Septblog 2022
Cosmology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJwEYJb7eks
Even NASA acknowledges that the JWST data may have holed the LCDM Big Bang theory below the waterline.
That would seem to leave only Eric Lerner's Plasma Cosmology or Hypersphere Cosmology in the running.
The now probably correct answer lies fully explicated here: -
https://www.specularium.org/peter-j-carroll/interview-with-a-wizard
If we get to the correct secret of the universe before civilisation collapses, it will all have been worth it!
The decline and fall of civilisation.
Oops! It all seems to start going downhill from about now on, exactly as predicted by the 1972 Club of Rome Report ‘The Limits to Growth’. The Chinese economy has gone into a tailspin, globally we have started to run out of cheap energy and climate disruption becomes increasingly catastrophic, world agriculture has taken a massive hit this summer, the great recession begins. The four horsemen of the apocalypse have saddled up and begin at a gentle canter………
Interpretations of Quantum Physics.
This highly amusing diagram appeared on Reddit: -
Whilst the Law-Chaos and Good-Evil axes seem to correspond to very little beyond the designer’s feelings about philosophy and causality or their absence, it does neatly summarise a number of the more well-known interpretations of quantum theory and the lack of scientific consensus on the issue. It did however remind me of the old D&D game system for character generation and classification which perhaps has some explanatory and predictive power in the ongoing war in Ukraine: -
In terms of the Law/Chaos - Good/Evil model, the recent assassination of Alexandr Dugin’s daughter in Moscow suggests that elements of the Praetorian Guard have fired a warning shot against The Emperor.
Putin has created a Neutral Evil state contended by both Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil ideologies. Alexandr Dugin’s Eurasian party represents the Chaotic Evil tendency that underlies the current Russian military adventurism, belligerence, and barbarism.
Esoteric thinking always seems to underlie Russian thought, not only has the Putin regime cynically entered into a mutual support deal with the Russian Orthodox church, but it has also done so with the huge Slavic neo-pagan Rodnovery movement. Rodnovery remains largely unknown outside of the Slavic world – it consists of a sort of ‘Druidry with Jackboots’ mixture of reinvented neo-new-age Slavic pagan mysticism, ritual, and magic. Whilst various currents exist within Rodnovery, it seems overwhelmingly nationalistic, patriarchal, racial, and authoritarian. Real Slavic ‘peasants’ don’t fill its ranks - young professionals make up most of its estimated one million membership. A quick googling of Rodnovery symbols shows that most of them consist of variations on the swastika.
Dugin quite openly advertises himself as a Eurasian Esoteric Fascist Chaoist and has long called for the conquest of Ukraine. Note the chaostar that represents Dugin’s Eurasia Party, it shows a golden yellow solar-ego star expanding into the supposed surrounding darkness.
Dugin’s daughter aped and amplified his bloodthirsty views in every way and frequently appeared in the media to try and persuade younger Russians. The assassin had almost certainly intended to get both of them at once.
That assassin seems very unlikely to have come from Ukraine which has consistently stuck to the playbook of Lawful Good in this conflict.
It seems far more likely that the forces of Lawful Evil in Russia have become fearful for their own future if Putin’s regime collapses completely as the war grinds towards disastrous defeat, and thus that some element within the ‘Praetorian guard’, maybe oligarchs, maybe security services; has organised this attack on Putin’s favourite geopolitical adviser.
In terms of political regimes, Evil corresponds to despotisms and dictatorships maintained by a great deal of force, repression, and propaganda. The Lawful ones at least have a set of rules and laws, the Chaotic ones operate by edict and whim and massive corruption. Evil regimes rarely succeed in cooperating with each other for long. Good regimes operate with the informed consent of the governed and not much repression, and they easily cooperate with each other. The Lawful ones tend to become culturally quiet and boring; the Chaotic ones exhibit more social conflict and creativity.
What about Chaotic Neutral in all this? It works largely behind the scenes on this one, with projects like this: -
https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war
After all, we have the reputation of Chaos to protect!
Augblog 2022
Cosmology. The preliminary results from the James Webb Space Telescope have caused consternation and uproar amongst mainstream cosmologists, the first scientific paper published on arXiv begins with the unprecedented words ‘Panic! At the Discs’
https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09428
They call into question the standard theory of galaxy formation and evolution, and by implication the Big Bang theory itself, whilst lending considerable support to the alternative hypothesis of Hypersphere Cosmology.
In brief, the very far reaches of the universe contain multitudes of fully formed spiral disc galaxies.
This simply cannot happen in a universe that somehow expanded out of a big bang and took its time first creating small globular galaxies which then eventually developed into large spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way.
On the other hand, Hypersphere Cosmology asserts that the universe will exhibit an underlying large scale homogeneity and isotropy at all points of space and time; it obeys the Perfect Cosmological Principle and has the same large scale form and structure everywhere and everywhen.
(It doesn’t ‘look’ like that ‘at first glance’ because cosmologists have misinterpreted the cosmological gravitational curvature that creates redshift as recession velocity, and they have misinterpreted the cosmological gravitational lensing that dims distant galaxies as an acceleration of a (non-existent) expansion of the cosmos.)
Previous observations from the Hubble Space Telescope had worried me a bit because they seemed to show that very distant galaxies seemed significantly smaller that local ones. However, the Hubble could only see the high frequency light from far distant galaxies that had become redshifted to optical frequencies, so the galaxies appeared small. The JWST can see the optical frequencies that have become redshifted to the infrared end of the spectrum, and this has revealed that galaxies at the far reaches of the universe (supposedly close to the big bang) have the same distribution of structures as seen amongst the local galaxies surrounding ours.
The JWST program has only just started, and so long as it doesn’t get hit by too many more micrometeorites, I expect it to completely overturn the conventional LCDM Big Bang theory in the near future, and that we shall find ourselves living in a completely different universe, - a universe now most likely better described by Hypersphere Cosmology, - a universe without beginning or end in space or time yet curved back in on itself by its own gravity at a finite size. We abandoned Flat Earth theory centuries ago, Flat Universe theory looks set to follow.
Big Bang theory lends some faint metaphysical comfort to Monotheism. Hypersphere Cosmology seems more supportive of Atheist Occultism and Chaoist Neo-Paganism.
The story of the development of Hypersphere Cosmology appears in this astonishing book: -
https://www.specularium.org/peter-j-carroll/interview-with-a-wizard
It all began with a strange magical experiment conducted in an Austrian castle back in he 1990s. The main body of the book resumes the extraordinary life and ideas of a sorcerer-scientist and a substantial appendix presents Hypersphere Cosmology in both easily comprehensible prose and also in the poetry of its full algebraic and mathematical exposition.
Update from the gardens of Chateaux Chaos.
Whilst away in Wales I had asked the gardener to throw more meat scraps into the pond for the developing tadpoles and toadpoles and they got more lamb and chicken pieces. On my return I found nobody at home in the water and wondered if the experiment had ended in ecological disaster, but then a closer examination of the plant islands and reeds and surrounding vegetation of the pond revealed hundreds of tiny four legged amphibians clambering around. Herewith a couple of them taking a break on a lily pad. Non-vegetarian feasts look set to become an annual event at the pond. We should all do what we can to prevent any further decline of amphibian numbers.
Liber Kaos – The Psychonomicon has received its edit and upgrade and a few additions for its forthcoming Classic Edition. At last, it has a cover that compliments its contents. Hopefully Weisers will bring it out before the end of the year.
Addendum
A couple of items seem worth repeating yet again: -
Hypersphere Cosmology Prediction. (From Feblog 2022)
The so-called ‘Cosmic Dark Ages’ did not occur. According to conventional LCDM big bang cosmology, a gap should exist between the CMBR and the light from the ‘earliest’ stars and galaxies. Hypersphere cosmology predicts that galaxies with redshifts all the way to CMBR levels will exist. The James Webb space telescope may hopefully prove capable of observing this.
Keep up the magical assault on Putin. His campaign falters into costly attrition, opposition to his tyrannical schemes grows constantly stronger and better supported.
Julblog 2022
Interview with a Wizard. Ian Blumberg-Enge interviews Peter J Carroll.
https://www.specularium.org/peter-j-carroll/interview-with-a-wizard
A book so extraordinary that the publisher brought it out simultaneously in both softback and hardback! (It seems destined to become collectable by magicians, occult historians, and physicists.)
Seventy years in the making! (Dated from the conception of the author.)
Two years in the writing! (During covid lockdown on a remote Welsh beach.)
The stuff that works - in Magic, Life, the Universe, and Everything! (Plus, some observations on what doesn’t.)
An extraordinary life of exploration and death defying adventures!
Three hundred and sixty five questions on a vast array of topics, the last of which attracts a twenty page reply!
The origins of Chaos Magic revealed!
The strange activities of a certain Magical Order, the goodies, and the baddies!
The Secret of the Universe unveiled! (Well at least the biggest one.)
From the Gardens of Chateaux Chaos
Whilst the three Autumnal Mandrakes sleep the summer away in their giant pot in the main greenhouse, attention turns to the amphibians in the refurbished pond. The frogs and toads and newts do great service in the gardens, controlling the slugs and bugs that menace the Memsahib’s collections of exotic blooms. The addition, over winter, of 26 tons of rubble to re-level the pond probably didn’t do the amphibians any favours, so to make up for a possible lack of water bugs, small chunks of meat were thrown in as the tadpoles and toadpoles entered carnivore mode. This initiated extraordinary feeding frenzies and revealed that the new water weeds had concealed hundreds more of our amphibian friends than expected.
Something I did not write and have not read.
I did not write this, nor have I read it and I probably won’t. It’s a kids book that a correspondent brought to my attention. Nevertheless, it seems amusing that art imitates life, as the wizard Peter Carroll and his wizard friend Charlie (Charly Brewster?) fight an evil wizard called Herbert (Helmut?) who has an army of robots (brainwashed acolytes?). Morphic fields strike again!
Addendum
A couple of items seem worth repeating: -
Hypersphere Cosmology Prediction. (From Feblog 2022)
The so-called ‘Cosmic Dark Ages’ did not occur. According to conventional LCDM big bang cosmology, a gap should exist between the CMBR and the light from the ‘earliest’ stars and galaxies. Hypersphere cosmology predicts that galaxies with redshifts all the way to CMBR levels will exist. The James Webb space telescope may hopefully prove capable of observing this.
Keep up the magical assault on Putin. His campaign falters into costly attrition, opposition to his tyrannical schemes grows constantly stronger and better supported.
Junblog 2022
Herewith the new Classic Edition of Liber Null & Psychonaut from the American publishers of the first combined edition.
The texts have remained in continuous print for four decades - and no wonder because this manuscript does for Magic what Newton’s Principia Mathematica did for physics and what Darwin’s Origin of Species did for biology. It created a Paradigm Shift and a unification.
In the tradition initiated by Eliphas Levi, MacGregor Mathers of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, and Austin Osman Spare, it presents Magic as a psychological and parapsychological science, rather than as an epiphenomenon of religious ideas and practices.
Liber Null - Book Zero – represents a complete restart for the art of Magic and it has heavily influenced most subsequent magical theory and practise and most subsequently written books on the subject. It shows the underlying unity of magical technology in everything from Shamanism, Tantra, Hermetics, Goetia, and Witchcraft, to free form do it yourself Sorcery.
This new Classic edition contains an upgraded section on magical history, suggestions for a Jupiterian/Blue magic ritual and an additional essay on Chaos Theory and Magic.
See: -
https://www.specularium.org/peter-j-carroll/liber-null-psychonaut
https://redwheelweiser.com/book/liber-null-psychonaut-9781578637669/
RPVs
Herewith a billion dollar idea for free as it doesn’t seem patentable: -
Perhaps we have the idea of driverless vehicles the wrong way around.
We shall probably never manage to endow AI with sufficient ‘common sense’ to have confidence in computer controlled vehicles. However, in many situations we would prefer not to have the driver physically present in the vehicle. Human drivers already exist in plentiful supply. We can already pilot drones and military equipment remotely.
Imagine trucks that could drive continuously across continental America or from Europe to Eastern Turkey with changes of remote driver every 6 hours. Imagine driving a train from London to Glasgow and sleeping in your own bed in Bristol. Imagine driving a taxi from your own spare room.
Ongoing Works
Interview with a Wizard (Ian Blumberg and me), this new book seems almost ready to roll off the presses. In addition to 365 interview questions, it contains The Occultaris Part 1, Cosmology.
The titanic struggle to create The Occultaris Part 2, Quanta, continues at Arcanorium College. An epistemological physicist now collaborates.
Lithonian Fleet
Herewith the Draako, the oldest and the newest addition to the Lithonian fleet. It set off some 500 years ago as a commerce raiding privateer but whilst trying to outrun alien naval vessels it strayed too close to the lightspeed limit and warped itself centuries into its own future in a few moments. Returning to the metal poor world of Lithonia with a valuable cargo of molybdenum and radionucleotides the crew sold the ship to the Lithonian admiralty. Refitted with modern turrets and missiles it now serves as a reserve frigate.
In the background see the Mozka, a semi-obsolete battlecruiser, its decks crowded with heavy missiles. ‘Two hits and that’s toast’, as one naval analyst opined. And on that note don’t forget this: -
https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war
Enchant long, it may yet take a while yet, but the evil despot will eventually fall.
Mayblog 2022
Operation Unthinkable.
With Nazi tyranny defeated, Winston Churchill commissioned a study into the feasibility of driving Russian tyranny out of Eastern Europe as WW2 drew to a close. Churchill’s generals concluded that ‘Operation Unthinkable’ didn’t look feasible at the time, at least not without massive American support and widespread use of WMDs. Consequently, Eastern Europe seemed condemned to suffer under Russian tyranny for some while.
The Russian system of tyranny derives from the feudalism of the Middle Ages. In the disastrous Russian Revolution, the fiefdoms of the feudal Tzars became the fiefdoms of a middle class led urban political party waving a communist banner. Tyranny and corruption continued as normal under different overlords, democracy never got a look in. Tyranny and corruption meant that Russia, and the satellite states it annexed, never prospered economically despite the huge natural resources and populations available. Far too much became spent on militarism and the state apparatus of repression that maintained the regime. When the Soviet System finally imploded towards the end of the 1980s, Russia missed its chance to join the community of civilised democratic European nations. Instead, the thuggish Vladimir Putin managed to completely recreate feudalism with himself as monarch and dictator and a whole new class of oligarchs and kleptocrats as his henchmen and barons.
Operation Unthinkable now seems distinctly possible. If the free world can remain firm against Putin’s threats, and if it can bear the consequences of comprehensively sanctioning Russia, and if it can keep supplying the heroic Ukrainians with ever better weaponry, then Russia will retreat in defeat.
If you have any psi-skills at all, consider contributing to the ongoing efforts of the free world’s wizards and witches to unseat the Russian tyrant: -
https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war
The people of Russia and Belarus may yet depose their dictatorships and the struggle against tyranny in Europe will have finally succeeded after many bloody centuries.
That will just leave China as the world’s main sponsor of tyranny.
I recently found this book on the history of China fascinating: -
China has the world’s oldest more or less continuous civilisation. It has undergone many cataclysmic implosions and changes of regime over the millennia, but it has always rebuilt itself on exactly the same Bronze Age political principles with which it continues to govern itself to this day. In this system, most of the power lies with The Emperor and The Imperial Bureaucracy. Aristocracy did not feature strongly; lords, barons, and rich merchants did not hold much power. The gentry of Chinese society consisted mainly of Mandarins, upward social mobility mainly lay through bureaucratic service.
The system has always depended on a massive effort of information gathering and information control to achieve taxation and regulation, and hence behaviour control.
The Chinese Mandarin or Scribal Class has persisted for thousands of years, and it has always cravenly collaborated to provide a Bureaucracy to whichever warlord or political manipulator became Emperor of China. The Scribal Class simply morphed into a Party Organization that provided Bureaucratic collaboration to communist emperors and now provides it to post-communist emperors.
The advent of modern electronic information technology has immensely strengthened the hand of the Chinese bureaucratic tyranny. It can now maintain real time surveillance on all its citizen’s movements, contacts, and behaviour, and it eagerly exports this technology to any regime that wants to use it. Cell-phone monitoring and facial recognition technology along with complete state control of the media have provided the Chinese dictatorship with more resources for thought control than George Orwell dreamed of in his seminal and prescient novel ‘1984’.
Information technology itself seems to lead us towards a future where the major conflicts will occur between democracies with relatively free information architectures and tyrannies with repressive information architectures.
Bosonics.
Plainly, quite a lot of things in Quantum Field Theory do not add up very well. Not only does the whole field of Quantum Chromodynamics concerning quarks and gluons look conceptually tortuous and a mathematical mess, but even Quantum Electrodynamics which concerns electromagnetic and weak forces and particles now comes into question. In particular we currently have calculated results for the mass of the W Boson and the g-2 spin of the Muon that do not match the experimentally measured values.
It rather looks like the calculations have missed the contributions made by the presence of extra particles that we have not yet recognised. Within the 3-dimensional time model under development here at Arcanorium College, the full suite of weak force interacting bosons could consist of: -
The putative X17 Boson may have already appeared in the decay of Beryllium 8.
Mesonics.
In a similar vein, the 3-dimensional time model suggests an additional meson type particle and field intermediating the inter-nucleon forces, this putative ‘Y’ Boson may also play a part. It could if produced, decay into any possible particle-antiparticle pair, rather as the supposed Higgs Boson does, yet unlike the Higgs it would not confer mass on other particles.
Magical Books.
The proofs and the cover designs for the following two titles have arrived: -
Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter J Carroll. Classic Edition with upgrades and additions, from publishers Red-Wheel Weisers.
Interview with a Wizard- Ian Blumberg-Enge interviews Peter J Carroll. 365 Questions on magical, esoteric, biographic, scientific, and other topics, with an extended appendix on the hyperspherical universe, from publishers Mandrake of Oxford.
Images and full details will appear here within weeks, as soon as publication occurs.
Aprblog 2022
Putin’s War
Marxism will go down in history as a profound tragedy because it allowed autarchy to survive industrialisation. Industrialisation generally and gradually brought democracy in its wake except where the dictatorship of the proletariat triumphed. The dictatorship of the proletariat inevitably meant dictatorship by elements of the middle classes. Tsars became replaced by Commie-Tsars in both Russia and China; authoritarianism and repression continued under new management, democracy did not get a look in. Marxism survives now only in North Korea and in half-hearted form in a few third world tinpot dictatorships.
Having found that Marxist economics simply could not compete with the economies of democratic states, both China and Russia eventually abandoned it in favour of crony-capitalism and nationalism whilst preserving the machinery of dictatorship. In effect they reinvented a form of neo-feudalism or fascism. The poor in both Russia and China lead very impoverished lives compared to people in democratic industrial societies. The autocrats in charge of the Chinese and Russian dictatorships live in fear of their own people and rely on repression, militarism, and war or threat of war to maintain their positions. They attain their positions through naked power struggle and then must maintain it to survive. They cannot retire, their only way out lies in a box.
Putin has launched a vicious war in Ukraine to strengthen his grip over his own politically fragile and economically weak country and in this he seems to have catastrophically underestimated how much resistance he would face from his intended victims and from the free world.
A month ago, I requested that the world’s magicians conjure to ‘Turn the people closest to Putin against him’.
https://www.specularium.org/blog/item/349-putin-s-war
My thanks for the excellent response. Remember that for best results in magic we need to Divine Short and Enchant Long, so keep those spells and rituals coming and widen the definition of ‘closest’ to include more of Putin’s diminishing group of supporters.
Europe will only become free of oppression and war when the Russian autocracy falls, and Russia becomes a democracy. The unpopular dictatorship of Belarus will not survive without support from Russian autocracy. The fall of Putin’s regime will contribute greatly to this. President Biden has shown statesmanship and a grasp of political reality in encouraging revolt against Putin.
Quasars
The last piece of the Hypersphere Cosmology jigsaw puzzle finally fell into place. The observed distribution of quasars has always been interpreted strong evidence for galactic evolution following a big bang origin for this observed universe. Most of the observed quasars seem extremely distant and hence we see light from them that left them billions of years ago. Hence theorists concluded that quasar behaviour mainly arose during the early development of galaxies.
Hypersphere Cosmology asserts that we inhabit a universe finite and unbounded in time and space and that we will observe galaxies at all stages of evolution spread across all of time and space.
Why then do we observe quasar galaxies mainly at very great distances?
We can only observe a quasar if the beam coming out of one of the poles of its black hole happens to point directly towards us, and as galaxies lie randomly orientated in space this becomes a very unlikely occurrence. However, the small positive curvature of the hypersphere of the universe increases the probability of a quasar beam becoming ‘tilted’ in our direction and the probability increases exponentially with distance.
See the full paper here: -
https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/350-quasar-distribution
The Occultaris parts 1 & 2. The secrets of the universe.
Many years ago, it became apparent that cosmologists had made a serious mistake in interpreting cosmological redshift as recession velocity and creating a hypothetical big bang. Whilst I worked on the problem the big bang the theory became ever more baroque with the addition of hypothetical dark energy and dark matter and cosmic inflation. A more elegant solution in the form of Hypersphere Cosmology gradually emerged. Two key insights allowed its development, firstly that a small positive spacetime curvature in the form of a deceleration A, where 2GM/L2 = A, would redshift light traveling across a hyperspherical universe in proportion to distance, and secondly that the (generally ignored) Godel metric W = 2sqrt(piGp) describes the inside of any hypersphere including the universe itself and the inside of a black hole in the reference frame of an internal observer. This rather than the Schwarzschild metric for the interior of a black hole in the reference frame of an exterial observer provides the key to a stable non-expanding universe and black holes which do not contain singularities. All this constitutes The Occultaris part one, which radically revises our entire metaphysical and ontological view of the universe, our place within it, and the probability of highly intelligent life having developed elsewhere in a universe without temporal boundaries.
The Occultaris part two remains a work in progress. It aims to clarify the awesome theoretical and conceptual confusion in our understanding of the quantum realm underlying reality.
Whatever mechanisms account for the phenomena of magic in this universe probably have their origins in the properties and behaviour of the quanta.
The current official Quantum Field Theory implies twenty six fundamental fields, twelve quarks, eight gluons, an irreconcilable wave particle duality, virtual particles with seemingly arbitrary properties, non-locality, and an underling spacetime metric which contradicts relativity. Moreover, a lot of the maths looks like a mere descriptive formalism that gives no clue as to the underlying ontology, and the ‘maths’ of quarks and gluons looks very dodgy and has little predictive power. The standard model also requires a Higg’s Boson to satisfy parts of its abstract mathematical scheme and at vast expense some unconvincing evidence has been manufactured for this but not everybody seems persuaded of its reality. The standard model of Quantum Field Theory does not include gravity, and the whole edifice looks like a phlogiston rich ad hoc mess. Where did it perhaps start to go wrong?
Perhaps the photon does NOT constitute the quantum of the electromagnetic field. In support of this heretical and blasphemous idea note that: -
1) Photons do not carry electromagnetic charges, nor do they cause changes in the electromagnetic charges of the particles they interact with. They merely carry spin and momentum and transfer these between the particles they interact with.
2) Photons do become exchanged between electromagnetically charged particles and we can cause their emission by manipulating charged particles and measure their absorption by the movement of charged particles, but all matter particles except neutrinos carry charges anyway if we include neutrons as carrying both positive and negative charges simultaneously, and neutrinos travel at lightspeed anyway, so we should not expect them to exchange photons in any easily observable way.
3) Photons interact equally strongly with protons and neutrons but less strongly with electrons which carry the same magnitude of charge as protons.
4) Maxwell’s equations describe electric and magnetic fields adequately but combining them to create moving electromagnetic waves does not actually yield the observed properties of photons whose energy depends on their frequency rather than on the intensity of the waves.
5) Neither electric or magnetic fields deflect photons despite that photons supposedly consist of oscillating electric and magnetic fields.
6) Spin-spin forces between particles have profound effects that effectively constitute another fundamental force in nature. Electrons form strongly bonded spin-antispin pairs in atomic orbitals and in semiconductor Cooper pairs. Nucleons also pair up very strongly in atomic nuclei and this contributes greatly to the nuclear binding energy.
If we consider photons as particle-antiparticle pairs that consist of and carry only units of spin and momentum in a Transactional Exchange, then we can explain not only their behaviour but also the Entanglement they create between matter particles. Moreover, the Graviton appears naturally as a consequence of this scheme. Photons increase the field between matter particles and give rise to exclusively repulsive effects, both emitter and absorber recoil. Gravitons create a diminution of the spin fields between particles to create exclusively attractive effects. Gravitons must have a much lower energy threshold for their creation than Photons, yet their very ease of creation allows them to dominate the large scale structure of the cosmos and creates a web of universal entanglement.
Lithonian Flotilla.
This year’s first visit to our hideaway on a remote Welsh shore provided an opportunity to reopen the Lithonian spaceship yards after the Memsahib found another scrap of ceramic insulation block washed up on the beach. The addition of a few vape components, bits of defunct electric razors and assorted metal scraps has led to the eighth vessel in the flotilla. Lithonian aesthetics decree that only stone and metal go into these vessels. We bin all the damn washed up plastic we can find and carry.
Putin’s War.
We interrupt the usual monthly flow of these blogs with an emergency appeal.
Following positive feedback from around the world - This following message is released for circulation by any available means. Circulate to all possible sympathisers and allies in all esoteric traditions.
Knights of Chaos Ukraine Campaign 2022.
The KoC calls upon all magicians everywhere to join in magical attacks to: -
Turn the people closest to Putin against him.
We wish to see him disobeyed and restrained or assassinated by his own people.
To this end we call upon volunteers to circulate intelligence about, and images of, those believed to have close connections to Putin for use as Magical Links.
We call upon volunteers to create and circulate rituals and spell procedures for individual and synchronised workings.
We call upon volunteers to launch magical attacks to ‘Turn the people closest to Putin against him’ on an irregular psi-warfare basis using a variety of techniques at unpredictable times and from many locations.
We bestow an honorary knighthood of chaos on all volunteers for the duration of the campaign.
Stokastikos, Acting Marshal KoC, Chancellor of Arcanorium College.
This war in Ukraine was started by One Man who does not enjoy the unqualified support of his associates or his country’s population. He appears to have become deluded, and the situation may deteriorate even further if he is not stopped. We seem to have a clear case here where intervention against a single individual can make a world of difference.
Conjure individually and/or involve friends, allies, and associates for larger workings. Spread the message.
The BBC has very helpfully provided details and images of some of Putin’s inner circle: -
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60573261
UPDATE. My thanks to all magicians from around the world who have volunteered, we seem to have raised a great many wands to the cause of stopping Putin.
Putin is losing this idiotic war due to the heroic resistance of the Ukrainians and the support from much of the rest of the world. He cannot possibly hope to conquer Ukraine now and it becomes increasingly crucial that his own people turn against him and prevent him from worsening the humanitarian catastrophe that he has engineered.
Thus, continue conjuring repeatedly to: -
Turn the people closest to Putin against him.
Since the fall of the Soviet empire the Russian state has become a presidential dictatorship under Putin. Without even the ideology of communism to justify it, the Russian state apparatus has concocted a bizarre ‘anti-fascist’ narrative to sustain itself. Yet it has adopted all the characteristics of the fascism it claims to oppose: - presidential dictatorship, crony capitalism, militarism, repression, the subjugation of the individual to the state, and a leadership that has placed itself above the law. Repression indicates weakness not strength.
Undermine Putin and the fall of this Last Czar may yet lead to a democracy in Russia.
Marblog 2022
Putin’s War.
One might have expected the nation that gifted the world the Kalashnikov and the rocket propelled grenade would have realised that the military balance currently heavily favours the defensive rather than the offensive, particularly if the defenders have strong motivation, good communications kit, hand portable anti-aircraft weapons, foreign support, and cities or broken terrain to work from. Have the lessons of Afghanistan not been learned?
So why has Putin invaded Ukraine with inadequate forces to hold it?
Either Putin has become deluded and will go down in history as the last Czar after losing this war, or he has some other concealed stratagem in mind. Remember that he used to play geopolitical chess viciously but logically.
KoC recommendation: - conjure for Putin’s closest people to turn against him.
<Following positive feedback - This following message released for circulation by any available means.>
Knights of Chaos Ukraine Campaign 2022.
The KoC calls upon all magicians everywhere to join in magical attacks to: -
Turn the people closest to Putin against him.
We wish to see him disobeyed and restrained or assassinated by his own people.
To this end we call upon volunteers to circulate intelligence about, and images of, those believed to have close connections to Putin for use as Magical Links.
We call upon volunteers to create and circulate rituals and spell procedures for individual and synchronised workings.
We call upon volunteers to launch magical attacks to ‘Turn the people closest to Putin against him’ on an irregular psi-warfare basis using a variety of techniques at unpredictable times and from many locations.
We bestow an honorary knighthood of chaos on all volunteers for the duration of the campaign.
Stokastikos, Acting Marshal KoC, Chancellor of Arcanorium College.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60573261
Definitions of Magic. Some thoughts from a recent academic exchange: -
Aleister Crowley defined Magic as: -
‘The science and art of causing change in conformity with will.’
Dion Fortune defined it as: -
‘The science and art of causing changes in consciousness in conformity with will.’
I have increasingly come to regard or define Magic as: -
'The Use of Imaginary Concepts to Create Real Effects.’
I define it thus because ‘will’ seems merely a product of imagination. Summoning so called ‘willpower’ or motivation fundamentally depends on engaging the imagination or adopting the products of someone else’s imagination. To restrict Magic to merely ‘changing consciousness’ limits it to psychology and mysticism whilst ignoring its parapsychological potential for direct interface with physical reality.
Such a broad description as 'The Use of Imaginary Concepts to Create Real Effects’, implies that both religion and science also rely on a certain amount of magic. Religions depend almost entirely on imaginary concepts and a lot of the concepts in science seem more epistemological than ontological. Plus of course a great deal of what goes on in politics, art, advertising, romance, and the other arts of persuasion also depend on the use of imaginary concepts.
In chaos magic we openly acknowledge that 'gods' and 'spirits' exist as imaginary concepts that we create and invoke to create real effects in ourselves and in the world. The blasphemy gets worse, self and identity also consist of largely imaginary concepts as well.
Algebrology
Numerology often gets a bad press from the righteously rationalistic, and probably for good reason, numbers have no innate metaphysical properties in themselves. Yet numbers can show the relationships between phenomena, and indeed a considerable amount of highly reliable ‘straight’ science developed from numerological analysis; corelation does not prove causation, but it can often reveal it.
Kepler’s third law of planetary motion, the purely phenomenological observation that ‘The ratio of the square of an object's orbital period with the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit is the same for all objects orbiting the same primary’, eventually led Newton towards a more mechanistic description of planetary motion, which Einstein later improved upon.
The Dirac large number hypothesis: the purely phenomenological observation that the vast numbers 1040, (1040)3/2, (1040)2 and (1040)3 all seem to relate quantum scale phenomena to cosmological phenomena, appears as either a fantastical coincidence at this particular epoch of the universe, or as strongly suggestive of a universe hyperspherical in space and time.
Numerical ‘coincidences’ always seem worth investigating, but only if they also have ‘Dimensional Equivalence’, herein lies the weakness of numerology as a system of divination.
Numbers, the letters of the alphabet, dates of birth, and favourable or unfavourable events, do not really equate with each other, such equations do not make any more sense than asking how many seconds make a kilogram.
Algebra on the other hand demands that both sides of an equation relate to the same stuff. Newton’s celebrated force = mass times acceleration has the same ‘dimensions’ of mass times length divided by time squared on each side and Einstein’s awesome E = mc2 has ml2t-2 on both sides. So, does this mean that any dimensionally equivalent equation accurately reflects reality? No, the numerical arithmetic must work as well, and even then, we need further reality checks. However, the technique of seeking algebraic coincidences does offer a powerful form of ‘divination’ into how the universe works. Such Algebrology suggested many of the relationships in Hypersphere Cosmology, and the arithmetic seems to work within the limits of observational measurement, but it remains open to confirmation or falsification.
Herewith another item of Algebrology, this time in the quantum domain, if we give quanta the theoretical size assigned to them by Einstein Cartan theory and the intrinsic rotation theoretically assigned to all matter by Godel, we can recover the easily measurable Planck-Einstein relationship E = hf. An interesting coincidence or something more?
https://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/347-algebrology
The Hellgate Chronicles. Have arrived!
‘The complete collected works of The Hon. Hugo C St J L'Estrange.
His satirical spoof "The Satanist's Diary" was published as a regular column in The Aquarian Arrow between 1978 and 1992. It won many friends and admirers for its wry comments on human nature, the occult, New Age, and current affairs.
This is the first full collected addition. It includes some previously unpublished material plus colour illustrations and an appendix by Lionel Snell.’ –
- as it says on the Amazon and the Barnes and Noble sites advertising it.
I finally grasp this long awaited hellish tome in my withered old claws and cackle hideously over its ghastly existential paradoxes and vicious social commentary. Any mortal that suspects an evil satanic conspiracy runs the world will run screaming from the unspeakable revelations within its pages. I have to say that I’m enjoying it immensely and rationing it out to myself at a couple of Hugo’s articles per day. This richly hilarious fare was written to be devoured in instalments, and the entire collection seems best read in a similar way. A fuller review will thus follow in the next blog here.
Forthcoming Book. Interview with a Wizard – Ian Blumberg interviews Peter J Carroll with 365 questions.
This book covers just about everything from anthropology to xenobiology, taking extensive detours through chaos magic, the ice war, sex magic, biography, extreme travel, the knights of chaos, conventional and alternative physics, and an extraordinary lifetime of unusual ideas and experiences. A substantial appendix also presents hypersphere cosmology both in an easily visualisable and understandable form, and with its full mathematics.
Mandrake of Oxford will let us know when it comes out.
Meanwhile in the USA, Weisers have scheduled the release of the Classic Edition of Liber Null & Psychonaut for May.
Chaos Wokeism.
Chaos Magic began amongst the occultists of the tail end of the Hippy subculture of the Baby Boomer generation. The Punks and the Goths soon embraced it. Then the Wiccans, Neo-Pagans, Thelemites, Darksiders, Satanists, Thule-ists, and Ultra-Rightists all took inspirations from it. Now things seem to have come full circle with the advent of Chaos-Wokeism as exemplified by the recent works of Professor Patricia MacCormack – a Chaos Magician who embraces full spectrum radical socio-political-sexual-ecological philosophy with gothic panache. Try googling her.
The Eight-Rayed Snowflake of Chaos rises!
You know that you have created a technology and a paradigm shift rather than a cult or a religion when so many diverse rebel subcultures adopt ideas and practices from its toolkit.
Entropy. Further cosmological musings.
Most physicists believe that the second law of thermodynamics, that the entropy of a closed system cannot decrease, must apply to the entire universe. As they interpret most of the processes going on in the universe as entropy increasing processes they figure that if the universe began with some sort of expansion from a big bang, then it must have increased its entropy continuously since then and that it will end in a state of complete entropy, the so called heat-death of the universe.
Hypersphere Cosmology models the universe as a vorticitating hypersphere, finite and unbounded in both space and time, that does not expand. This hyperspherical universe has spatial and temporal horizons but no beginning or ending in space or time for observers within it. Thus, the overall entropy of the universe should remain constant despite local fluctuations and its obvious tendency to increase hereabouts where we live at the expense of a burning star.
Several processes maintain this cosmic equilibrium: -
1) Proton to Neutron conversion via the weak force interaction. Inside stars, gravity effectively forces Electrons to combine with Protons creating Neutrons. Protons then combine with Neutrons and other Protons to create elements heavier than hydrogen. Up to the creation of Iron nuclei, this process liberates energy in the form of photons and neutrinos. The creation of elements heavier than Iron during the gravitational collapse of heavy stars stores energy in the newly created elements themselves.
2) The gravitational collapse of very heavy stars can result in the creation of neutron-only matter or ‘neutronium’ and/or further collapse to form black holes containing hyperspheres vorticitating at lightspeed.
3) Neutron to Proton conversion via the weak force interaction. Free Neutrons quickly decay back into Protons and Electrons emitting energy and antineutrinos in the process. Bound Neutrons in heavier elements do so more slowly in radioactive decay.
4) Stars can explode in various ways and return matter to space. According to Hypersphere Cosmology, the hyperspheres inside of black holes return matter and energy to space not only by Hawking Radiation but more so by the overspin effect of the cosmic hypersphere on their lightspeed vorticitation.
Just which of the above general processes above increases entropy and which of them decreases it, remains an open question.
Every major process in the universe seems reversible given enough time. Energy moves back and forth between Kinetic and Gravitational manifestations and between its manifestations as Proton-Electron pairs and Neutrons.
Hypersphere Cosmology Prediction.
The so-called ‘Cosmic Dark Ages’ did not occur. According to conventional LCDM big bang cosmology, a gap should exist between the CMBR and the light from the ‘earliest’ stars and galaxies. Hypersphere cosmology predicts that galaxies with redshifts all the way to CMBR levels will exist. The James Webb space telescope may hopefully prove capable of observing this.
Book Review.
‘The Weirdest People in the World’, by (Professor) Joseph Henrich.
This book first came out in 2020 and somehow slipped under my radar, now it has appeared as a thick Penguin paperback. I found it fascinating and deeply thought provoking.
In Liber Kaos I outlined the Aeonic progression that appears to have occurred from Animism and Shamanism to Paganism to Monotheism and then to Atheism. Henrich draws upon a wealth of anthropological, historical, and sociological data to show precisely how this progression occurred.
Many modern Neo-Pagans and Magicians find monotheism unattractive and wonder how Christianity managed to supplant Animisms and Paganisms almost everywhere in the world that it encountered them, and how it won the Cultural Darwinism race. Henrich shows precisely how it did this, and how Christianity inadvertently eventually shot itself in the foot in the process and opened the door to Atheism.
The western church expanded extraordinary efforts in the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages to break the hold of extended family clans and tribes on society. It did this because it wanted the church itself to supplant the social dominance of such clans and tribes and it gradually acquired immense influence, power, and wealth by doing so. To accomplish this the church campaigned with extraordinary aggressiveness against anyone marrying any person with whom they had any family relationship. First cousin marriage became ferociously anathemised and at times nobody could marry anyone related even to the seventh degree. Divorce, monogamy, remarriage, adoption, and the whole concept of illegitimacy and inheritance became very hotly contested issues. This caused many hereditary wealth and power structures to eventually fail and many inheritances to fall to the church. Before the Reformation, the church owned one third of all land in England.
The roots of Christian restrictions on sexual activity all derive from this period. The doctrines of hell and damnation grew largely to reenforce such restrictions.
Within centuries this caused a massive shift in the psychology of the west. It stimulated individualism and voluntary association as it eroded traditional loyalties to extended family clans and tribes. The growth of Individualism eventually spawned Protestant Christianity, mass literacy, and the Industrial Revolution and a European continent full of WEIRD people. Gradually the Weird new individualism began to erode the power of the religion that had birthed it.
WEIRD because as it began in western Europe, most of the original weirds were White, and they became Educated, Individualistic, Rich (by historical comparison), and Democratic by inclination due to their rejection of hereditary and clannish authority. WEIRD because very few people had thought outside the box of extended family clan for the whole of human history.
Weird ways of thought and life have become exported to many parts of the world over the last few centuries, often by imperial force and missionary work, but sometimes they became adopted to force modernisation, as in Japan. In China, Mao’s cultural revolution primarily sought to destroy ancestral family clan structures and the way of thinking that went with it.
Weird and non-weird peoples usually have great difficulty understanding or even tolerating each other’s strange seeming loyalties, religions, gods, moralities, laws, and sexual and social mores.
I have always felt a distrust of the sociological and psychological maxim that ‘People Are The Same Everywhere’. It certainly didn’t gel with my experiences of world travel. Henrich’s book shows how cultural evolution can make such a massive difference to the way people think and behave that it almost seems to change what we think of as their ‘human nature’.
A very illustrious historian of my acquaintance cautions against reading too much into such an overarching big idea hypothesis which may depend on highly selective evidence, and which has yet to make much academic impact, but I found it a very thought provoking read.
Weird Physics.
It may take a year or more before possibly decisive cosmological data comes back from the James Webb space telescope, in the meantime back to the problems at the other end of the scale in the quantum realm: -
Three Dimensional Time?
For many years I have suspected that three-dimensional reversible time can explain the phenomena of indeterminacy, superposition, entanglement, the various characteristics of the quanta in quantum physics, and the phenomena of retroactive enchantment and probabilistic divination in magic.
Yet a problem has always remained, how can a spacetime that appears to us as having one temporal and three spatial dimensions conceal two extra ‘time-like’ dimensions - an additional plane of time that acts like a sort of ‘hidden space’?
Perhaps the answer lies here https://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/343-quantum-principle-of-relativity
If so, then it does not involve any wild new speculative physics but merely a reconsideration of already known physics that physicists generally agreed to ignore, namely the superluminal solutions of Special Relativity and the advanced wave solutions of Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism.
Politics and Covid.
The people elected Trump and Boris to do similar things: -
To reverse the Economic Decadence that Globalisation has caused in their First World countries through the unrestricted movement of capital and migrants, which has led to diminishing prospects for the indigenous lower and lower middle orders of their societies.
To reverse Social Decadence by reigning back the political correctness, wokeism, multiculturalism and identity politics that the political left has adopted in both countries since largely abandoning class based politics.
The people knew full well that only roguish rule-breaking characters could achieve either of these objectives and they duly elected a pair of rogues.
Covid then intervened, and the conservative-libertarian roguish instincts of both Trump and Boris led to different outcomes. Trump tried to tough out covid and it cost him his second term, even though his other policies showed strong signs of rebalancing the distorted American economy which underlies America’s social conflicts and culture wars. Boris bulldozed through the mess created by the barely decisive Brexit vote and created a viable route forward. Then he took a bold gamble on covid vaccination as his instinct to tough it out no longer seemed a viable option. As a result, Britain will likely become the first country to waive the covid restrictions that Boris so reluctantly imposed on other people.
‘Rules are for the obedience fools and the guidance of the wise’ as the old RAF saying goes.
Although fatality numbers may seem high, the number of covid Deaths per Million in the UK seems moderate by international comparison, for a nation with an old and ridiculously overcrowded population and a non-authoritarian state: -
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
I do hope that Boris manages to tough out the current media-provoked leadership challenge. Let only those without sin cast the first stone. Let’s face it, during lockdowns most people did whatever they thought they could get away with at their own discretion.
Let us hope that the economic damage of covid does not hamper the rebalancing or ‘levelling up’ of the British economy that Boris intends.
Games, Life, and Magic.
If I had to describe The Esotericon and Portals of Chaos in a few words I’d call it a game plan for a magical life. It consists of a series of psycho-mythological maps of reality, a kabala upgraded to the post-Neoplatonist esoterics of the Pandaemonaeon.
Fair Warning: -
The last few remaining copies of the first edition will soon undergo a substantial price increase to finally amortise the huge costs of printing and sales of this two kilogram package of an outsize hardcover full colour triple Grimoire and its accompanying deck of altar sized cards. Yes, the artist and I did rather overdo the design specifications and the print bill became enormous, but we made it for posterity and priced it for cost recovery only.
Lockdown provoked a few conceptual breakthroughs in boardgame design. Frontier Space War has evolved into a game so richly complex that you can play it against yourself to create a story, because, unlike chess, by the time you have examined the strategic, logistical, and tactical situation on one side of the board you will have forgotten most of the initiatives you cooked up whilst playing a turn on the other side of the board, The latest version appears here: - https://www.specularium.org/games/item/344-frontier-space-war-4
The Human’s spacecraft consist of nuts and bolts, screws and masonry fittings, and plumbing spares. The Human’s surface units were scrounged from Risk 2210 AD. The Alien’s ships consist of nuts and bolts and Milliput, and their scorpion surface units consist of woodscrews, wire and sealant/glue teased out to give an organometallic-biomorphic effect.
Life itself often seems best regarded as a game played against oneself, or between one’s selves.
Winter Solstice 2021 Blog.
Seasonal Greetings.
Herewith from the halls of Chateaux Chaos the goddess Apophenia atop the festive tree.
Cosmology News
The James Webb Space Telescope should soon set off to take station 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth at a Lagrange point between Earth and Sun. It has cost about twice as much as the large Hadron Collider. I profoundly hope that it launches successfully and deploys its delicate structures as planned, as we do not currently have the ability to fly out and fix it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
I entertain high hopes that observations made by this telescope will lead to the demise of the Big-Bang expanding universe LCDM theory, and the triumph of Hypersphere Cosmology.
The JWST will take long hard looks at galaxies near to the limits of observation because the older Hubble telescope unexpectedly found a vast number of galaxies with many that looked far too well developed to fit into the official Big Bang story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLA0817g
Hypersphere Cosmology asserts that the universe always remains roughly isotropic and homogenous at all points of space and time. We should find galaxies at all stages of their circular evolution and recycling in every observable region of spacetime.
The universe is closed according to Hypersphere Cosmology, its own gravity curves it back in on itself. That same curvature creates redshift and the illusion of expansion through lensing.
Several other ‘Crises in Cosmology’ already threaten the official Big Bang model; attempts to pin down the apparent expansion rate, the so called Hubble Constant, give inexplicably different results. A recent study of the cosmic lensing of the microwave background radiation strongly indicates a closed (hyperspherical) universe.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.02087
Quantum News.
With the Hypersphere Cosmology thesis now seemingly complete and awaiting confirmation or falsification, attention returns to Quantum Ontology, what the heck really goes on in the quantum realm that appears to underlie reality?
We have no shortage of Quantum Epistemology; we have the mathematically baroque description of Quantum Field Theory which gives precise predictions in some areas but only probabilistic ones in other areas. It gives very little that we can readily re-express in images or words. Thus, we have a growing suite of Interpretations about what the current mathematical epistemology could mean for the ontological structure of reality – what really exists or how does it do what it does.
We seem in a situation similar to that of the medieval alchemists struggling to understand what happens when we start experimenting with metallurgy and heating and mixing and separating substances, we have developed a very complicated set of rules of thumb but not yet any understanding of the underlying reality (in this case of atoms) which can explain the chemistry involved more clearly than ideas about green and red dragons, peacocks of antimony and phlogiston.
The current suite of Interpretations includes a rich menagerie of weirdness from the many-worlds interpretation, through pilot-wave theory, to reversible-time transactional interpretations, to interpretations with any number of extra spatial and temporal dimensions, to the alternately zen-like inscrutability, agnosticism, or cosmic nihilism of the Copenhagen Interpretation which eschews any interpretation, either because we currently cannot do so definitively, or because either no underlying reality exists, or because it cannot exist in any form that we could possibly understand.
I had wondered if my speculations on quanta as fast rotating multidimensional spinorial toroids seemed an intuitive leap too far but published it here on 2nd June anyway.
https://www.specularium.org/3d-time
Now I notice that the illustrious Gerard 't Hooft published something which seems to explore a similar line of speculation on 29th July.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.14191
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.14191.pdf
See Gerhard’s discussion of 'fast variables' and multidimensional toroids.
If god does not play Dice, perhaps she plays Roulette instead, but so fast that we cannot see it.
Azathoth seems subtle, yet more indifferent than malicious.
Magical News.
With the revisions to Liber Null and Psychonaut complete, and with the Occultaris provisionally tucked in as a 20-odd page appendix to Interview with a Wizard, work has begun on a revision of Liber Kaos for a classic edition. This will entail a few upgrades to the opening science sections where science has caught up with magic in the interim. The closing chapters which deal with the contentious matters of grades, hierarchies, temples, and orders, will receive the benefits of a lifetimes experience and some wry observations about what achievements and disasters can result from them.
And in summary of 2021…….
On the downsides, most of the powerful players copped out of their responsibilities at COP26 and kicked the can down the road. The anthropogenic climate crisis visibly worsened as did the conflicts which it creates. The globalisation of just about everything has brought with it not only creative chaos but also a seemingly uncontrollable surge in entropy. In terms of biological cultures or thermodynamics, the prospects for our current forms of overpopulated overconsuming civilisation do not look promising.
On the upsides, the pandemic has put the Scottish Independence fantasy on hold, where more careful reflection upon its multiple fallacies quietly erodes it. The same goes for anti-Brexit sentiment, the EU has responded poorly to covid, Belgium, the rotten heart of the EU, has some of the worst pandemic figures on the planet.
The pandemic has brought home to many just who and what matters to them. Introverts with a rich inner life have generally fared better than the extroverts that our culture and media favours. For many of them lockdown has proved an annus mirabilis in terms of the appreciation and production of ideas, literature, art, and science. Lockdown economics has demonstrated that we could in principle, and with a bit of redistribution, easily thrive on a lot less work and consumption.
All the best for 2022, Choyofaque, Stokastikos, Pete.
DecBlog 2021
Rebel Physics.
Hypersphere Cosmology has finally defeated LCDM Big-Bang Cosmology!
The universe has always existed, and it always will. Merry Christmas.
The final battle recently occurred on a cosmology forum where HC took the last remaining bastion of LCDM by accounting for the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation in terms of its own model.
Herewith the plan of attack used: -
Herewith the tactics in full: https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/340-the-cmbr
The fighting was brief and bitter this time, the losers ended up cancelling and no-platforming the victor.
It all had the flavour of an atheist demonstrating the non-existence of god to a theological college.
Japanese Chaoism.
I have almost no idea what sort of Chaos Magic goes on in Japan, apparently my works have appeared in translation there, but language difficulties prove a barrier to communication. Nevertheless, a group over there sent me this delightful artefact: -
It’s a magic scrying mirror that resumes both late medieval grimoire symbolism and the alphabet of desire as given in Liber Null & Psychonaut.
21st Century Catastrophe.
I’ve had a fair bit of feedback about King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man lyrics from the previous blog: -
"Poets' starving children bleed"
There's a 2-minute clip here that predicts one nasty future consequence I haven't seen described before:
https://twitter.com/ExtinctionR/status/1464494350419709953
"Blood rack barbed wire"
This report finds that the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are spending, on average, 2.3 times as much on arming their borders as they are on climate finance. This figure is as high as 15 times as much for the worst offenders.
https://www.tni.org/en/publication/global-climate-wall
I suspect that most national leaderships in powerful nations must have already calculated that in the absence of sufficient international action, national preservation takes precedence and that their populations will back them on this.
Finally, a Poem. In celebration of HC CMBR victory.
The Starlit Sky
Away from the glare of our burning cities
The sky at night looks black as pitch betwixt the stars
Olbers said that cannot be
In a universe of infinity
Yet look again with a microwave eye
And it’s all aglow betwixt the stars
Is this the relic of a mighty blast
From distant aeons in the past
Or does the light from here
Go round a cosmic hypersphere
Coming back a little tired and cold
After all, it’s very old.
Novblog 2021
Remembrance Day. In the UK, on this eleventh day of the eleventh month we traditionally stand for two minutes silence at the eleventh hour, to remember those fallen in war. This began after WW1, ‘The war to end all wars’, which somehow ushered in a century of wars instead. It seems also a time to reflect on future conflicts that now seem inevitable.
COP26 has predictably ended with universal agreement that Something Must Be Done, but that nobody needs to oblige themselves to do anything they really don’t want to.
I'm getting the feeling that, historically, COP26 will mark the beginning of serious universal appreciation of the problems but that insufficient action will follow until the problems worsen and the costs of inaction by the big players start to hideously outweigh the costs of radical action even in the short term. That seems normal for Homo Sapiens.
Our species suffers from the morality paradox. Telling others what to do and then not doing it yourself usually proves the best course of action.
I think we can now confidently make three predictions about the coming decades; global temperatures will rise well past 20C, human-made catastrophes and wars will multiply hugely in frequency, and by mid to late century, world human population will have decreased markedly from current levels. Mind the cull.
As I listened to the results of COP26, a friend put on an old prophetic 1969 King Crimson track.
Cat's foot iron claw
Neuro-surgeons scream for more
At paranoia's poison door.
Twenty first century schizoid man.
Blood rack barbed wire
Politicians' funeral pyre
Innocents raped with napalm fire
Twenty first century schizoid man.
Death seed blind man's greed
Poets' starving children bleed
Nothing he's got he really needs
Twenty first century schizoid man.
Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser Ansible?
Perhaps worth a try, the Elder Gods may well maintain Cosmic Indifferentism, but some lesser aliens might reply.
See here https://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/338-delayed-choice-quantum-eraser-ansible
Distraction Hobbies.
Lithonian Space Navy.
The shipyards of Lithonia have closed for the winter along with our holiday lodge but working in them has provided a stimulating distraction from reading and writing during the social isolations and lockdowns of covid.
An arms race with surrounding planetary civilisations has led to the development and deployment of new classes of Lithonian warship.
Herewith the LSN Flagship Draconia and two escorting SMVs, stealth missile vessels.
The Draconia has a standard silicate hull hewn from the rocks of the metal poor beach world of Lithonia and it carries an array of long and short range weaponry forged from scavenged coat hooks, dismantled electric razors, metal scraps, and vape accessories.
The SMVs have tougher hulls selected from huge unworked slabs of seaworn vesicated basalt and they rely on speed, stealth, and rock armour to close with opposing vessels.
I can foresee a sprawling boardgame evolving out of all this in the fullness of time, it will probably require a fair area of the beach to lay it all out on.
I used to make ships from plastic kits over half a century ago but always found it more interesting to discard the instructions and create something new. Now I eschew plastic altogether and take inspiration from whatever more durable junk comes to hand and eye. Having enjoyed the first one, I figured that I may as well start on my second childhood early.
Herewith the fleet so far.
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.