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Decblog
Trumpwins decisively, against the expectations of the pollsters and against an opponent who had the support of most of Hollywood and who outspent him by a factor of three. The bookies however consistently had him in the lead at odds of 4/6. Maybe, as with Brexit and the Scottish Secession votes, many who intended to take the tougher and least publicly acceptable option chose not to say so to pollsters.
(The pundits and the bookies didn’t appear to favor Brexit but the bookies adjusted their odds on the basis of just the value of bets placed. However a later analysis showed that a relatively small number of idiots had placed huge bets in the hope of making a quick profit from an expected Remain result whilst a much larger number of people had placed smaller bets on Leave out of hope, and wishful or magical thinking – and it worked.)
Perhaps we should not get too ‘Gary Latchman’ about Trump as a master of Chaos Magic but he certainly seems to understand the relativity and indeterminacy of truth, and the power of both positive and negative forms of thinking, rhetoric, and belief to create real effects.
Trump’s decisive victory has dispelled the hysterical threat of civil unrest or even civil war in the event of an indecisive result. No wonder then, that he kept implying that such a threat existed.
How much of a revolution Trump will accomplish in the next four years? Disgruntled or power hungry members of the middle and upper classes lead all revolutions by appealing to their fellow malcontents and to the great mass of the little people.
On the bright side we can expect a rollback of the hyper-liberal wokeism of identity politics, critical race theory, intersectionality, minority rights, political correctness, cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and mental health obsession that has so distorted free speech and academic debate in the USA and has seeped across the Atlantic to contaminate the UK. That philosophy developed as a weapon used by one faction against another in the bloated and overpopulated intellectual and managerial classes. Now they will find it used against them.
On the darkside we can expect a rollback on Environmentalism in favor of anything that creates more consumption, production, growth, ‘wealth’, and more global climate and ecological catastrophes.
On the grey side, there seems little chance that Trump will Make America Great Again if ‘great’ means a return to the global economic, technological, military, and cultural dominance that America enjoyed in the post WW2 decades. America distinguished itself then by doing things differently. Doing the same things again won’t work. Maybe under Trump, America will try some blend of Neoconservatism but with Chinese style Non-Interventionism in its international relations, prioritizing transactional business over principles.
Project Krakatoa – Global Warming vs Nuclear Winter.
COP29 ended with no substantive agreements at all about dealing with global warming, apart from resolving to aspire to sending some money for mitigation to developing nations. Most of this money probably won’t get paid. Most of the major players did not even bother to attend in person. Humanity has effectively decided to continue burning fossil fuels for as long as it makes short term economic sense and to live with the consequences whilst trying to avoid paying for them.
The amount of carbon humanity has already added to the Earth’s atmosphere will inevitably cause increasingly serious cumulative warming for centuries to come and, collectively, humanity remains determined to continue adding to it.
No scheme of carbon capture currently seems remotely feasible or affordable at the required scale. The political will to endure the immense immediate costs of decarbonising our economies through gigantic investments in renewables and nuclear power does not yet exist.
Don’t worry though, we already have the technology to avert total global catastrophe. When global warming becomes intolerable we can start detonating nuclear weapons in remote areas to throw up enough dust into the atmosphere to cause any required degree of global dimming. We know this works because major volcanic eruptions always cause global dimming and a drop in temperature for a while.
A couple of two hundred megaton blasts every year should do the trick, one in the northern hemisphere, maybe in a remote part of Siberia or Alaska, and another in the southern hemisphere, maybe on some little used Pacific islands or in the empty middle of Australia. This will hardly make a dent in the world’s existing nuclear arsenal.
Okay so we will have to endure a certain amount of dust and radioactive pollution but hopefully this will kill less people than the collapse of agriculture and mass starvation and all the wars that will result from that.
Galaxies at Redshift 18.6!
Just as Hypersphere Cosmology passes 380,000 reads https://specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
The James Webb Space Telescope finds galaxies far too close to the supposed big-bang and thus the standard LCDM cosmology model seems in terminal difficulties.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.13640
Bimaternal Mice https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(18)30441-7
Having read a few sci-fi novels and feminist tracts in the past I have long wondered about the possibility of fusing two unfertilised eggs to make more female people. It seems that Chinese scientists actually got over halfway there a few years ago and made viable female mice out of two mouse ova. Such proof of principle means that doing this with humans now becomes feasible. (It doesn’t work with two sperms because neither contains the additional cellular machinery to make a viable embryo.)
Would all-female high-tech societies out-compete other societies eventually? Perhaps they would because of greater cooperativeness, better and less destructive behaviour, greater conscientiousness, and more patient military drone operation.
Maybe in a century or two, if we still have any sort of civilisation, we may have a women only planet.
Dean Radin Interview.https://youtu.be/7OGJSULpwVc?si=5CmM9PPB6yir3bUp
The result here seems somewhat shambolic, Dean promises further extracts from our long audio skype in later episodes.
MandrakesCirce has blossomed early, whilst Boris and Igor have taken their time this season, so maybe they will not achieve cross pollination between them. We have few insects in the greenhouses of Chateaux Chaos at this time of year but I have a tiny paintbrush on standby.
Robert Anton Wilson biography!
The definitive biography of the life and times and astonishing ideasof this towering countercultural giant has arrived. I feel honoured to have made a small contribution to it.
EPOCH news.
Mandrake of Oxford recently sent me slimline versions of the Esotericon and Portals of Chaos card deck, and a more sensibly sized edition of the great Triple Grimoire itself.
I have to say that they both handle much more easily than the first edition and all the colour plates look great in the new format. Matt and I did get a bit carried away with the format of the first edition, not realising that the resulting 2kg package would create logistical and carriage cost nightmares.
I’ll let you know when they become available from Mandrake.
Have a splendid Festive Season.
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