I started blogging again after a ten-month break with the piece "These are Gnostic Times." This was a confession as much as an article, and I do try to make everything I post here read as much like a proper article as much as possible.
In it I talked about some of the challenges I've been dealing with, and how they've impacted on the blog. At the time I was still toying with the idea of relaunching the podcast, an idea I've abandoned for several reasons, one of which is technical (the wifi in my house simply isn't up to the task) and the other of which is that I simply don't think there are enough people out there I find unusual enough to put in the kind of work and resources that a podcast would require.
Well, everything is cyclical. Who knows what the future holds?
Time Magazine declared that "God is Dead" in 1966 only to see the Religious Right roar back to life ten years later, in large part due to higher birth rates among the more seriously religious. With the "New Atheism" literally dead and buried, we could see a resurgent (and almost assuredly unrecognizable) Evangelicalism battling the New Age for social dominance by century's end.
Some believe young, vital Islam will simply wait for the aging, decadent West to collapse and bring Europe under its heel but I see serious winds of change for the current status quo coming; especially to Europe, but to the rest of the world as well, on that matter. It will not be pretty, and respectable people are willing to let pre-selected black hats do all the dirty work.
And to the engine room of what will massive worldwide change? Let's just say the money you're saving at the pump is not the work of "market forces." Are you ready for .99 cent gasoline?
We looked at Channel Four's Utopia, an insidious bit of predictive programming disguised as conspiracy drama. Utopia's creator Dennis Kelly made the requisite noises that he "didn't believe in conspiracies" a risible and cowardly wordfart, considering he works for British broadcasting, a snakepit of some of the most despicable, heinous and inhuman conspiracies on the planet.
Next we looked at H.P. Lovecraft's obvious yet unacknowledged source for the Cthulhu Mythos, the contemporaneous work of fellow New Yorker Alice Bailey. This led to a meltdown in some quarters (though delight in others), invariably among self-appointed Lovecraft experts who read absolutely none of the material in question and didn't realize that contemporary work was far more likely to be an author's source than work published more than 40 years ago in those pre-Internet days.
All the more so considering that most public libraries wouldn't be caught dead holding any of this material and that Bailey was publishing her work precisely because the Theosophical Society was going out of its way to bury the more sci-fi stuff Blavatsky had written (Bailey referred to her missionizing as "Back to Blavatsky") in order to clear the path for their chosen one, Krishnamurti.
I linked to the piece on my private FB page and my closed FB group (which I subsequently left- more on that later) but it seemed to strike a nerve and went viral. I wonder how many of the people who criticized it on Reddit actually read it (my guess is zero) and it was obvious that one particularly noxious internet troll who bashed it didn't actually read it before the knives came out.
I posted again on Lovecraft when I noticed that despite his oft-cited poverty he seemed to travel around a devil of a lot (and to very unlikely places, and places known for their Masonic Grand Lodges, a salient detail given the Masons' political intrigues between the wars) and for a poor, obscure pulp writer, he also seemed to have friends in the intelligence racket (Houdini, most famously, but also E. Hoffman Price).
I decided to move on to other topics when a Lovecraft scholar informed me about Lovecraft's relationship with the underage R.H. Barlow, the (published) details of which definitely shine a new light on Lovecraft's writing and biography (certainly his sham marriage, and other mysteries now more easily understood).
In between we looked at UFOlogy's latest "death". Or is UFOlogy undead? With Hangar One, Unsealed Alien Files, Ancient Aliens, In Search of Aliens and The Unexplained Files all playing on cable, and UFO videos often getting hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube, it's a very strange "death" indeed. Sightings are at all-time highs, TV news continues to cover local flaps and encounters so I'm not exactly sure how the media define "dead."
No, that's not true; pundits see everything through the prism of the publishing world and yes, UFO books are selling as poorly as everything else that's not a 'tween novel. And yes, UFO conventions aren't going gangbusters either. They're doing exactly as well as comic conventions would if you banned cosplay.
There's a serious undertone to all of this-- the clampdown of government secrecy on everything and anything, UFO information included. Just as with many matters of national security, all the serious UFO data-- and presumably all those pilot encounters and radar reports -- is reportedly being outsourced to Bigelow Aerospace, who are under no obligation to comply with Freedom of Information requests. There's been as least one major flap I can name off hand since 9/11; Stephensville, Texas, but we never got much in the way of anything official on it.
And as far as I know no one except Bigelow is putting any money into UFOlogy. There's still plenty of work being done in other countries, but someone decided to starve serious UFOlogy of data-- and money-- and all we ever hear is old news.
You know the type; those documentaries that serve up a parade of nauseatingly earnest schoolmarms telling you how superheroes arose from this nebulous psychological impulse and the creators themselves were just innocent bystanders.
Well, Ancient Aliens did the same, offering a little bit of Neo-Theosophical hoodoo for spin on the PBS pabulum. Had they done a bit of research they would have discovered that two of the most important comics creators, Jack Kirby and Otto Binder, were diehard Ancient Astronaut Theorists, and that Kirby did a number of AAT-themed comics (starting in the late 50s) and Binder co-wrote one of the most important AAT texts, Mankind, Child of the Stars.
Not to get too, too conspiratorial but I can't help but wonder if the producers did in fact know this (I've discussed Kirby on William Henry's show) but feel a need to preserve this myth of Von Daniken as the founding father of AAT (a myth the media is all too eager to play along with).
We looked at the 100th anniversary of the start of World War One and wondered if new and deadly alliances weren't gestating in the world around us. Just today I read that China has bailed out Russia, which had been under sustained economic attack after its annexation of Crimea. With this bailout China leaves no doubt at all where its loyalties lie and now the aging, corrupt Western alliance- its governments at war with their peoples- find themselves staring down two nuclear barrels now.
If India tosses its hat in with Russia and China, that will make three, and nearly a third of the world's population. What are we sleepwalking into now?
And yes, I've mostly avoided most of the big news stories and done so quite intentionally. Oh, I have my opinions on them, oh yes, I do indeed. But they certainly wouldn't make anyone happy on either side of these (intentional) provocations that have been rolled out, one after the other.
Suffice it to say all of this is going to end very, very badly for those who are being manipulated. All of what? you may ask.
Name it. Oh yes, my friends, just you name it. Let history be your guide.
And to the engine room of what will massive worldwide change? Let's just say the money you're saving at the pump is not the work of "market forces." Are you ready for .99 cent gasoline?
All the more so considering that most public libraries wouldn't be caught dead holding any of this material and that Bailey was publishing her work precisely because the Theosophical Society was going out of its way to bury the more sci-fi stuff Blavatsky had written (Bailey referred to her missionizing as "Back to Blavatsky") in order to clear the path for their chosen one, Krishnamurti.
I decided to move on to other topics when a Lovecraft scholar informed me about Lovecraft's relationship with the underage R.H. Barlow, the (published) details of which definitely shine a new light on Lovecraft's writing and biography (certainly his sham marriage, and other mysteries now more easily understood).
Speaking of Ancient Aliens they blew a major opportunity to do some serious work when they did their superheroes episode and got all sun, moon and stars about where superheroes came from, serving up the same vague "from the ether" origin story you'd expect from a PBS documentary.
You know the type; those documentaries that serve up a parade of nauseatingly earnest schoolmarms telling you how superheroes arose from this nebulous psychological impulse and the creators themselves were just innocent bystanders.
If India tosses its hat in with Russia and China, that will make three, and nearly a third of the world's population. What are we sleepwalking into now?
And yes, I've mostly avoided most of the big news stories and done so quite intentionally. Oh, I have my opinions on them, oh yes, I do indeed. But they certainly wouldn't make anyone happy on either side of these (intentional) provocations that have been rolled out, one after the other.
Suffice it to say all of this is going to end very, very badly for those who are being manipulated. All of what? you may ask.
Name it. Oh yes, my friends, just you name it. Let history be your guide.