(Southern) Imbolc on Wicca

Many things in Wicca have changed. The changes are well documented.

There are several traditions, not just that of GBG. Even GBG's religion evolved with the addition and expansion of his original work by the likes of Dorien Valient. Gardner started out condemning homosexuality, eventually he accepted it.

Here in the Southern Hemisphere even most Trad Wiccans now circle sunwards not clockwise, and celebrate Midsummer in December. They are a few still hidebound by the calendars written in England a half century ago, but they are increasingly rare.

Wicca itself was an eclectic conglomeration of Cabalistic/Abrahamic imagery and now largely discredited early 20th century anthropology and folklore studies.

Wiccans share 

- the Rede, at least the short form

- a belief in a masculine/feminine duality in our relationship with the numinous

- a relationship with the natural cycles through a solar/lunar ritual calendar.

You do not need to be initiated in a lineaged tradition to be Wiccan, you need that to be a lineaged member of that tradition. Wicca is a mystery religion, one path to the mysteries is through the rituals of GBG and his original coven. Another valid path is to seek those mysteries for oneself. That won't qualify you as a 17th Degree Priestess of the Isle of Ducks Tradition, but it will make you Wiccan if you share certain basic beliefs. Except that beliefs aren't necessary, because what is shared is rituals - actions.

Get out of being Evangelized Free Card

Also works against "Jesus loves you!"

I'm a huge Nukees fan, and have to thank Gav for pointing out this Get Out of Being Evangelized Free card. Some of my friends have questioned if it is fair dinkum, so:

Mar 3:29 

But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin.”

Nukees - Wednesday, May 2, 2007

http://nukees.com/d/20070502.html

So, remember, I believe "The Holy Spirit is a Prick", and thus will never be forgiven. There is thusly no point in trying to save me, please find a less hopeless way to spend your time. Yay me.

Frontier money

In many places larger companies would mint tokens or notes to make up the shortage of circulating official coin. The better ones were sometimes better than government money in their primary circulating area. Similar coins and notes were printed for Company Stores, usable only to buy at inflated prices from your (effective) owner. Some of those Company Store peonage operations were frightening.

Others allowed the notes to be circulated, with a promise to purchase them back (effectively making them cheques) but there were many scams. Often the notes were printed on paper that was fragile using soluble inks. Get them wet, handle them, do anything much and they became useless scrap.

Some bosses baked the notes brown and crumbly so they wouldn't last long enough to be spent.

Here in southern Queensland they were known as Calabashes, nobody seems certain why. More generally in Australia they were called shin plasters (possibly derived from chin plasters after the use of scraps of paper to stem bleeding shaving cuts).

On Marriage

Way back when the Established Church (ie only legal one) recorded Marriages in their ledgers. If any question arose as to the status of the relationship between Mary and John, it could be answered by digging through dusty books.

Then people started moving long distances to cities where the book of their home parish was inaccessible. Around the same time religious diversity started to become an issue.

Inheritance; moral hygiene laws; contracts; huge areas of the law considered marital status as significant. Something had to be done, so the State stepped in to hold a central record of marriages and other significant life events.

Somewhere along the way a certain degree of protection of the vulnerable and various crank concepts like racial purity slithered in and so it went from a registration of a legally significant fact to the State regulating the institution of marriage.

In some places and times the regulation was minimal, not already married, old enough and of sound enough mind to understand what they were doing, not entering into a fake marriage to claim some benefit or privilege. In others it was intrusive.

I'd like to see the word "Marriage" given by the state to the churches, let the babies have their bottles. Hold back the registration of domestic partnerships and the protection of the vulnerable to the state.

Of course under such a reform I look forward to making popcorn and watching the fun when a Gay friendly church starts Marrying (Oh Noes!!!) same sex couples...

Conspiracy Theory²

I have a theory...

Actually several.

1/ There really are conspiracies. Some of them are large and nasty. Some are Government sponsored.

2/ These real conspiracies sometimes interact, getting in each others' way, forming alliances, sometimes sharing key personnel. The world doesn't make sense and sometimes that is because somewhere there are madmen playing god.

Which brings us to

3/ Many Americans are blind to the nature of the American Capitalist System, which is effectively a bucket of conspiracies. 

4/ There are a lot of crazy people who spew their madness into the world. Disturbingly sometimes they are right.

5/ Some crazy conspiracies are promoted to discredit conspiracy theorists and classes of theory.

6/ Many Conspiracy Theories are displacement of other fears.

Finally Occam's Razor is your friend.

Banksterity

Banksterity - Making the 1% carry their share.

The Banks profit from their own mistakes, reach into the public purse, then insist the poor and the middle class pay. Austerity measures see the lives of billions across the world disrupted to preserve the wealth and profits of the very richest.

• Trading in all bank and financial services corporation shares suspended immediately.
• A 5% levy for 10 years on all income over 13 times the average wage in each country, no deductions.
• If a bank took more than 1% of its total deposits in government subsidies, or an absolute amount more than 1,000 times the national average price of a home in 2004, administrators are to be appointed for 5 years to ensure that the public receives every cent back with average credit card interest. All interest on residential owner-occupier loans to be suspended for 5 years.
• “Performance” bonuses paid to senior executives after subsidy payments to be reversed.
• Foreclosures on homes to be allowed only if the bank holds no (an insignificant number) vacant properties.
• Banks to be charged vacant possession fees equivalent to 24 hour commercial security patrols to repay the public purse for the fire and police services used to protect their vacant property. 
• Any foreclosed property vacant for more than 6 months and in poor repair to be seized by the government, repaired at the bank’s expense and used to the public benefit by sale or lease with no return to the bank. Any foreclosed property vacant for 1 year to be sold at no-reserve auction with the proceeds after administrative fees returned to the bank.
• A public enquiry into the finance sector in each country with the highest level of power to investigate and to compel witnesses.

Love is Asymmetrical

I love, you are loved.

We are *in* love, but that doesn’t mean your experience is anything like mine.

Anyone who had a crush in high school should recognise the asymmetric nature of love. As might anyone who was the object of an unwelcome crush, if they have a modicum of self awareness and sympathy for their fellow primate.

To love is to place someone else’s happiness above one’s own. To ignore their imperfections and exult their finer qualities. To be willing to endure hardships to defend their peaceful existence. Unfortunately we do these things with many of our cynical higher intellectual functions swamped by biology, so we suffer tunnel vision that often prevents us noticing that our level of devotion is not reciprocated.

Taxation is Theft (and other delusions)

Taxation is Theft!

It’s a Lie!

Taxation is insurance against disaster, criminality and revolution. What is theft is misuse of taxation income.

Taxation at its most basic form is the act of the State acquiring a reserve of food (and seed) against a bad harvest or loss of stored crops. Which in the hands of a compassionate Prince rapidly extends to a basic Grain Dole for the poor.

A clear step up from [insert biblical references to gleaning and orchard harvesting]. In the Roman Empire in 58BCE it took the next logical step, and became a universal Grain Dole. Providing the poor with the basis of life, enough to keep Body and Soul together a day longer. Give us this day our daily bread was not a plea for a poverty stricken Roman Citizen, but part of their contract with the State. Of course it was rapidly reduced to only the poorest 50% or so even Caesar decried Middle Class Welfare.

Theft of Tax Revenue can be many things. Military White Elephants are theft if they are not projects of innovation, funding research and development of technologies with civilian  spinoff potential. Military adventurism is likewise theft, not just of Tax revenue, but also of the taxpayers’ very lives. Adventurism should be contrasted with actual defense and the rare but unfortunately necessary Just War. Which as an aside brings us to Military Conscription, which is theft, of liberty and labour and at times life itself.

Tax, redistributed as an income support payment of some kind, discourages the very poor from robbing, or or even killing and eating the very rich. Restrict such bribery too far, and you create the incentive to engage in freelance socialism, or even barbeque the Patricians. Most civilised people are only a couple of days of empty bellies off rioting on the streets.

23 skidoo - Sri Syadasti

Sri Syadasti Syadavaktavya Syadasti Syannasti Syadasti Cavaktavyasca Syadasti Syannasti Syadavatavyasca Syadasti Syannasti Syadavaktavyasca

Which is Sanskrit, and means: "All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense."

It is the name of a Discordian Saint.

Brightfart news

Breitbart, a site that aspires to the credibility of the National Enquirer and the journalistic excellence of such stories as:
2,000 Year Old Chinese Mummy Gets Job As Noodle Cook...

if I'm a dickhead...

At high school a girl called me a dickhead in class, and in a creepy AF voice I said "If I'm a dickhead, can I rub my forehead against your crotch." I looked around, the teacher, a friend, was tight lipped trying not to react, breathing slowly to not loose it, and...

The [little bitch] yells "Miss! Miss! [nickname] just said" and quoted me. the teacher fell forward onto her desk screaming with laughter unable to contain herself. After about ten minutes she calmed down and the girl was bouncing at her and would not shut up. Finally the teacher said [little bitch] "Oh do shut up, he got you, just... Shut up..."

Represented by the "Liberal" Party

Not the Party! (Blue)

The Liberal Party is not the Party of Small Business, they are the Party of Multinational Corporations and Offshore Bank Accounts.

They don't represent Pensioners, "battlers", Australian Values, they represent Brown Paper Bags Full Of Cash. Which they do by giving us their very best effort to be sitting in the right chair when the bell rings, most of the time.

While they are busy doing that, they steal, sorry mistakenly abuse, allowances from the tax payers worth millions of dollars, and unlike some kid on the dole who gets his Centrelink form wrong, they don't go to Gaol, they just pay it back if they are caught.

They are not the Party of Menzies, the man who threw away the cumbersome "insurance" format of the Aged Pension and replaced it with a commitment to pay the Pensioners a reasonable stipend to live on in return for a lifetime of being available to contribute to the economy.

They are not the Party of Fraser, who brought us Multiculturalism and Ethnic Diversity as priorities from the Commonwealth Government. He gave us our first comprehensive refugee policy, of open arms, in response to Vietnamese Boat  People. He opposite Apartheid in South Africa and racism both there and here. He brought in the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act of 1976.

They are the party of faceless Billionaires and Religious Fanatics who flirt daily with Fascism while they sneer at Australian Values like a Fair Go. They squeeze the Pensioners, they push young people to homelessness and despair, they help the rich steal from the poor while trying to run the most fundamental services of the State as sources of profit. They defy the wishes of up to 70% of Australians on Marriage Equality and other issues at the command of Theofascists like the Australian Christian Lobby. To be fair, also the shadowy medieval fringe of the  administration of the Catholic Church, the same secret power structure of financiers and Princes Ecclesiastical that has been exposed as harbouring hundreds of Kiddie Fiddlers who molested thousands of victims, because to throw them on the mercy of the Courts could cost Mother Church billions in compensation.

They assist known members of international crime syndicates to get an easy route to residency, but genuine refugees languish in Concentration Camps which are acknowledged as intended to inflict misery to discourage refugees. They are, in short, unAustralian.

Notes on Ming the Merciless

Menzies sold us out to the Mine Owners and English Agribusiness Investors. He killed our Space Program, computing, materials science and built environment research expertise, and artificially forced down STEM salaries. At the behest of the English and Americans he abandoned moving into high tech manufacturing by applying luxury tax to high technology, indeed almost any manufactured goods,  rather than tariffs, preventing local manufacture building a strong base. He (and his mates) attempted to impose Fascism on Australia but were forced to repaint it as Economic Liberalism after Hitler and Tojo moved against The Empire.

If we had taken up the manufacture of goods the way the US helped Japan do after the War, our natural resources would have made us world leaders, instead, we grew wheat, baled up wool and dug ores out of the ground all sold at rock bottom prices to the English and as they turned toward Europe, other markets.

He held our Universities back, as did his useless successors until the Whitlam revolution, ensuring that only those with the money to study in England got advanced degrees of any value, plus a few clowns on scholarships chosen to be our future middle management and backbenchers.

My Vast Mind

I have had No Life for decades, my vast mind¹ is crammed with data, small portions of which have been assembled into knowledge and some little wisdom distilled from those gleanings.

Now, have I had lunch yet?

¹ it is purple, made of a putty like material

Five books...

Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein
- the book that invented Hillsong as a parody

Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
Contains detailed instructions for bullet proof encryption

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
Western culture explained by one of the men who created it.

The Book of the Courtier - Baldassare Castiglione
A guide to Western Culture at its peak

Principia Discordia -
Malaclypse the Younger & Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst
Western Culture explained by those living through its collapse.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Tersorium.

The Roman sponge on a stick that served the better class of persons as a bum cleaner rather than a few choice pebbles. Used by Military types as a swagger stick, and possible origin of the expression grabbed the wrong end of the stick.

Sterculius

The Roman god of shit. From stercus - manure. He who supervised toilets and fertilising the fields. They really did have a god for everything.

Diamonds are (not) very valuable

Diamonds are very low intrinsic value, even fine gem stones. A cartel maintains a false market price by corporate war, dumping of excess production, and assorted market frauds like “Investment” Diamonds. They produce too much even to process it all as diamond grit for grinding and polishing.

Perfect stones can be made easily by vacuum deposition. You can diamond coat things by burning polystyrene under laboratory conditions, a moderately well equipped high school science lab can do it. Diamond is a poor conductor, so you can use it in some fun mad engineering projects.

When the economy collapsed, no, not that time, nor that, back in the 1929 Share Market collapse,to keep the price of diamonds high, they took barrels of them out into the North Sea and dumped them. Sometimes they were too lazy to properly empty the barrels, so years later some fishermen found valuable trash.

Beware Red&Blacks under the bed

Oh noes, the terrorisms!

Family can be so awkward.

My (now ex-) wife kept her name when we got married, back in the mid 80s. Her Grandmother would make cryptic comments about "being married but not acting like it" which everyone would sort of shuffle past and ignore.Until she made the comment to The Governor at a Garden Party she'd taken my wife to as her plus one. Ms Ford was a little taken aback and said "Molly, what on Earth do you mean?" Molly explained that her granddaughter had kept her name when she got married, and the Governor said "Well, Molly, so did I, so if it is good enough for me, I think it is all right for your granddaughter." Molly never made awkward remarks about our marriage again.

I'd helped Molly work her way through the protocols on which version of her regalia to wear, and the Protocol Officer gushed to her about how pleased he was to see somebody wearing the exact right kit for the occasion. Molly told him that I'd guided her through the protocols, and he begged her to convey his effusive thanks to me. One of my proudest moments as a herald.

Baby it's cold outside...

Back in 1983 I was an engineering student and I had a classmate who wore sandals, except in Thermodynamics Labs (what we would now call PPE rules). One day Brisbane had a rare near freezing morning, and a bunch of us stood around outside our first class speculating on how he'd respond.

Yes, despite the frost, still in sandals.

Toe Socks. Rainbow coloured knitted knee length toe socks held aloft with bicycle clips...

Real Life is way weirder than fiction.

Politically I am neither Left nor Wrong

I'm an Anarchotechnocrat who understands Otto von Bismark's use of state welfare to defuse the rage of the middle class and hunger of the poor. I have Fabian leanings because the better the welfare system the lower the crime rate. As a technocrat I acknowledge that there have been insufficient jobs since the coming of the tractor decimated rural labour forces after WWI, so eventually we need to either abandon consumer economies or implement some variety of UBI.

I regard Marx as an idiot, and not a useful one. As I speak English, I find most American pontification on politics and economics to be meaningless babble. They throw around words like socialist and communist without the vaguest idea what they mean. While a number of countries have fallen under the control of groups styling themselves as the "Communist Party", as far as I am aware there has only ever been one Communist State. For a couple of years, post Mao-ist Albania was a functional Communist State coupled with a Socialist Economy. Unfortunately the experiment was aborted by a raging infection of #Crapitalism and pyramid schemes squeezed all of the wealth out of the nation.

A quick thought

We can categorise many of the most problematic of our fellow citizens, the most gullible and ill informed as:

People whose total number of biological grandparents, living and dead is below 4...

Let's directly address Indigenous Deaths in Custody.

When someone commits suicide but it is hours before the body is discovered, that's criminal negligence. If they were on suicide watch it is manslaughter, if the cameras in the hall "malfunction" it is conspiracy to murder.

Ethical Humanism

I have raped as many people as I feel the urge to, zero. I have murdered zero people, although admit one or two sorely tempted me. I have acted where possible to not harm other people, and to reduce harm to others where I can. I have, when not desperately poor, supported artists and musicians, where I can.

I have shared my skills and knowledge with others, and have devoted time to enriching my community. This has, as it always does, lead to accusations of corrupting the youth of Athens. I have blasphemed my Goddess and acted in heretical manner against her rules, as she directs us to, despite not liking hotdogs all that much.

I have caused people to think, to question, and challenged them to be the best version of their possible selves. So, according to those who sit on Hillsong's side of the table, I am unspeakably evil.

Compromised Coppers

Good cops quickly realise that tomorrow they could be in a life and death situation with a corrupt/evil cop behind them and if they have formed an opinion that the Good Cop is less of a threat to them if allowed to die or as the victim of a friendly fire incident, well...

So they join for all the right reasons but then find to do any good, indeed to just stay alive, they have to actively support the corrupt and evil. At least enough that they are reassured that their criminality is not threatened.

Brust on Cops

“Ah, you poor fools, walking so tall and haughty with your guns and your sticks and your wide belts full of gear like the second coming of Batman, sitting in your little cars full of mechanized fear as you reach for your little radios at the first sign of anything more worrisome than a jaywalker.”

— Steven Brust

#AllCountriesMatter

#AllCountriesMatter

Seriously.

Few things are more asinine that responding to Black Lives Matter with a mealy mouthed "All lives matter" as if someone said Only Black Lives Matter.

Nobody said Only Black lives Matter, indeed BLM is about systemic racism, which is a life and death problem for African Americans, worse for North American First Nations People, and pretty farking bad for everybody who isn't white. Pretty rough for White Catholics¹ in some places too. The rest of the world has joined in support, and in many places highlighted their own systemic racism problems. Usually with the Pigs.

Angry at being accused of perpetuating mindless brutality, in too many places, the Pigs responded with... Mindless Brutality, worse, in some places it is deliberate, premeditated, murderous brutality.

Seriously you can't make this bullshit up, because editors of fiction would reject it as too far fetched. And then you have unidentified, Uniformed Goons, no numbers, often no farking identification what kind of goon they are, menacing the public. We know some are mercenaries neither controlled by the City/Police nor the Military. Some are apparently "contractors" hired by Prison authorities from Academi (the latest rebranding of the global corporate war criminals) formerly known as Blackwater. Goons fanatically loyal to Eric Prince, brother of notorious White House child trafficker Betsy DeVos.


¹ Racism is an imbalance of power amplified through a lens of colour/ethnicity/culture or religion.