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A month on from Frogmass (see http://www.specularium.org/index.php?option=com_blog&view=comments&pid=120 ) and an estimated 10,000+ tadpoles now cruise my pond, grazing on the algae, plus the first of the newts have shown up. Just how many frogs will result from all this I don't know but I guestimate 10 with luck. Each year we see about 8 dragonfly larvae clamber up the reeds in autumn and hatch out of their armor and take wing. The voracious larvae probably account for hundreds of tadpoles each. I don't know which gives me the most joy, the sight of a majestic dragonfly perched on a pole in the sunlight regarding me through its thousand faceted alien eyes, or the surprised and slightly affronted look of a frog disturbed buy the repositioning of a flowerpot.
How many Frogs do we consider a Dragonfly worth?
Milder winters and duller summers in these parts of late may have done something to halt the decline of amphibians but any further lurches of climate bode ill, agricultural yields have fallen worldwide.
Atmospheric CO2 has now just passed the 400ppm mark, at a run, with every indication that environmental catastrophe rather than collective restraint will eventually halt the rise.
How many humans and how much consumerism do we consider the entire planet worth?
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Screw the EU
UKIP have made a good showing at the local council elections in the UK. Nobody really wants UKIP local councillors as such; they just want to show the depth of their distaste for excessive immigration and the EU in general. It seems likely that at next years elections for the sham ‘European Parliament’ UKIP will take the majority of UK seats in an historic two fingered ‘Up Yours!’ to Brussels.
After that we will have a UK General Election in which either UKIP or a Conservative party that has adopted a lot of UKIP’s policies will play a strong hand.
So just what does the pro-EU constituency really consist of?
Firstly ‘The Political Class’ itself, it means a gravy train for an ever increasing number of unelected, and unaccountable, and unsackable politicians and bureaucrats as it consists of a Synarchy rather than a Democracy. Failed or retiring politicians dream of sinecures in the EU.
Secondly ‘Big Business’. The regulatory culture of the EU makes life hell for small and medium sized businesses. This suits big businesses fine because they can afford to set up entire departments to deal with the mountains of paperwork and regulation and it seems a small price for them to pay to have competition from medium and small companies eliminated.
Every other constituency seems to hate the EU. Even those who used to vaguely suppose the EU embodied some laudable sort of ‘internationalist principle’ can now see the ugly realities that result from trying to shoehorn different cultures and different economies into a corrupt Synarchist Federation by stealth.
The economic case for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU seems either neutral or positive although big business screams otherwise. Britain runs a trade deficit with the EU; there seems no reason why the EU should cease to trade with Britain, EU countries trade with many countries beyond the EU. Britain’s trade with the rest of the world would undoubtedly improve if freed from regulatory burdens.
The Scottish Nationalist’s position seems particularly daft; they seem to want to quit a British Union that’s prepared to devolve ever more powers to them in favour of a European Union that seeks to remove ever more powers from them.
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I've been asked for a few more words about the Apophenia course just beginning on www.arcanoriumcollege.com which you can join anytime this week, so here goes: -
Apophenia means seeing connections between things that most people don't. Thus it can lead to genius or lunacy or both, for the hidden connections may prove true, (for a given value of truth), and/or useful in art, or science, or magic, or if they prove too outlandish they may just create conspiracy theories and religions and other nonsensical merchandise.
Magicians have used apophenia inducing techniques such as sortilege or kabala or the ars cobinatoria of Ramon Lull for many centuries on a rather ad-hoc basis, however in 2005 the attempt by some magicians to directly evoke the phenomenon of apophenia resulted in the surprising Phenomenisation of Apophenia Herself as an Actual Goddess, a sister to the recently revived Eris apparently.
Magicians have the technology and they can call up servitors, daemons, and gods if they want to, and sometimes by accident.
Since then, The Muse of Peculiar Connections has given us more hints on how to invoke Her and to portray Her, and a multitude of strange and unexpected inspirations and ideas. We celebrate her eighth birthday on May 26th and in the run up to that we shall attempt to expand upon her Invocation by practical magic and see what She evokes in us.
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And another thing, have you noticed a certain amount of excitement on the physics pages about The 'Causal Entropic Principle'? 
This somewhat speculative idea suggests (I think) that a system will tend to try and maximise the entropy it can produce in the future over its entire possible path rather than just go for maximising entropy as quickly as possible. In some simple models and experiments this seems to happen. Speculation runs rife that this mechanism could possibly account for the existence of err, life, intelligence, the universe and everything. Calling it 'causal' thus seems a bit odd for it implies that a system can 'know' something about its own future possibilities, or at least get some sort of retro-causal feedback from them.
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St George’s Day again and hardly anyone notices, we gave the world Newton, Darwin, and Democracy, plus nearly all of its games and sports, but now British Identity seems to mean little more than A Glorious Past and No Future. The EU State Religion of Political Correctness becomes increasingly enshrined in law and hence as morality, because most people sheepishly believe as commanded. Thus any discussion of why British Identity has no future becomes both futile and illegal. Nevertheless even some economists begin to wonder now if this pocket handkerchief of an island can accomodate any more people on it.
Despite a posh education, neither of my kids seems to know the first thing about the history of this sceptered isle. Well I suppose even if we have lost pre-eminence in just about everything else, Britain still punches well above its weight in Hollywood, dodgy financial services, arms manufacture, and of course Wizardry, Magic and Esoterics, although having said that I’m delighted to invite an American colleague to lecture in our next Semester on Arcanorium: -
Semester 5 Arcanorium College. http://www.arcanoriumcollege.com/
Semester 5. 29th April - 7th June
Fra. Alloy. Into the Dreamlands: Lovecraftian Sleep & Dream Work
Pete. Apophenia 2: Theory and Practise.
Alloy’s Summary: A course on how to explore the Lovecraftian Dreamlands and Mythos Dream Magic. Class will include a variety of techniques for controlling and using the Dreamlands symbol set for dream/sleep and dream-related magic. A familiarity (ideally, fluency) in Lovecraft's Dream Cycle is STRONGLY recommended (links to free versions of all of the reading are available under the College of Mythos Studies sub-forum).
Week One: Dream Journals Week
Two & Three: The Map & The Journey
Week Four: Enemies & Allies – Obtaining Servitors, Wards, and Guides
Week Five: The Work of the Silver Key – Rituals in Dreamspace
Week Six: Great Cthulhu -The Sleeping God
My Summary: As Apophenia's Eighth Birthday falls within this Semester on May 26th I intend to provide an opportunity for participants to do an Apophenia working for inspiration and genius in chosen personal projects, an opportunity to debate the text of the Apophenion book, and also to hold a birthday celebration for the muse Herself.
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Plus my Liber Null & Psychonaut and Liber Kaos have now come out as e-books in Italian thanks to the magnificent translation work of a certain bilingual Arcanorian, so it has received expert translation. Unfortunately I cannot read this beautiful language but I may well try singing a few of my rituals in err, sort of ‘Opera Mode’. (In Private!)
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Judgement Day, a review, but first its Frogmass!
Spring officially began this last weekend by Chaoist reckoning, for that’s when the pond at Chateaux Chaos filled with frogs. We have about 50 this year for the start of a 24/7 two week non-stop party and shagfest. The ‘music’ gets rather loud in the evenings. They have come in a variety of colours from whitish-yellow through greens and browns to a few that look a bit burgundy.
Let us hope we don’t get a late freeze, the climate seems oddly disturbed; we have just had the coldest Easter in a very long while.
The Science of Discworld 4, Judgement Day, has just appeared, I love this book although I suspect many liberal arts based Pratchett fans may find the extended science sections from Prof Ian Stewart (Maths and Physics) and Dr Jack Cohen (Biology) a bit of a challenge. Pratchett himself weaves an amusingly quirky tale that basically allows the two scientists to let rip with some of the more extraordinary recent developments in our understanding of reality, and an exploration of their strange philosophical implications.
I note with pleasure that the Big Bang hypothesis and the Higgs Boson get treated with a robust scepticism, as do many topics in cosmology and quantum physics. I began to wonder if the morphic fields of The Apophenion and The Octavo have found some resonance in the memesphere.