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Following a number of heated debates with my eldest who has gone native after marrying a fine Scot, I've taken a lot more notice of the arguments about Scottish Independence.
I'm all for the gloriously bogus Tartan Romanticism myself, castles, kilts, mountains, broadswords, haggis, Burns, the skrill of the bagpipes, love all that stuff.
However economically it doesn't make a lot of obvious sense. Politically, Scotland has become tainted by a subsidy induced sense of socialism which it probably cannot afford to maintain unless it gets ownership of all the North Sea oil and gas revenues.
Macro-politically, Scotland already has it both ways with a voice in Westminster and its own Parliament. That Westminster Parliament may soon allow us all a referendum on leaving the ghastly EU and we shall probably say yes to that.
And where does that leave Scotland? Hankering after an EU membership? Well they can have ours if they want one.

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Arcanorium College announces its program for Semsters 6 and 7. www.arcanoriumcollege.com
Semester 6. Jun 15th - Jul 28th
Pete, Elder Gods
Hyperritual, Measuring Magic
Semester 7. ~Aug 6th - ~Sept 14th
Tadhq, Knights of Chaos 3.
Andriehvitimus, Chaos Vodoun
In Semester 6 I invite Staff and Members to asist in the creation of a Necronomicom worthy of the name, so far nothing in the field strikes me as entirely good enough. As this planet's premier magical institution we have the capability and the responsibility to do so, whatever the casualties.
Whilst the rest of the world is preocupied with watching the London Olympics on television the Knights of Chaos will mount a third annual campaign to save the biosphere and human civilisation by deploying sorcery against those forces striving to destroy them. Every little helps. Willing Wands Welcome, apply to Arcanorium College online, as above.
Personally I find the Olympics tiresome, when you start taking sport too seriously it first becomes absurd and then grotesque, and berift of any sense of fun or sportsmanship. I may however give the ladies beach volleyball a few moments of attention, that looks like fun, and basically who cares who wins? The best time to see London incidentally, is in the 1970s, a slightly down at heel bohemian place full of Hippys and old bookshops. Since then the place has become poisoned by too much money. I used to crash in sleeping bags in properties that now fetch more than a million quid each.
I just re-noticed Dave Lee's review of The Octavo. http://chaotopia-dave.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/octavo-by-peter-j-carroll-review.html
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Plenty of good cheer this week, married off my eldest daughter to a fine scotsman, dog bit my sporran mistaking it for a badger, it probably once was a badger, otherwise a splendid day. The anti-rain spell worked despite an averse forecast, we had a brief flurry of snow to accompany the sunshine, white wedding in May! I returned to find that my mandrakes have sprouted from seed as had the canarian dragon tree, this may take 300 years to mature but the project to repopulate southwest england with mandrakes may only take a decade or two.
I notice that my seminal earlier blog on Designer Religion has now achieved 1,000 reads. Perhaps this calls for a franchise operation.
http://www.specularium.org/index.php?option=com_blog&view=comments&pid=38&Itemid=137
The Dark Matter absence seems to be causing some serious head scratching amongst our cosmologists, and the chances of the Higgs existing seems to receede with every passing spin of the LHC. The standard models of cosmology and particle physics look set for drastic revision, hooray.
There remains some danger that the Euro and the EU may survive though. We must have the courage to accept the short term consequences of their collapse and welcome destruction, for otherwise europe will condemn itself to a Synarchist Totalitarianism run by an unelected oligarchy of faceless bureaucrats that we have no power to deselect, and who will expand their regulatory powers beyond all apparent sense and reason until they have achieved their actual goal of Arbitary Power. SCREW THE EU.
Saturday 26th May marks Apophenia's Birthday, prepare rituals, lay in plenty of chocolate.
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http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/340170/title/Dark_matter_search_turns_up_empty
Ahem, yes well I did predict that some time ago and wrote it up in The Apophenion and The Octavo.
Half-crazed wizards can take speculative risks denied to career scientists.
See the VHC paper on this site. Vo = (Gm/r - rA)^1/2 sorts the galactic rotation just fine with a small adjustment to orbital velocity due to the Anderson decelleration.
BTW the universe has never expanded and no big bang occured either, we inhabit a vorticitating hypersphere of a universe, finite and unbounded in both space and time. Don't expect the Higgs boson to appear either, Mass = Spacetime Curvature, not a gauge field effect.
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St George's day will probably pass more or less unnoticed as usual, since our phyrric victory in WW2 and our loss of empire and superpower status we haven't really done patriotism with any enthusiasm.
Our Illiberal Dimocrats want a fully elected House of Lords, the hereditary principle seems indefensible as does the automatic inclusion of the bishops of what has become a marginal religion. The other parties want to retain the right to appoint lords to the 'upper' house to preserve their influence there.
I have a far more radical idea. If democracy works through a system of checks and balances then what we actually need is a non-democratic check on democracy itself. The monarchy no longer really provides this. Thus we should have a RANDOMLY SELECTED upper house. A few hundred people picked at random off the electoral rolls with absolute power of veto over parliament. After all we trust this principle in our courts of law, twelve citizens at random for the jury, to moderate the power of the judiciary.
Such an upper house would contain a representative selection of all age and income groups and sexes by virtue of its randomness.
Let us hope that Francois Hollande wins in France. His policies display the usual economic illiteracy of socialism but they do have the virtue that they will hasten the breakup of the single currency and hopefully the entire cursed European Union.