Blog

Details

Published: 14 January 2021

Hits: 8804

Pandemic

Chinese bats now seem to have killed more Brits than the Luftwaffe, or indeed the annual toll of WW2 did. Nevertheless, we have a home-grown vaccine that may well sort this out by the summer here and in the entire world thereafter. I hope that we do not punish the government at the next election. This pandemic represents a disease of progress and civilisation – our fault for exploiting wild animals and encouraging mass travel around the globe. Authoritarian regimes have had much lower casualties, but freedom has a price, better Dead than Yellow or Kraut. The Labour opposition here has whined and bleated, failed to come up with policy alternatives, and grudgingly agreed to the government’s tactics. Let us thank all the gods we did not have Comrade Jeremy Corbyn in charge during this crisis.

Politics

Culture War or Class War?

Here in the UK, we have an irritating amount of overspill from the so-called ‘Culture Wars’ allegedly wracking the fabric of American society.

Wokeism, Anti-Colonialism, BLM, Cancelism, and Minority Sexuality advocacy seem to have coalesced into a single liberal virtue signalling package against which an equally polarised backlash has formed to promote White Supremacy, Anti-Globalisation, Nationalism, and Conspiracy theories.

What underlies this Polarisation? - The Economy.

For the last several decades the professional and managerial classes in the USA, and to some extent the UK, have screwed the lower middle and working classes through globalisation. The wages of the poorer in rich countries have stagnated or declined in real terms as manufacturing has become outsourced to the developing world or insourced to cheaper imported labour. Meanwhile the managerial and professional classes have profited from cheaper goods and services and capital invested overseas.

This becomes all too clear when you examine ‘The Elephant Graph’. -

https://www.ejiltalk.org/being-charged-by-an-elephant-a-story-of-globalization-and-inequality/

The rich in rich countries often opine that they have helped to uplift many parts of the developing world and that this would lead them to adopt western style values and democracy. The later has singularly failed to materialise. The rich in rich countries have merely succeeded in shifting wealth to themselves, and from the poor in their own countries to the rich in poor countries.

All the issues which have become polarised into the so called ‘culture wars’ revolve around the concerns of the poor in rich countries.

The American dream of a working-class family with their own home and car and with one parent as homemaker now seems a rarity or a forgotten fantasy for many. I has also become exceedingly difficult to achieve in the UK.

QAnon’s seemingly mad ideas about a conspiracy of ‘Satanic Paedophiles’ actually makes a certain amount of metaphorical sense if interpreted as a conspiracy of ‘Greedy Capitalists Denying Poor Children a Future’.

Yet for all sorts of historical reasons America can never admit that it has a Class War, so a Culture War stands in as a proxy for it. Socialism comes close to blasphemy in the land of the free, and in the land of the free, many choose to regard poverty as self-inflicted despite the glaring inequalities of opportunity.

The American democratic party, rather like the British Labour party, now seems dominated by Rich Liberals, and both ignore the lower orders whose mores and habits they despise.    

Liberalism sets great store in an offensive against the side effects of relative poverty rather than its cause. Thus, it campaigns for any imaginable minority grievance rather than address the underlying economic factors which give rise to them.

Many Americans voted for Trump in the hope that he would do something about the American response to Globalisation. He seemed a strange choice but nobody else from the American elite dared to put themselves to the task, and America elects only from what it considers its elite. Trump may or may not now disappear, but the underlying issue will not, particularly under the pretence that it remains a Culture War.

Do not expect a revolution. Revolutions the world over, only tend to succeed under middle-class leadership.

Many British voted for Brexit in the hope it would allow us to deal with globalisation on terms of our own choosing. Our Conservative government at last talks openly about levelling up the economies of our poorer areas and classes. I live in hope.

Esoterics

The main part of this blog consists of an extensive email interview that Mr Ian Blumberg-Enge requested I give. This took place over the last week, because of its substantial size I have placed it here: -

https://www.specularium.org/wizardry/item/308-interview-january-2021

Details

Published: 20 December 2020

Hits: 9074

Winter Solstice 2020

Seasonal Greetings.

Astrology. For those who choose to invest belief in it, a rare conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter occurs at this Solstice. This does not necessarily presage the end of the world – fortunately the Chaobala of the Epoch attributes a Saturnine-Jupiterian current to Osiris - the embodiment of rebirth.

Physics. Herewith a seasonal gift to the world: -

https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology

After many years of struggle the maths of Hypersphere Cosmology have achieved complete internal coherence and a precise match with observational data. The LCDM Big-Bang Theory will become formally discarded soon, and thank the gods for that, it brought some very distasteful metaphysics with it. Many thanks to all he terrestrial and extra-terrestrial intelligences who have assisted with this project, JD and Yog-Sothoth in particular.

The science media voice increasing doubts about the Big-Bang, the Editor’s Pick letter in the xmas edition of New Scientist begins ‘Time to abandon the big bang theory? Plus, the daft idea of so-called dark matter has just come under further attack from the ‘External Field Effect’ (try searching on that), Hypersphere Cosmology resumes this MOND type effect and identifies and quantifies its origin in Gödelian and Machian principles.

The mathematics off Hypersphere Cosmology condense to a few terse pages accompanied by about forty pages of explanation and metaphysical interpretation. These will appear eventually in the forthcoming Occultaris. In the meantime, the maths appears on this site ‘pour encourager les autres’.

The completion of that part of the Natural Philosophy project opens the way for a serious alternative to the mess of Quantum Field Theory. A gradually emerging model of Quantum Hyperspheres shows promise – in this, everything becomes the cause of itself in hyperspherical space and hyperspherical time. In the best traditions of natural philosophy this leads to an holistic reality in which the properties of anything depend on the whole of the rest of the universe, and many of the strange connections that Apophenia suggests have a reality.

Politics.

Britain seems close to finally liberating itself from the EU Synarchy.

The Eurocrats cannot possibly offer Britain anything less than punitive terms if it refuses to accept political interference, otherwise many other countries will try to regain their political independence and the whole rotten corrupt EU shambles will disintegrate.

Ever since the founding of the Common Market a clique of largely unelected synarchists has promoted a conspiracy to rule Europe through a vast non-democratic bureaucracy that controls every aspect of its citizens lives. It has done this by stealth, by coups, and by bluff.

When Britain conducted a referendum in 1975 on joining the Common Market, strange bedfellows united to oppose the idea. Tony Benn on the far left opined against a ‘Capitalist’s Europe’ and Enoch Powell on the far right said that it would lead to a ‘Progressive Loss of Sovereignty’. The ‘Yes’ campaign made much of the ‘nutters alliance’ opposing the Common Market, yet history has proved both Benn and Powell right. The Common Market mutated into a political project largely beyond democratic scrutiny and it developed the ingenious ruse of putting big business in charge of an ever-expanding regulatory culture that actively supresses competition from smaller businesses. Plus, it became heavily protectionist to shield European big business from outside competition.

Powell also raised controversial early objections to immigration. The burden of immigration falls almost entirely on the indigenous poor by depressing wages and causing housing shortages and increasing crime. The well off reap the benefits in terms of cheap labour and inflating property prices, and even the increased crime and declining social cohesion provides the well off with plenty of administrative opportunities.

Britain will undoubtedly suffer in the short term for a No-Political-Strings-Hard-Brexit but we must do this for the long term benefits: -

Freedom from EU control over our Agriculture and Fisheries which currently degrades the environments of both.

Freedom to control our own borders.

Freedom to decide by democratic means, our own laws.

Freedom to trade with the rest of the world on our own terms.

Freedom always costs. The price, however high, always proves worth paying in the end.

Details

Published: 03 December 2020

Hits: 9489

Esoteric Horticulture - Now in their eighth year at Chateaux Chaos, the Mandrakes have blossomed with exuberance for the festive season. Note that after producing an initial celebratory heptagonal flower with six stamens, Circe and her friends have exclusively reverted to the usual pentagonal symmetry.

Sculpture – With all the shops shut due to the pandemic, and with internet shopping failing to provide a satisfactory festive experience, crafting gifts seems like an agreeable alternative. Herewith an Earring Tree. Iron wires tied and epoxied together, coated in black milliput, afterwards drybrushed with green acrylic and mounted in an old green slate block, inspired by the highland Larch.

Politics – America seems to have a problem with its institution of Head of State. The Potus has too much power and the periodic process of replacement proves both expensive and disgraceful. Britain on the other hand has a severe problem with its economy. Perhaps Britain could offer America surplus parts of its royal family as a readymade constitutional monarchy? Obviously, the Americans will not want Prince Andrew now, but what about Prince Harry? He comes fully trained in all ceremonial, charitable, military, and diplomatic duties and has an American wife and an heir. How about 100bn U$ and free aircraft for our two new unaffordable aircraft carriers?  America could recoup the costs quickly with an ‘honours for paid taxes’ scheme in a new American Order of Knighthood.

Esoteric Physics Update – As part of the forthcoming Occultaris, a treatise on Natural Philosophy that unifies magic and science, it seems necessary to demolish the standard LCDM model of big-bang cosmology and replace it with a Hypersphere Cosmology which now exists in a fully quantitative form. It also seems necessary to replace the standard mode of Quantum Field Theory with a model based on Quantum Hyperspheres to fully unify the microcosm and the macrocosm.

Official QFT demands no less than 25 different fundamental fields pervading all of spacetime and 36 supposedly fundamental quanta, it seems massively baroque and ad hoc and riddled with the modern equivalents of epicycles and phlogiston.

In the emerging Quantum Hyperspheres model, spacetime itself (with a few extra dimensions) provides the basis for all fields, and all quanta consist of various centres of spin in up to 4 different planes which creates spinors. The basic bones of the model appear below. It treats quanta as less fundamental than the various configurations of spin that comprise them. It remains geometric and qualitative at this stage; I would welcome collaboration from specialist mathematical physicists to explore the quantitative aspects.

The underlying motivation here arises from a desire to model an entirely natural description of reality that also explains non-locality, entanglement, and superposition and a wealth of esoteric phenomena in terms of extra-dimensionality and temporal reversibility.

Details

Published: 10 November 2020

Hits: 9391

Psychology, Oneirology

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” – Nietzsche.

And Erik Hoel of Tufts University makes a strong argument for this in his recent paper on The Overfitted Brain Hypothesis: -

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.09560.pdf

A thorough study of this September 2020 paper will prove rewarding. Hoel discusses the various leading theories about why we dream and then he adds another astonishing one that perhaps supersedes them all.

Hoel draws heavily on what we have learned from trying to develop deep machine learning and machine intelligence, it seems that if you want a machine to develop a broad ability at problem solving then you need to feed it on Chaos. Or to put it more politely, Stochastic and Random inputs including Imaginary Data.

The theory goes that any information system can get a bit stuck and inhibited by the patterns it knows and expects and particularly by what it has recently learned, so it can benefit by shaking it all up and mixing it all about to provoke synthesis and integration.

Humans rarely dream ‘real’ memories, except in PTSD. Dreams usually consist of fantastical Apophenic mash ups of fragments of old memories and newer ones.

Hoel argues that the brain deliberately indulges in the hallucinations of dream to achieve this vital housekeeping function that any complex and adaptive information processing device will require. He devotes some of the paper to a discussion of dreams and creativity.

Hoel writes further in edition 3307, 2/11/20 of New Scientist and touches on the human need for unreality in general, our insatiable taste for myths and novels and entertainments about imaginary events. He suspects that we may need such inputs to prevent our minds ossifying around our often-humdrum repetitive life experiences.

This led me to wonder if some people value hallucinogens precisely because they mimic the random and hallucinatory state of dreaming, despite the potential survival costs of performing such activity whilst not safely asleep and immobile.

I have to say that I have got far more inspiration from dreaming and the liminal states of waking than I ever did from hallucinogens.   

Politics

Farewell Donald Trump, you brought a stimulating dose of chaos, excitement and controversy to American politics, the highest election turnout ever, and a focus of attention upon a lot of the elephants in the room, notably the failures of multiculturalism, political correctness, neo-liberalism and globalisation, the European reluctance to pay for its own defence, the need for renewables to make economic sense, the massive drug and people trafficking across the Mexican border, and the emerging broad spectrum neo-imperialism of China.

In choosing Biden the American people seem to have opted for Conservatism with a small ‘c’, - let us hope that does not mean more social and economic neo-liberalism as usual. Social neo-liberalism means policing thought and speech. Economic neo-liberalism means elites will take an ever-larger share of the pie.

Esoteric Horticulture

Circe the Mandrake has signalled approval of her new accommodation in the greenhouses of Chateaux Chaos by producing a flower with 7 petals and 6 stamens instead of the usual pentagonal symmetry of 5 and 5, as displayed by one of her smaller companions. Who said plants cannot communicate?

Quantum Hyperspheres

The microcosm chapters of The Occultaris continue to develop and now include a possible model of quantum gravity in qualitative form at least.

Sorcery

Finally, my thanks to the hundred or so around the planet who participated in the Samhain magical attack requested in the previous blog. The tide may have started to turn, but humanity must not squander victory by a return to its bad old ways. Mother Earth has so far admonished us mildly with climatic and biological responses, but if we really annoy her, she can swat our entire civilisation, and if necessary, our entire species, all too easily.