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Octblog 2021
COPOUT 26
The make or break Climate Conference in Glasgow looms, and there seem few grounds for optimism because it looks set to avoid the underlying issues.
I just sat through an edition of the BBCs Question Time and in response to the question ‘The Environment or The Economy?’ all the assembled politicos predictably said ‘Both’ and then proceeded to fantasise about how we could all both eat our cake and have it. This probably reflects the attitude of most humans currently.
Unfortunately, the science and the maths say something completely different. Business as usual cannot continue for much longer. None of the technical fixes we currently tinker with or theorise about will make much difference, the economy and the environment will both decline for many generations to come now. They will do so because since WW2 everything has gone exponential in population, consumption, production, pollution, and environmental damage, and we have already overshot the limits of the resources that this planet can provide and the damage it can absorb whilst sustaining us.
Progress has failed. Analysts of ‘progress’ in terms of wellbeing and life satisfaction generally conclude that developed countries achieved a maximum of wellbeing and life satisfaction sometime in the 1970s. Since then, economic growth has begun to erode general wellbeing and life satisfaction.
Global economic activity cannot grow or even continue without provoking the environmental changes that will undermine it and cause a gradual or catastrophic decline.
Humanity has a choice. It can either choose an acceptable level of degrowth, or it can choose to see what level of degrowth becomes forced upon it by inaction.
Involuntary degrowth could easily mean returning to Dark Age or Neolithic level economies and civilisations after resource conflicts, mass migrations, and social order collapses have devastated industrial societies, and the four horsemen of apocalyptic War, Famine, Pestilence, and Megadeath have done their work.
Voluntary degrowth to a sustainable level might just prove achievable if humanity collectively aimed for something like the 1970s and preserved some but not all the technical innovations made since then. This would of course involve levelling the developing world up to that. We should for example, keep the internet as a valuable communication and information resource, but scrap social media entirely.
Imagine a world in which everyone has the basics but where long distance travel and trade have become a rarity, the burning of fossil fuels has become illegal along with private transport, a local rather than a globalised world, where very little except information moves between continents, a world in which people lead simpler material lives but work less and have richer social and cultural lives.
Interview with a Wizard.
The first series of thirteen Blumberg-Carroll email interviews came to over eighty thousand words, enough for a book.
We seem to have pioneered the literary equivalent of a late night chat show series, except that here the interviewer and the interviewee have each had at least whole day to think about each of the 365 questions, so expect some penetrating questions and provocative answers. Lionel Snell has graciously offered to write a preface.
Covid.
I wonder what casualty allowance the UK government has given itself for its current policy of relaxing Covid restrictions and precautions and relying entirely on vaccination. Scientific opinion and the political opposition have turned against it.
As the new wave of infections and deaths rises here, it does seem surprising that the government and the media do not give greater publicity to the percentage of the unvaccinated amongst the newly hospitalised and dead.
Lastly, leaf fall from the deciduous trees around here seems oddly delayed this year, and look who seems to enjoy the unseasonable climate:-
I may have done them a favour; Greece may well become too hot for their kind in years to come.
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Septblog 2021
Esoteric Horticulture.
At Chateaux Chaos the Autumnal Mandrakes have sprouted surprisingly early, before autumn equinox, with Circe already a foot into the sky and Boris and Igor just getting started. This year they will have an experimental outdoor season, note the slug repellent copper wire around their new home. Let us hope that the increasingly unpredictable climate does not bring any early frosts.
Magical Book.
The world’s most illustrious academic historian of the esoteric arts has prepared a splendid preface for the forthcoming Classic Edition of ‘Liber Null and Psychonaut’, the book that initiated an epic paradigm change in magical thought. Since its first publication this book has attracted both aggressive dismissal and laudatory recommendation. A new paradigm will always make some people very angry and other people ecstatic. Weiser’s Classic Edition which includes some new material, will appear sometime next year.
Holidays.
Retirement from most of the more time demanding business activities has led to a life of concentric holidays and research sabbaticals with frequent sojourns in remote Wales where a lot of wildlife still thrives. Herewith an adder sunning itself on some concrete. Some bright spark decided that this area would provide adders with an excellent habitat and released a few hundred captive bred specimens some decades ago, now we have thousands of them here. Shoes now seem essential in the dunes, but on the upside, they do bite dogs that people don’t keep on leads.
Herewith also a friendly cricket. Until recently I could always hear their high pitched chirping at night. This year my youngest daughter, a professional ecologist, told me that they were making their customary racket, but I could barely hear them. Oddly, I found this a greater portent of mortality than my need for reading glasses, something may soon disappear from my universe forever as my faculties fade. I seem to have just eaten a pot of dog ice cream having mistaken the picture on the carton for a polar bear. I may have only few decades more to discover the remaining secrets of the universe and the quantum realm presents bizarre difficulties akin to juggling spaghetti whilst blindfolded in a hailstorm.
Quantum Chess?
During discussions of the concept of dimensions with my interviewer/biographer, the following analogy or thought experiment emerged to illustrate the possibilities of multiple time dimensions.
The record of a game of chess provides its temporal dimension, it shows what happened over time. It does not show the moves not taken. However, we could have multiple timelines in which alternatives moves occur. A player unable to decide between two moves can elect to make both of them by replacing a single piece by two smaller shadow pieces in different positions with the provisos that whenever one of the shadow pieces interacts with an opposing piece, the other shadow piece becomes removed, and a player moving one of the shadow pieces must also move the other corresponding one as well. Otherwise, all the usual rules of chess apply.
Now here comes the really strange bit: -
Afterwards, we could write a single timeline move sequence to describe the whole game that does not include the shadow pieces that became removed! However, an expert would probably notice something very odd about some of the moves chosen when looking at the record afterwards. Such a Quantum-Chess analogy can in principle explain many of the mysteries of quantum mechanics and magic. What may have happened, and what could happen, can affect what does seem, to us, to have actually happened. ‘Imaginary’ phenomena can have very real effects.
Afterthought – simply sawing each piece of a chess set down the middle and numbering the two halves the same provides an easy way of preparing a quantum chess set. The two halves of each piece begin the game on the same square.
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Augblog 2021
Dragon seen in Wales. I met a representative of the dragon races in the dunes near our retreat in remotest Wales. She said that despite having to work on smaller scales and less ambitious projects than in the Mesozoic Era, she remained confident that her kind would regain world domination after hearing our IPCC report on anthropogenic global warming. Another forty gigatons of carbon dioxide per annum for a few decades more should do the trick nicely, she continued. Its not so much the seemingly minor average temperature increases but the resulting exponential increases in extreme weather events that will render your civilisations unviable as your agriculture collapses and you start to massacre each other wholesale. All this will give dragonkind splendid new opportunities, she cheerfully concluded.
Afghanistan. I went through it on the Hippy trail back in the late seventies. It seems a mistake to classify it as a nation for it consists of tribalized territories that no central authority or external power has ever really controlled. Due to western medicine its population has mushroomed far beyond the agricultural carrying capacity that the bone dry and often freezing territory offers, and cultural and religious attitudes inhibit the adoption of industrial or post industrial development. It has valuable mineral resources however, as the Chinese have noticed. A descent into dark ages barbarism and theocracy with Kalashnikovs now seems inevitable. A Taliban dictatorship seems unlikely to build a nation, more likely a fragmentation back to tribal rivalries will occur. The Brits, The Ruskies, and the Yanks all failed there. The Chinese may eventually become tempted to go in hard for the strategic minerals and they won’t shy away from eradicating the culture and as much of the population as that requires.
Lithonian flotilla. Beach detritus, DIY leftovers, and vape accessories continue to provide resources for the growing Lithonian space fleet. Note the inclusion of the Retro-Dreadnaught in this flotilla. Due to occasional relativistic navigation errors, vessels dispatched on weeklong voyages sometimes come back hundreds of years later, and the Lithonian fleet consists of vessels from many eras.
Microcosm, Psi, and Macrocosm.
The quest for a sub-quantum geometry that can explain quantum physics with gravity, and psi and their relationship to hyperspherical cosmology continues here; -
https://www.specularium.org/3d-time
At present it consists mainly of a list of qualitative ingredients for a potential description. These include Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics, my Three Dimensional Time hypothesis, Wolff’s Wave Structure of Matter, and some higher dimensional geometry.
Fitting that lot together and rendering it quantitative certainly presents a challenge, may Azathoth modulate my neurones.
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Julblog 2021
Covid Strategies. I keep a close eye on the Worldometer report,
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
particularly on the Deaths per Million of population column to see how various strategies or lack of strategies tried by various governments affects mortality outcomes.
For a relatively wealthy country with a very high population density, an old population and massive connectivity to the rest of the world, the UK has not done too badly in the rankings.
Here we have just embarked on a gamble to achieve something like herd immunity through vaccinating most adults and now allowing children to acquire immunity through mild infection. Boris Johnson gambled on Brexit and then gambled on throwing vast resources at the vaccine effort and he won both times. Let us hope he has got this right. In the absence of another new variant that can jump the vaccine barrier with impunity, he probably has.
Magical News. Work continues apace on the upgrade for the Classic Edition of Liber Null & Psychonaut. From more recent anthropological and ethnographic research it has become apparent that Animism provides the wellspring from which most magical traditions arise and that Shamanism constitutes just one manifestation of animist ideas, in contradistinction to the theories of Mircea Eliade. The forthcoming classic edition will also contain upgrades to modern Chaos Magic rituals.
Conversations with a Wizard, a mega-interview with an esoteric journalist, now begins to approach book length.
The microcosm chapters of the Occultaris gradually evolve. The mutual dependency of the microcosm and the macrocosm becomes increasingly apparent. The quest for a theory of quantum gravity seems doomed within the current framework of quantum field theory and the standard cosmological model. Rather it seems that quanta and fields must have a co-fundamental mutually dependent existence and a similar higher dimensional geometry to the entire universe as in Hypersphere Cosmology. Moreover, fields must act non-locally even if waves in them only propagate at lightspeed or less. The properties of the apparent parts depend upon the whole and everything lies far more intimately connected than conventionally thought. This seems to go way beyond Mach’s Principle, Entanglement, Quantum Handshakes, and so called Morphic Fields.
Amazing Cosmology News just in: -
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01380-6
The filaments of galaxies that stretch across the cosmic voids have measurable spins that the Standard Cosmological Model cannot explain.
Hypersphere Cosmology uses the Godel metric W = 2sqrt(piGd) in which ‘Matter everywhere rotates relative to the compass of inertia with an angular velocity of twice the square root of pi times the gravitational constant times the density’.
https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/323-equation-5
This seems highly likely to supply an explanation for the new observation of the largest spinning structures ever seen.
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Magic
Weisers, the publishers of the first combined edition of Liber Null & Psychonaut, plan to bring out a Classic Edition next year of this paradigm shifting book of magic which has remained in print and appeared in a considerable number of other languages since its first publication. The new cover design looks great, the contents will get an upgrade, and a suitably illustrious figure has volunteered to write a foreword to the new edition.
Work progresses on The Occultaris, a treatise on Natural Philosophy. This seems likely to send shockwaves through the fields of both science and magic which have become somewhat unnecessarily estranged for the last couple of centuries. The Occultaris explores the higher dimensional geometry of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm (The Universe and The Quantum Domain) and the esoteric consequences of a new model of each.
On a lighter note, ‘Conversations with a Wizard’, or something like that, may eventually appear as a book. What started as an e-mail interview has got a bit out of hand during lockdown. It has grown to about a hundred pages of biography, travelogue, recent magical history, and a lifetime of anecdotes and observations, and we haven’t finished yet.
Sculpture
Beach detritus and DIY leftovers continue to inspire craftwork at our lockdown hideaway on a Welsh shore. Herewith the latest addition to the Lithonian task force, a hyperspace missile cruiser featuring a large bronze marine bolt which polished up nicely to form the bridge.
Politics
The EU makes an ass of itself over an UK-Eire border that nobody wants. Perhaps it seeks revenge for Brexit or to give notice that it will create trouble for any other country that tries to escape its synarchist clutches. The political capital of the EU has hit a new low with its dysfunctional response to the Covid crisis with the majority of the population of the EU now professing dissatisfaction with the entire rotten institution.
Historically, Catholicism has created a bloody fault line between Ireland and Britain. After partition, Eire became a virtual theocracy run by a viciously repressive and primitive manifestation of Catholicism that hideously maltreated countless women and children and arrested economic and social development. Thankfully, that has all become exposed now, and the clergy discredited. The Irish have turned away from ancestral faith and become a modern democratic and largely English speaking people.
The old atrocities and battles that took place between Ireland and Scotland, between England and Wales and between England and Scotland no longer influence relations between them. The war between Britain and Southern Ireland ended almost a century ago.
Does it now make political, economic, and geopolitical sense to extend an invitation to Eire to join the United Kingdom?
Alternative Physics
https://www.specularium.org/3d-time
Anyone for or against a Clifford Torus or a 3-Torus in curved three-dimensional space and curved three dimensional time as the basis for a Hypersphere Quantology without quantum chromodynamics?