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Published: 18 June 2024

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Junblog 2024

Holidays, family visits, seasonal horticulture and aquaculture at Chateaux Chaos, correspondence, and a couple of unfinished sculptures have consumed much of this month, so just a few thoughts on various matters: -

Ontology and Fundamentals.

Presently we only seem to have achieved Quantum Epistemology. We have formulae and mathematics which can predict what will most likely occur in the quantum domain apparently underlying reality. Whilst such formulae predict what measurements we will probably get, they give us no adequate words or pictures to describe what ‘really’ goes on down there. The universe seems composed of phenomena which do not behave like ‘things’ at all.

Can we even have an Ontology about anything truly fundamental? Perhaps human language prevents this if it remains confined to the ‘Subject, Verb, and Object’ grammar of thought.

We cannot actually perceive ‘being’. We can only perceive doings, similarities, and differences. From these we abstract the convenient fiction that phenomena have some sort of underlying being separate from their observable doing. This perhaps creates a conceptual barrier to finding an ontology of anything fundamental.

Can we have a better but Non-Fundamental Quantum Ontology? Atomic theory for example looks like an adequate but non-fundamental ontology, Nobody disputes that matter consists of atoms, the theory works so well that almost everyone accepts the ontological reality of atoms, but we account for their varying properties and doings in terms of their constituent protons, neutrons, and electrons. We no longer regard atoms as fundamental. Electrons along with photons and neutrinos still seen fundamental but protons and neutrons seem to have to have bits in them called quarks to account for their properties.

If we do come to regard some quanta (or quantum fields) as fundamental, can we account for their activities in any meaningful way without ascribing both being and doing to them as the grammar of our thought seems to demand, without implying an unlimited causal regress?

Cosmology News.                                                                           

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/JADES-GS-z14-0

The James Webb Space Telescope has just spotted the most distant galaxy yet with a redshift of z = 14.32 which in terms of the standard LCDM cosmology model locates it at just 290 million years after a supposed big bang 13.4 billion years ago. That seems a remarkably brief period in cosmological terms for a substantial galaxy to form. The previously predicted cosmic dark age of about a billion years in duration before stars and galaxies formed and ignited has shrunk by at least two thirds. The JWST has the capacity to observe up to about z = 20, and astronomers now expect it to see galaxies all the way to the limits of its observation. In the Hypersphere Cosmology paradigm, a redshift of z =14.32 indicates a distance of 93.5% of the way to an antipode at 13 billion light years.

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

The JWST does not have the power to spot galaxies all the way back to the fog of the CMBR and hence to falsify LCDM in favour of HC, but it certainly casts more doubt on the conventional standard model. Perhaps only very high power radio astronomy that can peek behind the CMBR and detect even more highly redshifted galactic light will confirm the Hypersphere Cosmology prediction that galaxies at all stages in their evolution exist at all points in space and time in a universe finite and unbounded in space and time.

Data Request. Hypersphere Cosmology theory depends heavily on Perlmutter’s type 1A supernovae data, now more than 20 years old. A great many new observations of type 1A supernovae have become cited in recent astronomy papers. The release of the raw data into the public domain may take some time. If anyone can help me out with access to some of it in the meantime, I will remain eternally grateful. I just need the supernovae catalogue numbers, their redshifts, and their apparent magnitudes. Hopefully such data will help confirm the Hypersphere Cosmology model and allow for a more precise calculation of the antipode distance of the universe.

I would particularly welcome data on type 1A supernovae with redshifts in excess of z = 0.8.

Dark Matter Cancelled?

This latest paper strongly supports a Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) explanation rather than a dark matter explanation for the observed galactic rotation curves.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/06/240617173533.htm

https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09685

Whilst ‘straight’ MOND uses a rather ad-hoc modification to existing theories of gravity, Hypersphere Cosmology can account for precisely what causes the required modification, see: -

https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology/item/319-equation-9

Politics. The Right and the Far Right have done well in many of the EU countries in the recent elections for the European Sham Parliament. The unelected EU executive and bureaucracy will simply ignore this warning result for as long as possible and try to bumble along with its own Synarchist agenda. Yet national elections within the EU nations will eventually give similar rightward results and then the real horse trading will begin and the next batch of Eurocrats may have to start taking the views of their constituents seriously.

This rightward swing has many roots. Russia now threatens Europe militarily, America begins to tire of the expense of defending Europe. China threatens Europe economically and geopolitically. Globalisation has had a negative effect on all but the wealthiest in the developed world. The indigenous population of Europe generally fails to reproduce at replacement rate because only the relatively wealthy or the very poor can do so now without quite severe economic consequences. Strident social liberalism has provoked a backlash against the increasingly compulsory affirmation of an expanding range of identity disorders, sexual abnormalities,  and acquired victimhoods. Immigration benefits only those who wish to reduce labour costs and inflate property prices. The mass importation of cultures and religions with philosophies inimical to European values erodes social cohesion.

Britain faces all these problems as well, and we will soon have a national general election which the Conservative party will probably lose badly. Yet this does not seem to imply an exceptionalist lurch to the left. The Labour party has hastily repositioned itself to the centre and an electorate exasperated with the incompetence and lack of real conservatism from the Conservative party will probably reluctantly chose Labour. Reform UK may well emerge from this election as the surviving custodian of British Conservative values. They do at least have an invigorating manifesto and they might even get to implement it following the election after this one.

https://www.reformparty.uk/our-contract-contents

Unfortunately, Reform’s environmental policies seem deeply unsound. All the main parties promise economic growth but that seems vanishingly unlikely to occur unless some massive source of cheap energy comes onstream now that the 20^th century fossil fuelled boom winds down. Thus, they all tell porkies and choosing between them becomes a depressing task because you know they can only really offer redistribution, which for Labour means levelling down.

Plus, the boardgame of Monopoly has led the UK disastrously astray. I love boardgames but I absolutely loathe the game of Monopoly for its tedium and its nonsensical economics. It has taught generations of Britons that property makes wealth better than enterprise does. Try playing it without the absurdity of collecting £200 every time you pass Go, for doing nothing.

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Published: 19 May 2024

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Mayblog 2024

Wandering around the UK

Returning from the ancestral Sussex pile along the south coast by rail, my dilapidated and delayed train left me with an hours wait at Portsmouth and an opportunity to wander around the Naval Dockyard. One of our new aircraft carriers had as many scaffoldings, tarpaulins, and cranes on it as Nelson’s old 1805 flagship HMS Victory. That seemed to say a lot about Britain – a place with a glorious past and an uncertain future, where few things seem to work very well anymore. Perhaps we should concentrate on fixing The Victory first – at least we know it works. It has fantastic damage resistance, and the addition of some missile launchers would give it a longer reach. Okay it’s a bit slow, but its totally green, requiring no fuel at all.

I had a delightful visit to the Scottish Highlands to visit family and enjoy two thing in particular that Scotland does better than England. Firstly, awesome Steak Pies that put the ghastly Cornish pasties of my adopted homeland in the Southwest to shame. A business opportunity must lay there. Secondly, huge expanses of a much more spectacular species of gorse bush which often lines the highland highways with a psychedelically vibrant and almost hallucinogenic yellow glory when the sun shines on it. Best of all, the damnable Scottish Nationalist Party went into a probably terminal nosedive during my stay, justifying my many years of polemic and cursing.

Endorsement for Baphomet - History, Ritual, and Magic of the World’s Most Famous Occult Icon, by Michael Osiris Snuffin.

Michael Osiris Snuffin has written a definitive Theometry of Baphomet. He shows us exactly how and why this deity-form arose and developed into a major occult meme that has inspired many of the leading magicians, romantics, and rebels of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty first centuries.

Impressive research and scholarship has gone into this book.

If we define magic as the use of imaginary phenomena to create real effects, then the magical creation and evolution of the Baphomet concept has certainly had a profound effect on the ideas and actions of several generations of occultists, sexual non-conformists, and rebel mystics.

The author gradually reveals a deep personal relationship with Baphomet and provides practical meditations and rituals through which the reader may approach and invoke the deity-form. By his magic he has made himself a High Priest of Baphomet.

Back down on the Welsh shores, a sweep of the beach yielded a few more sea-worn pieces of aerated autoclaved concrete block. The surf has remained poor and the sea cold, so the vape accessories recycled and saved over the winter have found a use in the space-yards in the construction of a couple of destroyers for the Skaron fleet.

This month’s esoteric musings on Quantum Ontology.

The diagram shows 5 of the six dimensions, two of space and three of time with the plane of imaginary time superimposed on the spatial plane as it acts as a pseudo-space. The cones show retarded and advanced quantum waves spreading out from, and converging at, the origin. In a fully 6 dimensional representation the circles would appear as spheres. This representation implies that deeper symmetries underlie superposition and entanglement.

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Published: 10 April 2024

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Aprblog 2024

Hate crime

I love Scotland but I HATE the Scottish National Party for its hypocrisy, its economic and geopolitical illiteracy or wilful misrepresentations, its lousy management of Scotland, its culture of anti-British resentment, and its compulsive Wokeism. I hope it gets trashed at the next General Election. Under their current leader they can no longer even play the ethnic tartan romanticism card.

If they can get away with it, the next step taken against free speech by the SNP will likely include the criminalisation of any thought-speak that might offend a newly created ‘protected group’ - career politicians such as themselves.

Nicola Sturgeon always struck me as a duplicitous career politician for whom Scottish Independence merely provided a flag of convenience for her own advancement. The same goes for Alex Salmond although he also seems to have been motivated by the possibilities of some slap and tickle as well. Let’s hope they’re both eventually tried for treason. Technically we retain the death penalty for treason, although we have commuted it for mere murder.

I have blood and treasure in the Highlands. I will let you know if I need crowdfunding or special forces to secure my escape if arrested for hate crime on my next trip to Inverness.

Trans-Antipodal light and the CMBR

The sixth equation of Hypersphere Cosmology

https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/322-equation-6

shows how light become redshifted or frequency reduced as it travels across the universe by the universe’s small positive curvature which acts as an omnidirectional deceleration A.

It shows that light coming directly from the antipode point of any observer will lose all of its frequency and become unobservable: -

f_o  = f_e (1-(d/L))   where f_{o =} observed frequency, f_e = expected frequency, d = astronomical distance and L= antipode distance.

However, due to the counter-factual indefiniteness of the frequency of a photon in flight, an observer can still receive  photons from trans-antipodal sources so long as such photons undergo some form of interaction enroute, perhaps reflection or absorption and re-emission, in which case the  mechanism works re-iteratively: -

f_o  = f_e (1-(d₁/L)) (1-(d₂/L)) (1-(d₃/L)) etc,   where d₁, d₂, d₃, etc, represent the distances travelled between interactions.

Clearly, if   d₁ + d₂ + d₃, etc > L  then light can still reach an observer without its frequency reducing completely to zero.

The CMBR represents the light from incandescent hydrogen at around 3,000 Kelvin downshifted by a factor of about 1100 to just 2.7 Kelvin, and it comprises a dominant proportion of the photon count of the entire extra-galactic background light (EBL) spectrum.

Now assuming that starlight does ‘bounce around’ occasionally in the course of epic journeys including perhaps multiple trans-antipodal journeys, then we can perhaps expect ordinary starlight to reach thermodynamic equilibrium with the background temperature of the universe and supply the relatively intense Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation that we observe.

Thelemic Symposium, September 2024

https://www.visible-college.org/symposium

Don’t expect me to attend. Chaos has already won the argument with Thelema methinks: -  

https://theblogofbaphomet.com/2014/04/15/exploring-thelema-and-chaos-magick-with-pete-and-sef-part-1/    (part 1 of 10, the other nine lie scattered forward in the same archives)

and there seems little point in trying to further promote the paradigm change to those determined to cling to the shreds of Crowleyanity.

Just a few published comments from some of the key speakers indicates the regressive flavour: -

Chaos Magic comes in for criticism for its ‘Extreme Relativism’. Ha ha, well once you have realised the relativism of anything you can never go back to absolutism about it with any shred of intellectual honesty.

Chaos Magic comes in for criticism for its ‘Lack of Initiatory Knowledge’. Ha ha again, does this mean the non-secrets of the sex magic of the Argentum Astrum and the Ordo Templi Orientalis, or does it also include the contrived Apophenia of ad-hoc Kabalas? Chaos Magic has no secret initiatory knowledge because we published it all.

Magic(k) has been redefined as ‘The art, science, and culture of experiencing truth’. Truth eh? Please do tell, otherwise we can only interpret ‘experiencing truth’ as the misuse of Gnosis to manufacture transcendentalist beliefs, the usual old religious tactic. Aiwass, the supposed bringer of ‘The Book of the Law’ seems just another of the masks of Nyarlathotep, the archetype identified by H. P. Lovecraft as underlying all manipulatory and exploitative cults. This archetype consists not of any kind of truth, but rather of a bag of tricks.

And again – ‘Chaos magick is not an enlightenment tradition and its affiliation with the tenets of post-modernism has rendered it narcissistic and egocentric in many respects. It doesn’t admit the Absolute, and therefore it doesn’t have the means to entertain even the concept of enlightenment.’

Indeed it doesn’t. Whenever you meet anyone claiming enlightenment ask them precisely what they have enlightenment about.

My Final Frontiers

At 71 I have a fair chance of living another decade, or maybe two, or just possibly three. The years seem to pass with increasing speed, yet I have more time free from mundane matters, but will it prove enough to find answers to the two big remaining questions about existence that remain for me? : -

1) Can we have a Quantum Ontology?

2) Do we need a Quantum Model of Minding and Parapsychology?

1) Hypersphere Cosmology arose from a dissatisfaction with the conventional LCDM Big-Bang model of the universe. The conventional model depends on rather too many concepts that may prove purely Epistemological – concepts that explain cosmological observations in terms of phenomena that may not actually exist, for example singularities, inflation, dark matter, and dark energy. Hypersphere Cosmology attempts to present a more Ontological model in which the stuff that we have a high confidence of actually existing, actually interacts on slightly different principles.

The development of Hypersphere Cosmology seemingly involved a two decade diversion from the two great remaining existential questions, yet it brought with it a change of metaphysical perspective to finite but unbounded time (and space) which itself has implications for esoteric philosophy and probably for Quantum Ontology as well.

So, what would, or should, a Quantum Ontology look like?

Well, it would have to model all the observable types and all the observable behaviours of the quanta that we have discovered and predict the existence of others if they exist. However, we already know that the ‘things’ apparently underlying reality do not seem to behave like ‘things’ at all. Or as Niels Bohr put it, "Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. To a reasonable approximation we can conceptualise atoms as miniature cannon balls. Yet we cannot describe the quanta inside of all atoms and the quanta of energy (including light) that fly between atoms Classically -  as always having definite masses, positions, momentums, spins, and causal relationships in three dimensional space and one-way one-dimensional time.

Ontology conventionally implies a Classical style Epistemology that seems suficiently convincing that we can regard it as a description of what actually exists or happens. Yet no attempt to describe quanta in such purely Classical terms can yield a viable Quantum Ontology.

We do however have extensive and extraordinarily complicated Quantum Epistemologies expressed largely in mathematics that do not readily translate into words or mental images. These epistemologies give better predictions in some areas than others: - Quantum Mechanics can give accurate but probability based predictions of the wave/particle behaviour  of quanta, and these imply that we have to abandon one or more of the principles of causality, locality, or of quanta existing definite states between interactions or measurements. Quantum Electrodynamics  gives a serviceable description of the behaviour of light and matter, but it introduces the questionable idea of virtual particles. Quantum Chromodynamics more or less describes much of what happens when we try to smash nuclear particles, but the theory of Quarks remains a horrendously complicated mess with poor predictive power. Quantum Field Theory attempts to encompass all of the above – with limited success, and with questionable mathematics in its renormalisation procedures, and at the price of positing up to 20+ novel fields that permeate the entire universe. No Quantum Epistemology yet convincingly includes gravity, and none seems likely to do so under the current set of assumptions.

I suspect that quantum theories in general have taken a wrong turn and/or missed something crucial. Hypersphere Cosmology developed from the insights that cosmological redshift does not necessarily imply cosmological expansion, and that the Godel’s exact solution to the equations of General Relativity deserves more attention than it got.

So, what might our conventional Quantum Epistemology have misinterpreted or missed?

Many Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics strive towards Ontological goals, they seek to create a visualisable picture of what really goes on at the quantum level. For me, the least extravagant and most economical interpretations involve temporal reversibility and three dimensional time.

All the equations of physics except those involving entropy look reversible and will work equally well forwards or backwards in time. The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics explicitly uses this idea to explain how individual quanta can interfere with themselves and how quantum entanglement could work. This scenario preserves causality and locality but in weakened forms. Causes and effects remain correlated, but we cannot regard either as the ‘true cause’ of the other. The lightspeed limit remains, but effects can also propagate at ‘reverse lightspeed’ when going backwards in time, creating simultaneity in entanglement. However, in this interpretation quanta remain in indefinite wavelike states until they interact probabilistically in an interaction that builds up ‘extra-temporarily’.

The ‘extra-temporality’ of the wave function collapse to particle mode suggests extra time dimensions. The sine functions of the fields and amplitudes associated with quanta suggests rotations in extra dimensions, and extra time dimensions may well act as pseudo-spatial ones that allow more to happen at a given instant of what we recognise as ordinary time.

Hypersphere Cosmology suggests that we should perhaps not regard quanta as point particles of zero size which exhibit wavelengths and frequencies, but as hyperspheres of exceedingly small size that can have spins in spatial and pseudo-spatial time dimensions. If so, the vorticitation of matter quanta around the cosmic hypersphere means that they flip between matter and anti-matter on a 13 billion year cycle.

Yet any final TOE, Theory of Everything, may well prove useless at explaining or predicting the emergence of complex structure. The total spins and electric charge and nuclear charges of the cosmos almost certainly all add up to zero. The total mass-energy of the universe may well equal zero as well if we enter gravity with a negative sign. Time may become understood as the negative of Space. The Entropy and the Information content of the universe may well also summate to a constant zero. If so, the final theory of everything simply becomes: -

                                                                                                                                    1 – 1 = 0

                                                                   Or as some dualistic mystics have put it,    0 = 2

Yet such a TOE would give us no clue even as to the (random?) symmetry breakages that underlie the apparent existence of hydrogen, neutrinos, and light in space and time, although we can very roughly account for most of the rest of the observed material phenomena in the universe after that.

2) Anomalies show us that we do not know everything. Occult phenomena always point towards something we do not understand. Some argue that ‘consciousness’ remains the most mysterious and anomalous phenomenon of which we have consciousness in the known universe. Some argue that consciousness always implies consciousness of something, and that consciousness must consist of a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being’, and we should regard it as an intermittent activity of the brain, in much the same way as we can say that we do not ‘have a mind’ as such, but rather a brain that (sometimes) does minding.

Panpsychists assert the non-anomalous nature of consciousness by claiming that all matter from atoms to plants, animals, mountains, planets, and stars has consciousness, on the basis that they can perceive or intuit some minding behaviour in these phenomena.

Either way, consciousness or minding behaviour must have some sort of quantum basis if it depends on the activity of matter, but can the classical behaviour of quanta in bulk entirely explain it, or do we need to invoke the specifically quantum phenomena of indeterminacy,  superposition, entanglement, and non-locality as well?

Can Indeterminacy guarantee ‘free will’ if we choose to claim agency for the random components of our thoughts and actions?

Can Superposition account for indecision or overlapping contradictory thoughts?

Can Entanglement explain why minding or consciousness does not subjectively feel to have a single point source for most of the time, and perhaps explain Apophenia and Sympathetic Magic as well?

Can Non-Locality account for psi effects at a distance?

Some argue that the above quantum phenomena operate on the wrong scale to have any effect on minding behaviour and that the classical behaviour of quanta in bulk can explain it, and that no case for psi exists to answer. Yet I remain fascinated by the anomalies I have experienced and those that others have recorded.

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Published: 09 March 2024

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Marblog 2024

Sortilege

Elective Democracy increasingly displays all its weaknesses in the face of pressure and finance from powerful interest groups and propaganda from powerful media. It encourages the formation and dominance of political parties and it spawns career politicians more intent upon re-election than good governance.

The classical Athenian Greeks rejected it for precisely such reasons.

About half of the world holds elections this year. In many cases such elections simply enable de-facto dictatorships to shuffle their cronies and weed out dissent. Yet in countries with supposedly free elections, the choice of candidates usually remains effectively determined by non-representative cliques, factions, political parties, and the media.

Thus, we now face the unedifying prospect of national elections in the UK and USA in which most voters would probably tick a ‘Neither of the Above’ box if it existed but will otherwise vote only to deny power to whoever they consider the worst alternative.

The vulnerability of Elective Democracy to abuse by self-interested cliques and oligarchs and career politicians led the classical Athenian Greeks to choose Sortition Democracy instead.

In an ideal Sortition system, representatives become selected at random by some sort of lottery to form a government. They serve for a fixed period as a public duty and cannot seek re-selection. Such a system would create parliaments that proportionally reflected all adult age groups, social classes, ethnicities, and genders within a society.

Such parliaments would ideally debate openly but vote by secret ballot. At a stroke this would break the stranglehold of political parties and eliminate most forms of corruption and lobbying by self-interested pressure groups. We could pay the members of a Sortition Parliament well to turn up for debates and votes and have an independent judiciary to eliminate any last vestiges of corruption. Sortition selected representatives would have no other motivation in debate or in voting than their own consciences and the long term benefits to society.

A Sortition Parliament could have half of its members replaced every few years so that it does not have to restart with completely inexperienced members after a complete sortition. It could call upon any number of experts to advise it and it would have a civil service to do so as well.

A Sortition Parliament would of course contain a small percentage of liars, idiots, self-deluded narcissists, criminals, and psychopaths, but far less than the current elective system throws up.

We should not give power to those who seek it.

We could perhaps trial the Sortition system in the UK by replacing the House of Lords with a randomly selected second chamber that has absolute power of veto over the first. It would act as a Citizen’s Jury that acts as a check and balance to the flaws and abuses that become increasingly apparent in  elective systems.

Religiophobia.

There seems zero evidence that any religion has ever caused a net improvement in human behaviour. Every bit of charity and compassion promoted by any religion seems more than cancelled by the oppression it has self-righteously enforced.

In our theoretically secular societies, it seems perfectly acceptable to loathe political philosophies like fascism or communism which have very grim and ghastly track records, yet rather bizarrely it becomes increasingly taboo to discriminate between religious philosophies, no matter how bad their recent track records.

So now we have the peculiar spectacle of secular British politicians trying to make capital (and votes) out of accusing each other of phobias against religious philosophies that neither side has any genuine sympathy with.

Richard Dawkins famously described Roman Catholicism as the world’s second worst religion. Should we hate all religions equally or do some seem currently more despicable than others? Surely the more patriarchal, misogynistic, authoritarian, anti-democratic, intolerant, anti-liberal humanistic, and anti-rational ones deserve all the derision, criticism, and discrimination we can heap upon them.

This is Chaos. The Draft Manuscript has Landed!

The publisher has received all the written contributions to the Chaos Anthology and responded with a resounding Huzzah! There will now follow a period of editorial work to arrange it all in suitable form and sort out the illustrations, footnotes, and citations, hopefully it will appear sometime later this year.

Contributors include Ronald Hutton, Peter J Carroll, Jaq D Hawkins, Jozef Karika, Julian Vayne, Jacob Sipes, Aidan Watcher, Ivy Corvus, Dave Lee, Lionel Snell, Mariana Pinzon, Carl Abrahamson, Sinobu Kurono, and Sanhre Daffowt.

FSW8 ‘Magic’.

I have always had a fascination with designing and building board games. Analysing and trying to model historical, real world, and fantasy scenarios seems a productive way of stimulating strategic, tactical, imaginative, critical, and counter-factual thinking.

What rules do the actions of a system imply? What systems will emerge from a set of rules?

People keep asking me why I don’t write novels as well as books on magic and physics. Well, I tend to read, and I would naturally write, plot driven novels of ideas rather than character and drama driven stories. So boardgames have become my novels of ideas, my ‘what-if’ stories, and they also allow for endless experimentation with alternative rules and multiple possible endings.

For years I have experimented with modelling magic in a boardgame. It seems that any game system of ‘magic on its own’ can only lead to some kind of quest scenario where you use magic just to gain more magical ability, either cooperatively or competitively. In most game systems, magic or psi works as a ‘rule breaker’ in the sense that it acts as a combat modifier or a mobility modifier or that it distorts the probability of what would normally happen in some other way.

That seems reasonable enough because in the modern view, Magic - whether in enchantment or divination, consists of the art and science of modifying probabilities. (In divination it modifies the probability of guessing the right answer.)

The latest add-on to Frontier Space Warfare, the Psi Weapon Tournament Rules reflects this view. Factions may invest in various Psi facilities and wand like markers denote their presence on the board. Most act as production, combat, or mobility modifiers, but one has a function perhaps unique in game systems.

The power of Prescience allows a vessel or a flotilla of vessels to launch an attack in which, if it fails, the player can cancel it completely and restore the situation before the attack, but at the cost of the loss of the Psi weapon used. It may seem odd to call this Prescience, but this effectively models prescience because it gives a player the ability to explore what would happen if they did something, and then of either going for it or of avoiding doing it.

Herewith the Aquarian faction with a complete set of all 8 Psi weapons. The ones which have a non-local effect remain on the Aquarian homeworld, the expeditionary flotilla on one of its smaller systems carries the local effect combat and mobility modifying Psi weapons.

The Psi weapon tournament rules appear in the FSW8 rules appear in the games section and below.

 Psychopath’s Chess

With his attempted conquest of Ukraine bogged down into an attritional stalemate and a contest of endurance with the West, Vladimir Putin must surely have dreamed of opening up a second front to distract the attention, resolve, money, and resources of the West.

Putin has cultivated an alliance with the Iranian government, based on little more than the dictatorial and pariah status of both regimes. Iran sponsors, trains, and arms both Gazan Hamas and the Yemeni Houthis. It seems unlikely that either would have gone to war without Iranian approval, and most likely that they both went to war on Iranian instructions.

Putin likes sending messages by dramatic and violent means. Hamas launched its attack on 7^th October, Putin’s birthday. He probably considers it a very worthwhile pawn sacrifice.

Amphibia

Climate change continues to confuse the wildlife, we have had an unseasonable period of exceptional rainfall, frosts, and warm days; some plants have flowered alarmingly early. During the unsettled weather of the last weeks, frogs and newts have appeared only fleetingly in the pond at Chateaux Chaos and then disappeared again. Nevertheless, we have healthy looking clumps of both frogspawn and toad spawn. Let us hope that the ferocious dragonfly larvae do not scoff the lot when they emerge, as they did last year.