Temporarily insane

 

Ior Bock
Credit: Nico Backström

Ior Bock (1942-2010) was a Swedish-speaking excentric, druggie and cultist from Finland who apparently invented an entire mythology, known as "The Bock Saga". I admit that I first heard about this colorful character at the YouTube channel of American influencer Styxhexenhammer666! But then, here in Sweden we don´t usually track the excentrics, Swedish-speaking or not, from our eastern neighbor!

Judging by Wiki´s article (see link below), Bock´s private mythology isn´t *entirely* original. Think Hyperborea, Sweden is Atlantis, the Arctic Home in the Vedas, Thor Heyerdahl...that kind of stuff. Bock´s more colorful contributions include a bizarre obsession with sex and "fertility" rituals, but this is probably derived from extreme Left Hand Path Tantra (Bock spend considerable time at a beach in Goa). 

Apparently, the old fool was stabbed to death by a mentally unstable Indian he took with him back to Finland as his "assistant". I sure wonder if something more "Tantric" could have been involved somehow...

Be that as it may, here´s the link:   

Ior Bock

Everything is Fermi´s paradox

 

Or suffering? 

A new speculative study suggests that even if an advanced civilization would take all its energy from renewable sources (such as solar power), it would still collapse after about 1,000 years if energy consumption continues to grow exponentially. 

The only solution seems to be - surprise - to limit population growth and hence energy use. So limits to growth is apparently a thing on all possible alien worlds. Blasted! I mean, who knew?

Of course, the above would solve Fermi´s paradox. Either aliens kill themselves in a gigantic heat death of their home planet (fossile, fissile or solar) or they give up space flight and accept being marooned for a billion years...

I know what I would chose, and no, it´s not "rather one year as a space faring lion than one billion years as a grazing sheep", I´m with the sheep on this one!  

Alien civilizations probably killing themselves from climate change, bleak study suggests

 

Dry bones...or at least seeds

 

Another Commiphora 
Credit: JMK 

"But the Bible was right", kind of. Some kind of weird resurrection scenario featuring a plant of the genus Commiphora (myrrhs) which could be from a population or even species previously thought extinct. 

Israeli scientists have succesfully grown a myrrh tree from a 1000-year old seed retrieved during archeological excavations north of Jerusalem. They speculate that the tree (nicknamed Sheba) might be the source of a medicine mentioned in the Bible. However, final identification of its species haven´t been possible yet, since the tree still after 12 years haven´t bloomed a single time!

Of course stuff like this makes it into the news, amen. 

Lost Biblical tree resurrected from 1000-year old mystery seed found in the Judean Desert  

The lesser dependencies of Mauritius

 

You learn new shit every day. I´m a notorious "flag nerd", but I completely missed this one! The coat of arms of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) includes the Latin motto "In tutela nostra Limuria", which is supposed to mean "Lemuria in our trust"! 

Yes, Lemuria. The imaginary continent of Lemuria, here with the more unusual alternative spelling Limuria. The above illustration is from the website of the BIOT administration. 

Just this Thursday, the UK announced that they will hand over control of the BIOT (a.k.a. the Chagos Archipelago) to Mauritius...but the large US military base at the main island of Diego Garcia will remain for another 99 years. So nothing really changed. Except, I suppose, that this peculiar coat of arms is soon history...  

Don´t curse the darkness

 

I posted this in 2021, but in Swedish. Here is an English translation. With one word added! (Yes, "ableism". Couldn´t help myself.)  

I´m not exactly a fanboy of Osho, but in his door stopper volume "The Book of Secrets" (the madman´s commentary on the Tantric meditation manual Vighyan Bhairav Tantra) he actually says something interesting. 

Namely that God isn´t light. Rather, God is darkness. Or more precisely put: darkness is a better metaphor for the divine than light is.

Why do we think that God is light? Because we *fear* the darkness. But actually it´s the darkness that is divine. Light is temporary, it comes and goes. The darkness is eternal. The darkness is what is always left when the light disappears. The darkness existed before the light. The light "creates" our personalities and our entire (visible) world, while the darkness is primordial, that which existed before "creation". It dissolves our personalities and that´s why we fear it, but if we could just meditate in darkness we would realize that everything is alright... 

Or so Osho says (insert emphatic disavowal here!) 

It struck me that the metaphor "God is light" can only be used by humans with unimpaired vision. A person who is blind since birth can´t use it. We could also imagine an intelligent species who lives on a darkened planet and therefore never evolves normal vision (maybe it´s telepathic instead or whatever). Yet, many claim that God is light not just metaphorically but that the statement should actually be interpreted literally! Anthropocentrism, ableism, or what? 

The mystics of the Orthodox Church describe God as "the dazzling darkness". Perhaps this comes closer to the truth...  

Don´t curse the darkness. And do NOT light a candle!

Bektashi Vatican

 

A *very* strange move by the Albanian government. Nobody seems to know what it means, and everyone was surprised when the announcement was made. Essentially, the Prime Minister Edi Rama wants to create a micro-state for the Bektashi Order, a peculiar Islamic group with a semi-secret syncretist religion often described as a blend of Shia Islam, Christianity and shamanism, while nominally being Sunni. 

The article hints at Albania hosting a number of controversial political/religious Islamic movements: the Iranian MEK, which fights the current Iranian regime, and the Turkish Gülen movement, which opposes Erdogan´s government. Perhaps there is a connection here? Do the Albanians have a policy of supporting "dissident" Muslims? Historically, the Bektashi have been associated with Albanian nationalism and are the only religious group mentioned with some respect in the writings of Communist leader Enver Hoxha! 

There are two religious micro-states in Europe: the Vatican and the Orthodox "monastic republic" at Mount Athos. There are also the Knights of Malta, who have extra-territorial status. Make Europe strange again!

Albania to set up Sufi Muslim Bektashi microstate

God loves bombardier beetles

 

These were my midnight musings last night, but I didn´t have time to jot them down until now. Because I was sleeping it off, obviously! LOL.

The quip “God loves beetles” is intended as a jocular jibe against Christianity from an atheist-scientific perspective. There are currently 400,000 described species of beetles. When the quip was quipped (around 1968), I believe the number was 250,000. The point being that beetles are the single largest taxon. Therefore, God must love beetles. I mean, why did he create so many species of Coleoptera otherwise? And since Anglican clergymen would presumably find this deeply embarrassing, it´s excellent atheist rhetoric. Or something.

But is it really? Paul said that all of Nature awaits the arrival of the sons of God, and then Nature will be redeemed. So why can´t Paul´s God love Insecta? I mean, where were *you* when He created the bombardier beetle? Medieval Catholicism had a crypto-Neoplatonist tendency, in which all of reality was seen (almost panentheistically) as a gigantic chain of being. C S Lewis probably had the same perspective. I can see him laughing at the smart aleck atheists over a pint of beer at the Prancing Pony. “Yes, the beetles, well, I always wondered about that one myself”. Why can´t a god “constrained” by Neoplatonist “Forms” create a lot of beetles? But sure, I suppose it´s hard to explain why a Protestant god created 400,000 species of Coleoptera, since he seems to have an inordinate fondness for humans (or at least some of them)…

Other religions presumably have even less issues with the accursed bugs. In Islam, I presume Allah can create more or less anything at any time, just to show his omnipotence to humans as a kind of “teaching device”. And in Hinduism, Shiva creates beetles as he goes along, as part of his crazy dance, simply because he can (I suppose Kali or even Krishna could do the same!).

So what´s the problem really? 

Women are becoming BASED

 

Paradigm shift? I blogged about this just a few days ago (in Swedish), and here we go again...perhaps. As usual, Dutton´s explanations are very Social Darwinist/genetical. I´m almost tempted to call them sexist! 

Taste and shadow

 

Sometimes Copilot Designer is darn funny. Like here. I asked the AI to generate a picture of "Direct Realism" (that is, the epistemological position) and this was the result. A painting of a bunch of fruit in a container. In other words, the art style known as "realism"! 

But there are *some* (direct?) connections between the art and the epistemology. 

Are the apples really red? Do the blueberries actually taste sweet? Are light and shadow "real"? What about the container? After all, it was made by human hands...so does praxis and socially useful labor prove direct realism? Or just socialist realism?

Those where my meditations on the picture. Welcome to my brain at 2:30AM in the morning!    

The secret of Prometheus

 

Super-chad!

Meditate on this, dear brethren, and ye shall know the secret of the human condition.  

Renounce love, all ye who enter here

 

John Michael Greer continues to scare away his readers (including - almost but not quite - my own non-humble self) with his analysis of Richard Wagner´s operas. 

The Nibelung´s Ring: The Rhinegold I 

Det verkliga skräckscenariot

 

Jag, när Trump tar hem Pennsylvania 

Tänk om Trump vinner valet och sedan händer...just ingenting?  

It´s official

 

It´s official: Nature doesn´t like zombies. Seriously, though, Sabine Hossenfelder presents some interesting reflections on AI and the nature of consciousness in this very short (!) YouTube clip.

TL/DR: Maybe they *are* possible, after all (mu-hah-hah).    

Welcome to the Sargasso Sea

 

- I´m not a plant, dude.
I´m just posing as one to trick the eels!

Eh, so brown algae (including kelp in the Sargasso Sea) are not *really* plants, but some kind of mega-sized protists?! Aaaargh, bring back Boomer science! 

>>>Kelps are large brown algae or seaweeds that make up the order Laminariales. There are about 30 different genera. Despite its appearance, kelp is not a plant but a stramenopile, a group containing many protists.

>>>Seaweed were generally considered homologues of terrestrial plants but are only very distantly related to plants, and have evolved plant-like structures through convergent evolution. Where plants have leaves, stems, and reproductive organs, kelp have independently evolved blades, stipes, and sporangia. 

>>>With radiometric dating vascular plants have been measured as having evolved around 419–454 Ma while the ancestors of Laminariales are much younger at 189 Ma.

Evolution is even crazier than we *can* know, LOL.

Sanction the world

 

The sanctions against Russia don't seem to be working... 

Note, btw, that "Palestine" might be admitted to BRICS, and that Turkey (a NATO member) wants to become a member! This might further increase intra-NATO tensions. As a side effect, it will also increase the number of nations which will never arrest Putin, if he choses to show his ass on their territory.

But Russia is supposedly "isolated", right?   

The expansion of BRICS

BRICS to admit a dozen new members

Congratulations

 

Jimmy Carter turned 100 years today. Fun fact: he is still eligible to run for president of the United States! Which may or may not be...interesting. 

On the waterfront

 

They should do this more often, me thinks... 

US port workers on strike

Gäsp

 

Öh...jaha? Vill Danmark invadera Mellersta Östern? Och göra vad, återupprätta det osmanska riket kanske?

Men okej, om Fredriksen går med på att sälja Grönland till Trump för lite smörrebröd, så kanske USA kommer att hjälpa till med en smärre intervention i södra Beirut?  

Danmark öppnar för militärt ingripande

Work-related problems

 

If you know, you know. 

Baa, baa, black sheep, do you have any wool?

Astral light, come forth!

 

AI´s fantasy picture of
Christian Rosenkreutz

A short but interesting introduction to the Western magical tradition, written by Richard Smoley (the author of "Inner Christianity"). Makes a lot of sense.  

The Forms of Magic