Blog (242)
Septblog 2021
Septblog 2021
Esoteric Horticulture.
At Chateaux Chaos the Autumnal Mandrakes have sprouted surprisingly early, before autumn equinox, with Circe already a foot into the sky and Boris and Igor just getting started. This year they will have an experimental outdoor season, note the slug repellent copper wire around their new home. Let us hope that the increasingly unpredictable climate does not bring any early frosts.
Magical Book.
The world’s most illustrious academic historian of the esoteric arts has prepared a splendid preface for the forthcoming Classic Edition of ‘Liber Null and Psychonaut’, the book that initiated an epic paradigm change in magical thought. Since its first publication this book has attracted both aggressive dismissal and laudatory recommendation. A new paradigm will always make some people very angry and other people ecstatic. Weiser’s Classic Edition which includes some new material, will appear sometime next year.
Holidays.
Retirement from most of the more time demanding business activities has led to a life of concentric holidays and research sabbaticals with frequent sojourns in remote Wales where a lot of wildlife still thrives. Herewith an adder sunning itself on some concrete. Some bright spark decided that this area would provide adders with an excellent habitat and released a few hundred captive bred specimens some decades ago, now we have thousands of them here. Shoes now seem essential in the dunes, but on the upside, they do bite dogs that people don’t keep on leads.
Herewith also a friendly cricket. Until recently I could always hear their high pitched chirping at night. This year my youngest daughter, a professional ecologist, told me that they were making their customary racket, but I could barely hear them. Oddly, I found this a greater portent of mortality than my need for reading glasses, something may soon disappear from my universe forever as my faculties fade. I seem to have just eaten a pot of dog ice cream having mistaken the picture on the carton for a polar bear. I may have only few decades more to discover the remaining secrets of the universe and the quantum realm presents bizarre difficulties akin to juggling spaghetti whilst blindfolded in a hailstorm.
Quantum Chess?
During discussions of the concept of dimensions with my interviewer/biographer, the following analogy or thought experiment emerged to illustrate the possibilities of multiple time dimensions.
The record of a game of chess provides its temporal dimension, it shows what happened over time. It does not show the moves not taken. However, we could have multiple timelines in which alternatives moves occur. A player unable to decide between two moves can elect to make both of them by replacing a single piece by two smaller shadow pieces in different positions with the provisos that whenever one of the shadow pieces interacts with an opposing piece, the other shadow piece becomes removed, and a player moving one of the shadow pieces must also move the other corresponding one as well. Otherwise, all the usual rules of chess apply.
Now here comes the really strange bit: -
Afterwards, we could write a single timeline move sequence to describe the whole game that does not include the shadow pieces that became removed! However, an expert would probably notice something very odd about some of the moves chosen when looking at the record afterwards. Such a Quantum-Chess analogy can in principle explain many of the mysteries of quantum mechanics and magic. What may have happened, and what could happen, can affect what does seem, to us, to have actually happened. ‘Imaginary’ phenomena can have very real effects.
Afterthought – simply sawing each piece of a chess set down the middle and numbering the two halves the same provides an easy way of preparing a quantum chess set. The two halves of each piece begin the game on the same square.
Augblog 2021
Augblog 2021
Dragon seen in Wales. I met a representative of the dragon races in the dunes near our retreat in remotest Wales. She said that despite having to work on smaller scales and less ambitious projects than in the Mesozoic Era, she remained confident that her kind would regain world domination after hearing our IPCC report on anthropogenic global warming. Another forty gigatons of carbon dioxide per annum for a few decades more should do the trick nicely, she continued. Its not so much the seemingly minor average temperature increases but the resulting exponential increases in extreme weather events that will render your civilisations unviable as your agriculture collapses and you start to massacre each other wholesale. All this will give dragonkind splendid new opportunities, she cheerfully concluded.
Afghanistan. I went through it on the Hippy trail back in the late seventies. It seems a mistake to classify it as a nation for it consists of tribalized territories that no central authority or external power has ever really controlled. Due to western medicine its population has mushroomed far beyond the agricultural carrying capacity that the bone dry and often freezing territory offers, and cultural and religious attitudes inhibit the adoption of industrial or post industrial development. It has valuable mineral resources however, as the Chinese have noticed. A descent into dark ages barbarism and theocracy with Kalashnikovs now seems inevitable. A Taliban dictatorship seems unlikely to build a nation, more likely a fragmentation back to tribal rivalries will occur. The Brits, The Ruskies, and the Yanks all failed there. The Chinese may eventually become tempted to go in hard for the strategic minerals and they won’t shy away from eradicating the culture and as much of the population as that requires.
Lithonian flotilla. Beach detritus, DIY leftovers, and vape accessories continue to provide resources for the growing Lithonian space fleet. Note the inclusion of the Retro-Dreadnaught in this flotilla. Due to occasional relativistic navigation errors, vessels dispatched on weeklong voyages sometimes come back hundreds of years later, and the Lithonian fleet consists of vessels from many eras.
Microcosm, Psi, and Macrocosm.
The quest for a sub-quantum geometry that can explain quantum physics with gravity, and psi and their relationship to hyperspherical cosmology continues here; -
https://www.specularium.org/3d-time
At present it consists mainly of a list of qualitative ingredients for a potential description. These include Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics, my Three Dimensional Time hypothesis, Wolff’s Wave Structure of Matter, and some higher dimensional geometry.
Fitting that lot together and rendering it quantitative certainly presents a challenge, may Azathoth modulate my neurones.
Julblog 2021
Julblog 2021
Covid Strategies. I keep a close eye on the Worldometer report,
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
particularly on the Deaths per Million of population column to see how various strategies or lack of strategies tried by various governments affects mortality outcomes.
For a relatively wealthy country with a very high population density, an old population and massive connectivity to the rest of the world, the UK has not done too badly in the rankings.
Here we have just embarked on a gamble to achieve something like herd immunity through vaccinating most adults and now allowing children to acquire immunity through mild infection. Boris Johnson gambled on Brexit and then gambled on throwing vast resources at the vaccine effort and he won both times. Let us hope he has got this right. In the absence of another new variant that can jump the vaccine barrier with impunity, he probably has.
Magical News. Work continues apace on the upgrade for the Classic Edition of Liber Null & Psychonaut. From more recent anthropological and ethnographic research it has become apparent that Animism provides the wellspring from which most magical traditions arise and that Shamanism constitutes just one manifestation of animist ideas, in contradistinction to the theories of Mircea Eliade. The forthcoming classic edition will also contain upgrades to modern Chaos Magic rituals.
Conversations with a Wizard, a mega-interview with an esoteric journalist, now begins to approach book length.
The microcosm chapters of the Occultaris gradually evolve. The mutual dependency of the microcosm and the macrocosm becomes increasingly apparent. The quest for a theory of quantum gravity seems doomed within the current framework of quantum field theory and the standard cosmological model. Rather it seems that quanta and fields must have a co-fundamental mutually dependent existence and a similar higher dimensional geometry to the entire universe as in Hypersphere Cosmology. Moreover, fields must act non-locally even if waves in them only propagate at lightspeed or less. The properties of the apparent parts depend upon the whole and everything lies far more intimately connected than conventionally thought. This seems to go way beyond Mach’s Principle, Entanglement, Quantum Handshakes, and so called Morphic Fields.
Amazing Cosmology News just in: -
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01380-6
The filaments of galaxies that stretch across the cosmic voids have measurable spins that the Standard Cosmological Model cannot explain.
Hypersphere Cosmology uses the Godel metric W = 2sqrt(piGd) in which ‘Matter everywhere rotates relative to the compass of inertia with an angular velocity of twice the square root of pi times the gravitational constant times the density’.
https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/323-equation-5
This seems highly likely to supply an explanation for the new observation of the largest spinning structures ever seen.
Junblog 2021
Magic
Weisers, the publishers of the first combined edition of Liber Null & Psychonaut, plan to bring out a Classic Edition next year of this paradigm shifting book of magic which has remained in print and appeared in a considerable number of other languages since its first publication. The new cover design looks great, the contents will get an upgrade, and a suitably illustrious figure has volunteered to write a foreword to the new edition.
Work progresses on The Occultaris, a treatise on Natural Philosophy. This seems likely to send shockwaves through the fields of both science and magic which have become somewhat unnecessarily estranged for the last couple of centuries. The Occultaris explores the higher dimensional geometry of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm (The Universe and The Quantum Domain) and the esoteric consequences of a new model of each.
On a lighter note, ‘Conversations with a Wizard’, or something like that, may eventually appear as a book. What started as an e-mail interview has got a bit out of hand during lockdown. It has grown to about a hundred pages of biography, travelogue, recent magical history, and a lifetime of anecdotes and observations, and we haven’t finished yet.
Sculpture
Beach detritus and DIY leftovers continue to inspire craftwork at our lockdown hideaway on a Welsh shore. Herewith the latest addition to the Lithonian task force, a hyperspace missile cruiser featuring a large bronze marine bolt which polished up nicely to form the bridge.
Politics
The EU makes an ass of itself over an UK-Eire border that nobody wants. Perhaps it seeks revenge for Brexit or to give notice that it will create trouble for any other country that tries to escape its synarchist clutches. The political capital of the EU has hit a new low with its dysfunctional response to the Covid crisis with the majority of the population of the EU now professing dissatisfaction with the entire rotten institution.
Historically, Catholicism has created a bloody fault line between Ireland and Britain. After partition, Eire became a virtual theocracy run by a viciously repressive and primitive manifestation of Catholicism that hideously maltreated countless women and children and arrested economic and social development. Thankfully, that has all become exposed now, and the clergy discredited. The Irish have turned away from ancestral faith and become a modern democratic and largely English speaking people.
The old atrocities and battles that took place between Ireland and Scotland, between England and Wales and between England and Scotland no longer influence relations between them. The war between Britain and Southern Ireland ended almost a century ago.
Does it now make political, economic, and geopolitical sense to extend an invitation to Eire to join the United Kingdom?
Alternative Physics
https://www.specularium.org/3d-time
Anyone for or against a Clifford Torus or a 3-Torus in curved three-dimensional space and curved three dimensional time as the basis for a Hypersphere Quantology without quantum chromodynamics?
Mayblog 2021
Mayblog 2021
Alternative? Physics. Muon Wobble.
The current excitement about a possible ‘fifth force’ responsible for the anomaly detected in the spin of the Muon particle may arise from a small interaction with the field associated with the X17 Boson.
The X17 boson remains unconfirmed but suspected from observations of the decay of Beryllium 8 where a putative boson of about 17 MeV decays to an electron and a positron.
In terms of the model under construction at the Physics Department of Arcanorium College this new boson would have the following configuration: -
In this model the X17 has chiral spin 0 and electric spin 0, and like all bosons it has a particle/antiparticle configuration, (Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics). As such it does not really represent a new fundamental force but rather another member of the electroweak bosons, W-, W+, and Z. In effect it consists of a Z boson with both of its half integer chiral spins (grey) going in opposite directions to yield no overall spin.
The horizontal lines represent the spin along the wz axis where z corresponds to the direction of propagation. This model uses the idea of electron bi-spinors generated by non-isoclinic double rotations in four spatial dimensions.
Does this matter? In practical terms probably not, this rare particle seems to play only a miniscule role in the behaviour of reality, however in theoretical terms it may lend some support to hyperspherical models of quanta in extra dimensions, and perhaps eventually to a fuller understanding of exoteric and esoteric aspects of the universe.
Politics.
We have just had multiple elections in the UK, both for the Scottish and Welsh assemblies that have self-designated themselves as the ‘Governments’ of their respective ‘Nations’, plus a large swathe of local government elections and a Parliamentary by-election for one seat.
The English and Scottish wings of the Labour party have performed disastrously enough to raise existential questions about the Labour party. It has lost touch with its robustly illiberal working-class roots and become the preserve of metropolitan champagne socialists and ‘woke’ activists trying to make a power base by starting culture wars and stirring up grievances.
Personally, I have always cheered on Jeremy Corbyn and Kier Starmer, they seem perfectly suited to leading the opposition.
That the Labour party did well enough in Wales comes as no surprise. Over forty percent of the Welsh work for the state in this subsidised region and the Welsh Labour leader, a verbose and reassuringly avuncular old owl, managed to get himself on television just about every day throughout the covid crisis. The Welsh nationalist party did not do well. A majority of the Welsh supported Brexit and can see no point in refusing English generosity and getting into bed with the failing superstate of the EU.
The results from Scotland give cause for deep concern.
The Scottish Nationalist leader shared the same advantage as the Welsh leader during covid and made the most of her daily television appearances. This compensated for the votes she will undoubtedly have lost over her mishandling of the crisis surrounding her predecessor. It seems unbelievable that she did not know about his behaviour for years and bit her tongue for the sake of her own career until the time seemed right to turn on him. Mischievously lowering the voting age to 16 also helped to bolster the nationalist vote. Mature voters in Scotland tend to favour continued union.
Four percent of the population of the UK now apparently want to leave the UK taking thirty two percent of its territory and none of its national debt with them. That four percent represents only half of Scotland’s population, the other half do not wish to be deprived of British citizenship.
This sounds like a recipe for a Northern Ireland situation……….
The leader of the Scottish Nationalists plays an extremely dangerous and divisive game to advance her political career.
Seven hundred thousand people from Scotland live and/or work in the rest of the UK, and many more have family ties across the presently non-existent border. All concerned should get a vote in the unlikely event that the economically, politically, and geopolitically illiterate scheme for Scotland leaving the UK and joining the EU ever gets put to a referendum.
At present every British citizen has the right to live and work in Scotland and to identify themselves as Scottish. The UK government should make it clear from the outset that these rights cannot be given away without a referendum that involves all British citizens.
I regard Ross shire, Sussex, Inverness shire, Somerset, and Gower as all part of my country, non-negotiable, and worth fighting for if necessary.
All political careers end in failure. Nicola Sturgeon would end up with her head on a pike after the implosion of an unviable Scottish state. The best she can hope for is to extract ever more subsidies and autonomy from Westminster and to eventually retire quietly to some beautiful part of a Scotland that stays British and free of Brussels.
Spring 2021
Magic.
The Chancellor of Arcanorium College confers the degree of Bachelor of Magic upon Jacob Edward Sipes, BoM.
This represents the first degree awarded by Arcanorium College since its inception.
Many have started on this demanding course, but few have had the determination to persist with the exceptionally demanding work.
The full citation appears in the Arcanorium College Department of Magic pages on this site.
https://www.specularium.org/arcanoriumcollege/item/273-arcanorium-college-department-of-magic
Alternative Science.
The Hypersphere Cosmology model now seems to have achieved its final form: -
https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
The model presents two observational tests which could show whether this model or the conventional Lambda-CDM Big Bang model best represents the universe. Unfortunately. both tests would take about forty years of observation, but presently Hypersphere Cosmology has the edge in terms of Occam’s Razor as it offers a considerably simpler and more elegant description of the universe.
All attempts to falsify this model will be enthusiastically engaged with.
In the meantime, work resumes on Hypersphere Mechanics, an attempt to rationalise the ad hoc mess of Quantum Field Theory and add some mathematical and conceptual rigor.
The ingredient list from which an improved model may evolve currently includes the following: -
A spacetime of three spatial and three temporal dimensions, and the whole metric curved by gravity into a spatio-temporal 3-3 Sphere.
Spherical rotations of various of the dimensions of spacetime itself as the basis of all fields, forces, waves, and particles.
Quanta as having some of the properties of hyperspheres. Mach’s Principle, as above so below, the quanta and the universe somehow mutually define each other’s properties.
Matter ‘particles’ and ‘anti-particles’ as the points where waves which travel right round the universe interfere, a sort of hyperspherical extension to Milo Wolff’s Wave Structure of Matter theory, but to include nuclear and gravitational effects as well.
Energy ‘particles’ as ‘particle-antiparticle’ exchanges with the antiparticle component traveling backwards in time, as in Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics.
The appearance of entanglement and superposition arising from retro-causation at lightspeed.
A possible geometrical relationship between neutrinos, photons, and gravitons.
The hypothesis that something out there might know more than we do, and that it might respond to the name of Azathoth. Common sense need not prove a limitation to imagination.
Sculpture.
Herewith the Edward Teach, Steam-Punk Pirate Spacecraft.
The hull of this vessel does not consist of a heavily decayed piece of timber, it consists of a piece of hard volcanic lava scrounged from Mount Teide on Tenerife that inspired the overall design. The assorted fittings come from the junk boxes in the sheds and outhouses of Chateaux Chaos. The policy of never throwing any interesting piece of scrap away has paid dividends during lockdown.
In the backstory the Imperium abandons a damaged robot freight vessel on a desolate asteroid. The AI that piloted it uses its droids to gradually assemble a functioning craft from the wreckage of the freighter and the material of the asteroid. The AI also reprograms itself in increasingly unorthodox ways, drawing on historical archive material in memory devices in transit, resulting in the antique design of the ship and the new rogue identity of the AI.
The Edward Teach now raids the far-flung outposts of the Imperium, relieving merchant vehicles of their cargoes, attacking some of the smaller classes of Imperium warships, and adding to its arsenal of strange and exotic weaponry.
Politics.
Regional Nationalism. Tony Blair remains one of the most reviled Prime Ministers of recent decades, we remember him mainly for the deceitful case he made for the Iraq war and the disastrous war itself. He managed to hand over power to Gordon Brown just in time to escape the economic catastrophe of 2008 that his policies during three terms of office did so much to exacerbate.
However, he also lit the fuse to constitutional crisis by setting up the Scottish and Welsh assemblies. It might have seemed like a good idea at the time, Northern Ireland had been given a gerrymandered assembly to try and persuade rival factions to talk more and fight less. Scotland and Wales were given their own assemblies in the hope that it would make the Northern Ireland assembly seem less of an anomaly and that it would head off Scottish and Welsh nationalism, despite that such nationalisms had rarely risen above a hobby activity for a minority of Celtic romanticists.
It has had quite the reverse effect, both assemblies have now self-designated themselves as the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments and Governments. The Welsh had little initial enthusiasm for an assembly, but now both assemblies have filled up with left dominated representatives spending central government funds and playing the nationalism card as a career strategy. Blair created a career opportunity for a new class of regional-nationalist politicians, and they took it, pulling the wool over the eyes of their electorates.
The nationalism cards do not bear scrutiny, they have little written on them except a faux resentment of England which heavily props up both principalities economically on one side. On the other they merely say, ‘We demand ever more regional subsidies!’ Nowhere do the nationalism cards mention anything realistic about what independence would mean in practice. Economy? Central Bank? Currency? Borders? Defence? National Debt?
Bristol has a longstanding tradition of political rioting, and it now leads the way in protesting against a new parliamentary bill which restricts the right to peaceful protest. Basically, if your protest is likely to cause an obstruction or a nuisance you will not get permission for it.
History shows that peaceful unobstructive protest achieves nothing. A million people marched quietly through London against Tony Blair’s planned war in Iraq, and it went ahead anyway. A quarter of that number smashed up central London against Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax and it was immediately cancelled.
A protest that inconveniences nobody influences nobody. Expecting people to protest for the right to make a nuisance, without making a nuisance, seems a ridiculous expectation.
If he persists with it, this may become Boris’ Poll Tax moment.
Marblog 2021
Marblog 2021
Toad-spawn! Newts! I had feared that the addition of 26 tons of rubble and cement to the old carp pond to reduce its depth from seven to two feet in depth might have discouraged our annual guests for a few years, but no, they have come back straight away this spring and resumed their frolicking.
Alternative Physics
The Hypersphere Cosmology model has successfully resisted several weeks of siege on the Cosmo Quest Forum.
I took it there and challenged a panel of experts to falsify it. A fierce assault began. Running repairs and upgrades to the defences occurred during the battle.
Eventually the referee gave a red card to the self-appointed leader of the opposition for losing his temper, and I retired with the theory unfalsified and strengthened.
During the sometimes less than civil debate it became apparent that Hypersphere Cosmology needed a few tweaks and a much fuller explication of its 17 core equations. It should now appear comprehensible to anyone with basic algebra, geometry, and physics.
I now present it here: - https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
Each equation now has its own sub-page of explanation of the physical principles it uses.
We now laugh at Flat Earth theories. I suspect that generations to come will laugh at the idea that for more than a century, people believed we lived in a Flat Universe that expanded at the speed of light and began with a big bang.
I now seek higher level falsification or collaborators to take Hypersphere Cosmology forward.
‘Cosmologists are seldom right but never in doubt’ – Landau. :)
Politics
I have met older people in the UK who have reservations about accepting their Oxford-Astra-Zeneca Covid vaccine because they have come across negative information about it originating in the EU, suggesting for example that it may lack efficacy for those over 65.
That misinformation has an entirely political basis. It has absolutely no scientific basis. The Europeans put out this misinformation to try and cover their unbelievably incompetent screw up of procurement and distribution of vaccines within the EU.
Belgium, the rotten heart of Europe, has the highest death rate per million of any sizeable country on earth.
The high-level fratricide in progress within the Scottish National Party comes as no surprise. The Loch Ness Sturgeon made treasonous overtures to the EU in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote. Expansion and preservation of political power base remains her only priority.
Culinary matters.
The Full Bristol Breakfast.
The privilege of living near this international trading city brings with it access to exotic ingredients from all over the world.
A lockdown years’ worth of experimentation at the laboratories of Chateaux Chaos and at the Welsh coastal research facility have led to the development of an optimal nutritional repast now designated ‘The Full Bristol Breakfast’: -
One handful of organic porridge oats.
One tin of responsibly sourced flaked Tuna.
A couple of cubic inches of cheese, preferably Blue Stilton.
A desert spoonful of smooth peanut butter.
A desert spoonful of coconut butter.
A teaspoonful of mixed herbs.
A teaspoonful of powdered turmeric.
A teaspoonful of chili sauce.
A dozen pitted green olives.
A cupful of water.
Heat all the ingredients in a pan with constant stirring until the cheese begins to melt and the porridge thickens. Eat immediately, direct from the pan. Total preparation, consumption, and clear up time, just 8 minutes.
During consumption, meditate upon the nutritional value of the ingredients and the physical strength and mental acuity that they will stimulate, rather than upon the taste which will become more agreeable with time.
The Full Bristol Breakfast provides sufficient sustenance for an entire days’ worth of gruelling physical, mental, or magical activity.
Recommended dose – do not exceed one portion on alternate days.
Feblog 2021
Feblog 2021
Covid
The Memsahib and I have just had our Covid 19 jabs. Trivial side effects passed within a day.
Astra-Zeneca, just what we wanted, thanks very much.
Thank all the gods that we have such brilliant scientists on this sceptred isle and that we escaped from the damnable EU.
Logically and Ethically, anyone who refuses the civic duty of taking the jab without good medical reason should also refuse hospital treatment for covid if they need it - and take their chances at home. The loss of anti-vaxers can only improve the collective intelligence of humanity.
Alternative Physics
This blog comes a bit late because of a ferocious battle in progress. I exposed Hypersphere Cosmology to a panel of anonymous experts on an internet forum, see the ‘Against the Mainstream’ threads https://forum.cosmoquest.org/ A Hyperspherical Universe without Singularities.
It has been algebra at dawn with references flying like bullets for weeks. Its meant waking in the middle of the night to scribble down half formed equations for the next morning’s hostilities.
So far Hypersphere Cosmology https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
has resisted falsification and strengthened its defences, see the upgraded Equation 6 and this new paper refuting the dark matter hypothesis: -
https://www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/290-galactic-rotation-curves
Politics
The sky has not fallen in since Brexit, despite the additional problems of covid the UK has survived, and despite also the spiteful interpretation of non-tariff barriers by the damn EU.
The EU itself has made an almighty pig’s ear of its vaccination program. If the EU functioned as a democracy, heads would have already rolled. But no, it functions as a Crony-Synarchy.
The Scottish National Party has predictably tried to exploit the covid crisis, but why will no SNP politician state clearly what Scottish Independence mean in terms of currency, central bank, national debt, border control, and the vast subsidy it currently receives from the UK? I fear Lowland Clearances – large numbers of economic migrants fleeing south to escape an imploding Scottish Economy.
The Scottish voice counts for quite a lot in the government of the UK, in the government of the EU it will count for very little indeed.
I love Scotland and I love Tartan Romanticism - althought that's not a credible politico-economic policy, just an invention of Sir Walter Scott.
The Scottish Enlightenment began with The Act of Union, long may it continue..
The Auld Alliance (with France) never served Scotland well.
New Year 2021
Pandemic
Chinese bats now seem to have killed more Brits than the Luftwaffe, or indeed the annual toll of WW2 did. Nevertheless, we have a home-grown vaccine that may well sort this out by the summer here and in the entire world thereafter. I hope that we do not punish the government at the next election. This pandemic represents a disease of progress and civilisation – our fault for exploiting wild animals and encouraging mass travel around the globe. Authoritarian regimes have had much lower casualties, but freedom has a price, better Dead than Yellow or Kraut. The Labour opposition here has whined and bleated, failed to come up with policy alternatives, and grudgingly agreed to the government’s tactics. Let us thank all the gods we did not have Comrade Jeremy Corbyn in charge during this crisis.
Politics
Culture War or Class War?
Here in the UK, we have an irritating amount of overspill from the so-called ‘Culture Wars’ allegedly wracking the fabric of American society.
Wokeism, Anti-Colonialism, BLM, Cancelism, and Minority Sexuality advocacy seem to have coalesced into a single liberal virtue signalling package against which an equally polarised backlash has formed to promote White Supremacy, Anti-Globalisation, Nationalism, and Conspiracy theories.
What underlies this Polarisation? - The Economy.
For the last several decades the professional and managerial classes in the USA, and to some extent the UK, have screwed the lower middle and working classes through globalisation. The wages of the poorer in rich countries have stagnated or declined in real terms as manufacturing has become outsourced to the developing world or insourced to cheaper imported labour. Meanwhile the managerial and professional classes have profited from cheaper goods and services and capital invested overseas.
This becomes all too clear when you examine ‘The Elephant Graph’. -
https://www.ejiltalk.org/being-charged-by-an-elephant-a-story-of-globalization-and-inequality/
The rich in rich countries often opine that they have helped to uplift many parts of the developing world and that this would lead them to adopt western style values and democracy. The later has singularly failed to materialise. The rich in rich countries have merely succeeded in shifting wealth to themselves, and from the poor in their own countries to the rich in poor countries.
All the issues which have become polarised into the so called ‘culture wars’ revolve around the concerns of the poor in rich countries.
The American dream of a working-class family with their own home and car and with one parent as homemaker now seems a rarity or a forgotten fantasy for many. I has also become exceedingly difficult to achieve in the UK.
QAnon’s seemingly mad ideas about a conspiracy of ‘Satanic Paedophiles’ actually makes a certain amount of metaphorical sense if interpreted as a conspiracy of ‘Greedy Capitalists Denying Poor Children a Future’.
Yet for all sorts of historical reasons America can never admit that it has a Class War, so a Culture War stands in as a proxy for it. Socialism comes close to blasphemy in the land of the free, and in the land of the free, many choose to regard poverty as self-inflicted despite the glaring inequalities of opportunity.
The American democratic party, rather like the British Labour party, now seems dominated by Rich Liberals, and both ignore the lower orders whose mores and habits they despise.
Liberalism sets great store in an offensive against the side effects of relative poverty rather than its cause. Thus, it campaigns for any imaginable minority grievance rather than address the underlying economic factors which give rise to them.
Many Americans voted for Trump in the hope that he would do something about the American response to Globalisation. He seemed a strange choice but nobody else from the American elite dared to put themselves to the task, and America elects only from what it considers its elite. Trump may or may not now disappear, but the underlying issue will not, particularly under the pretence that it remains a Culture War.
Do not expect a revolution. Revolutions the world over, only tend to succeed under middle-class leadership.
Many British voted for Brexit in the hope it would allow us to deal with globalisation on terms of our own choosing. Our Conservative government at last talks openly about levelling up the economies of our poorer areas and classes. I live in hope.
Esoterics
The main part of this blog consists of an extensive email interview that Mr Ian Blumberg-Enge requested I give. This took place over the last week, because of its substantial size I have placed it here: -
https://www.specularium.org/wizardry/item/308-interview-january-2021
Winter Solstice 2020
Winter Solstice 2020
Seasonal Greetings.
Astrology. For those who choose to invest belief in it, a rare conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter occurs at this Solstice. This does not necessarily presage the end of the world – fortunately the Chaobala of the Epoch attributes a Saturnine-Jupiterian current to Osiris - the embodiment of rebirth.
Physics. Herewith a seasonal gift to the world: -
https://www.specularium.org/hypersphere-cosmology
After many years of struggle the maths of Hypersphere Cosmology have achieved complete internal coherence and a precise match with observational data. The LCDM Big-Bang Theory will become formally discarded soon, and thank the gods for that, it brought some very distasteful metaphysics with it. Many thanks to all he terrestrial and extra-terrestrial intelligences who have assisted with this project, JD and Yog-Sothoth in particular.
The science media voice increasing doubts about the Big-Bang, the Editor’s Pick letter in the xmas edition of New Scientist begins ‘Time to abandon the big bang theory? Plus, the daft idea of so-called dark matter has just come under further attack from the ‘External Field Effect’ (try searching on that), Hypersphere Cosmology resumes this MOND type effect and identifies and quantifies its origin in Gödelian and Machian principles.
The mathematics off Hypersphere Cosmology condense to a few terse pages accompanied by about forty pages of explanation and metaphysical interpretation. These will appear eventually in the forthcoming Occultaris. In the meantime, the maths appears on this site ‘pour encourager les autres’.
The completion of that part of the Natural Philosophy project opens the way for a serious alternative to the mess of Quantum Field Theory. A gradually emerging model of Quantum Hyperspheres shows promise – in this, everything becomes the cause of itself in hyperspherical space and hyperspherical time. In the best traditions of natural philosophy this leads to an holistic reality in which the properties of anything depend on the whole of the rest of the universe, and many of the strange connections that Apophenia suggests have a reality.
Politics.
Britain seems close to finally liberating itself from the EU Synarchy.
The Eurocrats cannot possibly offer Britain anything less than punitive terms if it refuses to accept political interference, otherwise many other countries will try to regain their political independence and the whole rotten corrupt EU shambles will disintegrate.
Ever since the founding of the Common Market a clique of largely unelected synarchists has promoted a conspiracy to rule Europe through a vast non-democratic bureaucracy that controls every aspect of its citizens lives. It has done this by stealth, by coups, and by bluff.
When Britain conducted a referendum in 1975 on joining the Common Market, strange bedfellows united to oppose the idea. Tony Benn on the far left opined against a ‘Capitalist’s Europe’ and Enoch Powell on the far right said that it would lead to a ‘Progressive Loss of Sovereignty’. The ‘Yes’ campaign made much of the ‘nutters alliance’ opposing the Common Market, yet history has proved both Benn and Powell right. The Common Market mutated into a political project largely beyond democratic scrutiny and it developed the ingenious ruse of putting big business in charge of an ever-expanding regulatory culture that actively supresses competition from smaller businesses. Plus, it became heavily protectionist to shield European big business from outside competition.
Powell also raised controversial early objections to immigration. The burden of immigration falls almost entirely on the indigenous poor by depressing wages and causing housing shortages and increasing crime. The well off reap the benefits in terms of cheap labour and inflating property prices, and even the increased crime and declining social cohesion provides the well off with plenty of administrative opportunities.
Britain will undoubtedly suffer in the short term for a No-Political-Strings-Hard-Brexit but we must do this for the long term benefits: -
Freedom from EU control over our Agriculture and Fisheries which currently degrades the environments of both.
Freedom to control our own borders.
Freedom to decide by democratic means, our own laws.
Freedom to trade with the rest of the world on our own terms.
Freedom always costs. The price, however high, always proves worth paying in the end.
More...
Decblog2020
Esoteric Horticulture - Now in their eighth year at Chateaux Chaos, the Mandrakes have blossomed with exuberance for the festive season. Note that after producing an initial celebratory heptagonal flower with six stamens, Circe and her friends have exclusively reverted to the usual pentagonal symmetry.
Sculpture – With all the shops shut due to the pandemic, and with internet shopping failing to provide a satisfactory festive experience, crafting gifts seems like an agreeable alternative. Herewith an Earring Tree. Iron wires tied and epoxied together, coated in black milliput, afterwards drybrushed with green acrylic and mounted in an old green slate block, inspired by the highland Larch.
Politics – America seems to have a problem with its institution of Head of State. The Potus has too much power and the periodic process of replacement proves both expensive and disgraceful. Britain on the other hand has a severe problem with its economy. Perhaps Britain could offer America surplus parts of its royal family as a readymade constitutional monarchy? Obviously, the Americans will not want Prince Andrew now, but what about Prince Harry? He comes fully trained in all ceremonial, charitable, military, and diplomatic duties and has an American wife and an heir. How about 100bn U$ and free aircraft for our two new unaffordable aircraft carriers? America could recoup the costs quickly with an ‘honours for paid taxes’ scheme in a new American Order of Knighthood.
Esoteric Physics Update – As part of the forthcoming Occultaris, a treatise on Natural Philosophy that unifies magic and science, it seems necessary to demolish the standard LCDM model of big-bang cosmology and replace it with a Hypersphere Cosmology which now exists in a fully quantitative form. It also seems necessary to replace the standard mode of Quantum Field Theory with a model based on Quantum Hyperspheres to fully unify the microcosm and the macrocosm.
Official QFT demands no less than 25 different fundamental fields pervading all of spacetime and 36 supposedly fundamental quanta, it seems massively baroque and ad hoc and riddled with the modern equivalents of epicycles and phlogiston.
In the emerging Quantum Hyperspheres model, spacetime itself (with a few extra dimensions) provides the basis for all fields, and all quanta consist of various centres of spin in up to 4 different planes which creates spinors. The basic bones of the model appear below. It treats quanta as less fundamental than the various configurations of spin that comprise them. It remains geometric and qualitative at this stage; I would welcome collaboration from specialist mathematical physicists to explore the quantitative aspects.
The underlying motivation here arises from a desire to model an entirely natural description of reality that also explains non-locality, entanglement, and superposition and a wealth of esoteric phenomena in terms of extra-dimensionality and temporal reversibility.
Novblog2020
Psychology, Oneirology
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” – Nietzsche.
And Erik Hoel of Tufts University makes a strong argument for this in his recent paper on The Overfitted Brain Hypothesis: -
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.09560.pdf
A thorough study of this September 2020 paper will prove rewarding. Hoel discusses the various leading theories about why we dream and then he adds another astonishing one that perhaps supersedes them all.
Hoel draws heavily on what we have learned from trying to develop deep machine learning and machine intelligence, it seems that if you want a machine to develop a broad ability at problem solving then you need to feed it on Chaos. Or to put it more politely, Stochastic and Random inputs including Imaginary Data.
The theory goes that any information system can get a bit stuck and inhibited by the patterns it knows and expects and particularly by what it has recently learned, so it can benefit by shaking it all up and mixing it all about to provoke synthesis and integration.
Humans rarely dream ‘real’ memories, except in PTSD. Dreams usually consist of fantastical Apophenic mash ups of fragments of old memories and newer ones.
Hoel argues that the brain deliberately indulges in the hallucinations of dream to achieve this vital housekeeping function that any complex and adaptive information processing device will require. He devotes some of the paper to a discussion of dreams and creativity.
Hoel writes further in edition 3307, 2/11/20 of New Scientist and touches on the human need for unreality in general, our insatiable taste for myths and novels and entertainments about imaginary events. He suspects that we may need such inputs to prevent our minds ossifying around our often-humdrum repetitive life experiences.
This led me to wonder if some people value hallucinogens precisely because they mimic the random and hallucinatory state of dreaming, despite the potential survival costs of performing such activity whilst not safely asleep and immobile.
I have to say that I have got far more inspiration from dreaming and the liminal states of waking than I ever did from hallucinogens.
Politics
Farewell Donald Trump, you brought a stimulating dose of chaos, excitement and controversy to American politics, the highest election turnout ever, and a focus of attention upon a lot of the elephants in the room, notably the failures of multiculturalism, political correctness, neo-liberalism and globalisation, the European reluctance to pay for its own defence, the need for renewables to make economic sense, the massive drug and people trafficking across the Mexican border, and the emerging broad spectrum neo-imperialism of China.
In choosing Biden the American people seem to have opted for Conservatism with a small ‘c’, - let us hope that does not mean more social and economic neo-liberalism as usual. Social neo-liberalism means policing thought and speech. Economic neo-liberalism means elites will take an ever-larger share of the pie.
Esoteric Horticulture
Circe the Mandrake has signalled approval of her new accommodation in the greenhouses of Chateaux Chaos by producing a flower with 7 petals and 6 stamens instead of the usual pentagonal symmetry of 5 and 5, as displayed by one of her smaller companions. Who said plants cannot communicate?
Quantum Hyperspheres
The microcosm chapters of The Occultaris continue to develop and now include a possible model of quantum gravity in qualitative form at least.
Sorcery
Finally, my thanks to the hundred or so around the planet who participated in the Samhain magical attack requested in the previous blog. The tide may have started to turn, but humanity must not squander victory by a return to its bad old ways. Mother Earth has so far admonished us mildly with climatic and biological responses, but if we really annoy her, she can swat our entire civilisation, and if necessary, our entire species, all too easily.
Samhain 2020
Samhain 2020
Magical Attack
Now seems the time to throw in some Sorcery in support of all the mounting Scientific attacks on Covid 19, if some form of vaccine can work then we can perhaps avoid a grim Fimbulwinter.
Local Midnight 31st October, prepare for a coordinated conjuration: -
1) Dress a seasonal pumpkin with spikes suggestive of the coronavirus.
2) Lay out weapons of choice.
3) Gnosis – attain mental focus either by silencing the mind with meditative procedures or by exciting the mind to frenzy by exertions and wild emotions.
4) Physically wreck the symbolic image of the target without conscious deliberation.
5) Banish with deliberate laughter and thereafter avoid thinking too much about the conjuration.
Ouranian Barbaric or Enochian incantations, sigils, nudity, or robes and black pointy hats optional.
Personally, I shall use a Hammer of Thor, an original Tibetan Purba, and all three manifestations of the current Mk127 pocket wand.
Received from Japan
This curious and rather beautiful object, thoughtfully incorporating a personalised nameplate. It glows in the dark as well, a desktop or bedside wand/chaosphere always at the ready and easily accessible in pitch darkness.
Hyperspheres in the Microcosm
Lastly, as part of the ongoing Quantum Hypersphere Mechanics project. A contemplation of Mobius strips with half twists in them: -
Suggests that spinors may arise from a hyperspherical rotation, consider an object with axes x, y, z, and a fourth-dimension w, it can have 2 independent planes of rotation, say xy and wz.
An 1800 rotation about wz will invert the z axis about which the plane of xy rotates and a 3600 rotation will restore the orientation of the z axis, but this will entail a 7200 rotation of the observable xy plane! Such non-isoclinic (not equal angled) rotations of 4D spacetime quanta may explain a lot.
Octoblog
Octoblog
Pandemic lockdown has provided an opportunity for something of an Annus Mirabilis in metaphysical magical theory and The Occultaris* proceeds apace: -
TIQM + HM + WSM + HC = OM!
Basically, an Apophenic addition of Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, (for energy quanta), to Hypersphere Mechanics to Wolff’s Wave Structure of Matter, (for matter quanta), to Hypersphere Cosmology, (in eight-dimensional spacetime), yields an Omnality Matrix, partially entangling absolutely Everything, this seems metaphysically satisfying and has extensive explanatory and predictive power in both parts of Natural Philosophy – Science and Magic.
In response to questions about particle generation/flavour conservation in the previous blog: - The decay of higher generation quarks does not appear to conserve particle generation. However higher generation quarks only arise as entangled quark-antiquark pairs and a consideration of the decay products of both the quark and the antiquark reveals a perfect conservation of particle generation/flavour quantum number.
If generation remains conserved and baryons consist of uni-quarks then an 8-dimensional hyperspherical universe with quanta having 4 rotational degrees of freedom becomes an increasingly credible sub-quantum epistemology, and perhaps even an ontology and a metaphysic.
*Book to appear eventually…………….
Gardening and Board-Gaming/Building meanwhile continue to provide light relief from the mathematics.
The Mandrakes at Chateaux Chaos sprouted early this year at the autumn equinox. Their roots had become too big for their individual pots so now they reside together in a single deep and huge one. Hopefully, they will all produce some apples this winter, not just Circe the big one.
Updates to Frontier Space War 2.
The scenarios have evolved through further playtesting: -
1) Discs placed below pieces indicate the number of units of that type, but the number of groups of any type of piece remains restricted by the number of pieces.
2) Command Vessels: - Tactical Attack/Defence use next dice up in size. Psi Attack/Defence best of three dice throws. This proves much simpler than adding numbers to dice throws.
3) Fortresses all use D12 Dodecahedrons A/D unless enhanced by a Command Vessel.
4) Strange Aliens. (partly inspired by the current plague)
Aliens have just two types of units, Hives and Wasps. Wasps can move from one system to another connected adjacent system each turn, and attack or defend with D10 Decahedrons. Hives cannot move and have no attack or defence capability and become destroyed by any attack. Hives can produce Wasps at a cost of 4 production units. Wasps can turn into Hives and vice-versa. A newly created Hive cannot create Wasps in the same turn it became created, but a Hive that turns into a Wasp can move and attack in the rest of the turn.
Possible scenarios including Aliens.
1) Aliens use the Soviet Territories in place of the Soviets. They start with a Hive on Vostok.
2) An alien force of 5 Wasps can appear once at any Black Hole between any two other Faction’s turns, at the discretion of the Alien commander who then takes that turn for the rest of the conflict.
These Alien pieces consist of black Milliput over nuts and bolts, gone over with black felt tip marker to give them an eldritch organometallic sheen.
Brexit appears to proceed well. We should not negotiate. David Cameron and Teresa May both attempted to negotiate and they both failed and got sacked. We should simply say what we intend to do and do it, and that includes not imposing barriers or tariffs unless they do.