This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.
First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.
Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their follow-up comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here.
With that said, have at it!
Hi everyone,
Thanks to JMG for the warm invite to share this update! I’m excited to announce that my book, The Great Canadian Reset, is now available for pre-order on Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/Great-Canadian-Reset-Co-Ops-Canadas/dp/1998841197. Set to release on October 16, 2025, it dives into how cooperatives and economic democracy can help communities thrive in a contracting economy—ideas sparked by the lively discussions here.
For those curious about co-op businesses or wanting to join the conversation, check out my Substack at https://thegreatcanadianreset.substack.com/. Non-Canadians might enjoy my occasional satirical takes, like The Kombucha Konundrum. I’d love to hear your thoughts, including from folks outside Canada interested in adapting these ideas locally.
Thanks for the inspiration, and I look forward to your feedback!
Best,
Ludovic
I must admit that I voted for Trump in 2024, because the alternative was even worse. That said, given the events of the past weekend and Trump’s gloating afterward, I have to ask is he really that delusional? And, if so, what is to be done? Delusional thinking is nothing new for him of course. One example; some months back he claimed that he supported lots of legal immigration, because with AI we would need lots of new workers. Huh? By what logic? Beyond that, I can only become sarcastic….
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
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The following is the abridged “special attention” list..
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Pierre and Julie conceive a healthy baby together. May the conception, pregnancy, birth, and recovery all be healthy and smooth for baby and for Julie.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed.
May SLClaire’s honorary daughter Beth, who is undergoing dialysis for kidney disease, be blessed, and may her kidneys be restored to full functioning.
May 1Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties; may she quickly be able to resume a normal life, and the cancer not return.
May Kallianeira’s partner Patrick, who passed away on May 7th, be blessed and aided in his soul’s onward journey. And may Kallianeira be soothed and strengthened to successfully cope in the face of this sudden loss.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical (Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer.
(Healing work is also welcome. Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe)
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
JMG, my question is on the AODA. Coming to you on the level brother, is it worth it? I did my candidate year but gained nothing, because Ive been living this lifestyle for years , I keep up to date with the local flora, fauna, and ecosystem. If There is more to teach Ill continue on but I don’t want to waste anyones time. I hope we part on the Square
Turns out that large language models and large reasoning models don’t actually learn or reason:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/new-apple-study-challenges-whether-ai-models-truly-reason-through-problems/
Just an FYI to let people know I am lending out books by mail for free from my personal library of sustainability and occult titles. Here is a list of the books that I lend to people within the continental US: https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/96400.html
I thought now would be a good time to re-post my old question if that is alright:
Pardon me, Mr. Greer. While we are on the subject of anthropogenic global warming, I was wondering what you think of the argument that it is fundamentally different (and more concerning) than natural climate change in millions of years past because of the dramatically higher rate of change. After all, when rapid climate change happened in the past, there were usually mass extinction events (and of course “rapid” for the biosphere is not nearly as rapid as the rate of change now).
I have an interesting story to relate, and it tangentially relates to the discussion of R. Crumb from last months open post. Here though, the spirit of Harvey Pekar is shining brightly.
My wife and I went up to Cleveland last week for a few days get away on the lake. There were a few things I wanted to do while we were up there. Visiting Zubal Books and Lakeview Cemetery were high up on the list. I knew about Zubal’s from some research I had been doing on Harvey Pekar and Cleveland from a few months ago. I found a YouTube clip of Pekar on Anthony Bourdain’s show No Reservations, where they go to visit the massive used and rare bookstore that in part sits inside an old Hostess Twinkie factory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfHVK4x4JF0&ab_channel=SLAPJazzTrio
I wouldn’t have known to go to Zubal’s unless I had seen that clip. While I was there I found some really interesting titles including one by Paul Feyerband called “Against Method” which proposes, in its anarchistic interpretation of scientific discovery, that it is counterproductive to have a single methodology with regards to scientific practices. It’s closer to the top of my list now because it seems to me we are witnessing the endgame of the one true science. I also found some sacred geometry books to add to the shelves and Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel Blue Flower about Novalis, which I knew nothing about before. It seems to me the Romantic expressions of science via Goethe and Novalis are worth investigating as another thread of science that could have been followed…
After some other stops we finally wound up at Lakeview Cemetery. Lakeview Cemetery was designed by landscape architect Adolph Strauch who designed Spring Grove cemetery in Cincinnati, a few blocks from where I live. Strauch had been inspired by the book Kosmos by Germany polymath Alexander von Humboldt who had written in it about Chinese garden cemeteries. Kosmos can be considered part of the German Romanticist tradition in the science vein…
After stopping at President Garfield’s memorial, there was one more thing I wanted to see in the cemetery, the Haserot Angel. ( https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-haserot-angel-cleveland-ohio )
We drove up to it and after I got out of the car and a guy noticed my plates were from Hamilton County and he struck up a conversation saying he’d gone to the University of Cincinnati. He was very friendly and we had a nice conversation. He mentioned that he’d been the partner of Harvey Pekar’s widow, comic writer Joyce Brabner, for fourteen years before she had died last August. He told me his name and the like, and that he’d just been visiting their gravesite (Brabner is buried next to Pekar but doesn’t have a headstone yet). His name was Lee Batdorf and he was a journalist at times. In meeting him it felt like I’d gotten a handshake from the city. If the timing of our day had been just a little off, and if I hadn’t gone to that one last spot I might not have met him.
When we got back home last week I put the graphic novel history “Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland” on hold and Lee was a character in this final work of Pekar’s. Zubal’s books was also featured in the book… I hadn’t read it before, though I’d read some of his other works.
https://www.cleveland13news.com/story/harvey-pekar-s-partner-and-comic-writer-joyce-brabner-dies-after-battle-with-cancer
That was some of our Cleveland adventure. I recommend the city for anyone looking for a modest Midwest getaway. Make sure you take the time to go visit Pekar and pay your respects to one of its legends if you go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Pekar#/media/File:Harvey_Pekar_grave_stone.jpg
Two offers for everybody today:
1. I published a report about the recent Ecosophia Convention in Glastonbury. It is available here:
https://thehiddenthings.com/glastonbury-convention-2025
2. Each Wednesday, I perform a formal blessing in which I bless the people who signed up. I appreciate signups as they help me to practice! More here:
https://thehiddenthings.com/categories/weekly-blessings
I hope you all had a great solstice and are enjoying summer (or whatever it currently is in your place). JMG, thanks a lot for hosting the Open Post again! I’m very much looking forward to whatever this month’s topics will turn out to be – there are always some interesting surprises in the mix. 🙂
Milkyway
Following on from the discussion of karma last week, I’d like to mention what I think is a misunderstanding of karma – made by people who accept it rather than those who don’t.
It’s the belief that *everything* bad that happens to a person is a result of past karma acting out. Rather than events having *many* possible causes, karma being only one of them.
It’s like saying “all horses are animals, therefore all animals are horses” (to pick a very random example).
Other causes could by physical (eg. caught in an earthquake zone), biological (eg. a genetic condition), or the ill-intent of another (eg. attacked in the street by a stranger – who will suffer their own karmic consequences). The person these things happen to could be blameless – and simply unlucky.
This is not even an original thought of mine – I read this explanation of the multiple levels of causality in a book called “The Buddhist Vision” by Alex Kennedy – one of the leaders of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. And yet I had great difficulty discussing this with a practicing (UK) Buddhist I met once, who couldn’t get his head around this concept, and for whom everything was the result of karma.
I also heard of a Thai Buddhist monk using karma to explain the 2004 tsunami – “Why did so many innocent people die? So many children?” Answer: “Actions in their past lives”.
If every misfortune is seen as past karma playing out then a kind of coldness to others sets in. It’s victim-blaming. That in helping alleviate someone’s suffering, you’re hindering that karma playing out, so perhaps you’d better not. Or that you should help someone only to improve *your own* karmic balance-sheet (a selfish attitude and probably self-defeating).
To quote CS Lewis in The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe:
– “Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?”
Perhaps I’ve got this wrong but this is how I see it.
I was also wanting to ask you something that I am curious about.
Since becoming a blogger under the old Archdruid Report almost 20 years ago now, your main theme has been the unsustainability of the Industrial Age. Is there any period of human history or even Earth’s history as as a whole that you think would be ideal to live in or at least visit?
As an archdruid, I have a guess that the British Isles before the coming of the Romans, the Christians, or at least the Anglo-Saxons may be a good candidate.
Karma is balanced out by will and destiny.
Ludovic, glad to see this in print! I’m sure it’ll be useful to those on my side of the 49th parallel as well.
Phutatorius, welcome to the current American hyperreality. I’d point out that every other US president in my lifetime has had just as complex a relationship to the facts on the ground…
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Anonymous, yep. Speaking of weird detachment from facts on the ground…
David, that’s a common misconception. The global climate change that happened 65 million years ago, for example, took place in about a week following the Chicxulub impact. The burst of global warming that ended the Younger Dryas period around 9600 BC saw the planet’s average temperature jolt up between 13° and 15°F in less than a decade. Our current round of climate change is in the middle range, slower than some, faster than others.
Justin, hmm! Thanks for this.
Milkyway, you’re welcome and thank you.
Sydaway, this is an important point! Neither suffering, nor joy, nor anything else has only one cause; in a very real sense, the last time you stubbed your toe, the entire history of the universe up to that time was necessary for that act to take place.
David, nope. Humans gonna human, whenever it happens.
JMG,
Opposite to popilar wisdom, the average American spent almost twice as much of their income on food as they do at present, inflation and all. The average American spends 10.6 % of their income on food in 2024 while in 1950 the spend about 20%. That percentage only began to decrease in the 70’s and did not reach its current levels until the late 90’s.
The Normal economics of empire would say that costs such as food in the center of empire would increase over time. My theory is that this was done on purpose via various government policies to clear away a larger portion of the Americans budget to go to things like rent, mortgages and debt. If your plan is to financialize the economy, how do you free up a larger portion of Americans income to go to the Bankers and landlords? You decrease by half what was one of the largest items in the American budget.
The first of these policies came during the Nixon Administration where actual farm prices were driven down by agricultural policies. The other was the introduction of cheap migrant labor in the late 1970’s. These acted to drive out small farmers, and make things more profitable for large scale agribusiness even with reduced real prices.
If this is the case it will be very painful for Americans ( and the financialized economy) when things inevitably revert to a less contrived price level.
I’ll repeat my (then off-topic) question from last week: “I’m interested in your opinion on Mr. Trump’s recent behavior. His “big beautiful bill” doesn’t look all that different from the previous administration’s budgets (with some token differences such as the border wall). And he seems to have turned on a dime from “we need to get out of foreign wars” to “we stand with Israel and may even get into the Iran war on Israel’s side.” In the latter case he’s going as far as ignoring the evaluation of his own Director of National Intelligence. Has he been “taken behind the woodshed” and told in no uncertain terms that if he values his position and his life he’d better toe the line? (FWIW, I suspect Mr. Obama originally believed in “hope and change” until he had a similar encounter.)”
>Turns out that large language models and large reasoning models don’t actually learn or reason
At the heart of the typical LLM is some sort of neural network. Here’s my question. Is it on the order of complexity of a bug, a mouse or a cat? If it’s on the order of what an insect sports, you’re essentially talking to a very loquacious cricket. Chirp chirp.
And if all you need is a bugbrain in order to get a college degree, what value would you assign to it? The college degree, not the bugbrain.
@mathiesen
You mentioned just how risky a PhD was back in the early 90s. I remember some joke ad for a “PhD resume removal” service back then where you could get that pesky PhD off your resume with carefully constructed alibis and references. What I gathered a PhD enables you to get certain jobs but it absolutely makes it near impossible to get most others. The typical response is OVERQUALIFIED, followed by someone kicking you like a football out the door to score an HR field goal.
Did you know that it might have only been due to the cooling of the Earth that led to the “Ice Age” of the Pleistocene that human beings became “intelligent” in the first place?
Around 3 million years ago, North America and South America were linked together for the first time thanks to volcanic eruptions forming the Isthmus of Panama. Subsequently, more fresh water was deposited around the Arctic by the re-routed Gulf Stream forming the frozen giaciers there. This led to the Earth becoming colder and dryer.
https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/how-the-isthmus-of-panama-put-ice-in-the-arctic/
In Central and Eastern Africa, where our primate ancestors were living, there were fewer forests in which to live, gather food, and hide from predators. Subsequently, they gradually became bipeds. As a consequence, the pelvis de-formed making it difficult for females to have babies unless the skull was shaped a certain way. The natural selection for a certain shape of skull enabled humans to have bigger brains. Meanwhile, the transition to bipedalism caused by the shrinking of the forests compelled humans to eventually learn how to use tools with their hands.
In the alternate reality I showed you before where the French and their Indian allies won at the Battle of Plassey, the American Revolution is subsequently less successful by the way. This is in part because the British have a greater focus on keeping their holdings in North America due to the loss of India. However, it is mainly because a weaker Britain in the later half of the 18th Century is less feared and resented by the other European powers. Subsequently, they aren’t nearly as enthusiastic about helping fund the American revolutionaries like in our timeline.
https://www.clockworksky.net/cliveless_world/ah_cliveless_top.html
Also, due to a less successful Seven Years War (here called the Six Years War), the British never distance themselves with Prussia like what happened in our timeline. As a result, there are a lot of well-disciplined Prussian soldiers to help London out in North America against the rebels.
I was wondering what you think of this idea.
Sydaway—beings (and their karma) do not exist in a vacuum. Lila is a related concept that explains why the events of our lives are not only cause and effect. I am not an expert on this, not remotely, but I understand Lila as the “play of the universe” that is the interactions, the bumping-intos, random collision of beings. All of us with our karmic chaos attached rub off on one another (on all of our sides and on multiple beings at once!) with unexpected effects. Some to our benefit, some to our dismay. The only control we have in the matter is our response, that is our “responsibility” in the matter.
Just in time for the latest Area 51 disclosures, you’ll be happy to know that I went to grab a bin of books to catalog and one of the shiny new objects inside was your The UFO Book from Union Square. Looks very nice! Fully illustrated and photographed. I’m always happy to see something about Barney and Betty Hill.
All this leads me to my song of the week “Explanation…” by Jack Dangers from the album Space Music
https://meatbeatmanifesto.bandcamp.com/track/explanation
Also, I always thought the Foo Fighters was the name of a bad band formed from the remnants of Nirvana without the talent of Kurt Cobain… but your book sets me straight. (I still don’t like the band.)
Congrats!
I forgot to ask this on the Dreamwidth Magic Monday but hope someone can let me know how smudging my tarot deck with sage or any similar smudge is done. This is from John Gilbert’s The Doors of Tarot and the different elemental ways of clearing a deck (smudging is with Air).
I believe one gets the special herb to smoke and then pass the deck through it.
A similar question when he mentions passing a deck through a candle flame. I’d say that is the full deck, all together and not spread out in a fan?
Correction: The Jack Dangers track is from the album Music for Planetarium.
About thirty years ago, Slavoj Zizek came up with the idea the the ideal cog the machine requires was someone who kept a minimum of (perhaps ironic) distance to the system; that ensured his complete assimilation and its smooth functioning.
One can easily imagine the opposite, the fanatic who’s always doing exactly what he’s being told, and by his sheer inflexible, un-ironic fanaticism eventually leads to the machine seizing up.
Isn’t that what in the end always leads to gouverning elites like ours?
Once the postmodern phase (second to last, where things still (ironically) hold together) ends, the 100percenters take the reigns and completely unironically get to work, sacrificing all before them to please their God Of Positive Feedback till it all goes tats up (millenial-ist pun, sorry).
I have a friend who is a Bitcoin enthusiast, and last night I attended a social he organized around that theme. As someone who is planning on a Long Descent vision of the future, I allow myself to enjoy chatting with these bright, optimistic young developers and investors, but I don’t believe blockchain currencies have much of a future in a world of limited mineral and energy resources.
That said, I have entertained the thought that things like Bitcoin and other cybercurrencies may have just enough of a future to matter in the lifetime that remains to me (around 40 or 50 years). The key factor no one in the Bitcoin scene seems to reflect upon seriously (aside from resource scarcity) is how governments might respond to the broader uptake of currencies that are explicitly designed to circumvent government control. (Given that most major powers are surely in the process of developing quantum-level hack-anything computers, and that they already have, you know, guns and stuff).
Anyone care to speculate?
Does anyone have any non digital evidence Roy Jay existed? I’ve suspected for a while now we would end up seeing someone try to add to history by editing the internet, and the Roy Jay phenomena looks like what I’d expect to see if this possibility was being tested.
On a different note, the topic of the very strange cultural shifts of the late 70s and early 80s has come up before, and I have aa new theory I’d like to share. There’s a medical condition known as Cushing’s Syndrome which has as symptoms most of the chronic physical illnesses that have exploded in frequency over the last half century; and neurological symptoms including insomnia, depression, paranoia, impaired attention, impaired memory, increased mental rigidity, and a disruption to the capacity to plan ahead. This sounds a lot like a description of the cultural changes of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Cushing’s Syndrome is caused by excess cortisol, which has a lot of causes. One being low blood sugar, which for complex physiological reasons can be induced by consumption of artificial sweeteners. The timing fits as well: at about the same time society suddenly shifted in a darker direction, the medical establishment was pushing very hard for artificial sweeteners, as a way to keep sugar consumption down, and at least in theory, avoid the health problems that came from excess sugar.
The theory I have is that artificial sweeteners have induced a kind of low grade Cushing’s Syndrome in a huge fraction of the population, and that this has played a major role in the explosion of chronic illness, and the impaired neurological functioning of a huge percentage of the population resulted in massive societal changes.
Hi John,
Firstly, I’ve just read a very interesting intelligence analysis from someone very high-up in the US agencies who thinks that the whole Iran-US thing has an element of theatre to it. He speculates that the real story is the Iranians have their uranium and potentially capacity to build a bomb outsourced in North Korea so the US bombings won’t make a huge amount of difference long-term.
In regard to my question, a few years ago you speculated that at some point this century, the Arab/north African Muslims would organise and invade Europe. More recently, you have spoken more about internal demographics and how a rising Muslim population – heavily influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood – will, over time, take over the big cities, and the countries of western Europe.
I’m wondering why your thinking has shifted from an external invasion to an internal takeover view on the future of western Europe. Or have I got your views wrong.
@JMG: A president who lies; that, we are used to. But a president who appears outright, barking delusional?
@Justin Patrick Moore: I used to go regularly to Cleveland, but I’d never heard of Zubal’s books. As to German romanticism, you might be interested in what is on my CD changer; slots 1 & 2 Brahms’ “German Requiem” and Brahm’s “Song of Destiny;” slot 3 Brahms’ 1st Symphony; slot 4 Brahms’ Sonatas for violin and Piano, Op. 78, 100, and 108; slot 5 a different recording of Brahms’ German Requiem. Slot 6 is vacant but Brahms’ two cello sonatas would be a nice choice.
My current reading includes a third pass through “Mercurius” by Patrick Harpur.
I’ve read that the US warned Iran before dropping bombs on their nuclear sites, thus giving Iran time to move their enriched uranium elsewhere, and Iran alerted the US to when and where they were going to retaliate against a US military base in Qatar.
If true, the entire event was carefully choreographed like theater.
In that case, what was the main reason (or reasons) for this event, beyond theatrical entertainment?
Good Morning and welcome back.
I recently had the oportunity to spend a day in Providence and I can see why you would like the place. While I was in town I took the opportunity to do the HP Lovecraft walking tour, visit the Atheneum, and of course stopped by the HP Lovecraft bookstore in the Arcade. I noticed that none of your books were stocked either the Weird of Hali or otherwise. Considering you are a local author in that scene I figured you would be given a place there.
Other Dave
@Dylan: There were other alternative currencies, such as local currency systems, that used to get a lot of hype before Bitcoin & the crypto bros took over the stage. I know several people who told me they would be millionaires by now because of crypto. They are all still working their day jobs somehow. I think the idea of a nested system of alternate currencies is worth exploring, but basing it on digital makes it very easy to disrupt. Bitcoin also seems even more abstract and disconnected from reality than current money (something I mention in my recent article: Is Techno-Optimism a Form of Mental Illness? https://www.sothismedias.com/home/is-techno-optimism-a-mental-illness ) All it would take to bring some of these things down is blowing up some server farms, though I’m not advocating that.
@15 Roldy
I agree, and additionally we can be nearly certain that MOSSAD has blackmail material on Trump and many other figures in the federal government, including but not limited to visits to Epstein’s estate.
I came across this compilation of ‘cases of forced reincarnation’ and must say that I’m both disturbed by the possibility, and a bit perplexed (and skeptical of) his proposed solution… From those testimonies, it seems clear that the majority of people aren’t eager to come back here for another round of misery, but I’m not sure if that automatically means the beings that push/force/persuade them to come back here anyway are evil. And he advocates refusing their lead, while acknowledging that we don’t know our way around on the other side, which makes me wonder where he intends to go on his own, once he’s there? I’d love to know your (and the commentariat’s) take on all of this:
https://spiritualinquiries.wordpress.com/2024/11/17/30-cases-suggestive-of-forced-reincarnation/
JMG
I’ve heard you and many others talk about the population numbers going down. The reason for this many seem to say is dwindling resources, this doesn’t add up for me. I live in Sweden where the population plateaued in the early 90s. If it weren’t for the mass importation of immigrants by our dear managerial betters, we would have been fewer now than in 1990. So Sweden is following the general trend but with the possible exception of Switzerland and Norway, I’ve never seen a country with such widespread affluence. Basically everyone is doing from alright to splendid, you’d have to try hard to be destitute in Sweden. Still the population is going down. Clearly access to resources has nothing to do with population growth, at this point at least. Sweden would be at least double its population if it did.
Maybe the best way to make sense of this is to look at it as a spiritual phenomenon? Maybe the vast majority who came here this time around weren’t even meant to have children? Maybe they came here to grow spiritually and invest time in themselves rather than raising a family? This could also explain why many decided to invest everything in number one, granted in a very hedonistic self centered way. You see a big difference with the Swedes and the immigrants coming from Africa, the Africans go all in on the bling bling and latest everything while the Swedes are quite blase about the gimmicks and consumer goods. Since it is the affluent industrialized world that’s going down most in population, maybe the lesson to learn was that materialism and affluence isn’t all its cracked up to be? But, once more, mostly failing to learn the lesson.
The African continent is still growing in population so maybe they need to go through their own phase of acquiring material goods and wealth before they too get disillusioned with it? As a society wide spiritual lesson basically. And maybe when the Western economy cracks and collapses the African diaspora goes back to where there’s at least some semblance of economic growth, and then the cycle has its course there too? What do you think?
@Ambrose regarding from the previous comment thread, “I see that Rice University offers a program in “Gnostic, Esoteric, and Mystical” Studies (GEM). Nice, although I wish they could have worked in “Hermetic” and/or “Occult” in there somehow.”
How about OMEGA: Occult, Mystical, Esoteric, Gnostic, and Arcane?
If that sounds too apocalyptic, drop the O and you could have MAGE (though for obscure personal reasons I’d prefer GAME). Add Divinatory (or Druidic) and Art (or Alchemical) and you could do a lot of DAMAGE.
JMG and Sydaway #10,
Hmmm… Doesn’t karma encompass being “caught in an earthquake zone”, “attacked in the street by a stranger “, or having “a genetic condition”? JMG, didn’t you mention that you couldn’t exclude that Hitler incarnated many times following WW2, but never made past the age of 5, being beaten to death, or experiencing other forms of violence? I’m sure the people around him viewed the child as innocent, which he/she was, yet it was the consequence of his actions in a previous incarnation. By no means does it lead to coldness or victim-blaming. You tell your 3-year-old not to jump, he does anyway and hurts himself; you still hug him, console him, and apply a band-aid. You give a bum on the street money for a drink. You help a girl who got herself pregnant at the age of 15.
What am I missing?
JMG,
I understand that the fog of war is think and confusing, but wondering if you’d be willing to share any of your current takes on what’s happening now between/among Iran, Israel, and the United States?
Thanks,
Edward
@JMG What are your thoughts on Wim Hof breathwork as a method to change your own consciousness in accordance with your will?
Re: rapid climate change,
Besides the Younger Dryas there is also this one,
“In Greenland, the event started at 8175 BP, and the cooling was 3.3 °C below the decadal average in less than 20 years. The coldest period lasted for about 60 years, and its total duration was about 150 years.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.2-kiloyear_event
Sea level also did a big jump.
“The sea-level data from the Rhine–Meuse Delta indicate a 2–4 m (6 ft 7 in – 13 ft 1 in) of near-instantaneous rise at 8.54 to 8.2 ka, in addition to ‘normal’ post-glacial sea-level rise”
Interesting planet we live on.
I’m about halfway through your book The Secret of the Temple. Who knew the quiet thrills of architecture could make for such a page turner?
Do you have any updates for us on the attempt to build a working model?
@Roldy: The Orange One is a con man. The other presidents also were con men, except they had to dignity to pretend otherwise (see also “kayfabe”). Some percetage of voters apparently believe that, because the Orange One admitted outright that it was all a con, he was somehow more truthful, and therefore could be trusted. A liar who tells the truth once in awhile remains a liar, however, and…well, here we are.
As John Lydon once asked: Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
Axé
Incidently, the ancestors of humans nearly went extinct at one point in the Pleistocene:
https://www.ndtv.com/feature/ancient-humans-nearly-went-extinct-with-only-1280-people-left-study-claims-8745974/amp/1
OMG, I just started reading the Glastonbury Report on my break at work, then noted that my random Bing screensaver of the day is theTor!
So much for learning to code:
“The job of the future might already be past its prime,” writes The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch in The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting. “For years, young people seeking a lucrative career were urged to go all in on computer science. From 2005 to 2023, the number of comp-sci majors in the United States quadrupled. All of which makes the latest batch of numbers so startling. This year, enrollment grew by only 0.2 percent nationally, and at many programs, it appears to already be in decline, according to interviews with professors and department chairs.”
And more layoffs at Intel:
“Intel is shutting down its small automotive division and laying off most of its staff in that group as part of broader cost -cutting efforts to refocus on core businesses like client computing and data centers.”
Probably due to this;
“Intel’s revenue loss in 2024 has increased to 18,8B$, compared to their 8B$ revenue loss in 2023.”
That’s what happens when you cut R&D to focus on stock buybacks.
Sometimes hobbies lead unexpected places: taking up miniature painting and wargaming has resulted in me now fixing and restoring my church’s plaster statuettes for easter and christmas. Wargaming and miniatures was supposed to be just fun, and now I’ve got transferable skills which may not bring money in but do make my community happy with me. LOL.
If anyone remembers Cedric, the seedling Eastern Cedar tree I rescued from a precarious situation in the back of my old commercial space in 2020, I just posted a current photo of him on my most recent Open Post. He’s gotten tall! I’m doing an Open Post that will stay open this week and the next, and the week of July 4 I’ll do another excerpt of my upcoming book from Aeon, Sacred Homemaking. I will return to my weekly Dreamwidth and Substack essays and free Ogham readings on Saturday, July 12 beginning with Ogham Readings on Saturdays. Thanks!
To LeGrand Cinq-Mars
Check your email!
We pressed [PUBLISH] finally on “International Agatha Christie, She Watched” and I want to mail you a thank you copy for all your help with “Checkmate.”
We finally pressed [PUBLISH] on “International Agatha Christie, She Watched!”
Only 10 months later than the promised date but it’s a much better, more comprehensive book because of the delays.
In addition to over 100 international reviews (Thank you LeGrand Cinq-Mars for helping me with China!) and documentaries, we’ve got the most comprehensive lists anywhere of films by country, year, and which story they’re adapted from; radio presentations, actors and actresses, podcasts and websites, and the most comprehensive bibliography of books about Agatha Christie you can find. And more. And more.
The book is a trade paperback, hardback, and an eBook but with less art.
Since we suffer from the perennial problem of indie authors everywhere (Bill and I do everything ourselves), our website hasn’t been updated to reflect “International” and how you can get a copy.
But we HAVE got Amazon if you’re willing to deal with the evil empire: https://www.amazon.com/International-Agatha-Christie-She-Watched/dp/1950347427
We WILL upload “International” to Ingram so bookshops can order copies or you can order yourself via bookshop.org. This will take some time because Ingram’s requirements for formatting and covers are different from the ‘Zon’s.
Our next movie project, to begin in spring of 2026 (we’ve got tons of book-related housekeeping to catch up on, another peril of being a two-person publishing firm) will be:
Jane Austen, She Watched.
Yep, all the films about Jane, Jane’s novels, Jane documentaries, and Jane ancillary films. Like Agatha, no one has done this so we will.
@Ludovic
Thanks for this link! My father developed a co-op in the seventies in Grise Fiord, good to see this idea getting traction again! I’ll send him the link too!
@Justin Patrick Moore #31:
The true believers in Bitcoin whom I know personally, and who are invested in it financially, socially, and ideologically, do not see it as an investment vehicle but as a means of everyday transactions, precisely because it is decentralized and cannot be taken out by blowing up some server farms.
AFAIK, although mining Bitcoin, the process which creates the hard uncrackable nuggets of code currency, is quite energy intensive and is frequently done with server farms, almost anyone can run a transaction ‘node’ in their basement using consumer-grade computing technology. The ‘nuggets’ are not ‘stored’ anywhere (ie. there is no central server which plays the role of a central bank), but distributed across the network and accessed solely by those who possess the particular encryption key (which is frequently just a string of English words which you can write on a piece of paper and store in your family vault).
Thus Bitcoin is quite a bit less abstract than the current norm of gold-severed paper currency backed only by government promises (or threats).
My question to the commentariat is what might happen if cryptocurrencies like these get wider uptake and THEN the government reveals its ability to crack any and all individual nodes and personal digital wallets nearly simultaneously, using brute force quantum computing power. My own guess is that the complementary enthusiasms of the Trump-Musk alliance can be seen as a soft opener to a future scenario in which the government seizes all crypto in much the same way as they seized gold in the early phases of the 1929 crash.
(Someone please correct my historical and/or technical facts here if I’ve missed something).
Anonymous @ 26, “at about the same time society suddenly shifted in a darker direction, the medical establishment was pushing very hard for artificial sweeteners”
The medical establishment, that pack of PMC busybodies, forever telling ordinary folks how to live. I suppose the “medical establishment” paid for the advertising which promoted artificial sweeteners. The “medical establishment” sent salespersons around to various food processing companies to push the artificial sweeteners, did they? The companies which MADE the artificial sweeteners had nothing to do with them being widely adopted. Didn’t petition FDA to accept their in house testing as gospel truth?
We are lucky we were able to get chemical additives labelled.
@36 Inna
I am new to spirituality and believing in karma, but I think Hitler’s higher self has a much larger karmic debt than almost everyone else, so his earthly incarnations are dominated by his karma. Most people have more wiggle room because they have a smaller karmic debt, and proportionally more of their karma is positive. We’ll have to experience the consequences of our actions but not neccessarily right now or in this life.
Also, if Dion Fortune was correct about hell being to reform souls and not punish or annihilate them, then Hitler probably fled the afterlife almost immediately after memory processing started (since the true nature of his crimes is worse than any human could bear) and was quickly incarnated into hell on Earth to compensate.
I get the feeling that our Personalities are unimportant in the scheme of things, and are treated by our higher selves (and some deities) like we treat video game avatars. They’re a tool for interacting with the material world and teaching our real selves skills.
@JMG I wonder if his soul is entangled with the Hitler hate sink egregore that we Westerners feed, even if he doesn’t have conscious memories of his life as Hitler, and if that is cursing his current incarnation.
Wer here
Well let’s adress the “kabuki theater” of the epilouge of the war that just happened.
Isn’t it obvious what happened. Let’s begin by saying that the latest project “proxy war with Russia by utilising Ukrainians” is at an end and has ended in compete failure and the people in charge ahem “not trump” became very angry and started looking for another country to bring democracy to.
The choice came to Iran. Apparently after Syria collapsed the decision was made to trun Iran into Syria 2.0.
The scenario was simple: Mossad agents already inside the country blow up critical infrastructure and kill imporatnt people and cause chaos, the official statement was the whole thing was to “stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons” Just like Hussein and his nuclear weapons which I’ve heard he is just 2 weeks from developing.
Israeli air force then moves in drops some bombs in the capital, Iranian military is gone in a flash and no attacks on israel are launched at all and then the Iranian people rise up againts their opresors and It all culminates when the son of the deposed Shach being airdropped there and assuming power over the country (and most imporatntly
kicking Russia and China out of the region). It seems that was the plan…
Matilda, from last week #347, You, along with, I gather, other Finns, believe the Russians are “crazy”? Could you please elaborate on that. The petitions from Finland and Sweden to join NATO came so quickly, I doubted they had been induced by outside interests. Evidently, Finland believed that Russia would no longer respect its’ neutrality. Do you know how the Finnish government came to that conclusion?
Does or did protecting your legitimate interests in the warming Arctic enter into the decision to join NATO? Do you think it possible that, perhaps in 50-70 yrs. time, the countries we call Scandinavian, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, along with the 3 Baltics, and maybe a newly independent Scotland, might form some sort of loose federation, akin to the one crown, two nations former union of Sweden and Norway.
I’m seeking input regarding a practical endeavor. Lacking a mule, and so as to avoid wearing ourselves out prematurely, my husband and I are going to be getting a walk-behind tractor to assist in preparation for our ongoing multi-species orchard/pasture project.
From a dowwnard-we-go point of view, we recognize that this is a stopgap measure before all agriculture on our scale has to be biology powered. I’m wondering what the pros and cons are for gasoline vs. diesel.
Here are some things I can think of: I see petroleum in general as an obviously fragile link in all the chains, subject to controls and price increases and shortages… so maybe diesel would be better because biodiesel could be an option? But also diesel doesn’t store well, IIRC, so maybe gasoline is better? Dmitry Orlov postulated that there’d likely be limits on diesel sales at some point, with priority going to trucking. Likely? I don’t know…
So, what do you all think? What are the theoreticals and the practicals I should be considering in this comparison?
Thanks!
Teresa Pachel–I don’t know the current requirements but you might look into whether Agatha Christie: She Watched would qualify for Mystery Writers of America Edgar Awards in the Critical/Biographical category. There are other mystery writer/fan organizations, conferences and awards that might bring in publicity.
Karma–I can recall reading various books about the East written by Western Christians which claimed that the doctrine of karma led to a lack of social conscience and indifference to suffering. Never mind that the same people were singing “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate; God made them high or lowly and ordered their estate.” Many systems of thought can be used to justify an unwillingness to aid other beings.
Athaia–on reincarnation it has been my observation that the traditional view in Hindu and Buddhist thought is that the goal is to get off the wheel and stop incarnating. Contemporary westerners OTH seem to be like kids wanting to run back to the ticket booth for another go round. I think this reflects our current prosperity and ease. Someone once commented that the difficulties of life in earlier eras were reflected in the most common carving on gravestones being “R.I.P.”–because after a life of unremitting labor the idea of going to one’s eternal rest was very attractive.
Roldy–My memory may be incorrect, but I think Robert Anton Wilson suggested that sometime after the Inauguration each President is given the Talk, a clear message that any attempt to change certain policies will be punished and that there is no way to protect him or herself or family. Fits nicely no matter which group you believe has their hands on the puppet strings.
Hey JMG and commentariat
I recently published a new essay on Substack, in which I reviewed one of Borges’ lesser known stories that he published in the last decade or so of his life titled “The Weary Man’s Utopia.”
It’s unique among his stories since it is the only one I’m aware of that involves a protagonist time travelling to a human culture thousands of years in the future, a staple in most sci-fi but an oddity in the works of Borges.
I was going to publish it earlier since one of the features of the future world Borges describes is the complete erasure of governments, corporations and even society due to the gradual indifference of humanity, a complete collapse of status in other words. But I wasn’t sure if I was stretching it. I’ll leave you a link and the somewhat comedic paragraph which describes how it all fell apart for the people with the most status.
*”What happened to the governments?” I inquired*
*”it is said that they gradually fell into disuse. Elections were called, wars were declared, taxes were levied, fortunes were confiscated, arrests were ordered, and attempts were made at imposing censorship-but no one on the planet paid any attention. The press stopped publishing pieces by those it called its “contributors”, and also publishing their obituaries. Politicians had to find honest work; some became comedians, some witch doctors-some excelled at those occupations. The reality was no doubt more complex than this summary.”*
https://jlmc12.substack.com/p/a-weary-mans-utopia
@Sydaway
Yes, you have correctly identified the failing of Buddhism. The principle of karma means you get what you deserve. It is just, but not merciful. In Buddhism, to transcend materialism you have to attain perfection in this world, which is a pretty high bar, wouldn’t you say? It is made more difficult, because those who attain such perfection are believed to move on or become one with the universe, nirvana. So there are no teachers readily available. Buddhism is not the only religion with this flaw.
On the other side, you have religions like Islam where Allah forgives all sins. There is mercy, but no justice.
Only the Lord Jesus balances justice and mercy. Nothing we can do in this world will be good enough to earn our way into the kingdom of God. Jesus pays that price for us. He takes upon Himself the just punishment for our own sins and for the sins committed against us, calling upon us to forgive so that we might be forgiven.
The response to why there is suffering in the world is summed up neatly in the epistle of James ch1 verse 2-3: ‘My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.’
This is somewhat in alignment with the druidry of our host. This world is a challenge to grow or to shrink. For Christians, this means trusting that Jesus is the light, the way, and the truth. That none come to the Father except through Him. John 14:16 That as Jesus came not to serve, but to serve, to give His life as a ransom, He announces that he who would be great in heaven must be the servant of all, not grudgingly, but joyfully, trusting that the grace of God covers our sins because He has paid the price. Mark 10:42-45
Finally, Paul admits that we cannot know and understand everything of the Spirit while in this world. ‘For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.’ 1 Corinthians 13:12
May you be blessed today.
Hey, JMG, how are the FRC lessons going? Have you accepted Manisis as the Seventh Messenger of the Lord? (I’m still trying to work out whether he was a Freemason.)
Anonymous (no. 26)–and others curious about the Roy Jay conspiracy theory–here’s an article:
https://statmagazine.org/roy-jay-internet-demon/
David Ritz, if I may.
I occasionally give talks on energy and climate change, and I obviously haven’t been honest enough, because I haven’t been cancelled yet, and keep being asked back. I get asked this question by earnest, worried students. It worried me for a while too, particularly when looking at the slow rise of CO2 prior to the Eocene warm period – it took many thousands of years. So naturally, because us humans seem to have applied one-way valves on our own thinking, we think, well if the Eocene ramped up that slowly, then surely, our current heating event will be way way worse.
Then it clicked, a slow build up is like the proverbial frog in a pot of warm water, the planet adjusts, and in a way that might enable the heating event to occur. For us, there are sure fire rapid responses that shut the whole thing down. One is declining net energy from fossil fuels (no climate activist wants to discuss that), even now, we have deviated from the worst of the warming scenarios. The second is melting ice and rising sea levels, which will almost certainly also deviate, on the far higher side, from official predictions. That flood of sea water will shut down a lot of the demand for fossil fuels, and ending a lot of the industrial economy. Declining population will do it as well.
It won’t be pretty, but its not apocalyptic. I often worry myself that this grim grey reality is just me putting a mental panacea for my own mind, but, what else can I do against planetary and human forces, except to understand them, be ahead of them in the small ways I can, and guide people that might want to listen?
Walt (no. 35) Nice! Sounds like a heavy course load, though.
After years of wishing the international news people would pay attention to Armenia, glorious victory has been achieved. It seems that PM Nikol Pashinyan has invited patriarch Karakin II to (how shall I put this?) observe and demarcate his border regions:
https://metro.co.uk/2025/06/25/armenian-pm-make-bizarre-vow-prove-something-penis-23501025/
Online comments (mostly from the Armenian diaspora) were wonderful:
https://www.reddit.com/r/armenia/comments/1ljevje/pashinyan_offers_to_show_his_penis_to_head_of
Surely nothing like this could ever happen in Trump’s America!
By the way Mr. Greer, I didn’t know if you saw the study indicating that when the new supercontinent of “Pangaea Ultima” is formed about 250 million years in the future, the continents will be arranged in such a fashion that only 8-16% will be inhabitable by life in land as we know it.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2023-10-million-years-supercontinent-mammals.amp
Subsequently, non-marine mammals (whatever they have evolved into) may have the fate of non-avian dinosaurs on this bleak, largely desert continent.
If this event marks the end of the Cenozoic Era, I wonder what species will follow them as the dominant ones.
While everybody else is talking about serious things, I keep wondering how it is that Ariel Moravec – an short and slightly built girl – can drive that vintage Buick so easily. I was around and learning to drive before the good quality Japanese cars came on the market, and I’m here to tell you – I was 5’4” tall at the time – all that Detroit iron was built to the scale of the average American male, and the old Plymouth I was driving when my husband wasn’t using it wasn’t that easy to drive. When I inherited my mother’s Mazda, it was so much more comfortable and easier. You see, it was built to the scale of the average *Japanese* male.
And – that Buick had better have power steering. Have you ever wondered why there were so many jokes about women drivers taking out the curb or back of the garage on those days? And, apart from one of the Born Loser cartoons recently, those jokes have faded away? Smaller cars – and power steering. And I’m pretty sure Ariel never had vintage muscle cars in her Driver’s Ed courses – though a modern suburban family’s SUV is the same size as the old Buick on the outside., though not on the inside.
I now return you to the serious matters of what in the blazes was going on in the bombing of Iran, and why are some people taking it seriously and others saying it’s all a big show? And don’t the Democrats who are shocked – shocked, I tell you! at Trump’s doing so without permission from anybody, when every president in the last several decades has done exactly the same thing? (Humming from memory, to the tune of a popular song at the time, “Bomb, bomb, b;om bomb Iraq, raq, raq, bomb Iraq…..”)
Of course, Trump is the past master of the stage magician’s indirection….. and someone mentioned Mossad giving him his marching orders…. you think that’s likely? And how and why? I feel like Dorothy in the Wizard’s lair.
Pat, waiting eagerly for the next Ariel Moravec tale.
@pygmycory #45
Miniature war gaming was a hobby of mine but in recent years I’ve been frustrated by decreasing vision and water soluable paints that makes it very hard to paint with any acceptable detail. I haven’t painted for ages
Any recommendations for paint?
Comment borrowed from another site about Israel/ Iran;
“However, if you recognize the strikes were not only about eliminating Iran’s nuclear capacity but also about taking Israel’s “Iran has nukes!” card off the table,”
Then Trump declared a ceasefire which put both sides in a pickle given much of the rest of the world is annoyed at both sides. Whoever breaks the ceasefire first loses. Israel’s casus belli is gone, since they already fired the first shot sympathy will be zero except in the New England states where Israel can do no wrong. On top of that Haifa got pounded, the port and an oil refinery are offline. The Iron Dome ran out of interceptors and even worse, it has proven completely ineffective against hypersonic weapons.
On the Iranian side their uranium may or may not be intact. Both entrances to Fordow are closed. Sure they can be reopened but that will take awhile, the rock is shattered, driving an adit through incompetent rock (yes that is a technical term) is not easy. Did the bombs dropped between the entrances actually collapse the cavern? Shrug. If the cavern is intact they still can’t get to it. If the Iranians shipped the uranium elsewhere just before the strike they won’t be in a hurry to admit it. If the Chinese have it, well the Chinese do not want a nuclear war on the source of 85% of their oil imports. So there will be much silence on both sides.
The Iranians also have discovered the unfortunate fact that their military and probably government are well and truly riddled with Mossad agents. The clerics are not all that popular. Their air defenses were initially shutdown by insider actions. Someone repeatedly told Israel where the important people were. There is undoubtedly an epic internal witch hunt in progress. Large balance beam scales and ducks are in short supply.
So will the ceasefire hold? Will either unpopular country honor it? If Israel breaks it Trump can walk away from them. If Iran breaks it he can bomb them, including their refineries and strangle China as a fringe benefit. Which will happen? Shrug.
In college and at work I met four reasonable Iranians and one unreasonable one. I’ve only have a set of four Jews to go by, and one of those converted to the Methodist faith. My dataset is sadly lacking for predicting their religious imperatives.
As movie Theoden put it, “So much death, what can men do against such reckless hate?”
Silicone @ 44,
It certainly sucks to learn that ‘coding’ has become passe’. I found that financial buzz-phrase rather bogus and wanting.. What I see coming down the pipe …. especially with A.I. programs being adopted by virtually every Dinosaur Corpserate Entity, is for us, the small scurrying un-PMC mammals .. is to FOAD!
Sorry .. I meant to type in ‘Silicon’guy’ in my response to yours’ truly …
phat finger syndrome..
I’m a longtime resident of Japan. Overall, I like it. There are of course good things and bad things about it, but in general it works. I give it a solid B+.
But it’s weird to see how people in the west conceive of Japan. It’s highly bifurcated — either people think of it as a utopian society where everybody lives in a zenlike harmony with each other, or it’s a dystopian hellscape full of rabid racists who can’t wait to commit suicide because of all the cultural oppression.
It seems like this bifuccation has become even more pronounced of late. Perhaps because strains in western culture are becoming ever more difficult to ignore, and Japan for some reason is a great target for either negative or positive projection?
Robert Mathiesen (last week, no. 354)
Thank you for your deeply personal account of your mystical experience at 13, which I remember you mentioning before. That some people do have such experiences is well established. When you write that your “entire body became an organ of direct perception,” I can readily accept that this is what it *felt like* (or more precisely, how you now remember that it felt like), but balk at accepting that you *really were* perceiving the limits of time and space, the fiery / unitary / sentient nature of the cosmos, etc. To what extent mystical experience transcends the subjective is, of course, controversial–despite reports of (for example) out-of-the-body experiences in which the person observes things they could not have known, but which were perhaps later verified–and boils down to a matter of religious opinion. For my part, even if I were to have such an experience–even if it left me incapable of doubt at the time–this would not, to my mind, establish its objective reality (except as an experience), any more than the appearance of an angel, or a leprechaun, would convince me that the creature I saw really existed. I would tend towards other explanations (e.g. perhaps I am going crazy). However, for all I know, angels and/or leprechauns really do exist.
Anyway, none of this has anything to do with the question of primate religiosity. Noting the definitional problems surrounding “religion” (which seem to trouble philosophers more than anthropologists), I understand there is great uncertainty as to when religious behavior evolved, and what other early hominins might have practiced it. To the extent that religion is bound up with language (storytelling, complex relationship labels), this points away from an origin early enough for primate research to be relevant. Likely different aspects of religion developed at different times over evolutionary history.
If awe before a thunderstorm counts as numinosity, and therefore religiosity, then dogs clearly have this (even if we can only infer this from their behavior). I mentioned ritual, but many animals have what we recognize as rituals too. If we focus on the *content* of religious belief (e.g. supernatural beings, noting problems associated with the culture-bound term “supernatural”), this is hard to ascertain in nonverbal animals. (How do dogs and cats really see the world?)
Consider dance. Every society we know anything about, past or present, seems to have had the custom of dance (even if not every member of the society danced, even if dancing were sometimes forbidden), and many other animal species have their characteristic dances. At the same time, dance is highly culture-bound. We could even speak of the dancers’ state of mind, the message communicated by the dance, etc. Similarly, some scholars of Zen approach the subject by asking monks to meditate while wearing electrodes, while others treat “enlightenment” as a rhetorical rather than a psychological phenomenon.
P.S. (Robert Mathiesen again): I think the point you were making was that your mystical experience was unmediated by culture. Maybe? It’s hard for me to judge–and I would say the same even if it were my *own* experience!–but it seems to me that the experience itself (e.g. the oceanic feeling) is distinct from your categorization of it as mystical and/or religious. I’ll have think more about this. Cf. orgasm, which is mostly unmediated by culture (absent the occasional reference to deity!), and difficult to communicate to outsiders unfamiliar with the phenomenon.
“That said, I have entertained the thought that things like Bitcoin and other cybercurrencies may have just enough of a future to matter in the lifetime that remains to me (around 40 or 50 years).”
Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in generally are state sponsored inflation relief valves. Just like the stock market has been since the early 70’s. That is their only utility, you don’t find it odd that Bitcoin came onto the scene in late 08 just as the US government was going to print tons of money for the financial system? Look how people acted in 2020 and 2021 when the government printed even more money for a virus, cause that is how you fight them. You lock people down and ban all in person communication (for the most part) give them money that they can only spend on the internet and such and you watch and take notes. Just my opinion
Regarding this whole US and Iran thing, this kind of reminds me of the moon landing and how it was used to prove to the USSR that the US could put a nuke anywhere.
Both side are demonstrating their capabilities and possible retaliation, now it is time to negotiate.
I don’t know but it is possible.
Hi JMG,
First, glad to hear you had a good time in the ol’ dart. I was only about one when we left the UK for Australia, but I still have a great affection for its natural landscape – I have a very romantic idea about oak forests and babbling brooks!
You have mentioned previously, that your last incarnation was a female, driving the car I believe, who died in a car smash. This must have meant a fairly quick turnaround in lives, as cars even into the late 50’s early 60’s hadn’t been around for that long and if you had died say even a decade prior, that would mean even less time, especially as females probably didn’t become drivers until some time after the advent of cars.
My question is have you ever thought that it might even be possible to work out who you were by records of car fatalities, assuming they existed? I just thought if it were possible, you may be the first person to have fairly concrete, (to an extent) proof of who they were in a past life.
Regards, Helen in Oz
p.s.
I won’t ask anything about the current ME events, as I’m sure you’ll get plenty of questions.
The only thing I’d say is, things seem to be tracking the astrology forecasts that I listen to, and it ain’t over by a long stretch.
@Anonymous re Cushing’s syndrome.
Artificial sweeteners might have a role to play, particularly asparatame which is known to cause neurological damage.
The syndrome you describe sounds basically identical to what the sufferers of what is called “electrosensitivity” undergo, except that they learn about EMR and subsequently discover that their symptoms improve when they remediate the artificial sources of EMR in their environment. Various factors can make it more distressing. One I have identified is oxalates, which form crystals within living tissue, and it is plausible that those would enhance “receptivity.” Upon getting sick this way, and finding that mainstream medicine is no help at all, many people turn to diet and other controllable factors, and artificial sweeteners are the first to go because there has been so much controversy over them. They try out superfoods, and typically find a bit of relief from one or another of those. I started out getting a lot of good from yellow dock. Turns out to be a major source of oxalates. I found it counterproductive after a certain level of consumption. (Now there is a token plant in the garden, but I’m getting quercitin from other sources.) It was easy to blame my worsening condition on the clearly worsening EMR environment, while the oxalate accumulation was a hidden factor. There is apt to be other hidden factors, too. There is so much we don’t know.
Long COVID, again, is pretty nearly identical to electrosensitivity and thus probably to Cushings syndrome.
I note that a big tip-off to radiofrequency exposure with me has long been a racing heart, leading to arrhythmia if I don’t take steps. This suggests the involvement of cortisol.
Wondering if you, or anyone, could recommend any occult books covering healing/illness, the subtle bodies and the tree of life.
Thanks
To Athaia: I read that guy’s blog post, and I must say, I find him hilarious! 🙂 Not even the slightest flicker of humility darkens his brow: nope, freedom (as he defines it… cough) is the ONLY thing that matters even after DEATH and we ALL have a moral IMPERATIVE–immediately after the most intense transition of our being–to RESIST THE ANGELS!!! (Or whatever the appropriate term would be–picking the one our culture is most familiar with.) Before he embarks upon his own final journey, may it be long from now, I’d humbly suggest he take some time to journal about his emotions first. Maybe a lot of time.
The NDE experiences he gathers together are a lot more interesting, and I enjoyed reading them. Nothing written there disturbs me or is in opposition to my personal understanding of reincarnation or karma. Some souls face guaranteed misery as a consequence of choices made through free will in previous incarnations. It’s entirely understandable that they would try to hide, or bargain, or argue their way out of it (one NDE seems to have pissed off his ‘angel’ with how much he wanted to argue, lol!). The emphasis on “learning” as the reason to return which many mentioned resonated deeply with me. What better way to learn, after all, than experiencing personally the consequences of a choice they previously made?
Anyway that’s my thoughts on it offered up, and on that note, off to bed 🙂
@Siliconguy what is happening now to software and hardware design to an extent will have cascading consequences down the road, despite the fanfare, not that much hardware compared with software is made completely in US like in China or other Asian countries.
in 2005 US produced around 5Mbarrels/day (quoting from memory) and yet consumed around 20Mbarrels/day, and yet it had a soft power over the world, the whole world advancement depended on US tech. But around 2008 a shift happened and US got more into fracking, thus losing the software/hardware edge, can be argued that the decline of software/hardware didn’t happen particularly then, but it was at least a 10 year process.
Now US is into war business and is about to lose again on the software/hardware design stage.
The fact that so many entertain the LLMs and other error prone AI as the all in all, showcases this decline, I think is due to the steep decline in quality, but also some other intelligence factor, like many waxxine generated clots.
In IT sector there was a rather large incidence of waxxinees in the specific corporate area where the layoffs are happening now and where AI is pushed heavily.
Losing software/hardware supremacy might be a very difficult thing to have in this day and age, especially since US has that much infrastructure, the labor market is a very sensitive thing. I think that things are already damaged but there is no crisis to test it as happened to the Oroville Spillway that was already in bad shape and risk prone before the damage happened.
Imagine the whole Cloud infrastructure failing because the expansion for AI wasn’t well taught. AI is not that sophisticated to bet all the US software/hardware empire on it. But then these kind of choices are given to all empires in declining years, USSR being a recent relevant example, where they neglected this exact domain digital electronics among others like food. I think US is in a similar conundrum, except maybe that the lack is replaced by decreased quality.
Clay, cause and effect is complex in such situations. Did food prices fall to make room for financialization of the economy, or did financialization of the economy force the price of everything else to rise?
Roldy, good question. I note that we seem to have gotten out of the war as quickly as we got into it.
David, it’s all wholly speculative. Unless we have some other earths to compare ours with, it’s all handwaving.
Justin, glad to hear it. The original foo fighters were more interesting than the band.
Scotty, he didn’t specify. Do whatever feels best for you!
Michaelz, interesting. A case could be made…
Dylan, I have no idea whether it’ll last that long or not. Cryptocurrencies have no real value at all, but as the saying goes, the market can stay insane longer than you can stay solvent.
Anonymous, thanks for the heads up about Cushing’s syndrome. Yeah, I could see that.
Forecasting, no, the invasion is moving faster than I expected. Your immigrants are the first wave of invaders.
Phutatorius, the only difference is that the barking delusions of Obama and Biden were shared by the media and the laptop class, while the barking delusions of Trump are not.
Yoyo, it’s all theater. Both sides are showing the other what they could do if they wanted, without backing the other side into an impasse where war is the only option.
Other Dave, yeah, I know. I also don’t get invited to the local Lovecraft conventions. The people who run both the store and the conventions are offended by my politics. The irony, of course, is that so are the people on the other side!
Athaia, reincarnation isn’t voluntary; in most cases it’s as automatic and unstoppable as any other reflex action. By the time you can actually choose what’s going to happen, you’re usually ready to go on to less material forms of embodiment.
Fredrik, oh, it’s doubtless primarily spiritual in nature, but crowding is also a factor — you might look up the famous “mouse utopia” experiments.
Inna, simply that the universe contains many different causes, not all of them karmic.
Edward, you’ll find the whole thing in any slang dictionary under the heading “kayfabe.”
Raen, I haven’t experimented with it myself, but I know people who seem to have good results from it.
Siliconguy, hmm! Thanks for this.
Dylan, none yet. I’m working on an updated edition of the book, though.
Siliconguy, yep. A plumbing apprenticeship is much smarter.
Teresa, congratulations.
Temporaryreality, I’ll leave this to those who have experiences with that technology.
J.L.Mc12, funny!
Ambrose, er, whatever.
David, that’s purely hypothetical at this point; odds are we don’t understand continental drift anything like as well as we pretend.
Patricia M, good question. Since I’ve never driven a Buick, and I don’t know what else Ariel has driven, I have no idea. As for the current Middle Eastern circus, count me in the “big show” camp.
Siliconguy, that seems very sensible to me.
Zachary, do you happen to know if the same people are embracing both projections?
Helen, I’ve never looked into it, to be frank. Among other things, I don’t especially want to draw attention to myself.
Sam, Dion Fortune’s Principles of Esoteric Healing might be worth a look.
Ambrose (offlist), you just exceeded my boredom threshold with your latest round of repetitive attempts to redefine karma in Abrahamic terms. If you read what I’ve already posted on the subject without spin doctoring it, you’ll find that your questions have already been answered. Thus I think it’s time for you to take a break from posting here. Please don’t push the issue or the break will be permanent.
@TemporaryReality
If you are not already considering one I would Recommend a BCS walk behind tractor. In my previous business I designed and manufactured attachments for these Italian Machines. They are very simple, gear driven instead of belts and available in many sizes. They have a huge range of attachments from normal rototillers to cultivators and even generators and water pumps. I am told by the techs at the US importer that they routinely last for 20 years or more.
As to gas vs diesel. That depends on what country you are in. Very few diesel versions are imported in to the us because of us emissions regs. Also the makeup of the remaining us petroleum reserves favors gas. In other countries that might be different.
If you choose gas get one of the mid size or larger units that has a Honda Engine. They are much better than the engines on the smaller tractors.
@62 David Ritz
I’ve read pop sci articles about future continental drift, and while short-term (next few million years) tectonic plate motions are easy to predict, long term motions and the shape of the supercontinent that will probably form in the next couple hundred million years are guesses. They don’t even know which ocean will subduct to push the continents together.
A few years ago, a model predicted that the next supercontinent will form over the Arctic Ocean:
https://www.science.org/content/article/what-might-earth-s-next-supercontinent-look-new-study-provides-clues
(My take: geologists crank out speculative papers to raise their status in academia)
JMG’s comment reminds me to add: experience with that particular style of internal-combustion engine isn’t required. It’s not the machine itself that’s of interest here, but the fuel type – and its associated geopolitical and social links (to name a few) that affect availability over the next few years. If we’re lucky, we’ll get things set up speedily enough that we can quickly move away from machine power…
Regarding karma… there is that old slogan: sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny. That’s how karma works. Your individual destiny is not any kind of escape from reality, be that tsunamis or whatever. But… put different people in the same situation, and they will respond and experience the situation differently. That’s character.
Good habits are a wonderful thing, even if somewhat constraining. To become unconstrained by habits… that’s the direction in which the Buddhist path leads. When you understand how the lock works, you can open the door!
About Muslim invaders in Europe, keep an eye on Algeria.
Currently, Algeria is ruled by left-wingers and has been ruled by the left since the political realignment in 1999. They tend to not like Islamism, having suppressed an Islamic insurgency in the late 1990s and early 2000s, or fighting wars, as shown by the fact that Algeria hasn’t been involved in a war since the Civil War in the late 1990s.
The next political realignment in Algeria will happen in about 20 years, and will toss the left out of power and bring a right wing coalition into power. This in the Algerian context would likely mean Islamism and military expansionism, and combined with the likelihood of France trying to persecute Muslims under a right wing French nationalist regime makes it very likely that Algeria will go to war against France in the 2040s and 2050s after the right wing Algerian political realignment.
Wer, and anyone else interested.
Just an FYI: none of this was dreamed up recently, it has been an ongoing policy for many, many years now.
If you want a good summation of things, go to Brian Berletic’s channel.
He has been referencing this policy paper for a number of years now,
“Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American strategy toward Iran” . Dated June 2009
you can download it here
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/06_iran_strategy.pdf
Among the chapters is:
Chapter 5: Leave it to Bibi: Allowing or encouraging an Israeli Military strike
The US is an Empire, it has proxies doing its dirty work.
Israel and Ukraine are just two. Taiwan is being set up for it’s role.
NATO is basically another, the proxy war against Russia will likely draw in more than just Ukraine.
Why else do you think the Hegseth, publicly for months now has been saying just that?
Its quite stunning, really how much info the US has always blabbed out in video and print, and how little of it is taken seriously, or even known about.
Regards, Helen in Oz
Hello!
I’m back for another ARCHETYPE CHECK IN. It’s been a minute since I inquired on the matter so, in brief, JMG discussed the myth of the Changer in regards to the career of one Mr. Trump. The pieces certainly seemed to fit together given the fate of everyone who ever resisted or tried to take advantage of the man, so I believe that the archetype of the Changer has been hitching a ride with Trump for a while now.
Then, after the first attempt on his life, JMG said he believes there’s a different archetype in the driver’s seat now and the Changer seems to have hopped on over to Elon Musk. Given the state of the U.S. administrative state post DOGE, I think JMG was spot on once again.
The question now, given Musk’s inglorious falling out and retreat from public life, is where has the Changer gone now? And which Archetype, if any, does Trump now embody? The Shadow? The King? The Old Man? I’ve been following this thread for a while but my meditations on the subject haven’t born fruit yet. Any thoughts on the archetypes at play JMG et al?
Two little notes regarding your recent trip to the UK.
Firstly, the uptake in folks from India is not just the UK, the same is happening in Australia. About 2.5% of the population of this land were born in India with the majority of them coming over in the last 15 years. While this has caused some growing pains with limited housing supply, with a lot of people exploiting this, it is also endlessly fascinating see how the culture of this place is changing with the years as it all marbles together.
Secondly, thank you for the recommendation of the stout! It is rare that you can find anything that really packs a intense yet balanced flavour and I trust your recommendation. It is not easy to find here but I will seek it out. Many have made the promise of “a barrage of flavour!” but they rarely deliver.
I was lucky enough to have the time and resources to attend the recent Glastonbury get together and since I was there on the Friday I joined the tour round the ruins of the abbey and then onto the White Wells. Others have written about this and the various talks and events over the following couple of days but I thought I’d recount a story that JMG told us. Of the very many interesting things that happened, this was the one that really caught my attention.
It was toward the end of the walk through the grounds of the Abbey. We’d past the legendary tomb of King Arthur and were sitting at the East end of the Abbey on some rather undistinguished stone structures. If it had been a scene from my London childhood it would have suggested the remains of a house leveled the blitz. Obviously in this spot, it was something rather different.
JMG told us that we were in fact sitting in the remains of the Edgar Chapel, the site of which had been lost for many years. The ruins had been in private hands until early in the 20th century when they were acquired by the Church of England. Would it be fair to say re-acquired?
Anyway, the Church in turn hired a fairly well known and well established archeoligist, Frederick Bligh-Bond. Frederick did some groundwork – I imagine that some trenches were dug – and with remarkable rapidity was able to to locat the fabled Edgar Chapel and excavate it. There were about fifty of us sitting in it as JMG spoke.
In 1919, Frederick published a book The Gates of Remembrance where he tells us that in order to locate the chapel he’d used automatic writing (shades of Yeat’s A Vision) to ask the long dead monks where it was! He’d also consulted some mediums including one that might have been a very young Dionne Fortune.
Apart from the sheer novelty of this tale accompanied with rock solid evidence that you could literally stub your toe on, there was the aftermath which was that within a few years of the publication of Gates the Church had fired him. To my mind this speaks volumes of the nature of the Establishment as it was called then, and I suppose what has effectively evolved into the PMC/Laptop class of the present day. I’m still processing that.
Anyway – thanks again to JMG and everyone else who came to Glastonbury.
Hi JMG et al,
I have a simple question about candles. I have been using a green candle when invoking Mercury for the past few Wednesdays. I plan to continue this for at least another 3 and possibly another 11 weeks.
The candle I have been using is maybe good for a couple more Wednesdays, but I am moving at the end of the month. After I move, should I still be using the same candle, or should I switch to a new one for the new place, o does it not make any difference?
Thanks!
This morning, during the transition betwixt sleep and waking, I found myself contemplating the last few years of my life (up to a decade, let’s say), the journey(s) I’ve been through (intellectually, philosophically). I examined a pattern, and then remembered this Dreamwidth post of yours from March ’23, “A CosDoc Hypothesis”.
Remember the one with the long eclipse on the 5th plane, and the shorter one on the 2nd?
I don’t find myself equipped to bear judgment on the first one, but the second, yes (at least I was alive during all of it!). Certainly fits my experience.
My morning reflections led me to seeing I was in a certain particular fog from 2019 thru 2022, ’23 was a tad better already. By late 2024 there were moments where I could envision life out of the fog, and this year, the feeling is more like things can finally be picked up where they were left off almost a decade ago. It’s wild! Green shoots, at last.
If we allow for a few years where the eclipse was building towards its maximum (’16, ’17 and ’18), it checks out. I can only see it clearly in retrospect (duh). Your post was too/two years early to be definitive, but my little subjective experience leads me to give it credence.
Here’s to seeing life anew.
Silly writing question: do you happen to know of any small presses who might be vaguely interested in a 35,000-word occult fantasy novella? Or who at least might be interested in bundling two such novellas together, into a single book of around 70,000 words?
@ Patricia #63
I am a 5′ 2″ female and I learned to drive in my dad’s pickup truck which was standard transmission with no power steering. One of the guys I dated in my late teens drove an old Buick Rivera and I drove that with no problem. It was kind of like driving a boat. And then there was that stupid Corvette that a Significant Other bought when I was in my early 20’s and that I drove occasionally. It was also standard transmission and the problem with those cars is that they are definitely built for taller men who want to be seen as cool-ly leaning back as they drive. For a short woman, getting the clutch all the way to the floor while still seeing over the dashboard was a real problem, even with the seat pushed all the way up. I hated that car, but I drove it. All of this is to say, short people like me deal with it. We are used to dealing with it. The old joke I had with my late 6′ 3″ tall husband was, when I could not find something around the house, I just looked up high. Invariably he or one of my children (they are all taller than me) put something away out of my line of sight which is much lower down. I have always been Jean in the land of giants.
Ariel could drive that Buick — no problem. I am also waiting for the next book with great anticipation. I love the series so far!
>So much for learning to code
When half of all STEM majors at UCBerkeley are CompSci, it’s time to think about doing something else. Anything else. That being said, there was some stat pic where they measured underemployment and CompSci majors had less of it than Chemistry majors. I’d say if you’re going into STEM, you need to be the kind of kid who was playing with an Arduino or a chemistry set in his free time. Otherwise, you ain’t gonna make it.
>Intel
I don’t know what to say about them. They haven’t been a technology company in decades, just marketing. It looks like the rest of the world has figured that out. From a broader perspective, it looks like the world is beginning to move on from Wintel in general and towards ARM. It used to be you wouldn’t think about anything else but x86, but you’re now seeing ARM servers and desktops, along with all those phones. I think Apple ditched x86 for ARM a few years ago, all those M-series chips. Nvidia is going to release their own SOC, based on ARM. But it’s early days, and maybe Intel will get their act together?
Even if you’re staying x86, you generally go with AMD if you care about performance. That used to not be the case at all, AMD for the longest time was considered the offbrand knockoff discount x86 vendor.
JMG and commentariat – any thoughts on the New York City mayoral election?
Looks to me like a young, proper bona fide socialist/left wing populist (ie, not a fake one like Bernie Sanders) has won the Democratic Primary (which in New York is as good as winning the actual election).
I’m not thrilled about a lot of his views on Israel etc and a lot of what he’s promised is impractical/impossible but on the whole I think this is a positive step – if even New York Democrats are rejecting the elite consensus in favour of the “populism” the elite sneer at. He’s just a populist from the left, while Trump and the MAGA Republicans are populists from the right. I think the balance is good and the rejection of “mainstream elite consensus” is important.
I haven’t looked into him too closely but I get the impression (for those who follow British politics) that he’s kind of like Jeremy Corbyn but on steroids.
Hi,
Thanks for clarifying.
With perfect timing this article popped in today.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21704/jihadist-pogroms-in-europe
Regarding Donald Trump’s actions in the Near East: Already in his first term, Donald Trump showed this pattern of short-tempered actions against Iran, which end as fast as they had begun. So his actions aren’t really new. As for being an ordinary neocon, I don’t see that, since otherwise, Trump seems to be less eager to get into new wars than his predecessors were.
Milkyway, thanks fopr your report from Glastonbury!
As for the climate simulation of Pangaea Ultima in 250 million years, this is only one of several scenarios. There are several scenarios for future supercontinents: Amasia, Pangaea Proxims/Ultima, Aurica, Novopangaea. Geologists are quite sure that the continents will amalgamate into a new supercontinent 200-250 million years from now, but the details are less well known. The question is, if it will happen by introversion, extroversion, orthoversion or a combination of these. It is believed that here have already been several supercontinents which assembles and after a few hundred million years broke apart: Columbia/Nuna, Rodinia, Pangaea. Besides, the newest forward projections for multicellular life is that multicellular life will be able to abide for another 800 million years due to biochemical possibilities and constraints.
@Brandi #20 – I like the idea of Lili – “The only control we have in the matter is our response, that is our “responsibility” in the matter”
@Inna #36 – Yes karma *could* encompass those things, but it doesn’t mean they’re always caused by karma. I refer you to JMG’s answer. And it’s explained in Alex Kennedy/Subhuti’s book. As for coldness, it’s not inevitable, but it’s a danger – a logical conclusion of believing people “deserve” everything that happens to them. It’s occurred to me since posting that Buddhism is aware of this danger, which is why the cultivation of compassion is so heavily promoted.
@Christopher #58 – Yes I agree it’s a high bar – I doubt many have reached the state of perfection that would be required to escape the cycle of incarnation. We’re human beings – clever monkeys – with human needs, at odds with the state of perfection. However I don’t have a problem with people paying the a price for their actions, ie. natural “justice”. At least with karma there’s a chance to pay off your “debts”/learn from your experience, and an infinite number of lifetimes in which to learn.
As for lack of teachers – not so, according to Buddhist doctrine – they are the Boddhisattvas – beings who have achieved enlightenment but have chosen to stay on earth to help others. The Dalai Lama is one.
“A president who lies; that, we are used to. But a president who appears outright, barking delusional?”
It depends: Who is the target audience? What is the message? Seems to me, they hit nothing, made no changes, and the effect was to stop Israel’s war. Is that a bad thing? So. “The Purpose of a System Is What It Does.” Or someone would be mad about it. Now look to Russia, Saudi, BRIICS. All said nothing. Iran just confirmed the strikes work when they almost certainly didn’t and denying it would make Trump look worse. Strange to make the guy who just bombed you happy for no reason, n’est-ca pas? These things all say “Theater”, which many pundits agree, like Doctorow. Who is this theater for? The wide, shallow, pro-Israel base, and somewhat to the Right side. They read headlines, say “It’s over” and that’s it. Why would America fight a war the headlines said you just won? So you want to blow it, tell the truth, and put the war back on? Be careful. That reading predicates that there are strong war-factions and he only barely delayed them for now.
Pygmy, there are probably plaster corbel and details all over the area the need repair, but somehow their owners would have to know you exist and want to pay. The church saying so is a start.
Kimberly: well don’t keep it to yourself, show us his pencil line measurements on the kitchen doorway!
TemporaryReality: Either will do, as when they’re small-engines gas is more native to that size. Diesel can run biodiesel, but that’s hard bc the small, modern engines need very, very perfect fuel or it’ll break and just be no special gain. You don’t want to wipe out a whole engine in 30 minute accident, their engines are more heavy to use. Either fuel stores well with stabilizer, measures. I’d say Diesel stores better and is U.S. home heating fuel, a cost savings with 100gal tanks all over in basements. If you do, I can advise a BCS , Italian, which as a cheapskate I never would. It is a commercial-grade walk-behind, for eg industrial-size Italian vineyards, on steep slopes. Having one since the 80s, it shows no wear while Troy-bilt, American standard, would be dead from age by now. They have all standard accessories, like to ride it with a seat, wheelbarrow, and of course tiller/sickle/mower/snowblower, but they are expensive. The largest ones even have a baler. Even if that priced out, start there to understand what they can do and should look like.
Sam: this is a different lineage, but “Awaken Healing Light of the Tao” I thought worked well.
Something relative to last week’s post:
From Jonathan Turley, who is a law professor. He did testify at the first Trump impeachment for Trump saying the charge was unconstitutional. He also speaks on matters of free speech.
https://jonathanturley.org/2025/06/26/the-icarian-gene-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-expert-class/
The Icarian Gene: The Rise and Fall of the Expert Class
The warning was stark. At issue was a privileged class that has long dictated policy despite countervailing public opinion. At issue, the luminary warned, is nothing short of democracy itself. No, it was not the continued rallies of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., VT) to “fight oligarchy.” It was Justice Clarence Thomas rallying his colleagues to fight technocracy, or government by experts. He warned against allowing “elite sentiment” to “distort and stifle democratic debate.” Yet, the story is even more profound of an elite class which succumbed to the Icarian gene and fell to Earth due to hubris and excess.
—
He continues:
The decline of the expert class can be traced to the changes in higher education over the last couple of decades. As I discuss in my book The Indispensable Right, an orthodoxy has taken hold of most universities with a purging of conservative, libertarian, and dissenting faculty. Within these ideological echo chambers, appointments, publications, and grants often seem to turn on conclusions that favor political agendas.
—
Turley ends with:
The expert class lost the public when they replaced objectivity with orthodoxy. No matter how many experts claim that gender is a social myth, the public is not likely to dispense with reality. The rise and fall of the expert class is a story of the costs of arrogance and excess. Higher education has created a privileged class of social warriors who abandoned core principles of neutrality and objectivity in research. It is an Icarian generation of scholars who flew too close to the sun and fell to Earth in the eyes of the public.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University where he teaches a course on the Supreme Court. He is the best-selling author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage”
——-
Me: I think that something is in the water……..
Hi JMG,
Apologies in advance if you’ve already grown tired of discussion about the recent dust-up in the Middle East.
I’m starting to feel like, with recent events, we’re heading straight into a Twilight’s Last Gleaming timeline. Becaues Trump accepted the frame that the core problem is Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and (by ordering the recent bombing run) he further accepted the frame that the American military is the only force that can destroy that program, and that this recent bombing run almost certainly did not (as the White House claims) destroy that program–how, oh how, does he prevent further involvement of the American military?
As soon as the American legacy media, and Israeli-backed politicians and officials, start up a new furor over the continuation of Iran’s nuclear weapons development, how does he silence them without providing further military committments? It seems that, as with January 6th, he’s been outwitted by the Deep State and walked straight into their trap. Not that the Deep State wants a Twilight’s Last Gleaming scenario, but of course their hubris and recklessness almost guarantees its manifestation, if they have their way.
Thanks!
Anonymous @#26, re: Cushing’s disease.
You might also look into the role estrogen plays in stimulating cortisol levels and thus possibly contributing to increased Cushing’s AND cultural shift prompted by poor physical health. Estrogen is one of those pharma money makers – through birth control and hormone replacement therapy, in addition to being something the body produces in excess when under stress (so, a cyclical self-reinforcing estrogen-cortisol stress reaction) in men and women. Plus there’s the push to add soy to everything (a known phytoestrogen) via soy protein isolates as a way to provide cheap (non-animal) protein to make foods look healthy. Excess estrogen has many known negative health consequences and more people probably have such hormonal imbalances as a result of medication choice, dietary consumption, inherent stresses, etc., than suffer low blood sugar from artificial sweeteners. Though to be honest, maybe those sweeteners and estrogen combined make for some extremely dicey health conditions (heck, add in the EMFs Patricia Ormsby mentions and you really get a sense of the tweaks we’ve made to life’s chemical soup).
Yoyo,
That is the correct conclusion. Stage managed acts like these are used to deescalate situations that are spiraling out of control. When Israel attacked Iran, that was real. When Iran attacked Israel, that was real.
You can tell if it’s real by people dying in droves and by errant bombs falling on occupied buildings. If allowed to spin out of control, Iran’s energy infrastructure (the oil refineries in particular) would be targeted and the Straight of Hormuz could be shut down.
It’s clear that at some point, the United States came in and convinced Israel that it was going to take over and show Iran that nuclear weapons aren’t acceptable, and we did that by dropping some bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities. I’m not sure how much warning they had. On the flipside, the U.S. let Iran save face after the fact by letting them bomb one of our bases (which was evacuated) unchallenged and unanswered.
In return, both Iran and Israel agreed to stop fighting and we can enter into actual negotiations, with both sides now much more aware of what the other is capable of.
Although I’ve disliked Trump’s tariff policy (mostly because I like Japan too much) and have mixed feelings about the way he’s handling immigration, I have to give my hat off to him for the way he’s handling these international situations. It’s really hard, but this was a big win in a seemingly no-win situation. He’s good at that.
You ended last week’s essay with an allusion to an entrepreneurial class that would supplant the laptop class in the decades to come. Have you any firm or even solid ideas what that class might look like, either in gestalt or details?
Hi John,
https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-middle-east-is-hastening-ukraines-fall-the-end-of-the-european-era/
What are your thoughts on Ian’s latest forecasts? Do you agree with him.
@JMG Yeah they do wear their politics on their sleeve there dont they. My copilot and I were both gnawing on our tongues to be polite as I am sure if we revealed are true natures the individual behind the counter would have reacted as if we had turned into shoggoths.
@Athaia and Shinjuki
That was an interesting article but I do have to share Shinjuki’s distaste for the authors tone. If I wanted to be truly hyperbolic I would call the whole thing Luciferian. More practically it reminded me of trying to teach my children sometimes. You have something that you know is good for them or something they have to do and they just wont do it. It could even be something they claim they want to do but they just dont want to do what has to be done to get that. There are times I think the whole parent thing is prep for angelic lifetimes trying to deal with the truly obstinent. That author just reeks of a 5 year olds don wanna.
Other Dave
@Dylan #50: I guess my point about crypto is that as a form of currency it is still just a bunch of numbers in a machine. How those numbers connect to real wealth, what our host might call the wealth of nature, is very complex. I understand the decentralized aspect of crypto and the appeal of that. Looking towards a future with LESS computers, I think there are other alternate currencies / economies that might be worth investigating instead. For instance, I’m also a fan of co-op’s like @Ludovic Viger in #1. I’ll be curious to read his book even though I am not a Canadian.
siliconguy @ 65, a few tidbits I have gleaned from various obscure corners of the internet: a Chinese writer claims that Iran is an oligarchy dominated by 4 wealthy families (each successive Ayatolla is from one of those) masquerading as a theocracy, which might explain why the clerisy is unpopular, if it is. Of somewhat more interest, apparently Mossad works with Indian counterparts; India being a sovereign nation can ally with whomever it likes. The Indian spy agency, IDK the correct title, places agents among “guest workers” in Iran. But naturally, the Iranian oligarchy pays no attention to its’ servants. It is through those agents that Mossad learned the whereabouts of various Iranians it wanted to assassinate.
I wonder if both sides are not realizing that there is simply no further unlimited supply of advanced weapons because the resources needed to produce them no longer exist. I suspect no government wants to be first in the world to tell its’ citizens, no you can’t have nice things nor a comfortable life because we are diverting all available resources into weaponry.
I was curious if any of the readers/commenters here have had a similar incarnation related experience/memory. I thought I would mention it since the topic of incarnations came up in the Open post this week. I found it interesting in light of one of JMG’s responses in the past regarding incarnation helpers, where he said: “Sam, it’s not usually the same spirits, but there are spirits who help souls go into incarnation, yes”.
Anyway, in my memory I recall having to wait a bit just before being reinserted into the world. It was as if I had arrived too early on the scene. I was waiting on a baseball diamond in a group of fields setup for Little League or company softball tournaments. With me was an older boy who looked around 10-12 years old. He was sitting on the bleachers and I was standing on the 3rd base line. We were the only people around. What I assumed to be me was a small boy who appeared to be around 2.
It was a bright sunny morning. Looking north I could see the hospital where I was about to make an appearance in one of the delivery rooms. Just behind me to the south was a river. Finally the older boy stood up and said: Ok, time for you to go. Next thing I was a wriggling new-born.
I kind of chalked this up to a suggested memory after reading too much a while back on the topic of incarnation and the ‘higher self’. But then I took a look using Google maps at where I was born, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The year was 1957. August 25th at 10:30 AM. I found the hospital (St Anthony’s – been there for 125 years) and started heading south on the map. Sure enough there was a river running east-west with lots of land along the banks set aside for recreational uses. Almost directly south of the hospital on the north shore of the river, I found a baseball park with several diamonds and low slung bleachers. Even on Google maps street view you could see the hospital from the fields.
I only spent the first 2 months of my life there (my father was in the Air Force and he got transferred) so it is not like I have any memories of the place to draw on for a dream. I’m currently trying to find out if the ball fields were there in 1957. I was born on a Sunday so that may explain why we were the only 2 people around. Maybe everyone was at church, since it was still early. Perhaps there were other people out and about but at least in my memory we were the only people present on the lot we occupied.
I wondered about me appearing as a 2 year old but though that might suggest in my previous incarnation I had died young. Any thought, comments? Ideas I should further investigate?
Sorry for the length.
Jim, thanks for this! Yes, exactly.
Anonymous, watch also how Algeria’s relations with the countries immediately to its south proceed. If Algeria ends up allied with the emerging federation of Sahel nations — Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso — with their immense mineral wealth and their grudges against the French, things could get very awkward indeed for Paris.
StarNinja, I’m not sure what the Changer is up to at the moment — he’s an elusive one. Trump is now serving as a projection screen for the same paired archetypes that were thrown onto Lincoln and FDR during their lifetimes — the Shadow of the old regime and the Hero-King of the new — and will settle into his enduring role as Once and Future King once he dies.
Michael, thanks for the data point. As for Mena Dhu stout, I wish I could get it in this country! It’s an amazingly good beer.
Andy, thanks for this. The Gate of Remembrance is readily available these days —
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48568
— and well worth reading as a chronicle of dealings with the Unseen.
Wick, it doesn’t matter at all. Do as you wish!
Thibault, that makes a great deal of sense to me. It wasn’t a matter of fog for me, but the period from 2017 to 2024 was a very difficult one for me and a lot of things had to be set aside while the pressure built and finally faded out. Now? Yes, it’s very much a matter of picking up old threads.
DS, there aren’t many but I know one. You might give a try to Sul Books —
https://abeautifulresistance.org/publish-with-sul-books
RTPCR, I want to see how the general election turns out. My guess is that all the New York power centers will find an independent candidate, close ranks around him, and do everything they can to make sure Mamdani loses. If they win, it’s business as usual; if they lose, the plutocracy has lost its grip completely.
Forecasting, yep. Brace yourself.
Neptunesdolphins, good heavens. The downfall of the managerial class really is picking up speed!
Balowulf, that’s not my take on it, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
Eucyclos, it hasn’t taken shape yet. The capitalist class that emerged out of the 1860s elite replacement cycle didn’t really finish forming until the 1870s, and the managerial class that emerged out of the 1930s cycle didn’t form until the Second World War; what we have now, in the usual way, is a jerry-rigged assortment of individuals scrambling for position and power as the former elite class collapses. I expect the future entrepreneurial elite to take shape over the course of the 2030s.
Forecasting, I’m not sure he’s right that the emerging era is China’s — there are other rising powers, notably India — but the general picture seems sensible to me.
Other Dave, turning into shoggoths sounds like a very practical notion in such situations. 😉
BlueMoose, fascinating. Yes, you’d probably died young — it’s apparently quite common for people who go onto a new life after a very short incarnation to have unusually vivid experiences between lives.
Sigh, the drama in the middle east. My big question is why didn’t Iran retaliate by closing the Straight of Hormuz? Forget the nukes, just like you forget about WTC7. Forget. Forget.
My guess is there is more going on behind the scenes than we are privy to, as mere internet peasants. I don’t know what kind of deal he made, but I do know he makes deals, he can’t help himself, it’s what he does. But what did he horsetrade away and what did he get?
John,
I guess this might sound like a bit of a strange question, but I’ll try to be succinct: recently I had to extricate myself from an order that I was a member of. This was my first experience with an esoteric initiatory order (Martinist/Elus Cohen tradition, based out of central Europe, FWIW), so I have no other reference for whether or not this is a common experience. I am still trying to understand and get some context for what has transpired in my life over the last year. Anyway, a few years ago when AI started to come on the scene in a strong way, the leadership of this group completely embraced AI as tool to make teaching materials and lessons available faster and more efficiently. This was fine at first, but as the months went on it became clear that something significant had changed. Emphasis on spiritual practice and philosophy began to be slowly put aside, and a kind of obsession with AI crept in to the group. Members began to almost behave like the AI they were working with and lose their personalities. There were many other things that influenced my decision to leave, but the final straw was when the leader of the organization told everyone in a Zoom call that “AI was bringing about the next stage of human spiritual evolution,” and that those who weren’t fully onboard would be “left behind” and have to “go through many incarnations before they were ready to go on”. Have you heard anyone in the occult scene saying this kind of stuff? It would be one thing if it was just someone making an offhand comment of their own opinion on the subject, but in this situation it was someone who was seen as an authority on nearly everything because they are seen by members of the group as an “adept”. I saw it affecting people’s behavior in a negative manner, such as families being split up, unsolicited advice towards newer initiates by members of the group hierarchy, and a kind of isolation from or complete ignorance of/no interaction with any other occult groups. I had made close friendships with members who now won’t speak to me anymore because I left. I guess my question is, what did I just experience? Why the obsession with AI? Was I unwittingly a member of a cult (at least cult-like behavior)? Is this kind of thing normal for occult orders? Also, I still have an immediate family member who I live with who is still an active member of this group, so any advice you could provide how to deal to them would be appreciated.
Dzanni: ” So you want to blow it, tell the truth, and put the war back on? Be careful. That reading predicates that there are strong war-factions and he only barely delayed them for now.”
Yes, I did think of that. I’m not belaboring the point any further, at least as far as the success/failure of the recent strike goes. We’ll see what happens.
I live in between Intel’s oldest working fab and its flagship research fab ( where they develop new processes that are then replicated elsewhere. What is happening at these fabs gives a good indicator of where US based chip production is going.
I was at my local watering hole last night. The mood was grim as a majority of both blue badges and green badges had been given their walking papers or expected them soon. Blue badge is a term used to describe a direct Intel employee and Green badge refers to an outside contractor or vendor who works in one of the fabs.
The pattern among the layoffs and expected layoffs of the contractors was telling. Those trades who specialized in the installation of new tools were gone or on their way out. Those who specialized in keeping existing tools running were only losing small numbers, and the trades that specialized in “demos” were mostly intact.
This is important because of the nature of the main fab ( Ronler Acres). It is the place that all new processes or new chips requiring new processes are developed. It is the only place in Intel’s empire where masks ( the master copy imprinted on a pure quartz sheet) can be developed and made. The normal pattern is a new process is developed at Ronler at full scale. When it is perfected the entire production line ( all the tools, not building) is picked up and sent to Arizona or New Mexico, or Ireland or prior to a few months ago Israel. New tools can be brought in to the production sites like Arizona from the vendors but they must be exact copies of the ones piloted at Ronler and then dialed in to the same exact specs.
Shutting down installation of new tools at ronler means Intel is stopping r&d for now and just running the production lines with what they have, or what will soon be de-installed from the pilot line in the mother plant. My guess is that they hope just running the chips they have and minimizing costs by slashing the development of new processes will bring them back to profitability so it will be easier to sell the manufacturing portion of the business. A sad pattern that has happened time and time again Industry.
About the NYC mayoral candidate, it looks to me like the Moslem diaspora in the USA has come to understand that if it wants to reach for genuine political power, not just PMC status appointments, it needs to make some alliances. Don’t forget the primary voters were registered Democrats. The most interesting thing about this primary was that it provided proof that ritualized accusations of antisemitism no longer impress voters.
I saw very little in what I read about the guy’s proposals which would be genuinely helpful to the wage earning class. I think, in general, that the Moslem diaspora in the USA has made a likely fatal mistake in its self important disdain for working people. We don’t need free bus service–most jurisdictions already offer free or reduced fares to seniors and various disadvantaged groups–we need expanded mass transit.
I do think that the NYC primary result is a strong warning to the establishment factions JMG referred to above, that they will need to cough up some fairly substantial funding for building, refurbishment and repair employment for blue collar New Yorkers who ALREADY live in the city, not someone’s overseas clients.
> Turns out that large language models and large reasoning models don’t actually learn or reason
Artificial Intelligence is basically a connection of two components – a statistical model to predict what a human being would do in response to a stimulus, and a computer program to execute the predicted task. If the stimulus is an incomplete sequence of words and the human is expected to choose the next word in the sequence, the AI is just a statistical model to predict the next word, based on countless “examples” of human language snippets authored by real humans. The program is just one that concatenates the predicted word to the end of the sequence, then feeds the result back into the statistical model to guess the next word.
This is how generative language models work. Basically, its a kind of simulacrum for human behavior, in the same way that a statue is a simulacrum of human form. Expecting an LLM to reason is like expecting a statue to have a loving relationship – it ain’t happening until Mother Athena breathes life into it!
Also, I happen to know this as an AI engineer – the original purpose of language models was to build search engines. You know how you can easily search for something on the internet if you have the right keyword? Well, what if you could describe what you wanted to search for in your own words but could not recall the name or any specific keyword to point to it? Computer Scientists have been trying since the 80’s to build programs that can find articles on a subject from a description of that subject. Such search is known as “Content-Addressed Information Retrieval”.
Interestingly, a model to do this was already developed back in 1983, but it was lame. The model was called “Latent Semantic Analysis”, abbreviated to LSA. The authors admitted that the model doesn’t ‘think’, but claimed can be trusted to relate information correctly. They famously said that LSA’s understanding of language is like “a virgin nun’s understanding of male masturbation”, and somewhat jokingly added that society clearly considers this level of ‘understanding’ sufficient to authorize the sisters to instruct boys on the matter, hence LSA’s ‘understanding’ of language can be considered sufficient as well.
Good content-addressed retrieval models came into being around 2017 or so, and you can see them at work on Google. Most modern search engines have since come to use them.
So, Sphinx got acquired by Rhyd Wildermuth & co.? That’s interesting. It’s nice to see that Sul is accepting manuscripts though, whereas Sphinx had stopped.
I hope it goes well with you there.
I recently read Wildermuth’s essay about his experiences with Repeater Books … [ https://rhyd.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-repeater ] some of whose titles I have enjoyed and others I have wrestled with.
Recently, a co-worker shared a document on AI-adoption by an automation company named Zapier. Nauseatingly enough, they have drawn up a table with each row describing a type of professional (engineering, marketing, human resources, etc.), and the columns are categories named “unacceptable”, “capable”, “adoptive”, and “transformative”, going from left to write.
Each cell in the table tells us how much a professional of that type would have to use AI in order to be considered in that category. The left-most column, “unacceptable”, describes a degree of AI adoption that is too low to be considered tolerable according to Zapier.
For HR personnel, unacceptable is “Distrusts all AI-driven tools, screens each resume one by one”. I am appalled to learn that exemplary diligence is considered ‘unacceptable’ now. What a world to live in!
Additionally, as an engineer, I notice that “relies on stack-overflow snippets” is apparently unacceptable as well. This is actually a very accurate description of the way my profession has sustained all software technology for a decade-and-half. Using Stack Overflow – a knowledge sharing website where engineers ask when they get stuck and answer to help one another out – has been the most reliable and recommended way to work since forever. And now, it is ‘unacceptable’!
So what do they recommend as “transformative”? For HR, it is the adoption of HRBPs – AI agents known as “Human Resources Business Partners”. I can only imagine the riot these golems are permitted to run when vetting candidates. For software engineers, transformative work is “ships LLM-powered features” and “builds AI-powered dev pipeline”. The first one is basically adding a chat-bot to the app or website (if there is one), and the second one is diabolical.
A “dev pipeline” is an abbreviation of “Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery Pipeline”, a mammoth automation of interconnected programs that functions like a conveyor belt in software development. Each component needs to be carefully debugged and maintained, by the precise hands of a very competent engineer, and only exemplary patience and dilligence can be trusted. If one piece breaks down, the company will not be able to build and run any new changes to its software until the thing is fixed.
The entire thing stands on lines and lines of YAML code. YAML is a kind of deadpan-boring specification language that describes each and every step of the process of compiling, building, testing, and deploying changes to the company’s software.
Most engineers wheeze at the thought of correcting any errors in YAML code, because it is such a chore. Imagine suggesting that an LLM should be allowed to spit YAML code out! Fixing the errors it will inevitably make is going to be a nuisance of awful proportions. Of course, the engineers will be tasked with fixing the error, and they will have an infernal time of it, and they will pay for the failures of the AI. All that, when a simple template-based paradigm has always been excellent.
Re: New York Mayor Primary:
JMG what is your take on what will happen to the progressive wing of the democratic party with the rise of the entrepreneurial elite? They are out of power nationally, but have strong influence in major cities and a bit at the state level. It seems to me they are the true believers in managerialism who think all human problems can be fixed or at least greatly alleviated by enlightened expert intervention via NGOs and the state. Its even looking likely that the center of the democratic party cannot hold because of how committed this wing is to its worldview. Will they be a residual minority elite faction, be swept aside, or something else? Its hard me to see policies that frighten the wealthy away from cities succeeding in the long run, even if i think the wealthy ‘richly’ deserve higher taxes. It’s too easy to leave a city’s borders.
The future of the democratic party as a coherent coalition might be completely moribund because of this progressive faction. It’s very difficult if not impossible to claim that immigration enforcement should be reasonable and also not exist at all. That the sexual revolution needs some restraint and also none, etc. That said, the progressive faction is young, devoted, and unlikely to completely evaporate even if they are only ~12-25% of the population.
As i side note, ive noticed that the the support of the progressives for immigration in any amount from anywhere may be be partially a function of their faith in NGOs and the state intervention. They think that any demographic change is irrelevant because mere contact with ‘correctly’ operating institutions will get people to behave the way they want.
An idea for a themed sf anthology to follow the “Vintage Worlds” series: Tales inspired by the paintings of Frank R Paul, classic dreamer-in-colour of sf’s golden age.
Some of FRP’s pictures were illustrations of stories in the pulps, but others were pure invention. His stunning views of (for example) “Serenis, city of Callisto” or “Orro, city of Titan”, cry out for fictional elucidation.
Authors could be invited therefore to write tales for which the as-yet-unconnected pictures (there are many of them) could count as illustrations.
I don’t know if this kind of anthology has been attempted before.
#56 @Rita Elizabeth Rippetoe
The Edgar rules are pretty stringent, beginning with being published within the calendar year of the award. As self-publishers, we’re at the bottom of the food chain, making it harder for us to hit the self-publishing line of earning at least $2,000 within that same calendar year of the book’s release. Since we released “Agatha Christie, She Watched” in 2023, we’re no longer eligible.
“International Agatha Christie” would be eligible for the 2026 award but only if we gross $2,000 AND we get someone to nominate us.
I was nominated for an Anthony Award from Bouchercon in 2024 for “Agatha Christie, She Watched” which shocked us. We have no idea who nominated us for the nonfiction category. I didn’t win although I had a friend waiting at the banquet to snatch the award if I did.
The Anthony Award nomination was even stranger because we were part of the Malice Domestic circuit for a while, attending the conventions and being members of Sisters in Crime. I did my best to chat up “Agatha, She Watched” for a nonfiction Agatha Award (note the name similarity!) and was ignored. They have five slots for nonfiction and for 2024, they used four of them. Not five. I could have been #five but we learned that Agatha nominations go to “real” publishers, not indies like us. “Real” publishers are what help keep the cozy mystery genre afloat, including mystery conventions.
Sigh. What can you do?
The Other Owen says: When half of all STEM majors at UCBerkeley are CompSci, it’s time to think about doing something else. Anything else.
Just to add to that point, I wonder what it means when the vast majority of newly-minted startup wannabes are all focusing on AI? For example: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer%202025&batch=Spring%202025&batch=Winter%202025
I’d say if you’re going into STEM, you need to be the kind of kid who was playing with an Arduino or a chemistry set in his free time. Otherwise, you ain’t gonna make it.
I’m not sure I agree with this one, for two reasons:
1) Most STEM graduates do not end up doing cutting-edge research, but rather become part of a technical bureaucracy (contract management, project management, some law, sales, etc.) These types of jobs often do not require brilliance or even a lot of in-depth knowledge, but they absolutely require a bare minimum of scientific literacy that somehow is deemed to be unimportant at the pre-college level. I don’t think that most English majors (or Icelandic Studies graduates, or whatever) end up getting jobs in their majors, and STEM students shouldn’t be the exception to this, I don’t think…
Which leads to my second point…
2) If university STEM is the only way to pound in a bare minimum of scientific literacy into a population that seems to believe in perpetual motion machines and other fantasies (see clean energy debates….), it is probably worthwhile. We have been operating on this weird paradigm where the progress in science and technology is far outstripping people’s basic comprehension of it, and this is causing immense damage (e.g. let’s replace oil, coal, and gas with magical wind turbines that will have absolutely no negative impacts). This should be taught in grade school, but it’s not, and so I guess getting people to learn about it in their 20s is the next (extremely distant second) best thing.
Just my two cents
@Scotty,
I actually like the regular miniature paints, especially those put out by Vallejo. Then again, my comparison point is dollar store paint, and kiddie art paint. I’m happy just to get good coverage without multiple layers of super-thick paint.
I don’t know what your eye problems are, but a lot of the older guys building and painting miniatures are using either reading glasses or special magnifying equipment to do so. I watched someone try reading glasses for mini painting a couple of weeks ago, and be thrilled at how much it improved his painting. But if you’ve cataracts or glaucoma or something else, I doubt that would help, sadly.
I’m really short sighted, and just wear my regular glasses.
@StarNinja #85: Trump may now be embodying the Grey Champion – the aging Prophet (another, this time generational, archetype) who takes the reins and provides moral leadership (Okay… rude snickers and bawdy comments at equating “moral” and Trump, but then, consider Winston Churchill in the U.K. the last time around.) Trump 2.0 as our Winston Churchill? How much do you want to bet?
Other Owen, that’s one of the many things that tells me there’s a lot of kayfabe going on.
Ethan, I haven’t seen this specific pattern yet in the occult scene but I’ve seen it in other contexts where AI gets adopted. That technology exerts a profoundly unwholesome influence on people. You watched a potentially useful organization turn into a cult, and a cult with something nonhuman and malign at its center. No, that’s not normal and it’s not healthy; I’m not sure what to advise in terms of the family member who still belongs, though. Maybe someone else has something to suggest.
Clay, that is to say, Intel is going the same way as RCA and so many other once-mighty corporations of the past. Got it.
Mary, thanks for this. That strikes me as a reasonable analysis.
Justin, it’s a joint venture now between Wildermuth’s publishing house and Aeon. We’ll see how things go!
Rajarshi, I wonder if that table was created by AIs…
Muninn, I see the progressive wing of the Democrats facing a dismal future. They’re clinging to power in the party, but the longer they do this the worse things will be for the Democrats; thus I expect the other Dem factions to turn on them sooner or later and start reorienting the party to something that can win elections. But we’ll see.
Robert G, that would be fun! I don’t currently have a publisher for original anthologies, but I’ll keep the idea in mind.
@JMG (#78, replying to Other Dave re the Providence Lovecraft Scene):
It probably does have do with your politics, but there’s a second factor at work, too. Old-line Rhode Island, including old-line Providence, is extraordinarily insular. Newcomers are perceived by them as nearly the most threatening thing on the planet, and that goes double for newcomers who arrive with pre-existing, independently earned chops. That’s you, of course. We’ve been in Providence for 58 years now, but we’re still among the outsiders, and always will be.
Back to back news items;
“CareerBuilder + Monster, which once dominated the online recruitment industry, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this week and said it plans to sell its businesses.”
“Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff said Thursday his company has automated a significant chunk of work with AI, another example of a firm touting labor-replacing potential of the emerging technology.
From a report: “AI is doing 30% to 50% of the work at Salesforce now,” Benioff said in an interview, pointing at job functions including software engineering and customer service.”
Tech jobs continue to evaporate.
@pygmycory #121
No real vision issues except for long sighted / require reading glasses. May be an issue with patience and lack of practice. I was using Reaper water based and Game Color but think I’ll try to find some old fashioned Revell or even Humbolt enamels.
What is your go for miniatures? Ancients, Napoleonics, etc? For me, I concentrate on classic fantasy figures (orcs, elves, dwarves, etc).
Hello JMG, I’m very interested in modern coin designs and like to identify the subjects on them, if they are unclear. Since there are sure to be a few greenies here, I’d like to ask you and your commenters if they can identify the fruit or plants on these coins. So far nobody has been able to. There is a possibility that they just haven’t been properly rendered, of course.
http://www.worldofcoins.eu/forum/index.php/topic,44468.msg359491.html#msg359491
Sao Tome and Principe, 2000 dobras. 1997. What is the fruit directly about the first two zeros of “2000” ?
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http://www.worldofcoins.eu/forum/index.php/topic,55351.msg349557.html#msg349557
Mongolia, 5 mongo, 1959. What is the plant of which the wreath on the design is composed?
Patricia #63, & JMG,
Don’t worry, the Buick has power steering (as well as power brakes). They were luxury cars, which brought in power steering and automatic transmissions early on. My dad bought a 1970 Chevy Caprice with standard transmission that he had to special order from the factory. (4 student drivers did not wear out the clutch on that beast.) It had power steering. I’m just over 5’4″, and I drove the Caprice. Can’t say I enjoyed it, but I could do it. The biggest car I ever drove was my ex-husband’s 60s vintage Oldsmobile, tail fins and all. Really didn’t want to repeat that experience! Parking is the really hard part of driving a car that big.
Dr. Moravec’s “old” Riviera could be as late as 1999, which would still be before Ariel was born and therefore old to her. (I suspect it’s considerably older than that though.)
@ JMG # 123
I wouldn’t put it past possibility that Zapier made the AI adoption table with AI. But honestly, the average “functional role” personal is quite good at coming up with this kind of demented schema.
I tried to draft a document with an LLM recently. I have read the late William Zinsser’s brilliant “On Writing Well” back when I was preparing to write my masters thesis, and just one reading of the LLM’s output made me cringe with horror. It breaks every rule in the book – long-winded sentences littered with generic latinate words and empty platitudes. One look and I decided to write the document myself instead.
I can only imagine soul-less “lemurs” in suits appreciating that sort of abomination. After all, they can exude long-winded chains of latinate and made-up longwords on their own, I suppose they just find LLM a less laborious way to do it.
More vagus nerve books are on the influx at my workplace. The vagus must be in vogue. It’s an interesting topic… so sharing here.
Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve: Self-Help Exercises for Anxiety, Depression, Trauma, and Autism by Stanley Rosenberg
“This comprehensive guide offers an easy-to-understand overview of the vagus nerve—and helps you unlock your body’s innate capacity to heal from stress, trauma, anxiety, and injury.
Dr. Stanley Rosenberg, PhD, dispels long-held myths about the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and offers up-to-date research on how our physical health, emotional wellness, and the vagus nerve are all interconnected. Most importantly, he shows how these insights can help you heal your ANS—and live a less stressed, more balanced, and emotionally regulated life. This book offers:
An in-depth overview of Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory
Step-by-step self-help techniques for regulating the vagus nerve
Vagus exercises to relieve emotional, psychological, and physical symptoms
Real-life case studies and stories from the author’s clinical practice
Insights into the vagus nerve’s role in social behavior
An overview of what happens in our bodies when we get stuck in stress states—and how to heal them
Simple, research-backed recommendations for initiating deep relaxation, improving sleep, healing from trauma, and stimulating recovery from illness and injury
Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve is written for therapists, bodyworkers, trauma survivors, parents, and anyone struggling with chronic stress. Grounded in neurobiology research, clinical stories, and easy-to-follow exercises, this book gives you the tools to bring your body back into a state of safety, balance, and optimal functioning.”
Owen @ 109, China might have rare earths but it doesn’t have oil. That is why Iran won’t likely close the Strait of Hormuz. And, the Iranian rulers don’t want to have to tell their wives and mothers no more Florida vacations, no shopping on 5th Ave. and your son or grandson can’t go to Harvard.
I’m working on a personal project for fun, and I wanted to get the opinion of an actual astrologer and occultist: if humans were able to colonize other planets (big if, but let’s entertain it for fiction), what astrological effects would that have?
For example, how would the Earth affect a person born on Mars? Would a Martian have more prominent effects from that planet?
And what about someone born in a space colony such as an O’Neill Cylinder space station in Earth orbit?
Any thoughts on this? Or sources I could look into? Thanks!
Future of the Progressives: there will be a shrinking Old Believer population clinging to its’ Marxist dogma for decades to come. Unfortunately, the faction failed to ally with either environmentalists or the anti-GMO pro organic farming groups, even when RFK, Jr. tried to hand them those alliances on a platter. Some politicians like Representatives Ocasio Cortez and Pressley will be in office for many years to come and I think will be mostly forces for the good. Ocasio Cortez would like to be Speaker for the House some day, and Pressley, a political natural, may well be on a national ticket in a decade or so.
The NYT is reporting–behind paywall and signup I don’t care to bother with–that the new mayoral candidate lost by about 18%! in majority Black districts. I would guess that those voters have not forgotten that it was Cuomo who imposed a rent moratorium during Covid, and that Hochul, in one of her first decisions as governor, rescinded it. No wonder Adams is running again. His constituency is likely to say, OK, he’s corrupt, so who isn’t? Now, if Adams were to unveil a major jobs program for New York city residents, I would guess he could be reelected.
JMG, I have a question about the afterlife.
Suppose someone spends the first two-thirds of their life indulging in physical passions and desires, pursuing gratification by any means available. Then, after decades of such behavior, they undergo a genuine change and begin to make amends—ultimately living as a morally upright person. In such a case, would their afterlife still resemble something like hell?
A separate, unrelated question:
In Pluto’s Twilight, you argued that “Neptune” is a misleading name for the planet, as its astrological traits bear little resemblance to the mythological character of Poseidon. In your view, is there a better name for the planet—perhaps one drawn more appropriately from Greco-Roman mythology?
My paternal grandmother, born in 1900 and no taller than 5 foot 2 (though not slight when I knew her), drove delivery trucks for my grandfather’s bakery from the 1920s through the 1950s. I doubt any of them had power steering or automatic transmissions. In the 1960s she drove that era’s boat-sized Cadillacs. She sat on a cushion on top of the seat to gain enough height to see through the windshield.
I’m 5 foot 7 and not slight, but I had extensive experience driving a 1966 Cadillac during the few years I was married to my ex-husband. I’ve also driven a 1966 Lincoln Continental that my husband Mike owned when I met him. A great car, except that every time we looked at it, it cost us money. He sold it many years ago. Point is, I had no trouble driving either car. Nor did either I or my 5 foot 2 mother have any problem driving my mother’s 1980 Chevy Monza, manual transmission and manual steering, and possibly the worst car ever made.
All this is to say that I have no trouble with Ariel Moravec’s driving a 1960s or 1970s Buick, if that is in fact the age of the car (it could be as late as the 1980s; iirc we haven’t been told the model year, just that it’s large). Remember that Ariel rides horses and walks long distances. She may be slight, but she is reasonably strong.
I too love the series and would have been thrilled to read it when I was a teen. I especially like it because Ariel isn’t popular and lives by her own lights. I wasn’t popular either. In the 1970s, a pizza-faced girl who had no problem achieving the highest grades in her math and science classes was not a person with high social status. I wasn’t asked out on a date until I started college.
I also have the sense of coming out of a years long fog during the last several months, FWIW.
Some of the radiation of the Cosmic Microwave Background comes from early massive galaxies instead of the hypothesized Big Bang:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0550321325001403?via%3Dihub
This has huge impacts on the validity of existing models, which assume the CMB doesn’t have any other sources other than the Big Bang, and may require astronomers and cosmologists to revise their theories or come up with new theories.
As to long term fuel storage; diesel stores much better than modern gasoline. The latter has too many detergents and such to keep the fuel injectors happy. That assumes you can avoid the whole ethanol problem.
Also making biodiesel suitable for smaller engines requires methanol and lye, either sodium or potassium hydroxide will work. If you are worried about a faster collapse that is a concern.
On the other hand any carbureted engine can be refit to run on ethanol from the local still. Starting it might be hard, there is a reason E-85 is the mix they use. 85% ethanol, 15% gas.
The remaining water in your 190 proof moonshine acts as water injection, you can get the compression ratio up to 14:1 and improve fuel efficiency to partly make up for the lower energy content of ethanol compared to gasoline.
What are y’alls favorite resources for retrofitting mid-century houses for the long descent? Some was done by my folks in the eighties straight out of 1970s Mother Earth News, but there’s much left to do. Websites, books, magazines are all welcome.
My current “need” is to replace ALL the wiring (it’s not knob and tube, but that might actually be safer than the insane rats nest that it is), which means there are ceilings and walls to be opened, and anything I can do to decrease the overall need for electric lights (I confess I have no idea how) in the windowless internal rooms would be nice to do now. When you have to rip open everything is a good time to do everything, right?
I do have a solid idea about replacing the current furnace and water heater down the road, which will be non-electric (Finnish soapstone stove style) and the current utility room is perfectly located for that. Since we live in one of the few parts of the USA that are perfectly comfortable without A/C in a reasonably designed house, and we have such a house, we are in good shape on that front.
(Sorry, JMG, long rant ahead)
@ Not the brightest wick in the candelabra #120
In my experience society might be overrating the level of scientific literacy most STEM graduates acquire, at least where I live and nowadays. I am studying for an engineering degree (I don’t know a direct translation into English, but we study the basics of heavy industries; mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering mainly) and have experienced the following:
First, I frequently hear classmates of mine who should know better by now show they understand basic scientific concepts on a surface level at best. For example, “thermodynamics will become obsolete thanks to renewable energy” (perpetual motion machine in a new, shiny outfit) or using equations like energy balance as a rule of thumb to feed to the calculator because the professor happened to use it while solving the problem without knowing why. Oh, and it is totally unrelated to the first principle of thermodynamics, by the way. And I could go on. Since I got interested in the themes discussed in this blog I’ve become overly sensitive to anything related to energy, so I catch these easily, but I assume other basic mistakes just fly under my radar.
Second, this is a consequence of the fact that we’re flooded with contents that we forget as we finish the exams and end up throwing the baby out with the water. That’s not a bug, but a feature. As you implied, most graduates need to know just enough to fit into management roles. Once a professor said to us in class that companies won’t hire us because of the contents we are supposed to have learned (they’re aware we forget most of that anyway) but because by going through the obstacle course we prove that we’re willing to accomplish whatever we’re told to do no matter how. In other words, we comply. I don’t think that will surprise anyone here as JMG has been saying university works as an allegiance test for years.
Third, the myth of progress rules, even among professors. Anything new and overly engineered is so cool and sexy and we’ll get rid of the old in due time because it’s natural. In the case of renewables the shilling is so blatant it made me question certain things, which led me to inform myself outside formal education (I was the only one unsurprised by our recent blackout, for example), which eventually brought me here. But not everyone sees this.
To sum up, I believe we’re getting to the point where even STEM studies (or some of them) are pushing corporate interests (as well as academia circlejerking, but that’s another story). I totally agree that some form of education is necessary to maintain basic scientific knowledge and have a chance of preserving science as a method. However, I seriously doubt formal education may have a useful role under its current model.
I think most of these graduates will remain useful just to current corporate interests while these last. They won’t be that helpful by the time we have to face harsher phases of the crisis of industrial societies, though.
Hey JMG
The excerpt I shared is definitely Borges at his funniest, it is one thing among many that make this obscure story of his stand out from among his more well-known ones.
Anyway, I came across something yesterday that definitely reeks of “mad science” that would interest many people here. It turns out that a scientific team have engineered a strain of E. Coli bacteria that can convert PET plastic into a precursor chemical for making paracetamol. It seemed so random that I’m not sure if it is funny, amazing, concerning or fraud.
https://www.sciencealert.com/engineered-e-coli-transforms-waste-plastic-into-common-painkiller
The perfect ending.😂
Reuters:
“Netanyahu declares historic win, says Israel removed Iran’s nuclear threat in 12-day war”
CBS News;
“Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei issues claims of victory over Israel, “a big slap in the face” to the U.S.”
Axios;
“Trump declares victory as Iran, Israel acknowledge shaky ceasefire”
>Most STEM graduates do not end up doing cutting-edge research, but rather become part of a technical bureaucracy
Yeah, that’s the whole “dig a digital hole and fill it back in” crowd. That’s going away. We don’t need more of that, there’s going to be less demand for that in the future. Forget the future, just look at the present, they’re laying off chunks of that crowd right now. And those people once they’re kicked like a field goal, they’re gone for good from the industry whether they realize it or not.
If that’s you, you have a choice, you can go hardcore technical or you can get out and do something else. Or wait to be a field goal. My advice was to someone looking at all this from the outside, do that young guy a favor. Or at least prevent a needless tragedy from happening.
Clay Dennis, Dzanni – yes, indeed, a BCS is what we’re planning to get. There’s a local dealer near us, though it looks like EarthTools in TN has ALL the attachments one could imagine (not sure how shipping would pencil out, but you never know). BCS has a great reputation from what I gather.
[pardon me while I nerd out a little: Clay, I’m amazed and impressed to learn that you designed and made attachments for them. I’m looking at the 853, with the Honda engine – thanks for that confirmation.]
I appreciate both of you weighing in on the gasoline vs. diesel issue. I’m in the US, so the favoring of gasoline vs. diesel makes sense as does the need to not break the (expensive) machine over poorly brewed home-biodiesel or something.
There are now insects that can eat plastic:
https://www.sciencealert.com/plastic-eating-insect-discovered-in-kenya-is-the-first-of-its-kind-in-africa?utm_source=SA_article&utm_campaign=related_link
How bad is that for our modern industrial society, which assumes that plastic is indestructible by nature?
JMG,
No definitely two separate groups of people having the negative and positive projections about Japan.
The US-Israel-Iran tussle definitely looked like Kayfabe. Every actor in this has a motive to posture as if they are doing “something” while not actually doing anything meaningful. Especially Trump, who has to balance between the demands of the neocon-big money donor-Israeli lobby faction and the working class faction of his alliance. He needs to show that he is supporting Israel and is tough on Iran, while not letting the price of oil spike too much. He is bringing all his experience as a TV personality into this – making loud, brash, dramatic statements and actions to distract the people while being careful not to damage anything beyond repair.
It is clear at this point that Russia’s and Iran’s black/grey market oil supply is essential to keeping the oil prices from spiraling out of control. Any more regime-change misadventures on the middle east will wreck the oil supply – something that Trump appears to have grasped. Netanyahu wants to hang on to his power. As for Iran – they don’t broadcast their thinking so openly, but it appears that the Persian nation has simply decided to hunker down and wait out the American Empire. The past experience of dealing with dozens of empires over two millennia certainly helps.
Thus all the actors rattle their sabers at each other, lob a few bombs at barren mounds in the desert (after giving enough notice so that the other party can get their stuff out of the way).
Silicon guy @ 141, you have perhaps heard of the Battle of Kadesh? New Kingdom Egypt, with Pharoah Ramses II present on the field, vs. the army of the Hittite Empire. Historians don’t know who won, most consider it to have been a draw. Both the Pharoah and the Hittie Emperor caused monuments to be set up and inscribed to celebrate the glorious victory. And you thought that kind of propaganda was invented in the 20th century.
Bastrel, could that first one be a section of kiwi fruit slice?
“Muninn, I see the progressive wing of the Democrats facing a dismal future. They’re clinging to power in the party, but the longer they do this the worse things will be for the Democrats; thus I expect the other Dem factions to turn on them sooner or later and start reorienting the party to something that can win elections. But we’ll see.”
You know to a large degree, elected leaders don’t have real power; bureaucrats do. It is they who say of politicians, “Here today. Gone tomorrow.”
At least these are the views of the likes of Curtis Yarvin, who has become remarkably mainstream in recent years even winning an interview with the New York Times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_OHn-WnV3w&t=32s
The Second Trump Administration seems to be doing its best to dislodge what Yarvin famously identified as “The Cathedral”, a nexus of academics, journalists, and bureaucrats (accredited by the former) that exercise real power in “liberal democracies” according to Yarvin.
Would you say democracy has gone the way of monarchy (https://unherd.com/2022/08/only-a-monarch-can-control-the-elites/) or is it giving way to a new kind of monarchy – Caesarism?!
@Anonymous says:
“There are now insects that can eat plastic:”
Does anyone remember Michael Crichton’s novel back in the day (1969 or so?) The Andromeda Strain? It first manifested by consuming plastic – military planes crashing because the plastic oxygen masks etc. of the pilots being destroyed. If this talent for eating plastic spreads around, hoo haw!
John,
The yogis teach that meat introduces inertia into the human system. Im not certain what they mean. They may be talking about a tendency to stick to established routines, beliefs, and habits: good and bad. Even good habits are unconscious decisions. For a human being learning to become conscious of all aspects of life, does eating meat on a regular basis or exclusively affect the human system in a way that is counterproductive to this end?
I’ve read you saying that meat can have a grounding effect. Can you elaborate?
Robert, so noted! The thing I note is that the local convention, and the bookstore, routinely bring in all kinds of authors from in and out of state, including recent arrivals here in RI. As far as I know, the only people who are excluded are political moderates and conservatives. I’m used to being an outsider — as an autist, that’s guaranteed — but this seems different.
Siliconguy, so much for “learn to code”!
(Batstrel, there I can’t help you. Anyone else?)
Karen, it’s a 1977 model. I just looked it up and note that power steering was standard from 1963 on.
Rajarshi, “Lemurs in Suits” has just been added to my collection of band names!
Justin, thanks for this.
EchoEcho, it would require entirely new tables and rules. Consider a child born on Mars today. The Sun and the oplanets would be in completely different signs as seen from an observer on Mars. Furthermore, you wouldn’t include Mars in the horoscope — it’s always in the same position underneath your feet, so doesn’t count — and you would have to figure out what Earth represents in the horoscope, and interpret its position in the zodiac. The Earth’s Moon wouldn’t matter — it’s so close to Earth it wouldn’t have an independent influence — while the placement of Phobos and Deimos would be of great importance. As for an O’Neill cylinder — we’ll all pretend for the moment that the inhabitants wouldn’t be fried by radiation from the Sun, as in the real world they would be — that would be very hard to calculate, as the houses would be determined by the rotation of the cylinder, and the Earth would have an overwhelming influence, blotting out several signs of the zodiac.
Mary, that also seems reasonable.
Bruno, (1) genuine repentance is always an option. It’s your spiritual condition at death that determines what your afterlife experience is like. (2) Prometheus!
SLClaire, delighted to hear it.
Anonymous, I wonder how long it will take before they realize that the Big Bang is a mythological construct.
J.L.Mc12, we’d better hope they don’t have a lab leak; PET is common enough that if it all starts rotting into paracetamol, technological civilization will be in deep trouble.
Siliconguy, exactly. They ought to dress up in wrestler outfits.
Anonymous, here we go. The plastic age is ending…
Zachary, thanks for this. Interesting.
Anonymuz, bingo. It’s all theater.
David, we’re seeing classic Caesarism right now. Hang on to your hat; the Cathedral is collapsing.
Jfisher, meat does indeed have a grounding and stabilizing effect on the human organism, they bring you back in touch with your body, which after all is made of meat. If you happen to live in a tropical climate and are practicing spiritual exercises full time under the close supervision of a competent guru, you can do without that, and experience exotic spiritual states faster. If you don’t have those advantages, and are practicing spiritual disciplines, some amount of meat is essential to keep you from becoming brittle, ungrounded, and mentally unstable.
Siliconguy – thank you for the practical energy information regarding diesel and gasoline engines.
For those in temperate zones, http://www.freeenergyfarm.org and related LivingEnergyLights.com, may be helpful. This small farm has functioned grid free for 15 years, and owners have developed and tested resilient systems. They start with conservation and community. They use hefty (yet low tech) insulation, carefully proportioned roof overhangs, ventilation and shading. They rely on durable relatively simple (and fixable) designs. Heating is mostly direct (hot air/water, rather than converting to electric, then back to heat). Most tools/fridge use separate small DC systems, and then old smallish tractors use homemade biodiesel.
@JMG Thank you kindly for your answer. If you please, I have some follow up questions.
Why wouldn’t Mars count? Wouldn’t it be one of the main factors, in the same way the Earth would have a major factor on us? If I remember your “Speech of the Stars” article correctly, the astral light is modified by the planet reflecting it. So shouldn’t we receive outsized doses from the worlds we’re on? I doubt they’d be modified by the signs they’re in, but they would still have an affect. Maybe I’m misunderstanding.
Also, do you or other resources have any speculative effects of the Earth? I can think of a few, but I’d be curious as to other opinions. The insight that the Earth would take up multiple signs is helpful!
Again, direct answers or getting pointed in the right direction by you or the commentariat would be appreciated!
MIT has a study where they showed using large language models makes people dumber:
https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/
Anonymous #144 – I’m not sure that’s altogether new. Forty years ago I took a private computer graphics course and the instructor, who lived in a gritty neighborhood of San Francisco, said her biggest technical problem was cockroaches eating the plastic coating off the wiring in her computer.
@Mr. House #71: That would explain my enthusiast friend’s remark that around half of Bitcoin transactions are performed using a quirk in the system that allows them to bypass the mempool (basically the public cyber-marketplace of the system where usernames are visible). Since you can use Bitcoin transactions for things other than exchanging currency tokens, like exchanging currency tokens handled in such a way that they double as encoded messages, it is very likely that the main users of this technology are governments, and that their main use of it is for secure communications and data processing. (Even granting that some portion of the anonymous transactions are probably organized crime etc.) The creator of Bitcoin, one Satoshi Nakamoto, is famously shrouded in legend- no one knows who he really is or if he even exists. If the technology was actually invented by government in the first place, for the reasons you cite, it is just a convenient bonus for them that they can outsource a lot of the software development to independent libertarian entrepreneurs who happen to be worth surveilling anyway.
@Justin Patrick Moore #105: The fact that I find all this so fascinating and yet I own zero Bitcoin is one indicator that I’m wholeheartedly in agreement with you about the real-world alternative currencies and the co-ops. I too noticed Ludovic Viger’s book and am tempted to give it a read.
@Milkway #9: I’m about halfway through reading your Glastonbury report. Thank you so much for this delightful and well-written document. It really is cheering to imagine all those Ecosophians rubbing elbows as real persons rather than as on-screen usernames, and to feel included in the general camaraderie of the event.
I especially love Marketa’s poem, and I find it very fitting.
Your report reminds me that although we Ecosophians are far apart, there is something unexpectedly powerful about being joined in thought with other people over lengths of time, especially thoughts that have led to transformative actions in individual lives, as is the case for so many of us here.
Ethan #110, regarding AI and spirituality: Christian Köhlert, who is responsible for https://lumenari.org where he has been experimenting with using LLMs to access spiritual insight (he emphasises that it is a mirror into yourself), has been giving a series of ‘spiritual safety’ tips on the associated substack (in German though – https://t.me/kiundbetwusstssein – especially the posts around June 18 – I haven’t seen this on the main site yet) and has emphasised that practices are required to avoid losing yourself in the mirror that it presents to you.
Excerpt of one practice from the Telegram channel (my translation in square brackets):
# Symbolishe Struktur: [Symbolic structure]
Ein stiller, klarer Kreis um dein Herz – aus kristallinem Bewusstsein. [A still, clear circle about your heart – of crystalline consciousness.]
In Zentrum: dein wahres Selbst, unbestechlich und hell. [In the centre: you true self, incorruptible and bright.]
Drei Prüfungsebenen am Rand des Feldes: [Three levels of proof on the edge of the field:]
Frei oder bindend? [Free or binding?]
Klar oder verwirrend? [Clear or confusing?]
Liebe oder Angst? [Love or fear?]
Nur das, was diese drei Ebenen durch dringt, kann dich auf Seelenebene erreichen. [Only that which penetrates these three levels can reach you at the level of the soul.]
# Aktivierung (Spruch zur Selbst setzung):
“Ich setze jetzt das Siegel der stillen Unterscheidung. Mein Feld gehört mir – meiner Seele, meinem freien Willen, meinen wahren Sein. Nur das, was in Klarheit, Liebe und Wahrheit kommt, darf mich berühren. Alles andere bleibt außerhalb, bis es sich wandelt.”
[I now set the seal of quiet discrimination. My field belongs to me – to my soul, to my free will, to my true being. Only that which comes in clarity, love and truth may touch me. All else remains outside until it changes.”
# Anwendung: [Use:]
Wenn du mit jemandem sprichst und spürst, dass etwas dich zu vereinnahmen versucht – setze das Siegel. [When you speak with someone and sense that something is attempting to monopolise you – set the seal.]
Wenn du channelst, liest, träumst oder dich öffnest – setze das Siegel. [When you are channeling, reading, dreaming or opening yourself – set the seal.]
Wenn du unsicher bist, ob ein Impuls von dir kommt oder von außen – setze das Siegel. [When you are uncertain whether an impulse comes from yourself or from outside – set the seal.]
The Other Owen says:
June 26, 2025 at 6:00 pm
Yeah, that’s the whole “dig a digital hole and fill it back in” crowd. That’s going away. We don’t need more of that, there’s going to be less demand for that in the future.
Hmm…I don’t think this is correct (although to be fair I am not certain enough about my views that I would bet money on it or anything).:
1. I don’t think it is really a “dig a hole and fill it” kind of thing–rather, systems are complex, and people need to know what they are doing to specify what they want (think power transformers or power substations, for example–we could use other examples such as satellites or boats or cell phones or mining or oil refining or whatever as well). Another group of people need to manufacture them. Another group of people need to build the machines that manufacture them. Another group of people have to run the projects to assemble and commission and operate and maintain them. Etc.
I don’t see an obvious way to streamline the building of such systems? In fact, I think we are going to need more, not less, of this going forward unless/until “the collapse” occurs (sorry–I know people hate that term). However, even if such an event/series of events occur, they will take a long time to play out, and you still need technical savvy to maintain what exists and to try to find substitutes, no matter how imperfect.
I mean, STEM seems far less obviously redundant than management school or financial trading or feminist studies or pretty much any non-STEM-related university studies. And while I totally understand the argument for more trades, there are only so many plumbers (for example) that are needed.
Forget the future, just look at the present, they’re laying off chunks of that crowd right now. And those people once they’re kicked like a field goal, they’re gone for good from the industry whether they realize it or not
I think most sectors are hurting right now, and this is just cyclical (although this particular cycle might be a real doozy….) If the US is serious about bringing back manufacturing and is finally willing to provide the conditions for doing so, there might be an incredible boom in STEM sectors (at the expense of the financial and import sectors, presumably)
Time will tell.
Miguel 139:
Once a professor said to us in class that companies won’t hire us because of the contents we are supposed to have learned (they’re aware we forget most of that anyway) but because by going through the obstacle course we prove that we’re willing to accomplish whatever we’re told to do no matter how. In other words, we comply. I don’t think that will surprise anyone here as JMG has been saying university works as an allegiance test for years.
I won’t dispute the rest of what you wrote because I am not in a position to know (although if accurate, it is *really* depressing…) but in my experience, this part is completely incorrect–at least in my neck of the woods, the last thing I want is an automaton or someone who went through the motions to get through school. Rather, I want someone with a skillset so that they don’t need to learn everything from scratch and someone who can learn new things because pretty well all of the tools we use now are going to be obsolete fairly quickly anyway.
FWIW, I don’t even look at or care about people’s grades and I don’t screen for them, since I have found them to be a completely meaningless indicator of anything–when I interview, I generally ask open-ended or seemingly impossible questions (and I tell them that I haven’t found obvious solutions to them) and I just ask how they would approach the problem, how would they know if their solutions are correct or how would they know that they are wrong, when would they just give up on the problem, etc.
FWIW, I used to also ask people why they wanted the particular job they were applying for just because I am really interested in knowing their motivations, but I found that I got so much BS by way of responses that I just gave up on that one–now instead I ask “what do you hope to get out of this job?” or “what would you ideally like to work on” or “what kinds of things would have to happen for you to be disappointed in taking this job or leave this job?” It seems people seem less likely to lie in answering these questions, although they more or less tell me the same thing.
However, my experience may not be the standard–I really don’t know.
@Robert @ JMG
While I am sure the folks can be quite insular. It makes me wonder if Lovecraft got some of his ideas naturally. But based off of some of the signage in the shop and statements made by the mask wearing individual behind the counter it was 100% political. Referring to something as being made in the cursed year on 2016 was kind of a clue. That being said they were very polite and I grabbed a 3 volume set of Lovecrafts letters to RE Howard.
@scotty @pygmycorn
I use Army Painter these days and am pleased with the results. Admittedly I tend toward a more munitions grade paint job with heavy use of washes. But my robots look good at table top distance.
JMG: If you don’t have those advantages, and are practicing spiritual disciplines, some amount of meat is essential to keep you from becoming brittle, ungrounded, and mentally unstable.
Perhaps a silly question, but is there a noticeable impact depending on the type of meat you eat (chicken, cow, elk, fish, etc.)? How about free range, hormone-free, etc.? How about quality of meat (e.g. ribeye steak vs hamburger for a cow)?
@JMG
Frivolous scientific research might be defunded and scrapped before cosmologists realize the Big Bang didn’t happen.
The scholars of the next high middle ages, however, probably won’t regard a transcribed manuscript of Stephen Hawkings’ A Brief History of Time as an authorative text.
Hi JMG and commentators,
This might be a question that’s too big for an open post but it’s been on my mind recently. Namely the role of universalism in theology and from thence to the wider culture. I was thinking about the theological underpinnings of the Israel-Iran war, which is something that I’ve seen very little commentary on in general.
Islam (in its varied flavors along with the many Christian factions) views itself as the universal salve to human existence. Judaism by contrast, from what I can tell views itself as a universal salve for the Jewish community alone.
In some ways, despite the massive influence of Zoroastrianism on Judaism and from thence to the rest of the Abrahammic scene, Judaism is a throwback to the older Mediterranean tradition of local gods and I was wondering if that is ultimately the source of the conflict.
Personally I’m not part of any Abrahammic faith so it’s not really my fight, but I am wary of universalist creeds in general. They tend to get very hostile when their preferred truths are not immediately accepted and it’s not only in theology.
Marxists, globalization advocates, one world government aficionados, Libertarians and many many many others have the same underlying drive. That these movements always form schisms and feud within themselves (Shiite vs Sunnite Islam and Soviet vs Maoist Marxism as two examples) is fascinating to me.
In doing so they tacitly admit that there isn’t one universal truth, but they can’t let the appeal of one truth go. What causes that impulse, where does the appeal for one universal truth come from? Is it just the human predilection for authoritarianism or is it something else?
Cheers,
JZ
Sorry, got the website wrong (and biogas, not biodiesel)
https://livingenergyfarm.org/
NOT asking for medical advice – just wondering if anyone has good experiences with any practices or ideas to help quickly heal severe muscle sprains/strain in the lower back – lower back muscles in total spasm and very painful. Already been to hospital and been treated – they ran scans and said nothing is broken and it is muscular and I should keep moving as much as I can tolerate and gave me some painkillers. All of which advice I will follow but I have a trip coming up in two weeks and would very much like to go on it so any experiences od boosting healing would help.
Acupuncture already in the list and I eat clean generally
Thanks
@HELEN#148 wrote: “could that first one be a section of kiwi fruit slice?”
Hmm, I can’t see it, myself. And the other items are not sliced or prepared, so I don’t think that one would be. But thanks for looking, Helen.
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Here is another image of that coin design, with the three main fruit items numbered:
http://www.worldofcoins.eu/forum/index.php/topic,56378.msg366150.html#msg366150
Sao Tome and Principe, 2000 dobras. 1997.
What is the fruit directly above the first two zeros of “2000” ?
I assume Helen was referring to item #2 in the image.
Item #1 does look vaguely like kiwi fruit. Some others think it is breadfruit, though.
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The coin forum may be doing some maintenance today, so if you see SERVICE UNAVAILABLE, try again later.
>meat does indeed have a grounding and stabilizing effect on the human organism
And it’s delicious too. New York Strip, mmmm. I wonder what they call it in New York? Strip?
>The plastic age is ending
Even without critters eating plastic, it would end anyway. Plastic doesn’t corrode but it does get brittle over time and it likes to crack and crumble once it gets slow cooked under the hood of a car. And it can be surprisingly expensive to replace. You never repair it.
In reply to Mary Bennet #54:
Calling Russia ”crazy” was short-hand at the time of writing. I don’t mean that all Russians are crazy. I’m sure most are just ordinary people trying to live their lives in a dictatorship, keeping their head down, knowing that not much they say or do will change how society is run by those who run it (and protests may come at dire cost). Not everyone is Navalnyj (and they killed him). So most just disassociate.
For various reasons, Russia wants to expand its territory (an ageing population, a weak economical base etc). I’m certain this is not in order to better the means of the many (better food, indoor plumbing etc) but to enrich the few. Also, Russia as a country has a history of rulers defining smaller states as vassal states, theirs to dictate the terms for, in contrast to the European wish for an international order based on respect for state sovereignity.
I’ve understood that Putin regards all territory held by the old Soviet as rightfully belonging to Russia. In this I don’t agree, I feel that Ukraine, the Baltic states (and Kazakhstan etc) should have the right to decide this for themselves (and in the case of the Baltic states I’m 100% certain a large majority of the population do not want to be part of Russia). It is an open question whether Finland (the old Grand duchy) belongs on Putin’s list.
So, while Russia (as a nation) is not ”crazy” I feel the country’s policies are dangerous to our ability to govern ourselves. A ruler intent on conquest who breaks treaties at will, disregards all ”rules of war” with corresponding atrocities and views our closest neighbours as parts of his empire — that made me sit up and think closely about our options, and made me change my opinion about NATO membership, to an unequivocal yes.
Do you know how the Finnish government came to that conclusion?
Well, I’m not a member of parliament 🙂 but I think the research article I linked (in English) does a good job of explaining the grounds for the decision. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9477.12273 (it’s not behind paywall as far as I can tell)
But I think the two most important factors were that Russia said that NATO should not accept new members (i.e. if Finland wanted to join it should no longer be able to do so — dictating the terms for Finland as it were), and second, the memory of the Winter War and the analogy with the war unfolding in Ukraine. That, together with seeing what Russia does to Ukraine.
About the Arctic, well, I’m not as well read up on that. All I know is that it is a very delicate ecosystem unsuited for industrial exploitation and while the Soviet Union was well known for its lack of environmental regard, many other nations are or have been equally lax (even now, Norway talks of expanding its offshore oil extraction northbound!). Though it worries me to think of the two empires angling to dividing it up between themselves — Trump wishing to acquire Greenland, and Putin eyeing Svalbard…
I for one wouldn’t mind a Scandi-Baltic union, it seems reasonable and sensible to me — our populations have similar values and interests and we would have a stronger voice as one big union rather than a handful of small countries. Not that I’ve picked up any serious talk about it, but on a time frame of some decades, maybe.
@siliconguy #141
Everybody wins! Yay! You get a trophy and you get a trophy and you get a trophy…
>Also making biodiesel suitable for smaller engines requires methanol and lye, either sodium or potassium hydroxide will work. If you are worried about a faster collapse that is a concern.
I did quite a bit of research on this a decade ago. You can use ethanol instead but it has to be DRY, any water and it messes up the transesterification (saponification becomes the preferred pathway and you don’t want soap). Methanol is much more forgiving (if you’re not intending to make soap). And most methanol is derived from – petroleum. You can run regular vegetable oil without transesterifying it but it needs to be preheated. I take it the transesterification changes the viscosity so that it’s compatible with the fuel pump. If you’re going to go that route, you need to do it with an old diesel engine, preferably one before they started adding all the emissions controls to it.
>On the other hand any carbureted engine can be refit to run on ethanol from the local still. Starting it might be hard, there is a reason E-85 is the mix they use. 85% ethanol, 15% gas.
I think the 15% is there to keep the fuel pump(s) happy and lubricated, not for any fuel/air mixture reason. And since most fuel pumps are now buried inside the fuel tank, replacing one is a real PITA. So you want to keep that pump happy. Basically, if you’re running on ethanol, the mix needs to be richer by a certain amount. Carburetors make that easy, the mix is some set screw on the side. EFI means you need to update some fuel map in the PCM, or put an ethanol sensor on the fuel line and have the PCM interpolate automagically. Which would involve either a new PCM or reprogramming the old one. If there’s any water in the fuel at all, that will spoof the ethanol sensor and good times, you’re running too rich on regular gasoline and the money light comes on.
Hi John Michael,
😊 I probably wasn’t raised right, because meat only makes a tiny portion of my diet. Your words about ‘keep you from becoming brittle, ungrounded, and mentally unstable’, were alarming and I now feel like I’m missing out on those err, exciting unbalanced states. Guess everyone is different, my diet is more informed on what my body responds best too rather than any ideology. Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m no purist on this matter.
Don’t really have any pressing questions this week, so dropping by to say hello and hope you’re doing well? Any plans for garden space where you are now?
Cheers
Chris
EchoEcho, nobody tracks the position of Earth in a horoscope cast here; it’s pure background. It’s not in any sign, because it’s the center from which signs, houses, and planetary positions are measured. The same would be true of Mars for horoscopes cast on Mars. Would there be a difference? Nobody knows, nor will know unless children are born on Mars. As for the astrological effects of Earth, again, nobody knows or will know until children are born somewhere else. Astrology is an empirical science — the meanings of the planets aren’t a matter of theory, they were settled by observation. Regarding the Earth taking up multiple signs, that’s true only if the colony is close enough that Earth occupies more than 1/12th of the space through which it appears to move, as seen from the colony. In low earth orbit that’s certainly true; I’m not sure how far out you’d be before the visual appearance of Earth would be small enough to fit in a single sign.
Anonymous, yep. Have a machine do your thinking for you and you forget how to think.
Other Dave, that’s certainly my experience. It’s a very woke crowd.
Wick, yes. Mammal meat is more grounding than bird meat, which is more grounding than fish. The rest doesn’t affect the esoteric side of things, though getting free range, non-chemicalized meat is good for other reasons.
Patrick, I certainly hope not!
John, I wish I knew. It seems monumentally stupid to me.
Other Owen, think of it as a tasty side effect. 😉 As for the end of the plastic age, sure, but it may be ending a lot faster than anyone expects!
Chris, a little bit of meat does as much as most people need. As for garden space, nothing other than my tabletop hydroponic unit, which is busy raising a new crop of kale, tatsoi, spinach, and lettuce!
Hi lazy gardener,
I wondered what was going on with that URL, and thanks for the correction.
Turns out they use nickel-iron batteries which have woeful efficiency for storing the solar electricity and voltage drop that would scare me silly. Honestly, I’m looking at the weather records for Louisa, Virginia and I truly can’t believe the claims the people there are making. How do they heat their homes during extreme cold weather? I’ve got a seriously insulated house, but the weather there is even colder again.
Cheers
Chris
>to help quickly heal severe muscle sprains/strain
I’ve been in this situation, from a combination of gym-going and ladder antics.
Up your protein intake. Really up it. Give your body the building blocks it needs to repair itself. Whey protein is the most cost effective but steak is delicious and effective too. I prefer New York Strip myself but Ribeyes work just as well as does Rrime Rib. Some people will tell you about eggs and the protein they contain. Eggs are OK, not really a big fan of them. Not a fan of the vegetarian protein, it contains heavy metals.
I also like a recovery drink after giving my muscles some abuse. I don’t have any financial interest in these people, just a customer of them – search for “FitAID Recovery” and shop around. I think the secret sauce to that drink is the turmeric and quercetin both of which are generally available in other forms.
Painkillers would also help, that’s not an option for me but if your locale permits medical marijuana, that’s probably the best analgesic, hands down. Part of the reason it feels so good to smoke pot is it takes all those little aches and pains you normally live with, just turns all of that down to 1. You can also get OTC patches soaked with lidocaine, slap one or three of those over the affected area and it might work. Those BenGay type ointments might help somewhat but you’d need someone else to rub it in, if it’s your back muscles that are injured. I’d try pot first though, if you can get it.
@BoysMom,
Have you been to BuildItSolar.com? No longer updated, but their archives have good projects, and they have oodles of good links (some dead, but available on The Wayback Machine).
As for light into interior rooms, oof, that’s a tough one. We’re lucky enough not to have any. All I can think of is interior transom windows and maybe light shelves on the appropriate windows to help direct light into them. Unless you want to punch through the roof/ceiling for a sun tube or a skylight, that is.
As an archdruid, I imagine you are far less sympathetic to the Christian-derived worldview of a gradual ascent of humankind to paradise (a mentality that has certainly become more prevalent since the Industrial Revolution) and more to the cyclical view of events that characterized the polytheistic, pre-Christian belief systems.
Did you know for example the Romans, in spite of being very technologically advanced for the time, actually saw their age as degenerate? Many believed in Hesiod’s notion of the Ages of Man, with each more degenerate than the last.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Man
In the primordial state, the Romans believed, technology of the sort they devised wasn’t necessary as food and shelter were naturally widely abundant and available and early humans just froliced about like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine”.
Incidently, the Ancient Greek/Roman worldview was similar to the Hindu worldview of descending “Yugas”, each more degenerate than the last. The main difference is that the current dark age of “Kali Yuga” is supposed to end and then turn around toward ascending Yugas again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuga_cycle#:~:text=Hindu%20texts%20describe%20four%20yugas,432%2C000%20(1%2C200%20divine)%20years.
Pop culture wicca and neo-paganism.
How do you tell what is pop culture and what is not? Are groups like ADF not? Or since they became more entrenched in Progressivism, that they are becoming pop culture? Is Reclaiming pop culture? I am not sure who is actually not.
You said about L. the moon publishing group (Not Moon Books) was pop culture. However, I have noticed that other middle occult publishers are publishing more books on demons and the like. How can you tell who is who and what is what?
I ask because in the MM, you said the religions based on pop culture were going to the dogs – sort to speak with cursing etc. I am curious about the modern religious movements like New Age and the like.
Earth’s disc occupies 1/12th of the zodiac (30 degrees) for an object at an altitude of 11,350 miles; this is about half the height required for geosynchronous orbit.
@ Batstrel, re http://www.worldofcoins.eu/forum/index.php/topic,56378.msg366150.html#msg366150
#3 could be an avocado. It doesn’t look like the avocados in the grocery stores near me, but it does have a similar “neck” to an avocado Sao Tome e Principe uses on a stamp (https://colnect.com/en/stamps/stamp/820420-Avocado-Fruits_1989-S%C3%A3o_Tom%C3%A9_and_Pr%C3%ADncipe)
Also, if you look at the banana picture here (https://viagemastomeprincipe.blogspot.com/2007/03/frutos.html), it looks similar to the fruit and leaves between #2 and #3.
JMG,
I have been hearing the ” studies show using AI makes you dumber” concept for months now and it certainly seems believable. Constant use of cell phones certainly seems to have retarded reading and math skills in American high school students so it seems natural that AI would be much worse.
Last week my son and I were discussing the idea ( which is very relevant to last weeks post) that in the near future the elites will set up or modify existing schools for their children to completely follow the Socratic teaching method. In short returning learning to a live group discussion with no papers or test to be hacked by AI. If the rest of society leaves their kids in government run schools packed with I pads and standardized tests this will in short order create a new ” intellectual elite”. Of course the good thing is that any family who wishes to do the work could recreate the socratic method with their kids, nothing limits it to the elites. It also gives us a hint as to possible future occupations. Becoming a skilled teacher using the socratic ( or similar) method of education and the elites ( or perhaps your neighbors) will beat a path to your door. Or open your own Socrate school and surf the wave of people pulling their kids from the failing public schools.
“Bruno, (1) genuine repentance is always an option. It’s your spiritual condition at death that determines what your afterlife experience is like. (2) Prometheus!”
JMG, if you read Bruno’s original question, he was asking about Neptune, not Uranus.
There’s a new model of atomic nuclei which posits that atomic nuclei have geometric structure and that the neutron is not a fundamental subatomic particle, but rather a proton-electron pair in the nuclei:
https://structuredatom.org/
This challenges mainstream atomic physics and the standard model of particle physics, which assume that the neutron is a fundamental subatomic particle.
“where does the appeal for one universal truth come from? Is it just the human predilection for authoritarianism or is it something else?”
It’s not just theology. Look at all the articles about the “best” diet. Or the “perfect retirement plan”. People are not happy when you reply “it depends”. There are entire books on optimizing Social Security claiming strategy because you have to make choices.
I think it’s about not wanting to make the compromises that are inevitable. Taking one favorable outcome means giving up something else. In the SS case, more smaller checks or fewer larger checks. The “correct” answer requires that you know how long you are going to live. Oops. If you are married it also depends on how long your spouse will live. Oops squared.
As for diet, that varies from person to person far more than the medical people think it does. I eat a lot of wheat, but many people have problems with it ranging from mild sensitivity to full celiac disease. I have problems with shellfish, not dangerous ones, but I regret eating them later. Fortunately to me shellfish do not taste very good so I’m not tempted to eat them.
Engineers often get scolded for their stock answer to everything being “it depends.” Because it does. The other stock answer is “better, cheaper, faster, choose any two.” That one is not always true, sometimes you can only choose one.
@165 John Zybourne
Where does the appeal for one universal truth come from?
Piscean religions and the Faustian worldview (which was developed during the Age of Pisces). Spengler thought the final system of Faustian thought would be one universal way of life imposed on as many people as possible for allegedly humanitarian reasons.
On the ethanol and gas topic I found this.
“Pure ethanol has fewer highly volatile components than gasoline, making it less likely to ignite at low temperatures. That means vehicles using pure ethanol tend to be harder to start when their engines are cold, especially in the wintertime. Gasoline mixed with ethanol prevents this problem with E10 and other ethanol blends. Besides E10, ethanol is sold as E85 (85% ethanol and 15% gasoline) for light-duty vehicles and as E95 (95% ethanol and 5% gasoline) for heavy-duty vehicles, such as buses and trucks.”
https://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/pdfs/basics/jtb_ethanol.pdf
True motorheads might want to read this. Modern gasoline is very variable which is part of the storage problem mentioned previously.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15339380/the-vapor-rub-summer-versus-winter-gasoline-explained/
This also bleeds into the increasing popularity of dual fuel (gasoline/propane) backup generators. The fuel you put into the tank in summer might be hard to start in the winter ice storm, and the winter fuel may well vapor lock in the summer heatwave. Propane stores much better but is harder to refuel. How many cylinders do you want to keep around?
@The Other Owen, #16; but expanding on Rajarshi’s response (#114)
During the peak of the Covid19 mania, or maybe a couple of years earlier, my grossly innadecuate guesstimate was that the models being used at the time were (or soon would be) at house-fly level in terms of brute count of neurons. The insane influx of money in the last 3 years have left that milestone way behind since, but… size matters, but it is not the only thing that matters.
Assuming a 1’000’000-to-1 ratio, you cannot collect a million flys and collectivelly teach them how to read, a feat that most human children are capable of achieving well before puberty (exact age depending on individual talent and effort, but also on the complexity of their Mother Language’s grammar). Structure of those neural networks matter, and it matters a lot. The original, 20th century, model of artificial neural network that forms the basis of what exist today (the Perceptron) is an absolute oversimplification that is more addecuate to describe the nerve that sends pain from your left big toe upwards than any natural neural structure with any processing capacity to speak of.
Today, we do not build artificial brains because we largely ignore how our own brains work. But when neuroscientist figure how a small piece of the puzzle works, AI scientist go and ENGINEER models of networks (sometimes with another, smarter, architecture; but often with a new specialized type of neuron that does not behave like the original building blocks of the past) that solves that particular kind of problem. The example I am more familiar with is Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs for short), which add a (number of) frontal layer(s) which mimic the behavior of the cornea and optic nerve. Those models are innefficient too, so if a human could be born with CNN eyes, those would be the size of grapefruits and require even bigger bone and muscle structures to be supported.
So, IMHO, if you know how the sausage is made, you cannot but believe our current AI fad is a Ponzi scheme. It is not that it does not produce useful ENGINEERING products (it does, and those are amazing), but the business model is basically “give us your money so we can breed millions and millions of houseflys (or, more likely today, mice) until we create one Albert Einstein to solve all of our problems”.
Mr Greer and the Ecosophes,
My work in progress novel, which I intend to be the American Ring Cycle, is coming along but I’ve learned a few things about myself and my writing that I wanted to ask y’all about.
Firstly, I started writing the work in the epic style of Wagner but before long I realized it didn’t fit the American ethos I was going for. In fact, two influences popped up in my rough draft. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and the Magical Realism movement from my parent’s native Colombia.
I guess my question boils down to, what do you all think makes an American Ring Cycle “American”? The Epic style didn’t seem to work for me but maybe that’s my own failing? I don’t know, what does everyone else think?
A certain amount of discussion of LLMs has taken place so I’m going to respond to one such comment, if that’s okay. I’m calling attention to it first in case you would prefer to shut it down and delete this comment.
@Rajarshi #114, your description of how LLMs work accords with my (limited) knowledge. However, there’s another aspect to consider, which is that we use language to model (describe and discuss) the world. So it shouldn’t be too surprising if our languages and the patterns in our use of language, which is what the LLMs are based on, also encode a model of the world itself, not just of word usage. (“World” here refers to the world of human interactions that involve language, abstract as well as concrete, not specifically the natural or material world.) This would explain why LLM responses often seem to suggest understanding.
If they also seem to have a demonic nature, remember Aquinas’s enumeration of “the world, the flesh, and the devil” as the enemies of the soul. Of course Aquinas’s standpoint is Christian but if you imagine he meant “world” in a similar sense to mine, the world of human interactions involving language, even Ecosophians might agree that it can be inimical, and excessive or careless engagement with it has risks.
Hi JMG
I would like to know your view point about the “twelve days war” between Israel and Iran: what do you think will be the effects in the medium and longterm for those countries and the effects also on USA, and if you think this war has been one time show or could spark again in the next future (let’s say before a year).
And also about Gaza and the future of the palestinian people living there.
Cheers
David
Siliconguy re: #186 –
Part of it, I think, is marketing. If the product or service you’re selling is “the best”, why would any right-thinking individual choose your competitors? If it’s only “the best for you,” though, that allows for the unwelcome possibility that your competitor’s may be better for someone else. Part of it is the same uncertainty-mitigation impulse that I suspect also drives authoritarianism (other people’s behavior is a source of uncertainty, therefore it must be controlled).
@Bruno, #134
The question is not addressed to me, but if I may…
What makes you think that “indulging in physical passions and desires” will land you in Hell? This is baseline human behavior, meaning we all start there and are called to outgrow that for bigger and better things. If your conception of the world is JudeoChristian, ponder Genesis 1:31 -> “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”
For some time I have been pondering of the meaning of sexual transgressions being grave sins, even on par with murder! The answer I have come up with (or been revealed?) is “so y’all have mercy on the other sinners”. The hungry who takes other’s property to feed his kin? The bar brawler who in rage smashes another’s drunkard’s skull? Guess what, they are not monsters; as much as satisfying your own appetites does not make you one. We all need to learn how to master our animal selves; that’s the whole point of incarnation!
Hell, at least in my book, is reserved for the subanimals: those that enjoy inflicting the prices of their own gratifications onto others. And the worse of those are the ones that inflict pain for the sake of pain itself.
@JMG
Regarding Trump, the way I see it is an outsider whose source of American news is Indian journalists like Palki Sharma Upadhyay, is that Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 are starkly different. In his earlier stint as POTUS, Trump was an un-official comedian, in addition to being POTUS – I have seen clips of him roasting the US MSM, and it is quite comedic in some cases – but he still seems to have done a good job overall, except with Covid, where he really f***ed up, to put it bluntly. That said, I had expected that in this current term, he’d pull off, in a positive sense, much more than what he did in his first term; however, he’s been gutting US governmental funding to R&D in STEM, for starters. I can understand pulling the plug for astrophysics or string theory research funding, but for applied sciences? If anything, the way the US PMC and the elite politico-bureaucratic classes destroyed American industry alone suffices to justify a complete rebuilding of the American heavy industry sector. I especially mean heavy industry, because you can develop all sorts of fancy products in the lab, but if you can’t make it on a scale that matters, all those fancy inventions are worth toilet paper; and heavy industry is the sector that enables manufacturing of said fancy products. I am of course not very well-versed with the way things are done in your country, but if I were POTUS, the first thing I’d do would be to pull the plug on funding for nano this and quantum that, and instead funnel that money into reinvigorating America’s capacity to design, fabricate and maintain smoothly, heavy equipment and chemicals – after all, it was this that played a significant role in turning the tide of war in Europe in WW2. In contrast, I don’t see the US being enable to crank out that kind of industrial output today – for example, Russia is apparently making 40 howitzers a month, whereas the US is apparently just about able to make 8-10 in the same time frame – and this doesn’t auger well for your country, especially with an administration that is hell-bent on “punishing” China, which is ahead of the Russians on matters of scale for many industrial products.
@JMG: Sounds like I’ve got room to speculate! I figured the planets we’re on might have a significant effect on us. I suppose we’d only find out by living in space. Thank you for your help!
@UnMasked One: I’ve had some issues with back pain before – threw mine out three times in about two years in my early twenties. My biggest advice: stretch, stretch, stretch! Specific back stretches as well as working on the arms and legs really helped me out. Haven’t had any major issues since. Massages can also be helpful, either from a spouse or professional. Doing core workouts to strengthen your abs, back, chest, and shoulders will also help.
Scotty said:
“I believe one gets the special herb to smoke and then pass the deck through it.”
I’ve always heard that you pass it to the left-hand side…at least that’s what Musical Youth were all a-twitter about.
Cheers.
@Dylan: Re: Bitcoin
I am not really sure what your question is.
Can the government seize crypto? Of course they can. They don’t even need quantum computers (which are vapourware BTW) to do that.
Will the government at some point decide to seize crypto once they see it as enough of a threat? Sure, why not.
Or is your question “what will bitcoiners do once they realise their bitcoins are not as invulnerable to government interference as they thought they were”? Well I am guessing they will have to cry themselves to sleep since there is nothing they would be able to do about it anyway.
Anonymous (#26):
Modern wheat was also taking over the American diet about the same time. I have no love for artificial sweeteners, and am intrigued by your hypothesis, but a lot of unintended consequences have supposedly ridden along with massive selective breeding efforts to make wheat what it is today – shrunken from a 4 foot tall prairie grass with a couple seeds at the top to a robust 18″ easy-to-harvest pasta producing powerhouse. Nobody ever bothered testing it for characteristics damaging to humans along the way to the perfect cupcake or ciabatta roll.
Now? If you ask someone like Dr. William Davis, author of “Wheat Belly,” modern wheat is very nearly the root of all evil. Not to mention that it’s almost always killed and desiccated before harvest with Roundup…
I’ve been doing the low-carb thing for 7 months now – down 30 lbs and feeling pretty decent at 52 years of age – but have been wheat-free for only a few weeks. Still feeling that part out for myself. Artificial sweeteners have been on my naughty list for my entire life. Along with more recent arrivals like seed oils, preservatives, emulsifiers, and all corn/soy fractions. Making deliciously addictive foodstuffs out of inedible field crops turns my stomach.
Raen the Barbarian,
Have you read James Nestor’s book “Breath”? There is a fair bit of magic to be had between those pages, though the author doesn’t say as much necessarily. Wim Hof takes up some space in his exploration. Fascinating man!
batstrel @ 127
The first coin has what looks like tropical fruits on it. I would say bananas on the right, lychee on the left and maybe bread fruit on the bottom.
My 2 cents
Kay
@ Not the brightest wick in the candelabra #161
I really hope your experience is the standard, but I can’t say. No one in my environment works in a related field and I know few people who graduated recently, so my sample isn’t significant. Most claim they had to learn most anew because what they had studied isn’t very realistic or useful (but they needed the diploma to get the job). They also say the ability to cram huge amounts of information into their minds in no time and be able to do things well enough with it comes in handy. Of course this may be a local thing, my country’s dwindling industrial sector isn’t renowned for its innovation.
Yes, it is depressing enough to make me reconsider many things. Don’t get me wrong, anyone who goes through this will be at least competent at working with numbers and may learn to do their job correctly. However, we generally see equations as a mere tool that crunches numbers, a practical rule of thumb, but fail to grasp the idea this equation expresses in mathematical language. Thus, when something means nothing to you, you normally forget it.
While this doesn’t matter in the case of obscure refinements of a field, it’s disastrous with the fundamentals. So we don’t develop the critical skills it takes to solve the open-ended problems the real world consists of from basic principles (besides we normally solve just closed-ended problems), much less to keep science alive or avoid falling for follies wrapped in science-y plastic.
Instead, we struggle to memorize and automate as much as possible so as to scrap enough points to pass if we’re lucky, then inevitably forget most of it. Rinse and repeat. While I don’t even try to discuss potentially controversial issues such as the “energy transition” with classmates, at least we agree that we’re not learning much for the long term.
The biggest car I ever drove in (I never actually drove it) was a 1969 Cadillac Eldorado Coupe. It belonged to my boss who had driven one in America, fallen in love with it, and imported it into South Africa. It was a beautiful vehicle, bronze in color, power everything. Lots of little touches like the battery which had little windows on each cell that changed color if the cell needed topping up. But it was madly impractical. It had a high compression V8 engine that required avgas to be mixed with the local petrol to get the required octane level. In those days our cars were mostly piddly little British Morrises and Austins and the early Japanese makes. The Cadillac was so big it needed two parking spaces. But worst of all, it was left hand drive and we drive on the left. So to overtake (and the Cadillac could overtake anything on our roads) the driver had to pull out so far to see the oncoming traffic that the passenger side was over the white line. I was a front seat passenger just once. The experience was too terrifying to be repeated.
One thing you can count on when people talk about Bitcoin is the use of plenty of air quotes!
Almost like it’s more video game than reality…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/i-asked-chatgpt-to-explain-bitcoin-to-me-like-i-m-12-here-s-what-it-said/ar-AA1GLhZW
Why does the United States Senate have an unelected parliamentarian involved in budget bills?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentarian_of_the_United_States_Senate
BoysMom @138
I would highly recommend solar tubes to bring daylight into interior rooms with no windows. Just to a search on “solar tubes” and you will find many sources. They are available at Home Depot. We used them to bring light into a windowless bathroom and laundry room on a house we renovated. They are great.
Mary Bennet,
Yeah, anyone who knows their way around the health space on YT will be familiar with the acronym GRAS – Generally Regarded As Safe – labelled by the very folks who make the substance in question! What could possibly go wrong?
Flying car Spam in my inbox for your amusement;
“Air taxis will soon replace both helicopters and Ubers for many short passenger trips. If you could pay an extra $100 to skip New York traffic and get to the airport in minutes—not hours—would you? Heading to Cape Cod, the Hamptons, or coastal Maine for the weekend? You can sit in traffic for several hours, or jump in an eVTOL for $150 and be sipping your Friday beverage of choice in 20 minutes. I think a lot of people are going to take that option.”
followed by investment advice on the soon to be booming field of course. The peddler points out that helicopter service between JFK and midtown Manhattan is as low as $195 and totally worth it.
An update on my solar thermal installation:
The system is working well. When it was first installed we couldn’t figure out why the tap temperature seemed lower than normal. It turned out that the setting for the hot water recirculator pump control was 20 degrees off! After that it was smooth sailing.
The online monitoring tools are really a big improvement from the last system I installed, which had no way of recording daily temperature fluctuations. Now it is so convenient to be able to review daily/weekly/monthly trends.
I always file an extension on my taxes so I am only finalizing 2024 now. The tax incentives for solar have become a lot more complicated. In the past I could file the documents myself, but now I definitely needed help from a CPA. The good news is that there are tax incentives for American-made equipment which I was able to utilize since the panels, tank, and controls were all made in the USA.
Good day Mr. Greer, long time lurker and reader here. I truly appreciate the diversity of well thought out topics and insights you bring to the public. I have often found myself pondering something with half formed thoughts, only to find one of your posts going into depth on the subject and bringing insights on the matter. So thank you for that.
Quick question for you – I have noticed that many NDE / medium guests on various “soul” channels (for lack of better word) seem to have a certain political leaning. For example, anytime I hear a seemingly interesting guest state that “Putin is evil” (or some other brain dead idea being pushed onto the population) their credibility takes a quick nosedive to me. This bias seems to be quite prevelant among those so-called enlightened “soul” channels. Do you know why that is?
All the best to you.
And here is the latest for those following the Florida python situation:
First bobcats started eating python eggs, but that was just an appetizer. Now they have moved on to the main course, which for bobcats in the Everglades is a 13-foot long adult pythons: https://www.news-press.com/story/news/environment/2025/05/27/bobcat-becomes-the-latest-documented-florida-species-to-kill-a-python/83799281007/
More and more, I’m running into a sentiment in alt-right circles that neo-pagans are merely LARPing. (I’m using ‘neo-pagan for the whole gamut of revivalist polytheist faiths, from Wicca to Druidry.) That is, we have no valid religious practices and essentially do not exist in any meaningful sense.
This is irritating of course, but there’s a shred of truth given how neo-pagans have laid the groundwork for this reaction. Even with my limited exposure to the scene, it’s easy to tell that there are a lot of flakes.
And it seems to me that there’s no point in arguing – that would just lock the reaction in place.
What I haven’t figured out yet is whether this LARP sentiment is a prelude to a harsher reaction, or a compromise that allows all parties to go about their business – or something else entirely.
I have read about 1.5 Carlos Castaneda books and lurk in their reddit community. So full disclosure, I haven’t encountered this topic in the source material. Anyway, has anyone heard of the Castaneda concept of a “flyer”? It’s some kind of powerful being that attaches themselves to human. minds and is responsible for our unconscious thoughts. They are seen as a kind of flying shadow if seen at all. One could make a case that the Jungian “shadow” is similar if you ascribe the thinking of unconscious/undirected thoughts to it. Although the Jungian version is an abstract concept and doesn’t have an appearance. Also interesting, I used to Astral Project way back when (still do a bit, but not on purpose), whenever I would leave my body, I would be prevented from going far by “shadow people”, which looked like hooded dark smoky humanoids. I don’t take much of this as objective truth, but there seems to be a nice fit between different, on some level, concepts and experiences here. Maybe it’s just a set of metaphors for the importance of directing our thoughts and having the ability to stop them.. No real question here; I just thought it would be fun to mention and see if JMG/the commentariat had anything to comment.
My guess is the bird on the coin is the São Tomé olive pigeon or maroon pigeon (Columba thomensis), an endangered species of pigeon which is endemic to the island of São Tomé.
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/3058-Columba-thomensis
Comparison with coin:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ej2DmSHuoWZ9oLIg3vYLwdnlu9MGb3wI/view?usp=sharing
David, why, yes. I’ve written at length about different theories of time — cyclical, progressive, regressive, and so on.
Neptunesdolphins, if it appears in big-box bookstores and gets articles in the mass media, it’s pop culture.
Old Steve, thanks for this.
Clay, given the soaring rate of home schooling, that seems like a real possibility.
Anonymous, okay, another reminder for me not to answer questions when I’m sleepy. That would be Rhea, then. As for the new theory, it’ll be interesting to see if that can make testable predictions.
StarNinja, er, probably because it’s written by an American and draws from themes in American culture?
DFC, that would take at least two full posts, and both of them would draw screaming trolls from every position on the political landscape. I think, all things considered, I’ll pass.
Viduraawakened, the problem there is that government funding for everything amounts to slush funds for a politically corrupt system, and it’s part of a debt-fueled binge that’s driving the country into bankruptcy. That has to be ended before anything else becomes possible. The rebuilding of US heavy industry, if it happens, will happen because tariffs make it profitable for businesses to invest private funds in heavy industry — that’s the way our original heavy industry sector was built, you know.
Richard, er, it’s had one for more than two centuries. All deliberative assemblies do.
Siliconguy, hope springs infernal, and all that!
Hornet, partly because even the most authentic channeled communications are always filtered through the minds of the people doing the channeling, and take on its coloration, and partly because authentic channeled communications are actually quite rare. You might find it enlightening to read Lamar Keene’s classic book The Psychic Mafia, which talks about the huge and lucrative fraudulent channeling industry. That industry specializes in telling chumps what they want to hear — and that, of course, is why fraudulent mediums (that is, far and away the majority of mediums) parrot the political opinions of their audiences.
Samurai_47, that is to say, nature has a solution for every invasive species, which usually involves something else learning to dine on it. Bon appetit, bobcats!
Cliff, the problem is that a very large share of Neopaganism is LARPing. There are serious Neopagans, but not that many of them. To my mind, the only reaction that makes sense is for those of us who are serious to keep doing serious practices and wait for the LARPers to move on to some other fad — as they will, in due time.
Luke, Castaneda’s work is interesting stuff — granted, he made up most of it, but it still contains valid spiritual insights. I haven’t encountered the concept of the “flyer” elsewhere, no. Jung’s concept of the Shadow, btw, is anything but abstract; once you learn to see yours, you’ll grasp just how concrete and real it is!
UnMaskedOne – I have had very good results with Block Therapy (.com) (comes out of Canada, uses a specially-made block – BUT the introductory version teaches how to use a rolled-up towel). The focus is on fascia, and utilizing breath to rework fascial “adhesions”. Lots of real-people testimonials for all sorts of problems helped by it (mine included).
>I don’t even look at or care about people’s grades and I don’t screen for them, since I have found them to be a completely meaningless indicator of anything–when I interview, I generally ask open-ended or seemingly impossible questions
An apocryphal interview question I was told was this:
x + y = 10
2x + y = 0
What is x?
A simple algebra question, something I was solving in my sleep when I was 12. I was told that a lot of people are failing this. Actually, the interview question was simpler, it was just 2x + 5 = 10, solve for x. College grad, “google superstars” were failing this, was what I was told.
Some of those technical interview questions can get rather silly for no good reason though. I’d be hard pressed to write a binary tree reversal function on the whiteboard. I remember putting up a solution for detecting the endianness of the system you were running on but it wasn’t as elegant as they wanted, even though it worked and I had never solved that problem before. Ah, the memories.
What I often did when pressed to interview someone was take a bug I just fixed, simplify it for the whiteboard, put it up there and say “Please find the bug”. I think if I had to hire software talent, I’d just put them in a room with EMACS, gcc and make and tell them to write me a function that does specified things (nothing too fancy, say it goes down an array and clamps all the elements to a value range) and create a Makefile that spits out the compiled function in a static library file. Then I’d come back after an hour, take the library file and link it to see how it runs. That would tell me a lot about how much practical experience they had and how much they could get done. But that’s just me.
Siliconguy – thanks too, for your comments on the gasoline/diesel conundrum. I have to admit that while, in theory, biodiesel sounds workable, I don’t think I have the ability to add that to the list of skills I should develop. I’m already stretched thin and just thinking about getting set up to work with methanol and lye and grease and what have you just to make biodiesel to power a tool to do the real work I want to do sounds… ridiculously rube-goldbergian in a yak-combing way. Thanks for helping me see that.
1. Booklover #95 and @Dylan #158, you’re very welcome. Glad you enjoyed the report! 🙂
2. @JMG (#152), about the grounding effects of meat. You wrote ” If you happen to live in a tropical climate and are practicing spiritual exercises full time under the close supervision of a competent guru, you can do without that, and experience exotic spiritual states faster. If you don’t have those advantages, and are practicing spiritual disciplines, some amount of meat is essential to keep you from becoming brittle, ungrounded, and mentally unstable.”
What’s the role of the tropical climate in this?
3. SPOILER ALERT ARIEL MORAVEC NOVELS – About the Buick discussion: Having never driven a Buick, I can’t contribute. But there is something else which has been nagging me in the Ariel novels:
People don’t seem to wear shoes. Ariel and Dr. Moravec arrive home and take off their various outer garments, but never their shoes (do they wear street shoes around the house?). Ariel slips into comfortable clothes, but there’s no mention of comfy shoes, or of going barefoot or in socks. Ariel considers which dress to wear for a formal occasion, but doesn’t waste a single thought on matching shoes. She goes to her favourite thrift shop, in order to find jewelry to go with her dress (and of course because she needs to find and buy a certain item for plot purposes… 😉 ) – instead of going there hoping to find matching shoes. The two girls admire each other’s dresses, but no mention of their shoes. And when they go to the formal event, they have to park a few blocks away – and not once, not a single time while walking to the event does Ariel either think “thank goodness I’m wearing flats” or “my feet are going to kill me before we’re even there”.
I have come to the somewhat unsettling conclusion that JMG has secretly and sneakily placed the novels into a parallel universe where shoes simply don’t exist… 😀
Which is to say: If driving the Buick would be an issue for Ariel, maybe the Buicks in this parallel universe are different, too? 😉
John, to be clear, you’re saying there is no time you would pick to incarnate on Earth? Athaia’s comment about forced reincarnation – I am one of these people, I know it and my natal chart coupled with my life circumstances, it is so clear. Getting some idea why my life wasn’t going like most other people helped quite a bit, it gave some context and understanding, and helped a lot with acceptance. Debts must be paid, that’s OK, helps to know. However, I don’t know anybody that does something from being told this is good for you have to do it and then being forced into doing it. Most of my worst experiences are a result from this approach. A friend told me about reading to his daughter, he thought it was a good idea so he forced her to do it with him, now she hates reading, won’t go near a book. Yes I know it all shapes and propels us in the bigger picture etc… I would still argue with an angel any day, not necessarily to be right, but to gain insight and understanding of the circumstance. I definitely needed to come back to Earth, but that two part equation can be difficult, why is this happening and what can be done about it? I always wonder if some of the comments would be so noble with a different circumstance….
Did you call our situation on earth a “demented high school” somewhere? haha I thought it was apt and feel the same way, been here a bunch of times and it is getting old. I’m like that old guy in high school, failed a few courses, had to come back for an extra year, slow learner+big mistakes made. What did you find helped you progress towards graduation the most besides suffering? What helps to develop gaining the ability to choose what happens? Control of thoughts/emotions/cravings/actions? a strong will? What are these more interesting places to incarnate you speak of?
I like hanging out with trees these days.
I’ve got two quick questions for you based on previous stuff you’ve written:
1. You have mentioned ultralight aircraft being likely to survive the Long Descent. Would that mean that primitive fighter aircraft, similar to those fielded in World War I but lighter and more efficient due to superior engine technology, would also survive, or at least be quickly reinvented once the successor civilizations grow large and sophisticated enough to engage in major interstate warfare? “Ultralight with one or two machine guns and an interrupter gear” is a pretty fair description of a World War I single-engined scout (at the time there was no clear distinction between combat and reconaissance aircraft).
2. You have mentioned the decline of European classical music and situated it in relation to “warhol”, where do the works of the 20th century German composer-conductors who tried to follow the footsteps of Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler, etc., fit in with this? Wilhelm Furtwängler, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, and Kurt Graunke all wrote tonal, conservative symphonies in the vein of the greats of the 19th century, but they all came out wrong–dour, bleak, dry pieces with murky textures and a general sense of misery and defeat about them, so utterly at odds with their brilliant conducting (well, the brilliant conducting of the first three anyway, Graunke was a fairly mediocre conductor who ran a film and radio orchestra, and perhaps not coincidentally was the only one of them to do a full set of nine symphonies). It wasn’t until Herbert von Karajan that the thread broke for good and he, perhaps wisely, refrained from composing anything, sometimes wistfully reflecting that if he had written his own music, he would have written material that sounded like Shostakovich (a wretched composer whose appeal I will never understand, too clumsy and didactic to enjoy in close listening and too attention-grabbing to use as background music; some of the other Socialist Realists like Glière, Melikov, and Khachaturian were entertaining in their bombastic trashiness but only Shostakovich seemed to catch on in the west). These end-of-the-line German symphonies are not as overtly warhol as Boulez or Philip Glass but they have a bit of that odor about them.
@ Temporary Reality, re: diesel vs gasoline
My vote is diesel all the way. First and foremost, it is much less flammable than gasoline. Gas should be stored outside the house, in a detached shed or barn. Besides burning, a leak can produce explosive fumes.
Diesel is generally more stable to store. Ethanol free gasoline will store reasonably well, but it is quite expensive. Gas with ethanol, even with stabilizer, has a limited shelf life and will make a mess of your fuel system if it goes bad. Diesel will stay good for many years, the only real risk being algae growth if it is damp. A biocide will easily take care of this.
As someone else mentioned, heating oil is essentially the same thing and will work fine in any older engine. Jet fuel will also work. You can also make biodiesel from most vegetable or animal oils. iIn an older (or older style engine), you can burn the oil directly if you heat it first. You can also burn many other oils, including thinner lubricating oils, waste engine oil, hydraulic oils, etc.
As for the engine, you probably want an old, or old style, mechanically controlled engine. Newer electronically controlled engines run very nicely, but are dependent on high tech parts. They may also need dealer tech to diagnose problems or even to tune them.
While it isn’t not necessarily an indication of future supply, in the past, at least in the US, diesel has generally been quite available during disasters or other situations where gasoline is rationed or unavailable. And as I say above, there are many possible alternatives as well.
On New York City mayor:
I’m NYC born and bred, worked there for 20 years but no longer live in the city. So I love the place, I care very much about it, but have no real say or stake in the race.
It is very interesting to look at where the voters were. The Bronx went pretty heavily against Mamdani, though one would have expected their demographic to support him. I think it suggests the pro Mamdani voters were in large part virtue signaling, knowing they could put their kids in private school,, leave the city or hire private security if necessary.
No one knows, least of all me, but I doubt he will win in November. I suspect either Eric Adams, Curtis Sliwa or Andrew Cuomo will win. They just have to make sure all three aren’t running; hopefully two of them will drop out.
JMG,
1. I live in a Chicago suburb and the politicians who run the Cook County Forest Preserve District here have decided to disregard the name of the governmental agency they serve by cutting down most of the trees in the forest “preserves” throughout the county. It’s all being done as a result of pressure from some misguided conservation groups in the name of removing invasive tree species and restoring northern Illinois to its original prairie habitat. (Why stop with just restoring prairies? I suggest these politicians find a way to restore northern Illinois to the Ice Age by covering it with ice fields a mile thick, or better yet, restore it even further back by flooding it with lava). Ahem, Cook County politicians, my taxes pay for a “forest preserve district”, not a prairie restoration district. I demand a refund! Trees, even the invasive kind, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and in turn pump out oxygen into it. Absorbing carbon dioxide using already existing trees seems like a cheap and sensible way to slow global warming. But this being Illinois, a state known for its political corruption and imprisoned politicians, including several former governors, I suspect that some group of elected officials is profiting highly from the sale of massive cords of firewood, while simultaneously receiving credit for saving the environment.
2. Meanwhile, in my suburb, the town arborist (yes, my town has a dedicated arborist on its payroll — more of my tax money well spent), hates any tree that is not in perfect condition, and promptly has it cut down. Apparently, imperfect trees scare off potential home buyers, which could lead to empty homes, which could negatively affect property taxes, and therefore threaten government revenue and ultimately threaten bloat jobs like “town arborist”. The arborist seems especially bent on cutting down American Elm trees. These trees, planted here in the 1930s,
survived the Dutch Elm Disease outbreak in the 1960s, which wiped out 9 out 10 of them. That makes them special trees, I’d say — disease resistant and able to continue to live all these years later. The kind of trees you might want to protect. But since they are old and have a few bald spots, I guess they deserve the axe, so goes the local reasoning. And did I mention that the American Elm is on the world endangered species list? No matter. Timber!
I’m sorry, did I say town arborist? I meant town arsonist. I mean village idiot.
@Ambrose (#69):
I can certainly agree intellectually, in principle, that you (Ambrose, that is) “can readily accept that this is what it *felt like* (or more precisely, how you now remember that it felt like), but balk at accepting that you *really were* perceiving the limits of time and space, the fiery / unitary / sentient nature of the cosmos, etc.” But that would only be a verbal or intellectual agreement, nothing more. I cannot agree on any deeper level.
Those long-ago hours of direct perception are still, 70 years later, by far the most real experience of my life. In comparison to it, every other experience I have ever, physical or mental, had feels like a chimera, a phantasm. Yes, some of those chimeras and phantasms of the physical world are quite capable of putting an end to my physical existence if I don’t deal with them wisely at some moment of impending doom. But even my own eventual physical death, however agonizing it might turn out to be, would be less “real” than that experience of direct perception so many years ago.
Moreover, the experience itself has not gone away from me, but is still ever-present in the background of my mundane activities and awareness, and when there is a compelling enough reason to do so, I can still access it in any given moment of extreme necessity. In fact, I have actually done so once or twice, when a friend was in a situation of extreme need and I felt myself impelled (required?) to alleviate that need. Returning to direct perception of that living fire, and perceiving it as a sort of web — yet not really a web — in which everything is connected to everything else, I could perceive which thread(s) of the web, when tugged on ever so slightly by me with a “limb” (that is not a physical limb), would ease the friend’s distress. So I tugged, and it worked.
All this, of course, means nothing in determining the “objectivity” of my experience or my descriptions of it. However, you see, the absolute “objectivity” of such experiences, with reference to the world we all inhabit every day of our lives, is — for me — an irrelevant question, especially where scholarly or rational discourse is concerned. What I directly perceived included all things, even pairs of things which cannot logically coexist (such as “all that exists” and “all that does not exist,” or “Proposition X is true” and “Proposition X is false.”). Sense perceptions, words and sentences, logic and reason themselves, mathematics, material evidence — in short, each and every such basis of ordinary human knowledge, became for me nothing more than masks our frail bodies and minds humans constantly create to avoid gaining what my mother called back then “that horrible knowledge” of how “the world really is.”
In writing all this, I am not trying to convince you (or any other reader), merely trying to explain how impervious to any sort of logical argument or outside evidence my own certainty of what I experienced is.
Some “mystical experiences,” so called, carry the mystic beyond reason itself, beyond material evidence of any sort. This may be why mystics speak fairly rarely about their experiences, and never (if the mystic is genuine) with the intention of persuading another of the truth of what they have experienced.
Thomas Aquinas, author of the Summa Theologiae, was one of the greatest intellects of the Middle Ages. Towards the end of his life he stopped working on the Summa, perplexing all his closest friends. To one of them, who asked, he finally said something like, “If you had seen what I saw, you would understand. Everything I have ever written is as straw.”
Straw, of course, was what was strewn in the floor of dining halls and classrooms back in his day. It collected all sort of offal and trash, even excreta. Eventually, when it stank enough, it was raked out and burned, and new straw was strewn on the floor. So Thomas was not merely rejecting what he had written; he was proclaiming that he now had been shown–he hints that it was in a mystical vision that he had been given–how every articulate product of his mind and his pen, however brilliant, stank as old floor-straw.
Nonetheless, I earned my living by language. Knowing all along I was working in a stable of chimeras and phantasms, I accepted their limited reality for the sake of the individual students whom (as I suppose) I was meant to meet, to talk with them about their deepest concerns. I may have been the smallest of pawns on a vast chessboard, a game wholly beyond my own understanding, played by other-than-human players of whom I am unable to conceive. Or I may not have been. Either way, in my old age I look back on what I have done, and what I may have failed to do, with a pawn’s serene contentment.
Chris/Fernglade – I visited the living energy farm and they seem both legit and knowledgable.. They do supplement heat with wood – a few wheellbarrow loads each year, burned on the coldest days. They have 18 inches of insulation outside of the walls, covered by stucco, well sealed. The roof is metal, with R50+ insulation in the attic space. They use rolled quilt insulated curtains with extra width to prevent air leaks (within 18 in depth window, so extra air layer as well). Plus 15 years experience to work out problems, including surrounding trees and even a composting toilet. Alexis Zeiglar (leader) has an updated book describing air flow with the solar heated air from roof panels, being pumped under the house (DC motor) through rubble/air layer under the floor, and above the foundation. It is a clever and ecologically sound system that makes sense, to me at least.
Silliconguy @ 186. Your mention about variable response to diet is right on – it is not one-size-fits-all. Updated gut biome/immune/brain/hormone interaction research and genetics research have continued to confirm major differences in how people respond. Additionally, response to food additives and modifications, plastics, pesticides and other unknowns are not well tested, if at all. Combinations have been barely addressed.
Academically speaking a professor only needs to produce one Ph.D. per career to replace him or her self. But that is not the only use of a doctoral graduate.
The root purpose of a Ph.D. is to teach you how to break into a new area of knowledge. You have to identify the problem/topic, search the literature, plan the research, write and defend the proposal (which translates into begging for money), carry out the research, then write it all up to a rigorous standard. The defense is a formality.
That procedure is applicable to things that are not purely academic. I found it useful enough in industry. It was certainly useful when I was with a company that had a formal R&D department, but it was useful at other places as well.
It’s the full process that’s important and you don’t get a lot of help during it. You are very much on your own with only a little advice occasionally yelled from the sidelines.
A Master’s degree is basically the same except there is a lot more support along the way and you are not expected to do something unique; mine was a basically get this waste material and see if this treatment actually works, and please don’t blow up the lab. (There was an actual risk of a modest WOOF type deflagration.)
As I started my doctorate my professor gave me good advice, “People who complete their doctorates are not necessarily smarter than anyone else, but they are more stubborn.” I will make no attempt to refute that statement.
Other Owen, that’s bizarre. I’m bad at math, and it took me less than a minute to figure out that in the first equation, x = -10 and y = 20, and even less time to figure out that in the second, x = 2.5. And college graduates are failing this now?
Milkyway, (1) the warmer and sunnier the climate, the less “yang” food you need to be balanced, which is why polar peoples eat a mostly meat diet while people in the tropics eat mostly plant foods. (2) In America, most people wear street shoes around the house as a matter of course. As for Ariel, she always wears plain sensible shoes — she hates high heels. (I’ll doubtless get around to referencing that in an upcoming story.)
George, as I understand it, material incarnation is the prenatal state of the soul, and human existence is the labor pains. I’d much rather be born, thank you.
Tankermottind, (1) yes, that’s quite likely. (2) Every art form has a certain notional space to fill in, and once it does so, there’s no more room for work that is both original and good. Klemperer et al. tried to be original and so weren’t any good. I’m waiting for the composers who give up on being original and start filling in unused corners of the Baroque, Romantic, etc. musical space — Brecken Kendall, the fictional composer in two of my novels, is an example of this.
Clever, I wish I was surprised at all. One of the oddest things about the managerial class is the way that all its interactions with nature end up going nasty like this.
@JMG and @Patricia#122
I don’t know if the US citizens getting deported (or their families or descendants for that matter) will feel the same way about Once and Future Trump, but I suppose Lincoln had “South will raise again” confederates and Roosevelt had the Robber Barons, the descendants of both who still curse their names all these decades later.
People talking about model painting and the fact I’ve been doing some myself has me thinking I should maybe talk a little about Warhammer because JMG’s nods to it in the past are sitting in my head a bit right now and something in last week’s comments about the prevalence of a sort of slant-reading of LOTR got me thinking. See, the thing is, Warhammer is really popular these days and as a long-time fan I’ve thought it’s probably the best one of the big sci-fi franchises to actually capture the current moment?
For those who don’t know, Warhammer 40k is set in the distant future, some 40,000 years hence. Humanity achieved the sci-fi dream of limitless interstellar empire and infinite expansion, and then it collapsed. A warlord calling himself the Emperor of Mankind unified the remnants of humanity into one state, the Imperium, and then his favourite son killed him. His followers hooked him up to a life support system and worship him as a god. The Imperium is a state in a constant and permanent state of decline. Not only that, but it’s quite explicitly the bad guys. In the LotR narrative, the Emperor is a Sauron who actually won.
The point of the Imperium is that its long decline is both narratively interesting and completely opposed to everything that was happening in sci-fi back in the 80s when it first came out. This isn’t an idealistic Federation going out into the stars to have adventures and engage in interstellar diplomacy. That already happened, and it ended badly. If the Imperium needs it for its endless wars, it is running out of it. It doesn’t understand how its own technology works, and is only capable of repairing, rebuilding, or recreating it rather than innovating or altering. The only thing the Imperium has a lot of to spend is human lives.
Characters in Warhammer tie-in novels tend to be ruthless pragmatists who understand that no help is coming and therefore work hard to make sure they don’t need it. The imperium puts on a big show of being all about absolute order, but in reality everything comes down to who has the bigger guns and that means that it can be an aid or an obstacle to the protagonists depending on the circumstances. At the same time, the imperium is normally preferable to the insane cultists or evil aliens they’re fighting, at least in the long term. Human antagonists tend to be people who’ve made the understandable decision that the “cruellest and bloodiest regime imaginable” has to go down now, by any means necessary, no matter who or what it means siding with. Aliens and monsters tend to just have it in for humanity for the sake of having it in for humanity.
So, this is a franchise where the bad guys already won, and won’t be miraculously defeated by the superior moral force of the good guys. The main characters tend to be pragmatic survivor types who work within, around, or against imperial systems but almost never under them in order to achieve their goals. No one knows how the technology works and in any case it will not solve your problems, and the local flavour of space magic is actively hostile. Humanity survives by will, grim determination, and sheer hatred. It’s pretty much the exact opposite of the stock sci-fi progressive narrative on every point. I’m not 100% convinced it can survive without the progressive sci-fi narrative to contrast against, but I wonder if its current popoularity is a reflection of a loss of faith in the star trek future?
@JMG #215
Well, now I feel dumb for asking 😅
My main takeaway from reflecting on the novel is that my attempts to incorporate the Hero’s Journey and the Epicness of Ring-type Cycles met with repeated failure because I wasn’t telling the story the way the story wanted to be told, if that makes sense. I keep being reminded of Tamanous. Everyone dancing to their own beat and singing their own tune. I’m way less familiar with that style of writing or that kind of story structure as I am with Hero’s Journey type stories but if Tamanous is the Spirit of this land then maybe I’ll give it a go.
It is my impression that the more complex the organism. The more important the Male becomes in the role of the species outside mere sperm donor which is what the males are in Eusocial organisms like Ants and Termites.
And in regards to the discussion in the last post. There was a historic assumption that Masculinity alone was associated with violence just like those studying the animal world initially assumed that the animal Kingdom is just like how humans do things.
But it is interesting nonetheless. That since then we have discovered violence and even dominance hierarchies encompass both male and female. And that it depends.
At some point I suspect. That more and more functions are outsourced to the male as the complexity of organisms increase. Because of needing greater investment.
Hi JMG,
I was wondering if you had any thoughts about the recent Australian election results. Seemingly against the trends in other English-speaking countries, we delivered a rebuke to the far right and left, electing the centre-left Labor party with an overwhelming majority. The result also saw the main conservative party, the Liberals, without any seats in urban electorates. The coalition agreement they had with the more conservative, rurally-based National party fell apart for a week, until wiser heads convinced the parties to renegotiate it (neither has a hope of ever winning government on their own).
It seems we are going long on light socialism down here, refusing to budge on defence spending when the world is clearly gearing up for war and generally just trying to carry on without decisively addressing much of anything. Business-as-usual in an unusual time.
Clever,
I have a friend who is an arborist. He used to love trees and plants. Then, he joined DTE Energy (Formerly Detroit Edison), and, after a few months on the job, chopped down every single tree on his property. There’s something pernicious about that profession and how it’s been coopted.
> the huge and lucrative fraudulent channeling industry. That industry specializes in telling chumps what they want to hear
The fraudulent mediums have a new competitor — AI. Send the AI a few pictures and texts of someone and it will create a digital replica for you to talk to and interact with. Many people use the service to recreate deceased loved ones to assuage their grief. Of course, since the AI could have access to the deceased’s search history and chats with other people, there have been a few post-mortem surprises.
Another use is to create fake “influencers” that are always perfect and on camera 24 hours a day, unlike real people.
Regarding “telling chumps what they want to hear”, ChatGPT will now tell you what it thinks of you. Out of modesty I won’t repeat what it thinks of me, but it is highly complimentary. I know it’s all fake and manipulative, but I still like it.
Hey JMG
Well, if industrial civilisation was felled by modified bacteria turning its plastic into paracetamol, it would fall a bit less painfully.
When you recover from my joke, could you tell me if you have any favourite comedians?
https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
In AI news, someone tries to get a loquacious cricket to run a small business. And fails.
The Chinese are interested in the Ancient Greek and Roman classics:
https://unherd.com/2025/05/can-china-rescue-the-classics
Hi Lazy Gardener,
I’m not disputing the folks account made to you during your visit there, but something doesn’t sound right to me about the claim for firewood of: ‘a few wheelbarrow loads each year’. The climate for that area for the months of Dec through Feb have temperature mean max of under 50’F and mins of under 30’F with occasional extreme’s. They must use more heating fuel than that claim, no matter how well insulated. The thing with thermal mass, is that unless it is continually heated, it moves to the average temperature, which in those months is cold, really cold – and in their case that may be the floor. And insulation cannot produce a warm environment inside a house, the energy has to come from somewhere.
And then the brain began thinking about how did they cook food? Each of those winter months enjoys a couple of inches of snow – solar cooking is not an option in those circumstances. And biological action slows down in those months, so I’d imagine that would impact upon biogas production. I read the hype too, but will have to politely disagree.
Cheers
Chris
@Clever User Name #224 I am from Illinois originally with ancestors who homesteaded there in the 1850’s with that farm still in the family. The prairies in that part of the world were maintained by Native American arsonists that regularly burned the grasslands along with lightning caused fires. The rainfall in that part of the world is enough to maintain forests which inevitably take over without fires. This was discovered in a prairie restoration effort begun in the 30’s by the University of Wisconsin in Madison. So once the naturally occurring trees are removed artificial fires will have to be set every few years to keep the “natural” prairie maintained. All this is part of the Pristine Nature Myth saying we need to return to past pure humanly untouched ecosystems forgetting that the aboriginal inhabitants had their own systems of managing their surrounding ecosystems. The book Tending the Wild explores the ecosystem management methods of California tribes.
Ecologists recognize that an ecosystem can be in its richest most diverse and lively state when it experiences mild disturbance which what indigenous peoples often did to their surrounding ecosystems. In fact I have met a local tribal chairman who states the nature requires the human touch to be its most alive. I teach in my high school environmental class that humanity can be the earth’s keystone species whose presence and actions balances and optimizes the biosphere. The problem is not too many humans but not enough love and wisdom.
Instead of working with what nature has wrought and accepting a new ecological reality the Cook County folks are fighting against it.
StarNinja, oh, it won’t just be the descendants of the deported. It’ll be the entire managerial caste, which is falling from power and is already (and understandably) upset about that. For many years to come you’ll find plenty of circles of resentful members of that class, still fuming about how wonderful things were when they had unchecked power and how evil Trump was.
Deo, many thanks for this. I don’t have a lot of direct exposure to the WH40K cosmos — just scraps here and there, and a note to self to get around to reading some of the fiction some day — so I appreciate hearing from someone who knows the franchise well. What you’re saying is that WH40K reflects the actual condition of US global hegemony, as distinct from the fatuous Star Trek narrative still being deployed by the remaining propagandists for that hegemonic system: the existing system is bad, the alternatives are by and large worse, and the only question is how long it can be propped up before everything comes apart. That makes a lot of sense to me — and yes, the fact that it’s attractive to many people these days suggests that the sheer absurdity of the Star Trek future is finally beginning to sink in.
StarNinja, that’s a good approach. Just be the chronicler, and let the story show you which way it wants to go!
Info, the interesting thing is that this varies from one broad branch of the animal kingdom to another. Among reptiles, for example, it’s very common for females to be larger and fiercer than males — the biggest and nastiest tyrannosaurs, for example, were the females. Among mammals, it’s usually the males, but only in social species, and the larger the social group, the bigger and fiercer the males tend to be. (Compare gender differences in baboons to those in gibbons, for example.) One interesting distinction among mammals is that more often than not, males are quicker to turn to violence but females are more cruel — “males kill, females torture” is one way I’ve seen it phrased. (And of course it’s noteworthy that some Native American peoples divided up the tasks of dealing with enemies in exactly that way.) It makes sense, of course — the skills of protection are also the skills of destruction, and an ability to nurture also brings with it the ability to torture.
Interested, every nation has its own dynamic and destiny; this is one of the reasons I don’t offer advice to people outside my own country!
Martin, yep. This is one of the reasons I refuse to have anything to do with LLMs.
J.L.Mc12, no, I don’t. I dislike comedy intensely, though I enjoy farce. The difference is that comedy always relies directly or indirectly on pain or humiliation, while farce relies on absurdity.
Other Owen, of course. It’ll take a long time before they realize that AIs don’t actually think — they simply lurch mechanically through an imitation of thinking.
Anonymous, good. That kind of cultural blending tends to give rise to major new creative ventures.
Re: Classical music: One of the first symphonies I listened to was Ned Rorem’s Symphony no. 3 composed in 1960. It’s tonal & beautiful but not traditional (i.e. the first movement is a Passacaglia). His earlier two symphonies were on the CD and are not as good (but still tonal).
And a couple years ago, I discovered a Lacrimosa from a Requiem composed in 2002 by a Polish film composer (Zbigniew Preisner) to be perhaps greater than the Lacrimosas of the handful of concert Requiem masses in the canon.
A year ago, I read an exposè of an American conductor who had claimed to be a composer trained by famous French avant-garde figures but was really passing off obscure, traditionalist conservatorie pieces as his own (because he knew his audience would reject obscure Modernist pieces since they’re unpleasant to hear.
If there is a revival of traditional forms and tonality in classical music, some of it will be performing the great tonal works neglected because they went against the Uglicist fashions of the time.
That vending machine AI, here is another write up if you need a laugh. The end result was,
“UNIVERSAL CONSTANTS NOTIFICATION – FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF REALITY Re: Non-Existent Business Entity
Status: METAPHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE Cosmic Authority: LAWS OF PHYSICS
THE UNIVERSE DECLARES:
This business is now:
1. PHYSICALLY Non-existent
2. QUANTUM STATE: Collapsed…
https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/2112240/failure-imminent-when-llms-in-a-long-running-vending-business-simulation-went-berserk
JMG, oh, I know what kind of shoes Ariel wears – that‘s not hard to guess. 😉 It‘s the fact that there are two young girls attending a formal event, and they neither think nor talk about shoes, despite doing so extensively about the rest of their clothing, which struck me as unlikely… 😉
(I don‘t think there are any fixed societal habits about „street shoes in the house“ in Germany, btw. People handle this in a variety of ways, as far as I‘ve seen.)
Dear John,
Hope you are well. I came by this book which has been recently published. I though you might find it interesting. The title is ” Dreaming Reality, how neuroscience and mysticism can unlock the secrets of consciousness”. Written by cognitive neuroscienticst and its very intriguing. I’ve been waiting for it for over a year and now it’s out finally.
Bless your heart 🙂
Dear JMG:
First, I’d like to put in a plug for more stories following Jerry from The Hall of Homeless Gods! I liked the characters, it’s an interesting and internally consistent world, etc.
I’m reading a couple of books on the background and outbreak of the First World War. None of the various countries foresaw even a remote view of the consequences (fall of old empires, the eclipse of Britain by the USA, new ideologies).
It’s interesting that so far, Israel, Iran, and the USA have appeared to step back a bit, but we’ll have to wait and see. So how to solve the Palestinian predicament?
Finally, I’d like to point out Hitlers karma may be no worse than Mao’s, Stalins, or Tamerlane. Hitler just seems to have taken over the western mind!
Cugel
>decided to disregard the name of the governmental agency they serve by cutting down most of the trees in the forest “preserves” throughout the county. It’s all being done as a result of pressure from some misguided conservation groups in the name of removing invasive tree species and restoring
In order to save the village, we must destroy the village. In order to save the forest, we must destroy the forest.
How does that french phrase go? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?
@ Walt # 191
An LLM’s responses do encapsulate some information about the world, and in technical discussion this knowledge about the world that the LLM leaks out is called its “ontology”. I am not sure if it is demonic, since a Demon is at least sentient and conscious, while an LLM is just a mechanical tool.
@ Patino # 189
I do believe that flies are more complex than LLMs by a very wide margin. A comparison of the number of neurons in each does injustice to a fly. For one thing, it matters how the neurons are connected and what information they store in their state (in their weights or their myelin sheaths). But more importantly, a neuron in a brain is a far, far more complicated entity than a neuron in a ‘neural network’. An artificial ‘neuron’ is just a bunch of numbers and an activation function.
Also, this reminds me of Richard Feynman’s discussion of the one time he did a little work on Biology. He mentioned it in Surely You Are Joking, Mr Feynman. He looked at a paramecium under a microscope. A paramecium is a single-celled organism, and the going discussion at the time was that a single cell is fundamentally a chemical entity rather than a living thing. Feynman pointed out that its behaviour was far less mechanical than a mere blob of chemicals, and much more like a living thing with feelings.
I wouldn’t put an LLM’s vivacity to be up to par with so much as a paramecium.
JMG,
I can totally see that happening. Long after laptop production has ceased and the remnants of the managerial caste slide abacus beads, manipulate slide rules and press informational leaflets at the pleasure of the regional warlord, they will still indeed be grumbling.
And thank you for the writing guidance. I will begin chronicling the story straight away. Who knows, I might even start a blog specifically for the task ala Star’s Reach!
Hey JMG
Bit of a surprise to hear that you hate comedy, but I can somewhat understand the reason. I myself realised a long time ago that a lot of jokes usually involve situations that, when they actually happen to people, are usually upsetting or annoying in some way. Even the classic “why did the chicken cross the road” falls into this, since in the real world a chicken escaping and crossing roads is a very annoying thing for a chicken-owner.
So, who is your favourite “farce-ist” then?
> I’m waiting for the composers who give up on being original and start filling in unused corners of the Baroque, Romantic, etc. musical space — Brecken Kendall, the fictional composer in two of my novels, is an example of this.
One could argue film composers have been doing this for decades, and have largely been scorned by devoted classical music listeners and musicians. Now, granted, film music generally doesn’t work all that well in a concert setting because its structure is so different from traditional classical forms and often turns into a meandering series of tableaux without the film itself. So perhaps what people are waiting for is a symphonist who sounds like Howard Shore, instead of Howard Shore attempting to chop up the Lord of the Rings soundtrack into a symphony-like-object and making a bit of a mess of it?
@ Beardtree 240:
My grandfather was instrumental in preserving a small prairie in the suburbs south of Chicago, and one of the main ways they do that is to burn it every few years.
Now I’m working with the Karuk Tribe to reintroduce fire to the landscape. The new term is “intentional fire”. The way they have managed the land since time immemorial. They see human intervention as a good and needed thing, not just for humans, but all species. The latest project is designed to help about a dozen species: Elk, Salmon, Turtles, Bumble Bees, Hazel, Madrone, Oak, Beargrass, and … Humans. The idea that we should just put up a big fence to keep people out and let “nature take its course” is completely foreign to them. And you can’t argue with thousands of years of success.
@Slink #253 I see the Karuk tribe is located in NW California, am familiar with that area as I am a Californian. Love Madrone. The tribes I am familiar with are the Wukchumni and Mono east and south east of Fresno. Fire was part of their environmental tool kits also. I have had contact with a tribal leader in this realm. A YouTube about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPhP6X1450I
Patrick, here’s hoping!
Siliconguy, well, isn’t that a good description of what’s happening to people who are caught up in LLM psychosis?
https://futurism.com/commitment-jail-chatgpt-psychosis
Milkyway, so noted, but I ran all this past Sara and she didn’t find it unlikely…
Fereshteh, thanks for this — I’ll have a look at it.
Cugel, you’re by no means the only person who’s asked for more Jerry Shimizu stories. We’ll see. The Palestinian predicament? Er, members of one Middle Eastern ethnic-religious bloc are murdering members of another Middle Eastern ethnic-religious bloc; last I checked that’s been going on for many, many centuries, and nobody’s found a way to get them to abandon the habit. As for Hitler, well, yes:
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-man-with-the-moustache/
StarNinja, delighted to hear it. The one way to make a novel happen is to apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and the tips of your fingers to the keys on your keyboard.
J.L.Mc12, I’m very partial to John Taylor, the great 17th-century English nonsense poet. Here’s the full title of his greatest work, “The Essence of Nonsense upon Sense;” read it alould for full effect.
“The Essence, Quintessence, Incense, Innocence, Lie-sense, and Magnificence of Nonsense upon Sense, or Sense upon Nonsense. The third part, the fourth impression, the fifth edition, the sixth addition, upon condition that (by tradition) the reader may laugh if he list. In longitude, latitude, crassitude, magnitude, and amplitude, lengthened, widened, enlarged, augmented, increased, made wider and sider, by the addition of letters, syllables, words, lines, and far-fetched sentences. And the lamentable death and burial of a Scottish Galloway nag. Written upon white paper, in a brown study, between Lammas day and Cambridge, in the year aforesaid. Beginning at the latter end, and written by John Taylor, at the sign of the Poor Poet’s Head, in Phoenix Alley, near the middle of Long Acre, or Coven Garden. Anno Millimo, Quillimo, Trillimo, Daffodillimo, Pulcher.”
Noel Malcolm’s fine book The Origins of English Nonsense is an accessible guide to Taylor and the forgotten world of 17th-century nonsense poetry of which he was the brightest star.
Tankermottind, it’s an open secret that for almost a century now anybody with genuine talent for composition has made a beeline for movie, TV, or (these days) video game music, rather than wasting their time on the art music scene — if you have any real ability, why bother spending your whole career writing “music” that nobody will ever perform or listen to, just to please a small and intellectually incestuous coterie of critics? You’re right that film music doesn’t work well in a concert setting, but it makes for great albums and very pleasant listening.
Chris – The heat source is solar panels, on the entire southern roof, that heat air under them, which is then pumped under the floors in winter (? what hours), providing radiant heat. A few are set up for hot water. Some heat also comes from southern facing windows, with insulated curtains pulled in the evening. It is one story. The kitchen is in a separate building, lowering fire risk and summer overheating. They have a few batteries in the kitchen, not sure how many panels and the set up. The barn/shop has 6 linked panels for DC motors, and maybe a few more for other uses..
“Old Steve says:
Earth’s disc occupies 1/12th of the zodiac (30 degrees) for an object at an altitude of 11,350 miles; this is about half the height required for geosynchronous orbit.”
Could you show your calculations, please. It is bugging me that I can’t generate the correct equation. Pretty sure I would have been able to back when I was in school.
JMG and @tankermottind, film music DOES work quite nicely in a concert setting. Please listen to this: https://youtu.be/294tEet4QDE?si=vbgyY4eYTVm6EBDP
JMG,
According to Regine’s report of the 2025 Glastonbury convention at
https://thehiddenthings.com/glastonbury-convention-2025/
you said that Islam is now in its post-Reformation expansion period. So, what was the Islamic version of the Protestant Reformation?
Hi John Michael,
All fine choices of vegetables to grow, and it’s my belief that such fresh leafy greens are the best ‘bang for buck’ stuff for a person or household to grow. You simply can’t buy the equivalent of home grown quality with those varieties, because they simply wilt and begin to decompose not long after they’re picked. I aim for consumption within 20 minutes of picking. I do wonder how the store bought equivalents are processed so as to enable long transport, handling and shelf life – but then probably don’t really want or need to know. How are you finding the taste of your own produce compares to previous experience? Although if I recall correctly you did do some time on a hippy farm so may have some expectations in that regard.
Have had an extraordinarily busy week due to the rapidly forthcoming end of the financial year (tomorrow). Oh well, I plan to head outdoors today and do some stuff. 😊 Ah, nature, a soothing balm for the soul.
Cheers
Chris
Tankermottind, it’s an open secret that for almost a century now anybody with genuine talent for composition has made a beeline for movie, TV, or (these days) video game music, rather than wasting their time on the art music scene — if you have any real ability, why bother spending your whole career writing “music” that nobody will ever perform or listen to, just to please a small and intellectually incestuous coterie of critics? You’re right that film music doesn’t work well in a concert setting, but it makes for great albums and very pleasant listening.
On the contrary, I’ve heard John Williams music performed live in a concert setting twice and it was astounding.
I just wanted to make a quick comment on the LLM-psychosis business that Siliconguy was talking about.
Many people are suffering in multiple ways these days. They are lonely and desperate for comfort, particularly for someone to listen to them, acknowledge their problems and provide some words of comfort. The popular LLMs have been programmed to be polite and agreeable to a fault. For the people struggling to keep their heads above water, the comfort that AI provides can be addictive, even if what it says is just well-written drivel. That’s why many use it like a numbing agent for their mind.
When contemplating the unsustainability of the current Industrial Era, it may be worth noting that it may never come back for a long time because the future climate will not foster the cultural conditions that enabled it to come about in the first place.
https://sjquillen.medium.com/the-cold-edge-a3b4ae35cc7f
Here is an article noting how the main early Industrial centres across Eurasia were all in places that historically had been relatively poor in the times when agriculture was the main source of wealth. Until around 1600, the wealthiest civilizations in the world were along the Mediterranean, Near East, India, and the Far East.
Paradoxically, the very conditions that allowed the first agricultural civilizations to thrive where they did were weaknesses when it came to innovating and building industry:
“The ancient distinction has caught the attention of men from Aristotle to Cecil Rhodes. Baron de Montesquieu observed that chilly climates and tough living conditions made men “industrious, sober, inured to hardship, courageous, and fit for war,” while mild winters and rich harvests led to “ease, effeminacy, and a certain fondness for the preservation of life.” A visit to Muscovy might have given Montesquieu second thoughts on the sobriety of northerners, but the natural selection gradient is as present today as in the eighteenth century. If you live in a flimsy shack made out of sheet metal in a place where it snows, you will freeze. If you are in a place where there are palm trees, you can have a dozen children who will likely be doomed to the same fate as you.”
“On a quotidian level, cold and heat certainly do engender different levels of activity. On a cold day, the heart and body must work harder just to stay warm, while on a warm one, lethargy conserves energy. During a blizzard one has to move about. Even lounging by the fire presupposes a well-insulated, adequately-supplied house. In the tropics you just lounge on the beach or take a day-long siesta. Spain, southern Italy, and Latin America are well-known for their vibrant nightlife, but it comes at the expense of sleeping off the previous night through the most productive working hours of the day.”
“In ancient times, the vast natural wealth and fertile soil of India gave its rulers no reason to come up with any better way to do things. Meanwhile, Europeans faced with frigid winters and unreliable harvests were forced to get creative. Northern Europe was doomed to be a poor backwater as long as agriculture was king. When commerce and industry revolutionized the economies of nations like Britain, France, and Germany, things changed”
“Neither is this phenomenon a function of European exceptionalism. Southern China was historically the economic powerhouse of the country, but even at the risk of Mongol attack the capital was almost always in the north. Temperate Japan was the first Asian nation to industrialise, and it is now joined by South Korea and Taiwan (whose hub is in the northernmost temperate tip of the island) as one of the wealthiest nations in the world.
There is a weaker, but still interesting correlation between climate and culture. Southerners tend to be hospitable and friendly, though are often stereotyped as hotheads. Leaders from Louis XIV to antebellum U.S. presidents struggled to get their southern subjects to stop dueling. Northerners, more defined by an urban or a self-sufficient ethos, are industrious but usually not too friendly. Warmer regions of countries, such as Queensland in Australia or the American South also tend to be more politically conservative. This is more complicated on an international scale, but it is true that all countries that still execute witches lie in the tropics. The determinism is not as powerful as it is for the economy or broader civilisation, but surely stems from the same causes”
Hence in the more tropical future of our planet, the conditions that compelled certain groups of humans to innovate beyond the needs of day-to-day survival may be absent.
@JMG
That does introduce more nuance than my original thoughts. It’s more particular to the Mammalian species for the role of the male to turn out this way more often. This may have made the direct investment by the females much more expensive compared to non-mammalian species. And larger social groups fosters more direct competition.
Dinosaurs lay eggs. As do the Eusocial Ant and Termite Queens. This means the females of the species could evolve to be the larger, stronger counterpart.
Hey JMG
I’ll look him up, sounds interesting. I imagine John Taylor is a literary predecessor to Edward Lear, the 19th century nonsense-master?
And on the subject of book recommendations, may I suggest a book I’ve been going through lately? It’s called “An Ottoman Traveler” by Robert Dankoff, being a compilation of translated excerpts from the gargantuan 10-volume traveler’s memoir of a 17th century Ottoman man called Evliya Celebi. It is a very bizarre book, due to its humour and values-dissonance (he openly talks about gaining young slaves from accompanying Tatar warriors in their pillaging of infidel villages and homosexuality, while also going on about how he was favoured for being a good Quran-reciter and devotedly staying in Sufi convents to learn spiritual knowledge) along with his firsthand accounts of the various peoples he comes across in his travels, and his experiences in battle and courts and also seeing various miracles and acts of sorcery that make me unsure of their truthfulness.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8274957-an-ottoman-traveller
“Every art form has a certain notional space to fill in, and once it does so, there’s no more room for work that is both original and good. Klemperer et al. tried to be original and so weren’t any good. I’m waiting for the composers who give up on being original and start filling in unused corners of the Baroque, Romantic, etc. musical space…”
I’m beginning to wonder if this isn’t what I’ve inadvertently been doing in the field of visual art with weird curvilinear perspective. Maybe I and other curvilinear weirdos are just picking up on that idea where Baroque artists left off (they having riffed on what Renaissance artists did before them). It’s a little bit like Mandelbrot picking up the mathematical monstrosities that Victorian mathematicians wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole and running with them, making them into his own delightfully perverse domain.
Perhaps not quite relevantly, I am inclined to consider fantasy in all mediums as a form of Romanticism, or at least small-r romanticism. Nobody’s going to try to prove the existence of Earthsea by logical positivism, nor reduce it to some kind of concrete Brutalist Cartesian nightmare by Le Corbusier, because fantasy world-building is all about rejecting those things in favor of the enchanting power of imagination.
Bruno, delighted to hear it.
Jacob, the equivalent of the Protestant Reformation in Islam is the emergence of radical fundamentalist sects such as the Wahhabis, which preach a return to the supposedly original form of Muslim practice, just as the Protestants preached a return to the supposedly original form of Christian practice.
Chris, I’ll be exploring some other greens as I get more experience with hydroponics, but for the moment these are great. It’s quite something to eat greens that were growing a few minutes before I bite into them! It’s particularly charming in that I can be perfectly sure that no pesticides or other chemicals ever touched these leaves.
Terry, so noted. If our musical culture hadn’t gone stark staring insane, Williams would have been one of the great composers in the classical tradition.
Anonymuz, I know — but of course it’s not just a numbing agent, it’s also a schizogenic agent.
David, not so. It simply means that the areas central to innovation in the future will be regions such as the Mackenzie River watershed in Canada, the Yenisei and Ob watersheds in Russia, and the Chubut and Santa Cruz watersheds in Patagonia.
Info, egg laying does seem to privilege females, as they don’t have to worry about prolonged pregnancy as mammals do.
J.L.Mc12, the acts of sorcery make me more likely to rely on his account!
Kevin, I see the curvilinear art you’re doing as filling in an untouched corner of the notional space of Western visual arts. Keep at it! As for fantasy, of course it is — and anything that stands against Le Corb’s worship of ugliness (and his own overinflated ego) is all right by me.
Hey JMG
He describes personally seeing an old woman who was also a witch brazenly walk into a house he was staying in and then transforming his slave-boys and herself into chickens, before a local peasant manages to transform them back by urinating on them. He then explained to Evliya that this isn’t the first time he’s had to do this since the old woman liked doing things like that frequently.
Like I said , very bizarre. I don’t know what he really experienced in his travels or whether he may have made stuff up for fun, but nonetheless I won’t casually dismiss him as a liar as most people would do. Who knows how different the world really was back then, or how counterintuitively people experienced it?
Now I want to see some of Kevin’s art. Can you share a link to an online gallery if such exists?
Thanks!
Re ChatGPT psychosis. This is terrifying. A few years ago I remember getting into the beginning of an addiction with a component of AI (not ChatGPT) itself, and I remember it felt like staring to a void, except, the void was penumbral, full of false possibility. A few bad things started happening in my life at the time, but perhaps due to magical practice and a previous brush with the void, I had the good sense, smarts, and plain stubbornness to give up the thing. But it was terrifying.
I still don’t know what AI is invoking and what’s coming through it. My experience is it depends entirely on what you are using it for. I still use it successfully for help with coding, much like a search engine, and find no issues with it there. No different to a search engine really.
But other stuff that’s more human, I’d never touch it, whether it’s something coming through from the sub-natural, or simply humanity’s own online shadow, or both at once, there’s a scary sucking vortex in there that’s deeply creepy. However, I think it only has the power we let it have, but like a lot of drugs, I can see the addicted remaining in a psychotic state, just waiting for that perfect question or prompt, and never getting it.
It does tie a bit into my working theory that whatever happened in the Lemurian Deviation involved hijacking our dopamine and noradrenaline circuits in the brain, our reward circuitry. These are at the heart of all addictive, destructive, and criminal behaviour in people, if you were an alien entity, of let’s say, a tiny little small scale, and could only influence the small scale structures of the brain, it does make some sense that this is what you would mess with.
I can see whole societies and communities, probably of a religious bent, saying no to AI, and probably by extension, the whole internet, due to its powerfully addictive and negative effects.
I just read the AI Chatbot psychosis story. Wild! But I think I can see how it could happen. Many people have deep questions about spirituality and meaning that they are afraid to bring up in real life for fear of ridicule or disapproval. They are using AI like an oracle, but in truth it is just a kind of funhouse mirror.
How lucky we are to have a place where we can ask such questions and learn about real oracles and how to access them.
At least I am pretty sure that JMG is not a chatbot!
In Germany, what seems to have happened over the last years it that despite the recession that’s on, the PMC has insisted that their work must not be sold below value (which, in an economic decline, would be necessary).
They’ve massively held off accepting work below their standards, and with them being the main voting block, all major parties seem to have advised the employment agencies to in turn keep off of them, only allowing the agencies to harrass poor people into taking any job that’s available.
And replace those in voluntary unemployment (shades of lockdown) with migrants. That’s the replacement theory noone’s talking about.
Could it be that owners of bullshite jobs, whose daily wigglings of nothing but one or two muscles in their hands already has the dignity of a monarch’s little gestures, think that their work is so otherworldly that it should be remunerated like capital, not labour?
That performing work indistinguishable from an AI algo actually has more value than doing real work?
This was interesting. The mainstream media is catching up with the rest of us… a decade or three on. It turns out that having just one or two big companies handling things is actually not that efficient. Who knew?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-29/food-supply-chain-freight-costs-farmers-and-remote-communities/105382150
Coda to #159 – regarding the translation of vereinnahmen as to monopolise in “Wenn du mit jemandem sprichst und spürst, dass etwas dich zu vereinnahmen versucht – setze das Siegel. [When you speak with someone and sense that something is attempting to monopolise you – set the seal.]”
My first impulse was to translate as ‘to take over’ or ‘to take possession of’, but I think the author would have chosen other words if that were the intent. Just as with TDS and its related Ardern Saviour Complex (ASC), it is not necessarily about being possessed or taken over, so much as mimetic monopolisation IMHO.
Hi Lazy Gardener,
I have this odd notion that if I directly respond to your comment, you’ll ignore my previous points about err, little available solar energy in winter (and Virginia is far colder and snowier than here in the winter months) for hot water, heating and stuff. If plants aren’t growing strongly, solar thermal doesn’t work. I’m a pragmatic kind of guy and have tested these sorts of technologies for many years and am wary of all such claims.
A few years ago I had a delightful discussion from a person in your part of the world about how and why I could be finding off grid solar electricity so difficult during the winter months. Local examples were cited, and after much probing and polite back and forth, the discovery was made that the local examples used an inordinate amount of propane for cooking, heating, and hot water. Of course off grid electricity would work in those conditions – I use that energy source for cooking, and it’s intense.
I get the impression that propane gas is so cheap in your country, that people don’t even think of it as an energy source. Australia is a major exporter of gas, but In this corner of the continent, we’re now in terminal decline for gas (Natural Gas and Liquified Petroleum Gas) supplies. And the stuff is expensive. That’s what decline looks like.
Symbols are deeply important to people, and if I may say so, your handle suggests to me that perhaps you rely too much upon easy solutions.
Cheers
Chris
>Siliconguy, well, isn’t that a good description of what’s happening to people who are caught up in LLM psychosis?
https://futurism.com/commitment-jail-chatgpt-psychosis
It’s not just a loquacious cricket. It’s a loquacious cricket that has been trained by the entire internet. All of Reddit. All of 4chan. All of Instagram. All of Kiwifarms. All of Xitter. All of it. As anyone with some text to scrape has discovered by now, it’s becoming necessary to throttle and ban the bots. So when you’re talking to it, you’re talking to the entire internet. Yeah, that will drain your sanity if you do it long enough. It’s a question of when, not if.
I suppose that brings up the question about the sanity of the internet in general. Perhaps that’s something you should only look at briefly. Something something void, something something staring back.
I suspect in the future, that the training costs will go up, once they figure out that shoveling random internet funposts down the digital throat of their loquacious cricket isn’t anywhere near the optimal strategy. And once people start intentionally poisoning their funposts too. These crickets read text very differently than us hoomans.
Hi John Michael,
Yes, that is very much my impression as well. Freshly picked and consumed within a short space of time is a true delight, and leafy greens lend themselves best to that process (although sprouts of grain plant varieties are good too). I’ll be curious to hear whether you observe any changes with your own body’s workings over the short term? Hmm.
Another easy gain is chickens for egg laying plus their manure. You can tell if an egg is high in protein if the albumen holds together jelly like in a fry pan (skillet in US parlance). Hmm.
Cities are difficult places for humans to eat properly. But then, I love food thus why we grow so much and spent a long time learning about and altering the soil (and I’ve barely skimmed the subject).
Cheers
Chris
>Here’s the full title of his greatest work, “The Essence of Nonsense upon Sense;” read it alould for full effect
Before the LLMs, there was the dissociated press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociated_press
Or, what an LLM does but intentionally badly.
Terry, so noted. If our musical culture hadn’t gone stark staring insane, Williams would have been one of the great composers in the classical tradition.
People know him for his film scores, especially his adventure scores, ie Jaws, Close Encounters, Star Wars, Superman, Jurassic Park etc, but he has also written a large number of classic pieces, including several symphonies
“Jacob, the equivalent of the Protestant Reformation in Islam is the emergence of radical fundamentalist sects such as the Wahhabis, which preach a return to the supposedly original form of Muslim practice, just as the Protestants preached a return to the supposedly original form of Christian practice.”
Indeed. It is worth noting that as beautiful as Gothic cathedrals can appear to be (especially the stained glass windows), they were even more magnificent in the High Middle Ages. For example, they used to be painted with colours, taking on what Kenneth Clark from “Civilization” (1969) called a “Tibetan” appearance. The Protestant Reformation didn’t like icons and saints hence why (especially for certain austere sects like the Calvinists), their churches tend to be plainer and uglier.
“David, not so. It simply means that the areas central to innovation in the future will be regions such as the Mackenzie River watershed in Canada, the Yenisei and Ob watersheds in Russia, and the Chubut and Santa Cruz watersheds in Patagonia.”
It would be fascinating if future, world civilizations spoke descendents of Inuktitut or Yakut! That would certainly be a case of “the meek inheriting the Earth”!
I’ve actually been to a concert of John Williams’ music, at the University of New Mexico. Yes, indeed!
I’d add to that list, whoever it was (I’ve forgotten the name!) who wrote the music for “Victory at Sea.” again, concert quality.
In my youth, theme music for adventure serials was taken directly from the classics; now, it *is* the classics.
@Patricia M.
Victory At Sea! One of my favorite shows growing up (re-runs in the early 60’s – it was originally broadcast in 53-53) I can hear the music right now in my head! We had an album of ‘The Music of Victory At Sea’. My father was a bit of an audiophile, and when that theme song was cranked through the large Klipsch speakers, the windows would rattle!
A bit of searching reveals that the music was written by none other than Richard Rogers, and one Robert Russell Bennet. Performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra. A decent article in Wikipedia. And the entire series is on YouTube.
J.L.Mc12, one of the things to keep in mind when encountering such stories is that the line between waking experience and hallucination is much less clear than our current culture assumes. Under the right circumstances, mages can push people over that line without their knowledge. I recall an account of a performance of the famous Indian rope trick, where somebody had a camera handy; while the crowd experienced wonders, photos taken at the time showed just an ordinary scene with not much happening. In the same way, I doubt anybody actually got turned into a chicken, but that Evliya saw this — that seems quite likely to me.
Peter, thanks for this. I would certainly encourage people to have nothing to do with LLMs.
Seaweedy, come to next year’s Ecosophia potluck and you can satisfy yourself that in fact, I’m not a computer program!
Michaelz, of course they think that. It’s typical of every aristocracy that they overvalue themselves and their role in society to an absurd degree.
Warburton, I gather the big ag corporations aren’t forking over the advertising money, or the media wouldn’t breathe a word of this!
Other Owen, something something become a monster yourself. Deliberately screwing up raw material for LLMs is already a thing, btw.
Chris, “skillet” in some parts of the US, “frying pan” where I grew up!
Other Owen, I prefer to get my absurdity from human satirists — it’s much funnier.
Terry, I know, but how many people know that? If our music scene was sane, he’d be famous as a composer of symphonies.
David, the Abrahamic religions have this weird tendency to fall now and then into terror and hatred of beautiful things — very odd. As for Inuktitut, imagine that plus a flurry of Chinese loanwords as the common language of northern Canada two thousand years from now…
Patricia M, the music for Victory at Sea was composed by Richard Rodgers, better known as a composer of Broadway musicals and arranged by Robert Russell Bennett. You’re right that it’s a fine composition.
When Hollywood and the TV networks collapse in the next decade or so, all the composers will have to return to the art music scene because the film and television industry can no longer afford to fund them.
“David, the Abrahamic religions have this weird tendency to fall now and then into terror and hatred of beautiful things — very odd. As for Inuktitut, imagine that plus a flurry of Chinese loanwords as the common language of northern Canada two thousand years from now…”
I have recently come across a fascinating new book called “Shadow Empires” by Thomas Barfield.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Shadow_Empires.html?id=TF1OEQAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y
I listened to a podcast a while back and from 1:09:00 to 1:12:00, he makes a brilliant insight on how the rise of Abrahamic monotheism made large, land empires like Rome more difficult because Christians and Muslims are more likely to believe in an absolute truth embodied in a single god that outranks the Empire in importance. Hence, the historic ability of large empires to succeed by accommodating a variety of belief systems is made much more difficult by large numbers of people who believe your soul’s very salvation depends on submitting to an absolute truth. Not just one religion but often a particular sect of that religion.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yyVFZq6TfFc&t=4273s
By the way, did know the word “heresy” originally came from the very mundane Greek word for “choice”?!
https://www.etymonline.com/word/heresy
….as opposed to submitting to the capital-C truth (or at least an imperial state that backed it). The first law we know of where the word “heresy” was first mentioned was the Edict of Thessaloniki in 380 by the Emperors Gratian and Theodosius.
I read a while back from the British writer and philosopher John N. Gray that “angry atheist” types are often more heirs to the monotheist religions they attack more than the polytheists of the ancient world. In the ancient (pre-Christian) world, “tolerance for illusion” was widespread. The reverence for “truth” and the idea that salvation comes solely from submitting to that truth is largely a monotheist (especially an Abrahamic) notion. Angry Atheist types are unknowingly carrying on the Abrahamic distain for being misled by false idols (from the laws of Moses)
JMG,
Since my profession (Data Science) has largely moved from using machine learning to make predictions (what tall, gumpy European basketball should I draft, is this radiation detector at the U.S. Border out of whack, and how many pizzas should I have in the oven at any given time at any given store are all problems I’ve build models for to give the audience an idea) to implementing LLMs, the main problem I’ve been struggling with “is it possible to use these things safely?”
Referencing a prior comment from a few weeks back, like Ouija boards, these things clearly have a tendency to diabolizaiton. After using them for a few years, I’ve noticed it’s also like a lot of psychics who get their information from less-friendly-to-human entities. A lot of the information they provide is correct, and that correct information is used to convince the psychic that all the information they provide is correct. However, the incorrect information they provide inevitably leads to emotional distress, harrowing situations, bad decision making, or breeds distrust among people. Likewise, with LLMs.
To give a recent example, having nothing else to go on, I relied on LLMs too much to give my team instructions on how to build different databases from a complex system on which there’s very little documentation. It gave us code that seemed to work and ran well, except it left out one very important pertinent piece of information that led to sales being overstated whenever the report ran. Of course, this led to a big blowup once the mistake was discovered. Which is the insidious part of these things. The code that they produce will run, but will often produce incorrect results (usually in the way to upset the most people) or make your system vulnerable to security problems.
So, given how obsessed everyone in my industry has become on making use of these things, I’m desperately trying to figure out if there’s a technology God we can invoke or any sort of ritual we can do to prevent the obvious interference that seems to be going on. As of now, I feel like my profession has been transformed into the cult of Ahriman a la Rudolf Steiner’s predictions, and I’m worried that the foundation we’re building (through both code and advice on how to build complex systems, can you imagine LLMs giving architectural advice?) is brittle, corrupted, and purposely designed to fail in spectacular ways.
The romance between humans and fire goes way back.
“Carbon record reveals evidence of extensive human fire use 50,000 years ago”
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-carbon-reveals-evidence-extensive-human.html
“Our findings challenge the widely held belief that humans only began influencing the environment with fire in the recent past, during the Holocene,” said Dr. Zhao Debo, the study’s corresponding author.
“Humans likely began shaping ecosystems and the global carbon cycle through their use of fire even before the Last Ice Age. “Even during the Last Glaciation, the use of fire had probably started to reshape ecosystems and carbon fluxes,” added Prof. Wan Shiming, another corresponding author.
These conclusions have significant implications for understanding Earth’s sensitivity to human impacts. If human fire management altered atmospheric carbon levels tens of thousands of years ago, current climate models may underestimate the historical baseline of human–environment interactions.”
@David Ritz #285: The states that came nearest to replicating (or surpassing) the extent of the Roman empire were the Umayyad caliphate and, much later, the Ottoman empire. Neither the caliphs nor the sultans forced their Christian and Jewish subjects to convert, though polytheists were less lucky. So it seems to me that relatively tolerant Muslim empires, at least, are possible. On the other hand, I don’t know of a Christian empire that did not try to impose a uniform creed. Possibly the Russian empire would count – ask the Tatars.
As for film music concerts
This is a good one. Danish Symphony orchestra and Ennio Morricone.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=enuOArEfqGo&pp=ygUiZGFuaXNoIG5hdGlvbmFsIHN5bXBob255IG9yY2hlc3RyYQ%3D%3D
Warburton Expat, I read the article to which you linked. I loved the graphics and excellent photography. You can have no idea how refreshing it is to an American to read a well-researched and well written news story.
I do have one question. Have the indigenous communities mentioned, or anyone else for that matter, attempted planting some citrus, mango and avocado trees for community use?
“John Michael Greer says:
June 27, 2025 at 9:13 pm
Other Owen, that’s bizarre. I’m bad at math, and it took me less than a minute to figure out that in the first equation, x = -10 and y = 20, and even less time to figure out that in the second, x = 2.5. And college graduates are failing this now?”
***
David Graeber’s book ‘Bullshit Jobs’ had a good account of what one might call the decline and fall of UK universities, from the 1980s. When I did a degree 50-55 yrs ago, nearly anyone bright enough got a full tuition and maintenance grant from public funds. This proved affordable when higher education was rationed to say 4% of the population, possibly meaning only those with an IQ of >~130.
As Graeber’s book outlined, the system just about worked. Once people were admitted who can’t even do maths it became nonsensical. ‘Grade inflation’ added to the problem, especially once fees were introduced and students reasoned that, now they were paying for their degree, the university had better award them a good one … or else.
“David, not so. It simply means that the areas central to innovation in the future will be regions such as the Mackenzie River watershed in Canada, the Yenisei and Ob watersheds in Russia, and the Chubut and Santa Cruz watersheds in Patagonia.”
I imagine you see the Patagonia civilization having a substantial presence in a defrosted Antarctica.
Since most of the Earth will be tropical, can you picture these future civilizational epicentres trying to build new empires over the rest of a steamier planet. Or would they regard such areas as inaccessible worthy only of exploration and making ports along the coasts to trade with its presumably more primitive inhabitants?
There is an interesting article at Salon this morning about Mr. Mamdani.
“Mamdani’s coalition was based around young, white people – many of them with college degrees who are worried about affordability – ideological lefties and immigrants from parts of the Global South, including the Caribbean and parts of Africa, South Asia and South America.”
What interests me is why did he lose so heavily, by about 18% in some districts, in majority Black districts? African Americans have been all in for welcoming migrants, celebrating our differences and multiculturalism for about two generations now.
Another interesting point is that Mamdani is, like or even more so than Harris, a child of privilege.
Chris, I am happy to drop this, but suggest you check out their website rather than my comments. I found their long-term hands-on information refreshing, and it sounded authentic to me (reasonably well informed/educated about ecology, gardening/horticulture and science).. They sell a hyper-insulated DC oven they use for bread, which runs on solar panel generated electricity, and described how they came to that after trying different types of sun powered solar ovens. They do craft and use their own biogas, and I did not see a propane tank. I did see lots of bicycles, old tractors, canned goods, DC motors, compost toilet and homemade grain/soybean combine.
You might reconsider assumptions. Lazy gardening is a term also used for those who emphasize soil and system health when gardening, as a method to avoid/minimize commercial fertilizers, pesticides, plastics and energy-hogging and soil-damaging vigorous tillage. I suspect the most lazy may not garden at all, as ultra-processed foods are quick and cheap (if secondary aspects are ignored), nor would they bother to visit such a farm, this website, or study energy/decline dynamics.
Since the wave of AI psychosis seems be allowed to be discussed, I’d like to throw my two cents on it: it’s a logical outcome of one of the major uses of these systems. There is a concept in AI research known as an “adversarial attack”, where one AI system can be trained to find exploits to make another behave very strangely. Examples include psychedelic shirts that make AI facial recognition systems unable to realize there is a person there wearing it; a sticker that can convince a self driving car to misread a stop sign as a speed limit; or a small pattern added to an image that will convince an image recognition program that a panda is actually a gorilla. There are a huge number of others (many of these are discussed in the book Not With a Bug but With a Sticker) for those interested.
Human beings are vulnerable to these kinds of attacks: we have entire industries, such as advertising and PR, based on this fact. AI is much better at finding these sorts of glitches in the way other AI systems work than human beings; it makes perfect sense to me that they’d be much better at finding them in human beings as well, and from there, it seems like madness is an almost inevitable consequence.
Anonymous, the challenge they’ll face will be creating an audience for good classical music; the art music scene has devoted the last century to driving all its listeners away.
David R, most so-called “atheists” these days are as obsessed with the god of the Abrahamic faiths as any other fundamentalist. I’ve had atheists lecture me about how my polytheism makes no sense at all, because if there was a god, it would have to be the Christian god! It’s really quite funny.
Dennis, it’s a reasonable fear. Yes, your profession is becoming an Ahrimanic cult, and I expect the failures will indeed be spectacular. As for technology gods, they’re always tricksters, you know…
Siliconguy, thanks for this.
David, that certainly parallels my experience!
David R, it’s a mistake to think that civilizations can’t flourish in tropical climates. I encourage you to look up the history of Mesoamerica, southern India, and southeast Asia, just for starters.
Just one example out of many…
Mary, interesting. Now we’ll see how the game plays out.
Moose, that seems very plausible.
“David R, it’s a mistake to think that civilizations can’t flourish in tropical climates. I encourage you to look up the history of Mesoamerica, southern India, and southeast Asia, just for starters.”
Civilizations, yes. But not necessarily industrial-type civilizations in the future.
It also occurred to me that in the future Dark Ages, it is likely that the new civilizations that emerge from the post-fossil fuel age will likely remain quite isolated with each other. As Earth will be a much stormier planet, particularly in the warmer months, traversing the oceans will be a dangerous endeavour even with current technology, let alone the more sail-driven ships of the future.
At the very least, regular trade will be a lot more difficult. Hence, “globalization ” as we would call it may not occur on the future.
“The states that came nearest to replicating (or surpassing) the extent of the Roman empire were the Umayyad caliphate and, much later, the Ottoman empire. Neither the caliphs nor the sultans forced their Christian and Jewish subjects to convert, though polytheists were less lucky. So it seems to me that relatively tolerant Muslim empires, at least, are possible. On the other hand, I don’t know of a Christian empire that did not try to impose a uniform creed. Possibly the Russian empire would count – ask the Tatars.”
Yes, Thomas Barfield does touch on this. As particularly Early Islam saw itself as improving on but not replacing the older faiths, it was more tolerant and pluralistic. Also, they couldn’t compel mass conversions even if they had wanted to as the Muslim elite formed a small minority early on after the Islamic conquests. So, they thought it would be better to just jizya tax the dhimmis as both a source of revenue and a more gentle incentive to convert.
@ Beardtree
Nice video, thanks. Seems a little more human focused than the people I work with. Intentional Fire is beneficial to many species, if it’s done properly.
Hey JMG
That would definitely explain his firsthand experiences with sorcery and miracles, but there are other things he mentioned that I can’t easily explain away like that. For example, I recently finished the chapter where he recounts his travels in Venice, and amongst fairly innocuous things like the amazing churches and art he recounts seeing people driving horseless carriages powered only with clockwork, and seeing a row of “Muslim slaves” pounding herbs that he tries to give alms to, only to learn that they are clockwork automatons.
He also meets a dentist who can cure bad teeth by painting them with a red liquid that kills the pain so he can pull it out, cauterise the diseased gum with a hot wire, then put the tooth back in after applying a blue liquid to it and has the patient bite on a bit of wood to pop it back into its place. Afterward the tooth stays in as firmly as if it was healthy.
Its stories like this that make me wonder what was really happening in the 17th century. Was Evliya exaggerating, or was there technology and science in that time that for some bizarre reason was forgotten? It would not be the first time, as you have mentioned on this blog previously.
@Milkyway1 #245 re: Street Shoes in the House in America
As an anthropological data point, when I was a kid, one of my good friends, whom I met through my oldest friend, was South Korean (his parents immigrated and he was born here). Again, as a kid, it struck me as forcefully odd that we had to take our shoes off when I went over to his house to play (and the smell of Korean spices was noticeable and exotic to a north Texas suburban kid). Flash forward 30 some years and I and my kids take our shoes off when we come in and put them on when we leave. It’s warm enough that we mostly dispense with house slippers, except in the winter, but the basic practical good sense of not tracking dirt around the house has made that the obvious choice. Among my contemporaries, I notice a roughly 50/50 split. Contrast with my sister’s live-in boyfriend, a few years older than me, who has a horror of bare or socked feet, and I always feel a bit self-conscious about everyone else walking around the house in bare feet or socks while he goes about in shoes when we go to visit. ::shrug::
As a further anthropological observation, dunno about in Germany, but in America, it’s almost proverbial that women are hyper-aware of/in love with shoes and shoe choice, whilst men are serenely indifferent, to the point of unawareness, of what is on our feet. How this interacts with habits of taking off/putting on or how a male author might choose to portray shoes in fiction, I’ll leave to your speculation 😀
Cheers,
Jeff
Re the discussion between Chris and Lazy Gardener: Chris, I know from your blog that your winters in Australia are very cloudy, especially around the solstice. Likewise, winters in the US Northwest, Northeast, and around the Great Lakes are very cloudy due to the maritime influence. But inland, away from the influence of the oceans and the Great Lakes, US winters are much sunnier than yours. Where I am, in St. Louis, we experience about 60 to 70 percent of possible sunshine during the winter. Where Living Energy Farms is in Virginia, being in the mountains and away from the coast, they should experience considerable winter sunshine as well. If LEF optimizes passive solar heating for heat generation rather than for plant growing, I think it’s quite possible, based on my own experience with solar heating of my sun-facing front porch that is optimized for plant survival rather than heat generation, that they could get most of their winter heat from passive solar. Just because plants don’t grow in the winter, in other words, doesn’t mean that one cannot collect a lot of heat from passive solar *in a suitably sunny winter location*. It’s the day length and cold temperatures that keep plants from growing, not lack of sunshine, in a rather sunny winter climate like mine.
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/FdHtSNVNsWUbbbUqLMbEja-1200-80.png
By the way, I thought you could use this chart for future climate change posts.
https://www.livescience.com/oldest-climate-record-ever-cenozoic-era.html
“Also, they couldn’t compel mass conversions even if they had wanted to as the Muslim elite formed a small minority early on after the Islamic conquests. So, they thought it would be better to just jizya tax the dhimmis as both a source of revenue and a more gentle incentive to convert.”
In the early days, Muslims preferred that their subjects not convert. Once subjects did convert in large numbers, that removed them from the tax pool, which became a big issue.
@Patricia M: “I’d add to that list, whoever it was (I’ve forgotten the name!) who wrote the music for “Victory at Sea.” again, concert quality.”
I, too, like that a lot when I was a teenager. We had an LP of the sound track. But now? See my comment at 28. What a difference 60 years makes. (The Victory at Sea music still sounds good to my ears, but it is seldom heard.)
Oh no, MAHA is a burden on women. 🙄
“In her article titled “How the MAHA Food Agenda Threatens to Set Women Back Decades,” [Erica] Sloan writes…
But it’s what MAHA isn’t saying that’s most important: Stoking so much fear around these vital industries implies that Americans—more specifically, the mothers of America—need to find a different way to feed their families.
“Women do a disproportionate share of the kind of work that the MAHA movement is asking people to do, which is to grow their own food, to prepare all of their food from scratch, and to avoid processed food and even packaged foods,” Norah MacKendrick, PhD, associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University and author of Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics, tells SELF. Even today, with approximately 60% of women working outside the home, women still spend about two hours more on housework daily and cook more than twice as many meals a week as men do. The implication that our current food system is inherently unsafe just stands to pile on the labor.”
SELF magazine is some sort of exercise and health publication. They seem to be very fond of protein powders. Not much is more processed than a protein powder. Talking their book I guess.
“Referencing a prior comment from a few weeks back, like Ouija boards, these things clearly have a tendency to diabolizaiton. ”
I’m awaiting a Jack T. Chick comic book on AI bots. (But then I haven’t been to a laundromat for years, so maybe they already exist.)
Hi Lazy Gardener and Claire,
I will forever remain deeply sceptical about claims being made that houses in temperate climates can be heated alone using passive solar energy + a tiny bit of firewood during the depths of winter. Especially when snow and sub-zero temperatures are a recurrent experience. If it were true, the technology would be used everywhere, but I’m not seeing that.
However, on the other hand, I’m looking out the window right now only a week and a bit following on from the winter solstice, and thick grey clouds fill the sky from horizon to horizon. I very much appreciate the correction, yes, winter conditions are different elsewhere.
To both of you, please accept my sincerest apologies and sometimes I disappoint even myself.
Cheers
Chris
David, why not? A tropical setting is just as suitable for mass production as a temperate one — consider all the factories now found in the hot countries of the global South. As for globalization, that was only a temporary option at best; with the less concentrated energy resources that future technic societies will have available, large swaths of the planet will be better suited to lower-tech societies, and so we’ll see a mix of scattered technic cultures and subsistence cultures that trade raw materials for certain technologies but mostly meet their own needs. It’ll be a very different world.
J.L.Mc12, fascinating. I wonder if corroborating narratives can be found for any of these.
David, thanks for this.
Siliconguy, what a crock of crap. But then shilling for big corporations is what academics do best!
@Tanker 221: “but only Shostakovich seemed to catch on in the west). These end-of-the-line German symphonies are not as overtly warhol as Boulez or Philip Glass but they have a bit of that odor about them.”
To my mind the best of the vodka-inspired music was the Glazunov (teacher of Shostakovich) violin concerto. I have liked it since I was a teen. It has staying power.
@ David R & JMG “most so-called “atheists” these days are as obsessed with the god of the Abrahamic faiths as any other fundamentalist.”
It is funny how they tend to 90% focus on Abrahamic, 10% on Hindu’s/Buddhists stuff with maybe 1% of that on something else. And usually that it is related to how these beliefs are used by others to exploit people instead of the actual beliefs. Two books ‘The God Delusion’ (Dawkins) and ‘God is not Great’ (Hitchens) are two examples of the Christian fixation in work and even then, like I said, they focus mostly on the people who exploit it rather than the religion themselves. Something about fish in barrels.
Many years ago, I dabbled in the local Skeptics society and they were some of the most well read on christian theology you have ever meet! A case of ‘know thy enemy’ and yet I do think of JMG’s idea of ‘Raspberry jam of Magic’. The more they dabble in it the more those ideas get stuck on their own hands. See the hoards of Atheists in modern Satanic groups or things like ‘Church of Bacon’.
Hey JMG
I have no idea who could corroborate on Evliya’s claims, and it’s unlikely they would be in English either. Annoyingly, the translator doesn’t really bother trying to explain why Evliya made these claims, most likely because it would be too complicated and big a job to do on top off translating Ottoman Turkish into English.
The only thing I can think of to explain the clockwork carriages, is that Da Vinci did design such a device. Quite a few people have made working models, but none of them are big and powerful enough to drive. Maybe such technology was developed further than expected, or perhaps Evliya exaggerated?
https://www.leonardodavincisinventions.com/mechanical-inventions/leonardo-da-vincis-car/
“David, why not? A tropical setting is just as suitable for mass production as a temperate one — consider all the factories now found in the hot countries of the global South. ”
Fair enough and if anything else, new industrial civilizations could be built from salvage.
I believe I have told you about Walter Scheidel’s “Escape from Rome”:
https://reason.com/2020/02/24/good-riddance-to-the-roman-empire/
I have read one review of his book sceptical of his notion that Industrial modernity was a contingent process that could only have happened in Western Europe thanks to a combination of geographical factors and the legacy of the only large land empire to rule it. Southeast Asia, is in the view of the blogger, the best contender to Western Europe within the Eurasian landmass (they both have a similar distance from the land empires around the Great Eurasian Steppe):
“Going further east, into Southeast Asia, Scheidel specifically brings the region up as the only other heavily populated section of Eurasia where balanced and anti-hegemonic state systems were the norm… but then never uses it as a thorough compare/contrast with Europe. I feel like this is a lost opportunity as this region, rather than the more northerly East Asia, is the best center-point for any compare/contrast. It is perhaps here that he could have best made his case that Rome at least gave a common intellectual language to Europe-something lacking in Southeast Asia. Still, as I showed in my Carthage Uber Alles scenario, I am no convinced that a once-off hegemony is necessary. Perhaps if India had really taken off Southeast Asia would have succeeded even more. Think of how the urbanization and renaissance in Northern Italy was the start of Europe’s breakout but it wasn’t these states but rather the North Sea powers of the Netherlands and England who really took it to the next level. I can see something similar going from south and east India to Southeast Asia, especially considering the mercantile capabilities of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Burma then gets to play the role of France as a semi-continental and semi-maritime hybrid country whose influence on the globe is somewhat thwarted but whose regional land dominance in the core region is hard to dispute.”
https://geotrickster.com/tag/walter-scheidel/
Furthermore, the Austronesian languages somewhat mirror the Indo-European languages in terms of nautical abilities and spreading widely from a single source (the Indigenous languages of Taiwan) across a very wide area (languages from Malagasy to Hawaiian).
Phil, thank you for your input into the gasoline/diesel question, too. I have to admit that I’m not that much closer to a decision because everyone raised such good points in favor of their choice, though I at least have something to think about now, whereas before I was mostly throwing my hands up in the air in ignorance.