A brief post to kick off 2020. This is a response to today’s blogpost from Larry Krummer at Fabius Maximus, an upcoming guest on The Liminalist, and itself a response to Jim Kunstler’s end of the year blogpost. In the article, Krummer quotes Robert A. Heinlein’s timeline of his future history stories:
“The Crazy Years: Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation, and social institutions, terminating in mass psychoses in the sixth decade, and the interregnum. …{then there are more phases} followed by the end of human adolescence and the beginning of {the} first mature culture.”
This is an interesting quote but probably best placed in the context of Heinlein less as a literary prophet than as a highly-placed cultural engineer whose influence on creating today’s “Clown World” was not inconsiderable (one example, Stranger in a Strange Land was the pulp Bible of the Manson Family).
There’s an implicit suggestion in this quote, at least I think this is how Krummer means it, that our culture is growing up and just has to pass through its “liminal” adolescent phase before settling down into responsible adulthood. Yet, if we look at individuals in our culture, there’s not much evidence that adults are any more responsible, or mature, besides physically, than they were as teenagers. They may coagulate into a fixed kind of socialized identity that has a semblance of responsibility, but they never flower into true maturity. This can be seen by how old people in our culture are rarely treated as elders while, at the same time, they rarely act like them either. The worship of youth has the self-fulfilling result of the negation of maturation. When (as Oscar Wilde quipped) youth is wasted on the young, then the young get wasted ~ because they never really learn from their mistakes in a culture that never takes responsibility for itself.
As we touched on in our upcoming podcast), Krummer, like so many today, is missing a MAJOR piece in the puzzle and that is trauma, both individual and collective. The long-term effects of trauma, in simple terms, are dissociation from reality. This occurs via the fragmentation of the psyche and the construction of a false identity self that exists in a bardo realm of language, images, concepts, and ideas that, if unchecked, move us further and further from biological reality (viz a viz the transgender movement), and towards the reification of a sovereign, self-determining superego (Lucifer reigning in Hell). Until this is addressed, no maturation can occur, because maturity comes about only via direct and sustained interactions with reality. In the meantime, we have a clown world of collective Peter Pan syndrome, the worship of youth and the denial of the fundamental realities of biology: sex, aging, and death.
I think this is where the dreams of a long (or short) emergency come in, because we know, intuitively, that the only thing that will truly wake us TO reality is a direct encounter WITH reality. And one of the keys to trauma (as mapped out by Prisoner of Infinity) is that, since dissociation includes amnesia, which precludes healing, we unconsciously seek to re-enact the traumatic event, as a way to become conscious of it and so resolve it. This means that all of our conscious attempts to fix our situation, since they never address (cannot address) the root cause, end up having the opposite result. They reflect, and so materialize, an unconscious drive to recreate (or repeat) the original conditions we are consciously trying to get out of. And so every solution makes the problem worse, exponentially, until we are finally faced with “Apocalypse” —the revelation of the trauma-generated clown-face of our adolescent rebellion against Reality (God). The end of the program.
If this is what what 2020 vision means, it is no wonder we prefer to stay blinded by endless media streams of entertainment, including a whole pseudo “Woke” movement of post-New Age Second Matrix simulacra in which baselines to reality (such as biological sex) are no less negotiable than hairstyles.
All this implies that, verily, the end is nigh ~ so happy new year!
P.S. In such an apocalyptic state of mind, I have not arranged a live Liminalist meet-up yet for this year; but if you are interested, send me a line, or comment below. I do try to respond to audience requests.
Wow, what an eloquently-worded summary relating to our “state of the nation”. Looking forward to more of your observations in 2020.
Marshall Mcluhan was right about almost everything
but was he prophet or a cultural profiteer? 😉
One of my fears is that in response to the clown world we will end up with a counter reaction or a hard pendulum shift to a hard authoritative conservatism akin to how the rigidness of the 50s gave birth to its opposite in the 60s but in reverse.
There is an idea that Europe being flooded with immigrants is an engineered crisis designed to push an envelope and bring about a hard right xenophobia that only previously existed in the margins of society.
As much as i don’t see this becoming a majority,i could see it happening in a large enough scale to cause a civil split as both sides react to each other.
What happens then is up for debate but neither side seems likely to budge and the only factor that cuts through it being the market its anyones guess where society will plateau at.
I’m interested in the next meet up fyi.
Thanks
I think that you’re right. Even though artificial, both the vast number of immigrants flowing into Europe and the response of the disgruntled, it’s enough for a relatively small and well-positioned minority to cause the pendulum swing. Not out of the realm of imminent possibility, if not planned for already.
I think he’s right too & we can already see the signs of the intended swing-back; which part are you referring to as artificial?
society’s plateau may be humanity’s flatline, if the end-game is post-human rule
Artificial as in created by the powers that be. Razing countries and then directing the migrant’ movement into Europe. Similarly, flooding certain areas with immigrants where they become a sizeable minority with an enough of a presence to agitate the locals struggling to make ends meet.
I’m curious how remembering trauma leads to healing. Is it the awareness that our decisions to escape from a continuous negative inner feeling about ourselves prolongs these feelings? That there is really no reason to have these negative inner thoughts about ourselves as they were a result of past events in our history when we had no control of the event? Is growing up simply an acceptance of who we are, our limitations, and a responsibility to first, quit perpetuating the values that lead others away from their humanity and to their false selves, and secondly, set up an environment that helps others to stop their false narrative and accept their true selves? When did humanity as a whole experience trauma? The industrial revolution? Agriculture? Religion? Are we not hard wired as a species to constantly compete for resources, status, and mates? If you take away the ability to compete for resources, status, and mates, is despair, and seeking to avoid despair, natural states? How can a lion be a true lion if trapped in a zoo? Maybe we realize as a species that Apocalypse is the only way to get out of the zoo. Our species nature is to not live instinctually, but to form a narrative of ourselves that we constantly read and create through time. We live in imagination. That is our gift. So how do we change the story of our culture? Will there not be trauma once we realize our story was a fiction, that Santa is not real but a trick played on you by your parents. Can an individual even understand humanity as a whole, or our we individual neurons, firing in response to our environment, not able to experience the meta state self of humanity? Do you have a narrative that we can live by, that brings peace and harmony to ourselves, that is constructive and not destructive to nature? I am searching, and living, and growing, but feel a long way away from such a narrative. I do know that I am surrounded by others that don’t seem to question the narrative, that are happy to go along consuming, judging, planning for a future based on a false narrative. Do they know they are dissociated, can they feel it, can they stop consuming long enough to figure it out? Are you hopeful for our species?
so many questions, so little time
it isn’t about remembering the trauma but re-membering the psyche, as in undoing the dismemberment of fragmentation-traumatization and restoring wholeness to the body & the life force…. In Freudian terms it is genital dis-organization (freeing the life force from the solar phallic ego false identity, to redistribute through the whole body)… I don’t think it is a matter of finding a better narrative to live by but of re-accessing the life force and the sensation body which might then give rise to better narratives, ones that more closely approximate reality/wholeness.
Dear Seattle Jason, I was not able to reply to your comment about Climate Change directly. I think it was too far down the thread (nested levels).
1) Is “The Debate Over”?
2) Has CO2 never been higher than 300 ppm, ever (from all available sources of data, not just ice cores).
3) NASA has a policy paper on the Carbon Cycle, do you agree with all of what is written therein: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/CarbonCycle
4) Is CO2 concentration the dominant factor in Earth’s climate?
5) In the ice core record, what changes first, CO2, or is it Temperature?
6) In the last 2000 years, has the modern era (2000’s) been the warmest period?
7) Did we create all the deserts, like the Sahara, by deforestation?
8) Are there any other issues, anything at all, on planet earth, that is more important (tsunami escape – hundreds of thousands of deaths, for example)?
9) Do you fear space rocks, in the least?
10) Were all ancient peoples primitive minded “astrologers” – in the sense of those who believed comets spelled disAster? Was that just “astrology”? Even those people in the Americas, with the same beliefs about a flying feathered serpent?
11) Do you believe comets are just “dirty snowballs”? Is the fear of comets just silly superstition?
12) Do you believe we really understand the Sun, fully and completely? What then, is the explanation for the Little Ice Age, the peak of which had Astronomer Edmund Halley observing zero aurora in the northern skies until his 60’s. (he got so excited when he saw an aurora, that he wrote a paper about it in 1716).
13) Do you think cold is not at all dangerous? What do you think, in history, allowed more productivity and expansion, and food supply? Times of heat (which are regular)? Or, times of cold (which are also just as regularly occurring)?
14) Do you think that glacial ice traps and solidifies a select year’s atmosphere, in each layer, to the exclusion of other bits of air that still move through the top layer of the glacier, for 100’s of years, until the air inclusions are sealed? “FIRN”
15) Do you think we should limit our study of climate to ice cores? No ground-based chemical measurements? (over 90,000 have been conducted since the 1800’s) Howbout solar oscillations? Howbout an actual study of historical glacial retreat? Or, is only today’s retreat of importance?
16) When, in the last 200 years, specifically, did we start to contribute so much CO2 that it would have caused glacial melt? 1800? 1825? 1850? 1875? 1900? 1925? 1950?
17) When, in the last 200 years, specifically, did the glaciers start to melt? 1800? 1825? 1850? 1875? 1900? 1925? 1950?
18) Has the arctic ocean never ever been completely free of ice year-round? Are polar bear populations on the brink of extinction? Do polar bears drown only because of CO2? Did polar bears never drown before the modern era?
19) Has Antarctica never ever been completely free of ice?
20) Does temperature, on our home planet’s surface, always stay at equilibrium? If not, what is the range of oscillation? Like, in other words, how much does climate change, on it’s own, over hundreds, to a thousand years. 0 degrees? 0.5 degrees? 1 degree?
21) Do you have an explanation for the Bolling-Allerod heating anomaly (14,700 years ago), or the Younger-Dryas Cooling event (12,800 years ago), or the sudden heat at the end of the Younger Dryas period? (11.600 years ago). Were we driving SUV’s too much at 14,7 and 11,6, and SUV sales went down to cause the 12,8 event?
22) Do you believe everything Science tells you? Do you believe in The Beginning to the universe? Do you agree with Astronomer-Priest’s Georges lemaitre’s Big Bang calculations, which Einstein used to make his universe stable? Do you think time is a separate physical dimension?
23) Is Science neutral? Is “The Science Agenda”, a creepy term which Till used, really some sort of communal, commonly-shared, open space, with A-politicized peer-review? Are you, personally, able to submit a paper contradicting Big Bang theory, if you had the training? Do you believe you would at least be heard? Do you think if evidence were to be submitted that clearly contradicts the Big Bang, that this would be immediately and attentively heard?
“In the year of grace AD 541, there appeared a comet in Gaul, so vast that the whole sky seemed on fire. In the same year, there dropped real blood from the clouds, and a dreadful mortality ensued.”
Flowers of History
Roger of Wendover
“Shooting stars indicate dryness of the air; if they all go towards the same quarter of the heavens, they foreshadow winds which will blow from that quarter, but if they scatter in all parts of the heavens they indicate the drying up of the water, disturbances in the atmosphere, and the incursions of armies moving in various directions.”
Translated from:
Relation de l’Egypte
Abd-allatif
Arab doctor in Bagdad
Translated and enriched with historical notes and critiques by:
M. Silvestre De Sacy
Paris, 1810, 4to. book 2, chap. 2, p. 340.
First quoted in part by M. Fraehn, (sup.)
The passages occur at pp. 117 and 118 of the Tubingen edition of 1789.
“ … There have been, and there will be again, many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them by fire and water, lesser ones by countless other means.
[The] story of Phaethon, child of Helios [which personifies the sun], who harnessed his father’s chariot, but was unable to guide it along his father’s course and so burnt up things on Earth and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt, is a mythical version of the truth that there is at long intervals a variation in the course of the heavenly bodies and a consequent widespread destruction by fire of things on the Earth.
When this happens, those who live in the mountains or in high and dry places suffer more than those living by rivers or by the sea. As for us, the Nile, our own regular saviour, is freed to preserve us in this emergency.
When, on the other hand, the gods purge the Earth with a deluge of water, the herdsmen and shepherds in the mountains escape, but those of you who live in cities are swept by the waters into the sea. … ”
Egyptian priest from the district of Sais,
Relayed during a visit by Solon around 600 BC,
Relayed eventually to Plato in around 360 BC,
who recorded it in his Timeaus
“The fierce flaming heat became so intense in certain localities, it created what seemed to be a vacuum. The vacuum would then quickly fill with violent and explosive gases … With a river so near, there would have been time to seek safety in flight and even to have removed goods if no greater danger menaced the townspeople than an ordinary forest fire. But when fire burst over the town it came in fierce explosions and in streaks, with suffocating choking gases that paralyzed the victims even before the burning.
It came too quickly for analysis. It baffled science. It could not be accounted for. It was a phenomenon that defies all description. It did not crawl or creep, but burst and exploded. It roared, seethed and boiled. On the ground it swept forward in walls and cylinders of flame; in the air it soared in massive balls of fire and gas. Its heat was intense and searing and it devoured kingly pines in minutes…”
Excerpts from From the Ashes: The Story of the Hinckley Fire of 1894
Grace Stageberg Swenson 1979
Sourced from Randall Carlson.
In spring of 1490, in the Ch’ing-yang district of China:
“Stones fell like rain in the Ch’ing-yang district. The larger ones were about 1.5 kg, and the smaller ones were about 1 kg. Numerous stones rained in Ch’ing-yang (city). Their sizes were all different. The larger ones were like goose’s eggs and the smaller ones were like water-chestnuts. More than 10,000 people were struck dead. All of the people in the city fled to other places.”
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1994Metic..29..864Y
To answer some of your questions,
1) The debate will never be over, as there will always be people questioning others explanations, such as today people willing to debate if the earth is flat or spherical.
Only how successful a model, or belief, is in predicting future outcomes, will one side of the debate grow vs the other.
2) Based on information gained from scientists, the earth has had higher than 300 ppm in past, such as Jurasic period. Keep in mind, the earth was not as close to the sun then as it is now, so had less energy being supplied to it.
3) I’ll take a look at the paper from Nasa, have not read it.
4) Climate is local, climate is not the same thing as global temperature. There are other factors, such as methane and water vapor, that are better insulators than CO2. Particulates in the atmosphere from pollution reflect incoming energy so have a cooling affect. If we lose those, the temperature is modeled to rise quickly.
5) I know that correlation is not causation
6) I believe that the Romans had a good climate due to increased temperature that helped them grow crops.
7) Not all desserts are caused by deforestation. Not all humans are Cretins.
8)As stated before, declining fossil fuels are, in my belief, much more of a concern to our survival than climate change.
9) A lot of your following questions seem to veer off into philosophy, ancient history, and speculation. I will just tell you that I am not a materialist, I do not believe the world exists without an observer, but as long as observers exist the shared experience of the world follows logical, cause and effect events on the whole, with some abnormalities. I do believe that individual intent can change events, on a probability level, very slightly in one direction or the other, and that if more people had less rational beliefs, the world would change into a less logical pattern. In the past beliefs were different, so shared experiences were different. I believe the world we share in our waking, conscience state, is experienced by local, individual egos, but we all share, and can be affected, by other states of conscience which are non local.
Science is good at what it does, but not all practitioners of science are good scientists. Peer review is a good tool to advance our knowledge of the world, but is not perfect. I don’t think Jasun’s blog is the best place to debate scientific controversies as there are many other places with more information and expert opinions to find.
This is a place for honest, curious introspection, and awareness of how societal information has affected our beliefs, narratives, and past actions. Science is one of the places we receive information, but not as nefarious as Hollywood, CIA, and other psychological controlling entities.
#1:
You write:
“What we know is that the high level of CO2 in the atmosphere has been put there by the burning of fossil fuels.”
Then, you write: “The debate will never be over”.
OK then. Is this specific debate over in YOUR mind? These are contradictory statements! If you are saying “people will always be debating” – that is not what I was talking about, and I know you know it! Oy! Is this how you would like to set the tone? Is this an “honest” debate already? Is this constructive? I have no time for these silly twists – these games of self deceit – address the actual question, as an integrated whole with all of your other statements! You knew very well what I meant.
You don’t think this is the right venue? OK then. Choose your arena. Or, maybe you really do think the debate is over (in your mind). It is this very specific unwillingness to debate the issue and just cast most of my argument as “my speculative philosophy”, which is at the heart of what is wrong with this non-existent debate. You are happy to cite mainstream science opinion as absolute established fact, but at the same time you paint yourself as open-minded, open to endless debate.
#2 – howbout CO2 higher than 300 ppm in RECENT times – say, since we started directly measuring the chemical constituents of the atmosphere? I’m not talking Jurassic. In the last 200 years.
#3 – Please do read this paper, in detail. It could be the basis for a truly honest debate, if it can be had here.
#4 – So then, wait. What is your answer? CO2 is not the dominant factor in earth’s climate? Are Methane and water vapour the only other factors on Earth, that affect climate? Not: Ocean currents? Milankovich cycles? Solar dips and spikes? Comet impacts? Nothing else? Really? You did not answer the actual question! Not in the least! Would you submit the same answer, if a Science teacher would have asked it? Nope – I’m just an idiot Denier, so you can just throw out a few bits, and that’s enough to settle this huge question (#4). In Science class, this answer would get a failing grade.
You respond to #5 with “I know that correlation is not causation”
Oy!
That was not the question! In the ice cores – which is the triggering element – which one triggers which: does temperature trigger CO2 changes, or do CO2 changes trigger temperature changes? This is a HUGE question! This is a HUGE opportunity to falsify ACC – which is precisely how Science should operate. Science should seek ways to falsify its own claims.
#6 – So, just the Roman Warm Period? Incorrect! It was warmer in the Medieval Warm Period, than it is now, based on this, and many other sources (this one is from Brian Fagan’s Little Ice Age):
“For five centuries, Europe (along with the rest of the world) basked in warm, settled weather, with only the occasional bitter winters, cool summers and memorable storms. Summer after summer passed with long, dreamy days, golden sunlight, and bountiful harvests. Compared with what was to follow (and what preceded it), these centuries were a climatic golden age. Local food shortages were not unknown, life expectancy in rural communities was short, and the routine of backbreaking labour never ended. Nevertheless, crop failures were sufficiently rare that peasant and lord alike might piously believe that God was smiling upon them.
As the Medieval Warm Period dawned and the Vikings crossed to Greenland and North America, Europe was a patchwork of feudal states and warring lords, unified only by the Christian faith. King Charlemagne founded his Frankish empire in 800. The Holy Roman Empire came into being in 962 but offered little security. The Norsemen ravaged the northern coasts for more than two hundred years, then acquired a veneer of culture from the lands where they settled. Knut the Dane, or “Canute the Great” (1016-35), famous for his attempts to control the tides, presided over a North Sea empire that linked Britain and Denmark. William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, conquered the kingdom of England in 1066. He parceled out his new domains among his Norman lords and created a feudal realm, a dense network of contractual relationships, which connected the highest to the lowest in the land. Not that the vagaries of the weather made William’s task easier. Persistent north-westerly winds delayed his Channel crossing until October. Furthermore, two centuries of warm conditions had caused significant sea-level rises. A shallow fjord extended deep into eastern England as far as Norwich. The low-lying English fenlands became a labyrinth of shallow channels and islands so difficult of access for an invader that the Anglo-Danish inhabitants of the city of Ely, led by Hereward the Wake, were able to hold off the Normans for a decade after 1066.
Despite wars, crusades, schism and other strife, the Medieval Warm Period was a bountiful time for Europe. Most years passed with good harvests and enough to eat. Average summer temperatures were between 0.7 and 1.0 degrees C above levels in the 1900’s. Central European summers were even warmer, as much as 1.4 degrees C higher than their modern averages. May frosts, always a hazard for heat-loving crops, were virtually unknown between 1100 and 1300. The summer months were consistently sufficiently warm and dry for vineyards to spread across southern and central England, as far north as Hereford and Welsh borders. Commercial vineyards flourished 300 to 500 kilometers north of their limits in the 1900’s. During the height of the Medieval Warm Period, so many lords quaffed prime English wines that the French tried to negotiate trade agreements to exclude them from the Continent.
Rural and urban populations rose sharply… … New villages sprang up on hitherto un-cleared lands. Thousands of hectares of woodland fell before farmers’ axes… … Warmer summers and mild winters allowed small communities to grow crops on marginal soils and at higher altitudes than ever before – 350 meters above sea level on hills of Dartmoor in south-western England, on the Pennine Moors in the northeast, where, in the 1200’s, shepherds complained about the encroaching cultivation of prized grazing range, and on the summits of south-eastern Scotland’s Lammermuir Hills, 320 meters above sea level. Today, neither Dartmoor nor the Pennine Moors support crops and the upper limit of cereal growth in the Lammermuirs is well below that of 1250. In 1300, one farm owned by Kelso Abbey in southern Scotland had over 100 hectares of land under cultivation, supported 1400 sheep and sixteen shepherds’ households – all at 300 meters above sea level, well above today’s limit. By the same year, thousands of farmers had settled on high ground and on marginal lands throughout England and Scotland, which placed them at risk of crop failure.
In Scandinavia, settlement, forest clearance, and farming spread 100 to 200 meters farther up valleys and hillsides in central Norway, from levels that had been static for more than 1000 years. What was grown around Trondheim and hardier grains such as oats as far north as Malagan, at latitude 62.5 degrees north. The height change hints at a rise in summer temperatures of about a degree centigrade, a similar increase to that across the North Sea in Scotland. Farming became considerably easier in the Scottish highlands as a result, as forests spread outward into hitherto treeless environments. Far to the south, in the Alps, tree levels rose sharply and farmers planted deeper and deeper into the mountains. During late prehistoric times, numerous copper mines had flourished in the Alps until advancing ice sealed them off. Late medieval miners reopened some of the workings when the ice retreated. Higher rainfall spread over much of southern Europe and the western Mediterranean. As a result, some Sicilian rivers were navigable in ways that would be impossible today. Medieval bridges, like the one in Palermo, still span them, but are far longer than now necessary, simply because the rivers were wider nine hundred years ago.”
Did you catch that last sentence? It is worth repeating: MEDIEVAL BRIDGES, LIKE THE ONE IN PALERMO, STILL SPAN THEM, BUT ARE FAR LONGER THAN NOW NECESSARY, SIMPLY BECAUSE THE RIVERS WERE WIDER NINE HUNDRED YEARS AGO.”
#7 Google: African Humid Periods. I don’t want to paste any more long quotes here. That’s the story I had in mind when writing #7.
#8 Woah, woah, woah, woah. Hold on here. Dude. In a question where I list hundreds of thousands perishing from a Tsunami, a very real and uncontroversial environmental threat to human lives, the only thing you mention, is us running out of fossil fuels? Oy! That really misses the mark of my question, and demonstrates the narrowness of mind that the ACC narrative induces. It also sounds like an opinion of a city dweller, unable to fathom working the land, just wanting a constant feed from all the pipelines, so he doesn’t have to worry about his own little world/economy collapsing.
Your response was uninformative, unyielding, unimaginative, cited no sources, while being philosophically bankrupt, in that you write: “I do not believe the world exists without an observer”. What utter nonsense. Sounds like Schrodinger’s cat confused gibberish to me, son. What? It takes YOU to make the world go ’round? Ha! So, not only do we dominate the climate (in a majority way), the climate would not even exist if we were not here to observe it? Nonsense!
Bonus question: ARE THERE NO PHILOSOPHICALLY-DERIVED ASSUMPTIONS IN SCIENCE? Beginning to the Universe, for example? It is assumed this is possible. Completely untestable! Beginning of Life – it is assumed this is possible! Life from lifeless parts! Ha! That is all just philosophy.
Since when is Ancient History something that Climate Science has no relation with? Oy! This demonstrates precisely the problem here! Your derision of Ancient History is unscientific and dangerous! Climate Change is about vast cycles of time. You are in error in your casting Ancient History as out of scope. It is PRECISELY THE SCOPE! The fact that this has to be articulated, is pretty darn silly.
You’re completely wrong about there being no such thing as “global climate” When a big volcano hits, it can shroud the entire earth in a haze for years. There are global averages. Sure, yes, there are local climates too, and microclimates. Microclimates do not negate the reality of global climatological changes. Really? I’m defending THIS? Oyoyyyyoy!
You, Sir, have proven yourself to be an unworthy debate opponent.
Gooday.
You remind me of Don Quixote, raging battles against windmills. I am not your enemy, nor did I try to debate you. I gave you some facts, and away you went. I am not a climate expert, nor a geologist, nor an expert in history. I do have a science background, and understand chemistry, thermodynamics, and basic physics. I have neither the time nor the interest to research the area properly for a serious debate, nor do I think you would go into it with an open mind and a willingness to learn, to find areas of agreement. You take my statements and mix them up into any order you want and invent arguments I never made. Your knowledge of different sides of this debate greatly exceed mine, but sometimes one needs to see the forest for the trees. That is also all I will say about the matter. I hope I did not exceed the proper etiquette of the site as I would like to continue to have the opportunity to post in the future.
all’s fair in love and climate change debate. I need to catch up on this thread, but I doubt you in-frakked any fault-lines here.
I might have been less defensive (and offensive), if you hadn’t painted the majority of my points as “philosophy, speculation” and, incredibly “Ancient History”, and just skirted around each point with a few sprinkles of truth.
I was very clear and open about the fact that I was looking for a debate partner, and I stated this from the outset.
I know people who have their daily mood ruined from Science imposing this “certain” “accepted” “fact” on them, in the tone and manner that preachers would employ in the Dark Ages, reading out passages from Revelations.
Unempowering.
Debilitating.
Distracting (from real environmental concerns).
This ACC narrative is poison. And it is also dead wrong. It is also incredibly easy to demonstrate just how false it is, if you would have been willing to accept this challenge wholeheartedly.
And, we really do need to understand our environment, to avoid catastrophe, so the fact that you are willing to ignore “Ancient History” (volcanoes, comets, earthquakes, plagues, famines, global hazes, African Humid Periods (recurring greening and desertification)), is absurd and dangerous.
If you don’t want to defend your empirical statement: (“What we know is that the high level of CO2 in the atmosphere has been put there by the burning of fossil fuels.”), when I am specifically calling out for a detailed debate, don’t come crying to me if I went on an all out Rambo-esque tirade. I’m not your worst nightmare. Dragons are.
Ok, I lied, that was not all I have to say. I felt that your questions were not real questions, but rhetoric, and you had already put my opinions in a category that was diametrically opposed to your own. I believe in the facts I stated, but do not know how they will affect future climate. I don’t know how scientist extrapolate past temperatures from ice cores or any other method, but believe they have given quite a bit of thought and discussion into what they do. I believe that climate has changed in the past, temperatures have gone up and down, and that people survived this variation. I don’t like to take on a strong opinion as I am often wrong, and have observed others with strong opinions also be wrong quite often. I was just stating facts that I thought all could agree upon.
I think CO2 levels have never been higher and will continue to rise and that this will be the variable that will lead to climate change . Hot, cold, wet, dry? I don’t know, but as stated we are playing with fire. I can find no other cause for the recent increase in co2 besides burning of fossil fuels, but am open to other evidence. I think everybody’s lives, no matter where they live, are incorporating fossil fuel usage on a daily basis. When we run out, billions of people will die, much more than hundreds of thousands. I don’t know if humans will survive long term, but consciousness will because that is all there is. On these points my mind is pretty much made up. As far as the world not existing unless observed, does your dream still exist once you are awake? Read Bernardo Kastrup, then an Idealist’s viewpoints will not seem so ludicrous.
FYI, each of these threads has a limited number of replies due to the shrinking nature of each subsequent one; I have special dashboard ability to keep replying; to continue this thread, jump to the bottom, here
In a past blog you wrote about catching a glimpse of the wholeness, like a chick being hatched. Can you still access this state, or are you still existing there? Also, I recently listened to the Aeon Byte talk about the Matrix, and you were trying to explain, gingerly, about being whole with your body, how the Matrix is about being separate from body, but unless there is a background with whom your talking I don’t think there is understanding, just polite nodding and acknowledgement. I could see you were reluctant to pop the balloon. I would be interested in how you would describe a culture of mature humans living, what are their day to day habits, how do they resolve problems or competing interests? How about a fictional story based on such a group? A sign to lead us, or at least show the possibility.
Yes that was during and after the last Dave Oshana retreat; it’s now been roughly nine months away (next one coming up), & the sensation-awareness has dimmed. The Aeon Byte interview, & the gingerness – the medium is the message & I didn’t feel very comfortable bodily or otherwise at that event and later wished I hadn’t bothered (a rare development). Besides fiction, the only way I know of to “show the possibility” of humans responsibly interacting is to participate in an attempt to do so, such as by attending a live liminalist meet (where these questions could be raised) or going on an Oshana retreat. These happen outside of day to day routines however, of necessity. The main thing, as Dave O has said (& as I recounted in a recent blogpost), retraining the nervous system to relax.
Seems the new year has started on a very bad foot (a foot I was suspecting). Trump *decided* (that is, as figurehead for the secret society networks, he is being credited with something that is being organized by much more sophisticated minds) to kill the second most powerful person in Iran, in Iraq, and now has the internet ablaze with speculations that world war three is just around the corner.
It’s funny, given how “perception management” works, that the author Leo Lyon Zagami claimed in one of his books that world war three will kick off in 2020. I’ve never read him, and therefore, do not know what else he claims; but its important to know that gaining credibility with others – as with Alex Jones – is augmented by getting some things right – but intending very much to lead others astray, as Jones did by promoting Donald Trump as the next Abraham Lincoln (or Andrew Jackson).
How far back does this go? There’s been a meme online that goes like this: Albert Pike predicted that there would be three world wars, and that only after the final world war would there ‘new world order’ be materialized. The standard for ‘perfect’ vision uses the notation, “20/20”. We have an idiom in our culture that goes, “hindsight is 20/20”. Would it be so surprising if the world goes haywire in 2020, and we begin to experience the reality of this idiom in the lives we live – where quite literally, hindsight becomes a function of the perspective-upon-the-past provided by the year 2020? Wouldn’t surprise me.
Even more generally, and without reference to Zagami, Pike, or any conspiracy thinking, if the socioeconomic order we exist within doesn’t slow down, climate change will truly ruin us as the other unknown feedback mechanisms which aren’t even factored into most climate models trigger even more dramatic climate change, since as we should all know, growth in the nature world is non-linear and exponential. It doesn’t grow in a predictable fashion, but in a accretive, compounding fashion, in the sorts of ways that venture capitalists trap unsuspecting business owners they invest in.
I suspect that people aren’t so stupid as to let the only world we have go to shit. Perhaps they (Satanists) think they can preserve their ethos during the downturn, when these are precisely the sorts of conditions which kill off those who regulate themselves through material-means (i.e. food, drugs, sex, toys) leading to the selection of those who regulate themselves through spiritual – maternal (i.e other oriented) means. The effect of the world around the corner is the creation of a personality that cannot be anything like the people who exist today.
Jasun, you strike me as a person with qualities that will be preserved. Intelligent, perceptive, altruistic, mindful, and courageous – willing to challenge what needs to be challenged; knowing that inaction is unacceptable, as it simply enforces the wrong sort of system in play; the sort of system which will lead to more suffering; more confusion; more chaos.
Thank you for that vote of confidence, Till. I am all for being preserved, as long as it is not in vinegar. However, my altruistic, mindful, and courageous perceptive intelligence is willing to challenge the whole idea of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) as one more scam of our psychosocial engineers & I am curious to know why you (and also Martin, who is another generally insightful guy who has stepped in to defend the official version) are so sure that, in this particular case, we are being given the real skinny. Isn’t that the equivalent of UFO buffs believing that the government is going to provide full disclosure about little grey men? Is it possible a narrative that is so obviously being used to manipulate us, sociopolitically, psychologically, and emotionally, would not be at least partially manufactured?
I am especially interested in hearing your, and other people’s, arguments, as there are currently mini-demonstrations about climate change in my town & I just roll my eyes at it all. I am accordingly helping a local chef who is a denier of human-caused climate change to organize a presentation to set these well-meaning people straight by giving them some (my impression so far is that he is well-researched) counter-arguments and evidence.
my position on CC is that I am far from convinced that it is primarily caused by human activities & even if it is, it is being cynically exploited, if not manufactured, as a means to implement more controls, foment a sense of outrage & powerlessness (a paralyzing combo), and distract from other much more pressing environmental issues (such as 5G). My impression on this matter is that mostly people who are concerned about ACC just blindly believe what they are told and substitute strong emotions for evidence-based arguments. And the fact that cynical corporations are denying ACC in their own interests means anyone who questions it gets lumped in that camp, at which point, no counter-argument even seems necessary. ACC is taken as proven and any questioning of its reality seen as irresponsible at best, malevolent at worst. In other words, belief in ACC is an ideological position, not a reality-referencing one.
Also, the fact that ACC is being presented entirely separate from other, much deeper and more ancient forms of pollution, such as child sexual abuse – the creation of human poison containers – and modern epidemics such as suicide and drug addiction, cultural bondage (brainwashing), trans madness, porn addiction, infertility, autism, & so on, all of which place the whole thing in a psychosocial context that far transcends any kind of corporate agendas. Once again, when the focus is on the effects, never the cause, no real change occurs because any kind of deepening awareness gets preempted.
My observation was that you cannot make inferences about a scientific argument or methodology based on its psychosocial implications and applications. If you want to evaluate the merits of a scientific argument you have to do it on its own terms. It’s a point of logic rather than a declaration of certainty on my part.
I have some direct experience of this, having spent some time at particle accelerators in my younger days. When now reading the occultic ‘interpretations’ of a place like CERN it makes me chuckle at how much of an exercise they are in speculative fantasy, like a dialogue with gnomes at the bottom of the garden. The reality is far more dusty and mundane, much more complex and more powerful.
I agree with your first paragraph.
My own argument basically argues within that logical distinction.
On the other hand, I also wish to stress the continuities that exist between these various levels, which is to say, how the Earth regulates itself – what we call climate – will affect how we our ourselves vis-à-vis our environments; which will affect how we communicate with one another – what I call “coregulation of affect” – which ultimately affects self-regulation.
I don’t doubt that eventually – after civilization collapses – that we will eventually reach an equilibrium with our environments, but I WANT MORE THAN THAT! More or less, I don’t want civilization to collapse, which is what is likely going to happen if we don’t work to bring climate change under control.
Of course, since climate change wont end for another 150 years (from my latest readings) we will have to adapt to a warming world regardless; but we can control the degree to which that happens; and indeed, a global world government, or shared-culture, is inevitable, and not necessarily a nefarious thing; in fact, it is precisely what is required to most effectively adapt to climate change.
I remember reading a research paper that started with the observation that the ‘global warming’ meme was er, losing steam, and concluded with the recommendation that ‘climate change’ would have longer legs, so to speak. Written shortly before everyone started talking about climate change.
…this might have been a reasonable move if it had grounded the conversation closer to reality but that was neither the result nor the motivation.
For me, how far can we push the conspiracy argument? Is physics a big conspiracy? Is biology a conspiracy? Is everyone who pursues interests in such fields being driven by a conspiratorial agenda? Or is possible to be genuinely interested in epistemology and ontology knowing full well the trappings that mysticism (or the mystification of consciousness) creates and has created for the human species?. Is it not possible that the motivation behind positivism is a belief that there is in fact a singular reality and that this singular reality can be explained in logical ways? I trust that, although qualia may be fundamental and therefore intrinsic, that everything which is has a logical basis in what preceded it. I believe time more than suffices to explain the phenomena we experience and interact with.
I therefore feel its incredibly important not to reduce all profound human thinking to the social sphere as postmodernists do and pretend that everything is just narratives, or rather, that all narratives are equivalent. This is not so. Some narratives are much more epistemologically faithful to experience than others are. Some viewpoints – like those I seek to promote – contend that the shared world we all experience provides the structural ingredients required to explain things.
Ask yourself a question, Jasun: how well do you understand the scientific narrative? In Cosmology? Astrophysics? Geophysics? Origin of Life? Biology? Psychology? If what we are is a bustle of patterns, then learning about those patterns and how the patterns of the past logically grade and evolve into the emergent patterns of the present underlies what we consider to be believable: the less you know of the scientific narrative, the less plausible anthropogenic climate change will seem to you. Its precisely the common threads of symmetry, balance, and regulation, which makes humans just like molecules and indeed, the earth system; everything reduces to kinematics. If you see it in yourself with your diet and your sleep and your thoughts and relationships with others, its hardly a stretch to see it in the earth system. Perturbations, or irregularities in processes, lead to effects, not necessarily linear, but definitely symmetrical (given enough time) with the causes.
So why woudn’t I pay special attention to the stupendous anomaly of anthropogenic climate change – a pattern with no precedent in history, which departs from all geological processes of regulation, and which, even if it can and probably is being manipulated by the powers that be, by no means deserves to be doubted as a fiction, or as not a calamity – indeed, to consider it a fiction is a clear giveaway that the person speaking in such a way doesn’t sufficiently understand the whole science of how disastrously changes in the climate will affect human civilization, via changing the intersubjective patterns of co-regulation of affect;
To me, it is irresponsible to deny climate change, and given you often mention you read Jordan Peterson, I cannot help but think you’ve derived this position from your reading of him – a view which, from what I understand, strikes me as obnoxiously off and overly concerned and bridled by concerns with social matters. Civilization – and even besides that, the fauna and flora of earth, are worth saving, which is to say, the complexity of life is worth preserving – will not survive if we don’t act to limit the amount of carbon we charge the atmosphere with. Levels keep going up; and to credit this to anything other than our industrial activities is sheer madness. May I suggest some books for you to read? James Lovelock (all his books), Tyler Volk (Gaia), and Stephen Harding (animate Earth) will help you better appreciate the flows that exist between organic life and the geospheres around us. Suffice to say that in burning coal, oil, natural gas, cutting down massive numbers of trees (which store carbon) and the mass methane pollution from industrial farming and other chemical pollutants, humans are with a very high degree of probability and plausibility modifying their own environments in ways that will kill off massive numbers of people by changing where water drops (where rivers, lakes and glaciers form), where plants grow (thus causing massive famine when our already developed farmlands go dry), and by causing massive forest fires – as we already see in Australia. Climate regulates everything that matters to human life and society.
To say we are emergent from these processes is to say the planet has a history, and that life – the biosphere – is an emergent property, or path of least action, which optimizes the dissipation of energy (in line with thermodynamics) through the three geospheres of water, air and earth. None of this arbitrary; it is utterly complex, and entangled, and we cannot, in fact, play games with the way the planet has stored carbon in physical forms – as coal, oil, natural gas, or buried in the deep oceans as clathrates, or in the tundra.
I do not doubt the other matters you bring up – with electromagnetic pollution (such as 5G) or with GMO, or with vaccines (even if they have been a life saver in other ways) or with trans-madness, etc etc. I am very much concerned about these issues – but still, we need to prioritize ourselves. Climate change is ontologically of greater importance than all those issue as climate encompasses everything humans do. You underestimate how biological we really are if you think screwing with our food and water isn’t going to sow even greater amounts of social chaos. This more than anything else makes people mean, greedy, and morally weak.
Believe me Jasun, sexual abuse is high on my radar, and my book is deeply concerned with that matter – as well as porn addiction, the denial of biological reality, materialism etc, but perhaps, I’m just speculating here, I may care more about preserving human civilization than you are. I have trouble looking over the last 6 thousand or so years and seeing it as amounting to nothing. I have to believe that the society and material cultures we’ve created can be complemented by a mindful, socially responsible ethos, anchored by a deep spiritual awareness of the essence of what we are.
I want civilization. I want child abuse to end; I want people to be educated properly in schools; I want the continuation of the scientific agenda; I want to continue the development of technology. I want to eliminate the worship of technology; I want to eliminate mythology – and thus, occultism – and I want people to see it for the epistemological farce that it is. All this is feasible. There’s no reason why we should allow ourselves to be pushed into a corner and deny something as significant as climate change because we believe it could be (and likely is, by certain groups) being twisted to support other agendas.
Is it not at all possible within your picture of things for climate change to be as serious as it is being described? Or are you fully committed to the opposing picture?
For me, how far can we push the conspiracy argument?
That seems like a weighted question; I could say “a lot further,” or I could say “who’s pushing it?” or even “what conspiracy argument?” So since it’s so vague I’ll just shrug & move on.
I trust that, although qualia may be fundamental and therefore intrinsic, that everything which is has a logical basis in what preceded it. I believe time more than suffices to explain the phenomena we experience and interact with.
You believe we have time to explain everything? I have no such trust, assumption, or belief, but fortunately no desire either. Logic is all well & good, as is the scientific method (tho not agenda), but only to get us, or me, to the point that I no longer need to rely on it. I do not think existence is inherently explainable or even understandable. God, by definition, isn’t, which is why (some of us) need the word in the first place. Surrender is finally the only sane response to reality, fortunately we eventually have no choice about it.
ACC, at least when I use the term, certainly is a narrative, and it is an ideologically freighted one. That doesn’t mean the elements aren’t referring to facts, they may well be, I wouldn’t know & I don’t have enough time/desire/belief in the possibility of doing so to find out; i also do not know the earth is not flat. It’s the narrative & the ideological freight of ACC (unlike that of a round earth) that I refuse to carry around like the new obligatory white man’s burden it is. But you are not wrong, Till: I don’t essentially care about 6000 years of history or civilization as you do; I don’t feel that if it was lost it would be much of a loss, on the contrary. Whether that’s because I am more cynical and embittered, or more enlightened, or both (or neither), I can’t say, & will let others decide.
But we may be disagreeing over imagined differences: I am not saying I am not appalled by the way we as humans have behaved, or by the things we have done to our own natures and to nature out there, or that I am not horrified by how grotesquely we have debased our relationship to our environment, animate and inanimate, or that I doubt that the consequences to our own nervous systems have been and will be immeasurably harmful. Yet I view the possibility of a non-catastrophic future on our current transhumanist, disembodiment trajectory as unimaginably worse than the destruction of our civilization.
I think we are, as the Torah has it, surrounded by the unseen demons of our own dementia, and that climate change is just the latest and most consensually acknowledged iteration or repercussion of that dementia, of our hubris, and the modern-day equivalent of a people at war with God and in terror of His judgment. And if I am right, intuitively, that sunspots are a primary factor in CC, more than carbon dioxide at least, then it may even BE the wrath of God we have wrought in a semi-literal fashion. But that’s all speculation. We are part of a system and the system seeks always to regulate itself and restore balance. Our idea that we could do something to improve nature is the problem, not the solution.
For these and other reasons, I don’t accept the scientistic diagnosis of the problem, the (IMO) intentionally induced reaction, or many of the proposed solutions. Clean up your own back yard. (Not your bedroom. BTW I don’t know where you got the idea I have been influenced by JBP; au contraire, I did a never-finished series attempting to expose that straw man’s clay feet.)
Dear Till, may I Till the soil of the fields of thought you have planted, and try to plant a fresh crop of perspectives (while preserving a peppering of the worthy seeds you’ve previously sown)?
I am in sore need of a worthy opponent, to have a lengthy, nay, very lengthy, detailed debate, about the specifics of climate change. I would prefer a formal format, a proper debate. Why? Because: We have been told that “The Debate is Over” by scientists, a very unfitting statement by those in that profession.
If you would like to discourse, at length, here, I would be fine with that, but this format can get wonky and I want to posit around 15 historical background items. It would get bulky and cumbersome here.
I want to keep things cordial, instructive, and constructive. I have spoken with Jasun, in hopes of organizing such a thunderous public debate, preferably with multitudes in attendance. It may one day happen, only if a challenger can properly articulate and defend the mainstream view.
Are you up for it?
Are you down for it?
Are you (whichever direction indicates “yes”) for it?
I think we can both agree that resolving such a matter would be of the utmost importance. I can and would, disabuse you of many fears about ACC, and let you sleep better at night. I would devote time commensurate with the severity of the issue, only if you are willing to respond in kind.
Cheers.
Dominic,
What we know is that the high level of CO2 in the atmosphere has been put there by the burning of fossil fuels. That CO2 traps radiant heat from the surface of the planet and slows its escape into space. That this slowing will raise the temperature of the surface and atmosphere until equilibrium sets. That we can measure the amount of energy the earth receives from the sun. That this energy depends not only on solar output but also how close the earth is to the sun, perhaps the earth’s magnetosphere can also affect. That increased energy in our atmosphere changes weather patterns, and could set off feedback loops to increase heat insulation even more. Science can model simple systems with limited variables fairly accurately in the short term, that the more variables that come into play and the longer the timeframe, the more inaccurate and unpredictable a systems behavior becomes.
That stable systems can absorb energy up to a threshold, then a very quick and violent transition to a new state takes place, such as lighting a stable pile of gunpowder with a match. Do we want to keep adding energy to the earth hoping that this threshold won’t be reached, not knowing the outcome or the final resting state? If you argue that science can’t predict the effect of CO2 on the earth, isn’t that even more of an argument to stop adding it? Science also knows that ecological systems cannot change quickly to adopt to new conditions, that the complexity of such a stable systems will not adopt but simply revert to a simpler state until things stabilize. Humans need nature, and once fossil fuels run out, something I believe is much more likely to affect our very near term survival as a civilization, we will rely once more on the excessive caloric output
of natural ecosystems, not the artificial industrial monoculture farming that keeps us fed today. Isn’t it suicidal to experiment with this ecological system that we will depend upon for humanities future survival? Playing russian roulette with 6 chambers and 3 bullets, and half the people saying we can’t know the outcome of pulling the trigger so lets not worry about it is suicidal, not exciting.
Anyway, thats my short take on our situation.
Jasun, would it be possible to create a poll on here about the various conspiracy issues? Would be interesting to get a more accurate theory of mind of liminalistener. Everyone agrees we’re being lied to, but no one agrees on the truth. Everyone also seems pretty convinced that they’re right in these exchanges. Maybe that doubling down is a natural psychological reaction to post-modernism. Would be interesting if the poll questions could also map reasons behind what we’re choosing to believe and disbelieve.
Makes sense that climate change is where people seem to be drawing lines on here—guess it doesn’t get more existential than this issue. I myself fall on Till and Martin’s side of this debate, but find your thoughts interesting.
not impossible but technically challenging; do you want to volunteer? the simplest way would be to write a new post with the various options and then have people vote in the comments; there may be some simple plug-in to create wordpress polls, as I did at the forum RI, here: http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40243
Jasun, somewhere in POI you said something about being a both/and guy, but of course in a different context which I don’t recall at the moment. But that flexibility is useful in a lot of contexts, including the climate change thing. My view: its real and its a psyop because the big stuff doesn’t get to not be a psyop even if–especially if–its real. Then again I am no scientist, just a meme consumer like everyone else.
yep, that’s a fair summation of my feeling on the subject; I thought I made that clear but it can be quite difficult for people to even notice the difference between non-belief and dis-belief. One of the “tells” that ACC is an ideologically fueled belief is that questioning it is often automatically seen as denying it.
Hmm interesting, The main narratives—right wing hysteria and genuine expose are neck and neck but coming up the rear is your second matrix theory.
Right now I don’t have the time to spearhead, but I’ll make a note to brainstorm poll topics in another, less crowded, thread.
Maybe MacCluhan was both prophet and profiteer. After all…man’s got a mortage to pay.
I have been a big fan of yours for many years, deeply impressed by your insights and ability to express them. You possess the skills i wish i had.
The climate change issue appears to me to be in a class by itself, the focus on the cause has been on display a hundred and fifty years, intensifying with every scientific advance.
It is deeply emotional individually and on a mass communal level, yes. Its been in the open from the git go, only recently being discredited as opposed to child sexual abuse being an eternal secret. Abuse is primarily held in secret in the individual psyche, while the overwhelming evidence for ACC is in the public sphere. They both do share mass public and individual denial at different scales and depths.
Maybe they are intertwined in ways not commonly considered. I don’t know. I rarely comment directly in public (no doubt an effect of personal trauma). I was just surprised by your climate position. Thanks for listening.
If you can state what specifically you disagree with in anything I have said then it helps avoid mission creep. A phrase like “overwhelming evidence for ACC” seems rash to me; I am not sure it’s comparable to “overwhelming evidence for child sexual abuse” (something I might say), which after all can be pretty well-established experientially, by talking to people and reading testimonials and so forth. ACC, in contrast, is surely highly speculative since, as Martin indicates, it relies on science that few of us understand, and instrumentalists that none of us have access to. (Which is why there is a growing flat-earth belief.)
My point is essentially this: I do not believe in ACC, because I do not know; this is not the same as I disbelieve it, but it does mean that I do not believe people when they claim to know, and say things like “the overwhelming evidence for ACC.”
For one thing, correlation is not causation, so even if it can be established that the earth’s climate has changed in tandem with human industrialization, etc, that doesn’t prove the one caused the other. What about solar activity? I suspect there’s an element of human arrogance at work here, as there is in most assumptions of strong belief, and human pride has its flip side with human guilt/shame. We have been taking the credit for so long that it follows we now want to take all the blame. We were very wrong to take the credit, so maybe we are just as wrong to try and take the blame?
Apparently the IPCC has finally agreed to look at solar data, starting in 2022.
“The Debate is Over” ?
Yes, yes, yes- our ‘time demon’ is the collective/identitarian retreat from authentic or naturally occurring reality as a response to nihilistic fatalism which seems to grip everyone at once. I have a friend in immediate family who has elected to transition to the opposite sex which is nothing more than a fancy considering that He is living out an adolescence protracted by recovery from hard drug abuse, loss of friends, disastrous personal relationships, et cetera. At 26 he has managed to put entire family in his thrall with this manufactured crisis and the response[coping mechanism] has been either(and both)to acknowledge that this is somehow better than heroin and ‘what’s so wrong with being who you(believe you want to/are to be),’ a kind of permissive malaise that covers everything after the failure of liberalism like an oily sheen of low expectations.
What I am interested in is how this permissive impulse that has been inherited vertically through multiple generations to today, replacing personal accountability completely and interwoven with the idea of individual liberty, becoming a cancer upon one young man’s life, inverts: actively sponsoring destructive behaviors as a function of guilt(rather than permissive irresponsibility).
Additionally, the transgender phenomenon has functioned unimpeded which is just more fuel for the idea of Trump, Conservatism, Inc. and the host of charlatans and fan boy content creators as witting/unwitting agents of controlled opposition for this post-cultural human liquefaction. They have fleeced what remains of the Big Mac-brand nationalist impulse while absolutely nothing has come out of traditionalist outlets, not even the return of Public Service Announcements, nada.
You mentioned SiaSL as a nuclear document for the Manson family and it seems that deserves unpacking considering Robert ‘C’mon, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?’ Heinlein’s mixing with Crowleyite familiars. That there is no document today but the vacuum of consumption and the pockets of obliteration that serve as support networks for transgender community to me is just more indication that New Conservatism is just Old Globalism. Please tell us more
Tho I don’t write directly about Stranger in a Strange Land in Prisoner of Infinity I think part two of that work probably addresses your questions & concerns from a number of related angles.
I once wrote a positive review of the book, as it had its influence on me also, before I began to see the light of the dark. Seems to have been wiped from the Net and from my doc. archives too. Maybe I dreamed it.
found it: https://web.archive.org/web/20031210223445/http://www.divinevirus.com/grok.html
1) OK I will grab a copy
2) Heinlein as a vector for free weaponized free love: ‘Grok what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’
Also interested in a live Liminalist meet-up if that isn’t clear from my blathering and clawing about for answers re: in-family transgender dilemma. Your analysis is to the hilt and you are absolutely zeroed in on how a world embroiled in trauma yields crisis of identity…
Emerging in the macro as the beta-testing for new era-stylized political parties[progressive, Conservatism, Inc.] almost exclusively as reactions to LGBT agenda. New tread on old tires, but maybe the semblance of change is objectively good?
And mass entertainment fatigue now that Everything is Canon(branded) and the culture-makers are apparently all pedo-adjacent. I think that Heinlein timeline mentions a return to 19th century values. Doesn’t sound so bad.
Until such a chat I shall get a copy of Prisoner which I’m sure you would prefer~
thanks Hari, noted about the lim meet; still waiting on the greenlight for that one, but it could be you…
My emcee response to the Jason from Seattle/Dominic debate above:
FYI: I have suggested to Dominic hosting a presentation-debate AFK in my town so he can share his unusual point of view with some local ACC-true-believers. This thread seemed like an opportunity for him to try out his arguments & I am happy for him to continue doing so, as long as there are sincere takers. Which admittedly there may not be after the last bout of jousting.
Dominic, a word of advice from the mod: those who have greater knowledge are also required to have greater patience, humility, and sweetness, at least if they want to impart their knowledge. This goes also for those who BELIEVE they have greater knowledge: I am so out of my depth here that I won’t even opine as to which is the case with you. You certainly seem very well informed about SOMETHING, but both your knowledge base and your communication style are unfamiliar to me & I am unable to tell what it is, as yet (though I know dragons & meteorites are in there).
I had that problem with Till also, and I still do sometimes; but Till isn’t here to try and change anyone’s mind but only to share his particular insights. You want a debate with people who disagree with you about ACC & you want to help them relax and let go of their fears about things you believe they are mistaken about, correct? The impression I have got so far is closer to the school master in Pink Floyd’s The Wall, rapping students knuckles with a ruler every time they say something he doesn’t like.
That was just a preamble, the word of advice is this: know your audience (or your opponent), and if you don’t, then get to know him or her before, or at least in close tandem with, trying to get your arguments across to them. It’s apparent to me that you don’t know your audience here, in both the narrow sense (i.e., the person you are addressing, Jason of Seattle, above) and the wider sense of this website’s readers. (But why would you, you just got here.)
So take the time to get to know them and let the debate proceed as a conversation and not a battle. Otherwise you wind up like Don Quixote thrashing at imaginary windmills, which was also my experience, even as a mostly neutral observer, so I can only imagine how poor JoS felt.
One result: There was so much energy and passion, and so little finesse, in your rebuttals that I found myself unable to pay proper attention to the arguments you wanted to make. That’s what happens when you amp up to “11!!”: you trigger people’s fight-or-flight cerebral responses so they aren’t able to concentrate on what you are saying, and nor will they want to.
The other word of advice is, similar but not the same: take it slow and distribute your information diligently and methodically, in such a way that your audience, who you already know is not up on this material, perhaps not at all, can stay with you (& wants to). This is a huge subject, so start with the baby steps, walk us through it inch by inch instead of trying to drag us ten miles in the first three minutes and then yelling at us for not keeping up.
OK, I said my bit as mod; carry on, or not, as y’all see fit.
Hi Jasun,
Those are all fair words. This is almost certainly not the place, neither the format, for this style of discussion. Thank your for moderating patiently this far. I will not change my style at this point, but I understand and agree with every point you make. The material I wish to present is too lengthy, for starters. For example, that Medieval Warm Period stuff – that was just a taste, to get into more detail, this page would get cluttered.
My patience for those who defer to the authority of “The Science Agenda” has worn too thin. I find it akin to regimented communist regime propaganda in which you “must” believe, or company-town-thinking that you have to digest. I live in a place where the trees are cleared wholesale, with plenty of alternatives available. I grew up watching David Suzuki, who documented hundreds of environmental concerns. The main thing I see now is people feeling self-righteous, complaining about what oil companies do. What THEY do. Trust in Science has now become a religious matter, a matter of faith. GMO’s, we are told, are Science, so we should not regulate them. Drug Companies, that is Science, so we should not regulate them. Even though Seattle Jason and Till probably agree with most of this, I have no patience for those who assert ACC as solid fact, but cannot be bothered to go into depth, understand all the needs of the environment, and truly ascertain whether this non-toxic trace gas is the single greatest threat to the biosphere forevermore, or at least defend the position in a methodical way, or at least admit that they have no idea, either way.
What triggers me most is when “believers” (notice how many times he used the word “believe” instead of “I know for sure” in his closing remarks), tell me that the line-items I wish to discuss are out of bounds “speculation” what specifically was speculative? “Ancient History” Yes! Ancient History! Of course! OK, OK, you’ve read this bit already. I’ll stop there.
Maybe another day and another time.
If anybody would ever want to defend ACC in a methodical way, let me know. My material is ready to go.
Excellent website Jasun. I will continue reading the first blogs to familiarize myself.
Peace.
The “he” you are writing about has access to your writings. Like talking to another person and using “he” while I’m standing right there. Don’t want to belabor the point as Jasun explained it better and with more patience than I could. Perhaps in the future we can discuss another topic with less emotion and more of an equal give and take. I believe its possible.
I do regret going to 11. I should have stayed at a 10. I convinced 0 people to duck and cover for safety when they see a Dragon burst forth in the heavens, rather than beholding shooting stars like a free fun fireworks display. Jasun’s words stand taller than mine, indeed. He could have added that there is irony, that the Dragons and Monsters motif I’m presenting is an even more amplified source of fear, which could be co-opted by others as yet another form of control, by means of telling people, for example “we will save you from the space rocks, just hand us all your taxdollars and obey our command as we divert all resources to launch space gadgets to deflect the comet” … “for YOUR safety” …. That would have been an angle to explore.
You write: “I have neither the time nor the interest to research the area properly for a serious debate”, as a part of a response to a loud call requesting specifically a debate, taking a lot of time. examining all the research. So, unfortunately, discussing any other topic is out of the question, seeing as I like to go into any topic in depth, with minds open to things like “Ancient History”, without being told that most of my arguments are just “Speculative”, from the word go. Not a good way to start, and a clear signal to end, for good, on any topic.
If you ever meet anybody who is as zealous as me, wearing a similar Rambo bandana, and who thinks that tackling this matter is of actual serious importance, and who is willing to go into the details, and take the time, and ponder new information systematically, please refer him/her to me. I do bite, but Dragons burn! 🙂
And if this hypothetical intrepid climate warrior wants to face off with Dominic in the flesh, then they can make their way to a little town called Hope, just across the west coast US border.
Question for Dominic: tell me more about the dragons. Are we talking literal or figurative?
Good evening Jasun,
Thanks for taking an interest.
I am talking real-world events, some of which were experienced globally, which were packaged and re-told in a figurative manner. So, I guess, both! The figurative aspect would come to haunt the minds of generations (especially if it’s the only story your parents know), and is an interesting topic in of itself, and the literal real-world dragons that were symbolized should be considered as the most intense, concentrated, and disturbing of ecological modifiers facing Earth (as a contrast to the more gradual nature of solar output variations, which are still exceedingly significant, but not as concentrated in intensity). So, we could ponder the value of frightening ourselves with these scary stories (so that greater peril, like that of famine, pestilence or plague, is avoided, later on, by decoding the symbol fully and effectively avoid getting blasted or prepare for a fire storm or flood event gracefully). Once decoded, the concept of the Dragon, with its haunting over-arching menacing vibe, could be transformed into a self-empowering symbol of ecological stewardship, and a source of pride, as we would look back with admiration, upon our wise ancestors, who had the smarts to make their “reports” last this long, with cunning word-play and storytelling.
Once the literal real-world physical: plasma storms, space rocks, aurora displays, sheet lightning, positive lightning and ball lightning events, along with their ecological impacts, fade from memory; peoples, around the world, try to draw figurative representations of these wild spectacles; even separated by oceans, on isolated continents. In the Americas, flying feathered serpents are a distinctive and central motif (Chichen Itza for example, with the serpent appearing on the equinox, as an optical illusion, with the serpent’s head protruding at the bottom). In China, there’s not just one type of Dragon, but several, each with their own properties.
What I’m contemplating these days is the myths of the PenDragons and other early Welsh and English tales (set in the 6th century), like Beowulf, but it’s hard to make heads or dragon’s tails out of these stories, because most of the stories were written many hundreds of years later, in France and Germany, with some early(?) Welsh/English tales; while many of the later “histories” have fabrications or twisted intentions, often ecclesiastic in nature, which distort the “history”. That being said:
“… there appeared a star of wonderful magnitude and brightness, darting forth a ray, at the end of which was a globe of fire in form of a dragon, out of whose mouth issued forth two rays; one of which seemed to stretch out itself beyond the extent of Gaul, the other towards the Irish Sea, and ended in seven lesser rays. At the appearance of this star, a general fear and amazement seized his people; and even Uther, the king’s brother, who was then upon his march with his army into Cambria, being not a little terrified at it, was very curious to know of the learned men, what it portended.
… But Uther his brother, having assembled the clergy of the kingdom, took the crown, and by universal consent was advanced to the kingdom. And remembering the explanation which Merlin had made of the star above-mentioned, he commanded two dragons to be made of gold, in likeness of the dragon which he had seen at the ray of the star. As soon as they were finished, which was done with a wonderful nicety of workmanship, he made a present of one the cathedral church of Winchester, but reserved the other for himself, to be carried along with him to his wars. From this time, therefore, he was called Uther Pendragon, which in the British tongue signifies the dragon’s head; the occasion of this appellation being Merlin’s predicting, from the appearance of a dragon, that he should be king.”
History of the Kings of Britain
Geoffrey of Monmouth
Book 8
Even though the History of the Kings of Britain is based on mythological fictions, and even though individual dragons are associated in this part of the text with peoples like the Saxons or the Germans, it is still interesting to take a look at Merlin’s fictional prophesy, remembering that in the same book Uther PenDragon gets his name from a “STAR” producing an immense light-show, in the form of a Dragon:
“Men shall be drunk with wine, and, regardless of heaven, shall be intent upon the earth. From them shall the stars turn away their faces, and confound their usual course. Corn will wither at their malign aspects; and there shall fall no dew from heaven. The roots and branches will change their places, and the novelty of the thing shall pass for a miracle. The brightness of the sun shall fade at the amber of Mercury, and horror shall seize the beholders.
… The seas shall rise up in the twinkling of an eye, and the dust of the ancients shall be restored. The winds shall fight together with a dreadful blast, and their sound shall reach the stars.”
History of the Kings of Britain
Geoffrey of Monmouth
Book 7
Now, this sounds like a lot of woo, I know, but, this was not my starting point. My starting point is based on the work of David Keys and Mike Baillie, who have very clearly demonstrated that there was absolute ecological chaos during the time in which these fictional mythological figurative tales are SET: 530’s-550. They have demonstrated that, worldwide, we all suffered tremendous ecological damage in the TIME of mythical “Arthur PenDragon” and his “Wasted and Strange Land” when he is wounded. I think this would explain a lot of what we call “medieval” or “dark age” thinking, due to the devastation wrought by 18 months of exceedingly dim sunlight, and next to no moonlight, and multiple bombardments, along with extremely severe volcanic events, spanning well over a decade, along with the horrendous ecological devastation that resulted.
Note that Dragons were described well before the events of 532-550, globally. That period was simply the last time we had a global significant visit.
Note that Dragons are not the only archetype of recurring ecological calamity encased in a mythological framework. Take the myth of Phaethon, for example. Scary business.
Note that interpreting dragons correctly is completely unnecessary to disprove ACC. I mention them repeatedly only because that is my current line of research/thinking. The real-world facts of the devastation wrought between 532-550 are solid, no matter what the cause; and we should take heed, no matter what the cause, even if my interpretation of Dragons proves incorrect.
Idea/lead credits: Randall Carlson, David Talbott, Immanuel Velikovsky, Robert Schoch, Brien Foerster, and many others, have associated cosmic impacts with myths. Again, David Keys and Mike Baillie are the guys who focus on 532-550 specifically.
Thank you for listening.
thanks for sharing; naturally this reading of dragon lore gives a new ominosity to the Revelation 12 passage:
But rather than follow the dragon thread, I’d like to inquire about your perspective on the Sun and sunspot activity, since you asked JoS above what his view of the sun was, and since I am curious how holisitic and/or metaphysical your perspective on “climate” is.
BTW, speaking of holism, someone just tweeted this about my first ever podcast:
Yes, crucially, you have mentioned our Sun many times, and you are hitting the nail on the head, and thank you for bringing this to the fore. Besides the dragon, there is a huge golden elephant in the room, although not as intense and ferocious, it steadily does slow cartwheels and perspires, then takes a break, and gradually guides the course of events in the living room, with the thermostat on the wall not enjoying the constant work of regulating the sordid affair.
One of my favorite quotes from Brian Fagan’s Little Ice Age is this one:
“The period between 1645 and 1715 was remarkable for the rarity of aurora borealis and aurora australis, which were reported far less frequently than either before or afterward. Between 1645 and 1708, not a single aurora was observed in London’s skies. When one appeared on March 15th 1716, none other than Astronomer Edmund Halley wrote a paper about it, for he had never seen one in all his years as a scientist – and he was sixty years old at the time. On the other side of the world, naked eye sightings of sunspots from China, Korea, and Japan between 28 BC and 1743 AD provide an average of six sightings per century, presumably coinciding with solar maxima. There were no observations, whatsoever, between 1639 and 1700, nor were any aurora reported.”
If there is one thing that I had to unlearn from school, was Astrophysics. We simply don’t know enough to claim much of anything at all about our opaque glowing orb of plasma (if that is indeed all that it is).
Robert Schoch has written a book, which I have yet to read (list is long), called Forgotten Civilizations, which basically says the sun had a major fart 12,900 or 11,600 years ago, and showered us with plasma storms the likes of which we cannot imagine today, wiping out the giant beavers, giant ground sloths, dire wolves, short-faced bear, giant cave bear, mammoths, mastodons, glyptodonts, saber-tooth cats; depositing a “black mat” layer of soot in the process. Below the soot = pleistocene bones. Above the soot = no pleistocene bones. This is only a speculative alternative to the more widely accepted theory that it was an impact event. And that is only a speculative alternative to the mainstream view that we all have nothing at all to fear of solar flares or space rocks at all, ever. Laa de daa de daa…. Milankovich cycles, the proposed multiple orbital paramaters that allegedly control our climate, are not enough to explain the Younger-Dryas eventS (a period in the ice records which show insane temperature swings, on the order of 8-10 degrees centigrade, both up, down, then up again; between 12,900 and 11,600 years ago).
I highly recommend a book called Lost Star of Myth and Time, by Walter Cruttenden. I don’t expect you to believe that we are tied into a double-star system with Sirius. I don’t expect you to take that Siriusly! But, his basic research, and chapter 4 on Precession of the Equinoxes, really gets one’s head in a Wobble about mainstream Astrophysics. His basic claim is that we are in a roughly 24,000-year cycle of golden ages when we are closest to Sirius, and dark ages when we are furthest, and the dip was 599 AD (furthest), and we are just climbing out. That’s not the main point I wish to relate here. What chapter 4 of his book does is demonstrate that we don’t understand precession – that’s the point. So, in order to understand the CLOCK that the ancients might have employed to date events, like solar maxima or solar minima, or bombardments events from known meteor streams, we first have to understand precession.
Anyhoo, back to Edmund Halley. The sun has oscillations. These, we simply do not understand. Science has a few figures and stats, and a few theories, but, for example, we only have a few centuries worth of detailed sunspot observations, we only have a few millennia of tree rings and pollen grains to see how much growth was going on or not going on. Due to the dark ages, we don’t have written records going back very far at all. The Sun reverses magnetic polarity every 11 years. Why? How? It goes through centuries long dips and centuries-long spikes. Why? How? Ice cores are pretty much all we have for deep time, and I think they know some stuff by looking at rocks (probably the plants that grew in those layers, and the heat required for their success…?…). But, ice cores, the principle indicators of solar output, have been mis-…. ….. mis-… …. well… … (cough) … howbout we leave that ice bubble alone for now, lest I melt my patience again. “OOoooooooohhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmm…..”
Re: The dragon/comet connection
Just this New Years Day 2020, I visited the amazing Serpent Mound in southern Ohio. Serpent Mound is essentially a giant serpentine dragon-like effigy fashioned out of layers of stone and clay and aligned to the equinoxes and solstices. While it currently appears to exclusively resemble a snake, at the site is a plaque detailing how formerly there were looped protrusions extending outward midway along the snakes body that, to me, resembled wings, the remnants of which can still be seen. I personally found the environment there to have a charged, almost magnetized feel to it that especially allowed for easier-than-usual access to a state of embodied presence. There is also another plaque explaining how the Serpent has been built within a giant, 9-mile wide crater from an ancient meteorite impact. Given your association of dragons with space rocks and other ecological disasters, this was just too relevant not to add to the conversation. What are the odds that a giant, unprecedented dragon-like effigy would be coincidentally placed directly upon the site of an ancient cataclysmic impact? At the very least it’s an intriguing side note to add to the theory you presented.
Hi Jarrod,
I would very much like to visit Serpent Mound one of these days. If early colonists had not cleared the vast majority of the earthworks, maybe native peoples would have a better sense of just how sophisticated their astronomy and civilization was. Part of the push to pass and enforce the Indian Act, was to prove that they are all just “primitives”, so any analysis of their ancestor’s works needed to be leveled flat.
The crater you mention is absolutely huge and scary, so if they did witness this impact (from very afar, in order to survive it), and mark and memorialize it, it must’ve been quite the firestorm indeed. I wonder if the charged sense you got was from magnetized rock resulting from the impact/heat/re-forming under a common magnetic direction.
Do you know of Randall Carlson? He has researched earthworks in the Americas (among many other things), and his Mayan stuff is absolutely amazing. He shows that the Maya had these wooden effigies that they would light on fire at its head and toss into a huge sinkhole. (implying that they were memorializing and re-enacting the event) He goes on at length about the space rock connections in myths in the Americas.
Brien Foerster is also an excellent researcher on reinterpreting the Americas and Easter Island. For example, we were told that crossing an ocean was impossible until white people invented the chronometer. He demonstrates that the Polynesians and the Haida Gwai and the Hawaians and the Easter-Islanders, were connected, contradicting the official story of Bering Land Bridge Crossing hypothesis.
this comment section is electric
thanks
So too are dragons 🙂
Thanks for the thoughtful reply : )
According to the plaque, the impact site is extremely ancient- millions of years old if I recall. This most likely means it was prehuman, unless of course you fancy an alternative theory of human evolutionary history than scientific orthodoxy would have us believe (I myself am open to anything). If it was prehuman, that still could mean we witnessed it, albeit in a different form through different sensory apparatuses, and thus we could still carry traumatic memory of the event. There are many possibilities, I suppose.
Still, I find it incredible that a sacred serpentine effigy would be placed directly upon a cataclysmic site of that magnitude, particularly in context of the theory you provided. Intuitively, it seems significant. I just don’t know how or why.
I too thought the magnetized feel of the site could be due to rock and/or remnant forces created by an impact of such overwhelming power and scope. 9 miles across is a giant crater, so such an event could cause physical and/or psychological resonances to travel across large expanses of time. Maybe the serpent was placed there intuitively, as some kind of unconscious memorialization of an event that occurred in the distant past, or, perhaps early mound builders noticed the geological and energetic signatures of the location and deliberately chose to place it there. I just don’t know.
At any rate, you absolutely should visit Serpent Mound. It’s an especially magical place in an area already full of historically rich and mysterious locations.
I am familiar with both Carlson and Foerester btw, and have enjoyed their work at different times over the years. I am especially fond of Carlson’s stuff and I think he seems like a really remarkable person.
@Dominic:
Point by point
1) Is “The Debate Over”?
What in your opinion is the most poorly established essential element in the ACC narrative?
2) Has CO2 never been higher than 300 ppm, ever (from all available sources of data, not just ice cores).
Can you briefly explain for the rubes the context for this? I assume 300 ppm is what it currently is and ACC advocates claim a) it has never been that high before and b) it is a direct result of human industry?
3) NASA has a policy paper on the Carbon Cycle, do you agree with all of what is written therein: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/CarbonCycle
I don’t personally have time to & many others won’t bother either; can you list some of the main things in here that you contest? In my view, after the research done for Prisoner of Infinity, and hearing things Gary Heidt had to say on my podcast, NASA is about as reliable a source on climate change as the CIA is on the US elections.
4) Is CO2 concentration the dominant factor in Earth’s climate?
I have no idea. What’s your position?
5) In the ice core record, what changes first, CO2, or is it Temperature?
This sounds like you are suggesting a false assumption of causation that may have it backwards? If so, can you link to a reliable source on this?
6) In the last 2000 years, has the modern era (2000’s) been the warmest period?
What do the stats say? If the answer is no, is this a fact recognized by ACC believers, and if so, what’s a standard explanation?
7) Did we create all the deserts, like the Sahara, by deforestation?
I dunno. What’s your point here? What might an ACC believer say, and what do you believe?
8) Are there any other issues, anything at all, on planet earth, that is more important (tsunami escape – hundreds of thousands of deaths, for example)?
“More important” is meaningless without a qualifier. More important to whom and in relation to what? I guess you mean, a greater threat?
9) Do you fear space rocks, in the least?
No but nor do I fear climate change. I do fear Smart phones though, and WiFi, and 5G and the internet of things and the microchip, and, you get the picture. I feel I would welcome space rocks, in a certain sense, if they would take out this manmade control grid once and forever.
10) Were all ancient peoples primitive minded “astrologers” – in the sense of those who believed comets spelled disAster? Was that just “astrology”? Even those people in the Americas, with the same beliefs about a flying feathered serpent?
You are pointing out the astrological correlation between disaster and astrology, as astra, star. Do you consider ACC narratives partly a distraction from a) a greater threat; b) a deeper meaning to the environmental factors that may be threatening us (i.e., that they are also guiding us towards true ways of seeing)?
11) Do you believe comets are just “dirty snowballs”? Is the fear of comets just silly superstition?
Do I think the Earth has been hit by massive asteroids in the past and will be again, to catastrophic effect? Yes, probably. But then that’s a scenario I have seen in movies & I don’t have much of a solid scientific basis for thinking so.
12) Do you believe we really understand the Sun, fully and completely? What then, is the explanation for the Little Ice Age, the peak of which had Astronomer Edmund Halley observing zero aurora in the northern skies until his 60’s. (he got so excited when he saw an aurora, that he wrote a paper about it in 1716).
Do you think that solar activity caused a mini-ice age in the past and may again? Can you relate this to CC phenomena?
13) Do you think cold is not at all dangerous? What do you think, in history, allowed more productivity and expansion, and food supply? Times of heat (which are regular)? Or, times of cold (which are also just as regularly occurring)?
Again, suggesting an ice age? In my limited understanding a rapid onset ice age is compatible with global warming, since it could be a reaction to it, just as when a human has a fever he may go and get an ice pack. (Loose analogy!) How does this point undermine ACC belief?
14) Do you think that glacial ice traps and solidifies a select year’s atmosphere, in each layer, to the exclusion of other bits of air that still move through the top layer of the glacier, for 100’s of years, until the air inclusions are sealed? “FIRN”
I don’t even understand this question.
15) Do you think we should limit our study of climate to ice cores? No ground-based chemical measurements? (over 90,000 have been conducted since the 1800’s) Howbout solar oscillations? Howbout an actual study of historical glacial retreat? Or, is only today’s retreat of importance?
Again, your question is assuming so much prior knowledge, belief, and opinion, that I have no response to it since it’s not directed anywhere near where I am.
16) When, in the last 200 years, specifically, did we start to contribute so much CO2 that it would have caused glacial melt? 1800? 1825? 1850? 1875? 1900? 1925? 1950?
Good question. What sort of answer have you found to be most common, and what’s your response? I would assume people go for the later dates.
17) When, in the last 200 years, specifically, did the glaciers start to melt? 1800? 1825? 1850? 1875? 1900? 1925? 1950?
See above.
18) Has the arctic ocean never ever been completely free of ice year-round? Are polar bear populations on the brink of extinction? Do polar bears drown only because of CO2? Did polar bears never drown before the modern era?
The point of this question being that the polar bear narrative is central to the larger ACC one?
19) Has Antarctica never ever been completely free of ice?
Is your point that there is a natural cycle occurring here that coincides with industrialization but is unrelated to it?
20) Does temperature, on our home planet’s surface, always stay at equilibrium? If not, what is the range of oscillation? Like, in other words, how much does climate change, on it’s own, over hundreds, to a thousand years. 0 degrees? 0.5 degrees? 1 degree?
Do responses to this question vary, and if so, how much? How important in your opinion to the ACC narrative is the idea that the earth has and needs a stable mean temperature?
21) Do you have an explanation for the Bolling-Allerod heating anomaly (14,700 years ago), or the Younger-Dryas Cooling event (12,800 years ago), or the sudden heat at the end of the Younger Dryas period? (11.600 years ago). Were we driving SUV’s too much at 14,7 and 11,6, and SUV sales went down to cause the 12,8 event?
Never heard of them. You can of course win any debate by asking your opponent about things they know nothing about. But it won’t be very interesting and no one will be convinced by your pyrrhic victory. I realize your point, one of them, is that anyone who believes in ACC should know about these things, but there is no visible limit to data around any given subject, so we have to find areas of shared knowledge and discuss them.
22) Do you believe everything Science tells you? Do you believe in The Beginning to the universe? Do you agree with Astronomer-Priest’s Georges lemaitre’s Big Bang calculations, which Einstein used to make his universe stable? Do you think time is a separate physical dimension?
This is a very broad question. I doubt anyone who reads this blog would answer yes to the first one. What’s your take on the last one, about time, and how is it relevant here?
23) Is Science neutral? Is “The Science Agenda”, a creepy term which Till used, really some sort of communal, commonly-shared, open space, with A-politicized peer-review? Are you, personally, able to submit a paper contradicting Big Bang theory, if you had the training? Do you believe you would at least be heard? Do you think if evidence were to be submitted that clearly contradicts the Big Bang, that this would be immediately and attentively heard?
I like this argument, as you might imagine. It sems to be saying, why would you believe a narrative so fully backed by “Science” when we know that there is a centuries-long Scientific Agenda and that anything that isn’t useful to it tends to be suppressed and marginalized, which clearly is not the case with ACC.
I challenge any of my readers (especially Martin, Gib, Till, & Jason of Seattle, if they are still following along) to argue against this and explain how or why ACC is an exception. Or perhaps, put less assertively, I will ask if they agree that there IS a Scientific Agenda that suppresses some data and promotes other data, thereby either lying by omission or by sheer invention; that Science, big S (as compared to the scientific method, which is something that belongs to all of us, if we choose to learn and apply it), is largely in the business of creating stories out of data; and that these stories are generally, if not always, constructed in service to Power, big P? And if they do agree, in a general way, do they think ACC is a significant exception? And if so, how and why?
You believe in many ‘narratives’ backed by ‘Science’ too, at least I would assume so – electricity, water purification, the internal combustion engine, blood transfusions – to pick a some off the top of my head.
There are political, corporate and military agendas, that lead to the suppression of information and data. This can result in erroneous scientific arguments that can seem correct based on the limited information that is provided. But this is an inhibition to the course of scientific discovery, not an essential aspect of it.
You would have to explain what you meant by a ‘Scientific Agenda’ as distinct from this.
Do you mean the agenda of technocratic (world) governance?
Or perhaps the philosophy of rational materialism? (Or Heroic Materialism as Kenneth Clark put it)
I think both of those but more the first; if the narrative around ACC is convenient to the establishing of a technocratic scientific dictatorship, which it does seem to be, then it seems logical to question whether it’s being manufactured, at least partially, for this purpose. Of course it doesn’t prove anything, any more than showing how US foreign & domestic policy proceeded in ways after 9-11 that it was trying to proceed before; but add that fact to the wholly specious official story of 9-11 and it amounts to substantial evidence of a manufactured narrative combined with real-world social engineering.
with ACC, I am no longer up on the arguments and can’t say outright that it’s a specious narrative. Hence I am much more on the fence about this than 9-11 or other real world managed crises. Have you seen this film? I know I found it quite persuasive at the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYhCQv5tNsQ
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle
Does a pretty good job of pointing out the problems with the movie, although a little snarky.
(knuckle-cracking sounds)
I think it might be best to respond to each one, or maybe a few at a time, so that responses, critiques, fact-checkings, and imaginative creative solutions (most important) resulting from each item, can be kept well sorted. If this gets messy, I’ll stop.
#1 You ask “What in your opinion is the most poorly established essential element in the ACC narrative?”
The single greatest blunder in ACC, is the fact that CO2 does not precede temperature changes, but FOLLOW temperature changes, in the ice core data.
Google: File:Co2-temperature-records.svg – Wikimedia Commons
Download the highest resolution you can, to zoom in properly.
Take a look at the peaks and troughs, especially at 2 specific inter-glacial periods – just before 300 thousand years ago, and just before 200 thousand years ago. I’ve spent tens of minutes, enjoying this graph in detail. “Climate goes uuuppppp, climate goes dowwwnnnnnn, climate goes uuuppppp, clim…..”
As someone who likes to think outside of the box, whenever I posit an idea to the “educated” quackademics of the world, the most common response is: “causation does not equal correlation!” Oh ya? You don’t say!
You see, Al gore (who used the same data as linked to above), what he did was, he split the CO2 from the temperature records, so the causation element is not apparent on the screen. The two data sets must needs be drawn on the same portion of graph. Zoom into the picture, and it is entirely obvious, especially at those two points I mentioned above. I’m not accusing Al of fudging things – I think he was a well-intentioned but simple-minded policy guy, and not really examining the science like a scientist might.
This settles #5 as well.
#2 “… … I assume 300 ppm is what it currently is and ACC advocates claim a) it has never been that high before and b) it is a direct result of human industry?”
Al gore, at the pinnacle emotional moment, when he’s doing his scissor-lift routine, says something like “CO2 concentrations have never gone above 300 ppm as far as our records show”. Thing is, he is only looking at ice core data! The problem with Ice Cores, is that the top layer of the glacier takes hundreds of years to seal for good! So, the result is general average. The resulting blunder is that we have these linear graphs showing steady long-term increases and decreases in CO2. Not so! The variations are spectacularly wild in the actual real nature world!
Google: 180 Years of Atmospheric Co2 Gas Analysis by Chemical Methods
Here is the the abstract:
“More than 90,000 accurate chemical analyses of CO2 in air since 1812 are summarised. The historic chemical data reveal that changes in CO2 track changes in temperature, and therefore climate in contrast to the simple, monotonically increasing CO2 trend depicted in the post-1990 literature on climate-change. Since 1812, the CO2 concentration in northern hemispheric air has fluctuated exhibiting three high level maxima around 1825, 1857 and 1942 the latter showing more than 400 ppm.
Between 1857 and 1958, the Pettenkofer process was the standard analytical method for determining atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and usually achieved an accuracy better than 3%. These determinations were made by several scientists of Nobel Prize level distinction. Following Callendar (1938), modern climatologists have generally ignored the historic determinations of CO2, despite the techniques being standard text book procedures in several different disciplines. Chemical methods were discredited as unreliable choosing only few which fit the assumption of a climate CO2 connection.”
The paper sits behind a paywall, but If you Google-Images for this paper, some astounding graphs will appear from it, or, pay the good researchers their just reward!
http://www.notbluenotred.com/images/orig_figures/noText/Fig6a.png
See the pattern? We are above 400 ppm as measured at Mauna Loa. When measuring co2, one has to be high enough in elevation that variations of co2 levels from plant respiration, and other processes which occur near surface, has had a chance to mix and even out. CO2 varies quite a bit at the surface, depending upon location, or even time of day. A reading of the rebuttal of your l google search, which is just a few entries down on same google search, would have explained all this. You are an example of quack science, picking debunked data and claims in order to push through your agenda. You seem like an intelligent person, but for some reason do not want, or even look at, arguments that go against your world view. I will give you credit that the NASA site on carbon cycle, is a watered down explanation designed for the general public to grasp the concepts, but can’t be used in anyway to show that man made carbon dioxide can’t be absorbed completely into the fast cycle. But the graph I linked shows a correlation that can’t be ignored. I would honestly like you to explain it. As far as ice core data, it seems that we are again running into the problem of local climate vs global. As more ice cores from different areas are compared, we should get a clearer answer on what comes first. Also, variations in the Earths tilt, and distance from the sun seem to combine to cause the regular ice age patterns. At least this is a strong explanation.
The source you cite, “not blue, not red, just green”, lists an extremely blurry and strangely puny graphic of the last 800,000 years – why? Why is the causal/correlation issue completely unaddressed? This should be the central graphic. On this sub-page:
http://www.notbluenotred.com/cycle.html
Do you assert that the ice cores indicate that CO2 causes temperature changes?
This is precisely the problem – the most important part – the deep history (climate) is actually physically blurred! Ha! I’m going to save this one. Ha!
Consider this one, from your “source”:
“Here are temperatures and carbon dioxide levels over the last 6,000 years:”
http://www.notbluenotred.com/images/orig_figures/noText/Fig3a.png
This graphic implies that the last 6000 years have only witnessed less than a 1 degree Fahrenheit shift in temperatures, until the year 2000 AD! Ha! Do you stand by this? Consider your response carefully, I would advise. This will lock your response for line-item #20.
You write “debunked data”
So then, you would take issue with the authors of the paper I cited here, regarding direct chemical measurements of the air, over the last 200 years? Is it that their data are false? Is it that their interpretations are false? Do you still stand by Al Gore’s claim that it has never been above 300 ppm, even in the last 200 years, even after reading that paper? Your graphic implies this, and demonstrates precisely the “monotonically increasing CO2 trend depicted in the post-1990 literature on climate-change”, which was the actual topic of item #2. The importance is that we could simply be in another one of those 3 peaks mentioned,, with the last one rising to 400 ppm. I guess, what, you missed that part? Did I not paste that bit – ya, I did – it was in the abstract?!?
The source of your graphic only uses Ice Core data for CO2 records:
“Historical Carbon Dioxide Record from the Siple Station Ice Core”
Instead of looking for the rebuttals that others have formulated, online, perhaps you could venture to formulate your own original rebuttals. Maybe they would have integrity, and withstand scrutiny.
You write: “But the graph I linked shows a correlation that can’t be ignored. I would honestly like you to explain it.”
Not unless you are willing to accept “Ancient History”, and a proper analysis of the last 800,000 years of data, comprehensively, and considering the matter without your dizzying ACC soundbites, and your continuing attacks on my character and intelligence, and accusations of quackery, based solely on the fact that I have taken a stance against ACC. Unbelievable.
I am starting to get the sense that you actually need there to be a problem here.
Fukishima? Nope. A! C! C!
Save the whales? Nope. A! C! C!
C! A! C! A!
You write: “You are an example of quack science”
Honestly, dude, desist.
You are no match.
And you trigger me.
Have you written a scientific paper that expresses your arguments?
Has it been peer reviewed?
#3
NASA has a policy paper on the Carbon Cycle: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/CarbonCycle
You write: “I don’t personally have time to & many others won’t bother either; can you list some of the main things in here that you contest?”
Contrast, for example, these two contradictory paragraphs, from this very same paper:
“Emissions of carbon dioxide by humanity (primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, with a contribution from cement production) have been growing steadily since the onset of the industrial revolution. About half of these emissions are removed by the fast carbon cycle each year, the rest remain in the atmosphere.” (later) … “humans emit about 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year—100–300 times more than volcanoes—by burning fossil fuels.”
And then, further down:
“The time it takes carbon to move through the fast carbon cycle is measured in a lifespan. The fast carbon cycle is largely the movement of carbon through life forms on Earth, or the biosphere. Between 10*15 and 10*17 grams (1,000 to 100,000 million metric tons) of carbon move through the fast carbon cycle every year.”
Woah, woah, woah, woah, woah there. Not, sooo, faaast. First, a seemingly precise statement of “half of our emissions get cycled back”. (30/2 = 15 Gigatons) Then, in the very same paper, we are told that:
Between:
10*15 (1,000 million metric tons) = 1 Gigaton.
And
10*17(100,000 million metric tons) = 100 Gigatons.
Are cycled every year???!!!!**????*#*%%&?????!!!!
Is anybody at the helm here?
So, to satisfy the first paragraph (where “half” of human output is cycled back), what sort of error-bars are we allowing NASA? Their lowest actual estimate would have us all in a panic. Their highest actual estimate reveals that our output is well within tolerance! Oy! The only thing that is revealed by this paper is the fact that these particular technicians (most scientists are in fact simply technicians), have no fracking clue how much is actually cycled. But, no, we have to have an answer for the textbooks! We can’t just say “we don’t know!”! I honestly think the right hand is not speaking with the left hand, in writing these reports. Everybody gets paid individually, for their individual studies and write-ups, and they just slap it all together in a fancy report, like a child’s collage held together with an UHU glue stick.
Notice also, when they say: “The time it takes carbon to move through the fast carbon cycle is measured in a lifespan”. Point #2, about direct chemical measurements in the air, which I outlined previously, completely invalidates this claim.
Again, my charge is not fraud, deceit, profiteering, mind-control, fear-induction, or conspiracy. I’m afraid it’s just stupidity, along with lazyness, and a whole lot of self-righteous finger-pointing and latent hatred for oil companies for doing other unrelated things dastardly, while being the easiest environmental cause to “work” for – just sit around, drink Kombuchya, and blame the oil companies.
NASA still does launch some interesting space probes, to this day, however, and should be given continuing credit for this, even though their interpretation of the results may be wanting, they are still TECHNICALLY an ingenious and innovative bunch, and there are probably many individuals within NASA that would agree with many of the sentiments I am expressing. It is a huge group of people. 17,000 people. More populous than the town I live in, by nearly treble. Surely there are some sane individuals in there, somewhere….
#6 and #7 – Current modern temperatures = warmest-on-record claim. #7 was about us being the cause of all desertification, a claim made by many self-hating humans who take up ACC as their reason d’etre, and that we are also responsible for all environmental ills on the planet today.
According to ACC, we are: experiencing an unprecedented heating event, that will blow out of control if we don’t stop it, seeing as the warmest years earth has ever experienced have been induced by fossil fuel burning, today, and no other time in history has the temperature been higher, or the CO2 been in greater concentration, as far back as the ice records reveal. That’s the whole point here. That’s the greenhouse effect. That’s precisely the “belief” we are addressing here.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-contour-plots-of-all-the-GRIP-temperature-histograms-as-a-function-of-time-describes_fig1_13521226
This shows 3 time scales, with generalized trends being the focus, rather than specific detailed oscillations. First note the Medieval Warm Period in the bottom graph. Then note the early-holocene climatic optimum on the top-right. Blue lines are today’s average temperature.
During the climatic optimum just mentioned, between around 8000 years ago and 4000 years ago, the Sahara was not at all a desert. Check out the youtube:
How The Sahara Desert Was Made – It Used To Be Green
And there are plenty of peer-reviewed papers written by qualified scientists, regarding this fact. Peter B. DeMenocal is one of many. The cycle is (apparently) on the order of 20,000 years from Green, to Desert, and back to Green again. The megalakes will return! Yay!
“… until about 5,000 years ago, Lake Chad still covered a considerable area. Rivers such as the Tilemsi, the Tafassasset, the Timmersoi and the Tamanrasset ran regularly, keeping the region moist and encouraging the growth of a luxuriant carpet of vegetation. The peaks of the Hoggar, the Tassili N’ Ajjer, and the Tibesti enjoyed a Mediterranean climate, and analyses of ancient pollens have shown that Allepo-pine grew there, together with cypresses, cedars, ash trees, evergreen oaks, nettle trees, walnuts, alders, myrtle, limes and olives.”
“The hippopotamus, shown being hunted from canoes, indicates the existence of living rivers. And for a huge beast such as an elephant – which eats an average of 450 pounds of forage a day – to have lived on the Tassil N’ Ajjer and the surrounding area, there must have been a dense cover of vegetation. This must have existed, too, to satisfy the appetites of a large number of domesticated animals, whose existence can be assumed from the many painted pastoral scenes. …”
“… There is a wide variety of colour and pattern in the coats of the animals, and the cows’ udders are well-developed – both characteristics which point to an advanced stage of domestication. As far as can be judged from the paintings, the cattle seem to have been in excellent physical condition, and their graceful outlines are a further indication of very good pasture.”
“ … The present camel period started around 2,000 years ago.”
The World’s Last Mysteries
Henri Lhote
Author of a short summary in this Reader’s Digest special
The Reader’s Digest Association, 1978
Pages 209 + 212 +214
The regular greening and desertification of the Sahara should give us pause, in the estimation of ourselves as the dominant players in the change of climate. And, more to the point here, the climatic optimum (warm period) during which the Sahara was last Green, was well above modern temperatures. Well above. This is not controversial. It is just not part of the non-existent “debate”.
This begins to address #4
Science, by its nature, attempts to explain phenomena using logic, cause and effect, and mathematics. In this regard, science is not neutral, it is matterialistic. Once explanations have been shown to answer previous unknowable questions, and to accurately predict future conditions based on cause and effect mechanisms, it becomes a paradigm. This paradigm will last for a period of time until questions can no longer be answered using it, then a revolution of sorts will take place whereby a new viewpoint is established that answers the older questions and also the newer ones. I think when one era is in a certain paradigm, it can seem like an agenda, as most established scientist will agree on a majority of theories, and it is hard to get a new viewpoint accepted, unless one has proof that the new theory is consistent, and answers existing questions. If true, a new theory will slowly slip into conscience, mind by mind, until a new paradigm is accepted. Keep in mind, information was not as accessible in the past as now, and viewpoints changed slowly. Today, a lot of basic scientific questions are answered, and a lot of the questions still out there require huge amounts of money and resources to physically test, such a CERN, Mars rover, ect.. Because we as a public do not have access to the information being discovered, and have to rely on “experts” to let us know what is going on, this makes it very hard to determine if any conspiracy is being carried out.
Now, I would place GMOs into the technology category, not the science category, meaning people and corporations use scientific knowledge to create new systems. Do corporations and universities have an agenda? Sure, to make money, the public and the environment be damned. They will lie, propagandize, and try to control the public’s perceptions in order to make money. They will put out disinformation, and higher unethical, and unknowledgeable scientists to promote their agenda, or persuade the public that no danger exists in using their products. But, in my mind, this is not science, and should not be confused with science. Advertising is not psychology, but it uses the knowledge, the science, of psychology, to sell products. This is where the agenda lies. As far as ACC, there is no way to test variables to determine cause and effect, except by using known properties of matter and energy, and modeling it on a computer. As computers become faster, as models start to match historical records better and better, we can build up a theory of climate and climate change. Science will look at the consistency of the logic, make sure the assumptions match known laws. If, say, 100 different models are run, using different variables, and different weights for each variable and 90 out of the 100 shows warming in the future by 2-5 degrees, while 10 show no warming or some cooling, and it is reported that the models show a likely 2-5 degrees warming outcome, does that count as suppression? I think the media, governments, and different political groups will report with a slant, one way or another, and leave some contrasting evidence out, but most scientific journals do a good job of publishing information that can be checked and verified. Will continue, gotta get back to work.
Doesn’t John Michael Greer agree that ACC is happening (or is at least part of the story)? He seems to have a pretty remarkable grasp on the science but is also coming at from a decidedly non-mainstream point of view. Perhaps have him back on the podcast for a chat concerning his thoughts on the subject.
I was thinking of JMG this morning but not in this context, rather than we share a publisher with Aeon Books, and why he didn’t get back to me after I sent him Prisoner of Infinity
I don’t think ACC would be at the top of things to talk about but I may send him an invite at some point.
Happy New Year Jasun,
That was much better than the Queen’s speech.
Yes ACC is an instrument in the promotion of technocratic world government. Yes there are political, corporate and military objectives relating to it, and disinformation surrounding it.
But the same is true of nuclear weapons and nuclear non proliferation agreements. Does that mean that nuclear weapons don’t really exist, and are just an illusory instrument of fear?
To the best of my understanding no, though I have seen people try to argue that also.
>nuclear weapons don’t really exist and are just an illusory instrument of fear
Martin, please, I can only take so much truth this early in the morning
Another good example would be polio and the vaccination campaign to eradicate it globally.
@ Martin: I have certainly had my doubts about nuclear weapons but it was more along speculative-mystical lines of such forces being by their nature beyond the control of human agencies. As I said, evidence that ACC narrative is a useful tool to the technocrats doesn’t show it to be false, but it does mean approach with utmost caution and skepticism, surely? Just as, if they are also promoting psychedelic use, that ought to alert people to the possibility that taking psychedelics may not be in their interests.
@Dominic – you seem to have a mixed goal in posting here. 1) You want to prove that ACC is a fallacy by showing all the evidence to the contrary. 2) You want people to relax and stop putting so much energy into this belief, and their misguided attempts to do something about it.
I have no skin in the first game, as it’s so far beyond my ability, or so far outside my interest, to devote the necessary time and energy to become sufficiently informed to have any kind of meaningful opinion about it. I do suspect that a really solid basis of knowledge around this is impossible for any of us without the necessary instrumentalities, which means at the end of the day that we are left with our own intuitive and deductive faculties to fall back on. In which case, evidence may not carry the day here and you may want to accept that at a certain point. It may help you not to confuse who you are or who your “opponent” is with their or your allegiance to an evidence-set, which after all is really not that far from an ideological position.
Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.
As to the second goal, however, that of helping people let go of imaginary fears and relax, here is where philosophy and logic and intuition and common sense and direct personal experience can all come to our aid and work together. Here also is where a possible meeting of minds, and even souls, might occur. It may be that we can *all* agree here that ACC, true or not, is being cynically exploited as a means of oppression: to lure people into certain forms of belief, emotional reactivity, and behavior, for schismogenesis even, as we have seen at this blog, as well as to push certain sociopolitical agendas that have little or nothing to do with “saving the planet,” and everything to do with introducing more and more forms of social and psychological control. If so, then you may find it more productive to focus on this area of possible agreement, and see where it leads?
My own view is that it doesn’t really matter, to me, if ACC us true or not (rather like the flat earth), because there is nothing I plan to do about it anyway. Nothing I am not already doing, at least. I am not concerned for the survival of the Earth, any more than I am for that of the Sun. That strikes me as the most absurd sort of human arrogance, on the one hand, and on the other, as a misuse of my time and energy – the modern day equivalent to wondering how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. It’s clearly outside my area of expertise. A man’s got to know his limitations. ACC, in my view, seems to play into human beings’ self-importance and narcissism in a quite insidious way. Which reminds me, “extinction rebellion” should perhaps be exhibit A at this point. Because if these are the good guys, we are in some serious trouble that goes way beyond c02 levels.
This is not to say that I am not with the average and relatively harmless ACC believer that we *are* in an environmental crisis, whatever it’s exact nature and whatever the causes. We surely are. Or that I don’t think human beings and our toxic behaviors aren’t a primary cause for God and Mother Nature’s current orneriness, because I suspect they are. But at the core of this is not, IMO, how we treat the Earth but how we treat our own bodies and hence each other. This means that the best, and perhaps only, way to really address this environmental crisis is to improve human (and animal, plant, air, water and food, and even technology) relations in any way we can, in our own lives.
It is here that an awareness of the environmental crisis can be useful, as a mirror for our own internal distortions and pollution, both bodily and psychologically. How are we polluting our environment, or helping to clean it up, with each comment we make, each look we give, and each thought we have?
So there are two sides to every question. Can you, Dragon-Man, allow that an ACC believer might be something other than the useful idiot you perceive him to be, more than his or her body of beliefs and opinions, and that they might have a way of relating to those ideas that works for them, and is quite different from how you perceive it from the outside?
“How are we polluting our environment, or helping to clean it up, with each comment we make, each look we give, and each thought we have?”
I guess my method is just as pollutive emotionally/WIFI-ly, and to take a stance against ACC is to invite predictable triggers, and I should be able to deflect or redirect them or accept them with grace, and keep my compassion of the other (as part of the environment in which I am discussing). I like this ideal, and would help to keep my own center. My mind and body simply do not work like that. When somebody calls me a Quack, there are at least 30 topics that immediately rush through my head of why that is not the case, and this drives adrenaline, which shortens temper, which quickens the key strokes, and draws the Send button nearer, just as one would flinch and shoo away a fly, as an automatic reaction. It’s not me, it’s my Amygdala! he he I wish The Non-Existent Debate were conducted in a non-pollutive manner. Maybe you could insist on ground rules, and exclude anything like “You are an example of Quack Science!!!”.
Concerning our ability to “do anything” … about … “it” (whatever environmental problem is most pressing), I was trying to convey the idea that there are multitudes of local environmental concerns (I mentioned clearcutting, which has many alternatives, like coppicing, a proven and ancient practice, ready to go, albeit with substantial initial effort). So, one attractive feature of ACC, as I’ve mentioned, is that you can feel like you are doing something for the entire world, all of God’s creatures, and, because it is sold as the over-arching all-encompassing problem that will dwarf all others, local problems (which take physical effort), are not as readily taken up, and seem less significant.
“as it’s so far beyond my ability”
“a really solid basis of knowledge around this is impossible for any of us without the necessary instrumentalities”
This is an extremely dangerous position to take, to concede such power of authority over the minds of men and women, to a select group of un-elected researchers, whose INTERPRETATIONS we all have to bow down to.
Just because somebody took 2-4 years to learn how to dig bones, catalogue them, and radiocarbon date them; doesn’t mean that this individual should be allowed to have the last say on what the bones and pot sherds mean! Sneferu allegedly built 3 giant “tombs” for himself! Oy! Sure he did. Right. Just because you found some copper chisels and some stone hammers, this does not let you assert that the Great Pyramid was built with these, by people with (allegedly) no advanced mathematics and no wheels and no saws with cutting bits stronger than the red granite or diorite there.
Just because we discover redshift of distant galaxies, does not mean I have to follow the INTERPRETATION that all of that redshift is from the Doppler effect, indicating recessional velocity, much less do I have to believe this indicates that there was A Beginning to the universe, an incredibly childish, ridiculous and un-scientific and untestable notion; and one that was originally introduced to Einstein, by a Priest, specifically in order to validate the literal creation myth in Genesis. Georges Lemaitre was the Astronomer-Priest’s name, fully ordained. Much less to I have to believe in Dark Energy in order for all the mathematics to work. “The power of the vacuum of empty space”. Sure. OK. If a New-Agey spiritualist would say the same thing, without evidence, they would get laughed off the podium. But, no, it’s a guy in a suit with a degree, pushing an idea without evidence, only to satisfy the stability of the “space-time continiuum”. I enjoyed Start Trek and Jordi’s engineering genius, and Scotty’s engineering bravery, but it is just Science Fiction. Wormholes do not exist.
Teacher, in school, got mad, when I mixed my units in math class. But, same teacher will instruct students that time units, like seconds, can simply be slapped and smooshed together with units of distance, like meters, to get “space-time curvature”. An exercise with the function of getting you to believe in a lie! Like:
What colour is this sheet of paper?
Blue.
Blue? No it’s not blue, it’s red.
But…
Let’s start again – what colour is this sheet of paper?
It’s B… B…. (raising of whip) it’s …. …. Red.
If you believe that they know more than you, and can interpret the results better than you, it is no better than trusting your local totalitarian regime, because its members took political Science at college, while you went to work in the coal mine. They can tell us any **** to believe in and we simply would have to accept having their beliefs filling the textbooks and diverting taxdollars, and shaping court law, and taking majority time in political debates (the only environmental concern mentioned on a national level now is ACC – giving politicians an even easier time on the question of “the environment”! Its all just one big single monolithic global problem now – not a dozen things to discuss locally!). If you achieve a state where this situation does not move you to studying and solving technical details and querying professionals, you do you Boo, but I don’t have to accept this, nor is it some sort of logical default position to take.
Of course I believe that ACC proponents are more than their set of untenable religious/social beliefs/constructs, and if they are concerned for future generations, this is the right starting point. The song “Shout! Shout! Let it all out!” by Tears For Fears, comes to mind here to sum up what I feel when encountering zealous ACCists. The lyrics mean something other than what I thought they meant when I was growing up. Maybe you could play it on this page, on repeat, for all visitors to ponder. Consider the line “I really want to break your heart…..” Hmmmmmmmm…. Tough love. I think it is necessary, in this case, even if the emotional pollution to achieve this end is an issue in of itself.
hmm… well it seems like you ignored the spirit of my comment and the main suggestion in it and focused on whatever you could disagree with
in psychological terms, this is known as a “negative identity”
it simple terms, it’s the tendency we develop due to push people away so we don’t ever get to risk feeling abandoned or rejected by them – to keep love at a distance so we don’t risk being hurt (you know, the strong silent types in movies, in life it is often the loud pushy types or overly prickly dogmatic ones – I know coz I was one)
debate’s OK, but my point above remains, if there’s too much focus on the differences of opinion, no bridging occurs, schismogenesis – the perpetuating of a gulf – does instead.
It is not at all that I ignored your central point, it is that I disagreed with it. Maybe I should have connected a few more dots:
If this is the central point you raised, in summary: “debate’s OK, but my point above remains, if there’s too much focus on the differences of opinion, no bridging occurs, schismogenesis – the perpetuating of a gulf – does instead.” then:
Those technical “differences of opinion” are precisely what is being ignored in ACC discussions, and is precisely why there is only stagnation in environmental discourse and no building of bridges!
My point is that if we don’t focus on the technical details, and speak truth to Science power in a persistent and methodical way, logical fallacies and erroneous conclusions will be left unchallenged. I’m afraid, in order to build a bridge, first you have to survey the river and the banks in depth and great detail. You have repeated that you are out of your depth and don’t wish to study the matter in depth, and that’s what I honed in on, as it was a central assertion in this last post. I don’t believe this to be true. You obviously have a deep intelligence, and yet, you repeat that the climate Science is well above your head. It really isn’t all that complicated. With your mind and your voice, you could easily discern fact from fiction on this topic, and be of use in “bridging” the divide. I think Science holds too much power in your mind, already. I think just a little effort, looking at the evidence, might free your mind of this dis-empowering myth. I did spend a good deal of effort to list the evidence, so it is disheartening to read, especially after those 4 posts only yesterday, that you are, after all, not interested in looking at the technical details.
sorry that you feel disheartened; keep in mind that I am only the emcee & my questions are in that spirit; you may well be right about Science & my relation to it around this issue. But expecting me to suddenly become an expert on ACC in order to discuss it here would be like me telling you to educate yourself on organize child sexual abuse in order to comment at my blog. In a word, an imposition & a presumption.
I’d still say you missed the spirit of my comment, but that’s OK. We can probably come back to it at some point.
Jasun, thanks for fielding my own zeal for almost a week now. This no longer seems healthy, for any of us here. I actually think that the TIlls and JIS’s and the Martins here do indeed think “The Debate Is Over”, so a true one won’t happen here, or anywhere else. After this, I think it is evident I don’t have the communication skills for a debate, whether in private or public. My strong point is research. I should stick to my asteroid-guns.
I am getting too old to have to try to convince others that Science is not this infallible neutral a-political benevolent force in the world with incomprehensible wonders held in safe keeping. They have won. They have the power in the minds of men and women that no set of words can shake free, and I’m done with it. The fear of addressing Science matters is total and absolute and debilitating for any constructive effort, in any discipline. The Ivory Tower gleams too bright in the sunshine to think or communicate clearly. This narrative is even more pervasive than ACC, and is the source and basis for ACC, in fact.
I belong with the trees and rivers and the snow. Auto-culture, yes, indeed. I’ll take that notion, even if I’m mis-interpreting it. A healthy sense of self-referencing, to build my own story, regardless of the views of minds parroting ACC narratives, to keep my own center, is probably in order. I will follow my own advice, and stick to tackling local environmental concerns. This is a waste of electrons.
Thank you.
Peace.
@Dominic F.
Your have made an impact, an impression and aroused curiosity. You seek to make connections: internally, virtually and externally. In your own words, what is your ultimate aim?
Good question Dave, maybe I should’ve started with that, to allay any fears that I want Exxon to run unregulated and poison the rivers, or that I’m employed by Dupont and seek to let it grow untamed and dump acidic or caustic barrels of unpronounceable crap into the woods, and just let industry “keep on trucking” as usual; as has been intimated below, which is telling. Jasun has already addressed the psychological aspects and social implications of this automatic accusation, in depth, below.
When I walk outside my camper door in the morning, what I would love to see is this: people tending to gardens gracefully, to grow as much food locally as possible. I would love farmlands to be open to human traffic (some organic farms do this, like a big interconnected park). I would love to see a mixture of veg and animals, rather than either-or in fields (rotational grazing). I would love our forests to be managed without ever clearcutting (coppicing instead), preserving root systems and habitats consistently, without ever resorting to smothering all but the planted tree crop (current practice is to exterminate any other sapling with chemicals or weed whackers). I would love it if the beautiful rivers I walk along every day were treated with respect, especially at their headwaters, where fish farms are strategically positioned to trap incoming spawning fish to feed the farmed fish (for one example). I would love it, if, when talking with people about the environment, that they understood the local peculiarities of nature, (which might or might not be helped with our involvement), instead of ringing a bell and wearing an ACC sandwich board reading “the end nigh”, with their eyes and ears closed. I would love it if Astrophysicists and scientific Cosmologists were open to scrutiny from outside their own circles (repeat that sentence for many other closed sciences), so that millions of people could contribute to Science, instead of a select few PhD’s. I would love it if textbooks listed the data sets, logic sequences, and sequences of deduction, that led them to the conclusions asserted, rather than just saying “this is the way it is”. Example – the images of the Cosmic Microwave Background, which were toyed with in the computer, reducing the (allegedly erroneous) glare from our galaxy, without it being evident in the textbook, completely distorting the conclusion, because if all the CMB is from the galaxy, then it is not a COSMIC BACKGROUND of microwaves, and has nothing to do with The Beginning of the Universe. I would love it if the Canadian government’s “Ask A Scientist” page, actually yielded any responses. I would love it if, when I attend a talk on “Time Travel” at the planetarium, hosted by professors at UBC, and ask a question that aims to refute the claims of these new priests in white lab coats, that the question be addressed with things other than (“It has been well established experimentally”) without referring to specifics, and ignoring the bigger question being addressed (that time travel is an inherently insane non-scientific notion). I would love it if, when I attend a talk on genetic engineering with a geneticist from UBC, and articulate a case that there is more to just “Nature” and/or “Nurture” that affects cellular development, and that cells have innate intelligence that needs to be factored in, and that this is part of the picture of genetics – I would love it if he would say something other than “This talk is about Science, not Philosophy”. I would love it if we all understood that Science has adopted massive philosophical assumptions, for example: the claim that our universe can “start” or “stop”. Or the claim that Life can have a specific origin. Before that: no life. Or that life can be born out of lifeless bits. And many other partridges in many other organically-grown pear-trees (heirloom cultivars preferably).
@Dominic F.
Thanks for your vision. How much time do you spend making that vision real versus tackling the ACC issue? Which action could you take that would have the biggest impact in the ACC-view world?
Dave,
The time I’ve spent is of no consequence, because it was all a by-product of researching the history of Jewish, Islamic, and Christian mysticism. After scouring tome after tome, it soon became very apparent that all, and I do mean ALL mystics that are quoted today lived during the Medieval Warm Period, and the foundations of (essentially) all mystical practices today, find their source (whether correctly interpreted or not) in this same Medieval Warm Period. Then, when studying early Islam, one quickly realizes that it was promoted very soon after the Dark Ages abruptly commences. Then, when studying why the Dark Ages were the Dark Ages, one quickly comes to the fact that between 532-550 AD, there was some huge natural climate change event (whether volcanoes, space-rocks, or whatever), which induced massive ecological chaos, lasting decades. Then, in 2007, the first heavy paper on the Younger Dryas climate change event was introduced, so that brings in a ton of more evidence about Natural Climate Change. Going back further, I was interested in the work of Micheal Cremo, Walter Cruttenden, and others, regarding vast cycles of time (Yugas), which made me focus on Ice Ages. Once you study Ice Ages at all, there’s no going back to ACC, because we are obviously near the end of an inter-glacial period, which repeat roughly once every 100,000 years. So, the only real time I’ve ever spent, focusing exclusively on ACC, is here. That is probably why it came out all clumsy – with like 50+ issues swarming around my head, and it all comes out sideways, all at once, like holding in an explosive diarrheal load for 26 years, within one’s bowels, and breaking the toilet after running there to avoid soiling the entire city block.
Your second question is impossible to answer. You see, the key is not ACC. The key is our current view of Science. Not just Science itself. Our view of Science. If %99 of Scientists vote on an issue, we are all supposed to bow down. Since when? This is actually the more dangerous thing. I have no solution. It’s not about writing a letter to Neil Degrasse Tyson. It is millions of people who take what these people are telling us to believe in, without thinking things through for themselves. I’ve witnessed this my whole life. Most people who go to college come out promoting Science as the highest authority – the be-all end-all, unlocking all of the mysteries of the universe, with mathematics and super-computers. Wowie! Oooooh! Ahhhhh! The truth is a lot less glamorous. We know absolutely nothing about lightning – nothing at all, for example. Ball-lightning: unexaplained. Affiliations between distant strikes: unexplained. How a stroke forms: unexplained. Plasma formations above earthquakes: complete mystery. Terrestrial Gamma Ray bursts from storms: complete mystery. Above-cloud lightning: catalogued, but no explanation. When we sent poor unsuspecting spaceship Columbia to go study above-cloud lightning (among many other things), the spaceship got zapped by the same phenomenon, during re-entry. Then, this is ignored, because it doesn’t conform to the Space-Time-Gravity-Only view that NASA et. al. promote. Electricity in space? Nope. I give this as an example to demonstrate that Scientists are only human, and that their own ignorance can lead to grave ills, no matter how much “certainty” you have with your existing calculations. Science is just a prone to group-think and confOrmational bias, as any other human pursuit. But, again, what is more worrisome is the unquestioning millions who defend Science like a new Religion, and go on a hunger strike at UBC, until the rest of us bow down to the IPCC. So, in order to tackle ACC, one would first have to de-throne Science, and put it in its place. Why? Because nobody is willing to debate the facts anymore, it is beyond any Scientific argument. Worse still, those on the fence claim that they can “sense something wrong” with the climate, even if the Science is unconvincing. This presupposes that our climate is never supposed to change, so the climate you experience as a kid, SHOULD be the same climate you feel now. Ol timers here tell me that the 60’s was really really really cold – with severe winters. Records show that climate is always changing, but geology adopted Gradualism (the belief that things are steady and continuous, and rarely disruptive on Earth), and Darwinism (originally) implied that things only change gradually (a view that persists). Therefore, modern science, which millions promote and defend mindlessly, without question, would have us believe that the temperature never changes more than 1 degree! Something which is at odds with reality. It gives us a nice false sense of security, while giving us something to endlessly complain about, when sea levels rise or fall by a foot or two, or the temperature in our backyard is “not what it used to be, in the good ol’ days”. (350 feet was the total rise in sea levels since the Younger Dryas, along with temperature swings on the order of 8-10 degrees centigrade, and since then, during centuries-long oscillations, the climate swings around 3-4 degrees centigrade, with this oscillation never stopping). The Little Ice Age saw the return of glacial formation, not seen since the Younger Dryas, for example. Inuits were paddling the river Don in Scotland. The ground in Sommerset froze to 4 feet. 4 feet! Climate always changes. If I can’t convince one person, with facts and particulars, I have no intention of pursuing the matter by any other means. If people aren’t interested in “Ancient History’, then I have no means to change the situation.
Below is an example of those I just mentioned, who believe in climate change, because THEIR climate has changed, over THEIR lifespan, which is absolutely expected, speaking in geological time, and not at all abnormal. The only constant in earth’s climate, IS change, well within a few generations, and sometimes drastic and overnight.
Andy Letcher On Bardism, Druidry, Music, Magic, and Madness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpysBihpn6s
(otherwise, an interesting talk)
Andy Letcher:
“If you start going, OK, I’m going to start paying attention to the world, even if I live in a city, I’m going to start paying attention to the world, then over time you start to notice when it “feeeels” wrong. Now, you can read all you like about climate change, but when, as you had last year, we had this bizzzaaarrre indian-summer, which went on and on and on, all the way into November, and I was still wearing a T-shirt and shorts in November. And, because I’ve paid attention to the seasons, and I know how the seasons SHOULD be turning; it felt wrong, on a visceral level. It was like a jarring note, like a discordant note, just constantly there. Like traffic noise, but in the weather. Then you can feel it. It sort of transcends rational argument. Something is feeling deeply wrong and out of kilter.”
If you sense change, from your norm, this doesn’t necessarily mean we are all going to hell in a CO2 canister basket, much less does it mean we have to hand over the keys to the city to enraged wild-eyed 15-year-old children (not what Andy Letcher was implying).
Rational arguments can be informed by and composed of feelings! Why are the two mutually exclusive? What gives? Actually, HOW can these be separated in the first place (at a fundamental level).
I also “feeeeel” this changing wobbling earth beneath my feet, and in this weird atmosphere, with charged plasma events popping off all over the place, and shooting stars ominously portending what is possible on earth. Feels just like it should, based on factual historical records. In fact, this is a golden age! This “feeeels” like the Medieval Warm Period! Greta should be smiling and picking strawberries, and enjoy her time in the sun before the inevitable return of glaciers (remember there are oscillations on a centuries-long time-scale, not just grand ice ages – read The Little Ice Age, by Brian Fagan, for more). The next dip probably won’t be for another couple centuries, based on the length of the Medieval Warm Period, but still, we should work to prepare for the next dip, by doing things like storing grain. Not only this, but there are spikes of heat during Little Ice Ages, and spikes of cold during Little Warm Periods, so… you never ever know when you might need that grain stored… This is essentially the symbolic theme of much of the book of Genesis.
@Dominic F
“ALL mystics that are quoted today lived during the Medieval Warm Period”
Quick question. The MWP spans only c. 950 to c. 1250. Are you working with a limited set of names for your list of mystics?
Ooooooph, Dave, that’s a doozie.
I will have to move to a new thread, because the paragraph width at this nesting level is too narrow.
I havent watched this yet but may be of interest and relevance:
“THE MYTH OF EXTINCTION” (REBELLION) | 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZQ9NSbigZo
Worth parsing the distinction of questioning a constructed climate narrative vs. believing that the industrial and post industrial ages have not caused terrible, possibly irreversible damage to the environment and climate at large. That it’s all a hoax.
Big oil, really all big commodity have their own and frankly much crazier narrative than “Al Gore’s climate change”. It seems inevitable the waters will rise. Not going to really matter why when it does. Populations will be fucked. Satellite time lapse of disappearing glaciers are scary no matter what the cause of it is. Given humanities history, given the train wreck that industrialization and capitalism has been, it does not seem far fetched we are to blame. Like others have pointed out I don’t know the science, nor do I care to. We have such limited time and capacity to learn the things we are going to learn. This is just not on my list. But big industry denying climate change is just ghoulish short term greed. Conservatives gonna conservative. They are looking out for no one but themselves.
Their goal so ghoulishly transparent it’s hard to ever take the position seriously. Not exaggerating to say conservative objectives are basically always some sort of existential threat to humanity (of course they do not hold this distinction alone). This doesn’t mean I’m running into the arms of their neo liberal counterparts manipulating the world with the ecological extinction narrative. It’s quite a quandary.
But when we simply reject the climate change narrative are we not differing to this other ever present form of fascism? The infinite growth model of unfettered capitalism that leaves everything pillaged and extinct with a break away society of elites living underground or in outer space? I don’t mean to let neoliberalism off the hook here. It’s two heads of the same snake, and the snake will eat itself. But Exxon/Mobile, the timber industry, the commodities are not leading us anywhere good, it’s important to remember what the other side is.
“But when we simply reject the climate change narrative are we not differing to this other ever present form of fascism? The infinite growth model of unfettered capitalism that leaves everything pillaged and extinct with a break away society of elites living underground or in outer space? I don’t mean to let neoliberalism off the hook here. It’s two heads of the same snake, and the snake will eat itself. But Exxon/Mobile, the timber industry, the commodities are not leading us anywhere good, it’s important to remember what the other side is.”
Sam H., Well said. I’m not sure why this isn’t mentioned more often.
I should add–whether it is accurate or not–it often seems that denying ACC (aside from whether that is true or not) is also a way of saying: “Nothing to see here and nothing to worry about . . . so keep on trucking.” I think I would be more receptive to ACC skeptics if (like Jasun) they were at least willing to admit we are treating the planet (and by extension ourselves) like a portable toilet. Maybe some of them are, but if so, I am not aware of it.
The first 20 minutes of this podcast from Windows of the World/Mark Windows give some sobering deep background to climate change & also intersect with Vice of Kings in a number of areas. Highly recommended. “Fake Activism: Extinction Rebellion”
https://youtu.be/cbX14-jjSNA
@Dominic: As Dave says (sort of), there are many ways to make an omelet and it is about more than just breaking some eggs. You have reached people (me) with your passion and commitment and allowed for a communal exploration on a subject that to date has never been explored at Auticulture. As a result, I have not only a better idea of the landscape of ACC but also of AC (my reader-listener-base).
Like you, I am also surprised by how much (what seems to me like) unquestioning belief in Science and Media around ACC we have seen here. I had assumed a higher level of suspicion and, frankly, discernment, but on the other hand, it’s clear that this is not a simple either-or matter. As I suggested with the Talking Heads quote, facts are in a certain sense the least of it, even if, without reference to them, we are lost in a haze of subjectivity and feelings. Facts, let’s say, are a poor man’s bodily sensations. And I believe our bodies already know what’s going on with the climate and what to do about it.
Insofar as ACC belief allows for more awareness of our relationship to our environment, I am all for it (most of our beliefs are partial and based in limited sets of evidence, let’s face it). However, I don’t think there’s much evidence for this, and I think it’s because a narrative that has been coopted for cynical ends, even when not wholly fabricated, invariably takes us further from reality, not closer to it.
For example, and in response to @Nakai and @Sam’s points – in what way is the ACC narrative and “global warming” necessary for people to be aware that there are things we do, individually and collectively, that pollute our environment? When I lived in Guatemala, I was quite frustrated by how people would leave crisp wrappers and other plastic and Mylar junk in the jungle. They simply didn’t distinguish between that stuff and biodegradable trash, because they were new to it, or it to them, and hadn’t been educated. In fact, they found the shiny wrappers attractive (plastic kid’s toys often ended up on altars, even crisp wrappers were used to decorate a shrine)! It isn’t necessary to push an ACC narrative to introduce these Guatemalans to the realization that, since this stuff doesn’t rot, it will build up over time and eventually interfere with their crops and threaten the wildlife.
By the same token, similar but not the same, that tossing endless reams of crappy plastic stuff in the ocean threatens the life of fishes shouldn’t require a PhD in oceanography. Surely a natural, healthy human response to this is one of compassion – which is not the same as sentimentality? Where this doesn’t exist, it can be encouraged by a number of means; but pushing the ACC narrative moves our natural response from empathy for other forms to fear for our own lives: suddenly it means human extinction! And people who are being motivated by fear are easy to control because they are not deepening their compassion OR their awareness. Fear drives, the devil rides.
What Sam’s pointing out is schismogenesis in action. It’s true enough that many forms of ACC-denial are as cynical as are the promotions of it, only on the other side, without the cover of fake compassion and “virtue,” but with equal disregard for facts,. An association is then formed in our minds between denying, or even questioning, ACC, and corporate agendas with a total disregard for the environment. (It’s the flip side of our conditioned association with ACC-concern with compassion and virtue.)
But people and institutions who are pushing the ACC narrative and proposing solutions for it are not necessarily, or even generally, doing it out of kindness or empathy, but from a combination of ignorance and opportunism. And ditto with many people questioning it: there’s no reason to associate it with disregard for the environment or avocation of corporate greed; that we do so is itself evidence that our responses have been coopted and pre-scripted. The worst part is that over time it can become true, because people who do feel a genuine empathic response look to find a way to act upon it and so get drawn into these fake movements and narratives that eventually suck the life blood out of what might have been a genuine awakening. And ACC-questioners may feel so beaten down by the true believers and virtue signallers that they end up taking refuge in a more hard-line position that’s in line with the cynical debunkers.
The middle way is straight and narrow and very hard to keep to. And essentially it’s love over fear. Is it really necessary to hate the polluters to love the earth? Maybe we could start there and see what follows?
Just started to watch The Extinction Rebellion, and am wondering how many protesters have had their tubes tied. You said earlier that we are just humans being human, which wouldn’t be a problem if there weren’t sooo many of us. That would be the proper sacrifice.
Its also interesting to compare these marches with those of MLK, so much dignity we have lost over time. What is your record for comments on one section?
there have been a few that go into triple figures but it’s rare to have this much activity; CC is a hot topic tho not, ironically, the subject of the opening post
my impression is XR is mostly for impressionable teenagers; I suppose some may be neutering themselves via trans surgeries
Jasun, you cannot be too critical of other people’s discernment when you yourself have said here that you are not sure the Earth is not flat.
I feel what we are encountering here are the limits to various forms of discernment in other fields of enquiry. I know from personal experience of the inutility of aesthetics within the mathematical sciences. I believe what you are also encountering is the inutility of liminality both within mathematical science, but also questions of collective responsibility and action. Similarly I have also observed the naivety of people who work in professional science about the realities of politics and parapolitics.
I would suggest your main objection to the ACC narrative is that it implies a bogus form of collective responsibility and action. I deeply sympathise with, and support, this objection to such narratives on the basis that they are invariably a process of transference of responsibility from the most abusive people in society to the least abusive – just as we have seen with ‘economic austerity’ programs.
I commend Dominic Forcier for his persistence and knowledge in this area. But this is not the correct format or forum to correctly test his ideas. If he does not already possess it, I recommend he develop a deep understanding of statistics, and present his arguments formally in those terms to an expert audience. Even if he is rebuffed, he will develop a deeper understanding of the subject matter, the tools he is using, and the qualities of other people in this field. Perhaps he will find that there are more reasonable people than he expects.
My comments about flat earth are a) an expression of liminality/uncertainty around things that are literally too large for us to see with our physcial senses; and b) an expression of solidarity for those who are on the fringes of the known and find themselves up against a massive consensus of opinion that isn’t *necessarily* backed by “Science.” Since it’s become a means to mock me it may have backfired – so I’ll make my position clearer: I do believe the earth is round; I just don’t claim to KNOW it. My objection of ACC is similar: I don’t know if it is real or not (I strongly suspect not), but what I am pretty sure about is that no one at this thread else does either, yet we’ve seen expressions of certainty on both side or, at the very least, an unwillingness to question. So I have little doubt that there’s a cultish consensus around ACC and that interests me, and affects me, especially when it includes people I know & respect who want me to join it. The challenge for me (or Dominik) is then not to double down and leave my liminal space to join the counter-cult of “deniers.”
You are correct that liminality has no place in mathematics just as I would argue it has no place in biological definitions of sex or, indeed, the shape of the earth or the truth of ACC. Facts are facts regardless of our knowledge or ignorance of them. But clusters of facts that become worldviews and then forms of coerced activism are something else.
“For the eye altering alters all;
The senses roll themselves in fear,
And the flat earth becomes a ball;”
– William Blake
are.. are you guys doing this on porpoise ? is it all connected !? 😉
eerie; Blake was a no-earther?!
re :Blake
I’m new to him, but it seems his work, engraving, maybe because of the tactility of his process, allowed him to break the Newton/Cartesian/Mercator spell of the times he was living in… that we are living in.. whatever.
Ian McGilchrist says Blake had this “union of the left/right brain” thing going on : https://youtu.be/ijg3HTpEKMI (long but interesting)
and McLuhan ends Gutenberg Galaxy with Blake, saying he was all over the ideas of “print/phonetic alphabet isolating the visual and messing things up” long before McLuhan compiled the Galaxy.
For the record, the fact that every documentary about Blake has Allen Ginsberg in it is infuriating.
& highly suggestive…?
Matrix Warrior has a collection of WB quotes for its opening page
Yeah, but I like Blake. It’s the torchbearers that came after.. Huxley/The Doors/McKenna/Ginsborg, etc..
Blake, I believe was, as the kids say, based.
I finally understand what liminal means. The transition space from one environment to another. Like a porch, transition from outside to inside, having aspects of both. Time to change the color of my auticulture belt from white to yellow. One thought, isn’t it better to be able to travel through this space, and live in both the inside and the outside as needed or as desired. Is staying in the liminal region not like a ghost, who has not transitioned from the material to the next region, but is living in the liminal, and isn’t this what makes ghosts so tragic? Sometimes it is cold and dark and dangerous outside and one wishes to be inside, safe and warm. Sometimes it is hot and confining inside, and one wishes to go out to play and explore. Lets move between the two, taking what is necessary to survive and be comfortable in either one, leaving what is inappropriate on the porch.
we don’t want to be stuck in the middle but walking the middle way, keeping our eye on both the jokers and the clowns
Slave masters the left of me, slave masters to the right of me, stuck in the middle with you …
Comment # 100:
I am researching the Edge Foundation currently due to its ties to Jeffrey Epstein; it was at its peak the 8th most popular site acc to Google and considered the leading intellectual-science site. They are all about techno-utopian solutions,
Yet. There is very little there about climate change.
This is from Stuart Brand, founder(Whole Earth Catalogue and Long Now Foundation) reporting to Edge about his 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto:
Very late to the game on all this but it occurs to me when thinking about humanity’s trauma and dissociation from reality that right around the time the species was starting to develop larger group cohesiveness, we collectively suffered an ice age meltdown and very likely a series of impacts of good sized objects from space. Once we recovered from that, we got into agriculture and that goes straight to war, slavery and kingship. So it’s one hammerblow after another from around 12000 y/bp. Just a quick thought.
Hmmmmm….
Dear Cat,
You have touched upon one of the most important set of climate data at our disposal, that of the “Bolling” warming event at 14,700 BP, and the extreme cooling event that “opens the Younger Dryas” period at 12,900 BP, and the extreme warming event that “closes the Younger Dryas” period at 11,600 BP. There is a layer of black soot in the soil, between 12,9 and 11,6, and below that, you (generally) get ice age giant mammals (pleistocene mammals over 44 kg), and above this layer, those giant mammals are gone. (some tiny mammoths survived on one Alaskan island, for a couple thousand years thereafter, for one exception) Along with the black soot, there are indicators of heat or impacts which provide pressure to produce things like nano-diamonds or shocked quartz (along with 3 other such microscopic indicators). This distinctive black mat layer, has now been identified on 4 continents, I believe.
So, were we driving too many SUV’s? Is that what happened at 14,700 and 11,600 thousand years ago?
Then, for the 12,900 event – did SUV sales plummet to zero?
What gives Greta?
Even Sir Fred Hoyle, back in the day (honestly, an Astrophysicist way ahead of his time, regarding Big Bang Baloney, and other such Science-blunders), was completely puzzled by the Younger-Dryas anomaly in the ice cores and soil strata. There are oodles of summaries of the details and implications of the Younger-Dryas online, but, to the point, here, in light of the linked spooky podcast about the Extinction Rebellion (especially that bit where the lady that was protesting fracking got flooded with these clowns co-opting her hard work and taking her food donations!!!). If we want to talk about extinctions, then the Bolling-Allerod-Younger Dryas should be our starting point. The number of species that went extinct (large mammals, over 44 kg) is insane. Giant beavers that stood 6 to 7 feet tall. Yes, that’s right. Taller than you. (American natives have old tales of Giant Beavers!). There were these giant Irish Elk, whose antlers looked like a small roof for a tiny home. There were these stupendous ground sloths – 16 feet when standing. 16 feet?!? I wouldn’t want to be around that walking compost heap when it’s time to off-gas. I could go through the list (around 150 species, including 4 probosidians (elephant-like species), but this would double the length of this already unmanageable comments section.
Sea levels, after the 11,600 event, rose, inundating coral reefs, eventulally totalling 350 more feet. There is an entire city, under water, off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt, for example (the dating of which I have no idea, but just to demonstrate that coastlines were much different in antiquity). We simply have to learn to adapt to this crazy home of ours, instead of feeling entitled to ever-consistent comfortable conditions! We have to be interested in our environment, and study it in detail, and broadening our scope beyond the past 200 years of “accurate” data gathering, and just asking a government to tax oil companies to “fix” “the problem”. Climate is always changing. We simply have to realize this, roll up our sleeves, and adapt. When sea levels rise or fall, we need to be ready. When tsunamis hit, we need to be ready. When droughts hit, we need to be ready. When volcanoes entomb the earth for 18 months in a global haze, devastating the entire harvest and ruining the soils, we need to prepare and be ready! When a hurricane hits, we need emergency-response crews on-hand (because it will always happen, we just need to accept the hurricanes, instead of bidding them go away!).
Now. Mainstream academia (honestly, not many professionals worked on the Younger-Dryas until recently), have held that humans exterminated all of these species (so we hunted all the sabertooth cats, all of the dire wolves, and we hunted and killed all the speedy giant cave bears, or the menacing giant short-faced bear. We pushed all the wholly mammoths off of cliffs, for meat, and kiiled off all the giant sloths (what sort of gamey meat would that taste like? Yuk!). Then, the culture of humans accused of doing all of this massacring (the Clovis culture), also disappears at the same time! Oy! I wish I could just buy a product to shoo away logical fallacies that Bug me so much. “Humans did it!” Phshshshshshshshshttt! “Hypocrisy-be-gone!” “Buy now, and we’ll throw in The Doubter’s Companion at no extra charge!” “Supplies are limited, because Hypocrisy is endemic!” “We can’t keep up with demand!” “Act now!”
Now, these global events, in terms of the trauma and disassociation from reality, that you posit as a real underlying psychological lingering aspect. This, I think, is probably the most crucial and fitting of insights to be brought to this forum. Immanuel Velikovsky repeated that we are “a species with amnesia”. Graham Hancock also repeatedly makes this point. But, as Graham Hancock might agree, there is also trauma along with that amnesia. The world that was lost looks more like Jurassic park, and we were part of it. The mechanism – how those memories/associations/yearnings/glimpses work and persist – that question produces a dizzying headrush and we would break Jasun’s server if we go down that route.
I can’t agree that agriculture was not around before these calamities, and I can’t agree that agriculture causes (or even leads, in any significant direct manner, as an absolute rule), to “war, slavery, and kingship”. Stop blaming your poor local farmer! 🙂 Of course, an army marches on it’s stomach (and many other inter-dependencies), I’m just saying that Human stupidity is to blame (among a host of other nuances), and not the planting and harvesting of crops, per se. There was a guy who would disagree with me, can’t remember his name, but he wrote a book about how early colonists are used aggressively – that agriculture is a war-like tactic. I still disagree – that just turns everything into one big bowl of gruel. I would prefer to take each historical case, one at a time. People planting coconut trees on an island, and planting a coppice for wood, in the Pacific, does not spell inevitable demise into slavery!
To the other point, that agriculture “began” just after the Younger Dryas, I find this assertion to be of the utmost absurdity (this assertion is common, so I’m not directing this at you, specifically). Plato describes the state of the soil, in and around Athens, before the 11,600-event, and then after the 11,600 event, and then after the multiple floods that have occurred in the intervening years:
“And the soil was more fertile than that of any other country and so could maintain a large army exempt from the calls of agricultural labour. As evidence of this fertility we can point to the fact that the remnant of it still left is a match for any soil in the world for the variety of its harvests and pasture. And in those days quantity matched quality.
What proof then, can we offer that it is fair to call it now a mere remnant of what it once was? It runs out like a long peninsula from the mainland to the sea, and the sea basin round it is very deep. So the result of the many great floods that have taken place in the last nine thousand years (the time that has elapsed since then) is that the soil, washed away from the high land in these periodic catastrophes, forms no alluvial deposit of consequence as in other places, but is carried out and lost in the deeps.
You are left (as with little islands) with something like the skeleton of a body wasted from disease; the rich, soft soil has all run away, leaving the land nothing but skin and bone. But in those days, the damage had not yet taken place, the hills had high crests, the rocky plain of Phelleus was covered with rich soil, and the mountains were covered by thick woods, of which there are some traces today.”
– From Plato’s Critias
Plato specifies that the date given to Solon, by the Egyptian priests, of a major deluge, which saw Atlantis struck by earthquake and inundation, as 9600 BC, so 11,600 years ago. This is the precise geologically accurate date of the end of the last great ice age. This date is the most significant date, geologically speaking, in the last few tens of thousands of years, that can now be seen in the ice cores, and clearly marked in the soil strata above a layer of black soot, and represents a severe and sudden rise in temperature, to the tune of 8-10 degrees centigrade, with sea levels rising.
For a fairy tale, this is a very magical coincidence!
According to mainstream understanding, 9500 BC is when agriculture officially “started” in the alleged “cradle of civilization”. Before this: no agriculture – at all – ever.
When myths, from across the world, on separate continents, describe fiery chariots, earthquakes and a global flood, long ago, with survivors finding refuge on mountaintops, with Solon’s Atlantis “myth” specifically giving a date of 9600 BC – an immensely significant geological date – the beginning of our era – the beginning of our time – the beginning of our geological epoch – the beginning of the “Holocene” period – the beginning of the current interglacial period – the exact point that scientists now say when countless large beasts like the Woolly Mammoths bit the dust; this should give us pause when rushing to the conclusion, based on archaeological research alone (evidence from the earth) (evidence in the soil), when it is stated in the account that the soils were swept clean, which would have removed evidence that we depend on for our conclusion that agriculture was invented 100 years later, in 9500 BC.
To depict anybody and everybody before 11,600 years ago as an unkept, toothless, cross-eyed, grunting, hairy moron lumbering along hunch-backed in loin cloths, arranging a stone bed in a damp and dreary cave, with vermin crawling all over; reveals a huge lack of imagination of what must’ve been possible for 190,000 years beforehand (the conservative estimate for how long us anatomically modern humans have roamed earth).
For example: not a single anatomically modern human soul, for 190,000 years, noticed that seeds are the start of a new plant, and so they never bothered to store any and sow them the following year?! Professionals who insist that nobody performed agriculture for 190,000 years of our history, have probably never worked the land at all, and know nothing of what human ingenuity, even in isolation, can produce, especially in periods of warmth and abundance; and demonstrate a complete lack of imagination of circumstances that may befall humanity, and show a huge lack of respect for our ancestors.
We don’t just underestimate the intelligence of plants and animals, we also clearly grossly underestimate our own abilities, and our own intellect, of our very own species.
Let us first address the dating of the Medieval Warm Period. Yes, your dates are within the Peak of the MWP. Brian Fagan would correct you to 800-1315. I would correct him back, by saying the first bit and the last bit weren’t all that settled or consistently warm. Although your dates are correct, the crystallization/writing/publication of these movements occurs up to the rains of 1315, 1316, 1317 (Great Famine), so I wouldn’t cut off at 1250 too hastily, in terms of mystical authors/works from this period. It takes time for the warmth to fuel a settled series of movements and authors, so you (generally) find the good stuff at tail ends of warm periods. Also, after the great rains of 1315+, there were still remnants, but after the inquisition and black death, goodbye for good, to these mystics of old, who interpreted Semitic Scripture symbolically (except for a few individuals, keeping to themselves, in fear of the church’s wrath). Books burned. People burned. Can I blame lack of sunshine? No, but lack of food and prosperity and opportunity can drive people into austerity within their minds as much as in their wallets, which, in turn, can lead to things like the Inquisition.
The topic of the 1315+ rains is a huge huge subject, and I would have to treat it separately from your question, but it relates to your question, and your question can’t be answered without it. For now, just assume that I could saddle you with a hundred quotes proving that 1315 was a shit climatic year, as was 1316, and 1317, with the rains and floods continuing into 1318. For example there was a flood at Baalbek in 1318. But, all this would be a torrential tangent. Just imagine, for now, 3 summers without sunshine, but just constant rain. Imagine food stores dwindling. Imagine sanitation putrefying. Imagine soil erosion. Imagine insanity. Imagine Robin Hood. Imagine Hansel and Gretel (children abandoned by their parents). If you want to speak about trauma, Natural Climate Change is the most important and frequent and pervasive inductor of trauma on earth! We ignore it at our peril. But, back to the Medieval Warm Period, before these shitstorms of 1315+
From “Catharism” – “In Our Time”– BBC podcast series
“Most historians would say that there is a reappearance of heresy, from about the year 1000, there are isolated incidents, probably not connected, between about 1000 and 1050. And, again, most historians would argue that there hadn’t been a major heresy threatening the church, since the Arian heresy, in the late Roman period, which was particularly attractive to some barbarian peoples, in particular – the Visigoths. When that died out, the European middle ages doesn’t seem to be greatly troubled by heresy, but you begin to get signs of it in the first half of the 11th century.”
(wicki) “The Cathars attained their greatest popularity, surviving in the Languedoc, in much reduced form, up to around 1325 and in the Italian cities until the Inquisitions of the 14th century finally extirpated them.”
We could have a discussion about whether we treat Cathars as “mystics”, but I list this here just to underscore the general trend: Non-orthodox Christianity coming to prominence within the MWP, and getting smothered at its end.
We could also have a discussion about whether we treat the Kights Templar (1119-1312) as “mystics” (almost certainly not), but this should be cited as yet another example of non-orthodox practise arising at the peak of the MWP, and then getting smashed at its end.
If you read Gershom Gerhard Scholem’s work, (foremost modern historian of the Kabbalah), the vast majority of authors described lived during this Medieval Warm Period. When he describes other authors, their views are essentially informed by the views of authors/works penned during this Medieval Warm Period.
If you consider, say, Dion Fortune (and her ilk), with her modern re-processing/re-gurgitation/bastardization of Medieval Warm Period mystical works, and it all becomes a jumbled confusing mess of opaque symbols like the Tree of Life, Sephiroth, tarot cards, séances/mediumship, ectoplasm, magic spells, crystal-sniffing, blah blah blah – all that modern mumbo jumbo destroys the spirit of the authors of the Medieval Warm Period, and sends modern seekers of enlightenment down several irresolvable wild goose chases, which stretch the soul in all manner of tortuous directions. That’s not the true Islamic, Jewish, or Christian mysticism I’m referring to. So, are there truly original home-grown “Christian Mystics” after the MWP, forming established schools of thought? Well, if you consider Dion Fortune (and her ilk) as relating true Kabbalah, or true Christian mysticism, I would have to disagree entirely. You could probably find some examples. I never have.
Consider the Talmud. It was not written/compiled during the MWP. Instead, it was compiled between the 100’s and the 400’s. It does contain “mystical” elements. But how many modern mystics/occultists reference the Talmud (in popular literature, like modern works on Kabbalah that you can buy at the bookstore) = 0.
You could also argue that there were at least 4 variants of Christianity in the Talmudic period, some of which regarded Jesus as not a bodily flesh (the “Docetic” view), with weird passages in their Apocryphal works. If you read early Gospels, they are very strange, and seem more “mystical” than the orthodox canon that we’ve “inherited”. OK – so there were Christian mystics before the MWP. But. How many times have you seen the Marcionites quoted or Docetism mentioned, in modern mystical literature?
Also, let’s consider the large SCHOOLS that were around – you rarely get entire schools of mystical practice, before, or after the MWP, which interpret Semitic Scripture in a non-literal symbolic way. If a school persists, like some sufi orders do to this day, their roots – their heart – their source – is from authors/practitioners that lived during the MWP.
The Chishtiyya order of the Sufis was established at the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period, in 930.
The Qadiriyya order of the Sufis was established near the peak of the Medieval Warm Period, in the 1100’s.
Isma’ilism was born at the dawn of the Medieval Warm Period.
“(wicki) The Naqshbandi [SUFI] order owes many insights to Yusuf Hamdani and Abdul Khaliq Gajadwani in the 12th century, the latter of whom is regarded as the organizer of the practices and is responsible for placing stress upon the purely silent invocation.[5] It was later associated with Baha-ud-Din Naqshband Bukhari in the 14th century, hence the name of the order. ”
Gershom Scholem dates the Zohar to the 13th century. The text itself says it was written in the 2nd century. The only copies are from this period, and no mention of it is found beforehand. Like so many other texts from this period, it claims authority and ancient provenance, but was really just a 13th century work. The Zohar is considered a foundational work of the Kabbalah.
wicki: “Suspicions aroused by the facts that the Zohar was discovered by one person and that it refers to historical events of the post-Talmudic period while purporting to be from an earlier time, caused the authorship to be questioned from the outset.[5] Joseph Jacobs and Isaac Broyde, in their article on the Zohar for the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, cite a story involving the Kabbalist Isaac of Acco, who is supposed to have heard directly from the widow of de León that her husband proclaimed authorship by Shimon bar Yochai for profit:
…
“A story tells that after the death of Moses de Leon, a rich man of Avila named Joseph offered Moses’ widow (who had been left without any means of supporting herself) a large sum of money for the original from which her husband had made the copy. She confessed that her husband himself was the author of the work. She had asked him several times, she said, why he had chosen to credit his own teachings to another, and he had always answered that doctrines put into the mouth of the miracle-working Shimon bar Yochai would be a rich source of profit. The story indicates that shortly after its appearance the work was believed by some to have been written by Moses de Leon.[5]”
”
(wicki): “The Bahir was first published in Provence France (near Italy) in 1176.”
The first reference to the Sepher Yetzirah is made in the 10th century (although I would be perfectly willing to accept earlier authorship of the Sepher Yetzirah, and in fact, I do think it was from the Talmudic period, but, in any case, it became more popular in the MWP).
From the wicki on the Sefer Raziel HaMalakh: “The book cannot be shown to predate the 13th century, but may in parts date back to late antiquity.”
From the wicki on: “Pardes Rimonim (in Hebrew: פרדס רימונים) (Garden [of] Pomegranates) – the magnum opus of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, published in the 16th century and the main source of Cordoverian Kabbalah, a comprehensive interpretation of the Zohar and a friendly rival of the Lurianic interpretation.”
So, 16th century = not MWP. But. What is it? “A comprehensive interpretation of the Zohar” (Zohar = 13th century = MWP).
From the wicki on: “Lurianic Kabbalah gave a seminal new account of Kabbalistic thought that its followers synthesised with, and read into, the earlier Kabbalah of the Zohar that had disseminated in Medieval circles.”
All the great majestic gothic cathedrals were erected during the MWP, and really pretty much only during the very peak (around 1120 -1315). Some were built later, but the point is – their inception – the idea – the source – the major productions – was during the peak of the MWP.
Lalibella – those insane rock-hewn churches in Ethiopia – were carved out of bedrock, during the MWP. Not before. Not after.
Great Zimbabwe = MWP. Abandoned after MWP.
The Chimu culture (and a whole host of other American civs) = MWP.
Some of the best Mosques – like Cordoba, were erected during the MWP.
The Missisipi Mound builders peaked during the MWP.
Borobudur Temple = beginning of MWP.
Angkor Wat = 12th century.
The Golden Age of Islam = MWP.
(Authors Micheal Tsarion and Ralph Ellis level derogatory claims on the established fact of The Golden Age of Islam. Tsarion and Ellis erroneously say “look at today’s Madrasas – those aren’t centers of learning”. Tsarion and Ellis are fools to believe that, after 1000 years and major climatic and political and religious upheavals, that the schools in Andalusia were equivalent to a modern Madrasa, or have anything in common with the practices of modern groups like the house of Saud. Tsarion and Ellis show themselves to be absolute fools, when they proclaim such narrow-minded defamatory comments about what was truly The Golden Age of Islam. Even author Graham Hancock slanders early Islam as those with “Hatred of the past” – page 171 of Magicians of the Gods. Oy! Islam isn’t just one monolithic thing – just like Christianity isn’t just one monolithic thing, spanning all its history. Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick! I expect better from Graham Hancock, honestly.)
Abundance, induced by regular strong sunshine, not only fuels human ingenuity, it can also fuel human stupidity. i.e. Crusades This was noted even by the Hindu writers concerning the Yuga Cycles – reporting that even during Golden ages (Satiya Yugas) of abundance, there were still wars. Ibn Arabi wrote “The Sufis of Andalusia”, in order to catalogue the saintly and goodly people during times of such human barbarism, demonstrating the abundance of both evil and good during the MWP. A bully stuck indoors in winters, has less opportunity to punch other kids, just as a farmer stuck indoors in winter has less opportunity to grow food to make people happy. Sunshine is not inherently “better”, but I would personally prefer to work things out in the heat and take my chances in the more turbulent wild times, than curl into an insulated ball for survival, with famine and plagues surrounding me, especially if I’m stuck indoors with a bully.
Just as the Vikings continued dark age practices well into the beginning of the MWP, so too have we continued things like Slavery and Genocide, after the Little Ice Age officially wrapped up in 1849, with the last freezing of the river Thames, and the commencement of significant rapid glacial melt (1849+), and with the Carrington Solar outburst event of 1859 marking the true beginning of a new age of centuries-long sunpower (while spooking a lot of Victorian-era people into mystical madness, with the global plasma storms visible at night, across the entire firmament, for two nights in a row); we have still continued Little Ice Age habits, even 170 years after the Glaciers started melting! 170 years! Slavery was “abolished” precisely at the dawn of our warm period, but it still took another 100 years for slave-like conditions to be dealt with.
Now, the converse is also true, and much more appealing: Just as at the tail end of the MWP, when it was already cooling down (frosts started popping up in 1200), there was already a well-established current of interpreting Semitic Scripture symbolically, which sort of crystalized before the rains of 1315 ushered in the Little Ice Age, inducing a return to the literal reading of Semitic Scripture. So, the very end of the MWP is where we see the majority of full-blown volumes like the Zohar, and things like the cryptic Arthurian Legends and such, in large developed volumes. What is the parallel today? That’s the important bit. We’re not there yet – our warm period probably will wrap up only until at least 300 years hence – and that’s the time I wish I were born into, like 200 years from now, before the end of this current warm period. I’m still with the grunting Vikings, dropping bombs on nations, defoliating vast tracts of land with agent orange, attempting to take every last Sequoia (etc…), at this opening of this latest centuries-long warm period. I do think that Reveal-ation, for this warm round, is at hand, however, so I’m not all that pessimistic (even though my stance on ACC seems to reflect a different outlook).
I am not a climate change Denier! On the contrary, history reveals sooooo many unique forms of insufferable natural climate calamities. I am proud of our ancestors, who had the foresight and cunning to compose works that could survive these perennial calamities, by means of the same ignorance and stupidity it wishes to address: by having the texts include a story-form that idiots will read literally (and copy and propagate and proselytize literally), while at the very same time conveying deep symbolic meaning, underneath this surface literal narrative, which future generations will invariably uncover = Reveal-ation.
“Greed can be a most powerful ally.”
– Qui-Gon Jinn
So can stupidity (the literal reading the Bible and the Qur’an).
@Dominic F
Thanks for your further reasoning regarding your statement “ALL mystics that are quoted today lived during the Medieval Warm Period”.
What is your criteria for inclusion/exclusion in the mystic category?
Apologies for commandeering the term “mysticism” with such a broad all-encompassing net. I should have added many qualifiers.
Simply apply the previous exhaustive examination of specific groups, authors, and works, as qualifiers/modifiers of my blanket statement about there being a glut in the Medieval Warm Period, and that this glut is the basis of MUCH of modern mystical practices.
Mysticism is essentially inherently undefinable, so my statement was way too broad. There are probably as many definitions of mysticism as there are mystics. My studies have focused on alternative symbolic interpretations of the Hebrew Torah, the Aramaic New Testament, and the Qur’an (specifically in Arabic).
Do you have a specific issue about Mysticism that you’d like to address/clarify/explore?
I am curious whether you see all mystics as similar or unique?
I am only well-versed in Semitic-style mysticism, and this was the context for my all-sweeping category of “all mystics quoted today”. I still stand by this statement (with the modifiers of “the source/heart/foundation of all (non-Talmud-era) Semitic-style-mystics quoted today lived and worked during the MWP”) There are commonalities between the 3+ allegedly monotheistic Abrahamic traditions. Some Jewish mystics read and quoted from Sufi mystics, for example (during the MWP). And, of course, there are differences.
For a different example of “mysticism”, consider Rudolph Steiner and the BioDynamic agricultural practices he promoted, and the educational framework he established. I was once applying for an apprenticeship at a BioDynamic orchard in the Okanagan. I met the farmers personally just to clarify how much of Steiner they were applying. He talked to me about a box of horns that he just received from Texas, and how “you never know if they’re from bull or steer”. He then described the process of filling the horns with manure, and burying them at specific moon-phases, and pulling them out at specific moon phases, then adding this to the compost heap (or compost tea). He then went on about buying a mixture of herbs online to add to his compost heap (or compost tea). He runs one of the most successful compost operations in that valley, and is renown for its quality, and his fruit are the best I’ve ever ordered at the organic produce section I managed for 2 years. Best giant juicy nectarines, evvverrr. I, personally, believe that adding herbs to compost piles is excellent, and speeds up and adds some “heat” to the pile, to get it going. I think that’s what is working for him. I would just grow herbs and add it to my pile!
Does the moon affect my planting of a fruit tree? Sure.
Am I going to base my planting of my orchard based solely on the moon? Absolutely not!
There are sooooo many other factors, that the moon phase is dwarfed, by comparison.
As you can imagine, I never took up that apprenticeship.
OK. To your question. “Are all mystics unique or similar?” Consider individuals within Steiner’s influence, like from Steiner himself, to his principle followers that set up and ran the institutions, like the Waldorf schools, down to the individuals spraying compost tea over the crops with a wispy brushing-motion in the air, or kids in a Waldorf school.
Steiner, I do believe, had mystical experiences. Reading his material on ancient lost civilizations, and the creation of the solar system, and “the primordial division of moon-bits from sun-bits from earth-bits”, I believe that he did have those experiences. Although I think his ideas are nutters, I do believe that he enjoyed ecstatic/deep intuitive moments, which were informed by his intellectual understanding, which was heavily colored by the science and spiritual works available during his time. For example, if the bookstores in his time, were all filled with the “latest” discoveries from Egypt, then, after reading all this “latest” up-to-date “news” (material which now seems petty and incomplete to us), and you close your eyes, what you start to contemplate on a deeper level will be shaped by this paradigm. You may then wish to have him lumped together with other folks with similar experiences, say, Edgar Cayce, for example, with the state and nature of Atlantis research available, or medical science developed, up to his time, informing his mystical experiences.
OK, that’s the “head” of Steinerism. What of his immediate followers. Some, probably understood him, and “got it”. Some, might have been coerced to attend by a spouse or friend. Others might be trapped by some financial or personal obligation, to remain involved or support Steinerism. Others might believe him fully and willingly, and try to reproduce the experience Steiner describes, but come up short. Others might simply want to have a cool club to join, and don’t really care about the mystical experience. Others might be just looking for the free soup offered at the meeting.
OK, now, a hundred years later, let’s imagine you are a kid, and your parents put you in a Waldorf School, or you are a farmer put to work in the field employing BioDynamic methods. You could probably imagine a thousand+ unique lives being led within the Steiner framework of understanding derived from his mystical experiences. For example, in a Waldorf school, they don’t teach you to read until you’re 7. Now, if you’re going to be the next Robert Bateman or Salvidor Dali, this might very well be the place for you. I know that I wouldn’t send my kids to a Waldorf School. There are probably some kids, right now, somewhere in the world, in some Waldorf School, scratching their heads, wondering what all this mumbo jumbo is all about, and why everybody is dancing around in such a bland and strange manner. They would certainly not “get it”.
If, when I look at rippled water in a pond, with the sunshine glimmering, and this temporarily seizes my attention, and makes me blend thoughts previously separate, or gain insight by “sub-conscious” faculties taking over, maybe letting me comprehend things that are hard or impossible to comprehend holisticly when just thinking details of things through individually…. this seems like a healthy form of “mysticism” that you don’t need to sign up for, or pay anybody for, or write an essay for the teacher to get “the right answer”, putting it all into words which constrict the experience. This doesn’t mean that I should avoid reading texts at an early age! I can enjoy both rational and mystical experiences! They are not completely separate! Each informs the other! There are healthy ways of teaching kids to read at an early age.
Consider whirling dervishes. The objective is to seek fana-fi-Allah “total effacement before Allah”. OK. This can be applied/interepreted in many ways. Imagine all the different interpretations of Allah (literal or symbolic, strict or benevolent, all-powerful controlling everything or judging the decisions among members of his own creation which he clumsily made with his limited powers). These would then add drops of uniqueness to the bucket term “mysticism”. The act of performing the whirling, would be completely different, depending on your intellectual grasp of the specifics of the contemplative discipline you have subscribed to. Some surely don’t “get it”, and are stuck in a socio-cultural complex that might not be in their best interests, or much much much worse.
What, exactly, are you interested, when speaking of “Mysticsm”?
Why is this particular question of importance to you?
I am not sure that I am interest in “Mysticism” as a subject, but I am interested in mysticism as expressed by another, not necessarily through words, but by everything that another is. I have been trying to sense what drives you to post and if your posting contains an implicit message for me.
I esteem Biodynamic produce.
Hmmmmmm….
Dave, essentially, I don’t think anything “mystical” would be to your liking (in terms of available literary works, or existing schools of thought/practice, or whatever).
You bemoan: “I spent several decades, as a spiritual seeker, fruitlessly trying to control my Ego, at the recommendation of my spiritual teachers, who never satisfactorily defined what the Ego is or how to find it.”
With available mystical works, you will invariably be confronted with an even wider array of un-deciphered and cryptic symbols, that go undeffined, which, even the author you read probably won’t really understand, because (as I discussed about the MWP), the modern stuff is (mostly) based on ideas thousands of years old, and things like the Inquisition blotted out their true decipherment. Books were burned. Confusion has reigned since.
The ecstatic experience of many mystics, would already clearly not be to your liking (all the noise and clamour in the mind during “awakenings”), and their distractions from your “true core”, as you put it, will significantly-sour your super-strawberry-smoothie.
The available mystical literature is appallingly confusing (maybe that’s inherent in mysticism?), contradictory, and sometimes even crooked and meant to distract or take advantage of followers. Especially when it comes to Semitic-style modern re-hashings of old-school wisdom, I would steer entirely clear of that nonsense. It seems like you’re doing just fine without any more influences, and are helping people release (or at least notice) traumas, and guiding them to healthy ways forward.
You write: “The spiritual marketplace is basically the blind leading the blind and built on centuries of misunderstanding.”
I don’t think the Mysticism booth in the Spirit Market, will add any valuable produce items to the Chicken Soup for the Soul you’re serving. For example, Tarot Cards, are useless, unless you were to seek out a decipherment of all those cryptic symbols, which you will simply not find at Amazon.uk. You would have to do investigative work going back more than a thousand years, at the very least, and this might take a few years, and you might not succeed! Booooooorinnnnnnngggg!
For an exception, if you find yourself in Persia, go seek out a whirling dervish Sufi group, and talk to those individuals, and they might actually have a lot to say of the “Formlessness” that you are interested in. This state, that you might be having a hard time expressing in words, is (part of) that whirling around. You are supposed to “efface” your “self”. Now, this seems different, but I bet you my Fez-Cap that they simply find and stay with “the core” you mention, and don’t really fully efface their “selves” completely. First, make sure that they are not just there as hard-line literalist Islamists, who would take offense at your questions. Each individual Sufi practitioner is as unique as each individual in your sessions.
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The bit where you speak of: “instead of creating and moulding yourself and your environment, like sculpting beautiful gardens (outside and inside), instead, we follow some other Story.” This reminded me of an excellent “magic” show by Darren Brown, that I highly highly highly recommend watching. He’s an atheist (self-proclaimed), but he toured and studied tent-revival-style ecstatic healing sessions, and he demonstrates, hands on, the power of changing the Stories, the narratives we repeat endlessly, that may block healing, or distract you from attempting to heal, etc… It’s called The Miracle. The results are spectacular (even if probably short-lived in most cases). His other production “The Push”, is probably one of the most important modern day experiments in psychology. I highly recommend watching these 2 features, especially if you spent 3 years studying psychology. I won’t spoil “The Push” with any sort of description – you just have to go into it all Formless like.
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Regarding the non-corporeality of your definition of Enlightenment, Cedomir enquires: “Who’s taking action and what is it?”
You respond: “It does not have a name but “deep nature” would be one way to get a clue.”
Speaking as a proud long-standing card-carrying member of the ISIH (International Society of Intellectual HeadBangers), I would like to point out that modern Science doesn’t necessarily have to be excluded from making discoveries that would inform us of the “how” of the energy work you do. It is just we are full of stiff Science-Blockages (Big Bang Baloney, Time Travel Tripe, Dark Matter Mutton, etc..) that it seems that Science has no connection to the reality you seek to express in words (or understand on a more specific and tangible/measurable level). That is not a problem with Science. That is a problem with Scientists (and modern zombie-consumers of Science notions).
What am I personally getting at here? It is my long-held deeply cherished view that sub-atomic particles are living sentient creatures, just like you or your cells. This is one of my core notions that informs most other wild ideas I come up with. So, electric bits moving between us, would be migrating creatures, sending/receiving signals, and possibly, at times, being agents of co-ordinating actions between multiple humans (like you and your audience). But, that, I have no direct proof of, and talking about it gets way too tedious, and then all the ostensibly-rational Science-types start preparing their tomatoes to volley my way.
In addition, along these lines, I would like to point out that The Electric Universe community is trying to (partly) address the “How’s” of your sessions, with healer Eileen McKusick, for a perfect example, who also speaks of healing from afar. These practitioners are heavily influenced by The Electric Universe theory, in that they see our bodies as radiating an EM field outward, outside our bodies (several feet). This fare would be far far more interesting than boring “mystical” tracts and treatises written by stuffy old men, I think, for your purposes. Eileen McKusick, Jerry Tenant, and Dawson Church are the folks I’m referring to, for examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=topPjxfby50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPDPrXEAe1s&t=32s
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The bit about coming into an identity in your mid-20’s. This is supported by the discovery that your pre-frontal cortex only fully develops at this time (mid-20’s). This, the pre-frontal cortex, is responsible, for, among other things, “inculcating social mores” the rules that our society imposes on us (or that we impose on others), and the frontal cortex, in general, itself is all about reward or punishment (releasing or inhibiting chemicals that increase drive or pleasure, or chemicals that do the opposite, depending on the situation (or mindset)). So, essentially, in other words, the frontal cortex, is involved in processing/analysing/acting upon what you think is Good and what you think is Evil (Bad). So, we are programmed, hard-wired, biologically, to operate in this manner.
But, seeing as your cells are not just wired in a binary way, the way this cellular circuitry is in fact applied (unfolds), is not binary. For example, sounds, music, tones, vibrations in the air that you perceive, in other words: your auditory processing neuronal nuclei, find themselves involved and intertwined allllll over the brain, and, for example, being intertwined in your proprioception (sense of body) and motor pathways (moving the body), sound is inherently meditative, bridging many cellular nuclei (groups/clusters) that might not communicate otherwise. This, in contrast to visual pathways, which are much more direct. Sure, there are some projections off of the visual pathway (like to the amygdala for example, for fight or flight purposes), but the visual stream pretty much just goes to the back of the brain, then projects forward in a simplistic fashion. Auditory streams, by contrast, bounce all over the place, up, down, left, right, back, forward, all over the place. So, the Good/Bad part of the brain, the frontal cortex (reward/punishment, exuberance/depression, Hope/Despair, Social-Credit/Isolation), apparently doesn’t really fully develop until your mid-20’s. But when it does, it is heavily interwoven with countless other nuclei in the brain (not binary)
I find this fact to be infinitely interesting, albeit a huge over-simplification, and more of a generalization. I believe that even a cell in your toe has a political opinion. Like, imagine you are at an Anthony Robbins retreat in Hawaii, a toe cell of yours might be all like “Hey, numbnuts! Stop walking on these infernal hot coals already – we get the picture – you want success – howbout you start by not burning your own two feet, and treating your own damn cellular citizens with respect! Sheesh!” So this notion that Good/Bad regulation only develops late, is obviously not the whole picture. All your cells can potentially develop and express a political opnion. But, that being said, the frontal cortex is obviously a dedicated structure, to this end, specifically, just as your amygdala is all about fear or the lack thereof while other cells (outside of the Amygdala), might also be preaching fear or the suppression thereof. And this specialized structure (prefrontal cortext) only fully matures in the time frame you’ve accurately identified.
I do believe that a huge part of the mind is indeed from the activity and communication between ALL your cells, all throughout your body (which includes your brain!). The brain is just as bodily as any other organ. Paraplegic patients remark that they’ve “lost something”. I interpret this as a breakage in the communication between cells from your body up to and between other groups of cells in the body (the brain and other organs elsewhere in the body). This, I believe, is a fact, whose implications have yet to be fully realized by modern scholars or thinkers, much less scientists.
We cannot separate the Mind from the Body. But, as you can see with my Prefrontal Cortex bit, I believe that every cell, even your toe cells, are sentient (although some are surely grunting Vikings as with us sentient creatures). So, even though the brain itself can dominate our minds, and that this can block things, it is also true that the brain is involved with the mind, just like I always say the body is involved with the mind. The body can also block what the brain needs to process! See? Cells are cells. They are all alive. They are all sentient. One cell in your visual cortex, for example, even if it’s just a grunt processing pixels by day, might, at the end of the day, have a valid opinion on what’s going on in your world, and what the rest of the body should do tomorrow, and may be able to send this opinion to the thalamus (Broadcasting Corporation of the Brain – the BCB), and have his two cents on the evening news (nightly dreams – signals to your other 37 trillion cells).
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You proclaim: “All problems come from lack of flow.”
Does this not put into question the rigidity of the idea of a Permanent state of Enlightenment?
The notion of Formlessness, is, in of itself, a Form, that, may become rigid, if left unchecked.
It is simply not possible to go %100 into Formlessness (although there may be benefits from the attempt).
Is not the notion of a Permanence in Enlightement, an excellent example of Form being crystalized?
Modern science would have us believe that an electron is a massless bit. The photon, it is alleged, is only a wave-pattern, a set of probabilities. There’s nothing there – just a “wave”. If I’m right, and electrons and their friends are alive, then they DO consist of matter, they ARE tangible, and so spirit might then be able to be understood as a very real tangible material Form! And, yes, this may be the pathway of “Transmitting” some sort of … … … to someone else. Thing is, there is a whopping huge semantic problem with the use of the term “Transmission”. It implies (not accusing, just saying, it implies:) that Somebody-Enlightened first needs to be around, as a pre-requisite! What if you find yourself on a deserted Island? Or, when you bite the dust, will you anoint a successor? I’m not saying you think like this. On the contrary, you are clear that you want people to attain this state for themselves on their own accord (cooking as tasty as the gourmet restaurant, was your analogy). I’m just pointing out that, from the surface, when somebody first looks at your work, they might get the wrong impression, as I did at first.
Dominic,
Just curious, where did you get the quotes from Dave?
Dominic, thanks for your polite challenges, witty contemplations, generous sharings and imitative style. You are a quick study.
Although myself a sceptic in the mystic marketplace where gold is either faked, misunderstood or miscategorised, I remain hopeful, and open to the possibility that one man’s poison is another man’s meat. With almost everyone, except the most disciplined or aware, food consumption is based on taste, pleasure and distraction. I suspect that from the MWP era someone has an offering that makes sense to my taste buds, though acquisition may be more complex than acquiring fresh local fare whose provenance can be more easily determined. Kind of “think global, act local”, which is perhaps how you think about sub-atomic participles.
You gave many dainties that could be explored in their own class, but for now, because it’s Sunday, I’ll consider the semantic soup in its totality and pick a few morsels.
Did you mean go back in time to Persia with fez in hand? Or go to modern Iran with a different outfit?
Derren Brown’s work raises interesting questions but he is a conjuror who uses misdirection and whose videos never show the full picture or the full sample set, so statistical analysis of clean data is complicated, if not viable.
Did you literally mean “Booooooorinnnnnnngggg!” for investigative work?
In which ways are “sub-atomic particles” not like “living sentient creatures”?
Yes, “the idea of a Permanent state of Enlightenment” has “rigidity” as a quality; all ideas tend to have that quality.
I agree “The notion of Formlessness, is, in of itself, a Form, that, may become rigid, if left unchecked.” It should be body checked and put down before it crosses the 100 yard line otherwise humanity will enter the dark ages of spirituality. Right now we might be in the Age of Aquarius or Pieces, Kali Yuga or Unreason. Lots of people are sure, but there is no consensus. You can’t even trust Amazon ratings – anymore. I deduce that we live in the Age of Uncertainty, I am not even sure of that.
You state: “It is simply not possible to go %100 into Formlessness (although there may be benefits from the attempt).”
How about having 100% Formlessness go into oneself?
You ask “Is not the notion of a Permanence in Enlightement, an excellent example of Form being crystalized?”
Notions tend to drift over time semantically, cognitively and epistemologically, similar to noxious fumes, whose sentience raises the expression SBD (“Silent But Deadly”) to new heights of meaning (an acronym for “farts”, “pups” in German).
You forewarn: “Thing is, there is a whopping huge semantic problem with the use of the term “Transmission”. It implies (not accusing, just saying, it implies:) that Somebody-Enlightened first needs to be around, as a pre-requisite! What if you find yourself on a deserted Island?”
I don’t mean Transmission in the way of Zen/Ch’an but The Way of the car mechanic (the book of the similar name was written by a German who worked Zen into the production line). Transmission exists everywhere, like blueberries in Finnish forests, and although Japan offered to buy all of them they don’t come to collect them but depend on those who do. Similarly, Transmission doesn’t require my existence. I am surplus to requirements and will become in obsolete before the polar icecaps. But I still have a few mushroom and berry collecting seasons to go to fortify my Transmission distribution activities with essential nutrients.
Evidence of Transmission phenomena could be analysed. The most recent anecdote on this site is what Ced said @ 59:19 in the MP3 here: https://auticulture.com/the-liminalist-225-the-william-blake-trap-liminalistas-meet/
“Did you literally mean “Booooooorinnnnnnngggg!” for investigative work?”
Well, yes, that’s right, (cough), yes, I did do. Just saying, like, there are a thousand more interesting and rewarding avenues of investigation, that would be more rewarding to explore. For example, studying the nature and history of plasma formations. This line of research is fresh (above-cloud lightning for example), ripe for discovery, informs our understanding not just of astrophysics, geophysics, EM physics (etc…), but also of the connections and transmissions which you speak of, between us. The same line of research has led me to better understand roots of religions and the experiences and myths that originate/inform them. For example, since you’ve written last, I’ve continued in my Dragons/Megalightning research, I looked at world flags for any with dragons, and lo, Bhutan has a wicked sweet dragon on its flag! Then, looking into the origin, this is what I found:
“While on a pilgrimage Tsangpa Gyare and his disciples witnessed a set of nine dragons (Tibetan: druk) roaring out of the earth and into the skies, as flowers rained down everywhere. From this incident they named their sect Drukpa. ”
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“The Druk is the “Thunder Dragon” of Tibetan and Bhutanese mythology and a Bhutanese national symbol.”
Besides raising an etymological question – “DRuK”, “DRaKan”, “DRaGon”, and besides coinciding with the 1206 anointment of Genghis Khan (probably unrelated, but maybe everybody on the Steppes also got spooked???), it may also jive with Anthony Peratt’s plasma research at Los Alamos, in which he demonstrates that beyond 9 rungs (9 plasmoids) in his experiments with a plasma formation that looks like Jacob’s Ladder, 9 plasmoids is the last stable formation. Beyond nine, and the ladder falls apart. So, not only does this inform me of the (possible) source of (some) of the beliefs of others, and especially myths and scripture (throughout vast amounts of time); it also leads my mind in a thousand other fruitful directions, for example:
Another (currently weaksauce) theory of mine, is when solar outburst or impacts from space rocks, inducing plasma formations in the sky (see: Carrington event of 1859, or the plasma glow after Tungusk impact, or electrical events at Pesthigo/Chicago “fires” of 1871); my idea is that watercourses and bodies of water get charged and this can either inspire (and may be of actual) effect on our living selves, and may offer a more “connected” state during brief episodes. The EM intensity in the air might dwarf the pollution of 5G, during these events.
In the amazing news report:
British Neolithic Stone Circle Marks an Ancient Lightning Strike _ Ancient Architects
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF3WePcNF0A
This video shows a huge electrical strike in the middle of a stone circle – the Calanish Standing Stones.
“One single large strike, or a number of small ones on the same spot, left a star-shaped magnetic anomaly, in the center of a 4 to 5 thousand-year old ancient stone circle on the Isle of Lewis.”
Your country (well, the British Isles), has enjoyed a flowering of research into your stone circles, in recent decades, as you are probably aware, and are dousing them, and observing their magnetic influence; and are tying them to myths of “water spirits” or “ladies of the lake”. In watching various investigations at Megalithomania.uk for example, I keep zoning out thinking of Andrew Hall’s (Electric Universe contributor) idea of capacitance, and Earth’s electrical charge, and conduits of current flowing through faults and cracks. Could there be times where there really are serpentine monsters spewing out tongues of flame that those believing it is a god to worship are quickly dragged into the “lair” by an electrical bolt that won’t let them go (like trying to let go of a hot wire), as they approach with offerings and supplications?
Are some “ghosts” plasma formations, like ball lightning?
Are some “UFO”s plasma formations, just as there are above-cloud lightning species that connect to the Ionosphere? It would explain their speed and fleeting nature, and glowing-orb appearance.
This is just all purely wild speculation on my behalf – that is where my mind is going right now.
This would be an example of how science can actually be applied to understand what has been derided as mere “mysticism” or “superstition” or “contrived reports”. For example, there was a TEDTalk with this lady who was seeing visions in her apartment, and phoned the debunker hotline. They said that hallucination is a common side effect of having a gas leak, so she went on a crusade, taking reports of “ghosts” seriously, and saving people from leaky gas lines in their homes. Science can be used in whatever manner, to determine whatever claim (not saying it has the certain ability to ascertain the truth of any claim – that’s not my point – what I’m saying is that Science can focus on what is “superstitious” or “religious” without shame). Today, cosmology is essentially 6-day creationism cloaked with a lot of datasets and concepts more cryptic than the Tarot, like “Dark Energy” or “Wormholes”. Scientists claim to be rational when dismissing “paranormal” things, while promoting things like Time Travel, which is utter nonsense. Time is most certainly not a separate physical dimension. THAT, is the “wild-eyed” “superstitious” fairy tale. “Once upon a Time, there was no Time…”
I’m not implying that YOU should study plasma and EM and the living nature of sub-atomic bits. What I’m saying is that, for me, instead of spending any more time with the cryptic Tarot cards, which would be an enormous undertaking, I have thousands of other leads to work from, in order to help me better understand some of the mystical and religious practices from the past, and how real-world natural aurora-like displays, and electrical discharge events, have shaped our psyches and our souls and have also added a little spice to life on Earth, with a connection to “spirits” in the water, maybe connecting us to other aspects of the Earth, inside, which are currently opaque to us. This is something I would love to personally exprience – like Loch Ness (the lake) with banded auroral streams flowing through it maybe – I would save a lot of money on fireworks, and test my Merlin skills at the same time. So, having gone down the Tarot route (briefly) as part of my foray into everything and anything in my teens and twenties, and having come out of a deeper study of Jewish and Islamic and Christian “mysticism” (some people we call “Kabbalists” today simply called themselves “Rabbis”, as if they WERE the orthodox, and not just a “side-branch”), happy with my understanding, I know that I simply will never bother with Tarot. Randall Carlson has noted many connections with the symbols in Tarot in relation to cosmic catastrophes, like the torch-bearer – with one torch up (Golden Ages) and one torch pointing down (Dark Ages), which is found in Mithraic symbolism too. I would love it if somebody else were to take the years of focus to accomplish a fulfilling decipherment. I would not burden you with that request, nor do I think you would benefit from the venture, as much as a thousand other things might.
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“In which ways are “sub-atomic particles” not like “living sentient creatures”?”
This is one of the things I most enjoy thinking and talking about, because it relates back to the convoluted plasma formations, and charged watercourses, and “water spirits”, and (some of the) Dragons depicted, that result from interactions with the sun (flares, ejections) or bolides (incoming space rocks), inducing electrical weirdness in and around the Earth, albeit for short duration.
My hypothetical notion is that electrons and their friends ARE alive. They ARE sentient creatures. They CAN be conscious of things outside themselves, things inside themselves, they can remember what they are conscious of, they can contemplate on things they remember, they can remember the things they’ve contemplated, and they can have a will to act in context with their understanding (with “understanding” being understood as the “memory of thought” here).
I include critters and plants and single cells. All living things enjoy these basic “abilities” (traits).
The way I sees it, is, a cell of yours perceives you much much much slower (than you perceive yourself). So, one footstep, or one thought, for them, would be in slow-motion, and so (among many other implications), they have more of a chance to prepare their contribution to the co-ordinated activity of your 37 trillion cells; but have less of a chance to observe your full true nature during their shorter existence, so they may have a limited view of the big picture of “you” as a whole, over longer stretches of time, and of all your dreams and paths you are forging (or states you are stuck in).
Apply the same principle to the possibility that sub-atomic bits are alive. Their perception of you and me would be sooooooo much slower. Imagine an elephant lumbering around compared with a fly buzzing around you. The fly seems quick, and the Elephant seems slow. Now imagine an elephant the size of the moon – its motions, as a whole, would be very very very slow. When you look into the eyes of a whale, they move so slowly in their sockets. The mind of the whale is slower (not more stupid, just not as fast) than us. It takes more time for a signal to propagate throughout the cellular grouping of a whale, than it does throughout the community of cells in a fruit-fly.
The idea that cells are composed of, and animated by, sub-atomic creatures, brings in the possibility that cells within you may have the means and will to dispatch these creatures outside of your body, to whatever end (achieving whatever result), with the ability to permeate through other things, and through to other people’s cellular groupings within, interacting with their cells. One journey between you and another would FEEL like days of preparation and weeks of travel for these emissaries, which would feel like a fleeting instant for you.
So, imagine, say, as you are doing a session, and Super-Stressed-Sad-n’-Sullen-Suzie-Simpson walks through the door, and, as you connect with her, you get a flash of one of her memories or something, which might relate to something you can help with clearing up. Well that process, I believe, would have to first involve her cells (and groups thereof), which understand such deeper details, and then employ the services of even tinier entities to transmit this constellation of memories and their associated trappings/blockages/whatever, toward your direction. The tiny sub-atomic particles would be experiencing the whole thing in super-super-super slow mo, and it would probably be rare and fleeting moments when these tiny creatures fully understand all of “you” or all of “her”, or all of her “problems”, much less vast numbers of them enjoying such understanding over significant time.
There are thousands other such nuances, and wild possibilities, implied within the notion of sub-atomic bits being sentient beings. We search for life with the telescope. I think we would better be served using the microscope.
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“Did you mean go back in time to Persia with fez in hand? Or go to modern Iran with a different outfit?”
Well, the sphere of influence of ancient Persia almost certainly extends past the modern borders of Iran (and Persia sounds less Ayatollic). Even after Islamic conquest (in antiquity), Persians were distinct, retaining much influence in the region, and were responsible for much of the achievements of the Golden Age of Islam, so I figure their reach would extend beyond modern Iran, even to this day. I even saw a Sufi house in Vancouver, on Hastings, near Boundary! I wonder if they have an interesting book selection.
Actually, I just did a quick Google, and it looks like the Ayatollah is cracking down on the very Sufi group I was suggesting to seek out. Man. What a distorted view the current state of affairs casts on Persianate peoples and their achievements:
“The Sufis in Iran observe Ja’fari Shia Islam, Iran’s official state religion, but they also follow additional spiritual practices that emphasize peace, tolerance and kindness under the guidance of a spiritual leader. And that’s considered a threat to Iran’s political establishment.
In March 2018, a member of the Gonabadi dervish community, Mohammad Raji, was arrested and beaten severely, then died while being interrogated by Iranian police. U.S. Department of State spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the U.S. was “saddened to hear that yet another prisoner of conscience” had died while in custody in Iran.”
https://share.america.gov/why-is-iranian-government-persecuting-sufi-muslims/
more:
https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/c1douo4u
You know, I really hope this is just American propaganda. I really hope this shit we hear about Iran is just some fabrication. Or, worse, maybe the US keeps that regime in power, to control the enemies at play, and sell it guns, to fight Iraqis, for example, to have a constant state of warfare – a permanent battlefield, with Shia groups funded by proxy through Iran and Sunni groups funded by proxy by the Saudis. Other than believing this to be false sabre-rattling propaganda, I have no other reason to doubt these reports (and others of a similar nature), so I hope you kept the receipt for your Fez cap.
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“Derren Brown’s work raises interesting questions but he is a conjuror who uses misdirection and whose videos never show the full picture or the full sample set, so statistical analysis of clean data is complicated, if not viable.”
Well, true, yes, but I think he demonstrates (at least in principle), that what tent-revival evangelists do, does have some physical tangible effect, and that it should be studied, rather than just ridiculed by “scientists”. (not just placebo) I wasn’t interested in the “magic” tricks (mid-direction). I’m more interested in his psychological bit about “the stories we tell ourselves” and demonstrating the power of snapping out of those stories (at times). Like, that lady in the crowd, whose eyesight was corrected. That was probably temporary, but still – what if that same “therapy” could be better cultivated, outside of “magic” shows and tent revivals. It just reminded me of your style, in that you spoke of the stories we get stuck in, and how this can relate to addressing complications in the body.
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“I deduce that we live in the Age of Uncertainty, I am not even sure of that.”
he he
Good line!
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“How about having 100% Formlessness go into oneself?”
Oooooph. Um… OK. Um… Formlessness is always always always going into oneself (and out from oneself), if Formlessness is truly universal and pervasive, and even “empty” outer space, the vacuum, is replete with it. For example, a pocket of atmosphere stuck in a giant balloon, could be moved around anywhere, to then be absorbed/inhaled into and build the structure of lifeforms. OK, sorry, that was a wonky example. Um… Actually, let me take a different tack:
Any portion of Formlessness would also be full of Forms!
Yes. I think this would better explain my two cents being offered.
Imagine a troop of sub-atomic living creatures, who have been tasked, by your cells, with a mission to transmit a message to your friend who is getting groceries, to get Eggs as well, as you notice, belatedly, that the carton in the fridge is nearly empty. Maybe upon the fear induced when you open the fridge, and the state of affairs is revealed to your mind, that this fear and panic triggers a call amongst your cells to send messengers/envoys to your friend at the grocery store, a vision of the empty carton, which your friend’s cells may be able to receive and interpret, thereby saving the day.
That is a specific Form (the TROOP of electrons), which is made of individual Forms (EACH electron). The electrons and their friends, alive and ready, would collectively constitute a troop (a Form) with a specific intention (as part of that Form). And, also, at the same time, individually, the members of that troops are each Forms, in of themselves, even when not acting as part of that group.
By contrast, imagine some sub-atomic strangers you or your friend have never encountered before, from strangers, and when they enter you, they interact with your cells, or with other electrons, or with themselves. Like maybe a Tsunami has hit the coast, and many on the shore are sending out distress vibes in your general direction, and you begin to receive bits from multiple (unrelated) sub-atomic creatures permeating the air, who are not combined into a “troop” on a specific mission, together, as a unified Form, but then gather into you and may collectively affect/coerce you, and Form the notion of “Run for your life! Tsunami approaches!”. This is a MORE formless arrangement than a combined troop from a single source, with a specific purpose, but, the electrons themselves, are still tangible Forms – creatures much like you and me – and, in fact, infinitely large within themselves, just as we are infinitely divisible within ourselves – infinite detail animating every moment of every living creature.
So, nope.
Not gonna happen.
You can’t have %100 Formlessness, no Matter which way it may be going.
Even if “Formless” un-grouped un-related individual Forms are %100 everywhere, in any “portion” of the universe, ready to combine/interact into groups, which, taken together form a new Form, whether this portion is moving into you, or out from you; those constituent forms will still be Forms, awaiting to be grouped into a parent Form.
The mind itself, seemingly intangible, consists of signals conducted/conveyed along by real tangible things.
No thing is made from NoThing, including our minds.
(Big Bang Creationism implies otherwise, which immediately falsifies its validity as a working model of the universe.)
This is an excellent thought experiment, in of itself, which is of inherent value. If you wish to go further down this rabbit hole, I would be happy to oblige.
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“But I still have a few mushroom and berry collecting seasons to go to fortify my Transmission distribution activities with essential nutrients.”
May your harvests be plentiful, and may they replenish and dynamicize your Transmission circuits, and flavour the network in which you are immersed and connected to, with delectable delights, and spicy spectacles.
The length of your delightful posts reminds me of a bygone era where letters took months to arrive by ship, allowing time to think, speculate and research. Instant messaging changed that.
“Formlessness” is an idealised concept, which like mathematical concepts, possibly all concepts, does not have to exist in the physical universe, and this “mysticism” is thus presumably distinguished from “science”.
For your hypothesis about electrons, is there evidence of cognitive functioning?
Reading between the lines, I wonder if vampires are in the mix?
I am surprised that you and Till have not intersected yet on this blog.
Dearest Dav’d,
O’er the breadth of tyme since mine words last reach’d your lands, there hast been much hurly-burly and many a travail, to report. In our cantref alone, the pompous Ravenwoods hast hoard’d victuals for their house and kin alone; a roving band of unlettered Wiltshiremen hast raid’d our remaining stores of grain; and worse still, Mrs. Weatherspoon’s garden hast been overrun by a multitude of devlish vermin, as if all of creation hast been dredg’d from the deeps, and thrust unwillingly onto land, during this current, and most tempestuous, torrent, nay, deluge, from above, flooding field and fen along with house and hut. Erstwhile, I hadst been generally of goodly spirits, and my coppice produced wondrous returns thif year laft. With thif poft, I include a fkin of my fineft mead for your merriment, but, with the poftman’s pony-journey being arduouf, you might not receive it in full.
***
Contemplating and applying the concept interplay of Formlessness versus Form, can be a very rewarding enterprise. For example, when I hear an album for the first time, it feels a lot different than when I repeat it over and over again, in different contexts. Then, you can think of what happened when sheet music appeared, or when mass-produced instruments appeared, or whatever… This is rewarding to think about, and even hum-bug scientists would benefit from this contemplative effort, but dismiss such things out of hand as pure “philosophy”, while their own theories are looooooaded with philosophy (like Big Bang, or Time Dilation, or Origins of Life, which, upon scrutiny, reveal huge “philosophical” assumptions, even if these were formed sub-consciously, without care).
You are well within the bounds of reason to employ it as a “useful concept”; just as, as you point out, mathematical concepts are also not absolute and perfect. For example, the notion of a “perfect circle”. We have determined the value of PI. Great. We can come up with PI, with all the decimal places to add more “accuracy” to the NOTION of a “perfect circle”. At the end of the day, though, there is no such thing as a perfect circle. When you zoom into any Form that has been “perfectly” machined, “perfectly” polished and smoothed, by computer-guided lasers or whatever; when you zoom into the edge of this circle, eventually, with enough magnification, the edge will be jostling or jagged, or otherwise not “perfect”, thereby invalidating PI as some sort of “perfect” mathematical Form in of itself, in the absolute sense. As you are getting at, we still use PI, it is still useful, even if the concept is not absolute.
If each Form is infinitely divisible (has infinite Forms within it), and each moment is unique and animated by infinite events happening inside and outside of you, then maths becomes infinitely more complex, and absolute concepts and “constants” become more fluid and less constant. Infinite equations would be required in an infinite universe, and each would only tell part of the story of the universe.
So, yes, you are perfectly justified, and legally permitted, to employ the semantically-imperfect dualistic concept of Form versus Formlessness. Especially if you understand and communicate its nuances and limits. Semantic perfection is, at the end of a day, only a pipe dream. That being said, there are other pitfalls and traps with this way of thinking, besides the fact that Formlessness is made of Forms (pitfalls that, yes, can also be found in “respected” pursuits like maths):
You have some characters, like Carlos Suares, who ask that you “choose” Formlessness over “Form”. Oy! With Suares, he thinks Formlesslness is “better”, and that going for the “Alef” is the goal, and to avoid the “Yuhd”. Oyayoyayyyyyoy!
You may also devolve into thinking of everything through this lens, and never wear other glasses to approach the world through other perspectives, and miss out on other aspects, other dualities, other processes, that would dwarf this.
This can also give a binary sense, in that some thing is either all Formless, or all Form, which (as you are probably already aware), distracts from all manner of possible gradation between the two extreme concepts.
I propose a middle-ground solution. First, Science matures, and admits that: there is no perfect circle, and that its definition of Life and Mind, are severely lacking; and that notions like PI are not absolute; while at the same time, us philosopher types also preach a moderated nuanced dynamic cosmology, by also pointing out all the ways in which our words/concepts are limited and not absolute. For example, I define “empty space” as being full of matter, and that all “matter” is full of empty space, to infinity. OK, so, being thus defined, I then allow myself to use the term “empty space”, because it is a useful concept, when, say, talking about space travel or something – there is a clear need to describe the space between us and the moon, and “empty” is pretty darn accurate (with our eyes, at our size level). Zoom into that “empty space” though, and it is fulllll of matter (and more portions of empty space). So, what I’m suggesting is to first define Formlessness as full of Forms (and other nuances), then you can freely use the useful term/concept, with the audience already aware that you’ve limited the absolute statement with these clauses. (Mystic Legalese)
In other words, if Science and Maths concepts are limited, maybe this should be impetus for us to redefine and dethrone Science and Maths, and dynamicize them further, and lay bare the weakness of concepts like maths being “the perfect language of the universe”; and then, after this effort, hold our philosophical concepts to this even higher standard, rather than rate the legitimacy of our theories by the currently low standards of Science and Math concepts, philosophically speaking.
In other words, Science should understand that it is mystical, and mysticism should understand that it is Scientific. Inherently. For both.
If each form or portion of empty space is infinitely divisible, then Science has no means to test this reality.
The default assumption (that the universe is finite and expanding into… ???) is just as untestable as the theory that it is infinite.
This is a huge huge flaw in science. The further out macro, and the further in micro, one observes, the less chance we have to conduct experiments. This fact, that Science cannot test beyond what its instruments can probe, reveals that we can never determine, by means of Science, if the universe is finite or infinite. That’s where philosophy (has yet to) come in. You could drive several large trucks through this hole in modern Science.
If Science would mature, realizing that it is fullll of massive philosophical assumptions, and accept that it has no satisfactory definition for Life or Mind, and cannot prove that an electron is indivisible, or that there is “an edge” to our universe, into which it is “expanding”; then maybe Science would take more seriously your second question:
***
“For your hypothesis about electrons, is there evidence of cognitive functioning?”
Yeeesshhh. I have a few bits of circumstantial … reasoning.
You have a mind.
At the same time, you consist (partly) of trillions of distinct creatures, cells, each with their own minds.
Upon this (relatively recent) discovery, it should have immediately been asked: “Are cells also made up of living creatures?” and “Are ALL living creatures made of up of smaller living creatures?”. These are perfectly reasonable possibilities. I’ve never heard this articulated, not even once, my whole life. Not sure why there’s such a dearth of imagination in this realm of thought…
The view of our entire universe (Einstein space-time) was formulated in a time when we had yet to observe galaxies. When galaxies were then observed, it should have immediately been asked: “Are galaxies also constituents of larger forms”.
When the quantum bits were first uncovered (again, mostly after Einstein revealed his scripture), and it was revealed that the Atom was not the Greek “Atom” – indivisible, “unbreakable”, fundamental, building blocks; it should immediately have been asked: are electrons constituted of smaller bits?
The way we see ourselves is as the middle-men of the universe. Literally, we see ourselves as residing in the center layer of the universe – with a few orders of magnitude of organisation above us, and a few below us, and we are comfortably sitting in the middle layer, with an equal view of the top and bottom layers of the whole universe, with our current instruments magically allowing us to see all the layers of the universe, from “top” to “bottom”. Oy!
Really?
Again. That is not Science – those are all just assumptions, piss-poor philosophy, adopted or promoted (sub-consciously, and without care) by Scientists.
So, my point is, Science could very easily be open to an Infinite Tree of Life, and ask the question “are electrons alive” without shame, but Science is currently unaware of its limits, and currently too narrow-minded and prissy and strict to allow even this possibility. It sees such possibilities as mere “stupid hippie-shit”, rather than a biological possibility, heralded by the discovery that we are made of living creatures, ourselves. Science has yet to realize the limits of Science.
Evidence?
Here’s one thing – how can I prove that you or I are alive, right now, if Science has no definition for Life. If Science insists that a plant or an ant doesn’t have a Mind, without first having a definition of Mind, then there is little chance I can prove that an electron has one, because plants obviously dooooo have a Mind, and we can more easily conduct experiments to prove this… That’s one thing.
A single independent cell can be conscious, learn, adapt, hunt for food, hunt for a mate, have a sex-life, build a home, avoid toxins etc… No neurons. No synapses. No brain. No problem. Even with No DNA, the cell can still communicate and avoid toxins and not change its behaviour in a noticeable way, for months.
But, the cell is, apparently, just made of clock-work machine bits (electrons, protons, and their friends), which, apparently, only act and react in a mathematically reducible way, like Maxwell’s equations and such – perfectly repeatable – solidly immutable – always unbending – predictable – absolute, of where the bits will go and how they react to other bits.
So, this opens the question: how the heck is the cell alive, and enjoys complex mindful activities, if all its molecules and quantum bits are just lifeless lego and billiard balls, bouncing around at random, and connecting and breaking apart at random?
Modern popular science is obsessed with discovering A.I. (a logical impossibility, an oxy-moron in-fact), but thing is, modern Science in fact describes us and our cells as animated purely by artificial bits! We are intelligent! And we are (allegedly) artificial! So, we’ve already “discovered” A.I. !?! It’s you and me?!?!!! Pfffffff.
If you look at live-cell microscopy – at the interiors of cells – with fluorescent dies staining certain molecules, you can see those molecules move around, and I personally perceive these as decision-making living entities. I have a particular shot I love, of the outside of a cell nucleus, with tons of little bits petitioning the nucleus for some goodies – some wait patiently, some are in a hurry, some get out of the way – like a bustling city center. Evidence? I dunno. I don’t know if Evidence is what will convince you or a Scientist, regarding this concept of an infinite Tree of Life. Philosophers would have to first insist on the point above, about the limits of Science, and then one would be able to submit philosophical deductions/arguments/logic-sequences for an infinite Tree of Life. I am convinced this will not happen during my lifetime. Why? Halton Arp, for one great example. He clearly and easily falsified Big Bang, decades ago. Science advances, it is said, one funeral at time. Tell that to Halton Arp’s family.
***
Yes, Vampires, as in, electrons with more nefarious intentions than others, or more “nosferatious” intentions, with questionable loyalties or affiliations, yes, along with varying degrees of ability and skills and understanding, etc… yes, yes, yes. But, delving into all that would suck the life out of Jasun’s server.
***
‘Till such time as I can demonstrate that I, myself, can carry on a greenhouse-effect debate in the “cordial and constructive and polite” manner in which even I, myself, insisted upon, I don’t think folks like Till will bother.
How’s this for a book title:
“Changing Climate-Change Climate”!
Eh?
Forcier 2020
“That is not Science”
really interesting comments ’round here, Dom
thanks
You’re still here? I’m amazed you’ve trudged along with us, all the way down this meandering twisted mucky stream of consciousness, often clogged with growing mossy intellectual algae clumps. Your boots must be in tatters.
This has morphed from Apocalyptic forebodings, thinking classes with disorded thinking, and current affairs being a mirror of our internal fragmentary house of cards; then it morphed into an unhealthy greenhouse-gas hot-air fart-fest, which is a great example of PRECISELY the discordant thinking and communication and trauma reverberating and carrying itself forward (I include my own folly here); then it morphed into defining mysticism and how principles of mysticism apply to Science and vice-versa.
I hope you’ve gotten something from all this. Maybe we can take these latter, more fundamental concepts, these cosmological principles, and come back “down” from the scale of the infinite, and relate these cosmological principles back down to current affairs, and wrap up this traumatic blog with some AHA glue sticks.