ll take note of your view.
I don’t know very much of USA politics beyond my dilettante view, but I see actual NY major not like the “white knight” which EU leftism depicts, but like a quite dishonest demagogue. I’ve written this feeling about him before my current comment.
There is an article in Compact Magazine that talks about how Mexico’s populist left-wing government under Andrés Manuel López Obrador got rid of middlemen government programs and NGOs and replaced them with direct payments to families:
https://www.compactmag.com/article/why-the-mexican-left-defunded-childcare-centers/
JMG – May your hiatus be greatly blessed, and as relaxing, restful, & stress-free as possible! BTW – for some weeks before your announcement, I had been thinking that you were overdue for a break & when you would take some time off from your regular routine.
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Re: Venezuela oil – my understanding is that the oil is more or less a decoy – it’s the supposed large reserves of heavy metals that’s the real prize.
Is this “off-topic”? What is the topic? I recently discovered the youtube videos of Malcolm Guite. He’s quite a fan of Tolkien, of the Inklings, and of smoking his pipe. I often wonder how he manages not to set himself on fire. For those who watch videos, check him out.
Patricia T.A 133, there is also Venezuelan farmland and patenting access to indigenous food and medicinal crops. Agribiz has a lot more influence than people realize.
Europe is screwed. The latest climate models give Europe about a century or so left before the southern half of Europe turns into an extension of the Sahara Desert and AMOC collapse makes the northern half of Europe as cold as Siberia.
Chaquin, I think what you think too in that states will thrive with less technology. Question is, how MUCH less technology? In my view, Rome (or that kind of technological extent) is extremely achievable
Anonymous # 132:
AMLO politics have been always controverted, another thing is to analyze wether they have been successful or not.
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Idem # 136:
Models are models, and the map isn’t the territory. However, the more accurate are models, the more they can depict us how probably would be the future climate. Last decades climate tendences in Southern Europe have shown Mediterranean areas tend to more dryness and heat, so do the math. North Europe could be cooler than nowadays by the AMOC collapse, which is a possibility, though it hasn’t happened yet.
Wer here
I for one don’t belive in any of the deal between Trump and Putin espacially if the trumps deal demands that Russian pay repariations for Ukraine (JMG does the winning side pay repariations?) or have foreign troops on Ukrainian soil.
It will be agains Russian interests and I doubt trump be trusted to uhold this deal espacially with the seizure of one of tankers that tried to leave Venezuela. Putin will have to be an idiot to accept this.
>Put New Yorkers to work
But that’s – work. And let’s face it, work, sucks. So let’s not do that.
>So, why not impose what is I believe called a Tobin tax?
I don’t think that’s a bad idea actually. Maybe for different reasons than yours though. Although really those “markets” are Rube Goldberg machines now and be careful what you wish for, or at least understand all the consequences of what you’re asking for, not just the consequences you want.
>I doubt Mondami is a serious person
Nope and neither are his lieutenants. Honk honk. But they also called The Austrian Painter a joke too when he came to power. Maybe he was indeed a joke from the universe and we just don’t have a sense of humor.
BTW re: Minnesota
If those loony lefties start shooting back with guns, basically irregular warfare with ICE, you have my blessing to start legitimately worrying about a civil war in this country. That would pattern match to “Bleeding Kansas” IMHO. That would constitute an annuciator light flashing at you.
What a January for our host to take off!
Jeffrey # 137:
I don’t bet internet and 24h/day electricity networks are going to last forever, so I think in a certain step down (but I don’t know when), during the Long Descent would be lost, first to the citizens and some years or decades later, to bureaucracies. However, it could be possible rich people and states bureaucracy may will have access to small scale electricity from hydraulic or wind origin, me think, at least for some decades more. It’ll depend of how many skilled people survives the path down, and some complex societies (but less complex than ours) are saved by smart elites. Direct power from rivers (wheels and simpler turbines) would work too, without much problem, to move directly for example mills…In addition to this, one shot guns won’t probably be lost in the long term, for their value in future warfare (between states and warlords). Finally, if some people takes care of it, simpler versions of printing presses could be working in the far future, though this depends of course, on full life digitalization failure in near future. I’m thinking more or less in a century ahead us.
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Wer # 139:
We don’t have every hard data about nowadays geopolitical current events, so I think it isn’t cautious to say this or that thing will happen. It seems better be opened to a variety of situations which could probably happen. You don’t know really what thinks Trump and Putin about Ukraine future, at least you’ve got telepathy to hear their thoughts. So I wouldn’t discard nor despise a Russian-USA deal scenary about Ukraine. By the way, Putin isn’t known by his fast decisions, so a deal could be a possibility between anothers.
Life imitates art department: remember the monsoons in Star’s Reach? https://phys.org/news/2026-01-global-reveals-future-rainfall.html
Mary Bennet, #135 –
Thank for info – hadn’t even thought about the Agribiz connection. Seems like some actors are flying under the radar, so to speak & and that oil is really the shiny booby prize. Thus the eternal question, “Cui Bono?”
Bofur, #142 – Amen to that! I do hope that all is going well with our esteemed host.
I think that it’s unlikely that Trump & Putin struck a secret deal, but there’s nothing to rule it out. The Kiev Regime falling to Russia in the coming weeks would be tanative evidence for the secret deal– but it could also be Russia’s retaliation for Venezuela or was a long term war plan of Russia’s finally coming to fruition.
Okay, I have a little while this evening to catch my breath. A few responses:
Industrial Alchemy, last I heard, the solstice gathering’s still on track.
Jeffrey, I’m sorry to hear that. Agriculture has been sustainably practiced in quite a few corners of the world for many millennia, and I remain convinced that future technic societies will be able to sustain some fairly intricate technologies (for example, radio communications, ultralight aircraft, refrigeration, and sound recording) using renewable energy sources and sustainable materials. That said, if Tom disagrees, why, he has the right to his opinion. As for The Dawn of Everything, I was unimpressed — it included a lot of useful data, but the authors were so busy pushing an obvious political agenda that they made the whole thing rather unconvincing.
Martin, nah, it just means that the US will have to default on its foreign debt, the way Russia did in 1998 and so many other nations have over the years. A default is inevitable at this point. In the meantime, having adequate oil strengthens the US geopolitically as it retreats from Old World empire-building.
Jeffrey, I’ve noted repeatedly that I’m talking about the decline and fall of Western industrial civilization. Other parts of the world will have their own trajectories, especially once global empires stop being an option. As for your climate question, er, you seem hopelessly confused here. The comment you quoted stresses that global temperatures won’t shift uniformly; my estimate is that most of the world will get only slightly warmer (say, 1°-2°C) while the northern polar region will see an average increase of 25°-30°C over the course of two millennia or so. How you get from there to the end of civilization in the short to middle term has me completely baffled. Again, the whole world does not warm up uniformly in times of global warming!
Milkyway, prepare to be disappointed. There’s a housing shortage in unknown Kadath just now, and my investments in real estate in R’lyeh remain, er, underwater.
Hankshaw, thank you! I was originally consecrated as a Gnostic bishop in 2004; this ceremony simply gave me the right and the responsibility to fulfill a bishop’s duties in a different Gnostic church. The amusing thing is that I’ve never just been an archdruid, and I haven’t actually served as an archdruid for more than a decade now; I’m not sure why that title stuck while none of the others did.
Bofur, it’s by no means certain that any other month this year will be less colorful…
Roldy, life imitates art because, in this case, art imitated paleoclimatology!
“The amusing thing is that I’ve never just been an archdruid, and I haven’t actually served as an archdruid for more than a decade now; I’m not sure why that title stuck while none of the others did.”
Oh bishops are a common widespread beast in many subspecies and varieties, but an Archdruid! Must be a rare possibly unique creature.
For anyone planning next year’s garden, Victory Seeds is offering a fairly large selection of some rare tomato varieties this week only. I have been looking through the list for early maters. I found a yellow oxheart which looks interesting. These are not on sale, which is why I didn’t post this on the frugal site, but prices are quite reasonable by present standards. I am seeing prices like 10 seeds for $6. from some companies.
Patrick # 146:
We’ll see. A secret deal would be difficult to be detected, if it really exists. Things aren’t very clear yet…
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JMG # 147:
You’ve pointed some more technologies which could be resilient to the Long Decline. I hadn’t remembered them. It’s possible they could work powered by biofuels or small scale electricity.
Wer here
JMG I’ve read the so called peace deal and it basically says that Russia must allow foreginers on Ukrainian soil and pay repariations (only the losing side must pay them) what kind of peace is that?
Also don’t get me started on “peaceful protestors in Iran. I remember there were once “peaceful protesters” in Kiev in 2014 (who burned down buildings and killed people) and were graciously funded by Victoria Nuland there,
The Ukrainian goverment did nothing and got regime change and the moment when that started the mess we are now in Ukraine was born. Again Russia and China have a strategic importance on Iran (they were helping during war with Israel last year all the time) and are unlikely to just sit and allow this to turn into Ukraine 2.0 right on their borders. They are problems in I ran yes but this obviously doings of CIA and Mossad who just want to cause chaos in that country. I remember corectlly this isn’t the first time Iran has riots everywhere and the internet is shut down happened once in 2019 during the Trump “mega sanctions”
JMG,
Thanks for your clarification about climate, that clears things up a lot.
I was focusing on your quote here:
“I figured Tony was asking about the short to middle term, and in that frame, I expect east and south Asia to do very well.”
This gave me the impression that you don’t expect Asia to do well in the long term, is that what you were trying to imply?
Best wishes to JMG for the re-location if that’s what it is, presumably to somewhere else within the (vast) USA (60x the size of England and Wales).
FWIW I find this useful for helping to work out what *may* be happening, geopolitics-wise: https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/
Of Brits. who’ve come to my notice since 2020 for standing up against the fascism, some have actually relocated to a different country, e.g. John Ward, Paul Kingsnorth, Simon Elmer, Prof. Jem Bendell. I’ve also heard reports of enough ‘ordinary’ Brits. emigrating to turn the population rise into a decline. This is unconfirmed, as they say.
@ Luciano Geronimo #118, I agree with much of what you say. The weaknesses and flaws of the US and its (diminishing number of) allies are discussed here regularly, but that makes it easy to overlook that their main opponents have serious weaknesses themselves too.
Russia is in demographic freefall and its “special operation” is going into its fourth year. Recent events in Venezuela and Syria caught them asleep at the wheel and the attempt at Putins life and caputure of a Russian oiltanker is another loss of face. If Russia was so powerful they wouldn’t have let these things happen. More likely they are overstretched due to the ongoing war in Ukraine and they are not getting full support from China.
China also has major problems. Their debt levels are vertigo-inducing and China is the only region on earth that can outdo Europe when it comes to their history of warfare. I think the odds of China falling apart in the coming 1-2 decades are actually quite high. If they stick together they will be probably try the same game as the EU tries vis a vis Russia (Divide, Imperia & grab the resources). That’s why they don’t fully support Russia. They want Russia to survive but not to flourish.
Iran’s mullahs are under severe pressure right now, but considering the protesters are attacking crucial infrastructure, I suspect the CIA or some party like that has a hand in it. I don’t expect the regime to go down without a fight and lashing out and attacks on crucial infrastructure in the US and EU will almost certain be part of the action. It looks like this could be very nasty on both sides.
Trump seems to have chosen a strategy that makes sense (“Donroe doctrine”) but in the process he is blowing up the international order that the US and its allies profited from the most. He is also symptomatic of an acceleration in the rise of domestic authoritarianism. It started way back with the Patriot Act, but Trump 47 goes pedal to the metal with it. Sending immigrants to an El Salvadorean gulag based on only accusations without due process is a very dangerous precedent. I give it a few years time before US citizens will get the same treatment simply because the administration decided so.
Another issue is the hardening of the hearts in the populace. I was shocked when so many people on the left showed support for the killing of Charlie Kirk. But the attitude is non-denominational. The footage of the woman who got killed by the ICE in Minneapolis is all over X. Many right wing commenters are saying that she got what she deserved while the footage shows clearly what it was – murder. By cheering on the death of the lesbian protester (for some reason her sexual preference is always mentioned as if it were relevant) people seem to be unaware that next time it could be them with their neck under the boot. You really shouldn’t want trigger happy goons in positions of authority.
I think an important reason for these developments is the many wars the US has waged over the past decades. You cannot kill millions of people without de-humanizing them and growing intolerant/insensitive towards their different religions, cultures and interests. This hardening of hearts is now finding expression in domestic affairs and I’m afraid it will only get worse in the near future.
It’s an interesting game to compare US presidents to Roman empires and I like to play it too although I’m not sure how useful it would be. I tend to see Trump as Septimus Severus. Under his reign the Roman empire added new territories for the last time and he increased the size and wage of the legionairs with 67% (similar to Trump increasing the Defense budget from 1 to 1.5 trillion). At his deathbed he gave the following advice to his sons: ”Be of one mind with your family, enrich the soldiers, and despise the rest”. Sounds like something Trump could say to Baron…
This is a surprisingly useful insight, and essay https://default.blog/p/the-internet-as-the-astral-plane
It begins as follows:
QUOTE
For years—truly years and years and years and years and years and years—I’ve been working on a single insight: “the Internet” behaves less like a tool and more like a portal, a separate plane of existence layered atop everyday life. In other words, it’s the astral plane, or Fairyland. The same charms, rituals, and yes, old superstitions that guide travelers through those worlds prove surprisingly helpful for navigating the Internet, too.
END QUOTE
I would also like to thank JMG for continuing to help us stock our toolkits for travelling through the worlds of Faerie, of internet, of Spectacle, and of “the planes”… the consequences of losing ourselves in any of those realms without proper tools are real…
@Owen that may happen, but would require aid from Russia or China or some other power. By themselves, venezuelan irregulars couldn’t be a real threat.
Check this – might be a piece of propaganda, but there’s something real in there too: https://x.com/anttsinc/status/2009643118748946647
@Chuaquin the thing is, this unpreparedness cuts both ways. Russia might be getting some war experience since 2022, but it’s not a really big, all out war. China hasn’t fought a war, not even a small one, since the seventies. Same goes for other powers. By avoiding big wars yet keeping a very large standing army and navy, the US also forces its opponents to remain untested on the field.
Hey John,
I just finished the secret of the temple and was wondering if you would, or have somewhere, propose a temple tech with electroculture temenos design. Maybe two versions the 40 acres and bezos budget and the 5 acres and the budget of a millennial willing to spend their life savings. I’ve been dreaming about basalt cathedrals with copper sigils on the spires and paramagnetic cables running through the mycorrhizal networks underneath. I’d love to hear your vision for similar.
Thank you for all you do!
JMG, nah, I won’t be disappointed at all by any mundane relocation destination, quite the contrary – relieved to hear it’s simply a mundane move! In contrast, if you had told me you’d relocate to some remote place in the midst of the jungle or on the top of a very high mountain, or to some country on the other side of the world, and in a hurry… I’d find this rather troubling, given the current state of the world! 😉
For those who are disappointed in the lack of celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, this may cheer you up. Behold the butter sculpture at the annual Pennsylvania Farm Show.
https://fcfreepresspa.com/1000-pound-butter-sculpture-unveiled-at-2026-pa-farm-show/
David @ 153, Dr. John’s blog, thank you for the referral, most interesting, is reporting that the attack on Venezuela also targeted an institution for science research. I wonder what that was all about? Degrading military capacity will of course be the excuse given should anyone be so rude as to ask Miss Spokesperson Barbie for an explanation. But, I did notice that one of the departments damaged was doing research on ecology. hmm.
The problem with small scale energy is that the whole ecology of fixers, wheeler dealers, salesduffuses and duffesses, and other nonproductive types doesn’t make any money and has no status.
@Wer #159
I think you are referring to the dream European/old American establishment agreement, which will not occur.
A possible secret deal being referred to by others is that US takes what it wants and can in Venezuela, Russia takes what it wants and can in Ukraine – in effect both sides get their “Near Abroad” as best as they can control it, but without interference from the other.. The wishes of the Europeans are not part of the package.
For additional fun, Greenland is part of the US’s near abroad.
Cheers and Good luck,
Drew
From my side, A few comments.
Firstly, a data point from Germany. I’ve now have had opportunity to find out how dysfunctional aspects of the German welfare system have become. In the process of getting payments when being out of a job, there are several institutions involved where the one hand does not know what the others do, nonsensical statements regarding legal claims get issued, and on the whole, it has become quite confused. Myself, I’m getting by, so no need to worry there, but it is not a good sign.
Secondly, these times are not the first months where it occurred to me that it is getting steadily more difficult to get accurate information about what is going on, in my own country and abroad. This can be a hindrance for mundane astrologers because it makes it more difficult to check predictions.
A third thing, which may or may not have something to do with the upcoming Saturn-Neptune conjunction: Moon of Alabama seems to become unable to make head or tail out of the recent geopolitical happenings. His opinion is that Donald Trump has gone rogue; like Yves Smith from Naked Capitalism he has more and more fallen into a habit of complaining about the actual geopolitical events in the world, especially in and around the United States.
I have forgotten to add that the atack on Putins home near Novgorod has already been followed by a retaliatory measure: an Oreshnik attack in the Western Ukraine and an attack on infrastructure in Kiev which has disabled electricity and heating for a large part of Soviet-era high rise apartments in Kiev, while temperatures are around -4 degrees Fahrenheit.
On Greenland; curiosity got me looking.
Denmark to Greenland is about 1400 miles. Denmark to mainland Russia (ignoring a large island) is 1500 miles.
The Danish navy consists of;
12 larger vessels (displacement > 1,500 t(m))
4 medium-size vessels (1,500 t(m) > displacement > 500 t(m)), and
38 small vessels (500 t(m) > displacement > 15 t(m)).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Danish_Navy
Notably they scrapped their submarine force. decades ago.
The larger ships are a pair of ASW ships and three ships for air defense. There are four of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thetis-class_patrol_vessel
But they’ve been stripped of most of their weapons capability and are mostly search and rescue oriented.
In conclusion Denmark has nowhere near the capability to defend Greenland by sea.
On land, (sigh) “The Nordic nation announced Tuesday that it will bolster Greenland’s defenses with a $1.5 billion in new resources, including two elite sled dog teams,”
https://nypost.com/2024/12/24/us-news/denmark-will-deploy-2-sled-dog-teams-to-help-secure-greenland-after-trump-threatens-takeover/
The Canadian’s don’t really have anything in Labrador that would make a second line of defense for North America. Relying on harsh terrain and bad weather for your defense isn’t that comforting of a strategy especially if you are worried about Russia which has dealt with Siberia for centuries. .
Booklover # 163 .. I’ve noticed, besides MofA and NC .. The Alexes at the Duran have kinda done the same. Almost like whining about how things SHOULD remain static – sticking to the supposed legal agreements of post-war Bretan Woods/Globalist agendas – rather than admitting that the UN/neolibracon Order is faltering.. with something developing that’s NOT predicated on post-WW2/$eeEYEaye style reconstruction ‘we are the world’ kumbya. A phase-shift has occured – Things .. Have .. Changed
Siliconguy#165.. “including two elite dog sled teams” … Oh, that’ll learn us for sure. And as for Canada?? Well, they could send out SparkleSocks to make us shake in our boots, right? .. I mean, he DOES need a new job to keep himself into trouble, afterall.
The Other Owen #140
> Honk honk. —> The Keystone Cops/Kops.
Chuckle chuckle.
💨🚓🚔👮🏿♂️👮🏾♂️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG #147
> I haven’t actually served as an archdruid for more than a decade now; I’m not sure why that title stuck while none of the others did.
Arch-rook, nah. Arch-bishop, nuh uh.
Here are some options:
Arch-unbishop
Arch-switchup
Arch-hiccup
Arch-stickup
Arch-ripup
Arch-cheerup
Arch-hitchup
Arch-chinup
Arch-spitup
Arch-bigup
Arch-didup
Arch-whichup
Arch-disap
Arch-himup
Arch-hizup
Arch-clearup
Arch-gearup
💨🧵🪡⚙️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
I read days ago an essay titled “La imaginación sonora”, whose author was a philosopher named Eugenio Trías. That book links classical music authors with their time philosophic and spiritual ideas, which influenced them to compose their works. Of course, a full chapter was written about Richard Wagner, which remembered me your very good posts about the Ring cycle, John. Trías makes remember the reader that young Wagner was a radical in politics (for example, being Bakunin friend) and in philosophy (following Feuerbach materialist ideas). When he suffered certain personal problems and changes, and when he was getting old (and richer), he turned toward more Conservative politics and a more Christian view. These changes can be noticed within the Ring cycle operas, according to Trías too, because of their long time composition. The beginning of the Tetralogy is more “progressive” and optimistic than the cycle ending, which is more pessimistic. In addition to this, the writer says Wagners “Parsifal” is the finest expression of this musician mind in his old age, to some extent more Christian. Trías also point Wagner controversial friendship with Nietzsche, who was first his fan, but after they finished badly their friendship, did a fierce criticism against his former friend. It’s interesting that E. Trias also points Wagner operas were very popular between leftists in Europe before his work and legacy was hijacked by a mediocre Austrian painter and his supporters…
Wer # 151:
I think you and me (and JMG and some more commenters) aren’t talking about the same thing when we write about an hypothetical deal between Trump and Putin. You’ve written about a “peace treaty” projects which (if it isn’t apocryphal), it’s being negociated within the official diplomatics opened to the MSM. However, a secret deal between Russia and the US wouldn’t be evidently public, and it wouldn’t be a conventional deal, but a Trump permission for Putin direct ending Zelenski Kiev regime (by a regime change exiling/killing its government, or bluntly striking the Ukrainian Army towards its complete defeat without American countermeasures).
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You’re quite right about the Iranian situation. Periodically, local protests probably tempt the Mossad and CIA guys to dream with a “color revolution” there, like the one which succeed in Ukraine. However, theocratic Iran is a harder bone to chew. Its repressive forces are well armed and indoctrined, including the Wards of Revolution, a state within the state which is fit to suffocate large rebellions. In addition to this, Irani power pyramid has quite wannabes supreme leaders if a beheading strike against high spheres would be attempted by Western and Israeli powers.
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Bocaccio # 154:
Russia can be in demographic free fall, but Ukraine population isn’t better than its enemy, and Ukrainian deaths in battlefields have been bigger than Russians. I think Russians fears the US over-reaction if they would attack with their full strength the Ukrainian puppet (indeed, they fight with one only hand); but if Trump says “it doesn’t mind for me”, Putin would attack with everything he has. So do the math…
Your nowadays USA analogy with a past Roman Empire time deserves the same warning I did to Luciano G: We must be careful using historical analogies (I think there’s cherry-picking risk).
I didn’t know nothing about that activist killed, but by disgrace I’m not surprised neither. X has become a (far) right nest, so it isn’t strange they cheer the killing of a lesbian woman, within their biased tunnel sight of friend/enemy dialectics.
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Bruno BL # 156:
In an hypothetical insurgence within
Venezuela, government could enjoy western technology (including drones) to its counter-insurgence war; but guerrilla(s) could equally be supplied by China, whose drone industry has showed before today it’s able to make cheap and lethal products. Drones have become the great equalizer in todays wars.
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Idem # 157:
There’s a spanish saying which is “El que no se consuela es porque no quiere”(Who doesn’t comfort to him/herself is because he/she don’t want it).
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Drew # 162:
That was also my idea too, about a secret deal, between Trump and Putin, bypassing the reckless and brainless EU leaders. We’ll see wether it’s real or not in the near future.
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Booklover # 164:
Yes, mediatic and spectacular Ukrainian strikes won’t turn Crimea into its power again, but they usually are “rewarded” by Russian more lethal revenge. Nothing new under the sun.
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Siliconguy # 165:
It’s a funny and wry irony not only the ridiculous Danish military real power, but to remember that NATO Denmark membership has been a good example of its leaders utter serfdom. It happened not very years ago when Danish “humanitarian” forces were deployed during Bush Jr. era…
https://xcancel.com/BradCLemley/status/1400619912796655618
On a completely different topic, nicotine is a very complicated recreational drug. They want you to focus on what it taketh away but – it doth giveth quite a bit in return. For some reason, they absolutely don’t want you to pay attention to that. I was watching old I Love Lucy episodes from the 50s and everyone was smoking like chimneys. Maybe that’s something we need to bring back too.
You know, it hit me. All this looniness you’ve been seeing lately, what if it correlates with the decline in nicotine consumption? Nicotine acts as a mental booster and stabilizer, it keeps you sane and helps you think. I wonder.
I wonder if some of these people flipping out would’ve been helped if they had a pack a day habit, like everyone seemed to have back in the 50s? We will never know, but I do wonder.
I looked it up. A bishop is addressed in person as either “Your Excellency” or “Your Grace,” and on an envelope (stuffed with money, presumably) as “The Most Reverend [full name].” If JMG ever becomes pope (Dan Brown informs us that this is possible by acclamation), well, you all know what to do.
Patricia Mathews (no. 128) “I’ve decided to go on a news fast for a while.”
And what a time to do it too–with the USA invading Venezuela and maybe Greenland, Iran erupting into civil war, space aliens landing in Mongolia, the new volume of “Game of Thrones” coming out, etc. Hope you can resist the urge to look things up!
(My brother tried something like this during / after the 2000 US presidential election–he wanted to see how long he could go without hearing the results. You may remember how that went.)
Silicon guy, the area we now know as Scandinavia, (yes, I have heard that Danes do not consider themselves Scandinavian, but bear with me here) was not always divided into the present nations. Mid to late 1800s, Norway was part of, or a possession of, Denmark and Finland was in some fashion united with Sweden. A Russian Czar, Paul maybe?, invaded Sweden and detached Finland, which then became a possession of Russia. That, plus a royal death, is what prompted Sweden to offer their crown to one of Napoleon’s marshals, Jean Baptiste Bernadotte. Bernadotte accepted the honor, and was duly adopted by the reigning and aged monarch. Sweden being caught like a nut in a nutcracker between Russia and the British Empire, Bernadotte made it is his policy to make Norway part of his realm. This was done, by means of an invasion, face-saving military victory by the Norwegians, and offer of the formula of two nations one crown, Norway to keep its language, culture and institutions. That arrangement lasted till the early 20thC.
I would not be at all surprised to see the Baltic nations all united in one polity. They have a vigorous population and natural resources; I think in time they could hold their own.
I suspect the announcements as to military buildup you and others find so amusing are intended to 1. appeal to that part of the American public which does not support this president, and 2. make it abundantly clear to world opinion that any American invasion, however described, would be illegal and unwanted by anyone except one deranged faction.
Luciano Geronimo (no. 118) ” The americans seem to be getting ready to abandon the ME and Europe while tightening control in the Americas and some presence in the Pacific.”
The USA, abandoning the ME?! But they want new bases in Damascus and Gaza.
Jeffrey (no. 112)” [Tom Murphy has been] “calling for a return to hunter-gathering […and…] calling agriculture of any kind unsustainable recently.”
Daniel Quinn never taught either of those things. He explicitly rejects them!
MAGA, Make America Great Again and Healthy Again. Hope it happens, have doubts it will. I am descended from 1600’s settlers and 1700’s cousins of John and Samuel Adams, and Revolutionary and Civil War veterans. That America is gone along with the America of Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower and The Beach Boys and Neil Armstrong. I feel like a maggot living inside a rotting yet still alive and twitching body. I am a well fed and comfortable maggot but I think steady decline is ahead with periods of attempted revival like what happened the 200-400 AD Roman Empire. My father who passed a few years ago at age 92 said he felt he had lived through good decades that wouldn’t happen again and felt sorry for his grand kids and great grand kids. History is replete with not so good times.
“I would not be at all surprised to see the Baltic nations all united in one polity. They have a vigorous population and natural resources; I think in time they could hold their own.”
The total population of the Nordic Countries is 27.5 million. Decent but not a juggernaut. Great Britain is close to 70 million.
Ambrose:
I never claimed Quinn supported the idea, I wanted to say that Murphy now advocates for it after reading Ishmael. We can’t exactly ask Quinn about it now, so I thought that’s what his message was too, sorry for the misinterpretation
Ambrose # 176:
JMG and Luciano G hypothesis about USA near future withdrawing from the whole global hegemony into its Western Hemisphere near influence zone, needs be compared with geopolitical reality. Until now, US has going on having military bases across the whole world, so unless Trump changes soon this situation, the global withdrawal theory could be contrafactical.
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Mary B. # 175:
I think Scandinavian countries, thanks to their latitude, could survive the climate change better than Southern Europe countries, and I won’t deny they’ve got some useful natural resources. However, their population isn’t really very high, and there are historical reasons for it. A big part of Scandinavia’s a mountain area or is full of lakes, so they’re rock soils or soaked areas not fitted for agriculture. Indeed, vikings raids across middle age Europe can be partly explained for Scandinavian relative good soils poverty to feed the local population. Some centuries later, Swedish kingdom started a crazy war against Zarist Russia maybe for a simillar reason (finally, Sweden was exhausted and Russian managed to repel the Swedish ambitions). Until the past century, Scandinavia countries were poor, and a lot of people migrated toward other world countries. It’s not casual some Americans nowadays have Swedish ancestors, for example. Only with the industrialization and Socialdemocratic welfare state, Scandinavian countries managed to thrive. However, the Long Descent will affect too those European northern countries. So I think you’ve depicted a pinky rosy view of Scania, though I also think they have a chance to do it better than their Southern neighbours if their elites are smart (which must be checked in the future).
In addition to my last comment, about Scandinavian countries, I’d like to point Denmark is the apparent exception to their neughbours weakness, because it’s a near flat country with much more agriculture fit soils. However, it’s a small country which consists in a tiny peninsula and some islands. This geography and its low population (compared with its South neughbour, Germany), makes it weak, too.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=s3QxEVybKPE&si=JWscUYfR3S7viTfy
This video discusses the future of Europe and its disintegration, basing its analysis on opinions about JMG’s catabolic collapse.
Although I believe it is significantly ahead of schedule. Unfortunately, the video is in Spanish, but I would like to know the opinions of other commentators on what it says.
I think Scandinavian countries, and Denmark especially, have an interesting geopolitical role in controlling the Baltic Sea to prevent Russian naval projection from St. Petersbourgh. However, Denmark size and its geographic position in a sandwich between a bigger country (Germany) and the British Navy projection makes it a not serious geopolitical player by its own will.
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Western MSM propaganda loves to point often Russia hasn’t achieved a victory yet against the epic and heroic Ukrainian soldiers, so Russia is a paper tiger and even will be defeated soon or later (well, sometimes western Spectacle warns us that Russia is going to invade EU countries if it isn’t stopped by Kiev “democracy”, violating the not contradiction principle).
If Russia hasn’t defeated Ukraine yet, in these near 4 years, the reasons are IMHO: First, Putin knows if he starts a blunt escalation, he could provoke an USA over reaction and then nuclear missiles could fly. Oh oh… Second, Russia is suffering strong economic sanctions by western countries: it’s near a miracle its economy hasn’t imploded yet (it can be explained partly by smart Russian deals with some non western countries). And finally, Russia isn’t fighting only against the Ukrainian cannon fodder, but also against the whole NATO weapons panoply, throwed “gently” by EU and US military hi tech toys against Russians endlessly until today. We can’t forget, neither, the 24 h per day western intel services help to Kiev and the full satellite surveillance non stop watching Russian troops. However, in spite of these extraordinary helping to Zelenski regime, Russia hasn’t been defeated in battlefields, and he hasn’t returned Crimea yet. So its resilience it’s a fact which of course Western narrative won’t recognize, because the “emperor is naked”.
https://xcancel.com/Steve_Laws_/status/2010065361966965196
And in the latest news, the UK gubmint is badly losing a propaganda war with its citizens. You can’t make this stuff up.
https://xcancel.com/martianwyrdlord/status/2010180946604265528
They’re summoning tulpas over there in the UK. This is getting spicy.
I bet the current spanish central government is screwed and it’ll lost next general elections here. The woke (fake) Socialist party and its smaller (and even woker) allies, the Commies and the populist left party, not only are losing the lawfare which the two right parties are supporting to present the govt as corrupt (indeed it’s corrupt, but I bet every party here has his dark financiation too), but losing the cultural wars. Woke left offensive which started when Pedro Sánchez and his travel fellows reached central govt, with their “holy cows”, has been answered by the (far) right own cultural war, saying the opposite to the woke doctrine. Well, I know the opposite of a bad idea is usually another bad idea, but I see right ideas are winning today between average people.
The massive and illegal migrants are the key in this success. Indeed, migrants are one of the left “holy cows” (like transgender people, but evidently you usually don’t have to see and interact with trans people every day). Meanwhile woke govt keeps on supporting the false equation between every criticism to unlimited migration and “fascism”, I think it has lost the battle in the streets. For example, yesterday I was talking with two friends (both them working class women, with a notorious leftist past and not religious), who told me they were thinking seriously to vote Vox (far right party) in next elections. They remembered to me the huge subsidies received by migrants, and how our town streets have declined in beauty and security thanks to multiculturalism. We were walking along the former main street of their neughbourhood, and I could see indeed some Black young men, sitting lazyly in the street and smoking marijuana. Well, this picture doesn’t push native people to cheer multiculti woke ideology, me think. I thought then: if these former “social justice warriors” were just about giving up their shared left ideology, less ideologized people indeed is under the far right enchantment now!
Another day, I was in my neighbourhood public “health center” and a middle aged woman started to rant, very upset, about how migrants were helping to the public health decline, “because they are benefitted by public health without paying nothing”, meanwhile native citizens must pay taxes to the govt. Well, of course I saw her speech very biased in favor of far right. She forgot to add as cause to the public health system slow decline, how the regional right wing govts (which have the competences about health here) have starting insidiously defunding public hospitals and favor private health. I can also remember that a lot of migrants are legal, so they pay taxes like natives too. However, it’s true illegal migrants have the right to go into public hospitals to be healed. So this righter woman propaganda has a part of real thing in it.
By the way, it’s interesting to point Vox electoral program says they want to limit only illegal migration, though I wonder wether they would do what they promise in their electoral promises or they’ve have another plans when Vox is going to rule my country, shoulder with shoulder with the Conservatives. They won’t fix really any real problem, but at least the woke cancel culture will be ironically, cancelled (though I’m not stupid and I guess another correlative right wing cancellation could be implemented…).
I finally ask to the Spaniard commentariat here: what do you think about this topic?
I personally don’t feel represented by woke left nor neoliberal right wing, so I doubt I’ll vote in next local elections nor general elections (when current govt mandate expires, or before that if they dare to do it).
@JMG
Enjoy your time off from blogging, and best of luck with your plans!
@Mary Bennet #175
“(yes, I have heard that Danes do not consider themselves Scandinavian, but bear with me here)”
Admittedly I’m not Danish, but to my Norwegian ears that sounds like a very strange position. We certainly consider them fully Scandinavian, and as far as I know, so do they. Maybe you’re getting them mixed up with the Finns? I have to admit I don’t know exactly how they define themselves, but we tend not to count them as Scandinavian, both because of geography and because we don’t understand their language.
@Mary Bennet (#175):
I’m half Danish by ancestry: all four of my father’s grandparents were born and raised in Denmark. I’ve never heard of any Danes who did not consider themselves fully Scandinavian, just like Norwegians and Swedes. Indeed, those three languages (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) are to some degree mutually intelligible.
Wer here
Well the reason that Russia is taking things slow is because Putin I think wants to evade a shock to the economy this is why Russians are moving steadily across the battlefield while avoiding giant casualties like they did in WW2.
In WW2 30 milion USSR citizens were conscripted approx 10 million were killed in the battlefield additionally 11 million Russian citizens were killed/wounded/raped the reason for such extreme actions is that simply the existence of the country was at stake and Nazi almost taken Moscow and every important city in the European part of Russia . Compare that to 300 thousand conscripted and 250 thousand originally and the Russian army in Ukraine never reached above 600 thousand (it didn’t need to be). The Ukrainians are suffering much larger casualities because of the idiotic counteofensives they did with (Kursk, Zaporoze) The Ukrainians are attacking constantly while the Russians are defending and only after they have a better position they surround a city and take it. The fact that Putin didn’t throw millions of people into battlefield is that he needs to conserve recources and people while NATO treats Ukrainia;s like foddler.
Other Owen #173: “All this looniness you’ve been seeing lately, what if it correlates with the decline in nicotine consumption? Nicotine acts as a mental booster and stabilizer…I wonder if some of these people flipping out would’ve been helped if they had a pack a day habit, like everyone seemed to have back in the 50s?”
I never thought of the effects of nicotine on mood – interesting theory! I do think the increase in obesity is partly due to the decline in nicotine use: people used to keep their weight down by lighting a cigarette when they felt hungry or stressed, instead of eating.
@ Chuaquin #171
“X has become a (far) right nest, so it isn’t strange they cheer the killing of a lesbian woman, within their biased tunnel sight of friend/enemy dialectics.”
And only a few weeks ago the “(far) left nests” were cheering the killing of Charlie Kirk.
It occurs to me that if you are an agent of chaos, you are not ON the side of the left OR on the side of the right (at least in respect of all of the ordinary people who feel affiliated to either tribe because of the ordinary values, interests and aspirations they hold as people).
If you are an agent of chaos, chaos is your “side”.
So, just now the left/right tribal rift is deep. It is already chock full of mutual suspicion, mutual fear, mutual disproval, mutual denigration, it already constructs two entirely different worlds of experience with fewer and fewer points of common ground. Let’s say, for the sake of chaos, you wish to bring it that last step into the territory of outright violence… it would help you enormously if you could serve EACH tribe a tempting occasion of vicarious thrill at the death of one of “those people” who you already fear, disapprove of, denigrate and suspect of terrible motives and plans… A death you didn’t cause, but which you can enjoy as a matter of “just deserts”.
And so, you “served” the spectacle of the death of the hated Charlie Kirk to the left, and then invited ordinary people of that tribal affiliation to sense the vicarious thrill of a bad guy getting what he deserved. Then, in turn, you “served” the spectacle of the death of Renee Good to the right, previously unknown, but representing everything hate-able, and you also invited ordinary people of that tribal affiliation to sense the same vicarious thrill of a bad girl getting what she deserved.
I personally suspect a “provocateur” aspect to both killings – although I think its utterly pointless to obsess about trying to pin down the details of either – but I think the prize being sought has no political or tribal alliance (in any ordinary sense of politics or culture) but is allied only to chaos, destruction and death… Every ordinary American (and every other person who feels culturally affiliated with, or in anyway affected by, American politics) stands to lose, because this game of chaos is being played AGAINST them ALL.
As it happened in my neighbouring Northern Ireland (and possibly as it happened in Spain, too, although I have very little knowledge of that history) from here it is a very short step to ordinary people succumbing to temptation and “copycatting” the spectacle of killing, whose “just deserts” thrill was initially vicarious, but can now be “fallen into” by anyone at all.
Achille # 182:
I take note of your link and I’ll watch it ASAP. Thanks! May I’m going to comment it soon. Gracias.
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The Other Owen # 184:
UK government propaganda war against its own population makes me to be comforted (ironically) about my own country reckless behavior, and I can assure you it’s a good govt. It’s a sad comforting to see outside an Spain ruled by reckless wokesters, you can see equal or maybe worse leaderships, not only in the UK, but in France (with its little Napoleon) and Germany (awful “Socialdemocrat” politics) too, for example.
In my last comment (# 192) I wanted to write to the Other Owen # 184: “ and I can assure you it’s NOT a good govt”. Evidently, I didn’t want to praise spanish govt, but I forgot to write the “not”. Thank you John for fixing my mistake…
As Liza Minelli once said, “Smoking is one of the leading causes of all statistics.”
I like to keep some good pipe tobacco around as an offering to the land & its spirits… I smoke a few bowls of pipe tobacco a year. Usually on a camp out or social gathering. Or maybe a nice cigar. I don’t feel the need to smoke every day, week or month though. For instance, went canoeing on the Little Miami with two of my cousins and our close friend in celebration of a birthday, and in celebration of one of my cousins return from the streets of San Francisco where he had been a homeless addict, to being back home and having a job. We stopped on a little bank and cooked hot dogs and ate smoked salmon and smoked cigars. Swam in the river. Awesome day.
My favorite tinned pipe tobacco blends tend to have latakia and I am quite fond of Balkan Sasieni.
I gave up cigarettes at age 21, having smoked them for seven years starting at 14. I still love the first smell of a cigarette, but after that first whiff they tend to smell pretty gross as does being in the house full of smokers or a bar where you can still smoke.
https://www.sothismedias.com/uploads/1/2/4/5/124587142/data-pipes_orig.jpeg
In this image we have a young Leonardo DiCaprio playing Rimbaud from the movie Total Eclipse, Marcel Duchamp, J.R. Bob Dobbs, and Andre Breton, all pipe smokers, along with Dada the Android, whose pipe smoke is being transformed into a sketch for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.
I think Scotlyn (#191) has nailed it about provocateurs. There are many, many parties who would reap profit or advantage from the country’s descent into into chaos and,. ultimately, into ungovernability,
Wer # 189:
I agree. Putin wants to loss the less possible soldier in the fronts, but I think you should take into consideration that maybe Russian elites are reserving “fresh” troops far from the battlefriends, because they’re afraid EU/NATO reckless elites order in a not far future sending western troops directly against Russia if their “loved” Kiev regime is in the worst situation (which it’s difficult to think in reasonable strategical terms, due to risk of nuke escalation risk, but not impossible unluckily). Additional Russian troops would be deployed after this hypothetic event. Historical events never have one cause, there are two or more, me think.
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Scotlyn # 191:
Homophobic cheering against a woman isn’t funny; Kirk killing neither, me think. The worst part of human behaviour is seen in the two sides alike. So I agree. Maybe there is a hidden agenda in favor of chaos triggering the partisan tribalism. Cui prodest? Who benefits from it? I don’t know yet. Do you know who could be?
Dehumanization of others usually happens before open violence spreads.
Well, spanish civil war in 1936 is indeed a good example of how zealots views within the two sides were imposed over the whole population to kill directly the ideological enemy even far from the battlefield front. North Ireland “troubles” in its darker decades would be another good example, too.
Thank you to all who responded to my comment about Scandinavia, including the information about Danes and Denmark. It does look to me, looking at a map and in view of recent events, that the four might do well to unite in one republic or constitutional monarchy or other government of their own making. I would not be surprised to see something like that happen.
Scotlyn @ 191, very interesting your thoughts about chaos. My thought has that always been that chaos creators are people who, 1. think they should be in charge, and 2., don’t want to do the work to achieve a high position. I agree that the two events you referenced have been deployed for propaganda purposes. I, myself, knew nothing about the late Mr. Kirk or his organization. I don’t understand his widow. When my husband died I was in no fit state to leave my home, let alone be making public appearances. What I saw of the death of Ms. Good looked to me like the opening stages of a violent sexual assault. In view of the fact that even members of congress are being barred from the ICE holding facility, I am afraid one does have to wonder just what is going on here.
As for loonies, plenty of those running around wielding guns and just shooting people instead of using the least force necessary. It really makes me sick. It also makes me sick when our heads of state are calling people ugly, drawing images of poo on their opponents heads, and having the least amount of decorum possible -which, since so many people are contemplating the not-so-great golden golem of megalomania, gives them a signified green light to go and act the same. Dialing all that down seems to me just as important in de-escalating the potential for civil war as seeking to heal the other ills in our society.
I’d like to see a law enforcement who are trained in using hand to hand combat style martial arts, and also peaceful diplomacy, to disarm and disengage those they have to do that with, rather than just committing homicide
And so many of the people who are supportive of the homicide are the ones who are nominally part of the Christian faith, and who say we are a (nominally) Christian nation. The deity of wrath in the old testament so often usurps the peace bringer and universal healer portrayed in the new testament.
Related to what Scotlyn #191 points out, the sowing of chaos and deepening of societal rifts, really seems to be to the benefit of accelerationists, effective altruists, technocrat venture capitalists, and others who want to speed the collapse by pouring gasoline onto the fire.
Regular people, and those muddling through in the middle, aren’t benefiting from these actions.
It seems also that further destabilizing yet another nearby Latin American country will mean there will be more refugees heading El Norte, more human migration and the like. It seems to me that the crisis we have our not just about minding our own boundaries, but not violating the boundaries as well.
Chuaquin #171 I’m not saying that Russia is losing in Ukraine. It seems that they are actually winning albeit at a high cost.
Russia did lose in Syria and suffered a loss in Venezuela. They also watched helplessly while the US raided their oil tanker while the Russian navy was on its way to protect it. All of that signals significant weakness to me. My take is that Russia has it hands full with the Ukraine situation and has little resources left for other purposes.
For clarity:
It seems to me that the crises we face as a country, are not just about minding our own national boundaries, but about not violating the boundaries of other nations as well.
The empire has stirred the pot a lot of the seeds we sowed internationally have come home to roost with the decay happening on the inside.
But I guess the oil machine never sleeps, and now that the Middle East has been wrecked, Exxon and co allied with McGovCorp will get what they can elsewhere.
Just came across an exercise that reminded me of what you said was one of John Gilbert’s areas of interest (the space between breaths) and thought you might appreciate:
“It was pointed out that the incredibly tremendous speed of its vibratory movement [the constant regeneration of existence – earthworm] hid this character under the veil of an illusory unity and that actually there is an infinitesimal gap between each flash of the world idea and the next. This gap is nothing else than the great stillness of mind-in-itself…
“…but unfortunately, although the thoughts are themselves discontinuous the personal ‘I’-thought dominate them all and behaves like a caterpillar which lets go of its foothold on one leaf only after it has created a foothold on another leaf. Consequently the true gap between thoughts is covered over by the personal thought which thus creates a continuous screen of sheer illusion that hides the reality of pure Mind out of which all these thoughts including itself, emerge.
“As this interval between the fall of one idea and the rise of the next does not exist for the ordinary consciousness the student has to create one by practising a formal exercise. It bears the peculiar traditional name of ‘The Path of the Serpent’ because it seeks to make attention glide like a snake into reality by watching for and seizing the intervening state between ideas…
“It would be a mistake however merely to suppress thoughts and remain intellectually blank and bereft of all understanding as the ordinary yogi seeks to do. Rather must he recognise the relation between thinking as an act and himself as the thinker.”
Now wondering if it might be possible AND useful to combine the ‘catching’ of rising thoughts and emotions with the use of the space between breaths and shifting perspective in the way described above when breath is being used purposefully as opposed to letting it follow it’s own pattern. i.e. bringing two exercises together into one – need to experiment and see.
At the very least it is fascinating to think of Brunton and Gilbert exploring this area and prompts me to think more on it.
I dont know about you all, but it seems to me there has been an empathic collapse as well as a cognitive one. I’ve seen it in the way business owners and employees treat their customers more in recent years… like if you have a question or a legit problenlm, your impeding on tjem, even though they are in business to provide a service in exchange for reality tokens.
There are still plenty of kind Americans,… one of our endearing traits according to some Europeans I’ve talked with, and from what I’ve gathered. But a new callousness to our fellows has emerged as an emotional counterpoint to the cognitive collapse.
Artificial Idiocy already speaks to the imaginative collapse as well.
We gonna need some real medicine peoplwle, alchemists, soul docors, mages and the like to apply the universal panacea.
https://youtu.be/RD0TOhPJGMg?si=xl9Jv4K4lY5ENIas
@ Yavanna and Other Owen – you may have a point about nicotine gentling the American temperament back in the day.. I never smoked in the past but recently I have started a tradition when I visit my son every couple of months. We light up cigarillos and have a smoke together, last time as he didn’t have any cigarillos we smoked the more natural American Spirit cigarettes. A pleasant social ritual like sharing a beer and a chat. I have a landscaper friend who grows and sells California native plants. He was working with a local tribe to reintroduce the use of the California species of native tobacco to move the tribal use of tobacco from the addiction space to the ceremonial and social. Gandalf smoked pipe weed perhaps shouldn’t we also at times?
There is a charming scene in The Hobbit where Gandalf did self care and took a break from his efforts to save Middle Earth and spent a pleasant relaxing time with his pipe smoking and creating smoke rings.
About being on a news fast – I know the iron dice are rolling, and I made an exception for an article from Al Jazeera which provided a scholarly analysis of Greenland without naming names – it was the bones of the situation as it is now; as it has been in the past; historic parallels and parallels with other nations – well thought out and well written, fully up to Retropia’s standards, and very refreshing. Of course, Al Jazeera has no stakes in that game.
What else passes for news that I have access too is far too much hot air and horse manure and partisan special pleading, a.k.a. Mainstream Media, else speculation, viewing with alarm etc.
@BeardTree
We could compare the modern user of tobacco with modern hemp-breeds of THC content, and theit casual use.
Those things contain risks, the modern breeding and use, and the unceremonial, daily overuse.
Traditional Tobacco use certainly is a thing with very valuable aspects too!
And conversely, the loss of ceremoniality in modern day eating is certainly oft an aspect of our culture coming apart at the seams.
@Justin Patrick Moore #198 “The deity of wrath in the old testament so often usurps the peace bringer and universal healer portrayed in the new testament.” I know the Bible well and I could easily select scriptures from both Testaments including a lot from Jesus himself and preach a message on the merciful God of the Old Testament versus the wrathful one of the New Testament. Those opposite traits are found braided together throughout the Bible.
re: Tobacco,
This could be dead wrong, but I was led to understand that the tobacco used by indigenous people in this area was far too strong for cigarettes. As in: you’d hit the ceremonial pipe, and that was it, or you’d puke. This might just be confusion with the “strong tobacco” of South America, but I’m not sure.
It would be ironic, if true, that this is then the exact opposite trajectory Cannabis has followed: MJ was called poison, got bred to be way stronger, and is now officially medicine. Tobacco was medicine, got bred way weaker, and is now officially poison. I suppose it’s par for the course; of course we all know nowadays that white is black, black is white, two plus two equals five.
Tobacco: I’ve never been a cigarette or cigar smoker. But for decades I’ve owned a small collection of briar pipes, smoking them once a year or less, but thinking that someday there’ll come a time…. Well that time has come. I’ve taken out my pipes, still not even broken in, bought some new tobacco (at a tobacconist shop, not the pre-packaged stuff) and am taking up a new vice; smoking a bowl or two a day. But there’s a right way and a wrong way. Do it the wrong way and you get “tongue burn” and you stop. Do it the right way and it’s quite pleasant. Helpful videos are available at the usual place. You might even happen across Malcolm Guite.
Correction: in my previous, I mentioned “tongue burn.” The correct term is “tongue bite.” And I just watched Malcolm Guite reading about Tom Bombadill. It occurred to me while watching it that he comes across a lot like Dr. Gene Scott. I sort of hate to say it. I don’t remember if Scott smoked a pipe or not.
@TylerA #207, my googling says the opposite about native tobacco. Nicotiana quadrivalis, is the California native tobacco I’m speaking of.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/science/1200-years-ago-the-nez-perce-here-smoked-tobacco-long-before-whites-arrived/#:~:text=Then%20the%20fur%20traders%20arrived,resist%20a%20more%20powerful%20drug.
@ Mary Bennet #197
” It does look to me, looking at a map and in view of recent events, that the four [Nordic countries] might do well to unite in one republic or constitutional monarchy or other government of their own making. I would not be surprised to see something like that happen.”
Well, that would be a hard sell for sure in all four countries as things stand now, I believe. The Danes and the Swedes have their eternal rivalry, the Finns have a deeply complicated relationship with Sweden, and for us Norwegians with our “little brother syndrome”, breaking free from Denmark and Sweden are central pillars of our national mythology. You’ll still hear the union with Denmark referred to as the “four-hundred-year-night” on occasion. And again, I think the Finns would out because of linguistic and cultural issues. Giving up our own monarchy would also be deeply unpopular here in Norway.
All that said, you might be right in the longer run, as the deindutrial dark ages proceed and force some hands. Plus, in many ways they function as one country already, as in, citizens of one can freely live, work, and pretty much do anything other than vote IIRC in the other ones. Still, the distinctions are culturally important, and I think Norwegians in particular will be very skeptical of another union. After all we also voted “no” to EU membership twice…
@Robert Mathiesen #188
“Indeed, those three languages (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) are to some degree mutually intelligible.”
To put it in anglophone terms, I like to compare it to Southern American, Scottish and Australian English. They’re very, very similar, even if some young people (especially in Sweden and Denmark) apparently claim they can’t understand the other ones anymore.
@Phutatorius: Check out the pipe guy Dread Tyger o YouTube. I met him at his shop in Gatlinburg last year, and bought a pipe from. He happens to be a priest in ine of the orthodox churches. Like his Appalachian style. He is also a big John Crowley fan. One of my Christian ham radio and pipe buddies gave me some Malcolm Guite books. Not my style really, but its a direction I find better than others. Id smoke a pipe with him.
https://youtu.be/810UeHQ2Ff4?si=CkrgoPE21gpyWjfZ
Achille # 182:
I’ve just seen the video you linked, and first I was afraid it was a conspiracy theory video, but soon I’ve heard the magic words “peak oil” and “catabolic collapse”(with the guy quoting openly JMG). I agree. EU in the long term is screwed, though I don’t think it’s going to be dismantled in only ten years. It may last more time being a shallow shell without real power, when the Euro finally falls. Video interviewed man has also said EU elites wants a war against Algeria supporting Morocco, which is attempting to make a little North African mini-empire (with Sahara phosphates to begin it). The guy doesn’t say it, but it’s near evident China and Russia would support Algeria, me thinks. Comparing EU last future years to Weimar Germany isn’t as crazy as it looks like at first sight: hyperinflation awaits in a poorer Europe, which doesn’t have much natural resources anymore, and whose new colonial temptations cannot be satisfied (USA, Russia and China won’t let it to do it in the rest of the world).
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This evening (local time) I’ve read my main town newspaper in a bar, and I’ve found the strange (or not so strange) case of the lesbian driver shooted by an ICE guy in USA. This newspaper is Conservative in its views, but the feeling I had after reading its article is the journalists nor me cannot explain what really happened. Spanish newspaper tells the official Trump government version: ICE officer shot the woman because she accelerated her car to willingly kill the ICE guy. So it was legitime defence. Trump himself, with his usual sensitive attitude, said there had been an act of “domestic terrorism”. However, leftist versions are different, that woman didn’t even touch the ICE with her car nor wanted to harm him. I don’t know really what could happen there, because there’s a video, but videos can be edited for manipulation into one or another version. Maybe the woman seems (according a video quoted by the local journalist) have a rude talk against the ICE man before accelerating her car, though of course this fact by itself doesn’t justify the shots. My idea about this mess is there are too Spectacle within the two polarized political sides in US to believe blindly in one or another version.
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Justin P. # 198:
It can seem highly shocking for external witnesses to see how some self proclamed Right Christians have rejoiced that woman shot by an ICE guy; although I could point traditionally right wing has been proud to hijack poor Jesus for their political crussades (sometimes literally). They don’t mind to contradict the Gospel teachings to achieve their goals.
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Bocaccio # 199:
I partly agree; in the relative Russian weakness outside its influence zone, but I think you undervalue Russian military reserves, like it usually happens within the western narrative about Russo-Ukrainian war. Putin, who isn’t a genius but he’s smarter than EU propaganda can admit, knows that if/when NATO European troops enters into Ukrainian territory, Russia must activate soon every military power it has. Why do you think Putin hasn’t ordered a general recruitment yet? I think in the Ukrainian fronts there are only a part of full Russian soldiers and military assets which could be deployed in a hypothetical direct fighting with EU/NATO forces.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some young Danes have more trouble understanding Swedish than their parents.
I have different materials for learning Danish that were produced over a multi-decade span. Even as a beginner, I could hear differences in pronunciation, sounds being dropped over time.
I have a theory that one big part of what keeps a modern national language stable is that conforming to elite pronunciation is socially advantageous but in contemporary Denmark, it is one’s command of English, not of upper class Danish, that facilitates higher social status. This frees Danish to mutate faster. Also, because a fair proportion of post-secondary education is in English, more of spoken Danish is day-to-day and slangy and less is elaborate speech.
With many western European languages, I can often make out things like “the President’s foreign policy” but “gemme another brewski while yourup” or “jeat yet?” goes flying right by. If young Danes and Swedes have a harder time understanding each other, some of that may be like the difficulty adults can have understanding teens when the teens go into full teen patois.
Oh, I also had the sense sometimes that with so many sounds being dropped, the resulting homonyms were distinguished by tone. In other words, Danish was becoming a tiny bit like Chinese. (For example, “hai” as hello vs. “hai” as shark.)
With my Danish, I can understand Oslo Norwegians nearly as well as Copenhageners, but when I heard folk from Trondheim, I couldn’t even tell they were speaking something Scandinavian. Even Icelandic sounds Scandi to my ears, though nearly completely incomprehensible.
The Scandinavian countries have some cooperation already and I suspect that in a crunch, they would find a way to pull together. Maybe a triple monarchy. It is not as though their monarchs actually rule.
In Denmark, I heard people joke about Swedes, but it felt more like the rivalry between fans of different football teams in the same city. Not like how Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans consider each other. Or Thais and Burmese. Or from what I have heard, Polish and Baltic attitudes toward Russia. The most anti-Swedish attitudes were in a few folks from Scona, the southernmost part of Sweden that was Denmark until the 1600s and that has been economically integrating into metro Copenhagen since the big bridge-tunnel was built.
At least in Denmark, there is a basic democratic attitude at the ground level. As one friend put it “a healthy disrespect for authority”. In both senses of “healthy”, both “a lot” and “healthy” in the narrow sense. I hope this will serve them much better than their political leadership is. One vulnerability is precisely that Denmark is a very high-trust society (at least compared to the US), so many naively trust their comprador* leaders and also American cultural hegemony. America seems too cool to be the enemy.
*Comprador = someone whose authority comes from acting as the agent of some outside power rather than from their role in the country.
@BeardTree,
It’s a big continent, so it tracks that there would be stronger and weaker varieties all across it. I imagine the Europeans picked what grew well in plantation agriculture in the Southern USA (“Virginia Tobacco”) and ignored everything else. I didn’t even know tobacco was grown out on the west coast, so that’s learning!
I went looking to see if the local tribes had anything online, and they do! The traditional smoke here was “nicotina rustica”, which is a different species than Virginia Tobacco. Wikipedia calls it South American, but according to the seed shops we can grow it here. Rustica is also known as “Aztec” or “strong” tobacco and is typically has 9 or 10x the nicotine of Virginia tobacco. That’s not something you could smoke a pack a day of! Well, maybe if you really worked at it.
Whew! Finally I have the time to catch up with the posts, and it certainly seems to me that Mr. “Unreal Anti-Vaxxer Ecofascist Grouch” Archdruid Greer spinning his “infuriating odes to despair” is firmly an environmentalist of the “our cruise ship is sinking and cannot be saved, we must paddle on our remaining lifeboats to a deserted island where we shall begin a subsistence level society” school, in contrast to Monbiot, Brin, and friends’ “we must convert the fossil fuel engines of our cruise ship to wind/solar/fission/fusion/whathaveyou until such time as we can convert it into a spaceship upon which we will enjoy a western hypertechnical (and hyperliberal) society” school.
Still, I must say that the latter to me still has far more appeal mentally (although I still accept that silly instances of straining at gnats and swallowing camels– such as casually accepting that humanity will somehow bodge out an AI that becomes God but sneering at the idea of hyperintelligent mussels evolving are indeed just a silly byproduct of the monofuture and the civil religion of progress). Call me a biophobe, but in a world that is also profoundly non-spiritual part of me wishes that the scifi monofuture that has only been more ballyhooed and commercialized in this time of a profound lack of faith in anything was true.
@ Patricia #128
“Considering what the news is all about, I’ve decided to go on a news fast for a while.”
This is something I do fairly regularly, go weeks or months last time without keeping up with the goings on. The internet is used maybe once a week or so for email and weather. It is astounding how much of it is just noise once you step away from it. Alas, most news is just entertainment and not something that actually informs. Occasionally I will be sent a link to something that is usually a rant about politics, when you haven’t been “in the loop” all the biases look so very odd. More that they take everything they see confirming their side as gospel. I have noted this on all political sides, that weird sense of everyone is either preaching to the choir or trying to recruit you to their side by divide and conquer tactics.
I do sometimes think many more folks before the advent of radio probably had a much better grasp on things simply because the limit on speed meant higher quality stuff could be prioritized. If you have a news paper once a week, both the paper could spend more time getting it right and the readers were limited to a single issue per week. It wasn’t perfect, but it probably swung closer to being useful than what we have today.
@JMG “As for The Dawn of Everything, I was unimpressed — it included a lot of useful data, but the authors were so busy pushing an obvious political agenda…”
That is a good summary of everything David Graeber. He had a great knowledge of world events and structures but always had the hard left bent on it. He was somewhat unapologetic about that but it does mean his works have to be interpreted with the heavy slant.
A few comments, now that I have a little spare time.
Wer, the public deal is for public consumption. What I’m suggesting is that a secret deal has been cut between the US and Russia, the terms of which are [ahem] secret, but will be displayed by events. The events in Venezuela are part of that; the events in Iran might be part of that; the detail that matters is what happens in Ukraine, and that hasn’t been settled yet. We’ll see!
Jeffrey, er, no. Predicting sunny weather for tomorrow does not imply that it will rain the next day!
Jack, I haven’t, and my research isn’t far enough along to attempt it yet. Down the road? We’ll see.
Chuaquin, interesting. Thanks for this.
Other Owen, well, the left can’t meme, so this doesn’t surprise me at all.
Earthworm, thanks for this! Yeah, it could blend well with John’s methods.
JoeSchmoe, it’s been a source of wry amusement to me, through twenty years of blogging, just how few people can think their way past the delusional dichotomy between the “Oh, woe, we’re headed back to the stone age!!!” and “Hooray, we’re going to the starzzz!!!” fantasies about the future. If you’d take the time to read some of the, oh, dozen or so books I’ve written on the subject, you’d find that my viewpoint doesn’t correspond to either of these — that, in fact, it falls into the middle that the mass media obsession with these two crackpot fantasies has attempted, not accidentally, to erase. If you’d like to learn what I actually think about the subject, instead of just falling into lockstep with the clueless, my book The Ecotechnic Future might be a good place to start.
I’ve written Scandinavia countries can survive the climate change better than another European countries, thanks to their high latitude. However, this thought doesn’t mean these countries will be an Arcadia during the hardest times before climate will find a new balance. Maybe the Baltic Sea is going to be a new Mediterranean one or two centuries ahead us (with orange trees growing in its shores), but before that, it’s possible heat waves make burn the Scandinavia forests, for example. In addition to this, they’ll suffer the Long Descent too. Of course, South European problems will probably be worse, but what I want to point is the mixing of predicaments (climate change and Long Descent, for example) will affect more or less, to everybody.
“it could blend well with John’s methods.”
I got the distinct feeling that they could have been approaching the same thing using different metaphors.
“It bears the peculiar traditional name of ‘The Path of the Serpent’ because it seeks to make attention glide like a snake into reality by watching for and seizing the intervening state between ideas…”
Already a feeling comes to mind that the symbolism of ouroboros might be of use in this. The ‘polishing’ of the small self so that it becomes a lens for intuition, so it (personality/ego) becomes transparent rather than opaque. The idea that the small self cannot ‘pull’ the higher self, but must quieten and become a part of a larger potential suggests the serpent is not gliding and seizing anything… rather, it ‘sacrifices’ itself to become itself.
There is an impression kind of like turning inside out at the same time as turning outside in. Or put another way, ‘it’s doing my head in’ is now dancing with ‘it’s doing my head out’ 😉
Wer here
Well on prospects on Europe making some kind of a smallish empire in the North of Africa i’d say it is just wishful thinking at this point. First of all I doubt If any European country has an army to do an actual invasion, if you thinking about trying to replace some people in a poor North African nation that is more realistic but then you have more of an liability than an asset (a nation with a violent population that will demand gifts from you and is completely oposed to the Woke ideology that the EU is almost worshiping at this point). Actually if you think rationally then the opposite is happening here because it is the people from North Africa who are colonising the EU and bringing their conflicts, problems, religion here.
Well people who talking about Iran having an color revolution are now complaning that the “peaceful protests” have fizzled out there, doesn’t mean that they will not stop in the future for God’s sake they launched an war against Iran just 6 months ago -in order to collapse the nation probably.
Apparently Starlink collapsed in Iran during the protests and only one nation was shown to disrupt communications like that before- Russia.
Another thing that one of the “reporters” proclaimed that one ayatollah was killed during the attempted coup and showed the picture of Khomeni (guy was dead since 1989) he then took off the post (shows who accurate the reporting is on the matter)
Venezuela is unclear and on one hand Trump is making bold proclamations about it but on another hand the chauvist are still there and were not replaced by anymore. Trump made also claims how he stole oil from and empty tanker, and arrested the 20 UKRAINIAN crew members. I cannot make any claims is this chaotic enviroment.
JMG you youself made this pronouncement on one of you early blogs that ” lavish spending and breakneck pace drilling of unconventional oil has convinced people that the barrel is still full but in reality it is just scrapping the bottom of the barrel” as you said JMG depletion never sleeps and no matter what onyone does the Golden Age of oil will never return only a slow grinding decline…
If our host were to be a pipe smoker, he might like this blend, which I happen to have some of:
https://www.tobaccoreviews.com/blend/11339/cornell-diehl-dreams-of-kadath/
The thing about Guite and some other “PipeTubers” is they are all hung up on Lewis and Tolkien. Not enough of them are smoking pipes and talking about Lovecraft!
@Tyler A / BeardTree: strongness of Native tobacco. I think you are both right. Some of the ceremonial tobacco was way too strong to smoke in the way we think, and other strains were suitable for smoking in the way we think.
Either way the cigarette industry is a far cry from what having a good relationship with the tobacco plant as an ally might be like.
And just FWIW… I abhor all the violence, assassinations and assassination attempts we’ve seen in the country these past years, just as much as I abhor what I see as the overstepping of force used by police on so many occasions, mass shootings, and the like.
Related: I don’t want to stop anyone from owning a rifle or a weapon, if they so choose, even as I choose to never own a gun myself.
I am a big fan of Peace Pilgrim, her teachings, and related philosophies.
https://www.peacepilgrim.org/
Peace
Archdruid, sorry for the confusion! I thought that the analogy I made was a decent adaptation of that middle route you propose (incidentally I have read virtually every book you have written except Ecotechnic Future, so I will get on that), upon closer reflection a better example might have been the conversion of that cruise ship with great big sails and some small onboard solar plants to a sort of floating sustainable metal island.
Ofc, I hope it still doesn’t come off as boorish or offensive to you that this backsliding progress head still keeps a secret hope in the back pocket that we will be able to get “to the starzzz!!!”.
Oops! I’ve missed a (sub)topic about David Graeber. Well, I can say about him I started to read “The Dawn of Everything”, and I didn’t finish to read it. He’s soooo biased. I din’t know how to translate into English my feelings about him from the vernacular spanish expression: “se me cae de las manos”.
You can point everybody has a biased view, but Graeber writings are very biased. And he’s a dishonest “thinker” too, me think. His “modus operandi” is hiding his far left propaganda behind his “fig leaf”: an etnologist, sociologist and historical (fake) “aseptic” speech, in which he cherry picks what he wants to fit in his Anarchist Procrustean bed. His facts usually are true (no real b**t), but he manages to put them outside their context to manipulate them into his political agenda. Unless you’re a True Believer in his far left evident ideology, I think you’re wasting your time reading him.
Graeber translations into Spanish are in my town public libraries, and of course he’s loved by the local far left to give a more apparent “intellectual/scientific” to their rehashed Spectacle.
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Last Kiev regime attack against one of the many Putin houses has been showed by the western Spectacle as an “evidence” of the epic Ukrainian fight against a weakened Russia, so show must go on (with its near Ukrainian victory and Russian “fatal” defeat). I think it’s a poor evidence, beyond the usual Kiev (and its western sponsors) inner consumerism propaganda, and EU citizen fooling by our beloved Russophobes elites.
Of course, such an epic deep attack within Russia has been probably prepared with the rutinary western paraphernalia, me think: intelligence services and military satellites help, so I think if you grasp this strike can’t be only explained by the legendary Zelenski government military wisedom (cough cough), so it doesn’t seem so impressive.
I can add to this impression that Putin evidently is alive yet, a bit angry obviously but “operative” to keep on waving Kiev with missiles salvos. Indeed, Putin has a “healthy” paranoia about the risk of being eventually killed: it’s said he likes a lot the many Russian nuke shelters (“si non é vero é ben trovato”). Even in the far hypothetical case the Ukrainian puppet govt and its western puppetteers could succeed in killing Putin, do you really think Russian leadership would collapse soon? I doubt it. Putin probably has since a lot of time ago his sucession line to pass his power into his favorite ideological heir within his party. Oh, and if Putinist party falls, the Russian Commies (who hate equally or more than Putinists the Kiev regime) are eager to “make Russia great again”.
I can guess Zelenski regime and his EU/UK/American elites supporters have been eaten by their own propaganda, if they think really (beyond the Spectacular appeal of such an attack) they can scare or even kill Putin in that way, or even push a regime change in Moscow.
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I think the killed woman in her car, the ICE guy who shot her and the online Righters who cheered the shooting, share the same mind hijacking by their reptilian brain: too much primal feelings and no reasoning. It’s a fact which could be seen in addition to the possible provocateurs “help” in worsening the current bipartisan tension and polarization. The woman was wrong telling an armed ICE such rude words according the video. It isn’t clear to me wether the ICE shots were to avoid been killed by the woman car or he had an easy trigger (in this case he would be another reptilian brain); and the rejoicing online (far) righters are evidently under their utter tribal instincts.
“it ‘sacrifices’ itself to become itself.”
might be more clearly expressed:
the ‘small self’ lets go of the illusory conception of itself in order that a ‘greater self’ be realised.
boccaccio @ #156: “the footage shows clearly what it was – murder”
Have you not seen the bodycam footage and the footage from other angles that’s been released in the last few days? They show that she drove at the agent and actually struck him with her fender. What might she have been planning to do next? Merely escape, or turn around and run down more agents? This agent had been dragged by a vehicle at another protest, so he knew what could happen. The streets and sidewalks were icy, which made the situation more dangerous for not only the agents but civilians who could have ended up under the wheels after a misstep. It’s terribly unfortunate that things came to the point that they did, but it was very clearly not murder.
That’s why they’re trying to turn her into a martyr, btw–if she’d been a mere bystander caught in crossfire or something like that, she’d get a few mumbled regrets instead of near-riots in her name. Because she was committing crimes (blocking the street, defying the agent’s order to exit the vehicle, using a vehicle as a weapon, committing assault on a law enforcement officer) at the time of her death, she’s a holy victim like George Floyd. I don’t know what damage these leftists have that they worship criminals as saints and have nothing but contempt for the innocent, but I find it deeply disturbing, and hate that I live amongst such people.
>Other Owen, well, the left can’t meme, so this doesn’t surprise me at all.
That’s a given. What they’ve done with Amelia, is drop ammo crates onto their supposed enemies. That’ll show those evil chuds. It’s like they’re throwing grenades – but they didn’t think (or know) to pull the pin first. So plop, here’s a grenade, ready to be used by someone who does know to pull the pin first.
And here comes Amelia back at them, darling racist Art Hoe Amelia. They’re even chanting “This is my Amelia, there are many like her but this one is mine”
For the rest of you going “Amelia? WTF?”, it’s from this propaganda game that some UK bureaucrat committee thought was a Bright Idea(tm).
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/uk-government-video-game-warns-kids-they-may-be-terrorists-questioning-mass-migration
What is it they say? When your enemy is digging himself into a hole, make sure he always has a shovel?
>I find it deeply disturbing, and hate that I live amongst such people.
Please if you must flee, please go to Texas or Florida or Tennessee, do not consider any of the other southern states. Feel free to bid their real estate up to the sky. They deserve it.
Wer # 221:
Of course, EU elite “bright minds” are wishing to get the new colonial power again, at least in North Africa, where there’s the gas rich temptation called Algeria. However, like you said, EU armies are small so indeed they are near useless to commit a real invasion. A “solution” to this problem could be ordering the compulsory military conscription in every EU countries. However, a part of nowadays young European men are…oh oh! North African and Black African migrants sons, so they wouldn’t be pleased to be sent into that war (I think especially in France with its “banlieus” tendence to riots). It’s also dubious the native young men were indoctrinated magically into the war eagerness, even if a propaganda brainwash were tried by UE. We aren’t in 1914 me think. Unless you shut down every online source, nowadays information flow is unstoppable (unless a China-like censorship would be imposed in near future: good luck with that thing!-I wish to Brussels “geniuses”).
It’s more probable the reckless EU bureaucracy would try to support Morocco mini-imperial hunger with hi tech toys, intel services help, mercenaries and a few military “advicers”, in its hypothetic war against Algeria. In the other side, it’s very possible Russian and Chinese support to the Algerian government (with hi tech toys, mercenaries and “advicers” too), so the geopolitical situation could go into a war escalation soon. By the way, I remember Algeria is the main source of the natural gas which arrives to Spain…
I’ve also read the rest of your comment: no argument here, Wer.
And for those of you who may be wondering, Father Richard, aka Dread Tyger in the video I sent to Phutatorius, is a priest in the Syriac church. It’s an interesting branch of the faith… In some of the videos he has posted on his pipetube, not sure which one exactly, he talks about having been formally very involved with Lurianic Kabbalism which he eventually rejected an joined the Syriac church, becoming a priest with a tobacco shop in the Smokey Mountains. Very interesting dude.
@ Chuaquin #225
“I think the killed woman in her car, the ICE guy who shot her and the online Righters who cheered the shooting, share the same mind hijacking by their reptilian brain: too much primal feelings and no reasoning.”
I sometimes get very nostalgic about the profoundly passé and old-fashioned concept of due process.
“Primal feelings and no reasoning,” appears to characterise the modern way of determining guilt and innocence, crime and punishment, and actual courts of law, in which evidence is presented, and challenged, and reasoning about the evidence informs the verdict and the sentence, appear to be almost, but not quite, redundant.
I paraphrase from memory, but recently heard journalist Bari Weiss questioning Erika Kirk at a town hall event, thusly (in the rough): “What do you make of all these conspiracy theorists who do not believe that Tyler Robinson is guilty of killing your husband.”
And I thought, you know there was a time, which seems now to be very long ago, when a journalist would have understood that EVERYONE must, by the standards of due process, hold and presume Tyler Robinson to be innocent of any crime until he is convicted of one in a proper, fair trial, at which he is entitled to defend himself against the charges, before a judge and jury.
Now, even though there ARE many circulating theories about the killing of Charlie Kirk, and even though there IS an apparent disinclination on the part of officials to investigate the majority of them, it is striking that, for this journalist, even the basic presumption of innocence before being found guilty in a court of law – which was once a mainstay of American jurisprudence – is falling into “conspiracy theory” territory.
@chaquin #230
This meme sums it up.
https://imgur.com/a/x9sDngF
@Scotlyn January 12, 2026
re: apart from being highly insensitive to ask that question to a recent widow, you have to understand that Bari Weiss is a self described Zionist.
A trend that the MAGA people fight, calling them Israel Firsters.
And that might hint at who really had an interest in killing Charlie Kirk.
No wonder a confessed Zionist like Bari Weiss is trying to obfuscate this.
I grew up in Sweden as exiled Ashkenazi Jew.
My mom, may she rest in peace, told me, that the Zionist during the Nazi reign in Germany tried to make her emigrate to Palestine and sell all her belongings in Nazi Germany instead of emigrating to Sweden.
Mom knew better.
regards, Mats Arnoldsson
Has any body heard from Nathanael Bonnell, the editor at New Maps? I haven’t heard from him since he edited my last piece in Sept., for the 2025 summer issue… I emailed him around Thanksgiving and again around the New Year to see if he was ok… just curious if anybody is in touch with him or not. Thanks.
About the death of the late and lamented Ms. Good; for whomever above referenced “lesbian”, and I don’t right now recall if the poster was merely repeating something said elsewhere, I will say that in the USA, adult homosexuality and same sex marriage are legal. I also take leave to point out that the current occupant of the White House is a three times married, known serial adulterer, with, shall we say, some rather questionable (proven) associations. The old saying show me who a man’s friends are and I will tell you what he is would seem to be particularly apropos here. I might also add, that the president has five children by three baby mammas, and of the four adult offspring, the only one who at all resembles a normal human being is the one he didn’t raise.
Anonymous @ 229, speaking for myself only, anyone, I. Don’t. Care. who they are, who approaches me in a loud, aggressive, expletive spewing manner gets NO response. None. I do not give such people energy. Nor the opportunity to show off to their following see how mean I am. If the person wants to escalate because of poor little feelingses hurt, on their head be it. Should any subsequent behavior result in my death or debilitating injury, clearly unprovoked by me, they and family will be paying compensation to mine for the next 20 years at least. I have from time to time had dealings with LEOs; the only one which even approached being acrimonious was when two officers knocked on my door by accident following up on a complaint of elder abuse. They were naturally indignant; I said, rather bewildered that my father was deceased, and they realized they had the wrong address. The only time I take orders from anyone is when they are my employer or designated agent of such, and that is a strictly business transaction.
Scotlyn @ 232, you don’t get it. Due process is boring. Not fun. It takes too long and gives no emotional satisfaction Right Now when we want it. A person has to give up hootin and hollerin party time to learn about legal stuff.
Bari Weiss should have some basic respect for a grieving widow, whether or not that widow chooses to go out in public. For that reason if no other, she cannot be respected nor taken seriously as a journalist. She is nothing but an overpaid, smirking scribe in service of PTB.
Scotlyn # 232:
Yes, it’s a pity. Pressumption of innocence and responsible journalism have lived better times in the past than today, not only in the USA, but in other “democracies” like my own country. MSM “parallel trials” have thrived ominously during the last two decades here.
******
I’ve read more in my town newspapers about the ICE guy and the driver “incident”, and I’ve seen there is a clearer evidence that the woman drove her car directly toward the man, so journalists here (at least in my town main newspaper) seem to accept, maybe a bit upset due to his anti-Trumpian and pro-Democrats bias, that the shots were a case of self-defense by the ICE guy.
Unfortunately, the woman who died in her car belongs to a “holy cow” group worshipped by woke leftism, so the controversy maybe will go and go on…
Of course, this fact doesn’t justify how some online right wing haters rejoiced and cheered a person death like something funny (with or without homophobic words). Trump labelling the case as “domestic terrorism” doesn’t help much, neither.
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During the current lawfare strategy which is being done here by the right parties bicephalic beast, I can tell you a supposed case of sexual harassment has been discovered within the spanish “Socialist” party. I’ve had the caution to write it’s supposed because theorically, before and during a trial there’s a pressumption of innocence for everybody, in a democracy. However, if this case is shown as true in court, it could be a sign of times in the decline of our current woke government. “Socialist” and their smaller allied leftists parties have promoted the woke identitarian and victimist feminism between their panoplia of “holy cows” until paranoia. Now, ironically the right wing returns the ball pointing this possible case of sexual bullying, marking another goal in the steady growing right hegemony in the cultural wars. If accusations are true, it’s too easy for Conservatives and their allies to point the evident hypocrisy of the govt main party: outdoors preaching feminism, indoors allowing and then hiding a man who maybe has bullied a woman.
Another story to erode our “Socialist” party is about (supposed) high spheres party man who spent money, between another expenses, in prostitutes. Well, the woke govt wanted not much time ago, to illegalize prostitution and punish men who were caught using prostitutes services (cough cough). I think only its lack of enough parlamentary majority left them without imposing that law. More woke hypocresy for the right wing rejoicing…
The Other Owen # 233:
Thank you for your link to the meme.
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In addition to my comment (answering to Wer) about an hypothetical EU-NATO intervention in a possible Morocco-Algeria war, I’ve just remembered there are a lot of Moroccan migrants here, who I suppose would join the Moroccan army (or not, who knows) happily…or compelled by their “democratic” government. Meanwhile, I think in France there’s a lot of Algerian and people from Algerian ancestors living there. If French government would support Morocco against Algeria it couldn’t be a wise decision (ahem). By the way, Spain would have to support Morocco too (we’re also in EU/NATO), but spanish citizens know well that Spain has fought several wars against Moroccans in the past, so it wouldn’t be a popular cause to support them, less even sending cannon fodder there.
I hope this crazy wishful thinking of EU elites doesn’t become reality.
Chuaquin – might I ask what your name means?
Putting it into a translation site, it reckons it detects Scots Gaelic which it translates to quack – another instance detects Tibetan and translates it as dwarves, but telling the software that the original language is Spanish gives me nothing, while a general search on ‘Chuaquin Spanish name’ just returns Joaquin.
Of course, it is a big assumption on my part that you come from Spain, so ‘bugger off’ is a suitable response to my question… I’m just curious!
Sigh, the lady that got shot up in MN.
I look at that snow on the ground and my first thought is “Why aren’t you people inside where it’s warm”. I only went out during snow season when I had to (mainly to shovel it). Snow, does not shovel itself.
And then I heard “Drive Baby Drive”, and then it hit me. If you replace her with Butthead and put Beavis behind the wheel, you have a classic Beavis and Butthead skit IRL. Except it’s not very funny when it happens IRL is it? Nobody’s going “huh huh huh”. Well, maybe a few people are.
So far, no irregular conflict, just stupid people winning stupid prizes. But the way things are going, it wouldn’t surprise me if irregular conflict does break out. Start a 6 year timer if it does, that’s how long it took from Bleeding Kansas to Civil War.
So, we’ve got a war with MN, another war with VZ, he wants to start another one with IR, and that stupid proxy war with RU via UA keeps stumbling along in the back. Have I left anyone out?
@ Scotlyn # 191 I agree agents of chaos are an important factor. There are many, both domestically and foreign.
In my country the Netherlands we found out about this the hard way in 2014. Flight MH-17 was shot over Donetsk, killing all 298 onboard (most were Dutch). It later turned out that the flight was shot down by a BUK rocket that the seperatists had gotten from Russia. But immediately after the incident many websites, Twitter accounts etc popped up that tried to put the blame on Ukraine. Russia must have worked for years to create that infrastructure and activated after the disaster. Russia has never accepted any responsibility and this is a major reason why Mark Rutte, who was then prime minister, changed to an anti-Russian stance. The Netherlands traditionally had a good relationship with Russia and just a few months before the disaster the Dutch king drank a beer with Putin during the Sotchi Olympics despite the predictable flak he got for that. Interesting is also that current prime minister Schoof also played an important role in managing the aftermath as high ranking civil servant. As expected he is all in on team Ukraine.
@ Chuaquin # 213
> Why do you think Putin hasn’t ordered a general recruitment yet?
That is an important question. I think that Putin needs support of the population. His hold on power is not as strong as it may look. He needs to continuously balance the military with his insiders crew of former KGB and Leningrad maffioso (he plays them against each other). And the ‘deal’ he made with the maffia-like olichargs in 2000 still holds: the olichargs basically stole the inventory of the Soviet Union under Yeltsin and Putin told them they could keep it provided they stayed out of politics. This brought Russia desperately needed stability, but today it acts like a break on economic development. And it is yet another fraction Putin needs to keep satisfied.
How tenuous his position is was shown with the mutiny of Wagner chief Prigozhin. Prigozhin was an old buddy from Putin’s time in Leningrad and part of his core inner circle. That he of all people mutinied must have shaken Putin and shows how little people he has around him that he can fully trust.
Finally there is also the fact that many of his opponents left this incarnation early due to a fall from a high building. Their friends and family are often still alive and potentially resentful.
I’d say Putin is engaged in a high-stakes balancing act and I don’t think for a moment his position is secure. So if Putin would announce a large mobilization without an obvious and desperate need to do so, he could fall from power.
@Anon #227
>I find it deeply disturbing, and hate that I live amongst such people.
That is one of the points I tried to make. It works both ways: among ‘such people’ is a sizable and growing number who think the exactly the same about you.
Our collective capacity to endure different opinions is in freefall. I consider that very ominous.
As fakes become more common and feed on their own detritus, one wonders how long it will be before we get:
In the smorgsbord of the delectables the quoranchibles are the star act. Little was known of the spongiforms until the eruptions of burbofilia when the mundanity of petty evil removed its mask and became gospel.
The plasticity of human drones curating models for hallucinogenic tendencies could accelerate the implosion of the donut of society, although it is argued that models cannot impersonate the dilapidoodle, the wombletools of the prolesquid are already so exceptional that the military wombletools that have generations deeper depth are angular in their inabilities.
MAHA dietary guidelines, replacing the 464 pg confusion with 10 pg of common sense, seems a good start. Change may require cutting industrial agriculture and BigFood/BigPharma subsidies, while re-instituting support revoked from small farmers, and for those struggling to get real food. https://cdn.realfood.gov/DGA.pdf
Turbocancer and many other problems rose post Covid and postVax, yet continued to rise when vaccine uptake dropped. With research gutted, and few testing to see how many times they’ve had Covid, it will be hard to know what caused what. Without good updates or infection prevention measures, time may tell.
https://icemsg.org/2024/07/21/2024-week-28/
Calling lack of affordability a hoax has not been a winner. Starting multiple wars is not likely to help, but may distract to some degree.. It is hard to assess theories about secret deals, or foreign actions. Talking about cutting costs, or making negligible changes, may make headlines more than a difference. Quietly nixing most anti-trust enforcement is also not likely to help, but may be countered by loud announcements suggesting action..
Hi JPM: I got around to watching a few of Dreadful Tyger’s videos. I would never accuse him of being insufficiently eccentric; no way! A Syrian Orthodox priest, and pipe shop proprietor. Hmmm. I’d visit his shop were I within driving distance of Gatlinburg. As it is, I make due with Campbell’s. In fact, I visited there today. I understand that there is a “problem” with homeless guys hanging out downtown. There did seem to be one, hanging out in the store, not buying anything, but just hanging around. Anyhow, I bought a couple of ounces each of their #2 and # 11 English or Scottish blends. (No aromatics for me.) But back to D. Tyger. He’s quite funny after a while. I think he’d be even funnier if I were really, really drunk. His snail joke: he once had a snail that he wanted to make into a racing snail. He removed its shell, but that just made it sluggish. He doesn’t display his books. I miss that. Never trust anyone who refuses to display his books!
@ Mary #236. > Due process is boring. Not fun. It takes too long and gives no emotional satisfaction Right Now when we want it.
Bingo. While it didn’t start with social media, 24-hour news TV is a good example of it before hand, it definitely has kicked it into hyper drive. Any major (or not so major) event happens, there is a thousand takes ready within the hour, all of them just as clueless as the next but bringing a lot of passion and bias to the table; ready to confirm or enrage equally on opposite sides. Which leads to…
@ boccaccio #241 >Our collective capacity to endure different opinions is in freefall. I consider that very ominous.
While this has always been a feature but it has also usually been somewhat muted. Yes, there would be disagreeableness but others would mostly be able to get a long despite this. But now, we seem to be heading into a state of total alienation of everyone. To be hyperbolic for a moment, a total break down of civility and social coherence.
Tribalism on a large scale and it tries to suck the air out of the room so that it can create allies and enemies with no possibility of a nuanced in between. This is something a lot of neurologists with a cross over on psychology have warned about. As stress increases, so too does Oxytocin. Oxytocin leads to stronger bonds which produces ‘in groups’ and ‘out groups’, this is a strong feature of decline as resources get spread ever thinner amongst the people.
Reminds me of an old joke. Some one is driving up to Northern Ireland and they get to the boarder. The boarder guard asks them a question. “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?” The driver responds “No, I am an atheist.” The guard simply asks :”Well then, are you a Catholic Atheist or a Protestant Atheist?”
I have seen it said that China didn’t build the ‘Great firewall’ to just control the people, but to keep everyone else out – to stop the bleed in of divisive thinking. It is an interesting position that probably has a fair bit of truth to it. Not saying it is good, but I can see the reasoning.
@Other Owen
In his mundane astrology book, JMG analyzed the foundation chart of the USA and pointed out that it has Libra Saturn in the tenth house. Progressed Mars is retrograding to the position of “natal” Saturn and will reach it in the early 2030s. I don’t know if this is important, because progressed Mars last moved over that position around the time of the bicentiennial anniversary (after the Vietnam War) and there was only a modest level of stress for America then.
Earthworm # 239:
Well, my name’s the phonetic translation of Castilian Spanish name “Joaquín” into the Aragonese language, which is nowadays near dead (there are a few scattered speakers in the Pyrenees mountains yet). It’s a tribute to a not well known and near deceased minoritarian language.
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Bocaccio # 241:
I won’t deny the pro-Russian secessionists launched the missile which blew that unluck plane, but what was doing a civilian plane flying over a war zone? Why the Ukraine authorities didn’t close the Donbas aerial space before it would happen an “incident”?
*********^
I’m glad to see you don’t think Putin is the allmighty tyrant usually depicted by western MSM propaganda, so until some extent, I agree. However, I think you’ve exaggerated the supposed Putin weakness as ruler. Of course, he needs massive support from citizens, and he’s supported “de facto” by the Russian military/industrial complex and the oligarchs, which are the elite within Russia. By the way, why you (like the EU MSM) label Russian elite as “oligarchs”, and don’t label EU rich elites with the same name? I guess that label is a thoughtstopper to see the straw in the others eye (cough cough). Today Russia isn’t the USSR (and it’s shameful it has had to trust in a mercenary force like Wagner: indeed, a mistake) but you should know (if you want to know it) that Russian own Spectacle has been successful to unite the civilians into a shared narrative against the West. I’m aware this narrative isn’t true as a whole, but it has some truth in it. Putin smart trick has been to show the Kiev regime and its army like Fascists, and then to call Russians to repel the menace, of course. Well, there are a few Ukrainian military units which show evident Nazi symbology and attitudes, but I don’t think the whole army is Fascist. However, that Russian propaganda has worked well, me think. So the spectacular attempts by the Kiev regime to scare Russian civilians don’t work against this Russian narrative wall. Ah, and indeed they’re being “rewarded” by rettaliation missile salvos every time after their “successful” symbolic atracks. But Zelenski is so stubborn…
Finally, I hope not being rude, but I’m afraid you’re a bit biased by the EU narrative about Russia.
——————
Michael G. # 245:
I had heard the North Ireland joke but not with an atheist, but with a Jew (a Catholic Jew or a Protestant one?). However, the joke sense it’s the same.
More thoughts about the Morocco war risk:
Our MSM and near every politician here tend to show Morocco regime like a democracy. Well, it’s evident Moroccans “enjoy” a political system with several parties for choosing in periodical elections. However, Moroccan politicians and average people won’t dare to speak clearly about certain topics which are taboo (and show the limits of democratic free speech there). First, the situation of Sahara people minority, who was annexionated by Morocco bluntly after being a former spanish colony without asking its local population about it (oh but phosphates are phosphates!). Second, the elephant in the room: the King. Spanish propagandists….err….journalists, love to show Morocco Kingdom as a Constitutional Monarchy-European like ours, although its king has some more power than his European kings “equals”. Indeed, the Morocco King is the Head of State and the Head of native Islam there. His dinasty is supposedly heir of its far ancestor…Muhammad prophet himself. OK, believe you it or not, this religious power seems good to avoid islamist temptations within the native believers, but it’s not good news for religious freedom and state laicity “a la European”. Moroccans usually praise their king, but are they doing it by love or by fear? Criticism against Monarchy is rare in
Morocco, because its consecuences are painful. EU usually ignores the real existence of political prisoners in Moroccan prisons.
If Morocco is such a democratic and economical thriving oasis, why are here and in other European countries a heck of Moroccan migrants?
In a context of resources war between the tiny embryonary Morocco empire and a gas rich Algeria, the EU/NATO guys would made the Spectacle of the “democratic” Morocco against the “dictatorial” Algeria. I don’t know much about today Algerian situation, but I’m afraid it’s not ideal. However, I think EU future narrative to justify its support to Morocco would be possibly to exaggerate and even tell lies about how bad is Algerian regime and blah blah blah.
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In a more frivolous mode, I’d like to ask you all…If you’ve watched the Strangers Things end, what do you think about it? A lot of its fans complained bitterly about a series end which they didn’t like. Although I personally liked it. I’m puzzled about this reaction.
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I’ve read my name is from Jewish origin. Saint Mary father name was Joaquin. It seems to mean “strength”, if I’m not wrong.
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A last topic suggestion: Do you have ever read Georges Sorel essays?
I read years ago “Illussions of Progress” and his “Reflections about Violence” in spanish translations. Sorel was an heterodoxial Marxist with a real scientific education who lived between the XIXth and the XXth century. He was popular during the first half of past century, but nowadays left often despises him as outdated. However, I think he was brave enough to write in his time about “illusions of progress”. Well, after reading the other book about violence, I understood he wasn’t a pacifist (ahem). His core idea was the “social myth”, which it hasn’t to be negative, but sometimes positive for the people. Sorel tried (and to some extent, he succeed) in mixing Nietzsche and Marx thought, in a beautiful and horrible alike hybrid. Of course, this bicephalic mixed being has its own dangers.
@boccaccio#241
When I read these same talking points in the mainstream media I thought to myself ‘they don’t actually have any evidence for that’. It’s just other people telling me what to believe. Your commentary appears to include the same didactic method, and the same breathless alarmism.
For my part I’m seriously considering moving to Russia. The Black Sea is one of my favourite seas, and my intuition tells me that Krasnodar will be a great place to live in the future, unlike Britain and the Netherlands.
@ earthworm #242
Speaking as a prolesquid in possession of exceptional wombletools, I resemble that remark!
@Lazy Gardener, January 12, 2026
we are homesteading in the subtropics on small lots in a mountainous area.
Local culture of interchanging foodstuffs is basically barter and gifting.
Most follow biologic-dynamic guidelines based on Rudolph Steiner’s research and results are getting quite good after 5 to 10 years.
We don’t even know or care about government regulations, lucky us.
And simply observing the effects of big government, laws and corporations, tells you everything you need to know about them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does
regards, Mats Arnoldsson
@Phutatorius: I am not a big fan of aromatics either. I like the English blends. Haven’t tried Scottish. I like the Balkan Sasiensi the best so far, which is considered a kind of English… but different. Yeah, Dread Tyger is quite the character, for sure. I think he is pretty good story teller, and when I met him in person, he regaled me with a tale as well. We were there in 2024 for a family reunion in Sieverville, and my wife and sister wanted to go around to the shops in Gatlinburg, so I drove them down there, braving the crowd… while they were looking at the other places, I found his spot, and we talked about John Crowley’s novels.
https://www.smokingpipes.com/smokingpipesblog/single.cfm/post/the-mystery-balkan-blends
Speaking of John Crowley. If culture is downstream from imagination… did Little, Big influence our country to have our own version of Russell Eigenblick, or was Crowley just tapped in, as artists, when they are good, are… and he intuited that we would have something like a Russell Eigenblick?
For all you pipe smokers… I had a dream last night where I was give a pipe that was made out of the branch of a long tree, twisted and gnarled. I wrote this poem while I was drinking my second cup of coffee, thinking on the dream. It needs to be tuned up, but here it is:
A PIPE IS A WAND
A pipe is a wand full of smoke and fire
a gnarled branch from a burning bush
carved from thorns and made of briar
with each puff I send to the sky
my thoughts, my hopes, my dreams
prayers of calm reflection and passionate desire.
Rings of smoke are wizard halos
drifting into clouds
whose aromatic shapes form a cloak
that around the mind enshrouds
visions of creation, visions that destroy
on the wings of sensation
where burns the will to employ
a seasoning for victory held in the tobacco pouch
a mojo bag tied around the neck
to stand erect and not to slouch
as from this stem I’m sipping
it does not bite my tongue
but whose drifts provide a ladder
to higher branches where I’ve clung
to see the greater vistas
that down the road unwinds
I sharpen up my dagger blade
as the whetstone on me grinds.
A pipe is a wand
full of smoke and fire
a flaming branch from the gods
whose sparks kindle and inspire.
Chauquin
“Well, my name’s the phonetic translation of Castilian Spanish name “Joaquín” into the Aragonese language, which is nowadays near dead…”
Fascinating – thank you!
Scotlyn
“Speaking as a prolesquid in possession of exceptional wombletools, I resemble that remark!”
Ha! An armoury of wombletools is like superglue in a time of cognitive de-bonding. Similar in nature to ‘sac-attach’ from ‘Nads ‘R’ Us’ but on a psychic level rather than physical.
All – Does anyone else think we’re getting close to the internet being unusable for general news and info about the wombletools of the world? An online Voight-Kampff test is a non-starter and I wonder if the Art of Memory is going to need a big-time comeback.
Hello John. Some time ago you published the Archdruid Report in its entirety as an anthology of books. I would like to be the complete collection. Is it still available? I meant to purchase it long ago, but have been distracted with too many other things during this so-far tumultuous decade. Thanks
Wer here
It never ceases to amaze me who thougtless some publications are especially those from the leftward side of the spectrum and how sometimes they say the quiet part out loud. recently an liberal slop “Gazeta Wyborcza” said the quiet part out loud that Poland is facing severe problems because of the demographics situation here. According to the publication there will be over 400 000 empty vacancies because there is not enough people in Poland ( that’s counting the Ukrainian refugees here!) It is obviously a hit piece designed to attack president Nawrocki known for his anti EU stance. It begs the question what if there is an mobilisation here in Poland as some people are claiming here what will happen to the economy then? in 1998 Poland had 40 million poles in it now it is close to 35 million and the number of pensioners had almost tripled here.
On the subject of false dichotomies, if I might make one more nod in that vein concerning the monofuture, it was sort of hilarious to see the sudden movement of “”gritty grimdark dystopic”” scifi in the peak of the monofuture’s dominance (the 70s-90s phase) b/c in the end it wasn’t even on the opposite side of the metaphorical coin of the scifi mentality at the time as the “superduper bright future materialist social justice Utopia” scifi that was also coming out around then.
To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, they shared the same side of that coin, and the *actual* other side was the idea that humanity would just go extinct and became yet another unremakable one planet graveyard of failed ambitions and dead dreams, something that any upright progress-head would hardly entertain except in their darkest dreams or at the metaphorical pulpit as their Hell-analogue.
Of course, as you have shown, both sides of the monofuturist coin were really just the products of stark and irrational biophobia, combined with fundamentalist apocalypticism/mythic cycles of ages, with an (un)healthy dose of rank control freakery and human supremacy (Man, Conqueror of Nature’s obituary on the old site comes to mind….)
I wonder wether “Joaquin” name has an etymological relation with the Masonic word “Jakin”, or not. If you didn’t know yet, in the Freemasonry own jargon, “Jakin and Boaz” are the names of two columns, maybe related with Solomon Temple. So I’ve thought there could be some relation, beyond the similar phonetic (casual?) between that Jewish name and the Freemasonic word (Solomon was evidently a Jew, too). I’m not sure of this, but it’s said Freemasonry has some fondness for Jewish symbology. I hope JMG (as Freemason himself) or another commenter who knows about this topic could get me out my doubt. Thanks on advance!
Trump calls Iranian protesters “patriots”, urging them to continue protesting…
If the world rhymed, Iranian officials would be equally justified (or equally unjustified) in calling ICE protesters “patriots” and urging them to continue protesting…
…it goes without saying… the world doesn’t rhyme…
…it also goes without saying, if governments did not have double standards, they wouldn’t have ANY standards… 😉
boccaccio @ #241: ” among ‘such people’ is a sizable and growing number who think the exactly the same about you.”
Oh, believe me, I know exactly what liberals think of me and mine. I’ve been called everything but a child of God (as they say in the South) by the “party of kindness” in the last decade and especially the last 5 years. I don’t accept your premise of moral equivalence, but everyone’s got a right to speak his or her mind.
Mats @ 251 – Much formal research about economies only includes monetary transactions, leaving out homegrown, informal trades and black markets. I suspect, as the dollar and rule-of-law declines, and official availability of many things and services falter, our friendships, families and capabilities will become a more reliable “currency”.
Having travelled to some “third world” countries, supposedly impoverished, I found the difference between official income, and well being, to be substantial.
@JPM: Russell Eigenblick and Caligula combined. And, I’ve been awaiting a chance to say that Dreadful Tyger might even qualify as an “odd duck.”
@ Anonymous #261
“I don’t accept your premise of moral equivalence”
I am actually very curious about this statement. I would be grateful if you could expound on it.
I myself tend to hew to the notion that if a person makes a moral claim, based on a specific moral proposition, that the validity of their moral claim depends utterly upon their own willingness to be measured by it.
However, I have often seen people disagree, and their disagreement is often couched in a rejection of “moral equivalence.”
Under what circumstances can a moral proposition, or a moral claim, be legitimately granted one standard of measurement here and a different one there? I would be very grateful to hear a reasoned argument for this view.
Thank you! 🙂
Um, the discussion here is starting to stray past the boundaries of courtesy, and a few posters have also taken my temporary absence as an excuse to flood the comments page with many very long comments. Please cool it down, folks, and remember that if you want a place to post full-length essays, you should get your own blog. The issue that required me to take a hiatus is resolving very well, and I expect to be able to pick up the reins again promptly.
In the meantime, a few comments:
Justin, maybe so, but I’m a lifelong nonsmoker — growing up with a father who had a two pack a day Benson & Hedges habit cured me of any interest in tobacco.
Joe, so noted. No, a better metaphor would be that the cruise ship limps along its route at ever-slackening speeds, the galley is running short of food, electricity becomes intermittent as more and more of the dwindling stock of fuel has to be directed to esserntials, the crew is riven into mutinous factions, and the charts are wrong. Meanwhile half the passengers are convinced that the ship’s engineers will figure out how to turn the ship into an airplane and fly them wherever they want, while the other half are convinced that just over the horizon ahead is an island paradise where they can give up on modern life and sit around all day wearing grass skirts and eating breadfruit. The sole exceptions are a little group of people gathered in an unfashionable corner of the deck, where they talk about the fact that sooner or later the ship is going to have to put into the first port it can find, this will be one of a handful of bleak and impoverished little fishing towns in the nearby part of the global South, and they’ll have to adjust their expectations to that setting because there’s no way back to the port from which the cruise ship sailed…
Other Owen, oh, granted. I can’t find a lot else to praise about the Starmer government, but you have to admit that it does a more spectacular job of failing than any government since, oh, Neville Chamberlain’s.
Justin, it’s always good to know that my own rather odd religious trajectory has been equaled and exceeded by some!
Earthworm, I must have read way too miuch strainge literature, because your paragraph about quoranchibles made sense to me. Oh, granted, I’d want to look up the exact nature of wombletools, but most of the other words are no riddle — burbophilia, for example, is obviously the bizarre craving for suburban existence that has, indeed, removed the mask from a lot of petty evil. Let’s hear it for the prolesquid!
Justin, you’re definitely on to something there. It would be straightforward enough to take a specific pipe and assign it to magical uses along those lines.
Earthworm, curiously enough, the manuscript I’m working on right now includes detailed instruction in the Art of Memory. Finding wombletools online has indeed gotten distinctly quoranchible of late.
NS, thank you for asking! They are being reprinted by Sul Books —
https://sulbooks.com/
If you contact the new publisher and ask to be informed when they see print, I’m sure they’ll be happy to oblige. It should be sometime this year.
JoeSchmoe, not at all. The idea of imminent human extinction is just another form of the narrative of “Look at how almighty we are” — it’s the version that says “We’re so powerful, we can even defeat ourselves!” Shall I speak the unspeakable? What if humanity just keeps fumbling onward, and the millennia ahead — despite a slow accumulation of slightly fancier tools — are just a rehash of the same themes as the millennia already past? What if we’re not going anywhere, really, or doing anything, and when we go extinct quietly in the usual way of things ten million years or so from now, we are simply replaced by the normal processes of evolution and nobody really notices? I wrote an essay about that a while ago…
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2013/09/the-next-ten-billion-years.html
The purpose of a system is what it does.
I have seen some videos of the death of Renee Good – I don’t know if I have seen them all. She may have acted in an imprudent way – I would certainly recommend everybody to follow the instructions of any group of armed persons. But I find it very hard to believe that a mother of three underage children, who had just dropped off the youngest at school, was in any way trying to block, much less attack, armed agents. It would take some very strong evidence to convince me of that.
But my real question is: what was ICE doing in that middle-class residential neighborhood? Why weren’t they raiding meat packing facilities, strawberry picking fields or wealthy suburbs full of landscapers, maids and cooks? Apparently, ICE doesn’t act in a way that would lead to the elimination of job rivalry between undocumented immigrants and other residents of the USA, i.e. the elimination of downward pressure on wages. I can only conclude this is a spectacle meant to reassure conservative voters and to frighten Democratic politicians.
ICE could have it even easier. Imagine a law to jail all employers of undocumented workers – let’s say one month of jail time per year of employment of an undocumented worker. That’s 120 months of jail time for employing 20 undocumented immigrants for 6 years each. Imagine promising a green card to each undocumented immigrant whose denunciation was the first evidence leading to jailing his employer. After the first 50 such cases, well publicized, the job market for undocumented workers would resemble a vacuum chamber. No need to arm 10 000 agents and send them into residential neighborhoods.
Again, this is a spectacle designed to create collateral damage.
@ boccaccio #241, @ Michael Gray #245, and others.
Lack of respect for different opinions isn’t exactly new:
“So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”
James Madison, Federalist 10, 1787
“But I’m a lifelong nonsmoker — growing up with a father who had a two pack a day Benson & Hedges habit cured me of any interest in tobacco.”
Same here though dad rolled his own using pipe tobacco (Borkum Riff) moistened with Southern Comfort. A double bypass at age 52 cured that habit.
As for “What if humanity just keeps fumbling onward, and the millennia ahead — despite a slow accumulation of slightly fancier tools — are just a rehash of the same themes as the millennia already past?”
Stoicism seems to hold up really well and that’s what, 2500 years old now?
JMG # 264:
No argument here. I accept an hiatus is an hiatus, so I take note of your advice.
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Aldarion # 265:
After having read and watched last news, I tend to think it was a case of policial self-defense, at least until the dead woman relatives and friends don’t show more evidence for the opposite view. However…
It’s a good question to think it, what were doing ICE guys in a not very fit area to find illegal migrants. Your view of ICE as a kind of Right wing Spectacle could be right too. Indeed, according the Debordian term, Spectacle can be not only the propaganda and news, but also the diplomacy and the usual politics. If we admit the ICE implementation has been done by politicians with a political act, we can call the ICE existence and acts as Spectacle too.
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More about Julio Iglesias scandal:
I’d like to remember a phrase whose author is a writer whom I don’t have to share every ideas he has, but I think he said something, some time ago, which fits in the current ugly Spectacle against our legendary crooner. Michel Houellebecq said some years ago that you won’t never be pardoned for anything if you are a straight, white European, and rich man. Which is the current Mr. Iglesias current situation…
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More about North African geopolitics:
In a possible scenary of war between Algeria and Morocco, I think the two countries and their sponsors (NATO vs. Russia and China) could play the inner unstabilization of the enemy. For example, Algeria lived during the ‘90s a bitter war against Islamists groups, so I’m afraid the EU/NATO block would be tempted to repeat the same “movie” which succeed (after long years) against the former Syria regime: first, the apparent protests for “democracy”, and then Islamist open terrorism/war showing its ugly face. Algeria has a lot of desert and mountains very fit to hide a guerrilla-like insurgence. However, Algerian rulers and their sponsors could play their own wild card to desestabilize the tiny embrionary Moroccan empire. It would be relatively easy to excite in the far South of Morocco, the Sahara tribal people against Rabat (which annexionated that area without asking before the native population, but phosphates are phosphates). In addition to this, North of Morocco is known not only by its huge cannabis plantations (ahem), but by his people sometimes too eager to riot against Rabat government for several reasons. So Algerians could also push eventually North Moroccans one more time under whatever casual cause of social unrest there. By the way, that zone has mountains, so it’s also ideal for an hypothetical insurgence.
These possible inner violence, in addition to the conventional war between the two countries, could make fleeing a lot of refugees, who sadly and ironically too, could be headed toward the EU countries. I think that risk of possible uncontrolled migration could disuade Brussels elite to fuel that war, but I also see its reckless and blind attitude…
“I’d want to look up the exact nature of wombletools…”
Originally a variation of wamble with ‘to wamble’ being a mental and physical response to societies, it became particulary pronounced in late 20th and early 21st centuries.
wamble (plural wambles)
(obsolete) Nausea; seething; bubbling.
(dialect) An unsteady walk; a staggering or wobbling.
(dialect) A rumble of the stomach.
Hidden meanings came about via the 3rd usage as adapted by the cults of mind, initially in reference to the activation of the lens of intuition but with subsequent subtleties that shapeshift depending on context.
An attempt to bury the term via television came in the 1970s in the form of creatures (The Wombles) living underground that collect and recycle human rubbish (trash) – but the original wombletools deal with the trash of mental detritus and states of mind rather than physical garbage.
In the time of social media, the term morphed once again into that of an insult. When the former British Prime Minister David Cameron first set up a twitter account the first response was: “***-off you cockwomble”
The precise meaning of wombletools can only be derived when considered in the context in which it is used, hence making it difficult for stochastic parrots to employ.
Because of the variation in meanings and use over time, wombletools can have both positive and negative connotations as well as referring to physical and non-physical forms, sometimes all at the same time.
“the manuscript I’m working on right now includes detailed instruction in the Art of Memory”
Now that does sound interesting!
I’ve written before about ICE force as Right Wing Spectacle, but I also think the Democrats have their own agenda to erode Trump presidency, so I’m not naïve, and I see another competing Spectacle around this sad incident.
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A message for the smoking commentariat:
When I was a parvulary child and I was learning to read and write, I remember there were in the books some simple and short phrases to read. One of them was “mi papá fuma pipa”(my dad smokes in a pipe). Unluckily, the fun of this phrase is lost in translation (it’s a phrase written to pay attention to the P letter in Spanish). Some years later, maybe thanks to antitobacco campaigns, this childish phrase seems to wane from first reading first books here. A pity…
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Some comments ago, Tengu said he/she wanted to migrate to Russia in the future. I’d like to complete my answer to him/her. I repeat I think migration to a foreign country should be the las exit to personal problems. It’s better to resist within the local social net of your own country, than starting from zero in a foreign land. Before fleeing your country, you should try to migrate within your own country into a safer and wealthier area (it’s my favorite option here if/when things will worsen more and more). If you’re finally compelled to get out your country, you should better go to similar language and culture countries, to avoid a big cultural and social shock. Finally, I personally don’t find very ethic to complain massive migration towards the own country and, at the same time, to see own migration as an “easy” solution; so it’s another reason I have to let personal migration as last exit during the Long Descent.
A cautionary warning regarding LLMs:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G-jpGyrXMAIzU_t?format=jpg&name=medium
https://x.com/AnotherHomoCon/status/2011113540237602850
With perhaps a ‘bitter’ irony that the image possibly came via that source!?
@pipe smoking
For some years now, I’ve been purchasing whole tobacco leaves from a website called LeafOnly. The leaves (depending on variety) can be quite large and when rehydrated prior to shredding become surprisingly supple and aromatic.
Buying whole leaves is substantially cheaper (due to minimal taxation) and, after some trial and error, I’ve arrived at a blend that is quite nice.
@ Aldarion # 255
“Imagine a law to jail all employers of undocumented workers…”
But, but, but… that might actually work! We can’t have that! 😉
@ Lazy Gardener # 261
“Having travelled to some “third world” countries, supposedly impoverished, I found the difference between official income, and well being, to be substantial.”
An elderly neighbour of mine, and myself have reflected upon this conundrum.
This man grew up in rural poverty in this locality at a time, when, as he said… “we had EVERYTHING but money.” His memories of his childhood times are mostly positive and as an elderly retiree, he drives up to his old homeplace up the mountain every day to walk around, and maintain his connection to, his old stomping grounds.
However, as a young man, he emigrated to England, learned the machining trade, and, eventually, since he could not stop being homesick, came back to Donegal with a wife and small children, to build a very successful engineering company, from which he is now retired.
And… having reflected on the two parts of his life – both poverty and material success, what he laments most is that nowadays, “we have nothing BUT money.” According to his lights, the second condition (Money + Nothing) contributes much less towards well-being than the first (Everything – Money).
Last year I went with my girlfriend to the movie theater in my town. I had been told it was a good movie, a Spanish-French production titled “Sirat”. It was about some French “ravers” freaks who have travelled to Morocco for enjoying a several days rave, so electronic music is omnipresent during that movie. There are also a Spanish man and his son who are there for another reason… Suddenly, short minutes after the movie begins, the characters are told by authorities they must leave Morocco because a bug war has begin. This situation leads them to several adventures and mis-adventures. What I want to point is that it’s never shown nor told to the public who’s the enemy of Moroccan Army, though I guessed easily it could be its neighbour Algeria. This movie director filmed some scenes in Morocco, and real Moroccan soldiers appear as “extra” crew during that movie, so it’s evident the filmmakers didn’t want problems with local authorities there. However, I think this movie’s worth to be seen for its artistic value.
Or perhaps
Womble – Wamble
Etymology
From an unknown root (possibly related to Latin vomere (to vomit), Norwegian vamla (to stagger), and Old Norse vāma (vomit)) + -le (frequentative suffix).
Wombletools
(originally) The tools of mental hygiene used by the cults of mind to manage and rise beyond the nausea induced by patterns of human animal behaviour.
(Subsequently) The mental nature of the tools became corrupted and reduced to a materialist foundation; however, this inadvertently set up an opportunity for the cults of mind to develop patterns of communication that could only be comprehended by conscious minds – a faculty beyond the scope of probabilistic computational models.
Of course, if elementals were a creation of the created that lack a divine spark, the possibility that the current idiocracy might create a degraded ‘form’ is not necessarily beyond the realms of possibility! A sobering thought…
>Imagine a law to jail all employers of undocumented workers
If I had the levers of power in my paws, it would be legal to shoot an employer of illegals on sight. All you’d need to do is shoot one or two in the head for everyone else to get the message. You’d need to do it right though, if some frustrated sadistic middle manager was the one on the hook for the bullet, they’d just slot another one in and keep going. You’d want to go after the investors in the company and shoot them.
That’s the stick, provide a carrot, make it easy to leave if you’re illegal and there you go.
>For some years now, I’ve been purchasing whole tobacco leaves from a website called LeafOnly
Now you’re making me wonder how hard it is to grow tobacco. It’s legal and I’ve got some land that was being used for a garden, so it can grow stuff.
>that the cruise ship limps along its route at ever-slackening speeds
Hey, it could be worse, we all could be on the poop cruise.
https://www.eonline.com/news/1419133/carnivals-poop-cruise-cruise-ship-nightmare-timeline
Aldarion, you may not be aware that a very large number of illegal immigrants are employed by middle class Americans as housekeepers, nannies, and gardeners — it’s not just the very wealthy who do this. (I’ve long suspected that one of the reasons people of Renee Good’s class object so loudly to attempts to cut back on illegal immigration is that, the law of supply and demand being what it is, they may no longer be able to afford domestic servants.) ICE actions in middle class neighborhoods are more likely to derive from the prevalence of immigrant labor there than from the cause you suggest. That said, I think a law penalizing employers for hiring illegal immigrants is a fine idea. Hefty fines would do the job — once it becomes more profitable to hire legal residents than to pay the fines, the problem solves itself.
Siliconguy, my father didn’t stop smoking until the COPD was so bad he started coughing up blood. I have no idea how he made it to 86. As for Stoicism, it really does work well — whenever I have to deal with hard times, that’s my go-to resource.
Earthworm, nicely played.
Other Owen, maybe we are…
One of the ways I am celebrating the 250 years of our nation is by writing up a series of articles on New World Records and the American Experimental Tradition.
Part 1 can be found here:
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/new-world-records-and-the-american-experimental-tradition-part-1
and I am now mirroring my posts on substack:
https://justinpatrickmoore.substack.com/
Here is part of my intro to the series:
“As 2026 gets underway, I want to celebrate American culture. Because of the very nature of America, “celebrating American culture” can mean a lot of quite different things to a lot of different people. At the present time of writing there are a lot of mixed feelings and hard feelings about culture in this country. America is still engaged in what journalists have called “forever wars” abroad and we are also just as engaged at home in what I call the seemingly interminable “forever culture wars.” I hope we can put an end to the forever wars and unwind our empire, and that these forever culture wars don’t erupt into a hot civil war serving none of us here at home. Democracy, is, among other things, a system that can help assuage such an atrocity from erupting, though as we know from the past, it isn’t an absolute protection. I admit it seems pretty touch and go at times.
Yet I think the experiment of democracy and of America is worth continuing, and it is in divisive times such as these when experimental music can come to the rescue. How so? I think one of the core guiding lights in America is a willingness to experiment. American culture is very experimental. Focusing on experimental culture can help us live the other parts of our life, personally and collectively, in a more experimental vein.
When Ben Metcalf, author of the novel Against the Country, was interviewed for the newspaper County Highway, he put his feelings about the nation in a way that I think many of us can understand. “People who just love this country or who just hate this country make no sense to me,” he said. “Loving it and hating it at the same time -that makes sense to me.”
It makes sense to me as well. There are so many things that I do love about America, but they are leavened by all the bitter feelings and animosity I feel for the very harsh aspects of the American experience. In place of the love and the hate, though, I’d like to focus on Americas experimental nature, the fact that we have barely even begun, that we are searching blindly in the dark for our own national identity and what it might become. Even as we search, there has been major foreshadowing, presentiments of destiny, glimmers and waypoints to those things we might collectively sense as being part of our character. The music released on the label New World Records can be listened to as a guide to some of those possible directions. Along with listening to the music, you’ll be sure to meet many national characters. …”
I do think regular smoking can be pretty gross and obviously unhealthy. I’ve been around lots of chain smokers. It’s nasty. So I apply the law of limits to my pipe smoking.
I think of tobacco here in America and the way Indians have used it. I’m not trying to be a Native American, but I do like the idea of praying when smoking. It makes sense to me… so I will be following up on that dream and implementing the idea of the pipe as a wand. Something like a church warden pipe, but more gnarled would be what I like for that project.
My father was a heavy cigarette smoker most of his life. He got addicted in the Navy in WWII. When he finally quit, he put on a bunch of weight. A few years later, he died of lung disease at 61. I grew to detest cigarettes and the smell of cigarette smoke. But second hand smoke from pipes was quite another matter. I’m 78. I have been a non-smoker for most of my life; except for a accumulating a small collection of pipes which I rarely smoked. But times are changing fast. Briar pipes are appealing objects, smoked or unsmoked. Good briar, which comes from the root structure of the heath tree/bush, IIRC, is becoming rare. Smoking a nice briar pipe can be a pleasure. Mearschaum pipes come from Turkey where most of the Mearschaum is to be found/mined. It’s carved locally by artisans. According to my local pipe shop, new mearschaum pipes are almost unobtainable in the US these days. I asked the pipe shop owner why people buy tobacco in tins, since it looks to be two to three times as expensive as the tobacco that the shop blends on-site. He said that it keeps longer. Maybe people buy it up to store in their prepper supplies. Or maybe they are simply collectors of stuff that they fancy. I forgot to ask, but I suspect the tinned tobacco has preservatives that the locally blended stuff does not have. Sorry for the longish “essay.”
Archdruid, I actually own the 10 Billion graphic novel and that article is one of my top 10 Archdruid Reports.
As an aside, its somewhat funny to me how Ugo Bardi (whose article you responded to was a blatant rewrite of a certain Clarke story, itself being a central religious text in the religion of progress right next to Sagan’s Cosmos) was entirely willing to write civilly worh you, while David Brin was so offended by it that he was promptly reduced to incoherent rage and vaporware-peddling that would have made the hypemen running our country’s economy proud. Then again, Bardi has always had a better grip on reality than Brin, to whom you really do seem to be the Beelzebub of his religion considering his reaction whenever your name is mentioned in his comments.
Anyways, I would like to ask a question about a recurring concept in your books. Have you written about the concept of biophobia at length anywhere? Thanks!
The Other Owen # 277:
In my country, there’s an specifical crime codified by law for people who “trade” with illegal migrants or/and uses them as illegal workers; the punishment is modulated by the criminality level seen by judges: between a painful fine and a real time in prison. Sometimes news about people caught (ab)using illegal migrants to work are seen here, but I seriously doubt Police discovers every case of such an extended practice…especially if the native people exploits the migrants discretly in small scale jobs.
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I’ve went today morning in my outdated vice of reading newspapers in a cafeteria (coffee and old fashioned journalism, two vices in one). Between last pages of my town main newspaper, I’ve found an article that told me the corporation which owns this town newspaper and anothers MSM across Spain (every of them evidently Conservative), has started a collaboration with Ukrainian journalists (including technical and money support) to keep alive and make grow independent journalism there. What the heck?-I thought. The western narrative says the whole Russian MSM is under the evil evily Putin boot (which is very possible), but Ukraine, like another European democracies, has a free press yet…I think (unless you accept everything which comes from Kiev as an article of faith) in a country where the Commies and other opposition left parties have been forbidden (and their leaders often arrested, exiled or they died “accidentally”), it’s necessary to doubt an independent journalism could thrive or even survive their censorship. Ukrainian intel secret services aren’t famous by his legendary respect to human rights…So this corporative activism seems IMHO a mere act of public relations to go on the usual narrative (excuse me if you find me too cynical here), to not think something worse.
Phutatorius, I think some people are buying it in tins because, from what I’ve heard, there is less pipe tobacco being produced, and some of peoples favorite blends end up disappearing. People “cellar” some of their tobacco, either keeping it in the tins. In the future it might be easier to get the pipe than the tobacco… so some people are stocking up on that, rather having lots of pipes. I only a two pipes myself at the moment, but several varieties of tobacco.
I like the line of Missouri Meerschum pipes made from corn cob. They are cheap. I have this “Daniel Boone” based one.
https://www.thecountrysquireonline.com/product/missouri-meerschaum-boone-corn-cob-pipe/
I may save up to get a nice pipe for my project above though.
Oh yeah, there used to be a local tobacconist I’d go too… but the pandemic ended their long business. When I was a teen there used to be another shop that sold me clove cigarettes and pipe tobacco underage. Back then my favorite was an amaretto flavor, but I just don’t care for the aromatics too much these days.
@Mary Bennet #123 Muslim questions–
This is a difficult situation– It seems. to me that Islam is not just a religion, but also a political system. For some of the Umma, there is a belief that the religion is territorial, and the question becomes whether God has given one area of real estate or another over to Islam. Signposts along the way include the allowance of Sharia courts to resolve conflicts, reviewed here:
https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/canadians-allow-islamic-courts-decide-disputes
Muslims aren’t the only ones who do this– In BC and Washington State the Chinese government keeps setting up Chinese courts to boss around their own expats. So far, the US and Canadian governments have been shutting them down… after a while…
Remains to be seen if Muslims in North America can widely adapt to a secular society–
“Can’t we all just get along?”
@ The Other Owen
That same site I mentioned does sell tobacco seeds of various varieties. While I have not tried growing myself, doing so certainly seems a viable option.
A garden writer, of some renown in the 80s and 90s, as I recall, published recipes for make it yourself insecticides, fertilizers and other garden sprays. Some featured chewing tobacco, highly toxic concentrated nicotine. He, and the formulae became quite controversial. I recall one gardener reporting on a forum that use of one of the person’s sprays caused mass earthworm die off.
I am wondering if the burning of homegrown tobacco leaves could make an effective indoor fumigant?
Victory Seeds, which I referenced above for rare mater seeds, also offers seeds of a variety of tobaccos.
@JPM: The tobacco store near me has been in business 50 years or more and in the same location. I’d guess it won’t be around forever, so I shouldn’t take it for granted. But when it comes to saving tobacco for an uncertain future, the old joke about not buying green bananas comes to my mind. I forgot to mention earlier that pipe smokers (except for Dreadful Tyger) don’t inhale so their nicotine dose is minimal. That’s good and bad. Nicotine is good for concentration, or so I hear, and it fights inflammation, or so I read. (My family doctor actually okayed my idea of using nicotine patches to help fight inflammation — but those patches are expensive!) Why did I exclude Dreadful Tygner? Because his videos show copious thick smoke coming from his nostrils, thus he must be inhaling. And I don’t envy him his teeth, either.
…slippery fingers today… I meant to say people cellar their tobacco in mason jars to keep for a longer period of time. From the prepper pov, stock up on your favorite blends now, and worry about pipes to put them in later.
https://www.smokingpipes.com/smokingpipesblog/single.cfm/post/comprehensive-guide-aging-and-cellaring-pipe-tobaccos
@ The Other Owen
Don’t know about your climate, but it grows very well in places with hot, humid summers and long days (you get massive plants with even bigger leaves.) Basically the Eastern US, from North Carolina to Massachusetts and west to Ohio. I live in Connecticut, which has a tobacco industry focused on growing giant, perfect leaves for wrapping for fine cigars. Daytime temperatures routinely go above 90F in June, July, and early August and the humidity is very high. Daylength on the solstice is 15 hours.
Tobacco seeds are tiny and take a long time to grow into a plant of any size, so we generally start them in March, and transplant them out in late May. The plants grow enormously if there’s decent rainfall. They start to flower in August here (I grow them for the fragrant evening blossoms) but I suspect you’d want to harvest the leaves for smoking just before or at the start of flowering, if the plant behaves like a normal herb the botanicals would be most concentrated then. But you should consult someone who knows about smoking it. I just grow it 😉
–Ms. Krieger
JoeSch… # 284:
Ugo Bardi has had a scientific education, and in addition to this he’s been interested in humanistic culture and History (it’s not casual, he’s an Italian and his country shows a lot of that culture). This wide interests horizon maybe lets him to accept constructive criticism, better than a more narrow minded man like Mr. Brin, who after having reacted in such a over-reacting attitude to criticism, portrated himself as a zealot.
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Emmanuel G. # 288:
Islamic religion has an evident political dimension. When we look at the past century history and to the current regimes within muslim world, the sight isn’t very happy in terms of democratic quality countries. It’s true foreign powers interventions haven’t help to democratize them, but it’s also an inner origin problem. The “Arab Springs” naïve euphoria ended in a not glorious way, me think. There are IMHO two big problems to mix Islamic culture and democracy. First, the identification between political and religious power. The Kingdom of Morocco (again, I’ve written about it several times before), is a case of a country with an apparent higher democratization level than his neighbours, but his “constitutional” king is the Head of the State and the religious highest leader alike. And he’s more of a decorative symbol there. So there isn’t a real separation between politics and religion. And when a secularist tendence regime has succeed for a while in muslim countries, it has been usually a secular dictatorship (like “Socialist” Algeria after its independence or Al Assad family in Syria). Of course, we can point the poster boy for secularism, democracy and westernization: Turkey. Well, Ataturk managed to build a modern state and a relatively secularized society, and some of Turkish governments have been highly democratic. However, we cannot ignore the Army has “protected” during decades the secularized state, and his intervention in Turkey politics has been sometimes quite rough (cough cough). In addition to this, the Erdogan era has been a time for Ottoman nostalgia and secularism decline. Orhan Pamuk said some years ago Turkey was indeed a “half-dictatorship”.
Second problem could be the lack of a political tradition of public free debate in Islamic culture. Western countries have a past of assamblearism and parlamentarism inherited from the Greek and Roman culture; the muslim countries don’t have it.
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In addition to my comment about hypothetical attempts to unstabilize the neighbour in North Africa, I’ve remembered Algeria accepted some former Spanish Sahara exiled when Morocco annexionated it; and then Algeria backed the “Frente Polisario” during some decades against the Moroccans. So I think it could be easy for the Algerian regime to reactivate that sleepy but not dead insurgence.
Here is a wee contribution to the thread on smoking…
The Galway City Museum has a page on Irish clay pipes… https://galwaycitymuseum.ie/collection/clay-pipes/
My personal experience of these is that it is still fairly easy to turn up a clay pipe bowl when digging the garden (never the full pipe – I presume they were readily thrown away and replaced after breaking).
The ones I find around here *** are mostly white and plain with no etching or decoration. They would have been of the very cheapest. As the article says, these pipes would have featured at wakes…
Nowadays the close relations and neighbours of the deceased will busy themselves offering every caller to the wakehouse a cup of tea and a ham or egg salad sandwich, but in the older, more raucous wake tradition, you’d have been offered a pre-filled clay pipe and a stiff shot of whiskey.
The local name for the pre-filled clay pipe offered at a wakehouse was “a penny blessing.”
*** here = southwest Donegal, Ireland.
Two observations:
(1) A screenshot of an anonymous Facebook user expressing his jealousy that someone else was dating his crush, and asking for help to overcome it led to a mini social-media tempest with some people basically calling the guy an entitled misogynist and other people expressing anger at the first group for pathologizing the guy’s utterly normal emotions . So, normal Internet stuff.
I mention it because of this commentary on the fracas, by P. Yeerk, pointing out that a great many people in our society have convinced themselves that all legitimate desires must be fulfillable so if a desire isn’t fulfillable, there’s something wrong with you for having it, which is a libidinal version of the just world fallacy:
https://xcancel.com/PYeerk/status/2011020205141700680
(2) I was feeling pretty blackpilled about current events until I read this article: “The white women turning to ‘Dark Woke’”
https://unherd.com/2026/01/why-white-women-go-for-dark-woke/
Why did this cheer me up? Because of the quote: “GQ, meanwhile, observed that the objective is to ‘subvert the qualities that people think made wokeness cringe — the virtue policing, the polite “when they go low, we go high” posturing — and go Joker mode to make Democrats cool again’.”
It suddenly occurred to me: if the Left are really shaking off their mental straitjackets, then progressive ideology isn’t long for this world. The whole ideology at this point is held together by the “We are the Good Guys, they are the Bad Guys” frame and the enforced unthinkability of alternatives. Without those, I expect a lot of liberals will feel themselves sliding away from the orthodoxy before long.
Or to look at it from another perspective: this looks like the Anger stage, but they’ve been in the anger stage for a decade now. This is the Bargaining stage.
Emmanuel Goldstein # 288
The Islam has not territorial reach, but universal. And is theocratic, looks for to govern all the aspects of the life of muslim people without regarding about if they live in Arabia, Afganistan or USA. For this reason is not compatible with another types of society and specially with democratic societies, based in the theorical equality of all the individuals, the so called citizens, before the law.
A law prohibiting hiring illegal aliens already exists.
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title8-section1324a&num=0&edition=prelim
“It is unlawful for a person or other entity-
(A) to hire, or to recruit or refer for a fee, for employment in the United States an alien knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien (as defined in subsection (h)(3)) with respect to such employment, or
(B)(i) to hire for employment in the United States an individual without complying with the requirements of subsection (b) or (ii) if the person or entity is an agricultural association, agricultural employer, or farm labor contractor (as defined in section 1802 of title 29), to hire, or to recruit or refer for a fee, for employment in the United States an individual without complying with the requirements of subsection (b).”
The problem is that no one is interested in enforcing it.
@Phutatorius: Mr. Tyger also chews, so that might explain his teeth… but yeah, I didn’t smoke my pipe for a good nine or ten months after I cracked a molar root (it already had a crown) while eating an almond at work that same year I met him. I started thinking about other smokers I knew…
…smoking is good for the concentration. I suspect that is why I like nicotine and coffee & tea. As a self diagnosed attention deficit type, I have found they help.
David Lynch might agree that espresso and cigarettes beat ritalin!
JMG, you are right that I hadn’t considered how many middle-class people in the US employ undocumented workers, and you may be right that the number is significant. I do recall that before 1989, very few people in Germany could afford to pay any household help. When more than a million people of (some) German ancestry rather suddenly immigrated from the former Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries (plus various other sources of immigration), suddenly many more people found they could afford to pay somebody to come in for a few hours a week, paid in cash. These actually were legal immigrants (I knew a number who came to our church), though many of them were prepared to work in the shadow economy.
I still think the choice to do armed raids on the streets of the capital of a state governed by the opposition (rather than actions based on prior information and denunciations) is strongly influenced by the motives I mentioned.
Oh geez, why did it take this long for me to notice this:
re: my last comment and the discussion I had a couple of months ago with JMG
If progressives are really embracing “Dark Woke,” even as a meme, that’s another big crack in the movement, because it means they’re finally embracing a name for their ideas.
All this talking smack about the Muslims reminds me of 19th century US anti-Catholic rhetoric. Mme Blavatsky even does it in “Isis Unveiled”–she goes on about the Inquisition, the crimes of the Jesuits, the mass graves of infants supposedly found buried halfway between some monastery and nunnery, that sort of thing. Sure, the Church has a dark side (HPB would have a lot to write about these days, even if she edited out all the urban legends), but nobody thinks being Catholic makes their relatives or neighbors dangerous or anything. Why can’t we think this way about Muslims?
“A law prohibiting hiring illegal aliens already exists.
[…]
The problem is that no one is interested in enforcing it.”
The problem is that many of the people employing illegals are Republicans and their donors in agriculture, construction, etc and if Trump ever tries to enforce immigration law and arrest the lawbreakers, he runs the risk of arresting huge parts of his support in the Republican Party. So all Trump is left with is kayfabe theatre where he sends ICE in to blue states to target his politcal opponents, while leaving the illegals and their employers in red states untouched.
There is apparently a Nazi-supporting Christian nationalist groyper called Kyle Langford running for Congress as a Democrat.
https://www.rawstory.com/california-redistricting-2674875476/?rand=926
Considering that dark woke has become a thing among the left, I wonder how long it will take until the left abandons their original woke beliefs and adopts the policies and beliefs of Nazis, Christian nationalists, and groypers?
What is “dark woke”? First time I ever heard of it is here. Please don’t refer me to Unherd, most of which is paywalled.
In addition to domestic labor, mentioned above by JMG, and underpaid labor, Richard @ 303, there is also the fact that a lot of people, landowners, so-called convenience stores, $stores, to name a few, are making a lot of money off poor folks’, including immigrant, spending. This, I think maybe ‘lumpen proletariat’ might be the technical term, is also a largely Republican constituency.
@siliconguy #298: Well, that makes it even easier for the president and the boss of ICE. They don’t need to convince Congress to pass such a law. They only need to make it very clear to law enforcement that the law is to be enforced now.
I recently wrote this essay on permaculture principles applied to online activity and thought it might be of interest to someone here – in part because permaculture is probably a topic of interest to this community and in part because I compare your online presence to that of another prominent Latin scholar whose name came up in your last essay. Also, if anyone has feedback on my prose in this article I’d appreciate it, I often treat new blogs as opportunities to try out new voices and I’m still finding this one.
https://open.substack.com/pub/eucyclos/p/digital-permaculture?r=2gjc2m&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Slithy T. # 296:
We’ll see if the Left is really “shaking off their mental straitjacket”. I’ve got my doubts. What I’ve seen in my country woke leftism is our government coallition has been watering down its wokeness b**t during the last months, “casually” the time when the right wing lawfare offensive has started to succeed against the govt. Scandals hurt…However, recent Julio Iglesias scandal about supposed sexual abuses has made grown again the woke rethoric (in its identitarian and victimist feminism variety) within our govt against the Conservative and rich crooner. Opportunism, me think, as”fig leaf” to hide its own shameful scandals. So I’m not sure of the tendence you pointed, at least here. I’m a little skeptical, but who knows?
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Anselmo # 297:
If you remember the Turkey example, this country reached an imperfect but real democratic state when it was compelled by Ataturk to westernize and secularize to some extent, diminishing the Islamic influence across Turkish society. More secularized regimes have ruled another Muslim countries, unluckily they’ve been near always dictatorships…
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Ambrose # 302:
I think you’re right about the anti-Catholic propaganda in the past (whose stereotypes have longed until today, not only in the US but in Europe too as leftist rethoric); and I agree there’s a strong similar anti-Muslim bias especially within Right and Far Right (I see it clearly in my country). However, Conservative Muslim migrants attitudes don’t help to integrate them in our culture, neither. Of course, not everybody who comes from Islamic culture countries fit into the steteotypes, because it isn’t strange to met North African people secularized or who have a personal liberal view of their religion (I’ve met personally some people who don’t fit the stereotyped of Muslims), but indeed most muslim migrants are social and religiously Conservative. Which leads them toward sociopolitical self-margination within western countries.
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Richard # 303:
I agree. Although I’d like to replace your word “theatre” with Debordian term “Spectacle”, which I like more…
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Peter # 304:
Far Left and Far Right freaks, beyond their evident mutual hatred, share more points in common than they believe. Violence attraction, for example; they hate their mild ideological side “comrades” for being “too reformists”; and their zealot doctrinarism too. They play a simetrical mirrors game each other. At least the far right (in its full Fascist variety) envies secretly (or not secretly) the tacticts and strategies commited by far leftists, mimetizing them. And since the old NSDAP, there’s been a “Nazi-Bolshevik” tendence within Fascists activists. So I’m not very puzzled when you’ve told us an evident Nazi guy tries to make career as a “Democrat”.
@Ambrose
“Why can’t we think this way about Muslims?”
Compare present day Poland, considered quite catholic, to present day Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, plus the fact that once upon a time the catholic Irish were considered those low class people with the many children, clanny and utterly unruly, and ask yourself who takes that kind of role in today’s Western world, and you’ll have at least half of the answer.
>Nazi-supporting Christian nationalist groyper called Kyle Langford running for Congress as a Democrat.
Just groyper and democrat in the same breath makes me giggle uncontrollably. 26th is that stretch of 101 above LA County. I can’t imagine that crowd ever going for a groyper.. I could see one of those rural mountain counties doing it but not an urban coastal county.
It’s too bad this journalist didn’t bother to ask the local democrats in the 26th what they thought of this. But I guess that’s work. And let’s face it…
https://xcancel.com/WarClandestine/status/2011628944877883438
This guy is of the opinion that it already is irregular warfare. I want to see exchanges of bullets before saying this is Bleeding Kansas 2: Electric Boogaloo. It’s not 1860s thinking – yet. We’re somewhere between 1840-1860. I suppose there still is time to turn this around. But are there enough people who want to? I don’t know.
I find it amusing that this time around, it would be all the northern states that would want to secede. I should ask random southerners, if MN seceded would you want to do anything to stop them? Or would you say “Y’all come back now”
Islamic religion is evidently Universalist, so globally proselityst: indeed like Christianism, but not like Jewish religion. I tend to think Conservative muslim migrants (who are the majority of Islamic countries migrants) self-margine themselves within our secularized western societies, so they’re partly “guilty” of the native bias against them, especially Righter people. However, I can also see an interesting fact: the more hard right is a native, the more he/she thinks muslim migrants as his/her “black beast”. I can guess (far) right Spectacle against Islamic religion migrants could be a McGuffin to a hidden (or not so hidden) agenda to erode state laicity and to return to the “old good times” of a Catholic State; at least in my country. Frantic far right denounciations against the supposed Islamization are correlative to the praising of “Christian culture”(which of course in my country is equalled to Catholicism). So it could be a subterfuge for a nostalgic agenda.
In my town, I think new generations of muslim countries migrants children tend to be less religious than their parents. It isn’t very strange to find some Maghrebi-looking teens in local bars having a beer, even in Ramadan, for example. I don’t have objective statistics surveys about personal beliefs within migrants offspring, but I guess this tendence exists, at least until the Faustian Progress faith declines more thanks to the Long Descent.
By the way, Islamic Universalism shouldn’t lead us to see Arab culture countries as a monolithic block. Conservative Islam from Morocco isn’t the same as the Afghanistan one. It’s interesting to point that Moroccan Conservative believers have fondness to go in pilgrimage to some “wise and good” men graves (a curious custom loosely near to Catholic saints), and Black African muslim usually have some animist pre-islamic beliefs. Of course, Islamist “orthodoxy” zealots hate this customs and beliefs.
Another Moroccan different Conservative and popular behavior which differs from “pure” and “orthodoxal” Arab Islam is its tendence to reserve the everyday prayers to the mosques, instead homes and streets.
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An unrelated topic which I want to ask to the not native English speakers/writers within the commentariat: I sometimes feel when I comment here or in another online sites, like I would sound dumber than when I wrote in my mothers language. Is it a personal complex or di you have the same feeling as me?
Just saw this – https://www.newscientist.com/article/2511484-china-has-applied-to-launch-200000-satellites-but-what-are-they-for/ My response – a quote from Heart of Darkness “Oh, the horror!” Elon Musk is aiming for 40,000 or so.
Ambrose#302
The problem with Islam is that It is theocratic, but christianism not. It is a feature wich makes that islam will be unable for coexist with modern states , based in the teoricall equality of all individuals before the law.
Another “Out on the road today I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac” moment – JD Vance, retweeted – Asmongold. Does it matter what it was about? Not really. And when did a guy who primarily obsessed over video games become a scraggly Walter Cronkite in a t-shirt? And become relevant enough being Scraggly Cronkite to grab the attention of the VP’s twitter team? So many things had to fail in the legacy media for this to happen.
We can’t go back, we can never go back.
>like I would sound dumber than when I wrote in my mothers language
Why, does your mother speak something other than Spanish? I think you meant “mother tongue”. But even that sounds a bit off to a native. The phrase you’re really looking for is “native language”. I think it’s obvious you are not a native English speaker, so if you mess up the grammar or use the wrong words, nobody’s going to hold it against you.
However because English is so deliciously ambiguous (if you can understand all the humor in Are You Being Served, you’re close to native) it is more possible to misunderstand what someone is saying in English than in other languages that have case and gender.
Anselmo # 314:
Theocratic tendence in Islamic countries to mix confusely political and religious power evidently is there, but it isn’t an unstoppable mystical power, at least for a while: that trend historically has been weakened by secularized leaderships like it happened for a heck of years for example in Algeria, Syria and Iraq during the past century (until inner and foreign influences stopped those secular regimes, ahem). Well, if you don’t like secular states under a Nationalist/ Socialist dictatorship, (I understand it: they aren’t democratic examples), you can see the modern Turkey (until Erdogan decided to “make the Ottomans great again”) or nowadays Morocco (with his dual religious/civilian king leadership, but however with pluripartidism and periodical elections). You may point Turkey nor Morocco are exact equivalents of our democratic western regimes (I’d agree), but what I wanted to say is these systems have weakened in a more of less way, the state-society/religion confusion, not that they’re perfect.
It’s too easy to criticize Iran, Afghanistan and Arab Peninsula kingdoms for their theocratic totalitarism, but some examples of the opposite tendence have been real, too.
Meme for the day:
https://imgflip.com/i/ahg79g
@Anselmo, #314, Christianity after Constantine went quite theocratic. Over the past 500 years this has diminished quite a bit as christianized cultures secularized and Christianity split into subsections. Which to my mind as a Christian was a good thing. I think the church or churches should be independent organisms not tied into societal control, though still having a presence and influence as part of the social ecosystem.
One more…
https://imgflip.com/i/ahg83t
@ Michael Gray #217 and #245
Patricia M and you have made me seriously considering taking a break from the news. You’re right that the signal to noise ratio is bad and the tsunami of AI slop is making it worse.
Your comments in #245 all make sense; thank you for sharing. Our declining social cohesion (going on for several decades now) will make us less robust to deal with the changes and crises that are on the horizon. Perhaps this is nothing new to you, but according to Ibn Khaldun, asabiyya (loosely translated as social cohesion) is the most important factor that determines the strenghth of a society. It is cyclical and in tune with the rise and fall of that civilization. I’d say that many developments of the past decades have undermined our social cohesion and less tolerance of different opinions is indicative of the fractures in our society.
@Chuaquin#247 and Tengu#249
Both of you suggested that I got my info about Russia from EU and MSM propaganda. That has me puzzled. The MSM in my country doesn’t progress beyond Stormtrooper syndrome nonsense like “Putin is evil and therefore we are in danger and is he is weak. If we dispose of him, everything will be allright”
I have never seen in the MSM anything resembling my analysis in #241 that takes inventory of the various fractions, the powerdynamics between them and the consequences it has for Putin’s leeway with regards to various potential policies. This analysis btw has been pieced together by myself over the years and could of course be wrong. If it resembles EU propaganda I want to know that because it would cast doubt over my work.
If you have a link to propaganda you’ve read that has the same level of depth and width as my analysis and drew the similar conclusions, please share it.
Aldarion #265
I share your concerns.
“I find it amusing that this time around, it would be all the northern states that would want to secede. I should ask random southerners, if MN seceded would you want to do anything to stop them? Or would you say “Y’all come back now””
States seceding and withholding funding and taxes to the federal government would be a good way to destroy the permanent federal bureaucracy in Washington DC. Would be ironic to many commentators on this blog if the left were the ones to destroy the federal bureaucracy and the PMC by their own actions.
Ambrose @ 302, it is a truism which is nevertheless accurate that to be human is to be fallible. Any person, political party or movement, country or even religion can be criticized. Reacting with outrage at any slightest lack of deference to one’s own prophet or founder or religious authority while condemning all other faiths is not a way to make one’s own group well liked in multicultural societies, as our own homegrown American Christian nationalists are even now beginning to find out. We, the citizens of such societies, have every right to resent incomers who demand every possible indulgence for themselves while openly expressing their disdain for their hosts.
About half a millennium ago, that is 6-5oo years, 250 years before the establishment of the USA, the Catholic Church committed horrible crimes against humanity. The “hand over to the secular authority” excuse was so transparent a fig leaf that no one then or now has ever believed it. 500 years later, half a millennium, the Church has still not lived down and not been forgiven this episode. One might think that Israel and Moslem countries alike would learn from this example. Are not Jewish and Moslem scholars forever telling us that, unlike the dumb Americans, they do not forget history?
@anselmo #314:
Some counter-examples:
– Roman emperors from Theodosius I. onwards, especially Justinian
– Popes from Gregory VII. onwards until the schism, especially Innocence IV.
– the Commonwealth of England after 1648
– the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the 1600s
I m not saying Christianity is always theocratic, quite the contrary. But it seems an oversimplification to say that Islam is and Christianity isn’t. Urban Islamic societies were rarely and still are rarely theocratic – currently the only real examples are Iran and Afghanistan. Now if by “theocratic” you mean that Muslim-majority states enforce Muslim religious law – yes, they do, and I would strongly oppose any application of Muslim religious law in my country. But Christian-majority states enforced Christian rules for centuries, too, just think of the tithe or of the prohibition of divorce.
I have been thinking mathematically about the course of human civilisations.
Human populations boom during urban civilisations, and this puts increased strain on natural resources. Soil fertility etc. drop, and this produces an adverse impact on the ability to maintain a large human population. This is a negative feedback process.
During “dark ages”, human populations are very low. The ecosystem has time to recover, with weeds and wild grass growing on once sown fields. This restores soil nitrogen and other nutrients. This makes the environment capable of supporting a wider population. This is also negative feedback, because low population produces high capacity for population sustenance and vice versa.
Now these effects occur with a delay, because the environment becoming less capable of sustaining population does not mean the population will automatically decline. Instead, there is a slow (and usually violent) lapse of culture followed by catabolic collapse, eventually leading to a dark age.
A delayed negative feedback, as taught in control theory, produces oscillatory behaviour. For instance, a pendulum or a pressed spring oscillates back and forth due to the delayed negative feedback – the further a pendulum goes from the centre, the more the force to restore it to the centre, but this force produces acceleration that slowly builds up velocity, hence the delay in the reaction to the movement.
So I think human societies (except very sustenant tribal societies that really know how to live in nature) are inherently oscillatory, going through dark ages and civilisation. This is a good thing, since a dark age filters out most of the expensive abstractions that civilisations build up, leaving behind only useful and pragmatic ideas.
Pottery, weaving, and navigation appear to be the only Minoan ideas that survived the Hellenic Dark Age. Simple machines, brickwork construction, writing, and mathematics are the only ones that survived the Sub-Roman dark ages. Whatever is really useful about modern societies will survive the next dark age.
Raharsi#325
Probably you’ll find interesting this document of our Archdruid:
How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse – Ecosophia https://share.google/MHLTCGMivepWTOaFP
Jack #322: “States seceding and withholding funding and taxes to the federal government would be a good way to destroy the permanent federal bureaucracy in Washington DC. Would be ironic to many commentators on this blog if the left were the ones to destroy the federal bureaucracy and the PMC by their own actions.”
That would indeed be ironic! However, it goes both ways: the states that secede would no longer receive federal funding, which could seriously cripple some (maybe not all) of them.
@rajarshi: Quite a bit more ideas survived the post-Roman dark ages in Western Europe: cities in places that didn’t have them before the Roman empire; the idea of states (even if they were weak); the idea of a corpus of law, and in fact the specific books of Roman law as codified by Justinian; stone architecture including vaults, though they were smaller and rarer; the Catholic church, and I could go on.
Even more has survived other “Dark Ages”, like the Egyptian intermediate periods or the periods of disunity in India and China.
Not to take away from your main argument.
“That would indeed be ironic! However, it goes both ways: the states that secede would no longer receive federal funding, which could seriously cripple some (maybe not all) of them.”
At this point, the left would probably take that trade off if it means owning Trump.
Sayer Ji (who is/was one of the “disinformation dozen” whose suppression during the Covid years alerted many to the tight relationship between censorship and breaching of rights) is writing once again about threats to free speech.
https://sayerji.substack.com/p/now-its-on-the-record-the-us-state
In this case he is writing about what he sees as confirmation that the US is also a participant in the transnational digital crackdown on free speech.
The Other Owen # 316:
Oops! You’re right, I wanted to write “mother tongue” or “native language”, which in my case is Spanish, of course; but I didn’t remember those exact words. Well, I think my English isn’t wonderful, but I hope I’m near always well understood…
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BeardTree #319:
You’re right, but you don’t have to go back so much time into the past to find the mixing of politics and Christian religion. For example, until 50 years ago, my country was under a regime which called itself as “National-Catholic” (cough cough). A secular state and society here started only 4 decades ago: not much time me think.
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Bocaccio # 321:
The Russo-Ukrainian war has two competing Spectacles or Narratives, I’m aware Putin regime has its own business, its “oligarchs” and its own military-industrial complex. I’ve pointed before my current comment that showing the Ukrainian army as a whole as Fascists has some truth, but evidently isn’t all the truth. I’m not naïve to not notice the Russian Spectacle.
You say your point isn’t the same as western propaganda. Well, I’ll have to accept it like an article of faith, because you’ve justified the Kiev regime direct attacks against Putin with the same (self-decepting) hope as Zelenski circle and the whole EU narrative think or pretend to think: Putin hypothetical death as the beginning of the end of Russian regime. What a strange coincidence. Could you tell me who are your safe and wise information sources? (If you don’t mind to write them in this blog).
By the way, you haven’t answered yet my questions about how strange was some years ago, a civilian plane flied over a full war zone before it was blown up by the evil evily pro-Russians. Kiev didn’t close its aerial space over the rebel Donbas area, in spite the fact things were heating too much in East Ukraine. How can you justify that decision? Shooting down that plane with a Russian toy was a stupid and bad decision by the rebels, but Kiev authorities previous attitude doesn’t seem cautious, to not say a worse word.
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Mary B. #323:
The attitude you’ve depicted (to show the shameful facts in others religions and shut up about the own sins) it’s usual between the right wing narrative, which often self-proclaims as Christian, hijacking the poor Jesus for its agenda. It seems a behavior which could be named as “fart ethics”: it’s bad only when the others do it, not when we do it. To be honest, this idea of comparing flatulences with morality it’s not mine, but it comes from a spanish philosopher…I hope not having harmed your sensitivity with this maybe rough metaphor.
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Aldarion # 324:
No arguments here.
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Rajarshi # 325:
I wish too some good modern technologies will survive the Long Decline, for example the printing press.
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A brief message on how to stimulate the attention economy
https://imgflip.com/i/ahh45u
I remember a common complaint of the past is that we were all just cogs in a machine. At least back then, you’d be dealing with other people, who had to follow rules, but still it gave you the feeling that you were dealing with a person.
The kids are ghosting each other now, applying to ghost jobs for work, living near empty ghost houses, maybe working from home in a job with a team of less-than-corporeal presence. Even in real life interactions, there’s a sense we are talking past each other, preferring to argue with ghosts from the past instead of dealing with the present reality. Doing the “ghost dance” in their effort to relive past heroics. Many have noted accelerating decay in the physical world as we live more in the online world, entranced by the allure of what some are calling “AI”. Dealing with disembodied intelligence is now routine, I’ve had more than one tech interview with what I was told was an AI.
The world feels less inhabited than it did when we were cogs in a machine. Are we living in a ghost story now?
A major block to a state or states leaving the union would be the loss of social security payments to the disabled and the elderly. Presumably that could be made up through the money no longer being paid to Washington. And what about the benefits already earned by those not yet retired. Also large chunks of a good number of states are owned by the Federal government – At least 45% of California is. Divorce is seldom simple.
For those who do the Five Rites:
– Have you noticed a tendency for the abs and core to get increasingly tight?
– Have you found any good exercises to counteract this?
The financial and economic consequences of a state leaving the U.S. ( if it were allowed to happen) would be extreme, its not 1860 anymore.
As someone has mentioned, social security and medicare payments to residents of the state would stop. The federal mortgage system ( fanning, Freddie, FHA) would end for that state.
The support for the federal highway system ( and Amtrak) in that state would end.
If the state gets a majority of its power from a federal power agency ( Bonnevile, TVA) that would end and the feds could direct that power back to the other states. Any military bases in that state would close, and any defense industries would have to move.
All federal land in the state would be thrown in to limbo ( Oregon is 60% federal land). Federal agriculture subsidies would end. That state would no longer be a part of any trade agreements. If the state has a port it would lose the protection of the coast guard and the U.S. Navy.
The federal entity could also sanction exporting business’s in the breakaway state if they felt like it. And finally the state would lose the support of the federal reserve, the US banking system and the reserve currency.
The federal government is going to go bankrupt in the near future, probably around when the dollar loses its status as reserve currency. It won’t be able to maintain Social Security, Medicare, federal mortgage systems, federal power systems, the military, federal lands in the West, the federal reserve, ag subsidies, etc. Those programs would be eliminated from existence for the fiscal health of the federal government.
At that point, why wouldn’t leftists just take their blue states and leave the union. Ditto with right wingers taking their red states and leaving the union.
@336 Clay Dennis
Secession will not happen now. It’ll have to wait until a time after deglobalization/relocalization has set in and when the federal government is so weak that rebellious states can seize the federal assets within their borders with impunity (or emerge victorious in a war with what remains of the U.S. military). The disinigration of America wouldn’t really be the cause of America’s downfall but an effect of it.
(I’ve added an initial to distinguish myself from the other person in the comments).
Greetings all of you, a topic of some great interest to me has called forth a response:
to #172; #194 #203; #205; #222; #278 & #293 Tobacco!
First to say thank you for bringing this up and to JPM for sharing the article from PNW newspaper and the poem!! Nicotine is not to be equaled to tobacco, although I am not certain of the differences between commercial pipe tobacco and commercial cigarette tobacco, I know that the tobacco I grow myself is organic and no chemical additives in it. And my daily use of it is all about ceremony and prayer, once per day each morning as I greet the sun.
I have been growing it here in the pacific north west for about 5 years, and yes, as Kimmi # 293 points out you must start them early indoors, and then transplant and then they grow like crazy!! The seeds I have been growing and saving and regrowing are, I am sure, Nicotina Rustica, although they come from a gulf island seed company that had been growing them up here for a few decades. I have also grown the ‘native Pacific NW’ tobacco, quadrivallis, it is a beautiful little and fragile plant but does not make a great quantity of smoking tobacco.
It seems somewhat easy to grow, but it is the drying, curing and fermenting for good smoking quality that I have struggled with and seem to slowly be getting a handle on. Trying to follow the path of the tabaqueros from south and central america, who make what they call mapaucho with it. For me it is all about the relationship with the plant, and seeing it as a teacher plant. And at my age (roughly similiar to that of our host) I have no worries about an early death or any cancer or long term effects it may impart, I say bring it on, teacher. But to each his own.
I love my pipe, and time spent with it and my own home grown tobacco, each morning, greeting the elements of nature in gratitude. A couple of years now and only once per day, no sense of addiction, no harmful effects, I rarely get sick. O maybe also to add that I blend in mullien with the tobacco, for its healing the lungs effects.
Peace to all and gratitude
“As someone has mentioned, social security and medicare payments to residents of the state would stop. ”
Possibly, there are exceptions, adding the new country to the list would be quite possible.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/virginialatorrejeker/2026/01/04/receiving-us-social-security-abroad-understand-ssa-country-list-1/
“As of publication, citizens of the following countries may receive uninterrupted Social Security payments abroad, regardless of residence:
Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea (South), Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and Uruguay.”
I’d also point out that Social Security is mostly pay as you go from current payroll taxes, the ‘trust fund’ is a book keeping exercise.
Federal land would revert to the States and so would military bases.
A serious problem for the interior would be losing access to ocean shipping. The coasts are reliably Blue except for the gulf which is a long way from North Dakota. In Canada Alberta and Saskatchewan have the same problem unless they can get either Manitoba or northern BC to join them.
On the other side though the cities like to deny it they are dependent on the countryside for food, energy, building materials, and sometimes even water. If the split comes there is no reason to think the state borders will be sacrosanct. East of the Cascades and West of the Cascades have been snarling at each other for at least two decades. Eastern Oregon has already voted to join Idaho but Portland thinks the east side still has assets worth stripping and they are not letting go.
Secession would not be trivial, but it’s not impossible either. A peaceful divorce is better than war.
>The financial and economic consequences of a state leaving the U.S. ( if it were allowed to happen) would be extreme
You’re thinking coldly and rationally about it. I can almost guarantee you, based on what we’ve seen so far, those people up in MN are not thinking coldly and rationally about any of this. Perhaps they should.
That said, I’ve yet to see anything that looks like irregular warfare – yet. We’ll see how the loony lefties react to being read the Riot Act by Trump today. Based on their past behavior, they will very likely double down. Walz did not help there. I’d say he poured gasoline on it. Does that include shooting back? We’re going to find out.
https://xcancel.com/nicksortor/status/2011693543379652619
This is getting closer to irregular warfare. Someone intends to shoot back at some point in the future. Not there yet but if things keep going down this path, we will get there.
Scott Adams passed away. In addition to Dilbert, what he should be most remembered for is convincing someone to install Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s vice president, which in turn greatly contributed to Donald Trump’s reelection.
Most people are unaware of that story, but during her rather unimpressive primary run, Scott Adams was the only political commentator (and certainly the only pro-Trump political commentator) who consistently complimented Kamala Harris and saying that she’s the only person that the Democrats have who uses the same persuasion techniques as Donald Trump (ignoring facts and speaking only with persuasion in mind). You can learn more about this approach in Adam’s book “Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.”
He kept repeating on his podcast (repetition is one of the persuasion techniques he advocates for) that Joe Biden should select Kamala Harris as his VP precisely because of her persuasion style, and that she could take on Donald Trump in a debate. And, lo and behold, a few months later she became Biden’s VP despite her poor primary run and in spite of other candidates (who included black women) being more popular. Adam’s himself laughed about her selection as VP at the time and stated that he wouldn’t take credit for predicting her selection because there’s a very strong chance that he caused it.
I’m firmly convinced he caused it, because lots of powerful people watched that show for his opinions after he was one of the few people (along with JMG) who called a Trump victory very early on when it seemed like a long shot.
Re: Monofuturistic shows such as Star Trek being thinly guised morality plays of contemporary times, apparently the United Federstion of Planets now has a problem with police brutality, specifically of the “redneck white police cops beating up young black teens and kneeling on necks” type (see: the trailer for their latest Crass Commercial Cashgrab show, I know the Archdruid doesn’t do video but trust me you aren’t missing out on anything that you wouldn’t have gotten from the more lurid tales of Mr. Ta-Nehesi Coates).
I’m not sure if ol’ Mr. Roddenbury is either silently praising keeping up the tradition of hokey parallelism, or spinning in his grave quickly enough to power industrial civilization for a goodly period of time (a year or so at the most), but either way one can hope the zombie can be put to rest after the media circus.
Dennis Michael Sawyers (no. 303) “. And, lo and behold, a few months later she became Biden’s VP despite her poor primary run and in spite of other candidates (who included black women)”
Biden had promised to pick a black woman, and she was the only one with substantial enough credentials–i.e. governor or senator.
Curt (no. 309) “Compare present day Poland, considered quite catholic, to present day Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia…”
Those countries don’t seem very comparable to me. Eastern Europe and Turkey feel about equal, civilization-wise, but are still very imprecise matches. Maybe the southern and northern halves of Bosnia, or the two halves of Cyprus? Albania vs. Bulgaria? I can’t think of any Muslim island that is very much like Ireland.
ATT, the phone company in these parts, is now employing quiet quitting on the corporate level, California so far will not allow them to give up on the analog landline phones ( these are gone in many states), so it seems their strategy now is to slow walk any repairs. My analog landline phone went out on Christmas day during the storms and many roadblocks were put up by them, first it is their only service that you cannot report a problem online. Second was trying to get thru by phone from another location as there was alot of waiting, transfering, etc….. their final solution though is to not have repair people, I guess they let most of them go, or else send them off to do anything else first. They did finally fix my phone issue at the pole 2 weeks later. It turns out they also just left an entire school of 200 students in the same fix in another part of the county, just a whole school in an area with no cell phone service with its phone line left unrepaired for at least 2 weeks. So my bet is that the first service to be let go in rural areas will be that, communications, there is still enough profit in the electricity to go for longer. At least hilly terrain areas not easily served by cell towers will lose it relatively soon.
I am fine, I have a handheld HAM radio that can hit a repeater tower 5 miles away, it is privately managed at a friends house and they run a propane powered generator for it when the electric is out. But also, as my life has this type of serendipity, my emergency cell phone ( phone only, no data plan) that is supposed to, but wont, make calls thru my internet wi-fi, on its own connected and worked as a phone from the day after my phone went out until a day after it was fixed, and is now back to not working over the internet again as I dont need it to… Magic Monday stuff, one of my daughters is confused by this, Im not. But at the time, it did surprise me to hear it ringing in my purse while I was in the house
Middle class women in the current political issues re. ICE: I hope I dont see more of them this far gone, but I saw in a parking lot today a couple of our local older women one trying to talk the other one down, the one was… angry/confused ? I dunno if more sad or angry, both, volatile for sure. From what I could hear, she was loud , she is convinced there is some kind of government lying/conspiracy coverup. The new videos are doctored. We are being lied to. The media she sees has her convinced the government is out of control and murdering. Makes me mad that people are doing this to her and others, manipulating narratives to that extent, I know who she is casually, bought a painting off her years ago. Shes pretty old now, one of the old artists from this area back in the day and this is the demographic that is getting emotionally manipulated around here and off protesting or just being upset when realy they should be planning their garden or doing something enjoyable or happy. But, I know they have done it to themselves too, it has been a long series of steps from TDS, COVID, years of hysteria at this point.
Hiring of illegals. Well, I read yesterday that a government board/employee in New York city was hired because they only had to attest that they could be legally hired, no one checked. Kind of like the voter registration forms out here. So this person was arrested. Locally, yes, absolutely the middles class LOVES to knowingly hire illegal to save money. Alot of people are hired by individuals, as nannies, as house cleaners, as landscape, as handymen as full construction projects on their homes under the table. Larger businesses hire this way by sub-contracting all the way down. So eventually they hire a contractor with a contractors license who then goes and finds a guy who brings a small crew up and not a one has a legal employment status. And we have plenty of young men who are willing to do eelctric and plumbing and roofing but that contractor pockets more profits this way, the customer of course is still paying prevailing top dollar. And this is how many of those illegals go out on their own, they know the contractor is paying them too little, so they give their cell number directly to the homeowner to be called directly next time, and to have it passed to the homeowners friends. Then, PG and E, the power company, does not hire undocumented, PG and E hires Davey tree, Davey tree subs to Community tree service, maybe they just have the hire “attest” by signing a form, or more likely, there is a stolen social security number because I know that that guy in the truck, driving (!) has no idea what I am saying. And it is almost all of them at that company. They let them signal for the road stops, we have almost had interesting accidents.
John, glad your stuffis going smoothly now
Scotlyn # 330:
Your comment is motive to my concern, free speech usually is hard to reach it, but it can be easily and fastly lost…
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Clay D. # 336:
I’m surprised by the fact 60% Oregon land is Federal owned. In my country, the Neoliberal Conservative Spectacle shows its fondness for the capitalist USA yet, which is depicted as “less state power”. However, the most extreme fringe right wing, especially “libertarians”, don’t trust in the American myth anymore: they prefer for example, Singapore as poster boy of full Capitalism.
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Dennis M. # 343:
I didn’t know he had passed away: rest in peace. I’ve read some Dilbert books,(I think they’re funny), which often have been translated to Spanish, but I haven’t paid attention to his ideas and more serious work.
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Going a bit deeper into the secularism topic, I’d like to point the beginning of secularization within Europe, when middle ages Emperors and Popes started fighting each others for the political supremacy, me think. Civilian power started to emancipate from religious influence, and Rome started to be “protected” by the Emperors. The process was long and lasted a heck of centuries. I think the Luther Reform helped to it, weakening the Popes power, but it was only yesterday (in historical terms), when the last part of the Pontifical States around Rome was lost for the Popes. This happened during the XIX century, when Italy was unified finally as one country. In my country, when Napoleon invaded it, a part of the Nationalist reaction against the invasion was the defense of Catholic faith against the “libertine” French, so secularization in Spain was a bit late…
I think there’s been a secular trend in
muslim countries too, but for cultural and historical motives has been later and weaker than in Western countries. It’s interesting IMHO to point that secularized nationalist/socialist regimes in Islamic world often have been influenced during the Cold War by USSR (and then by Russia), so the “free world” did its best to destroy them. In addition to this, secular tendence regimes like evily Saddam Husein Iraq, which were alligned with western interests for a while, ended being “useless” for them when they tried to “escape” toward other influenced…so they were destroyed by USA not very years ago. Finally, we mustn’t despise another motive to explain why secular tendences within the muslim countries seem to go back in last years. Petrodollars and oil: Wahabbite Coranic school was a fringe tendence in the Arab Peninsula…before the Saudi were blossomed by huge oil reserves discoveries. They’ve been using their oil wealth to build mosques and fund Coranic schools and other “charities” in another muslim countries, of course for spreading their own petty Islamist “thought” school. We can’t forget the Saudi engagement against Syrian Al-Assad regime, for example, supporting some of the Islamists militias there, between another factions involved in that war.
@ Clay Dennis
If a state left the US, everything you mention in your post would be almost immediately replaced by local equivalents, which it wouldn’t be too difficult to create: social security, medicare, a mortgage system, funding for highways and railways. Power would either be generated locally or bought from abroad (think of the USA and Canada). All federal land would instantly belong to the new independent state. If the state has a port it would have to pay for its own protection, but I’m fairly sure it would cost less than what the average US taxpayer pays to fund the US armed forces and their 800 bases abroad. Europe has a lot of small states, even tiny ones (such as Monaco) and they do quite well financially on their own.
My Mauritian-born wife experienced the independence of Mauritius in 1968, when she was still a child. Basically it meant that the British governor and British civil servants were replaced by indigenous Mauritians, who became Prime Minister of Mauritius, Mauritian government ministers, etc, after a small majority of Mauritians voted for independence. Mauritius issues its own currency with the British pound as a reserve currency (at least back then, I don’t know now). Independence obliged the Mauritians to work hard to attain some level of prosperity. They created an industrial free zone and signed trade agreements with foreign nations (including India and China). Last but not least, unlike the UK, they are not involved in military conflicts of any kind.
I’d like to suggest you all two questions to answer them, if you want to open (or open again) a can of worms:
1-Do you have read the French novel “Submission”?(written by the “enfant terrible” Houellebecq). If you haven’t read it yet, in the short way, he tells the reader the takeover of French government by its first Islamic leader in a near future, event which mixes with the personal life of his novel main character. I think it’s a very well written and very provocative/controversial in its contents (more for the woke usual “Islamophillia”), but although as work hypothesis of future as a whole isn’t impossible the grim scenary he depicts would happen, not every events depicted in that book would always seem IMHO possible in the real future world. If you want to go on this topic, I’ll go deeper in my opinion about it.
2-What do you think about last news about the Greenland mess? From my European point of view, Trump occurrence has upset EU, or at least its leaders are pretending it. A tantrum Spectacle has been shown by some EU military “powers” around the Greenland Trumpian appetite; even our “beloved” President (indeed Prime Minister in a proper term) has said something about Greenland lately, maybe to distract people off his government scandals (like he has tried to do with the Julio Iglesias McGuffin), but also influenced by the evident unrest within the UE about this topic. I’m skeptical how UE/NATO military midgets could/want really to break their serfdom to the USA in this geopolitical challenge, but who knows.
>Monofuturistic shows such as Star Trek being thinly guised morality plays of contemporary times
They always were, always are, always will be. Not about Teh Future(tm), about the hyperpresent. Watch old Doctor Who shows, where all the space stations had the chonkiest computer terminal props. That’s what they thought the future would look like, what they had right now but even MOAR SO.
TBH, few people really want to hear about Teh Future(tm) because it upsets their comfort.
>rednecks in space
About the only TV show that’s come close to that would be The Expanse, with their Belters. But if we ever did become a starfaring people, you’d almost have to have people around who had practical skills who could get things done in a not-so-pretty way. People who had a keen perception of reality and knew how to deal with physical risk.
For those of you continuing to celebrate the season of winter, I have created a dark ambient mix of music, for your journey in seeking endarkenment. This is music for when you want to cave in and hole up. Music to listen to in the dark. It is in fact, a weather report from the hollow earth.
https://justinpatrickmoore.substack.com/p/a-weather-report-from-the-hollow
>A serious problem for the interior would be losing access to ocean shipping
Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas would like to clear their throats right now. I think the ports up north are better for shipping, something about drafts and shallow. Not a navy guy. Never sailed the high seas. Arr.
Even North and South Carolina have sea access but it’s all swamp and shallows, no way a container ship can get anywhere close. Florida IIRC, became a backup port of call when CA decided they were too special and precious to unload cargo during the coofy craziness.
>A peaceful divorce is better than war.
You’re thinking coldly and rationally about this. Stop that. Reach down deep inside you and find that inner fanatic, who knows xe’s always unshakably right. There you go. Now, let’s scream out some hymns. Here’s some Manic Panic, now go color your hair blue.
re: smoking being icky
Nothing’s free. But I would ask, which is worse – smelly people and places or the looniness you’re seeing right now? All I’m saying is consider the tradeoff between the two. Or, is the tradeoff for the populace living an extra 10 years going to be the collapse of society due to degraded mental fitness? Is that the tradeoff you prefer? Maybe it’s inevitable at this point but something keeps telling me this is a choice and it’s not inevitable. Maybe I should tell that something to shut up? Don’t know.
It’s not a perfect world and sometimes every choice is bad. Although it seems like lately you can just replace sometimes with always.
From the official announcement .
“Zorin OS 18 just crossed 2 million downloads in under 3 months 🚀
More than ¾ of these downloads came from Windows users, helping to grow the Linux user base even further.
Thank you to everyone who supported and shared our biggest release ever!”
https://www.pcguide.com/news/linux-distro-designed-to-look-like-windows-hits-2-million-downloads-since-the-end-of-windows-10-support/
An update to Linux Mint just shipped too. I updated on Tuesday.
Microsoft continues to catch flack for Windows 11 and Apple is catching flack for their Liquid Glass user interface update. The latter induces eye strain in a significant number of users.
Both the big players tripping over themselves at the same time might open the door for the competition.
A while ago someone commented on Professor Jiangs lectures, can’t remember who that was, but if you see this, thank you! Been really enjoying them.
He is obviously betting on a Pax Judaica, where Israel will come out in the dominant position in this century and has traced the history of secret societies that lead him to that conclusion.
It’s quite convincing, but thought I’d put forward this youtube “debate” between Jiang and Simon Dixon, where they get into their different ideas about geopolitics right now, Dixon leaning more heavily into the idea we wont get WW3, transnational capital is just shifting its positions, neglecting Europe etc. Quite a good back and forth!
All the best
T
@ Chuaquin #331
> You say your point isn’t the same as western propaganda.
errr, *you* said it was and I asked for an example
> you’ve justified the Kiev regime direct attacks against Putin with the same (self-decepting) hope as Zelenski circle and the whole EU narrative think or pretend to think: Putin hypothetical death as the beginning of the end of Russian regime.
Nope, I put that statement between quotation marks ” ” and characterized it as MSM nonsense. I actually believe it would be a stupid and very dangerous idea to try to assasinate Putin.
I don’t think this conversation is going anywhere so I will back out of it now.
A cartoon I once saw. Two old gents bent over in wheelchairs in a rest home with catheters and urine bags attached.. One says, “Hey, Harvey”. The other one replies, “Yeah, Bill, what you want to say” Bill replies, “Aren’t you glad we quit smoking so we could experience this?”
What is the definition of middle class? I might have barely scraped into the middle of the middle class over time, for my area, but I certainly can’t afford to hire any help. And we are doing better than we ever did before! Still, when it comes to making a big spending decision, it’s always an either/or right now… we can get a bigger done on the house OR buy a used car, etc. I may be middle class, but I don’t feel “middle class” in the way people are using it here. Maybe it is because my dad was the sole breadwinner for a long time growing up, and he was a welder. And when my mom did work when she was alive, it was as a hospice nurse. They still struggled for a long time.
Even if I were to make more money, I have never considered hiring any help though, not to do my chores that I can do myself. I’d feel really weird about have someone clean up after myself. Doing the regular chores is good for you. It keeps you grounded & humble. I’ve of course hired contractors to do repairs and work on our home. Who the contractors hire is also another matter.
Something that doesn’t seem to get pointed out often as it might is that the U.S. has been involved in “counterterrorism” in Somalia since the 1990s. It’s no wonder many of the people have fled their homeland. Since Trump has been in office, especially during his first term the number of strikes doubled on Somalia. Here are the numbers of people killed by American’s in Somalia for each presidency since Bush II.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z4cue3_nMMTQMY18Zz8-Frz-02jfyKPgq-ioJMOujeU/pubhtml?gid=478247173
Ever since our involvement in the failed Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 the area has been destabilized.
Interesting article on Venezuela from Charles Eisenstein here:
https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/venezuela-an-evil-omen
As I mentioned before… if we didn’t violate the boundaries of so many other nations, perhaps our own boundaries would not be violated in ways some people dislike.
The Other Owen #350..
But what to make of those serene-like folks who fly (SixGuns in Space.. ‘;]) Firefly Express; where one can initiate a bar fight, shuttle some contraband for the agreed price, or just give the greater galactic mussel the middle index finger..
Justin P. # 351:
Thank you for your music suggestion!
Ok, here is how the illegal hiring is done in California, even though there is a Federal Law about hiring only those with a legal standing to work, and a federal E-verify system for checking, California has a law exempting all private employers, so no stolen ID needed, and employers are not allowed to ask immigration status in most cases. You could get sued for hiring discrimination. And as the immigrant population is over 50% at this point, if you are not native bilingual you have trouble getting hired for alot of positions
” California’s approach to E-Verify includes specific exceptions and exemptions, reflecting its nuanced stance on employment verification and immigration. One primary exemption involves private employers not subject to local mandates. Unless dictated by local ordinance or industry requirement, private employers generally aren’t obligated to use E-Verify, underscoring the state’s emphasis on balancing immigration enforcement with protecting workers’ rights.
Certain industries, particularly those with federal contracts, may have different rules. Federal contractors in California must use E-Verify to comply with federal regulations, overriding state exemptions. This creates a complex compliance landscape ” https://legalclarity.org/california-e-verify-laws-employer-compliance-and-penalties/
Chuaquin @ 349, about Greenland. Throughout the 20thC, Democrats were the party most prone to overseas military adventures, such as Vietnam and both world wars. The Republicans tended to be more pro annexation, believing that no better fortune could befall a place than to be admitted into The Union. Alaska and Hawaii were both admitted under Eisenhower.
With that in mind, what was NOT offered in the recent talks between Greenlanders, Danes and a couple of admin. flunkies? Yes, I referred the The Vice President as a flunky, and I cannot for the moment think of a less diplomatic person than the VP. Well, it would seem that statehood, becoming part of the USA, not merely a possession, was not offered. (What? Two senators, a representative and 3 electoral votes for 50,000 brown indegenous? Not going to happen. ) Not to mention state government which does have this tendency to pass laws that impede moneymaking by outsiders,
OK, what about respect for Greenlandic culture and traditions? Those traditions include a ban on private property, so that one is a non starter.
How about preferential admission to top tier universities for Greenlandic young people? Uh, that is generally reserved for idiot scions of ME royalty and privileged brats of the gazillionaire class of which our pres. so badly wants to be a member.
There isn’t much this administration is willing to offer that any other place would want. I imagine that the Greenlanders understand their resources will be mined by somebody, but they seem to have the not unreasonable expectation that they should be paid what those resources are in fact worth. As well as a decent respect for their pristine environment and traditional ways of life. I don’t personally think that is too much for them to ask. That is no different than what the Saudis enjoy now.
For anyone who wants to get mad at me for disrespecting the VP, I despise Mr. Vance. IMO, not only is he a sociopath, he is a dumb sociopath. The guy can’t even pretend to hide his disdain for anyone who is not a me firster like himself.
As for how militarily possible is this project, have a look at the recent blogging and toobing of one Malcolm Nance, a former enlisted non commissioned officer (the guys who keep dumb a@@ lieutenants alive) who does understand military matters. He is not sanguine about the prospects.
Very OT : According to a Greek source, the indecipherable Linear A Minoan tablet has been deciphered, but not by linguists, but by those who know how bureaucracies work. “These are the records of the Minoan functionaries,” these guys reasoned. “There are a lot of this kind, a few of other kinds, and this bundle was found in this office, and another in that.” And from then on could figure out that this batch dealt with grains, and that, with olive oil, etc. And then compared them by size and where they were found, to what was in the Linear B, and found some close correspondences. And just working like that, got a pretty good handle on it.
That is, they compared the shape of this to the shape of that like a paleontologist comparing two fossil skeletons.
Will have to check the source on my phone, where it popped up. Quite often, they come and go, while the cat memes and advice columns linger forever.”
And – not just a straw in the wind, but an entire haystack: Time Magazine’s “person” of the year is “A. I.”
@Chuaquin,
You might misunderstand why 60% of Oregon is Federally owned. Most of the federally owned property is land that would cost more to take care and pay taxes on than they are worth. There are two types of federally owned land. The mountainous forest land that is owned by the Forest Service ( part of the department of agriculture) and the high desert grazing land that is owned by the Bureau of Land Management ( dept of the interior). It is much cheaper for a lumber company to pay the forest service to harvest a parcel of trees than to replant, and maintain the roads on private property. The same is true of grazing land. It is much cheaper to pay the BLM grazing fees than to own and maintain the land yourself. This is a system that was set up to benefit capitalism ( the form we have anyway) and not as a symptom of socialism.
>helping to grow the Linux user base even further
The “Year of the Linux Desktop” is a running joke but it looks like Microsoft and 2026 will give that joke a run for its money.
Mary Bennet (no. 363), the whole thing reminds me of the 19th-century Indian treaties. Take the glass beads, get sent to the rez.
“I might have barely scraped into the middle of the middle class over time, for my area, but I certainly can’t afford to hire any help. ”
Way back when I was an undergraduate I remember an article in either the National Review or New Republic where a woman was complaining that even with an upper middle class income she couldn’t afford a maid. But she had enough free time to dig up the data for the fraction of people in domestic service at the turn of the 20th century. It was a substantial fraction in the maid, cook, gardener categories.
Isn’t one of the themes of Downton Abbey the decline of the rich causing a steady reduction in the number of servants they can afford? Even Miss Marple had a maid and/or a cook and she got by on “a small legacy.” Hercule Poirot had Georges and Miss Lemon. The gentile class had servants.
People bailed out of personal service because better jobs opened up.
Somewhat related to Greenland I looked up the list of British ships. Six destroyers and seven frigates. They have two aircraft carriers but not enough escorts to keep them both at sea at the same time. How the mighty have fallen.
Boccaccio #321
> you have made me seriously considering taking a break from the news
At the beginning of 2026, I stopped ingesting news media, except Tucker Carlson and Bill O’Reilly. Instead of partaking of news, I focus more than ever on my ‘cozy’ hobbies of reading murder-mystery short stories, the occasional hardcore 19th-century horror short story (way more extreme than Edgar Allan Poe), and watching Prime Video’s mainly murder-mystery series/shows like Miss Marple, Poirot, George Gently, Midsomer Murders, Vera, Foyle’s War, and Shetland. My so-called volunteer day-job is designing my husband “Jethro’s” upcoming website in Photoshop (regarding his second career) where, thankfully, I am having a grand time buying and viewing the best clipart ever.
My main visceral need is “I ‘biggly’ need to do things that SOOTHE me (solace).” I keep reminding myself that, at 73, this is not my world anymore. I look forward to the 2026 mid-term election where I will vote straight Republican, the more conservative the better.
No news makes sense anymore. I gave up trying to gain anything from people who say “blah blah blah, all day long” just to hear themselves talk. Everyone seems whacked out — nothing jives. No news reports will (or can) change my mind about voting straight Republican, so why would I waste time watching or reading the news? News is 99.9% crock. I will perk up days before Tuesday, 3 November 2026, on voting day, where I will vote in person.
I am pretty well disgusted, but am being stoic about it. Yes, thank you, JMG, for reminding me of stoicism. Stoicism makes sense; it will get me through.
JMG, on whatever your projects are for this month of January, more good luck heads your way. I await, impatiently, for your first essay of February. However, the third week of February will, I think, be the pits🖤.
💨📺🔪😵🗳️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
The Other Owen #352
The Great Lakes, as JMG has said many a time, will come to the fore. Being a relative newbie to the Great Lakes region (Madison, Dane County, Wisconsin), there are some existing cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Buffalo which, I presume, will be re-purposed. I am sure there are dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of small harbors throughout the Great Lakes that will find new reasons for being.
My late father, a merchant marine, in the 1960s, used to be First Mate on Mobil oil barges traveling from the Chesapeake Bay, Philadelphia, and New York City, over the Saint Lawrence River, and up onto the Great Lakes, delivering oil to many major ports, including my nearby Milwaukee. The Great Lakes are difficult to navigate, and needs super special training. Dad was training for his Captainship when he dropped dead of a heart attack from too much, yes, chain-smoking, drinking alcohol, eating fattening meals, a habitual womanizer (gigolo), no exercise, and regularly neglecting his prescription medications. I suspect this sort of barge-work will be in more demand than it is now. Navigating the Great Lakes is not for the faint of heart — one must have nerves of steel. For pleasure cruises, when a storm appears, get the hell outta there to some safe port.
Don’t forget the Great Lakes. Lake Superior: the furthest west, and in elevation the topmost, has pure water (as is) worth drinking, and contains more water in quantity than the other four Great Lakes put together. (Californians, regarding water, eat your heart out. You ain’t gettin’ ours. We are very protective of our water.)
💨⛴️⛵️💦🍸💃🥩🥔💊💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hi JMG, im curious about something:
In your novel stars reach, you envisioned a post industrial future in about 2400, but with ecological restraint and less extent than even preindustrial civilisations im infrastructure, etc. is this still in the 500 year downslope you mentioned, a seed for future empires?
Bocaccio # 357:
Well, maybe I didn’t understand you very well your view, if it wasn’t your will to justify the fool Kiev attempts to kill Putin: I’m sorry.
By the way, I understand you don’t want to say which safe public information sources you rely. You’re in your right to not reveal them, but I also have my right to not trust very much in your opinions, me think…
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Justin P. # 359:
I didn’t know about US strikes in Somalia.
In addition to the Venezuela topic, I remember how the EU leaders cheered fastly the Trumpian Maduro “abduction” and Chavist regime end…while now are complaining bitterly about Trump evident will to annexionate Greenland from its traditional Danish sovereignity. International laws are equally challenged in the two cases alike. Can I see last news with “Schadenfreude”?
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Mary B. # 363:
Thanks for your opinion about the Greenland controversial topic. I personally don’t know very much about that Danish “colonial” territory, only that Denmark justification to have it mainly it’s the Middle Ages Vikings explorations and ruins in that big island. I also know its scattered population is made of Inuit and mixed Danish/Inuit people. I agree: the Trumpian government offer has been blunt and rough, but I also think Greenland people, in an ideal world, should have their right to choose freely their future under one or another country…or even to choose their independence.
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Clay D. # 365:
OK, I understand that Federal public lands are functional for Capitalism, not for Socialism. However, that tendence in the US shows how Capitalism needs Government help to work, which is ironically contrafactual to the Conservative (and of course, the “Libertarian”) binary opposition between Capitalism and State. It wasn’t evidently my will to see massive Federal US land ownership as “Socialism”.
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(There’s an spoiler in my following comment!)
I see nobody in JMG has read Houellebecq novel “Submission”, or maybe you don’t want to write about it if you’ve read it, I don’t know.
I liked very much the artistic side of that controversial book, and the provocative story he tells in his novel. However, the depiction of the Islamization of France in a near future has some not very well thought situations. For example, the main character plans to escape to Spain for avoiding the violent French context. Well, it would be strange that political unrest in
France thanks to Islamic rioters wouldn’t be contagied to another European countries (Spain has indeed a heck of North African migrants). In addition to this, in the novel appear some real French politicians, but the Islamist French leader is a fictional character. It’s a pity Houellebecq hasn’t been brave enough to
not point an actual and real famous Muslim activist…Finally, it seems to me not very realistic that in a situation of “democratic” Islamist takeover of France government, there wouldn’t be a reaction to save the state laicity within the own state. I think evidently, as last option, in a preventive coup d’état by the military, coordinated by secret services, as work hypothesis. I’m aware a novel is fiction, but I also think the author could have thought better his story (which in the other hand is very good).
Part of being middle class on paper is that our wages have increased at the same pace as inflation … so while still better off, it also seem to be still treading just ar slightly different level. We live within our means and stay out of debt after getting house paid off, but our vehicle are old, etc. I guess that makes us downwardly mobile. We had to get a partial new roof lat year so that stopped other projects we might do on the house.
At the same time so much if what others seem to have beyond the surface is all propped up on massive debts and racked up credit cards.
I also see how different it is for our parents now, what they were able to do coming up as boomers, and how our millenial kids also have it harder than us in terms of getting started with a home and affirdability.
Justin P. # 373:
Middle class is IMHO a very “elastic” term which depicts similar but slightly different situations across within a country, and in several countries. However, when things worsen beyond a “non return point”, people can’t support their middle class fantasy anymore. I think one of the several causes of woke “left” decline here during last years, is the steady decline of real middle class spanish people (the ideal voters for usual woke “left”). Middle class people don’t have to coexist in degraded neighbourhoods with multicultural “marvels” like the low worker class people (who’s fed up to live with the ugliest side of massive migration everyday, so they’ve voted and the’ll vote soon to the far right). So when more and more families lost their middle class status and enter into the low class cathegory, it’s possible they start to know the dark side of woke politics…and a few more votes for the government coallition would be lost.
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If I’m right, JMG said a lot of his posts ago, he used to make a “triangle” to be well informed about the Russo-Ukrainian war. First, he read a western MSM, then a (pro)Russian media, and finally, a not western nor Russian MSM. It’s interesting to point John, after using this system, has said in his opinion, Putin and his near circle have managed Russia survives quite well in military and economics during this war time; in spite of endless western sanctions. I think personally the real thing must be between the BBC (an usual Kiev regime mouthpiece) and Simplicius “the thinker”(if you don’t know him yet, he’s a clearly pro-Russian online analyst).
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Yesterday, I had an argument with my mother about Julio Iglesias scandal. She watch too much TV, so you can guess her mind has been hijacked by the Woke/Envy Narrative here, about supposed sexual abuses by the crooner against several women. It’s interesting to say I didn’t support Mr. Iglesias clear innocence, I only pointed pressumption of innocence must be respected, until everybody (even Hannibal Lecter if he’d be a real guy) is declared guilty by a judge in a fair trial (which is a basic Human Right in a democracy). In addition to this, I told her a weeping woman story can be true…or not, before a judge and experts say it’s a real evidence to condemn someone. It’s more difficult more than one supposed crime victim would be lying together, but Mr. Iglesias is very rich, so it’s not impossible the supposed victims (and her lawyers) are seeking Iglesias money…
Finally, I said this scandal is very useful to hide under a “fig leaf” the corruption scandals of a declining woke government. She answered to me the usual and predictable mantra: The old crooner is an evident perv (sic) and the women cannot be lying because some TV channels broadcasted their facts version.
I guess this supposed sexual abuses case would end when the women lawyers and Iglesias lawyers reach a deal to pay them a heck of money. Then, the Court probably will forget the case, after having found a legal subterfuge to stop the trial (cough cough). We’ll see.
The “Lies are Unbekoming” substack has published a piece on the hate speech legislation up for voting by Australian legislators on the 20th of this month. It is from the same stable as other hate crime legislation, of which, I’m sorry to say, Ireland was an early adopter.
https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/five-years-for-words-they-wont-define
The Australian bill is entitled “Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026”. As the poster points out, none of the three titulary words – antisemitism, hate or extremism – are defined.
Per the essay:
QUOTE
“Section 80.2BF creates the offence. A person commits a crime if they engage in public conduct intending to “promote or incite hatred” of a person or group, or to “disseminate ideas of superiority over or hatred of” a person or group, on grounds of race, colour, or national or ethnic origin.
“The conduct must be of a kind that “would, in all the circumstances, cause a reasonable person who is the target, or a member of the target group, to be intimidated, to fear harassment or violence, or to fear for their safety.”
“Three elements of this construction warrant attention.”
END QUOTE
The essay then proceeds to give close attention to each of these three elements. Worth the read.
On the other hand, it seems that the element of surprise, that always oversets programmes for exerting control, is already at work in regimes that have passed this kind of legislation… to wit – the emergence of “Amelia” in English meme discourse.
Personally, I love surprise… and I note that Terry Pratchett once named “surprise” as the fifth element… It is the capacity of autonomous agents to surprise that will perennially frustrate all schemes of perfect control.
Which is not to say that such efforts to perfect systems of control will not continue to cause trouble, strife and suffering.
Still…. surprise!
>“Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026”. As the poster points out, none of the three titulary words – antisemitism, hate or extremism – are defined.
Here, let me help you with that definition. They all map to YOU. It’s “Combatting YOU Bill 2026”. Hope that helps.
re: middle class
Cynical rules of thumb. If you get to take Turkey Day as a four day weekend, you’re (at least) middle class. If they compel you back at work the next day, you’re not. Same thing with Christmas and Christmas Eve, if you get both off, you’re middle class. If all you get is Xmas, you’re not.
Other markers which are probably becoming obsolete. If you obsess over a “401(k)”, you’re middle class. If you have no idea what that is, you’re not. If you get enough “vacation” to theoretically travel somewhere, you’re middle class. Although nobody is supposed to take their vacation, you take your vacation pay when you leave a job and arrange for the new start date to be a month after you leave and that’s when you’re supposed to take it. In general, if you have a job where you have to ask HR about benefit details at least once, you’re middle class.
>Californians, regarding water, eat your heart out. You ain’t gettin’ ours. We are very protective of our water.
I occasionally think about the difference in water availability across the Dry Line (there’s a sharp boundary between the desert air and the moist gulf and atlantic air). And how on one side, you have more water than you know what to do with and are constantly trying to get rid of it and on the other side, chronic shortages of water are a constant fact of life.
And then I think wouldn’t it be nice if you built a continent-wide canal where you could sell and transfer that excess water on one side to the other side that’s always parched and thirsty? And then I think that the ability to organize and do something on a scale like that has come and – gone. Nobody in charge has the ability to get anything like that done any longer.
But we can put all the pretty pixels you can fantasize about on a screen. And that is called Progress.
@ Justin Patrick Moore #359
“As I mentioned before… if we didn’t violate the boundaries of so many other nations, perhaps our own boundaries would not be violated in ways some people dislike.”
I do agree with this. Thoroughly. As a civilisation, we appear to dislike “moral equivalence” and often hue to notions (and I use that word quite deliberately) that what WE do is done for higher and better reasons, while, when THEY do the exact same thing, it is egregious, execrable, and also punishable!
Whereas, I continue to believe that we can (at least morally) stake righteous claims ONLY to rights that we ourselves respect in others, especially in others with whom we disagree. If we insist on a non-moral-equivalence based double standard, we are feeling entitled to some special privilege, and so long as we have some power, we may, temporarily, get it… but the universe is not obliged to respect our entitlement.
Also, thank you for putting a bigger context around Somalia/US relations… 🙂
Middle class/hired help.
Middle class is a term used for a VERY broad brush of incomes. Some of the middle class people who have someone come into clean are not realy middle class on a nationwide income category, they would be in nationwide top 10% income at least and they absolutely self identify as middle class. Then the low income people want to identify as middle class too, so the term is over used. It is not very expensive vs. all other housing expenses for someone to have a cleaning service or person come in twice a month to clean, it is done by some maybe many upper middle class 2 income households. They make their kids help pick up first before that day so the cleaners can swoop thru and get the actual mid-deep cleaning done. There is a certain efficiency to it. This is not like having a maid or daily help at all. Then there are elders for which this type of cleaning is hard, and we still have a large baby boomer demographic here. When I was a child I was a child of a working class family with 2 working adults and at various times was either a latch key child or went to a babysitters after school. This babysitter, who was also family friend and every child who passed thru called Grandma ____ worked into her grandma years with the children there, so at some point, she also had a cleaning woman whom I remember fondly too, she came in once a week and did real hard deep cleaning, scrubbing the tile, etc… when Grandma ___ was younger she would have done her cleaning herself, but in later years with her own children grown ( so less expenses now) and income coming in from children, she had this. Myself and my family, we never had any cleaning help.
Outside work is a different thing. It is very common for people to have someone else mow the lawn. Used to be you could get a neighbor boy to hire to do it, they dont seem to do this around here anymore. Even my folks when my dad got old had someone swoop in once a week to mow the lawn. But no one for inside work. Even I have someone help with this, not an immigrant. Back when my own son was a teen, there was him or there were more teen boys I knew thru him, so if they needed cash, there is a never ending supply of wood to be moved or various weeds to clear or grass to mow. I usually hire in the spring and have someone mow once unless there is late rain, then twice, and he is mowing an acre with a string trimmer and chainsaw back Himalayan blackberries . He is local, raised in this area and makes a good living doing chainsaw work, mowing and some dump runs. He is very fast. But he cant meet the demand, so other households have to find others to do the work and do bring in immigrants. I dont know why some of the young men dont see that if he can do it, they could too. I think he started as a teen and just never stopped, he used to split and sell firewood too. He is a fast and efficient worker, and keeps at it, he doesnt sit unless its in the truck going to the next property. Owns his own home in this area with no mortgage new built with cash. We seem to tell our young folks hard work is bad, they get debt, pay for gym membership, cant find a job for that degree.
Dear JMG,
Esteemed group,
I recently revisited some books on NLP after a long time,
and am wondering whether there are any specific/known roots in occultism?
Thank you for your work!
C.A.
@Other Owen 350
That certainly makes sense. I’d also argue that the old “space-monofuture” is really almost totally dead and gone nowadays, ever since budget cuts savaged the program during the tail end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st, as evinced from the near-universal panning of the aforementioned Crass Commercial Cashgrab.
In terms of mass thought, the Terrorist Tragedy we got instead of a Space Odyssey in 2001 and the subsequent great plague instead of sexy chromed up chooms in 2020 were tremendous deathblows against the monofuture in basically all of its metaphorical aspects.
The monofuture of the “blue-hair” set seems to have shifted to “fancy gadgets and woke justice” as someone here put it a while ago, in addition to the Protestant eschatology of Kurzweil, Hinton and friends’ cultists. Gizmodo is a pretty good indicator of the shift.
Scotlyn # 375:
Yes, that bill is IMHO a direct threat to freedom of speech, because its non-definition of the bad words which will trigger the future legal punishment, means to open a very wide window to the government(s) to limit at its will in a shameless way the necessary democratic dissensus. This Australian occurrence seems also to me an attempt to shut up the criticism against massive migration (one of the several woke politics “holy cows”). For example, the term “Antisemitism”, according this legal black hole, can mean every criticism made in this blog against Israel and the US Israel lobby, could be prosecuted if we were in Australia. Even my comment (some JMG posts ago) criticising babies and children circumcision commited by religious motives (pointing reasonable motives against this custom) could be labelled as “Antisemitism”.
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Following with the middle class topic, more accurately, its decline across western countries, I’ve remembered now what was said in a spanish online forum, sone years ago, by a guy who was proud to tell everybody he was a middle class man. He said he had started to live in his new flat, which was in a government subsidized building (so cheaper than a free market house). In addition to this, this guy also commented his parents were helping him partly to pay his flat mortgage. I thought then he had a “middle class” cognitive dissonance…
The Other Owen # 377:
Well, middle class definition may change depending of times and countries, but I keep thinking it’s very elastic…but not infinite. There were a time in my country (the “happy” ‘80s and ‘90s) where everybody here was or pretended to be middle class: even some people was upset if you suggested there were another social classes. I’m aware those old good days have gone since more of less 20 years ago.
@Chuaguin #312 and @The Other Owen #316
If you can get all the humour in “Are You Being Served” you are (1) British and (2) of a certain age (i.e. born around 1960-65, I forget which of the pretend-Chinese-horoscope “generations” this is supposed to correspond to, but around the vintage of our host).
Don’t worry if you don’t. British English (or, as I quaintly call it, “English”) is my mother tongue (a perfectly valid expression, by the way) but almost nobody speaks it nowadays and it will be the Aragonese of the future. I would expect everyone who currently gets all the humour in “Are You Being Served” to be dead in 20-30 years.
I would be surprised if getting all the humour in “Are You Being Served” were a requirement in the current UK citizenship tests, and I am a UK citizen with a very low opinion of the current UK government and all its works.
The pending Australian anti-speech legislation mentioned by Scotlyn (#375) and others is utterly appalling. It suggests that governments have finally recognized a profound truth, first articulated by Rudyard Kipling in 1923 in his address to the Royal College of Surgeons at their Annual Dinner:
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Not only do words infect, ergotise, narcotise, and paralyse, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain, very much as madder mixed with a stag’s food at the Zoo colours the growth of the animal’s antlers. Moreover, in the case of the human animal, that acquired tint, or taint, is transmissible.
If you want to eliminate any opposition to your government’s policies, or bring your population into unresisting obedience, just drug it into passivity, and prevent it from accessing other drugs that might counteract the ones you administer. What more powerful drugs for that purpose than words? The more free use of words you deny any populace, the tighter your grip on them. And all you need do is to consistently lie that your control over words is for the populace’s own good.
Dear JMG:
Have you ever visited The Breakers in Newport? I wonder if it’s all touristy.
“And then I think wouldn’t it be nice if you built a continent-wide canal where you could sell and transfer that excess water on one side to the other side that’s always parched and thirsty? ”
There is a very annoying mountain range in between the two sides that is the problem.
It would be easier to pump water out of the Columbia River to Goose Lake on the California-Oregon border. The distance is much shorter, but there is a 4,500 foot hill climb involved. That works out to about 2000 psi pressure at the source which I took to be above John Day dam. The good news is that there are hydroelectric stations on the Pit river out of Goose Lake so some of that energy could be recovered.
Just add money.
Me🦍not nice today. Grunt grunt. (The cat is away, and here I play.)
I am watching a 4-hour documentary film on Britain’s Victorian era.
The Victorian era was The Material Machine Age. Machines did indeed manifest in the material world.
The 2020s era is The Imaginary Machine Age. The inventors couch this in the vague term “Artificial Intelligence,” aka AI (aye-eye). No actual work gets done on the material level.
In reality, our current age isn’t working out “as expected.” That is because everything happens in the imagination, in the mind—but whose imagination and mind? No-one knows. It’s all in one’s head. And if it occurs in too many heads, it is mass delusion. People’s expectations are (way) too high. Only imaginary accomplishments occur nowadays. If one thinks it, “it is.”
One imagines something is happening, but nothing is:
The roof still leaks. One can put a pot down to collect the drips. One can imagine one is not being driven crazy by “drip—drip—drip,” where one would prefer being buried alive than hear ONE___MORE___DRIP.
The car still breaks down. One can let the car sit in the driveway or on the street. One can imagine strangers at night are not stripping the car for parts.
The clothes still tear. One can imagine one’s arse doesn’t show, or that one’s arse is surprisingly draft-free. (I suppose having a hole in one’s clothes is better than being a naked-emperor.)
Best study/apprentice to be a plumber, car mechanic, or mender/dressmaker.
Hardy-har-har, numbskulls🃏. Those—who think Aye-Eye is real—have been struck dumb; how’re things working out in yer head?—you’ve been had—the joke is on you.
💨🪠🚘🧵🃏⚡️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Tim J. # 385:
It’s a pity, I’m not British and I wasn’t born during the ‘60s (I’m slightly younger, from the ‘70s), so I’m afraid I wouldn’t understand “Are You Being Served” humour.
You’ve also written about citizenship tests in the UK; well, of course we’ve got them here too, but I doubt their level is much better than your government does. Last “leftist” spanish govts don’t seem IMHO very concerned with the “new Spaniards” quality: votes are votes.
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Robert M. # 386:
That amazing Kipling speech suggests bluntly the power of words, so their control by governments has been essential, especially of course by the totalitarians. Which leads us toward Orwell “1984”, with his “newspeak” language (an impovirished and manipulated way of communication) and his “2 minutes of hate”(public lynching against the black beast “du jour”). It’s a pity the democratic consensus is being narrowed fastly by ominous legal tricks like the Australian bill, after being widely attacked by the woke cancel culture and the COVID and Russo-Ukrainian war narratives. It seems to me the new censors shameful goal is the Chinese censorship…They try to move the Overton Window at least toward that way.
@tim #385
It’s a British show but it the writers certainly took the language to its humorous limits, IMHO. It is their language after all. There’s a certain amount of ambiguity built into the language and the writers used it to full effect.
Mother tongue is certainly a valid expression. So is four-and-twenty. It sounds a bit old fashioned. I dunno, if you’re a furriner, grab whatever expression you can remember and leave it up to the guy you’re talking to, to parse it. Nobody will hold it against you, or at least most reasonable people won’t.
A heck of time ago, in 1812, the first spanish Constitution was written and approved, it was liberal for its time, but it said with no doubts official country religion was Catholicism. A lot of years passed, and after the Franco dictatorship (who said it ruled Spain by the Grace of God), our current 1978 Constitution says clearly the State is not confessional: government and bureaucracy don’t have religion, although the traditional social hegemony of the Catholic Church is taking into consideration. So Spain has a weaker State laicism, less strong than the French one, because it was inspired on Germany Constitution, but indeed State and Religions are separated. This is the theory.
Some months ago, I noticed interesting news. In a spanish town, some muslim leaders asked local authorities for a permission to use certain public facilities to kill, cook and eat lambs, in a religious celebration which had been done without problems since some years ago. Local government said NO, pointing the State constitutional not confessionality, and the lack of hygiene of such muslim rites (sic). This led to a country wide controversy in which local and national right parties supported the denial to North African migrants to celebrate a party within public facilities, and woke Madrid govt said the opposite opinion (how predictable is this kind of cultural war!). I’m glad ironically, that right wing here had discovered our state laicity, but…oh wait! I often see in local MSM our local and regional leaders fondness to go to some Catholic celebrations in my town, clearly representing their institutions (cough cough), not in personal name. Today local and regional authorities are from the same right wing parties which denied that muslim rites in the another town I said. In addition to this, since the right parties reached power in my town and region, they give gently more and more public money as subsidies toward private schools, which casually are mostly Catholics (giving less money into public schools, which slowly decline). It smells IMHO to hypocrisy.
By the way, since 1978 there’s been a long and slow decline in Catholic worshipping and beliefs in my country, though most of native population is nominally Catholic. I’m a Christian personally, but with a not very orthodox view, so I think my opinion is quite balanced in this topic.
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I think the lack of logic and “bravery” in some parts of Houellebecq novel “Submission”(by the way, a good title to depict in the short way the feared Islamization), could be explained by his eagerness to be again the “enfant terrible” of French literature, so he was more interested on going on the controversial thing, than writing a fully coherent story.
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I’ve though lately the infamous attempt to censorship more the speech freedom in Australia could be perpetrated in near future, not only by woke governments, but ironically by Conservative and harder right wings govts too. At least in my country, the righters love Israel State, and they’re serfs to the US Israeli lobby…So the Antisemitic bogey man could be a subterfuge to limit more and more rational criticism against the Zionist business…
https://www.disclose.tv/id/n9g5ppqbu8/
BoE is said to be preparing for a crisis initiated by admitting that aliens are real. Ok.
So that’s what they’re going to blame all the economic instability on? Little green men? It’s all their fault?
Then again, these people are cut from the same cloth as the people who brought you Amelia. I question their competence. Maybe doing business with such people is a bad idea…
More cynical middle class markers (applicable only to Murica). If you look forward to jury duty and see it as almost a holiday, you’re not middle class. If you see jury duty as a waste of your precious time and would rather be anywhere else (even at work), you’re (at least) middle class.
Here, if you’re drafted to serve on a jury, your employer has to pay you for your jury duty at your current rate. And in theory, your employer can’t fire you because you showed up to the courthouse and not your job. Or the theoretical penalties are pretty stiff. And if you don’t want to serve, it’s pretty easy to get rejected by the lawyers – wear an “Alex Jones Was Right” t-shirt or something like it and nobody will let you past voir dire.
@Chuaquin (#390):
You can find the entire Kipling speech in his A Book of Words (1928), pp. 221-228.
Lazy Gardener 243:
These guidelines are virtually identical to Luise Light’s original Food Pyramid, before bureaucrats and lobbyists gutted it. The only difference I see is the apparent exception of milkfats from the 10% saturated fat limit. You can read about how the original message was perverted in Ms. Light’s “What to Eat” or Denise Minger’s “Death by Food Pyramid”
Looking at the recommendations, the limits on Sodium and saturated fats are relics of Academic capture for Sodium and Veg. oil lobby influence for saturated fats.