Dancers at the End of Time, Part Three: A Mortal Splendor

Some of my critics like to insist that I never admit that I’m wrong. Those readers who have been following me for any length of time know that this isn’t true, but like so many of the fashionable distortions of our age, it points to a truth it doesn’t actually express. What offends those critics,…

Heating Up The Political Climate

Yes, we need to talk about climate change again, and it’s probably necessary to start with a point I’ve made on this blog several times already: anthropogenic climate change is real and serious, and it’s being exploited by political and corporate interests to push a dubious agenda on the public. Many people these days don’t…

Waiting for the Next Panic

When I first started blogging more than thirteen years ago, the main focus of my online essays was peak oil. It was a good time to discuss such things. The price of crude oil, which had been rattling around a little above its all-time lows for more than a decade, started rising not long after…

An Astrological Interlude: Libra Ingress 2019

A few days from now we’ll have arrived at the northern hemisphere’s autumn equinox, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator to bring spring to my readers in Australia and fall to me and my neighbors here in North America. The equinox is an important holy day to Druids and members of various other nature-centered…

The Dream of a Managed Society

My essay here two weeks ago on the way that the industrial world’s elites are beginning to back away from environmentalism, using chatter about “ecofascism” as a convenient excuse, got the lively response I expected. To be fair, there was also a certain amount of noise, and a certain number of exasperated demands that I…

The Twilight of the Monofuture

I’m pleased to say that my post here two weeks ago, on the way that belief in progress depends on a certain kind of historical amnesia, got a lively and mostly thoughtful response. Oh, I fielded and deleted some saliva-flecked denunciations, to be sure, but that always happens when I try to pose hard questions…

The Dark Places of the Future

Over most of the last decade now, I’ve watched celebrations of the New Year become more and more muted, and I think it’s far more likely than not that this trend will continue when 2018 gets hauled off to the glue factory a little less than a week from now. No doubt plenty of people…

An Astrological Interlude: Libra Ingress 2018

The autumn equinox is nearly on us, and with it comes the mainstay of the political astrologer, the ingress chart. Regular readers who’ve been following the discussions here for the last six months already know that the branch of astrology that forecasts trends in politics and society is called mundane astrology, and that horoscopes cast…

An Astrological Interlude: Cancer Ingress 2018

Three months ago, we marked the beginning of the astrological year by discussing the Aries ingress chart for the United States. Those of you who weren’t part of that conversation may want to know that an Aries ingress chart is one of the basic tools of mundane astrology, the branch of traditional astrology that tracks…

An Astrological Interlude: Aries Ingress 2018

This fourth Wednesday of the month would normally be an open post for readers’ questions, but I’ve been asked by quite a few people at this point to cast and delineate a chart for the 2018 Aries ingress, and this is as good a time as any. Aries ingress? That’s the technical term for the…