JMG on the Kunstlercast

[ecosophia]

For those of my readers who want something lively to listen to online, I'm pleased to announce the latest issue of James Howard Kunstler's always-lively Kunstlercast, with Jim and I talking about my forthcoming book The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power.  As usual for Jim's podcast, it's a far-ranging conversation in which the occult dimensions of the Trump era and its aftermath are only one thread in a tapestry of politics, magic, and cultural weirdness. Interested?  You can listen to it here. 

Comments

[fringewood]

This is an excellent and enjoyable podcast featuring two of my favorite writers. Thanks so much for doing it. I plan to give it a second listen soon😉 as well as purchase the book as soon as it is out.

[daniellethepermaculturist]

I just had the pleasure of listening to the episode as I am subscribed to JHKs podcast. I loved it as I am a fan of both of your works and ideas and I especially appreciated your comparison of today's repression of hate to Victorian repression of sex. There is a lot written on woke culture but that piece made the whole thing make a lot more psychological sense to me. A lot of commentary on the psychology of wokeness simply names it as narcissism but I have always found that explanation not satisfactory due to how wide spread it is and narcissism gives little indication of how it will play out in a larger societal context. The comparison with the Victorian purity morals to thr sex revolution made sense. I wonder what the "hate revolution" would look like though it sounds like something of which I would rather not be a part.


I also enjoyed your cheerful attitude about the subject. That sense of humor of our times is the best strategy for overcoming todays emotional maelstrom and is also uplifting for others to see and hear.

[(Anonymous)]

In one of the texts on mundane astrology, by either Raphael or HS Green, there was an observation that many of the notables who created the archetypal Victorian mores were born under the prior conjunction of Uranus and Neptunein ~1821-1823. Having noted so, they left as homework for future readers to see if a repetion of this phenomenon would take place for those born in the ~1989-1998.

Interview

[(Anonymous)]

It was a good interview, quite enjoyed it

[(Anonymous)]

Sad thing about most podcasts is that there usually is no transcript... You say that you can't stand video - but can you do audio? I find both hugely difficult to follow and prefer written content by far. Despite that, I managed to listen to the first interesting 20 minutes and the words about pseudo-reality resonated with some of my own physics-wrapped thoughts. If I may:

I think it's fair to say (though that's an axiom, too) that we don't have direct access to reality but can only try to describe it. If we do this by ways of science (the method, not the institution!), we always start with a set of axioms or to say it even more directly we make assumptions. We assume certain things to be true and from this we derive our theory that should somehow describe the reality we observe. Newtonian mechanics provides a fine example. Three basic assumptions on the interplay between force, mass and acceleration and you can in fact describe a lot with that. Of course we know that Newtonian mechanics is very incomplete and that quantum mechanics / the general theory of relativity make a better description in their own domain but are very incomplete, too. And no matter how nicely your theory fits a set of facts, at the very bottom it's just a (possibly) educated guess.

If you are familiar with the astonishing difficulties physicists had to wrap their heads around the early quantum mechanics you can see that letting go of a set of axioms and accepting a new set is not an easy process, even if it's purely abstract. It's a lot like tinkering with a large house of cards. You put a few cards here and you remove a few cards there and you hope that it won't collapse. That way a set of axioms can be bent to describe a lot more than what it was invented to do, but you can't bent it infinitely, of course.

I think that's a lot of what's behind all this talking of "fake-news" and "alternative facts", "narrative" and so on. There has been done so much tinkering on the western house of cards to keep it alive, that it has become very unstable and has possibly already split in a few separate and only loosely connected buildings. And once somebody notices that some others are in fact tinkering on a different house of cards than their own, they try to knock it over.

Cheers,
Nachtgurke

The Irving Berlin piece, and Dmitry Orlov.

[jpc_w]

Another great interview with you and JHK. You have good interview chemistry together.

What was the Irving Berlin musical/album you referenced?
It would serve as a valuable corrective to current media offerings.

On a not unrelated note, Dmitry Orlov (on his SubscribeStar list) translated an article claiming the White House is fortifying the riot barrier and troop deployment in Washington D.C. into permanent structures and arrangements.

Is this claim grounded in reality?

Re: The Irving Berlin piece, and Dmitry Orlov.

[ecosophia]

1) It's a musical, Of Thee I Sing. I find on looking it up that I got the composer wrong -- it was George Gershwin, of course, not Irving Berlin.

2) I have no idea.

Re: The Irving Berlin piece, and Dmitry Orlov.

[(Anonymous)]

2) I've heard from someone who lives in DC that it seems like they are. If true, it's a very, very bad sign......

Re: The Irving Berlin piece, and Dmitry Orlov.

[(Anonymous)]

It is getting fashionable. In Poland, temporary antiriot metal fence stayed for a couple of years around the parliament building and now the ruling party ordered a proper 3 meters fence to fend off pesky people.

Years ago I visited Israel. They have around Knesset a fence that could not only stop people but also dinosaurs - looks pretty much like this one https://jurassic-pedia.com/electric-fencing.

[stcathalexandria]

What came through in this podcast through was your concern for what the this year holds. Your voice communicated a level of worry that I hadn't picked up in the writing. Not all out panic, but genuine care for everyday people swept up in the swirl.

[(Anonymous)]

John--

As this second impeachment trial illustrates quite clearly, the champions of the PMC keep mistaking the man for the archetype and the effect for the cause. Banning Trump from office will surely be the defeat of Sauron!

As you point out in the interview, the archetype simply moves to another vehicle in that case and the process continues. Meanwhile, those fighting to preserve the status quo miss the swirling undercurrents slowly engulfing them...

--David BTL

[ecosophia]

It's frankly embarrassing to watch them go through the same motions endlessly, stuck in an endless rehash of the same failed narrative. I hope that at least some of them can extract themselves from it before it consumes them completely.

[methylethyl]

It reminds me of an interview I listened to with Paul Stamets, about doing Amanita Pantherina mushrooms, and getting Repetitive Motion Syndrome.

It's here, starts at about 6:30 in the vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxBSuwRXynE

Repeating the same sequence over and over, because you just can't stop... pretty sure there are seizures that cause that too. I wonder what's got into the Dem leadership, though? It's like a slow-motion RMS episode, years long and with many many people. So odd.

[brendhelm]

And, of course, it started with the moon void of course including Pluto as a planet.

The Spastic Grasshopper

[(Anonymous)]

One of the comments in your conversation with James Kunstler reminded me of an incident I witnessed several years ago.

I used to rent a couple of rooms in a house with laundry and kitchen privileges, along with several other housemates and the landlord, who also lived in the house with us all. Over the back patio was a large wooden structure, basically an oversized grape arbor, and one sunny Saturday I was out by one corner of it, pruning a feral rosebush while the landlord stood nearby and chatted with me.

Suddenly, out of the rosebush flew one of the big nimble grasshoppers that live in these parts. With wide open sky all around, the grasshopper made a 90 degree U turn at top airspeed and smacked facefirst into one of the big weathered wooden crossbeams of the arbor. Stunned, it fell back down into the bush.

Then, it took off again, again veered 90 degrees and again smacked facefirst into the same wooden crossbeam, and again fell back down into the rosebush.
It did this three or four times in a row until finally it took a different direction after launch.

My landlord and I both marveled at it and he dubbed it the "spastic grasshopper".

I think there's a metaphor in there somewhere.

- Cicada Grove

[(Anonymous)]

I look forward to listening to that, but it’s “with Jim and me,” not “with Jim and I.” /grammar-pedant

[(Anonymous)]

thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou for pointing that out. When a Latin scholar fails to use the objective case correctly, the angels mourn.

[ecosophia]

The angels speak Enochian, which doesn't have an objective case. ;-)

[(Anonymous)]

...Didn’t say which angels. In this CamelCase, it includes the Dative Americans, the Subjective & Subjunctive Seraflimflam (jointly and severally), the Ablative AbsoLute-Players, and, of course, the HardCore Objective Angelic Archonia. Oh, and the Effing-MyOhMy! Watchits.