Campion

Both sides are imperialists trying to extend their control over more and more of the world with no respect for national sovereignty. Looking at this post and some of your earlier ones such as the one about China's propaganda response to 9/11, makes me realise how much these superpowers need external enemies, or the appearance of enemies, in order to keep their population afraid, compliant and grateful to their overlords. And agreeing to whatever depredations are inflicted on them at home. So although Russia and China want to see the decline of the West, imo they won't want to completely destroy us and take over, unless there's some other bogeyman which can replace us as the great satan. Edit - of course all this is equally true for "our" side too.

Doing a quick internet search shows other pictures of feint dark lines in the sky so I'm inclined to agree it's actually there, but the lining up with a plane's trail is harder to explain, as the others I've found don't have a plane in them. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2384260/Mystery-shadowy-dark-line-shooting-cloud-Florida-beach-stumps-weather-experts.html https://m.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=3696990367005969&id=171330336238674

Just this story? Imo the whole of celebrity culture with its obsessions on the minutiae of the lives of attention-seekers is planned distraction from our collapsing civilisation. Or am I just getting grumpy ...

A good post Pi, but imo we need to highlight the racial dimension here. Gammon is an anti-white term of hate speech, especially used against middle-aged men actually daring to stand up for the white race. It's to the whites what the n word is to blacks and other similarly banned words. Except that it's allowed to be used as an insult unlike the others, as the Collins Dictionary demonstrates. Hence it's showing the institutional anti-whiteism in the mainstream (ie progressive and globalist) establishment.

I belong to several busy forums and it's a big challenge to triage the content and keep up with the stuff that's relevant to me, let alone make detailed replies rather than just pick out one or two points to pick up. Often I just use likes, and try to use up my daily allowance, to show them that someone's in the room and listening, to give some encouragement and thanks for all the work which I can see some members giving to the forum. How do other members keep up with the content? If I look at the 'All Activity' screen it's incredibly busy with everything, and only shows the first couple of lines or so, to decide whether to read the whole thing so I tend to be caught by the clickbaity stuff. On the other hand if I use the 'Notifications' screen I end up in an echo chamber of only reading the members I've followed. But otherwise I've learned a lot of useful content and also honed my skills at skim reading to quickly decide if something's worth closer attention or not. For practical action rather than theory, I tend to go elsewhere and my involvement here has led me to other organisations which are active in real life. Another thing I've learned is how much I'm limited by wanting to stay anonymous and avoid accidentally doxxing myself, so I tend to hold back from saying more and stick with generalities instead.

Yes quite so, the middle east has always been a strategically important area on profitable trade routes so it's not surprising it has been fought over for the whole of recorded history. The crusades can't be picked out as any worse. Well in practical terms many of us were brought up from childhood to believe in God as the boss of the universe which perhaps makes sense as a means of educating children with a sense of self-discipline and morality although it's got obvious drawbacks. But imo it's a very basic type of theology that's not suitable for everyone and anyone who wants to question things will soon develop a more nuanced position.

Leaving aside the self-reference of whether or not such a God would control himself, or if not, where his thoughts come from. If such a God does exist he would be completely controlling my mind and I can't claim to be a separate individual with my own free will which I could use to investigate questions like this and decide what I believe to be true. So I have an epistemological problem with the issue, as with the free will question. It's only worth trying to answer it by making a working assumption that I have free will and independent thought.

Maybe Mr H, it's come back down to the long-term price now. Where do you buy gas futures, a specialist broker?

I've just started looking into Druidry, so this is very much my initial impressions. But most orders operate with a three level of training, the first stage is the Bardic stage which is about expressing our creative side. Bards are the storytellers, singers, poets and artists of the tribe but nowadays this seems to be taken more widely as creativity in general. They have rituals to receive the Awen, which is a Welsh name for the artistic muse and inspiration although I haven't started down this path yet. Maybe the spiritual (and artistic) work helps to relax the linear logical thinking mind and opening up space for the subconscious to emerge, the emotional to express itself.

Yes, I won't eat a meat curry unless I'm sure it's not halal. Which is hard to do, often it's not labelled or just labelled with that arabic word for halal.

What's so occult about slitting animals' throats, isn't that how mainstream religions do ritual slaughter instead of stunning them? The only difference here is that the animal isn't eaten, and ofc it's done without permission.

Now Monty Don has given in to the politically correct mob. Apparently the Chelsea flower show is too white and middle aged. https://www.thesun.co.uk/tv/22485247/gardeners-world-monty-don-complaint-chelsea-flower-show/ I was kind of expecting Gardeners World to go woke, now there's very little left of our national icons to bother tuning into the beeb for. What's next, Antiques Roadshow? Last one out turn off the lights.

The Japs need to do something to deal with their fertility rate (like many of us), currently on 1.4 when the break- even level is 2.1. This doesn't sound as much fun conceiving the natural way, but this way avoids women being pregnant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate

In our recent local elections the turnout was about 25% in my area, yet the politicians still get the same amount of power. I wonder what would be the turnout if we had referendums for the big decisions instead of leaving the politicians to get on with it and do whatever they want.

I went to a 10 day meditation retreat that had no speaking & touching too. After about a week of being very serious someone started giggling and we all couldn't help ourselves laughing at the absurdity of it all. It was like a sober high . And I had an out of body experience too, it was an amazing time. My life is too full up of other stuff with family and work to do it now.

All part of the plan to keep us locked up in a containerised system where the easy choices are designed from the top down and wealth flows upwards. If you don't vote for their choices they still win. Especially in high density population areas like western Europe where there isn't much free space to go off grid.

I guess buying a home is better if you're wanting to settle down and build a long-term nest so it depends on where you are in your life plan. Not to mention that over the lifetime of boomers and gen-x houses worked well as a geared investment because house prices have risen much faster than the interest rates they've paid. No doubt that's why they're now forced to sell up to pay for care in many cases. How long do young people take out mortgages for nowadays? It used to be 25 years which sounds a long time when you're young but I think this kind of long-term financial planning is well worth it. Take pensions as another example, you need to save into them even longer 40+ years to have a decent retirement. I have friends who buy-to-let properties instead of having a standard pension and it seems to work for them. However perhaps the horse has bolted for all that now as property prices have spiralled so far ahead of the rest of the economy, and the smart money will look elsewhere for easy profit.

Yup, definitely, tho it's better than paying rent your whole life imo. And I think it's also a symptom of the collapse of our once close-knit and cohesive family and tribal structure, into this corporate-marxist run prison camp which we call modern society. Asians still have some of that cohesion when they lend money within the family for buying property and starting small businesses, and keep the wealth themselves. Tho perhaps the corporate-marxists are chipping away at them too these days.

Nice one. Contradictions aren't necessarily bad, they're a teaching aid in the mystical traditions - as someone who used to practice Zen I've wrestled with a few. I reached a point where I needed to experience it first hand rather than trying to just analyse the illogic of it with the mind. How do I resist not the urge to resist? Trying not to resist is itself resistance. Like trying to relax isn't relaxing, or trying hard to pray is itself the barrier to God. Trying to meditate or become enlightened sends you straight to hell. It's where religion collides head on with the old chestnut of the free will debate. Without free will there can be no good or evil, and how can we have free will without having a separate ego who controls and is responsible for its actions? So the desire to be good and resist evil only strengthens our sense of ego which is where evil comes from in the first place! The devil is supposed to be a fallen angel, and angels, unlike us apparently, don't have free will! So the devil is only acting out his programming given by God. Yes we need to fight evil in self defence, but don't expect fighting to eliminate evil. To do that you need to transcend both good and evil (lower case) such that they collapse into a unified Good (capital G), which is God himself, or God's Love, or Infinite Love or whatever you want to call it.

Interesting experiment, shows how we're indoctrinated to buy more stuff than we need. And I wonder if it depends whether you have hard or soft water? What kind of retreat was it to have rules like that?

Thanks Mac, yes I can see how this stuff needs a lot of commentary to make it into an understandable and practical teaching, like with a lot of spiritual texts. But when we go to other authors to explain their version it creates new layers of teaching on top. It's the same when I'm learning about art. Ultimately it's not just the teaching of the original founder who we put on a pedestal, but over time it branches out and becomes communal property, with which I wrestle, create my own version and seek the truth as I see it.

I would agree, but don't we already have this in the form of the national insurance ID system, so the taxman can keep tabs on you? This issue then becomes, who has access to the database.

Yup, the message has also seeped into medicine, carry on with this toxic lifestyle which weakens our natural immune systems and rely on scientific superheros in the form of jabs, drugs and operations to save us. It's the same with those hyper-marketed superfoods to counteract the bad effects of the likewise hyper-marketed junk food.

Thanks Pi, I can't do justice to all the depths of this subject but here's a few off the cuff thoughts. Something within me rails against the idea that there's no right or wrong, and I wouldn't go so far as to say there's no right or wrong, just unpack it a little to distinguish between absolute vs relative (or objective vs subjective). The Crowley quote looks at first sight that it teaches a sort of Nietzschean individualistic will to power, but it's ambiguous - at least when taken out of context of how he would interpret it. It does imply that teaching if 'thou' means us as individuals, and 'law' mean natural or scientific law. But if 'thou' means God, then we're straight back into traditional Judeo-Christian ethics, where the 'law' is all about obeying God's will and he's telling us what to do. It all depends how you interpret it; so this teaching is relativistic too imo.

Ok thanks Pi, so it's just violent resistance which he is against. I haven't checked the original quotes in the Bible so I'll take your word for it. But I do also remember another passage about him not bringing peace but a sword. It all makes me think the context is important and we can't make generalisations out of specifics.